The Once and Future Witches

by Harrow, Alix E.

  Gideon Hill.

  The last time Bella saw him he was ordering her sister’s arrest.

  The sight of him now is another knife-twist in her belly, a hot rush of hate.

  She withdraws the silver shears from her skirt and studies them. She isn’t a librarian anymore and her library is nothing but ash, but surely she can still evict a misbehaving patron. Surely it’s easier to lose something than to find it.

  Bella glances up at Strix, circling so high above the square he could be mistaken for a crow unless you catch the hot gleam of his eyes.

  Bella whispers her grandmother’s words and snips the scissors once in the air. A simple charm for a hedge-witch hiding her potions or a child hiding her petty crimes, for secrets kept and truths untold.

  The black tower and the gravestone-trees vanish in a fold of elsewhere. This time there is no binding to hold it close, no jar of earth and leaves, and the tower falls deeper and deeper, a coin dropped in a bottomless ocean.

  Hill’s men are left holding their rakes and shovels and blinking stupidly at one another, but Bella isn’t watching them. She’s watching Gideon Hill himself. His neck stiffens, the satisfied smile becomes a snarl. His colorless hair wisps into his face as he turns around. “Where is it? Who—”

  Bella enjoys a second of savage satisfaction, but his expression is wrong somehow, unhinged in a way that makes Bella duck back behind her doorway. It reminds her of their daddy when one of them thwarted him: red fury stretched thinly over gray terror.

  But Hill hasn’t been thwarted. He’s already won everything there is to win; what is there to fear in a vanishing ruin?

  A dark twist of movement catches her eye. The shadow of the doorway is writhing as she watches it, sprouting hands and fingers, a malformed head. Bella doesn’t move, doesn’t breathe, as the shadow passes over her. It doesn’t seem to see her, but the head rolls back and forth like a hound with a scent, searching.

  Bella runs.

  “Tonight, I think. As soon as it’s good and dark. Are there tunnels that lead out of the city?”

  Agnes wakes to the soft murmur of voices and the yellow slant of daylight. Through a doorway she sees Bella and Cleo sitting together at a scuffed kitchen table, their legs intermingled.

  Cleo doesn’t answer immediately, but lays her hand on the table, not quite touching Bella’s. “Yes. But I’d rather you stayed.” Her voice is soft but somehow urgent, intimate. It occurs to Agnes to wonder where her oldest sister slept last night.

  “But we’re putting you in danger just by being here.” Agnes watches Bella’s hand creep toward Cleo’s, as if it possesses a mind of its own. “Someone is bound to notice three white women and a newborn living in your mother’s spice shop, no matter how well we disguise ourselves or how thoroughly we hide. And we know now our wards won’t hold against Hill forever.”

  “So we’ll find other safe houses and move between them. Renew the wards twice a day. The Sisters will help, and maybe the Daughters—and what about Agnes’s man, who delivered you to my doorstep so efficiently?” Agnes’s man. What a novel, rather appealing arrangement, to own a man rather than being owned by him.

  Bella huffs. “And who will feed and clothe us? Our savings burned along with everything else, and none of us have jobs anymore, you’ll notice—”

  “I do. And if they stop printing my stories we can steal or scavenge or beg. We’ll find a way.” Cleo pauses, eyes flicking across Bella’s face, and her voice falls. “You’re no coward.”

  Bella swallows, eyes falling to Cleo’s hand still lying between them, then away. “It’s not a question of cowardice or courage. It’s just logic: We lost. He won. We thought we were the beginning of some grand new story, but we were wrong. It’s the same old story, and if we keep telling it every one of us will burn. Witches always do.”

  There’s an enormous, scathing huh from the opposite doorway. Agnes startles and the air above her twists. Dark wings, the gleam of talons: her hawk, returned from the other side of elsewhere to hover over Agnes and Eve.

  He flutters to the back of a chair, glaring at the smallish, sharp-faced woman who stands in the doorway. Agnes’s memory of the previous night is fragmented and feverish, but she thinks she recalls that face hovering above her, singing her well again.

  Now her hands are on her hips, her face seamed and bitter. “I should have known. You spend all summer stirring up a hornet’s nest worth of trouble, but as soon as trouble arrives you’re heading for the hills.”

