The Once and Future Witches

by Harrow, Alix E.

  “Between—?” Miss Stone sounds puzzled, as if she is unfamiliar with the concept of jobs, as if money is just a thing a person finds whenever they reach into their handbags. “Oh. Well. No woman is barred from our cause by poverty.” She says it all lofty and generous, but her tone hooks under Juniper’s skin like a summer briar.

  Miss Lind launches into a lecture about all their various letter-writing campaigns and subcommittees and allied organizations. Juniper listens with her temper simmering, bubbling like a pot left too long over the fire.

  “And then the Centennial Fair is coming up in May, of course, and we feel it’s an excellent opportunity for another demonstration. Get people’s minds off th-the equinox.” Miss Lind’s throat bobs in a dry little swallow. “Anyway. What projects interest you? The campaign for the vote is paramount, naturally, but we also promote temperance, divorce rights, property ownership, and various charitable—”

  Juniper tilts her head and says, “Witching.” It lands like a barehanded slap, flat and loud. Beside her, Bella makes a soft, pained sound.

  “I beg your pardon?” Miss Stone’s mouth has gone very small and dry, like an apple left too long on the windowsill. The secretary’s mouth is hanging wide open.

  Juniper is tired of this mincing and dancing, sidestepping around the thing they ought to be running toward. “You know. You saw it: the tower and the trees, and the mixed-up stars.” Both of them are blinking at her in horrified unison. “That was real witching, the good stuff, the kind that could do a whole lot more than just curl your hair or shine your shoes. The kind that could cure the sick or curse the wicked.” The kind that keeps mothers alive and little girls safe. The kind that might still, somehow, find a way to steal Juniper’s land back from her dumbshit cousin Dan. Juniper spreads her arms, palm up. “You asked what I wanted to work on, that’s it.”

  Miss Stone’s mouth shrivels even smaller. “Miss West. I’m afraid—”

  Her secretary interrupts in a nervous little blurt. “The men did it. Those union boys in Chicago last year—they say machines rusted overnight, and coal refused to burn . . .” Miss Stone casts her the sort of look that turns people into pillars of salt and the secretary subsides.

  “The Women’s Association is not interested in what some degenerate men may or may not have done in Chicago, Miss Lind.” She draws a deep, not very calm breath and turns back to Juniper. “I’m afraid you have entirely misunderstood our position. The Association has battled for decades to afford women the same respect and legal rights enjoyed by men. It is a battle we are losing: the American public still sees women as housewives at best and witches at worst. We may be either beloved or burned, but never trusted with any degree of power.”

  She pauses, her mouth shrinking to the smallest, bitterest apple seed. “I don’t know who was responsible for the abnormality at St. George’s, but I would turn her in myself before I let such activities destroy everything we’ve worked for.”

  Miss Stone extracts a ruffled copy of The New Salem Post from the front desk and flings it at Juniper and Bella. The splashy over-sized headline reads MAGIC MOST BLACK, with a smaller line printed beneath it: MYSTERIOUS TOWER TERRORIZES CITIZENS. Some imaginative artist has provided a sketch of a great black spire looming above the New Salem skyline, complete with brooding storm clouds and little bats flapping around the top.

  Juniper squints her way through the adjectives and hysteria, skimming past excitable phrases like “terrified wailing of innocent children” and “malevolent apparition” and landing on the last few paragraphs:

  While Mayor Worthington’s office has claimed there is “no evidence of serious witchcraft” and urges the citizenry to “remain rational,” others are less sanguine. There are rumors that the notorious Daughters of Tituba may be behind the occurrence, although the New Salem Police Department maintains that no such organization exists.

  Miss Grace Wiggin, head of the Women’s Christian Union, points to the recent and virulent fevers that have run rampant through New Salem and recalls the ancient connections between witchcraft and plague. “Surely we need not wait for a second Black Death before we act!”

  Mr. Gideon Hill left us with this sobering reflection: “I fear we have only ourselves to blame: in tolerating the unnatural demands of the suffragists, have we not also harbored their unnatural magics? The people deserve a mayor who will protect them from harm—and there is no harm greater than the return of witching.”

