The Once and Future Witches

by Harrow, Alix E.

  She hears the pound of footsteps behind her, the rush of heavy breathing.

  She dodges behind a marble mausoleum and presses herself against the door, the iron rings digging into the soft meat of her back. It isn’t much of a hiding place—any second now an officer is going to stumble around the corner and see the shine of her spectacles in the moonlight, and she’s going to burn beside her sister for a crime she didn’t commit.

  Behind her, the door gives way. It caves inward and hands reach out to pull her inside. She has time to think, calmly, that this must be a fear-induced hallucination, because it’s only in story-papers that the dead come alive on the full moon and pull sinners down into their graves—

  Before a warm, dry hand presses over her mouth. It smells of cloves and ink.

  “Stay quiet. And stop biting me, woman.”

  Juniper knows better than to bait a mad dog or a drunk, and she knows from the glassy-eyed faces of the police officers that they’re a little of both. But she also knows there are times when every choice is a losing one, when you just have to go in swinging and hope you make it out alive.

  She keeps her staff swiping and her legs kicking, tangling the officers in the long sweep of her robes as she flails. She chants A tangled web she weaves in a breathless whisper, crushing the cobweb in her skirt pocket and reveling in the yelping and swearing of men who have just felt spider-silk gumming across their eyes and mouths.

  One of them shouts, “It’s her! The witch! She got me once before—” and something cracks across her spine hard enough to knock the air from her lungs. A fist smashes against her ear with a hollow-melon sound and she finds herself facedown in the dirt.

  She smiles into the ashes. Run, girls.

  Boots and batons land in a panicky hail across her body, blending together into a single pulsing pain. She hears a terrible splintering sound and worries for a moment that it’s bone before the shattered pieces of her red-cedar staff fall before her.

  “Oh, that’s enough of that, isn’t it?” She hears the smile in Hill’s voice.

  Juniper opens streaming eyes to see his face queerly doubled above her, pale and grayish against the night. She grins up at him, knowing from the copper taste in her mouth that her teeth are slimed with blood. She makes a sideways hat-sweeping gesture from the ground. “Fancy seeing you again, Mr. Hill.”

  It might have passed as nonchalant and unbothered, except she has to swallow hard against the bile rising in her throat. She closes her eyes against the red flare of pain.

  She feels silken fingertips beneath her chin, pressing upward, and opens her eyes to see Hill smiling down at her. His expression seems—wrong. Pleasant, relaxed, nothing like a cringing bureaucrat out hunting witches past midnight. “Oh, Miss Eastwood, what a delight you are.”

  It’s the sincerity in his voice that does it, slicing through her defiance and making her feel, for the first time, truly afraid.

  Hill lifts his eyes to the men gathered around him, panting and bruised, one of them holding the halves of her staff with a blackening eye and an aggrieved expression. “Take this one to the Deeps, boys.”

  May she snatch me through the doors of Hell

  And take me down with her to dwell.

  A spell for opening certain doors, requiring stars & scars

  Standing in the stale dark of a tomb, surrounded by the muffled stamp of boots and held tight against the woman she is reasonably sure is her enemy, Beatrice Belladonna thinks of several questions she would like to ask. What are you doing here? seems like a logical starting place, or maybe Why did you betray us?

  Instead she says something like grrrg, because Miss Cleopatra Quinn’s hand is still clamped around her jaw. She wriggles and Quinn relents very slightly, lifting her palm a cautious inch away from Beatrice’s lips.

  “Cle—Miss Quinn!” she hisses. “What—how—are there coffins in here?”

  Beatrice can’t see Quinn’s expression because her back is pressed against her chest and also because the tomb is the lightless black of the space between stars. The air feels thick and sour on her skin. A stale breeze exhales from somewhere.

  “No.”

  “What are you—”

  Quinn cuts her off with a low rasp in her ear. “Not here.”

  Beatrice doesn’t understand where else they might find opportunity to talk, as the cemetery is full of baton-wielding witch-hunters and the sun will be rising soon. She imagines spending an entire day in the tomb, a grown woman reduced to a little girl locked in the dark again. Panic claws up her throat.

  “Listen, I c-can’t stay in here. I have to get out.” That wind blows again, damp as breath on her neck.

