The Once and Future Witches

by Alix E. Harrow

  One winter’s day the witch found the boy, who was no longer a boy, in a grove of rowan trees. The trees were full of starlings, but they were strangely silent. None of them cast a shadow on the ground. The witch watched while the boy commanded them to sing, and then to fly, and then to hurl themselves to the frozen earth, their necks twisted and bent at wrong angles.

  The witch asked the boy to leave then, because she feared him, and feared the cost of his ways. The boy agreed without complaint, not because she asked him to but because he had learned what he needed. He asked his sister to come with him, but she refused. She chose to remain in the woods without him. He left with the coal burning bright in his chest.

  The boy who was no longer a boy returned to his village. He found his mother and father still living, less hungry now without two more mouths to feed. His mother cried out when she saw him. Before she could curse him as a ghost or banish him a second time, the boy stole her shadow and her will. Her eyes turned empty and faraway, and she smiled as she held out her arms to him. “Welcome home, my son.”

  The boy and his mother and father lived happily ever after. For a time.

  Remember, remember till the fifth of December!

  I know no reason why a single season

  Should ever be forgot.

  A spell to recall what is forgotten, requiring saltpeter & a single tear

  James Juniper thought Gideon Hill was just like her daddy: a cowardly shit of a man who only felt whole when he was breaking something.

  Now she thinks he’s more like her. Or what she might have been if she never found Agnes and Bella again, never stood arm in arm with her Sisters or held Eve tight in her arms: a vicious, broken creature who knew how to survive and nothing more.

  Gideon Hill is staring at the ceiling, his hands clasped loosely in his lap. His dog is staring straight at Juniper with those mournful black eyes. Juniper doesn’t figure that’s their natural color.

  “No one’s ever guessed what she is.” Juniper says it softly into the cell, the air still rich and thick with storytelling.

  “I hide her well.” Hill’s fingers stroke the iron collar at his dog’s throat and the dog flinches.

  “I thought witches were friendly with their familiars.”

  Hill shakes his head at the ceiling. “That’s what the stories say, isn’t it? But if you want real power you must abandon sentiment. You must learn to think of your familiar not as a pet or a companion, but as a tool. And if a tool fails to do what is necessary, if it resists its master’s hand—” He shrugs in a manner that’s supposed to look careless but doesn’t.

  Juniper tries to imagine what kind of devilry you’d have to wreak before witching itself resisted you, before your own familiar bared its teeth at you. Was it when he first bound his soul to someone else, and stole their body for himself? Or was it even earlier, when he drove a grove full of starlings to their deaths?

  Her eyes fall to the rubbed-raw skin beneath the dog’s collar, and she wonders if it’s more than it seems. The first witch-collar, perhaps, crafted by some way-back incarnation of Gideon Hill to control his wayward hound. Then she wonders what would happen if it were free.

  Gideon is still looking upward, waiting patiently for her next question. Juniper asks it. “What happened? After the happily-ever-after?”

  Gideon sighs. He lifts one hand and its shadow stretches and roils across the cell floor, digits and joints bending in unnatural shapes. “The words and ways this requires are . . . potent. They come at a price—power always does. This isn’t a matter of wrong or right, you understand, but merely the working of the world. If you want strength, if you want to survive, there must be sacrifice.”

  That’s not what Mags taught them. You can tell the wickedness of a witch by the wickedness of her ways. “So who paid your price?”

  He bends his neck to look directly at her, weighing something. “A fever spread through my parents’ village that first winter.”

  The word fever rings in Juniper’s ears, a distant bell tolling.

  “It was nothing too remarkable, except the midwives and wise women couldn’t cure it. One of them came sniffing around, made certain deductions . . . I took her shadow, too. And the sickness spread further. The villagers grew unruly. Hysterical. I did what I had to do in order to protect myself.” That line has a smoothed-over feel, like a polished pebble, as if he’s said it many times to himself. “But then of course the fever spread even further . . . I didn’t know how to control it, yet. Which kinds of people were expendable and which weren’t. I’m more careful these days.”

  The ringing in Juniper’s ears is louder now, deafening.

