The Once and Future Witches

by Alix E. Harrow

  Juniper remembers lying in bed between her sisters when she was young, listening to the slur and stomp of their daddy downstairs. Agnes would stroke the hair back from Juniper’s forehead and whisper, It’ll be alright.

  Even as a child Juniper knew it was a lie. But it was the kind of lie that became true in the telling, because at least there was someone in the world who loved her enough to lie.

  Agnes is frowning so fiercely at her that Juniper thinks she must know what’s coming, must see it in the tremble of Juniper’s hand over her daughter.

  “What’s going on?”

  Juniper leans down to kiss her cheek. “It’ll be alright.”

  She turns to face the flames.

  She hesitates. Partly because Gideon Hill is railing and screaming inside her, straining against her will like a mad dog against the leash, but mostly because she likes being alive and wants to keep doing it.

  She wishes she could stay right where she is, with the frost-bitten edge of the wind in her hair and the wild wheel of stars above her and the beat of her sisters’ hearts beside her.

  She wishes she could run away. Mount her rowan branch and disappear with her sisters, never to be seen or heard from again. They might go back home, to the mist-hung mountains and the cold creeks, and build their tower deep in the green woods. They might let the blackberry vines grow high as a rose-thorn hedge around them and raise Eve together in the leaf-dappled dark, safe and secret.

  She wishes she were one of those firebirds from Mags’s stories, that something might rise from her ashes.

  She can’t hold out much longer. Gideon Hill’s soul seeps like venom through her veins, settling into her bones. It seems like a fitting end, at least: her mother died for her and now Juniper will die for Eve. Maybe Eve will be the one to finally redeem all those generations of debt, all the sacrifices of the women who came before her.

  Juniper draws a last breath. Pats the black wolf once on the head, like a loyal hound.

  Hill twists like a knife inside her but she still feels some reserve in him, a calculating calm. Maybe he can’t quite believe she’ll do it, even now, because he can’t quite imagine loving anything more than he loves himself.

  Or maybe he thinks he’ll survive it. Maybe he plans to slither away from her burning body the way he left his last one, clinging to the world until he finds some weak-willed creature to bind himself to.

  He doesn’t know the Eastwoods have spoken to the Last Three, that they have the secret to his unmaking. That all his sins have finally come home to roost.

  Juniper licks cracked lips. “You’ve had a lot of names, Gideon Hill.” She feels him cease his struggling, listening. “Gabriel Hill. Glennwald Hale. George of Hyll. Always Gs and Hs, so I guess you must have missed her.” He coils tighter inside her, cold and terrible and just beginning to be afraid. “Your sister sends her love, Hansel.”

  Juniper feels a tremor move through his soul, a wave of confusion and longing and finally terror, as he understands that this death will be his true and final one, that all his scheming and stealing will end here, tonight, in the fire he lit himself.

  Juniper steps into the flames and they close their waiting arms around her, hot and close. She hears Agnes screaming, Bella wailing, “June, no! Stop her!”

  Then there’s nothing but the sound of burning and the words in her own mouth.

  All the king’s horses and all the king’s men—

  Ring around the roses,

  A pocket full of posies,

  Ashes, ashes,

  We all rise up.

  A spell to bind a soul, requiring an untimely death & a destination

  Agnes Amaranth screams. The wolf howls. The crowd roars. And beneath all that desperate noise Agnes hears the soft, inevitable sound of her own heart breaking.

  She should have known better than to draw that circle wide. Should have known what it would cost her.

  Agnes rushes toward the flames but reels back at the snap of black teeth. Gideon’s wolf is standing between her and the fire. There is no wrath in the deep red of her eyes, but merely a weary duty.

  Agnes curls her spine around Eve to protect her from the hiss of cinders. “August!”

  He’s already beside her, drawn by her scream. She knows by the sound of his swearing that he’s seen Juniper standing in the white heart of the fire, her hair floating in a dark halo around her head, her woolen shift burned black.