  Quinn’s arms unwrap from her chest. One palm rests lightly on her shoulder. “Hold on.” Beatrice hears the shush of fabric and the snick of a struck match before her eyes sting with sudden light. Quinn touches the match to the narrow tip of a wooden wand. She whispers the words and the wand glows a rich, tiger’s-eye gold. Her face emerges from the blackness like a fire-lit dream, all dark hollows and honeyed planes, the witch-light burning in her eyes.

  The light spreads, filling every cobwebbed corner of the mausoleum, and Beatrice discovers why she felt a breeze blowing inside a stone tomb.

  “Stairs?” Her voice is an octave higher than she’d like it to be.

  Quinn holds a finger to her lips and turns back to the door. She sings a short hymn and presses her wrist—the scarred wrist, pocked with white slashes and circles—against the aged wood. Heat flares, driving back the damp chill of the tomb. A lock creaks into place.

  Then Quinn takes Beatrice’s hand in hers and pulls her down the narrow steps and into the long, serpentine tunnel that runs beneath the New Salem cemetery.

  For a long time after they descend, Beatrice hears nothing except the nervous pant of her own breath and the shush of her skirts along the dirt, and sometimes the scuttle of some many-legged creature dodging Quinn’s wand-light. Several times she knocks her head on the sloping ceiling or scrapes an elbow along the wall, but no dirt shakes loose. The tunnel walls feel smooth and unyielding, as if they were carved from granite rather than clay and root-riddled soil. There are no struts or beams, no wooden trusses beneath her trailing fingers. Beatrice grew up in Crow County; she knows enough about mineshafts and cave-ins to understand that this is impossible.

  “What is this place?” Her own voice sounds over-loud, shouting back at her from the too-close walls.

  “Why,” Quinn answers, with a showman’s sweep of her wand, “the Underground Railroad, of course.”

  “Really? You mean these tunnels go as far as—”

  Quinn’s laughter echoes through the tunnel. “No, not really. Saints. No one dug a hole all the way to Canada.” Her shadow flickers as she shakes her head. “These tunnels are only under New Salem.”

  “Oh,” Beatrice says, intelligently.

  “This city was built in a huge hurry, did you know that?” Beatrice did. After the burning of Old Salem there had been a great rush to rebuild, as if the fresh-paved streets were ropes to bind the unruly past. “City Hall and the College were built within a year, along with half a dozen churches, all those boring square houses on the north end . . . Who do you suppose built all that?”

  Beatrice has read any number of pamphlets and historical texts about the founding of the city but can’t recall anything about the workers. “I don’t know. I suppose it would have been—”

  “Slaves.” Quinn’s tone is perfectly even, but her spine is rigid. “Slaves, in the nation that so recently fought for freedom. Slaves, building the City Without Sin.”

  Beatrice feels a queasy flick of shame. “I didn’t—”

  “But their work was plagued with delays and setbacks, missing tools, mistakes. Because they were busy building something else beneath all that marble and money. Something that would let them move through the city without fear, whenever they pleased.” Quinn gestures with the wand at the endless tunnel around them, smooth an
d hollow as the burrow of some vast snake. “They taught their sons and daughters, and the secret was passed down to us.”

  Beatrice is quiet for several steps before asking softly, “Who is us?”

  Quinn stops walking. Her shoulders lift and fall in a steadying sigh. “The Daughters of Tituba.”

  If her voice wasn’t so flat, so entirely empty of humor or mockery, Beatrice would think she was being laughed at. It’s like claiming to be a vampire or a valkyrie, a monster out of myth. The Daughters of Tituba were a rumor, a whisper, a penny-paper story. They were the reason husbands went astray and graves were robbed. In the least reputable papers they were drawn with bones tied in their hair and teeth strung around their throats, red-lipped and wild. The Last Living Descendants of the Black Witch of Old Salem, the captions read, Still Hungry for Vengeance?

  Miss Quinn does not possess a necklace of teeth or a bone hairpiece, as far as Beatrice knows, and if she hungers for anything it’s only the same small, impossible thing that Beatrice wants: the truth, laid bare. The story told straight.

  “I didn’t think they were real.”