  Bella has her mouth open, but another voice shouts across her, “The hell we are.” Juniper’s objection is so loud and abrupt that Eve wakes with a startled snort. Agnes struggles upright—the entire middle of her is wrong-feeling, squashy and swollen and aching—and tries to wrap the swaddling back around her daughter before her wails wake the neighbors, or possibly the entire city. But Eve seems to have sprouted several extra arms and legs in the night, all flailing in separate directions.

  Juniper scrambles upright, hair standing at wild angles. “It’s all right, baby girl, Aunty June is here.”

  Aunty June proceeds to scoop Eve from Agnes’s arms, swaying and patting. Eve’s cries shrink to muttered complaints and Juniper beams down at her. It’s a soft, half-sleeping smile that Agnes hasn’t seen on her sister’s face since they were girls.

  “Sorry,” Juniper whispers. “I only meant: I’m not going anywhere. I want to fight.”

  “We are aware, June.” Bella scrubs a hand over her face. “But there’s a time to fight, and there’s a time to survive. If we leave now—”

  “And let the bastards win? No, ma’am.” Juniper’s face isn’t soft anymore.

  But a faint frown crosses her sister’s face as she looks down at the baby curled in her arms. Juniper looks burdened and a little bewildered by the burden, as if she’s found herself hauling a heavy load entirely by accident. “And—it’s going to get bad, isn’t it? They’re going to come for all of us, for every woman who knows more than she should, who doesn’t smile when she’s told to.” Juniper sounds uncertain, feeling her way across unknown terrain. “It seems to me like Miss Araminta’s right. We got them into this mess, and we can’t walk out on them now.”

  A brief, slightly astonished silence follows. Agnes wonders when her wild baby sister started thinking about duty and debt, cause and consequence. Somewhere in the dark of the Deeps, maybe. Or right now, standing with the weight of her niece in her arms.

  Bella is the first to collect herself. “That’s very . . . laudable. But I went to St. George’s this morning—”

  “You what now?”

  “—and saw Gideon Hill. There’s something wrong about him, something sick—you were right. He was furious when I sent the tower away again, almost deranged. He’ll keep coming after us. And what happens in November, if he’s elected? What happens when he has more than just angry mobs and shadows?”

  Agnes sees Bella glance down at Cleo’s hand again, her eyes clouded with worry, and understands that it isn’t herself she’s afraid for.

  Agnes thinks of August running through the rising riot, searching for her, and the relief on his face when he found her; of Eve staring up into her eyes, solemn as a Saint; of Juniper’s voice breaking as she promised to take care of her. Of the terrible risk of loving someone more than yourself and the secret strength it grants you.

  “Well,” she says mildly, “I’m staying.” Above her, the hawk croons.

  Several sets of eyes swivel toward them. Bella adjusts her spectacles. “I thought you were done with all of this.”

  Agnes shrugs. That was before Eve, before her familiar flew out of the darkness to her, before her life cleaved into before and after.

  “Aren’t you worried for her?” Juniper tilts her chin at Eve, who is making a faint irritable-bee sound that might be a snore.

  “Yes,” Agnes answers, because she is. She lay awake half the night consumed by stray terrors and uncertainties, convinced the miraculous rise and fall of her
daughter’s ribs would cease the second she closed her eyes. But beneath the terror was something else, something clawed and fanged and ruthless that she doesn’t know how to explain.

  I am terrified and I am terrible. I am fearful and I am something to be feared. She meets Miss Araminta’s eyes, dark and knowing, sharp and soft, and thinks maybe every mother is both things at once.

  She gives her sisters another shrug. “Yes. But I’m still staying.”

  Juniper’s face lights. Her eyes slide back to Bella. “Well?”

  Bella lifts both hands in the air. “Well what? You two can make all the brave pronouncements you like, but what good are they? What good are we? Without Avalon—”

  Araminta interrupts her. “You still have more words and ways than nine women out of ten. And”—her eyes slide to the hawk perched on her chair—“I know a familiar when I see one.”

  Bella opens her mouth and then closes it. “And how’s that?”

  Araminta smiles a sly, sidelong smile, and for the first time Agnes sees some of Cleo in her face. “Because I’m the tenth woman.”