  Indeed. And Mr. Hill—an up-and-coming member of the City Council and third-party candidate for New Salem mayor—might be just the man for the job.

  Juniper tosses the paper back on the desk. “Well,” she offers, “shit.”

  Miss Stone regards her grimly. “Quite.”

  “Who are the Daughters of Tituba?”

  Bella opens her mouth, but Miss Stone answers first. “An unsavory rumor.” She stabs a finger at the paper. “Listen, Miss West: you are welcome to assist the Association in our mission. Saints know we need every warm body we can get. But you will have to abandon your pursuit of this, this”—she taps the article—“devilry. Am I understood?”

  Juniper looks at her—this little old woman with a powdered wig and a big office on the fancy side of town—and understands perfectly well. She understands that the Women’s Association wants one kind of power—the kind you can wear in public or argue in the courtroom or write on a slip of paper and drop in a ballot box—and that Juniper wants another. The kind that cuts, the kind with sharp teeth and talons, the kind that starts fires and dances merry around the blaze.

  And she understands that if she intends to pursue it, she’ll have to do it on her own. “Yes, ma’am,” she says, and hears three sighs of relief around her.

  Miss Stone invites Juniper to report to the Centennial March planning committee the following Tuesday evening and instructs Miss Lind to add her name to the member list and give her a tour of their offices.

  She turns back once before she sweeps into the recesses of the office, her apple-seed mouth unshriveling very slightly. “It’s not that I don’t understand. Every thinking woman has once wanted what she shouldn’t, what she can’t have. I wish . . .” Juniper wonders if Miss Stone was ever a little girl listening to her grandmother’s stories about the Maiden riding her white stag through the woods, the Mother striding into battle. If she once dreamed of wielding swords rather than slogans.

  Miss Stone gives her shoulders a stern little shake. “I wish we might make use of every tool in our pursuit of justice. But I’m afraid the modern woman cannot afford to be sidetracked by moonbeams and witch-tales.”

  Juniper smiles back as pleasantly as she knows how and Bella whispers “yes, of course” beside her. But there’s a look in Bella’s eyes as she says it, a struck-flint spark that makes Juniper think that her sister doesn’t intend to give up her moonbeams or witch-tales at all; that maybe she, too, wants another kind of power.

  Beatrice Belladonna leaves the New Salem Women’s Association headquarters with her cloak pulled tight against the spring chill and an anxious knot in her belly.

  She walks down St. Patience thinking about the way her sister looked as she added her name to the list of members, bold and foolish, and the way Beatrice’s fingers itched to copy her.

  Thinking, too, about the words she found written in the margins of the Sisters Grimm and her growing certainty that, in speaking them aloud, she had touched a match to an invisible fuse. Begun something which could not now be stopped.

  Because Beatrice’s eyes are on the limestone cobbles, her shoulders hunched around her ears like a worried owl, she doesn’t see the woman walking toward her until they collide.

  “Oh my goodness, pardon me—” Beatrice is somehow on all fours, feeling blindly for her spectacles and apologizing to a pair of neatly shined boots.

  A warm hand pulls her upright and dusts the street-grime from her dress. “Are you all right, miss?” The voice is low and amused, her face a blur of white teeth and b
rown skin.

  “Yes, perfectly fine, I just need my—”

  “Spectacles?” A half-laugh, and Beatrice feels her glasses settle gently back onto her nose.

  The smudge resolves itself into a woman with amber eyes and skin like sunlight through jarred sorghum. She wears a gentleman’s coat buttoned daringly over her skirts and a derby hat perched at an angle Beatrice can only describe as jaunty. The only colored women on the north side of New Salem are maids and serving girls, but this woman is quite clearly neither.

  The woman extends her hand and smiles with such professional charm that Beatrice feels slightly blinded. “Miss Cleopatra Quinn, with The New Salem Defender.”

  She says it breezily, as if The Defender were a ladies’ journal or a fashion periodical, rather than a radical colored paper infamous for its seditious editorials. Its office has been burned and relocated at least twice, to Beatrice’s knowledge.

  Beatrice shakes Miss Quinn’s hand and releases it quickly, not noticing the way she smells (ink and cloves and the hot oil of a printing press) or whether or not she wears a wedding band (she does).