  “Real enough.” Quinn is still standing with her back to Beatrice. “I wanted to tell you. Truly, I did. But we’re sworn to silence on the graves of our mothers and their mothers across the sea. I couldn’t.”

  “But Frankie said—oh.” Beatrice recalls the phrase other interests and everything she thought it implied. She finds her embarrassment overcome by a sudden buoyancy. Not the Colored League; not a string of lovers, after all.

  Quinn turns. “Frankie Black?”

  “We spoke. I understood—that is, I thought you and she were . . .”

  Quinn’s eyebrows are higher than usual. “We were. But I made it clear that the Daughters came first, and she objected.”

  “Oh.”

  “Beatrice—I’m sorry.” Beatrice doesn’t think she’s ever heard Quinn apologize.

  She half reaches for her before she remembers what else Quinn ought to be sorry for. She makes her voice cold and hard, pretending her flesh is stone once more. “We were betrayed. They were waiting for us, and J-Juniper is . . .” Her breath catches. “Agnes and the others ran, but I don’t know how far they made it.” She feels the distant spark of her middle sister and knows that she, at least, is safe.

  Quinn’s mouth is grim, her shoulders heavy. “I’m sorry,” she says again.

  “Was it you?” The words come out ragged and bloody, as if they ran through dense briars on their way to her lips. “Did you tell the police? Make some trade or deal with them?”

  Miss Quinn’s eyes go wide. She takes a careful breath before saying, very slowly and soberly, “The Daughters have been interested in the Lost Way of Avalon for a very long time. So much of our power was stolen from us—although we kept more than you thought—and the idea that it might be restored to us in a single instant . . . well. When the tower was called to the square I was sent to investigate the suffragists. And I found you: a librarian with a clever face and hungry eyes who knew more than she ought to. I assisted you. Pursued and encouraged you.” Her eyes flick over Beatrice’s face, furtive, guilty.

  “Because you were ordered to.”

  “Yes.” It should feel like a victory—the hero forcing the spy to confess her sins!—but Beatrice feels nothing but an oily shame. To think that she believed Miss Quinn was interested in her . . . friendship (she never thought Miss Quinn was interested in friendship).

  Beatrice wishes without much hope that the tunnel will collapse and bury her before she cries, but instead she hears a soft curse and feels Quinn’s fingers clasping hard around her wrist. “I spied on you. I lied to you. I told the Daughters everything you discovered or planned or even suspected.” Quinn’s voice thickens, low and urgent. “But Beatrice, I swear it wasn’t me who betrayed you.”

  The tunnel fails to collapse; Beatrice cries. In a small, blurred voice, she begins, “Then who—” but breaks off. She thinks of Agnes, hard-eyed and harder-hearted, who would do anything at all to save her own skin. But if she’d betrayed them, why had she come tonight? And what about the oath they all swore with pricked fingers and crossed hearts, whose breaking would have certain obvious and rather gruesome effects?

  Beatrice swallows a knot of salt and snot. “Why did you come?”

  “For the same reason I came to your first two spectacles. Because you—the Sisters were walking into harm’s way, and I wanted to be there in case . . . they needed me.” Miss Quinn—the brash liar, the spy who wields her charm like an edged weapon—cannot quite meet Beatrice’s eyes as she says it.

  “And where are you taking me now? To your superiors? Am I a captive?”

  Quinn lets go of her wrist very quickly. “No. Never. I’m not . . .” She looks tired and sorry, stripped bare. “Saints, I’ve butchered this. I’m trying to say that I’m sorry, and I will not lie to you again. I remain a faithful Daughter.” Beatrice hears the capital D, the weight of a century of secrets and witching. “But I hope to become a Sister, too. If you’ll have me.”

  Beatrice just stands there, looking into Quinn’s yellow eyes (one-one-thousand). She wonders if trust, once lost, can ever truly be found again, and if she’s being a fool (two-one-thousand). She decides she doesn’t care, that maybe trust is neither lost nor found, broken nor mended, but merely given. Decided, despite the risk (three-one-thousand).

  “I’m afraid I left my notebook in my office,” Beatrice murmurs in a slightly underwater voice. “But I believe there’s room on the roster.”

