The Once and Future Witches

by Harrow, Alix E.

  Cross my heart and hope to die.

  Strike me down if I lie.

  A spell for secrets kept and told, requiring bindweed & blood

  The Calamitous Coven.”

  “No.”

  “Eve’s Army.”

  “No! It ought to be about, I don’t know, sisterhood or union—”

  “The Ladies Union of Giving the Bastards What’s Coming to Them.”

  “James Juniper, if you can’t be serious, at least be quiet.”

  Juniper subsides, slouching lower against the wall. As a clandestine society of would-be witches, Juniper had anticipated that their first order of business would be exciting and magical, like burning the Sign of the Three across City Hall or turning the Hawthorn River to blood.

  Her sisters and Miss Jennie Lind apparently thought otherwise. The four of them have been stuck in Agnes’s cabbagey room at South Sybil for hours now, discussing safe houses and membership oaths and other disappointingly unwitchy subjects.

  Jennie is even taking honest-to-Eve notes, sitting on Agnes’s bed with Bella’s little black book propped on her knees. She’s the one who suggested their society have a name, although she has so far ignored each of Juniper’s excellent suggestions.

  “The Sisters of Sin.”

  Jennie’s pen doesn’t move.

  “What about—” Bella begins, then bites her lip. “What about the Sisters of Avalon?” It takes less than a second’s silence for Bella to begin backtracking and hand-wringing. “Perhaps not. It sounds a bit like the Daughters of Tituba, doesn’t it, and we hardly want to be mistaken for make-believe. And it’s so provocative to associate ourselves so openly with the Last Three—”

  But Agnes is smiling and Jennie’s pen is moving across the top of the page, and Juniper can feel the name settling over them, shining in their faces. Juniper has a goosefleshed premonition that it will be printed in papers and on wanted posters, whispered through the alleys and mill-floors, passed like a lantern from hand to hand. The Sisters of Avalon, they call themselves. Did you hear? The looks exchanged, the flash of longing in their eyes.

  “Excellent.” Jennie finishes the last flourish of the name. “And what about titles and duties? Should they be elected positions, do you think?”

  Juniper finds that this somewhat dampens the shine of their new name. “Positions?”

  “Well, I mean—secretary, treasurer, president, vice president, press liaison, head of recruitment . . .” Jennie ticks them off on her fingers.

  “Saints, there’s only four of us.”

  “Sounds like a problem for the head of recruitment.”

  Juniper flicks a ball of lint at Jennie and Jennie dodges without taking her eyes from her paper. Bella offers, tentatively, “I—I could be the press liaison. I have a—contact in the newspaper business.” Bella doesn’t look at any of them as she says it, and Juniper wonders if she means that colored woman in the gentleman’s coat, and why that should cause her to blush such a vivid pink. She recalls a little uneasily that there were rumors back home about her oldest sister, too.

  Jennie writes something in the notebook. “Full name?”

  “Beatrice Eastwood.”

  Jennie hesitates. “Why do your sisters call you Bella?”

  Juniper says, “Because that’s the name our mama gave her. Beatrice Belladonna Eastwood.” Bella shifts uncomfortably and Juniper sighs at her. “Honestly, if we can’t use our mother’s-names in a secret society of witches, when can we?”

  Jennie finishes writing and turns an expectant eye to Agnes, who looks very close to rolling her eyes. “I can . . . ask around, I suppose.” She makes a circle with her index finger, indicating either the South Sybil boarding house, the neighborhood of West Babel, or the entirety of New Salem. “Does that make me in charge of recruitment?”

  “Name?”

  “Agnes Eastwood.” Juniper tosses a second ball of lint at her. “Oh, fine. Agnes Amaranth Eastwood.”

  Jennie records this, too, then says brightly, “And who’s president?”

  There’s a brief exchange of glances between the sisters. Juniper asks, “What does it mean to be president, exactly?”

  Jennie makes a seesaw motion with her head, cornsilk hair swinging. “Not much, really, if we agree to a collective decision-making process.” The phrase recalls the endless meetings of the Women’s Association. Juniper gives an involuntary shudder.