  “Help me—the damn wolf—” Agnes can’t seem to string her words into sentences—Juniper’s pain is echoing through the binding between them, vast and hot—but August understands her. Agnes feints left and the wolf follows her while August leaps behind it.

  He dives into the flames without hesitation or second-guessing, as if it’s his own sister burning, and Agnes has the fleeting, mad desire for her daddy to appear beside her so she could show him what love ought to look like.

  The wolf snarls and follows him into the flames, jaws reaching for a boot or a leg. A too-long second follows, while the wolf pulls August backward and August refuses to be pulled. Both of them tumble out of the fire, smoking faintly, coughing and retching—

  Without Juniper.

  “She won’t let go of the post!” August’s voice is raw and smoke-laden, his face smeared with soot.

  Agnes looks back into the fire, squinting against the rising heat. Her sister’s arms are wrapped tight around the stake. Agnes can feel the grit of her will through the binding, running like steel beneath the pain. Her mouth is open, lips forming words that Agnes recognizes even through the bright lick of flames and the haze of smoke. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men—

  The words to sunder a soul. The words the Last Three had written for Gideon Hill, centuries ago.

  Agnes understands what Juniper must have done, and what she is doing now, and why she will not permit herself to be saved.

  Agnes feels the broken edges of her heart grate against one another. Here she thought she had escaped Hill’s trap, refused his too-high price, but in the end she’d merely delayed it. In the end it’s still your life or your freedom, your sister or your daughter, and someone still has to pay.

  August is beating uselessly at the flames with his shirt now, his chest smeared with char and ash. He calls to his men down in the square, begging for water, but they’re busy holding back the maddened crowd. There will be no circle of cold water and no whispered words to save Juniper this time.

  Pan and Strix are circling the fire, crisscrossing above Juniper. Other birds have joined them—the ordinary pigeons and common crows of the city, come to witness this last great act of witching, eerily silent.

  Agnes hears the wolf give a low, mournful howl, like a bell tolling in the distance, and knows it’s too late. Juniper’s hair has caught fire, a bloody crown, and her dress is flaking away from her body in gray sheets of ash. Smoke boils thick and greasy from her skin.

  Agnes is the strong sister, the steady sister who stands unflinching, but now she looks away. She cannot bear to watch her sister burn.

  Juniper is unraveling. Her soul is unspooling from her body, slipping like smoke through the cracks of a burning building. She wants to follow it, to drift into the sweet dark while her flesh spits and sizzles, but she stays. She speaks the words.

  All the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put Georgie together again.

  The words are like fingers picking at a knot, patient and persistent. They burrow between her ribs and find the black tangle of Hill’s soul and prise it away from the world, pulling it toward the vast silence of the hereafter. He resists, naturally—Juniper feels him clawing and screaming and generally kicking up three kinds of fuss, reduced to nothing but the wordless will to keep existing—but Juniper’s lips keep moving, the spell steady as a heartbeat and hot as hellfire. Maybe it’s her sisters’ wills added to her own.

  Maybe it’s Mama Mags whispering in her ear. Keep going, honey-child.

  Or maybe dying for someo
ne else is just worth more than living for yourself.

  Her dress burns first. Then her hair. She’d hoped maybe she wouldn’t feel it—her daddy always said the healing hurt worse than the burning, that he’d prayed for life during the fire and prayed for death afterward—but pain licks like a barbed tongue over every inch of her skin. It nibbles and bites, sinking its teeth bone-deep.

  It occurs to her that she won’t be able to speak the words, soon. Already her tongue is cracked and swollen and the smoke is ground glass in her throat, but Hill still clings to her like clay on a boot-heel. She feels him stirring with the malicious hope that she might die before his soul is entirely sundered.

  She might have. Except sometimes, if you reach deep enough into the red heart of magic, some little scrap of magic reaches back out to you. Sometimes if you bend the rules long enough, they break.

  Juniper’s eyes are closed, but she feels it arrive: a winged darkness. A shape that smells like witching and wild places. It perches on her shoulder and brushes hot feathers against her cheek.