  Quinn smiles, wide and relieved, witch-light dancing in her eyes. Beatrice clears her throat and adds, “Does this tunnel come out anywhere near the College?”

  The mischief returns to Quinn’s smile, curling the corners and adding a devilish pair of dimples. She turns and strides deeper into the dark. “Not directly. Have you heard of the night market of New Cairo, Miss Eastwood?”

  The tunnel branches and spreads like the root of a hollow tree. They turn right, then right again; twice Quinn stops to sing them past locked doors or other, less visible barriers, and once she pricks Beatrice’s finger and daubs her blood on a pale stone before they walk on. The walls turn slick and wet for a while, cold as a river-bottom, and then they climb upward again. They pass steps leading up to every possible entryway: sewer grates, narrow closets, trapdoors, granite slabs that would take witchcraft to move aside. The doors are marked with strange signs, arrangements of stars and lines rather than words.

  Beatrice is aware that she ought to be investigating and questioning, possibly taking notes, but she feels dull and heavy, as if the line leading to Juniper is an anchor pulling her under.

  Quinn rises in front of her and Beatrice follows her up a narrow staircase. The steps are stone, softened and scooped with years of use, leading to an ordinary-looking door.

  Quinn hesitates before it, glancing back at Beatrice with a calculating expression. She unfastens her cloak and tosses it over Beatrice’s shoulders instead. Bella tries very hard not to notice the heat of her fingertips as she pulls the hood high and tucks stray hairs beneath it.

  “Tuck your hands in your sleeves, please. No need to start talk.”

  The door opens into an alley, velvet-blue and fresh-smelling after an hour spent deep beneath the city. It’s not yet dawn, the moon still a silver dollar above them, but the alley is crammed full of people. Women with white wraps over their hair and gold-flashing bangles on their wrists, men wearing linen cloaks and swinging canes, the white flash of teeth and the blue shine of skin. Stalls line both walls, overflowing with wares, clinking with coins: a marketplace, held by moonlight.

  Beatrice is too busy staring and blinking to hear what Quinn is saying. She gives her hood a sharp tug. “The Daughters ought to know what happened at the cemetery tonight. May I make another report?”

  Beatrice nods and Quinn catches the eye of a woman standing just outside the door, arms crossed. “Is she in?”

  The woman gives a half
-bow that must mean yes. Quinn turns left and Beatrice trails behind her, head bent to hide the freckled milk of her face. During her daylight visits to New Cairo she’s felt noticed, perhaps a little out of place, but she’s never felt so thoroughly foreign. She wonders if this is how Quinn feels on the north end, as if her skin has transformed into an unreliable map, bound to lead people to all sorts of wrong conclusions.

  The stalls they pass seem to contain both ordinary contraband—home-brewed liquor and home-cooked remedies in brown glass jars, crates of cigars that look like they’ve never met a customs agent—and much less ordinary goods: curled leaves and pale roots; furs and feathers; the black glisten of beetles’ wings and the ivory gleam of bone. Witch-ways, sold by wizened grandmothers and laughing girls, women with neat aprons or sweeping skirts or babies wrapped and bound to their chests, sleeping through the moonlit market.

  Quinn moves easily down the alley, receiving nods and waves and tips of more than one hat. She seems subtly different, taller and grander. Nothing about her has ever struck Beatrice as fearful, but there’s always been something armored about the way she moves on the north end. Here she is a queen, and royalty requires no armor.

  Quinn steps sideways through another door. It’s only as Beatrice follows her and sees the sign—ARAMINTA’S SPICES & SUNDRIES—that she realizes it’s the same shop she visited only hours before.

  Araminta’s Spices & Sundries is a very different sort of establishment by moonlight. There are black wax candles dripping onto bronze saucers and green bottles lining the shelves with labels like Hellebore, collected after rain and Hen’s teeth. The other-smell has grown stronger, wilder and darker, unmistakable for anything except what it is: witching.

  “Does this happen every night?” Beatrice doesn’t know why she whispers it.

  “Lord, no. Only on full moons.” Quinn leans an elbow on the counter and dings the brass bell three times. “It’s famous, in certain circles. People come up from miles away, hoard their goods and recipes all month . . .”