  “But in the Association . . . Miss Stone was the heart of us.” There’s a gray note in Jennie’s voice, like regret, and Juniper shrugs away a prickle of guilt. It was Jennie’s own damn choice to follow her out the Association door. “She was our direction. We all steered the ship, but she was our compass.” Jennie looks at Juniper as she finishes, frowning a little.

  Juniper looks away. “Well, we can vote on it later. Let’s talk about getting some girls signed up, O head of recruitment.”

  But Bella says anxiously, “I’m not sure how many people we ought to recruit. What would we be recruiting them to, exactly?”

  Juniper says, “Hell-raising,” just as Jennie says, “Yes, we’ll need a constitution, and a declaration of intent.”

  Juniper considers for several consecutive seconds and offers, “To raise hell?”

  The other Sisters of Avalon ignore her. She tries again. “To bring about a second age of witching. To get back what was stolen from us.”

  “That might be a little . . . much, don’t you think?” Bella clears her throat over Juniper’s muttered you’re a little much. “How about: to restore the rights and powers of womankind?”

  Jennie writes it down while Bella frets, because Bella always frets. “Without the Lost Way we don’t have any powers to restore. I’m not sure anyone would sign up for the sake of m-moonbeams and witch-tales.” Her hands are twisting in her lap, chapped and ink-stained.

  Agnes is standing by the window, looking out at the gray alley. “You’re forgetting a whole street full of people just saw a woman set a viper on a boy because he gave her a little trouble.”

  “A little trouble—”

  Agnes continues. “By now the city will be rotten with rumors. People will be scared, scandalized . . . but some of them will want to know more. They need to know more, if what June says is true.”

  Juniper had told them about the shadows at the riot and the sick shine of Miss Wiggin’s smile. She doesn’t know how convinced they are, but she had seen them sidestepping shadows and looking twice at dark doorways in alleys.

  “And who knows?” Agnes continues. “They might have some witching of their own. Every woman has a handful of spells from her aunt or cousin or mama.”

  Jennie objects. “Not every woman.”

  “Well, most women, then.”

  There’s a stiffness in Jennie’s face, a wordless denial.

  Bella is watching her. “And how did you and the other girls escape the riot, exactly, if it wasn’t witching?”

  The stiffness cracks. Jennie chews her lip, cheeks pinking. “It was nothing. Just a little spell.” Her cheeks slide past pink and head straight for scarlet. “To . . . tie shoelaces together.”

  Juniper cackles, because the image of dozens of rioters tripping over their own feet is delightful, but Bella asks, boringly, “That sounds like men’s magic. Or boys’ magic, at least.”

  Jennie isn’t looking at any of them, face draining to blotched white. “I . . . had . . . a brother.” Even Juniper hears the past tense and shuts the hell up.

  Agnes wades into the hush. “Well, wherever you learned it, I think your friends are grateful.” Jennie gives her a twist of a smile. “And even a boys’ prank had some use. Maybe our words and ways don’t seem like much all scattered around the way they are, but if we put them together . . .”

  Agnes trails off, but Bella continues in a hushed voice. “I could collect them. Record them. The first grimoire of the modern age . . .” For reasons that are obscure to Juniper, the prospect of so much writing and reading makes Bella’s eye
s shine and her frets vanish.

  The rest of the evening is a series of debates and schemes. Jennie recalls that the Women’s Association ran regular ads in The New Salem Post encouraging interested parties to visit their headquarters, and suggests the Sisters do the same. Agnes notes dryly that they don’t have headquarters, that they wouldn’t want anyone to know where it was if they did, and that The New Salem Post would never run an advertisement for witchcraft anyway.

  Bella makes a hmming noise and mutters that there may be “other reputable papers” in the city, if they had some means of ensuring their invitation reached only sympathetic eyes. A thought seems to strike her. “Do you think ‘cross my heart and hope to die’ could be altered for mass-production?” She snatches her notebook back from Jennie and sinks for some time into her own notes, murmuring to herself.

  By nightfall the members of the Sisters of Avalon have gone their separate ways: Bella to present their proposal to Miss Quinn and the staff of The Defender; Agnes to rustle up witch-ways from someone called Madame Zina; Jennie to check on Inez and Electa and the other members of Juniper’s small rebellion, and invite them to join a much bigger one.

