The Once and Future Witches

by Harrow, Alix E.

  A voice mutters a soft rhyme and a hot, golden light fills the room. Bella blinks against the sting of tears and follows the light back to its source: Miss Cleopatra Quinn, sitting cross-legged against the pulpit with her wand glowing like the orange eye of a cat.

  “Took your time, didn’t you, ladies,” she says tartly. But Bella hears the warm relief behind the words.

  Bella doesn’t bother to look anywhere else, or even to stand. She crawls down the aisle and wraps both arms around Cleo’s legs. She lays her cheek against her knees.

  “Get a hold of yourself, woman.” Cleo’s voice is rough but her fingers on Bella’s face are soft. “Did you find what you needed?”

  “Oh, Cleo, we saw them. We spoke to them! The Three themselves! I need a pen.” Bella’s fingertips fizz with the need to write it all down, to decant the marvels and curiosities of the last hour into the safety of ink and paper. She looks a little wildly into the shadows, as if an ink-pen might materialize. “Where are we?”

  “The Mother Bethel Church in New Cairo. We warded it as best we could, but we shouldn’t linger.”

  “We?”

  Quinn lifts her wand-light and other faces swim out of the darkness, lining the pews: the Hull sisters with their hoods pulled high; Jennie Lind looking grim, one eye blacked; Yulia and her daughters sitting next to Annie Flynn; a scrawny, raw-boned girl who stares at Agnes with some combination of resentment and gratitude; a half-dozen others, their shoulders squared and their eyes steady.

  The Sisters of Avalon. Their sisters, still.

  Juniper is grinning, hard and fierce. Agnes is staring around at them, white-faced. “What are you all doing here?”

  Yulia ticks her chin at Cleo. “She called. Said you three were doing something very stupid.” Yulia’s voice goes gruff. “Said they took your baby girl.”

  Agnes swallows several times.

  “You will get her back now?”

  Agnes nods once, her eyes like hot steel.

  Yulia grunts. Bella waits for the Sisters to ask questions, like how? or with what army? But they merely sit and wait. Bella fights an embarrassing impulse to cry.

  She is rescued by Cleo tapping her gently on the shoulder. “You spoke to them?”

  “Yes. That is, their spirits. They invented a binding that breached the usual corporeal bounds of the soul. They tied themselves to the library—or to witchcraft itself, I suppose. And I was right about rhymes as vehicles for the preservation of spells during the purge. They told us—”

  “They told us Gideon Hill is an immortal and a witch,” Juniper interrupts, perhaps wisely. “In addition to being a pain in our asses. And they told us how to kill him.” She slouches into a pew across from Yulia, crossing her staff over her lap. “The only trouble will be catching him with his guard down and getting rid of those damn shadows of his.” Her gaze lands on the burning light at the end of Cleo’s wand. Her eyes narrow in speculation. “Huh.”

  Bella shakes her head. “That’s just a housewife’s spell to shed light. I’m not sure it could do anything but annoy him.”

  “But what if there were more of us? And what if he didn’t see it coming? If we could catch him at some kind of public speech, maybe, or a parade. He’s bound to hold one eventually, man like him.”

  Agnes’s voice slides across Juniper’s, thin and tired. “We have until tomorrow at sundown.”

  Bella and Juniper stare at her.

  “Hill made a deal with me.” Agnes swallows. “I’m supposed to betray you to him by tomorrow at sundown if I want Eve back alive and well.” She speaks her daughter’s name carefully, as if it’s broken glass or bent nails in her mouth, likely to cut her.

  “Oh.” Juniper scrubs her palms over her face. “And what did you say?”

  Agnes swallows, throat tensing in the long shadows of the wand-light. “I said yes.”

  Juniper nods, unbothered. “Good girl. Doesn’t give us long to plan, though. Any of you know a way to get the mayor out in public, surrounded by our people? Jennie? Inez?” A pair of lines appear between her brows. “Where’s Inez?”

  Jennie answers her, voice shaking very slightly. “They got her yesterday. Electa, too. We were trying to get food to the girls in the Deeps, but the shadows held them fast. I tried to stay with them, to help, but Inez told me to run. She was . . . forceful.” Jennie touches the swollen edge of the bruise around her eye.