  It occurs to her that it’s exactly her kind of bullshit luck that she’d finally get her familiar but die before she laid eyes on him.

  She tries to touch his claws with her hand, but there’s something wrong with her arms, her hands, the skin and sinews between them. All she can do is send him the words and hope, somehow, that it will be enough.

  “All the king’s horses and all the king’s men—” It’s her own voice singing strong and clear through the flames, but it doesn’t come from her cracked and boiling lips. It’s her familiar carrying the words for her, singing them loud and clear even as her throat closes and her lips burn.

  There’s a loosening in her chest, a knot unbinding. Hill’s scream sounds very far away, as if he’s on a train heading into a long tunnel. The only thing holding him to the world now is Juniper’s own life, and that won’t last long.

  The heat of the flames fades. So does the crackle of burning wood, the hiss of her own skin. Even the pain fades, and she knows then that she is dying.

  Juniper is the wild sister, the sly sister, never caught, always running, but she can’t run from this.

  She hears singing as she dies, distant and familiar. A children’s rhyme she used to chant with her sisters on summer evenings when they were young and whole, when the world was soft and green and small, when they thought they could hold hands forever, unbroken.

  Bella feels her sister dying but doesn’t believe it. How can Juniper die? Juniper who is so young and so bold, who seems twice as alive as everyone around her? And if she can die—if that’s truly her body burning on the pyre, her pain ringing loud in the line between them—then the world is a far crueler place than even Bella imagined, and she wants nothing more to do with it.

  She knows precisely how the Last Three must have felt at the end of the age of witches, knowing that something fierce and beautiful was leaving the world, so desperate to preserve even some small piece of it that they let their bodies burn around them.

  But not—Bella draws a sharp breath—their souls.

  The Three stole Saint George’s victory from him at the last second. They bound their souls to a tower of words and disappeared into nowhere to wait, undying, for the next age of witches to begin. What is magic, anyway, if not a way when there is none?

  Cleo has her arm tight around Bella’s shoulders, holding her steady. Bella breaks free and spins to face her. “The rose petal I gave you, the one I put around your finger—do you still have it?”

  Cleo’s face says this is a very odd thing to ask while your sister burns and the city riots, but she reaches into her skirt pocket and produces the petal, even more crumpled and dry, but still whole. “Having second thoughts, love?”

  “Never.” Bella cups the petal in her palm. Such a small, fragile thing on which to rest her sister’s soul. “Agnes!”

  Agnes is swaying and pale, too tear-blinded to see the rose in Bella’s hand, too grief-struck to understand the eager intent in her eyes. Then Bella says the words, and hope rises like the sun in Agnes’s face.

  They’re the words the three of them had sung as little girls, dancing beneath the fireflies. They’re the words the Three wrote to bind their souls to witchcraft itself, which have filtered down through the ages as a children’s rhyme, not quite forgotten.

  Ring around the roses, pocket full of posies, ashes, ashes, we all rise up.

  Cleo joins Bella’s chant, then Agnes. August comes next, his voice low and unsteady, and Strix and Pan high above them. More voices follow, too many to count, singing up from the crowd below—the Sisters of Avalon and the Daughters of Tituba, the Women’s Association and the workers’ unions, the maids and mill-girls, all the witches of New Salem who came when the Eastwoods called.

  Together they call the magic and the magic answers, boiling through their veins. Bella waits until it crests like a wave in her chest before she curls her fist around the petal, crushing it. She tosses the remains into the night.

  The sky does not split open. No black tower appears. But a sudden wind rises, sharp and green and rose-sweet. The wind tangles Bella’s skirts and whips the flames high. It hovers above the pyre, waiting.

  Bella knows the precise moment Juniper dies.

  The line that leads to her youngest sister goes slack; Agnes screams; the wolf’s howl goes abruptly quiet. Bella sees a pale shadow rise from the fire, like mist, before the witch-wind carries it away.