  Juniper lingers in Agnes’s room. She steals a handful of salt from a pot on the table and tosses a line of it across the threshold and window ledge, thinking of Mags. Honey to keep things close, salt to keep things out. She thinks, too, of those wrong-shaped shadows rolling and oozing through the streets, prying at shutters and sliding under loose-hung doors.

  Juniper limps to the bed, where Bella’s little black notebook lies open. She flips through the pages and squints at Jennie’s tidy writing.

  Beatrice Belladonna Eastwood, Press Liaison.

  Agnes Amaranth Eastwood, Recruitment.

  Jennie Gemini Lind, Secretary/Treasurer, with the mother’s-name written in a shaky, uncertain hand, as if she wasn’t sure of the spelling.

  And, at the very bottom of the page, neat and firm:

  James Juniper Eastwood, President.

  As a rule, Agnes walks out of the Baldwin Brothers Bonded Mill and keeps walking. She doesn’t linger to chat or laugh, she doesn’t head to the dance halls or evening sermons or markets with the other girls; she keeps her eyes on the pavement and walks the hell home.

  But on the eleventh of May, just as the afternoon is softening like butter into a warm evening, she waits.

  She leaves the dim tomb of the mill and leans against the heat of the brick, shifting her weight from one foot to the other, trying to lift the baby off her bladder. Mr. Malton isn’t the sort of boss to grant extra privy-breaks to a girl just because, as he says, “she can’t keep her knees shut.” He’s been eyeballing Agnes’s belly as it grows, pressing hard against the bar of the loom. Just this afternoon he tapped it with his red-sausage finger. “You get three days for bearing. When she’s four she can work in the rag-pickers’ room.”

  Agnes closed her eyes so he wouldn’t see the white lick of rage in them.

  Her daughter will not grow up in the sunless dark of the mill, breathing dust and fumes, huddling next to the steam pipes in winter to keep warm. Her daughter will not be nothing.

  Agnes unclenches her jaw in the alley. There are knots and strings of women gathering nearby, but she doesn’t look at them. Instead she looks at the thin stripe of sky above, the hungry green of the weeds reaching thin fingers between the cobbles, crabgrass and chickweed and dusky deadnettle. Agnes can’t recall if there were this many weeds last spring.

  There’s a cluster of women forming down the alley, a copy of The Defender spread between them. None of them, Agnes imagines, are regular subscribers to New Cairo’s radical colored paper, but the Sisters of Avalon purchased several dozen extra copies of this particular issue and distributed them through the boarding houses and mail-rooms of the west side.

  Agnes catches a raised voice. “It’s nonsense, is what it is. Pure fancy. Somebody’s idea of a joke.”

  “Or,” suggests another, conspiratorially, “it’s a trap. The police never did find that snake or the witch who made it, did they? Maybe they think they’re being clever.”

  There are low, doubtful mutters at this, and Agnes figures this is more or less the opening she’s been waiting for. She wishes she had wit or zeal to convince them, but she’s not her sisters, so she merely stalks toward the gathered women and waits for them to notice her squared shoulders. “It’s not a trap,” she says quietly. “Or a trick.”

  All of them stare at her the way you’d stare at an alley cat that suddenly sang opera. Agnes understands why; she hasn’t spoken a single spare word to them other than “bobbin’s busted” or “watch your shuttle” in five years of working shoulder-to-shoulder.

  One of them huffs loudly, but another one shushes her. Agnes chances a glance of the shusher’s face and recognizes her vaguely as the new girl who got her hair caught in the loom last spring. The machine sucked her into itself, slick and fast, as if her body was just another thread. She screamed, and under the screaming was the wet rip of hair from scalp—until Agnes sliced through it with a pair of shears. The girl fell to the ground, weeping and moaning, stuttering her thanks. Agnes told her to pin her hair up if she wanted to keep what was left of it. She’d never learned her name.

  The girl is a year older now, a year harder. Her hair is pulled tight beneath a gray kerchief and her eyes are the color of coins. “That so?” She says it level and flat, like a woman paying off a debt.

  Agnes meets her eyes. “Did any of you try it yet?”

  Embarrassed shuffling. A clucked tongue. The rustle of a hastily folded newspaper shoved down someone’s apron-front.