  Juniper doesn’t say anything, but the lines between her brows deepen. Her shoulders bow, as if a heavy weight has settled over them. It occurs to Bella that she doesn’t look much like the wounded, wild seventeen-year-old who came staggering into the city six months ago; there’s a gravity to her features, a weight to her limbs. As if she has seen the price of her wildness and is no longer certain she wants to pay it.

  Bella feels the heat of Cleo’s fingers on her shoulder and wishes for a wild second the two of them could run. Could leave the city, the country, the world itself.

  From the corner of her eye, Bella sees Juniper’s shoulders unbow. Her eyes kindle. It’s an unsettling expression, familiar to Bella as the light that generally precedes something dangerous or illegal.

  “You know,” Juniper observes to the gathered women, “there’s nothing more public than a good old-fashioned witch-burning. And it’s nearly the equinox.”

  Her tone is conversational, almost airy, but Bella feels the cold slither of premonition in her stomach. She can sense the edges of Juniper’s idea through the thing between them, formless but terrifying.

  Agnes gives their sister a quelling, don’t-even-think-about-it frown that tells Bella she feels it, too. “So?”

  “So.” Juniper stands and strolls down the aisle, staff clacking. She spins on her heels to face them and spreads her arms wide, like some ancient priestess offering a bloody-handed blessing. “Let’s give this city what it wants.”

  Rain, rain go away

  Come again another day.

  A spell to delay a coming storm, requiring mere luck

  Beatrice Belladonna never understood how brief a single day could be until it was her last. It’s as if the hours sprouted wings in the night.

  She is crouched in the dim, dust-specked attic of an abandoned house on Sixth Street, surrounded by a small ocean of books and papers, hastily scrawled notes and half-written spells for rust and sleep and sunlight, for changeling children and flying brooms. Candle-stubs puddle precariously close to piles of poorly folded cloaks in a dozen shades of charcoal and ink, still smelling of summer. In the middle of this mess Bella sits in a ring of salt, fingers cramped around a pen and sleeves rolled to the wrist, trying to ignore the feathered passing of the hours.

  Her battered black-leather notebook is propped against a mug of cold coffee, the pages dog-eared and marked. It occurs to Bella that if their plans go awry, it might be the only surviving record of events that isn’t skewed by Gideon Hill’s propagandizing. It isn’t much—part memoir, part grimoire, interspersed with rhymes and witch-tales, a scrapbooked record of their summer—but her fingers trail lovingly over the cover.

  She flips to the first page, where a nameplate is pasted neatly in the center:

  Beatrice Belladonna Eastwood

  Assistant Librarian

  Salem College Library

  She blots out two-thirds of the nameplate and adds four lines above it:

  Our Own Stories

  Being the Entirely True Tale of the Sisters Eastwood in

  the Summer of 1893

  By

  Beatrice Belladonna Eastwood

  Assistant Librarian

  Salem College Library

  Avalon

  She can’t quite bring herself to cross out the word librarian. It was her home and refuge, the thing she became once she was no longer her father’s daughter or her sisters’ keeper. She thinks of herself now as a librarian awkwardly bereft of a library, obliged to build her own.

  Except she can’t build her own. It would take years and decades—a lifeti
me of research and collecting, of following every hummed lullaby and half-forgotten rhyme—and she doesn’t have decades. She has a few final hours to scrape together the words they need most.

  Her sisters have gone out to assemble the ways and wills, spinning through the city like spiders weaving mad webs, but the sun is already slanting toward afternoon. The shadows rise like cold water up the walls, smelling of first frosts and last chances.

  Bella wonders if the cells of the Deep are smaller than her room at St. Hale’s. She wonders if despair is waiting for her down in the darkness, ready to swallow her whole. She flexes her hands, remembering the deep bite of bound thread around them.

  The trapdoor creaks upward and the smell of cloves and ink wafts into the room.

  “Cleo!” Bella sits straighter in her paper-nest and pats ineffectually at her hair.