  For a moment she thinks she hears voices calling, almost like three women welcoming a fourth, or maybe she merely hopes she does. The spell ends and the wind dies and a strange silence falls over the square, as if even the most foolish of them know something grave and grand has happened.

  Bella feels her knees crack against the scaffold, then the sting of tears and the warmth of Cleo’s arms around her.

  Bella is the wise sister, the bookish one, the knowing one, but she doesn’t know whether it was enough.

  Agnes wants to climb into the fire and burn alongside her sister. She wants to scream until her throat is flayed raw from screaming, until the whole city has to stop and look and see what they have wrought. She wants to step into nowhere and call Juniper’s name.

  But there are people swarming up the steps now. Some of the most devout Inquisitors and their followers have rallied and fought past August’s men. August rushes to meet them, iron bar whipping back and forth, but Agnes knows he can’t hold them for long. She looks down at Eve—awake now and frowning fiercely—then reaches for the rowan-wood branches and climbs to her feet.

  She tries to think of nothing but the cool strength of the wood in her hand and the sharp scent of sap. Not the third bough she leaves lying on the scaffold, riderless. Not Juniper’s face when the Crone told them the spell for flight. Not the way she looked up at the sky as they were bound to the stake, sly and knowing, as if the moon was a long-lost lover she would soon meet again.

  The scaffold blurs before her, fractured by tears. She stumbles to Bella, who leans half-collapsed in Cleo’s arms, and presses a branch into her hand.

  “Come on, Bell. It’s time to go.”

  Bella looks as if she, too, would like to lie down and let the flames wash over her, but she doesn’t. She stands slowly, as if she’s aged several decades, and offers her hand down to Cleo. She pulls her to her feet but does not release her hand. “You could still come with us.”

  Cleo shakes her head once. “I’m needed here. The Daughters have work to do, and a chance to move in the open, without Hill.” But she touches Bella’s face, thumb brushing over her cheekbone. “I’ll come when I can.” Then she draws a stub of chalk from her pocket and marks a shape on the scaffold, singing a song. Cleo blurs around the edges, not quite invisible.

  “Don’t keep me waiting, Miss Quinn,” Bella says, and the heat of it makes Agnes look away. Her eyes find August, forced to the top of the stairs now, iron bar still swinging. His mouth is red and swelling. A bright line of blood runs from
a cut at his temple. He throws a wild look back to Agnes and she knows he intends to stand there until she is safely gone or until he can stand no longer. This last look is the closest they can come to goodbye.

  Agnes reaches for Bella’s hand and whispers the words. Lady bird, lady bird, fly away home.

  An airy, weightless feeling spreads from Agnes’s fingertips to her ribs, as if her blood has been replaced with rising mist.

  She and her sister (she stumbles over the singular word, the absence of that soft s at the end) mount their rowan branches and feel their bare feet lift from the scaffold. They rise into the air like smoke. Or like witches, in the way-back days when they flew with clouds as their cloaks and stars in their eyes.

  They follow the spirals of cinder and ash with their familiars winging alongside them, leaving behind the city that hates them and the people who love them and their sister who died for them. It’s only in Agnes’s head that she hears a small, wild girl begging her: Don’t leave me.

  The air grows clean and cold as they fly higher, smokeless, moonlit. The world feels vast and boundless around Agnes, like a house with all its walls and windows thrown down, and she clutches her daughter tighter to her chest. She thinks she hears a muffled gurgle from the wrapped bundle, almost like a laugh.

  The sound outweighs the grief in Agnes’s chest, like a brass scale tipping. They had lost too much—a library called back and then burned; a sister found and then lost forever—but not everything. Not the sound of her daughter flying with moon-shine on her skin, laughing.

  Beneath them the city square looks small and dim. Agnes sees upturned faces, feels the tug of hundreds of watching eyes. She can almost see the new stories cast like dandelion-seeds behind them, taking root in the city below. Stories about shadows stolen and then set free, about villains and wolves and young women who walk willingly into the fire. About two witches flying where there should have been three.