The Once and Future Witches

by Alix E. Harrow

  Hill lifts his chin. “Inquisitors—arrest these women. For murder! For malice! For witchcraft most wicked.”

  The scrape and clank of armored men shifting behind him, the heavy drag of chains. Gloved hands reach for their ankles, a little hesitant, as if even plate armor and fifty friends might not be enough to keep them safe from the most wanted witches of New Salem.

  One of them catches the trailing edge of Juniper’s cloak and she kicks her leg without looking down. Agnes hears a muted crunch that might be a human nose.

  “Where is she, Hill?” Agnes’s voice is flat and low.

  The corner of Hill’s mouth twitches, as if it wants very much to smile but knows it would be off-script. “Silence, witch!” he screeches instead.

  There are many hands on their skirts now, hauling them down. Juniper is swearing and kicking. Bella is whispering oh dear, oh dear in a desperate circle. Agnes pitches her voice far louder. “Where is she? You promised me my daughter back!”

  This time the smile escapes, a cruel curl of lips puckered by Pan’s claw-marks. “Witches don’t have daughters, Miss Eastwood.”

  Agnes isn’t surprised, not really. She knows powerful men only keep their promises when they have to, and they never have to. But she’s surprised how angry it makes her to be told she has no daughter—when her belly is still slack and empty from carrying her, when her breasts still ache with the certainty of her motherhood. She’s surprised, too, by the sound she makes, a keening howl.

  Juniper flings herself down onto the Inquisitors, fists bruising against armor, and Agnes lunges for Hill a second time. Hands intercept her, tangle in her cloak and skirts, drag her to the cobbles. Pan’s claws skree against helmets and shields and men’s voices swear. Beside her Bella’s chant has escalated to oh hell, oh hell, interspersed with the hiss of spells. Several Inquisitors collapse, bee-stung or sleeping or clawing at their own sewn-shut mouths.

  But there are so many of them, and so few Eastwoods.

  Soon Agnes is kneeling beside her sisters with a mailed fist snarled in her braid and iron cuffs around her wrists. Collars creak and snap around their throats, frost-cold, and Agnes feels the great red heartbeat of magic go gray and distant. Pan and Strix vanish. The lines that lead to Juniper and Bella go slack, replaced by the heavy pull of chains leading from collar to collar. Agnes hears the ragged pant of Juniper’s breathing, feels the shiver in her chain, and wishes she could hold her hand.

  Hill dismounts in a fluid sweep. His shield reflects the last yellow edge of the dying day; his face is stern, like Old Testament God descended from Heaven to visit some calamity on sinning mortals, but Agnes sees the strut in his stride. Behind him, his dog licks her teeth nervously, not looking at them.

  Agnes closes her eyes. “P-please, sir,” she begs him, because he expects her to beg, because men are stupid when they think they’ve won. Because it might work. “Please.”

  He doesn’t bother even to answer her, but merely turns his back to the three witches and speaks to his men. “Bind their tongues, that they may not work their devilry, and follow me.”

  He doesn’t watch as his Inquisitors approach the sisters with jangling metal bridles, as thumbs bruise their jaws and force their mouths open, as Juniper curses and spits until she’s silenced by the bit between her teeth. The cage locks around Agnes’s skull, the bit pressing into her mouth like a metal tongue.

  Hill doesn’t watch as they are half dragged, half marched down Third Street to the Hall of Justice, as the evening crowd swells around them and rumors swoop like cruel-beaked birds through the air—I heard they put half the city into an enchanted sleep; I heard Mr. Hill banished the Devil himself from the square; why not burn them now, before their master returns?—and the crowd’s murmurs turn to mockery and then malice. They throw spoiled fruit and insults at first, then bottles and stones. Juniper swears around her bridle and Bella clenches her hand tight around her battered brass ring, and still Hill does not look back.

  If he had, he might have seen the promise seething in Agnes’s eyes: That is the last time you will ever hear me beg, you bastard.