  An uncanny illness, the Three had called it. Juniper remembers the illustrations in Miss Hurston’s moldy schoolbooks, showing abandoned villages and overfull graveyards, carts piled high with bloated bodies. Was that Gideon’s price? Had the entire world paid for the sins of one broken, bitter boy?

  And—were they paying again? I’m more careful these days. Juniper thinks of Eve’s labored breathing, the endless rows of cots at Charity Hospital, the fever that raged through the city’s tenements and row houses and dim alleys, preying on the poor and brown and foreign—the expendable. Oh, you bastard.

  But Hill doesn’t seem to hear the hitch in her breathing. “People grew frightened, angry. They marched on my village with torches, looking for a villain. So I gave them one.” Hill lifts both hands, palm up: What would you have of me? “I told them a story about an old witch woman who lived in a hut in the roots of an old oak. I told them she spoke with devils and brewed pestilence and death in her cauldron. They believed me.” His voice is perfectly dispassionate, neither guilty nor grieving. “They burned her books and then her. When they left my village I left with them, riding at their head.”

  So: the young George of Hyll had broken the world, then pointed his finger at his fellow witches like a little boy caught making a mess. He had survived, at any cost, at every cost. Oh, you absolute damn bastard.

  “And your sister? Did they catch her, too?” But Juniper doesn’t think they did. Juniper thinks his sister escaped, retreated to the lonely tor of Avalon, and wrote herself into a dozen new stories. Until the day her brother came with an army at his back and burned her for the crime of not loving him enough.

  “No.”

  “Did you ever see her again?”

  “Once. I asked her again if she would come with me, stand at my side—I could have protected her—but she refused me. Again.”

  Juniper has always thought of the final days at Avalon as a grand battle, a clash between the forces of good and evil, Saint against sinners. Now she pictures instead a brother and a sister looking at one another through the flames, both haunted by the same hateful story. The Maiden, who found her way into a better one, who made a way for herself among the crows and foxes and wild things. The Saint, who never found any ways except cruel ones.

  Juniper wonders what it cost the Maiden to refuse the brother she loved. She wonders what it cost the Saint to burn the only person who ever loved him.

  Gideon Hill is watching her again, and she imagines she sees something of that cost in the hollow blue of his eyes. “You remind me of her,” he says, very softly. Juniper looks away.

  He straightens on the bench, voice clipped and quick again. “Which brings me to my question, James Juniper: Will you stay with me? Or will you, too, burn?”

  Her neck snaps back toward him. She feels her jaw dangling and closes it carefully. “Come again?”

  “I’ve been alone for—a very long time. I grow weary of it. I have no wife, no family, no lovers.”

  “What about Miss Wiggin? Isn’t she your daughter?”

  Hill makes a soft, derisive noise in his throat. “She’s useful to me, in her way. A pliable will, a pretty face. Excellent for politics. I’ve met a dozen women like her in my time.” Juniper is willing to bet he’s met hundreds, maybe thousands. How dull the world must look after centuries of soul-eating, s
linking from body to body like a disease. How many wives has he buried? How many children has he outlived? Grace Wiggin must seem to him nothing but a mayfly, another collared creature under his sway.

  “But you are a rarer species. Free, feral, forceful. And such a will—didn’t you wonder why I never stole your shadow?” His smile is warm, almost admiring. “What a witch I could make of you.”

  “And my sisters?”

  The smile dims slightly. “The people need a villain again. Someone has to burn.” Beneath the watery red of the eyes he stole, Juniper thinks she sees a glimmer of his true self: a little boy lost in the woods who doesn’t want to be alone. “But not you.”

  Juniper can tell by the curl of Gideon’s smile that he’s confident in her answer, certain she’ll forsake her sisters and survive. It’s what he did, after all.

  It’s what Juniper herself might have done, back when she was a heartless, hurting thing. Now she wants so much more than merely to survive.

  She pretends to consider it, catching her lip between her teeth and making worried eyes. Hill stands slowly and steps closer, hungry-eyed, hopeful, hands lifting as if he wants to take her in his arms. She waits until he’s close enough that she can see his pulse jack-rabbiting in his throat.