  Beatrice swallows. “B-Beatrice Eastwood. Associate librarian at Salem College.”

  Miss Quinn is looking over Beatrice’s shoulder at the Association headquarters. “Are you a member of the Women’s Association? Were you present for the events in the square on the equinox?”

  “No. I mean, well, yes, I was, but I’m not—”

  Miss Quinn raises a placating hand. Beatrice notices her wrist is spattered with silver scars, round pocks that almost but don’t quite make a pattern. “I assure you The Defender isn’t interested in any of that breathless witch-hunt nonsense printed in The Post. You may be confident that your observations will be presented with both accuracy and sympathy.”

  There’s a vibrancy to Miss Quinn that makes Beatrice think of an actress onstage, or maybe a street-witch misdirecting her audience.

  Beatrice feels exceptionally drab and stupid standing beside her. She smiles a little desperately, perspiring in the spring sun. “I’m afraid I don’t have any opinions to offer.”

  “A shame. Suffragists have a reputation for opinions.”

  “I’m not really a suffragist. I mean, I’m not a formal member of the Association.”

  “Nor am I, and yet I persist in having all manner of opinions and observations.”

  Beatrice catches a laugh before it escapes and stuffs it back down her throat. “Perhaps you ought to join, then.”

  She can tell by the flattening of Miss Quinn’s smile that it’s the wrong thing to say, and Beatrice knows why. She’s overheard enough talk at the library and read enough editorials in The Ladies’ Tribune to understand that the New Salem Women’s Association is divided on the question of the color-line. Some worry that the inclusion of colored women might tarnish their respectable reputation; others feel they ought to spend a few more decades being grateful for their freedom before they agitate for anything so radical as rights. Most of them agree it would be far more convenient if colored women remained in the Colored Women’s League.

  Beatrice herself suspects that two separate-but-equal organizations are far less effective than a single united one, and that their daddy was as wrong about freedmen needing to go back to Africa as he was about women minding their place—but she’s never worried overmuch about it. She feels an uncomfortable twist of shame in her belly.

  Miss Quinn’s smile has smoothed. “I think not. But the equinox, Miss Eastwood. Why don’t you tell me what you saw?”

  “The same thing everyone saw, I’m sure. A sudden wind. Stars. A tower.”

  “A door with certain words inscribed on it and a certain sign beneath them.” Miss Quinn says it mildly, but her eyes are yellow, feline.

  “Was there?” Beatrice asks lamely.

  “There was. An old symbol of circles woven together. It’s of . . . particular interest to me and certain of my associates. Would you—a librarian, I think you said?—happen to know anything about that sign?”

  “I—I’m afraid not. That is, circles are common in all sorts of sigils and spell-work, and the number three is a number of traditional significance, isn’t it? It could be anything.”

  “I see. Although”—Miss Quinn smiles a checkmate sort of smile—“I don’t believe I told you how many circles there were.”

  “Ah.”

  “Miss Eastwood. I was just heading to the tea shop on Sixth. Won’t you join me?”

  As she says it, she gives Beatrice a particular kind of look through her lashes, heated and secret. It’s a look Beatrice has spent seven years carefully neither giving nor receiving nor even wanting.

  (When she was younger she permitted herself to want such things. To admire a woman’s peony-petal lips or the delicate hollow of her throat. She learned her lesson.)

  She takes an anxious step back from Miss Cleopatra Quinn and her long eyelashes. “I—I’m afraid I must get to work.” She attempts a cool nod. “Good day.”

  Miss Quinn looks neither offended nor discouraged by her abrupt departure, but merely more intent. “Until we meet again, Miss East-wood.” She gives Beatrice a sober tip of her derby hat and spreads her skirt in a gesture that is half-bow and half-curtsy. Beatrice blushes for no reason she can name.

  Beatrice walks the three blocks back to the College with her eyes on her boots, not-thinking about moonbeams or witch-tales or the thin wedding band around Miss Quinn’s finger.