  The three sisters are not locked in the seeping dark of the Deeps, as Mr. Hill intended, because upon arriving at the Hall of Justice they found no single piece of iron or steel unrusted. The bars of the cells stood like rows of snapped teeth; doors hung at mad angles from rotten hinges; rings of keys were nothing but circles of red-orange rust on the floor.

  Instead the Inquisitors locked the sisters on the highest floors, generally reserved for the drunk sons of City Council members or businessmen whose lawyers were sure to raise a fuss about unsanitary conditions. The cells are dry and clean-swept, with chamber pots and barred windows that divide the moonlight into clean silver stripes.

  Agnes lets the moon touch the bruised flesh of her face with cool fingers. It trails over the ugly iron of her witch’s bridle and collar, down the bare white of her shift. She misses the weight of her cloak and skirts; she misses her sisters locked in their separate cells. But mostly she feels nothing at all.

  Mags used to tell a story about a witch who cut out her own heart and buried it deep. Agnes knows precisely how she must have felt, walking around with nothing in her chest but an absence.

  The moonlight vanishes, replaced by scorched black wings.

  Agnes opens her eyes to see Pan perched on the narrow window ledge. He looks somehow translucent, barely there, as if she isn’t really seeing him but merely his reflection in a smudged and dim mirror. The collar burns dully against her throat, a rising warning.

  Agnes crawls as close to him as she can before her chain draws short. Pan opens his beak and a voice issues from it, a faint echo: “I have her. She’s safe.” A man’s voice, low and steady, that tugs at the absent place in her chest.

  Pan wisps into smoke and vapor. Her collar cools. The moonlight shines clear once more.

  Agnes collapses on the dry stone, trembling with relief and exhaustion and wild laughter, because she knows the same thing the heartless witch knew: without your heart, they cannot hurt you.

  Roses are red,

  Violets are blue,

  The Devil will pay,

  And so will you.

  A spell for vengeance, requiring thorns & blood

  The Salem College archives include several hundred trunks full of records relating to the witch-trials of the purges, and Beatrice Belladonna has read most of them. She knows what’s coming better than her sisters. She knows that history digs a shallow grave, and that the past is always waiting to rise again.

  First: the convening of the court.

  They gather in a small, lightless chamber in the Hall of Justice: the judge, pale and lipless, like a large mushroom forced into a starched white collar; a panel of milky men in pressed suits; a reporter and a sketch-artist from The Post. Gideon Hill himself, standing with his hound beneath the bench, smiling faintly.

  Three chairs wait in the center of the room, stained and old, with iron bands waiting like open hands. The Eastwoods are chained to their seats by a pair of Inquisitors who must have been selected for their sober expressions and clean-parted hair, the perfect human opposites to the bedraggled witches between them.

  Already Bella can hear the excited scritching of the artist’s pen, see the cartoons that will run in The Post for weeks: three women bound and bowed, their limbs bare and indecent, their hair poking at wild angles through their bridles. Most people will unfold their papers and tsk their tongues at the sight of such wicked witches.

  A few of them, though, will see the fury in their eyes, blazing even through the callous caricature, and suspect that behind every witch is a woman wronged.

  Second: the evidence against them.

  Gideon begins with a sanctimonious little speech about sin and sedition and the propensity of evil to flourish where good men do nothing. Then comes a parade of witnesses, ranging from the purely fanciful—a red-nosed barkeep who claims to have seen Agnes cavorting “in a most unsee
mly manner” with a fork-tailed gentleman; a housewife who was supposedly seduced by Bella’s “foul glamors” into visiting a house of prostitution on the south end—to the uncomfortably plausible.

  There’s a series of disgruntled fairgoers who saw Juniper’s hat-trick; a handful of doctors from St. Charity Hospital, one of whom watches Juniper with an anxious expression, rubbing a pink scar on his forehead; a paper-boy who claims to have seen Bella riding a broomstick while kissing a colored woman, which is at least half-true; a handsome, earnest young man named Floyd-something who testifies that Agnes is a seductress and a snake, and that the infant taken into custody might belong to half the gentlemen in New Salem for all he knows. He looks at Agnes as he says it, with a kind of bruised, vicious meanness; Agnes looks mildly back, unmoved, even bored.