  On the sixth page of that newspaper, in the section generally reserved for advertisements selling pomades and tobacco and Madame CJ Walker’s Wonderful Scalp Ointment, there was a half-page of solid black ink. In large white capitals are the words:

  WITCHES OF THE WORLD

  UNITE!

  The text below invites women of all ages and backgrounds to join the Sisters of Avalon, a newly formed suffrage society dedicated to the restoration of women’s rights and powers. Interested parties are instructed to prick their fingers and smear the blood across the advertisement while chanting the provided words, which would—if the blood belongs to a woman, and if that woman bears the Sisters no ill intent—reveal a time and location.

  A Miss Inez Gillmore purchased the ad on behalf of the sisters, signing the check with a merry flourish that Agnes both envied and resented. Bella and Juniper provided the spell, fussing for days with bindweed and blood and ink, their fingertips gone purplish red from repeated needle-pricks. And Agnes provided the location, against all her better judgment. Who would ever suspect the shabby, respectable South Sybil boarding house as the site of seditious organizing?

  Agnes gestures to the poorly hidden newspaper. “Try it. Speak the words. Feel the worth of them.” They were the words the three of them had used as girls to leave messages for one another, the ones they didn’t want their daddy to see: Meet me at the hollow oak or Staying at Mags’s tonight. “It’s true witching, stronger than anything your mother taught you.”

  One of the women—Agnes thinks it’s the same broad, ruddy-cheeked woman who laughed with her over Floyd Matthews—gives a quiet, doubtful huh, as if her mother taught her a thing or two.

  Agnes holds both palms up in surrender, but continues, “And there’s more where that came from. Lots more.” Well, some more, at least. “Think what you might do, with a little real witching.”

  Agnes can see her words working on them, tugging at the loose threads in their hearts. These were women who were never tempted by the suffragists or their rallies or their high-minded editorials in the paper. Oh, they wanted the vote—what woman didn’t want it, aside from Miss Wiggin and her fellow fools?—but these were women who knew the difference between wanting and needing. The vote couldn’t feed their children or shorten their shifts. It couldn’t cure a fever or keep a husband faithful or stop Mr. Malton�
��s reaching fingers.

  Maybe witching could.

  The girl with the tight-pinned hair and the coin-colored eyes chucks her chin at Agnes. “You one of them, then?”

  Agnes flinches a little at that them, at being one of something rather than simply one, but she ducks her head in a nod.

  The broad woman makes another derisive sound. “Well, good for you, eh?” Her accent is cold and jaggedy, like snow-cut mountains. “I would never risk my children in such a way.” Her eyes linger pointedly on Agnes’s rounding belly, flick once to her ringless finger. There are murmurs of agreement from some of the others.

  Shame bubbles acidly in Agnes’s throat, followed very quickly by anger. She regards the big woman: mouth thin and hard, red veins cracked under milky cheeks, eyes like iced-over lakes. “How many children do you have, ma’am?”

  She puffs out her chest. “Six daughters, all healthy, all hard workers.”

  “And your daughters. They’re safe, you think?”

  The frozen eyes narrow. Agnes presses. “They’ll grow without knowing hunger or want or a man’s hand raised against them? They won’t go blind in the mill or lose their fingers packing meat?”

  Now the woman’s shoulders are straining against the seams of her blouse, her face reddening. “Well, they will not get themselves”—she says a long, chilly word that sounds like it must be Russian for knocked up—“without a husband, that’s for damn—”

  Agnes cuts her off. “And their husbands will treat them kindly? They won’t lose their paychecks in barrooms or gambling halls, they won’t die young, they won’t beat their wives for back-talk or a burned dinner?” Agnes knows she’s going too far, saying too much, but she can’t seem to stop. “And if they do, will your daughters keep their own daughters safe?” Her voice cracks and bleeds like a split lip. If their mother had been a true witch instead of merely a woman, would she have saved her daughters from the man she married? Would she at least have lived?

  Agnes swallows hard into the silence. She can feel glances winging past her. “It’s a risk just to be a woman, in my experience. No matter how healthy or hardworking she is.” A great weariness washes over her as she says it, a grim bone-tiredness that makes her want to walk away and keep walking, until she finds someplace soft and green and safe to have her child. But no such place exists. A voice very like Juniper’s whispers, Yet, in her ear.