  “I told you before, Hill.” Her whisper is soft, sincere. “Go fuck yourself.”

  Shadow-hands slam her spine against the stone wall. The collar burns at the touch of his witching, but Juniper’s throat is knotted and scarred now, half-numbed to the pain. Distantly it occurs to her that men like Gideon ought to stop breaking people, because sometimes they mend twice as strong.

  Hill’s face swims dizzily before her: chalk-white and mad as a spring starling, the lost little boy replaced by the ancient, addled soul.

  “She refused me and she burned for it,” he hisses into her face. “And so will you, James Juniper.”

  He vanishes in a swirl of shadow, and she is alone.

  Juniper sits for a long while after, not sleeping. She touches the brass locket lying warm against her breast, thinking of all those long hours lying on Mama Mags’s grave waiting for a ghost that never came, thinking of the voice she heard the last time she was locked up. Wishing she could hear it again.

  Then she thinks: Why not?

  She draws the chain over her head and cracks open the locket. Half of it is occupied by a face that Juniper never lets her eyes linger on for long.

  She lingers now. The photograph is blurred and silvered, the face blooming out of shadows. She’s beautiful, like Agnes. Freckled, like Bella. Juniper has never found much of herself in her mother, but she supposes they share a certain tilt in their chins, a wildness in their eyes. A heavy hand rests on her shoulder. The picture is too small to show its owner, but Juniper knows every scar and knob of her daddy’s knuckles.

  The other half of the locket holds a single curl of thistledown hair, tufted and white. Juniper strokes it once.

  She knows it’s madness. She knows it’s the foolish dream of a frightened girl. But she whispers the words anyway: Little Girl Blue, come blow your horn.

  She hesitates when she comes to the place where a name should be. She figures a person should be respectful when summoning the dead, so she calls her grandmother by her true name: Magdalena Cole awake, arise!

  Nothing happens except that the collar sears white-hot and Juniper swears.

  And the wind rushes through the cell window, smelling of tobacco and earth and midnight. Of home.

  Juniper swallows very hard. “Mama Mags?”

  No one answers her. But a cool touch trails over her brow—the wind over her skin or the brush of ghostly lips.

  “I’ll be twice-damned.” Juniper’s voice is hoarse, tear-thick. “You did it, didn’t you? Bound yourself to this locket?”

  Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. The words are the creak of floorboards, the whisper of moonlight.

  It’s nothing but a hedge-witch’s spell to mend split seams, but maybe it isn’t the words that matter, really. Maybe magic is just the space between what you have and what you need, and Mama Mags needed to leave some pale scrap of herself to watch over her granddaughters.

  A suspicion occurs to Juniper then, about what else Mama Mags might have bound. About the invisible force that pulled Juniper and her sisters to St. George’s Square that day in March, the lines that still stretch between them. Not fate, not destiny or blood-right, but merely the faded remains of their grandmother’s gift.

  Juniper rests her head in her palms and feels the tears sliding down her wrists. Shh, shh, whispers the wind. It’s alright, baby girl.

  Juniper cries until the breeze dies and the smell of tobacco fades from the room, until her collar cools around her neck and the bitter coal in her heart finally burns itself to cold ash and blows away.

  When she got to the top of the hill,

  She blew her trumpet both loud and shrill.

  A spell to shout, requiring daring & day-old meadowsweet

  The sky is the milky blue of old china and the wind whips from everywhere at once, as if the ceiling has been lifted off the world to let in a draft. The city feels brand-new, scoured clean.

  If Agnes Amaranth must burn, at least this is a good day for it.

  Her feet are bare and cold on the cobbled streets and her hair flies long and loose around her face. Her sisters walk one behind and one ahead of her. She can almost pretend they’re girls again clambering up the mountainside, following the crow-feather tangle of Juniper’s hair.

  Except instead of calico and cotton they wear rough-woven wool with ashen Xs painted across their chests. Instead of laughing and shrieking they are silent, their jaws locked tight in their iron cages. Instead of the soft shush of leaves and the sing-songing of creek-water, they’re surrounded by the clank and grate of their own chains, and the fevered hissing of a crowd.