  Madame Zina Card limps to the stand next, looking thin and hollow. Yes, she says, Agnes Amaranth sought her services as an abortionist. Yes, she repents her own part in such wickedness.

  Miss Munley from the Salem College Library testifies that Bella abused her position to gain knowledge of the occult, and notes that all such materials have been submitted to the mayor’s office for destruction. Bella waits to feel the numbness of betrayal, but all she feels is sorry and sad and weary.

  Miss Grace Wiggin is the final witness.

  “You spoke to one of these women on the night of the solstice, is that correct?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And what did you speak about?”

  “She asked me if I would join them in their dark purposes.” Wiggin looks up at Hill through her lashes, a child eager to please.

  He gives her a stern, bracing smile. “And what purposes were those, my dear? Be strong now, and tell us.”

  Grace brushes a lace handkerchief across her forehead. “To end the rule of man,” she answers, tremulously. “To bring about a second plague.”

  The courtroom dissolves into gasps and whispers. Hill smiles. “The city thanks you for your bravery, Miss Wiggin.”

  There is no cross-examination, no defense. This is a witch-trial, after all, and witches have even fewer rights than women. Bella can do nothing but sweat and stand on aching legs, listening to her own damnation with the taste of iron on her tongue.

  Third: the confession.

  Bella doesn’t know why Hill bothers, really. Whether they repent or plead innocence or keep their silence, they’ll burn just the same. She supposes it’s merely the proper end to the story he’s telling.

  An Inquisitor fiddles with the clasps of their bridles. The mask falls away and Bella retches as the metal tongue slides from her mouth.

  Then Gideon Hill asks them a series of questions: Will they repent before God? Will they provide the names of their companions in sin? Will they spend their eternity in Hell?

  At this Juniper laughs, a sound like a rusted hinge creaking in the wind. She grins up at him through swollen lips. “Ask for me when you get there, Hill. I’ll be waiting.”

  Hill watches her for a long, watery second before nodding to one of his Inquisitors.

  After that he asks all his questions again, but they’re harder to hear. It’s the screaming, Bella thinks.

  She wonders if Hill expects the pain to break them, and some delirious part of her wants to laugh. They know pain too well. It dined with them at their table, slept beside them, grew with them like a fourth sister. What are hot needles and cold mallets to the Sisters Eastwood?

  Over the iron smell of her own blood, Bella thinks that Araminta Wells will have to keep waiting to be disappointed.

  After that Bella goes away for a while. (St. Hale’s taught her that trick.)

  When she returns, Gideon Hill is at the judge’s bench, whispering. The judge stands, flushed and blinking, his white collar wilting.

  “This court, convened on September the twenty-first in the year eighteen-hundred and ninety-three, finds the Eastwood sisters guilty on all charges.” He clacks his hammer once. “They will burn at dusk tomorrow.”

  Over the sudden noise—the murmurs and hear-hears, the curses of the officers now wrestling Juniper back into her iron mask—Bella hopes no one notices that Agnes is smiling.

  The first time Gideon Hill visited Juniper in her prison cell she was reeling and wounded, stunned to meet a witch in the Deeps beneath New Salem.

  This time, she’s the witch. This time, she’s waiting for him.

  The moon has already risen and ripened by the time she hears the soft tap of boots, the click of claws. The steps pause outside her door.

  She thinks of beasts who came for maidens in the night, of knights who plucked princesses from their towers like fruit from the branch.

  A hissed exhalation, a twist of shadow, and Gideon Hill and his dog are standing in her cell. He’s not himself, she sees, or maybe more himself: his features are the same, but the muscles beneath them are arranged differently. His shoulders are no longer stooped, his spine no longer furled.

  Juniper looks at him through the iron bars of her bridle, waiting.

  He flicks his hands and a pair of five-fingered shadows peel lazily away from the window and inch toward Juniper. She doesn’t recoil when they slide over her bare ankles, crawl like hands up the thin cotton of her shift. Her collar flares hot beneath their touch and her breath hitches in her throat—but the shadows pass on, coiling like snakes around her bridle.