  She barely hears the scintillated whispers of the passersby or the paper-boys darting like swallows through the streets, calling out headlines (Witches Loose in New Salem! Hill’s Morality Party on the Rise! Mayor Worthington Under Pressure!), and if the shadows on the streets behave oddly—peeling away from dark doorways and coiling out of alleyways, trailing after her like the black hem of a long cloak—Beatrice does not notice.

  Bye baby bunting,

  Mother’s gone a-hunting

  A spell to end what hasn’t yet begun, requiring pennyroyal & regret

  Two weeks after she found her long-lost sisters and lost them again, Agnes Amaranth is standing in a dim back-alley shop just off St. Fortitude. There is no sign or title on the door, but Agnes knows she’s in the right place: she can smell the wild scent of herbs and earth, just like Mags’s hut, out of place in the cobbled gray of New Salem.

  The proprietress is a handsome Greek woman with black curls and dark-painted eyes. She introduces herself, in an accent that rolls and purls, as Madame Zina Card: palmist, spiritualist, card-reader, and midwife.

  But Agnes hasn’t come to have her fortune told or her palms read. “Pennyroyal, please,” she says, and it’s enough.

  Madame Zina gives her a weighing look, as though checking to see whether Agnes knows what she’s asked for and why, then unlocks a cupboard and tucks a few dried sprigs into a brown paper sack.

  “Steep the pennyroyal in river-water—boil it good, mind—and stir it seven times with a silver spoon. The words cost extra.” Madame Zina’s eyes linger on the eggshell swell of Agnes’s belly. She’s barely showing, but only women in a particular state come to visit Zina’s shop asking for pennyroyal.

  Agnes shakes her head once. “I already have them.” Mags told them to her when she was sixteen. She hasn’t forgotten.

  Madame Zina nods amiably and hands her the brown paper sack sealed with wax. Concern crimps her black brows. “No need to look so glum, girl. I don’t know what your man or your god has told you, but there’s no sin to it. It’s just the way of the world, older than the Three themselves. Not every woman wants a child.”

  Agnes almost laughs at her: Of course she wants a child. Of course she wants to lay its sleeping cheek against her breastbone and smell its milk-sweet breath, to become on its behalf something grander than herself: a castle or a sword, stone or steel, all the things her mother wasn’t.

  But Agnes wanted to take care of her sisters, once. She won’t bring another life into the world just to fail it, too.
r />   She doesn’t know how to put any of her foolish, doomed wanting into words, so she shrugs at Madame Zina, feeling the bones of her shoulders grate.

  “Let me read the cards for you. Free of charge.” Zina gestures to an armchair that looks like it was once pink or cream but is now the greasy color of unwashed skin. Ragged red curtains droop over the arm.

  “No, thank you.”

  Zina runs her tongue over her teeth, eyes narrowed. “I could read hers, if you like.” Her eyes are on Agnes’s belly.

  Agnes sits as if something heavy has hit the backs of her knees.

  Zina settles herself across from her and produces a pack of over-sized cards with gold stars painted on their backs and edges gone soft with use.

  “Her past.” She flips over the Three of Swords, showing a ruby-red heart with three swords run cleanly through it. Agnes thinks of her sundered sisters and the terrible wounds they’ve dealt one another, seven years old and still unhealed, and shifts uncomfortably in the chair.

  “Her present.” Zina lays out three cards this time: the Witch of Swords, the Witch of Wands, and the Witch of Cups. Agnes almost smiles to see them. The Witch of Swords even looks a little like Juniper—her hair a wild splatter of ink, her expression fierce.

  “Her future.” The Eight of Swords, showing a woman bound and blind, surrounded by enemies. The Hanged Woman, dangling upside down like a sacrificial animal on the altar. Agnes avoids her gaze.

  Zina sets the deck on the table and taps it once. “You draw the last one.”

  Agnes reaches out her hand but a sudden wind whips through the open window—night-cool and tricksome, scented faintly with roses—and scatters the deck across the floor. The wind riffles like fingers through the fallen cards before whispering into silence. It leaves a single card face up: the Tower, shadowed and tall.

  Agnes’s blood burns at the sight of it. “Here—” She claws the cards off the floor and shoves them at Zina. “Let me choose properly.”