  Agnes has never seen such a large crowd; it’s as if every building in New Salem has been upended and shaken until its occupants fell out and swarmed into the streets. There are workingmen with their sleeves rolled high and clerks with their derby hats tilted back. High-society ladies in fur-lined cloaks beside leering drunks with split-veined noses, entire families sprawled on checkered picnic blankets. All of them come to watch the witches burn.

  Their eyes are bright and empty, shining like wet stones in their skulls; their shadows pool like oil behind them, viscous and misshapen.

  But not every eye is empty, and not every shadow is twisted. Scattered through the crowd Agnes finds other faces: the Domontovich girls standing with their mother, vast and blond; Annie, standing in a cluster of girls from the mill; Ona, the raw-boned girl, glaring among them; Frankie Black and Florence Pearl and six other women from Salem’s Sin; Rose Winslow beside the Hull sisters; Gertrude the Dakota girl and Lacey the nurse from Charity Hospital; Inez, disguised by a heavy cloak and a white wig, holding so tight to Jennie Lind that the two of them look like a single creature; a dozen other women freed from the Deeps, their eyes dark and their lips curled, waiting.

  The Sisters of Avalon, who were not their sisters in truth but who still came when they were called.

  And so had others. Agnes sees ranks of disreputable-looking young men she remembers from the Workingman, looking entirely too eager for mayhem. There are knots of brown-skinned women standing together, wearing long cloaks and grim expressions—Cleopatra Quinn is beside her mother, her eyes like a pair of lit torches as she looks at Bella—and even a few ladies from the Women’s Association. Miss Cady Stone stands behind Jennie Lind, her jaw lifted.

  More—far more—than Agnes dared to hope, all here for Eve. And here for more than Eve: here because they are tired of stolen children and missing women, of creeping and hiding, of raids and arrests. Because none of them is strong enough to face Gideon Hill alone, so they did not come alone.

  Annie Flynn catches Agnes’s eye and bows her head once, a soldier to her general, one witch to another. She slants her eyes sideways at someone else and
Agnes sees him: Mr. August Lee.

  He wears a cap pulled low over the blond bird’s-nest of his hair and a red scarf wrapped under his chin. His eyes blaze at her, as if he can’t see the witch-mark daubed on her chest or the iron muzzle over her face, as if she is a queen ascending her throne rather than a convict marching to her death. He holds a silver flask in one hand and something bundled tight in the crook of his arm. The bundle squirms very slightly.

  Agnes stops walking, ignoring the yank of the collar around her throat, the curse as Juniper stumbles on her bad leg. The crowd shifts, someone steps aside, and she sees a ruby glint of hair, a tiny pink fist raised high. Her heart, held safe.

  Eve. The nurses and nuns at the Home for Lost Angels must not have noticed yet that they’re tending a lump of clay. The spell will crack and fade in another few hours, but by then it will be too late. She and Eve will be free among the stars.

  Someone hauls their chain forward. The collar feels light as lace around her neck now.

  St. George’s Square has been transformed into a scene from a cheap play. A scaffold stands over George’s plinth, built from wood so green it weeps around every nail-head. A stake points up from it like an accusing finger, piled deep with pine and white oak, glistening with lamp-oil.

  A second scaffold stands upwind of the first, filled with ranks of grave-faced men in judges’ robes and Inquisitors’ armor. Grace Wiggin is the only woman among them, her white sash crossed neatly between her breasts, her expression fixed and vacant. Agnes stares up at Wiggin as they pass, willing her to look down and see her own dark reflection there: a woman bound and bridled, stripped of her words and ways. Wiggin doesn’t look down, but a thin line appears between her brows.

  A man in a stained gray suit stands at the base of the steps with a lit torch held high. The sight of it—the greasy coil of smoke, the aged iron—makes Agnes feel unmoored in time. As if she’s drifted out of the world of trolleys and elections and into some murkier era of castles and knights and midnight bonfires.