  The bit slides from Juniper’s mouth. She rolls her jaw and listens to the wet pop of tendons and bones. “Still paying house calls before sunrise, I see. Guess you can’t teach an old dog new tricks, can you?”

  Hill’s eyes sharpen at the word old, searching her face for hidden messages or veiled threats. Keep him stupid, Agnes warned her.

  “I’m still not in the mood for a confession, if that’s what you came for.” Juniper knows it isn’t.

  The sharpness leaves his features. He gives her a strange, angled smile, almost wry. “No, I thought not. May I sit?”

  Juniper makes a grand gesture to the bench opposite her, shackles clanking. She tries to keep her face scornful, but there’s a tenseness in her stomach, a whisper of uncertainty. She expected Gideon to gloat or sneer or possibly rave, to torment her like a cat with cornered prey. It’s what her daddy did as he dragged them to the cellar, drunk with his own power.

  Gideon’s face doesn’t look much like her daddy’s. It’s watchful in the moonlight, hungry in some way that Juniper doesn’t understand. “You must hate me,” he observes.

  Juniper feels her eyebrows rise. “You make it pretty damn easy.”

  A soft laugh from the shadows. “Yes, well. One does what one must to survive, and not all of it is pleasant. I thought you might understand that better than anyone.”

  Juniper doesn’t say anything. She thinks of the slide of snake scales, the addled terror in her daddy’s face at the very end.

  “I was wondering, Miss Eastwood, if I might tell you a story. And then ask you a question, after.”

  Juniper thinks about telling him precisely where he can shove his story. Thinks about showing him the swollen red places where the needles burrowed deep, the blackening bruises along her knees and knuckles, and telling him he already asked enough damn questions.

  He seems to see her answer in her face, because he withdraws something from his breast-pocket: a battered brass locket. “Here. A trade in good faith.”

  He places Mama Mags’s locket on the bench beside her. Juniper tries hard not to scrabble for it too eagerly, to press it too hard against her breastbone. “I only ask a little of your time, in exchange.”

  The locket is warm against her skin, despite their hours apart. She leans back against the wall, and listens.

  nce upon a time there were a brother and a sister who loved each other very much because they had no one else to love them.

  The sister told the brother it wasn’t always so—she remembered the warmth of their mother’s arms, the boom of their father’s laughter—but the little boy never knew their parent
s as anything but hungry and hateful, with bitter coals for hearts.

  In time they grew hungrier and more hateful, until one day their mother led them into the deepest dark of the woods. She gave them a single loaf of bread, more sawdust than wheat, and told them to wait for her return. They waited, as the owls swooped and the badgers burrowed, as the woods turned from blue to black and the tears froze on their cheeks, but their mother never came back. The little boy found that he, too, had a bitter coal burning in his heart.

  The boy and his sister wandered farther into the woods. They ate their meager loaf of bread and shared the last crumbs with a black raven who watched them from the trees. The raven gave them a long, red stare, then led them along a twisting path until they found a little house tucked beneath the roots of an ancient oak.

  Juniper thinks she knows this tale. In the version her sister told her, the house is made of gingerbread.

  The house was crooked and wild-looking, and so was the woman who lived inside it. “A witch,” the boy whispered to his sister, but she didn’t seem to mind.

  The witch sat them at her table and wrapped her fingers around their wrists. She tsked at the grate of their bones beneath their skins and fed them sweetmeats. When they were both reeling and drunk with the fullness of their bellies, she told them they could stay if they liked.

  The boy’s sister agreed readily. For the next seven years she studied with the witch in the woods and grew wilder and stranger, until she was nearly a forest creature herself, until she seemed not to remember the mother and father who left them in the woods.

  The boy studied, too, but he did not forget their mother or father, and looked always for the words and ways that would let him return to them. For that he required more than the witch’s old books and rhymes; he needed spells that could break wills and command hearts, that could change the nature of a soul.