  And as she says it an animal appears at her feet, coiling out of nothing: a black hare with ember eyes. Juniper whispers something profane and admiring. Agnes gasps. Bella merely looks intent.

  “There’s more witching left in the world than you think, girls,” Araminta says, and her eyes are on Bella’s. “The kind they can’t burn because it was never written down.”

  Cleo speaks for the first time since her mother arrived. “And if they stay, will we help them? Will the Daughters stand beside their Sisters, Ohemaa?” Agnes frowns over the last word, but Araminta gives a little grunt, as if the title is an arrow aimed well.

  She bows her head to her daughter and Cleo grins back. She turns to Bella. “What do you say?” Cleo’s voice is low and too warm again, her eyes bright, burning gold. “All for one?”

  Agnes almost feels sorry for her sister, subjected to the heat of that gaze. Bella’s eyes search Cleo’s face, and whatever she finds sends a flush tip-toeing up her neck. Her fingers creep those few final inches to curl tight around Cleo’s.

  “And one for all,” she whispers.

  What is now and ever and unto ages and ages,

  may not always be

  A spell for undoing, requiring a needle & a cracked egg

  For three days, Beatrice Belladonna and her sisters remain in the dim back rooms of Araminta’s Spices & Sundries. They’re long, tiresome days: Agnes rests and wakes and rests again, her fever rising and falling like a stubborn tide; Eve alternates between cherubic contentment and fits of aggrieved screaming, as if she was promised some treat and then bitterly denied; Bella sits for hours with her black notebook on her knees, listening to Araminta Wells’s lectures on constellations and sung-spells and the rhythm of witching. Juniper is mostly absent, arriving and departing at odd hours, filling her pockets with herbs and bones from the shop’s stock.

  The nights are long, too, but Bella does not find them tiresome. They are smothered laughter and lips, hands and hips hidden beneath the saffron quilt. They are hours stolen out of time, unburdened by the future and unsullied by the past.

  (Though sometimes the past slithers in. Sometimes Bella wakes from dreams of cellars and burning barns. Sometimes she flinches from Cleo’s touch as if it’s hot wax, and Cleo lies very still until Bella’s pulse steadies. Afterward she holds her carefully, like Bella has spun sugar for skin.)

  By the afternoon of the fourth day Bella is beginning to hope they might be safe. That her sisters were not fools to stay in this vicious, hungry city. That she might wake up every morning with her cheek on Cleo’s shoulder.

  But then Juniper staggers into the shop with her mouth thin and her eyes hard. “Outside. The shadows are . . . gathering. Thickening. I don’t know if they can smell us or track us or what, but I figure it’s time to get gone.”

  They leave as the sun sets, drawing Nut Street in mauve and gray. They follow Cleo down into the tunnels: Bella, then Agnes with Eve wrapped tight to her chest in the manner Araminta taught her, then Juniper, swearing and shivering. Even before her time in the Deeps she didn’t care much for being belowground. Now she detests it.

  They emerge long after dusk, filing out of a tiny building that looks from the outside like a garden shed or a pigeon coop, then slipping through a hedge and onto a sedate east-side avenue.

  “Is this close enough?” Cleo whispers.

  “Yes,” Bella answers.

  “Send word once you’re settled.”

  “I will.”

  Cleo runs out of things to say. She simply stares at Bella, tracing her face—and Bella has never liked her own features so much as she does in that moment, in the soft gold of Cleo’s gaze—before touching the brim of her derby hat. “Three bless and keep you.”

  Bella and her sisters are left alone on the darkening street.

  The east side is apparently untroubled by the riots and arrests plaguing the rest of New Salem. The houses have dignified gables and clipped lawns and the slightly burnished shine of old money. Their windows send soft lamp-light and the clink of crystal over the empty streets. A man’s laugh floats from one of them, unworried, perfectly content.

  Bella’s sisters crowd close behind her in their borrowed clothes and black cloaks, like refugees from some darker, wilder world. An owl and a hawk wheel high above them.

  She leads them to a red-brick house on St. Jerome Street, slightly shabbier and older than its neighbors. She knocks twice, and the silence that follows is sufficient for her to doubt every decision that brought her here.

  Then the door swings inward and an elderly, sweatered gentleman is blinking up at her. “Miss Eastwood! Pardon me—Misses Eastwood.” Mr. Henry Blackwell beams at the three of them as if they are unexpected guests to a dinner party rather than the most wanted criminals in the city. “And are those . . . my word.”

  Their familiars have swept to their shoulders in a rush of black feathers and hot eyes, talons curving like carved jet. Mr. Blackwell’s genial smile shifts toward awe as he looks at them. He gathers himself. “I don’t believe we have been introduced.”

  “This is Strix varia—Strix, I call him—and Pan.” Bella gestures to the fisher-hawk on Agnes’s shoulder. “For Pandion haliaetus, the western osprey, you know.”

  Behind her she hears Juniper mutter about the injustice of her sisters finding their familiars first if they were just going to give them such stupid long names.

  Mr. Blackwell appears not to hear her. He gives each of them a small bow. “Do come in, all of you.”

  The hall is dark oak and dense carpet. As soon as the door clicks behind them Bella begins. “I’m so sorry to surprise you like this. It’s an imposition, I know, and terribly dangerous, but my sisters and I need a place to—”

  But Mr. Blackwell is waving a hand over his shoulder at her. “Oh, it’s no trouble at all. I’ve been worried sick about you, to tell the truth.”

  Bella isn’t at all convinced that amiable, bespectacled Mr. Blackwell understands the gravity of the risk. “If they find us here, you might well be arrested. Your property could be seized, your position terminated.”

  Mr. Blackwell reaches the end of the hall and bends to peruse a bookshelf, thumbing through clothbound spines until he reaches a little bronze statue of a dog, its head shined smooth with use. Blackwell gives a small hah! and tips the dog forward. Some unseen mechanism clicks and whirrs, and the entire bookcase glides smoothly away. Behind it lies a dim, windowless room with a slanting ceiling and several fat down mattresses.

  Mr. Blackwell makes a polite throat-clearing noise. “I tidied up a bit last week, got the worst of the cobwebs out at least. I had a suspicion it might be needed.” At Bella’s wordless, openmouthed expression, he adds, “My grandfather built this house. He told me there would always be someone who needed to hide, and that there ought always be a Blackwell there to hide them.”

  Bella is searching for words that mi
ght adequately express her gratitude and relief when Juniper says, “Well hot damn, sir,” in her burnt rasp of a voice, and Mr. Blackwell leads them into the kitchen, chuckling.

  Much later that evening, after Bella and her sisters have consumed a frankly astonishing number of tiny crustless sandwiches and Agnes has retired to the secret room with Eve, her eyes bruised and sleepless, Bella and Mr. Blackwell sit in a matched pair of armchairs with a neglected checkerboard and an un-neglected bottle of chardonnay between them.

  “Thank you. For letting us stay.” It seems to require unusual effort to enunciate. “It’s a lovely house.”

  Mr. Blackwell plucks an ebony checker from the board and studies it a little morosely. “I thought for a while it might be yours, if you would have me.”

  It takes several seconds for Bella to process this statement, and another several to respond. “You what?”

  “Oh, merely as a matter of convenience! You had no family and I had no wife, and I thought we might be pleasant enough companions, despite the difference in our ages. Of course as soon as I saw you and Miss Quinn together several things became clear to me.” Blackwell blinks at her, brow furrowed. “I hope I haven’t caused you any distress.”

  “No, it’s just . . . I never thought . . .”

  Mr. Blackwell gives her another of his affable smiles, but the edges are turned downward. “Someone along the line misled you as to your worth, Miss Eastwood.” Distantly, through the froth of chardonnay, Bella hears the word nothing in her daddy’s voice. “I should quite like to give him a piece of my mind.”

  “I—thank you.” She thinks of Juniper, the hiss of scales over straw, the sin she bore for all of them. “But it’s no longer possible.”

  Mr. Blackwell nods, unsurprised. “Good.”

  She thinks of Cleo’s eyes on her face before they parted, studying her as if she were precious, even vital. “Or necessary.”

  “Even better.” Mr. Blackwell raises his glass. “Give Miss Quinn my warmest thanks.”