  Cleo tosses a bulging brown paper sack onto the bed beside her. Bones clack as it lands. “It’s thin pickings now. The shop is practically empty. I bought what I could and bartered or begged for the rest. Tell Juniper she owes me—I bought those snake teeth from a little witch up from Orleans who gave me the honest-to-God chills.” Cleo is fidgeting distractedly in her skirt pockets as she speaks, as if her mind is elsewhere. “I spoke with the Daughters, too. My mother says to tell you this entire plan is, quote, ‘dumber than a bucket of bricks,’ and ‘doomed to fail’—”

  “If only she felt she could be honest with me,” Bella murmurs.

  “—and that she’ll be there. Along with any Daughters who volunteer.” Cleo smiles a little crookedly. “Although none of them like it much.”

  “What don’t they like about it?”

  “The part where three white ladies who know all their secrets wind up in the claws of Gideon Hill. You could betray us all.”

  “Oh.” Bella finds her own fingers fidgeting now. She tries very hard not to think of witch-trials and tortured confessions. “Well. We won’t. I won’t.”

  “So I told them.” Cleo says it lightly, but there’s so much trust in her voice that Bella finds her eyes stinging.

  After a slight pause Cleo asks, “How are things here?”

  Bella flaps her hands at the crumpled pages. “A mess. I’ve done the best I could without the library, but I don’t know if it will be enough. I don’t know if we’re enough. This is by far the worst idea Juniper has ever had, and let me tell you that’s saying something. When I was nine she tried to sneak a fox kit into the house as a pet. One time she jumped off the roof with our kitchen broom in one hand because she wanted to fly. Mags had to stitch her up.” Bella is aware that she is babbling, saying everything but the thing she ought to say.

  She stops herself with considerable effort. “You and I need to talk, Cleo.”

  “We do, yes.” Cleo is smiling, hands now back in her pockets.

  “I—I’d like you to leave New Salem.” Bella’s tongue feels wrong-sized, reluctant to form the words.

  Cleo’s eyebrows form a matched pair of arches. “It’s a little late for that, don’t you think?”

  “Quit smiling, I’m serious. You’ve already risked more than any sane woman would for us—for me—and this plan of June’s—”

  “The plan in which I play an extremely daring and heroic part? Without which the entire thing collapses?”

  “We could find someone else!”

  “You really couldn’t.”

  “Cleo, please. Eve isn’t your niece, Agnes and June aren’t your sisters, I’m not your—anything.”

  “Bella.” Cleo’s voice softens, the smile replaced by a dangerous sincerity.

  Bella looks away, knotting her fingers together to keep from reaching out. “I can’t stand to think of you captured or hurt, for my sake.”

  The soft shush of skirts, the creak of a floorboard. “Beatrice Belladonna Eastwood. Look at me.”

  Bella looks. Cleo is crouched on one knee inside the ring of salt, her eyes blazing and her lip caught between her teeth. She has something held carefully in her palm, fingers bent around it in a cage that quivers very slightly.

  Bella feels dizzy, delirious, as if she’s back on the Ferris wheel, swinging through sky. “What are you—”

  Cleo opens her hand. A ring lies in the precise center of her palm, tarnished and battered. The cut-glass gem is fractured and badly chipped, very much as if it was dropped from a great height and spent a summer abandoned on the weedy cement, until a clever-fingered witch found it again.

  “I believe this is yours, if you’ll have it.” Cleo’s voice is less sure now, higher than usual. “As am I.”

  Bella finds her fingers extending of their own accord, trembling over Cleo’s open palm. “I thought one marriage was enough for you. I thought you didn’t make the same mistake twice.”

  Cleo gives a one-shouldered shrug. “It’s possible I was mistaken.”

  “A novelty for you, I’m sure.” Bella is breathless, swaying high above the city.

  “It won’t happen again.”

  Bella’s hand hovers above Cleo’s, hesitant. She closes her eyes against the sudden pulse of memories: Thud. Her daddy looking at her with death in his eyes. Thud. The suffocating silence of St. Hale’s, her hands bound together in forced prayer. Thud. Cleo’s voice advising her to trust less easily. Thud. The ashes of Avalon around her ankles, the taste of failure in her mouth.

  Thud. Her mother. Who chose only what was good and proper, who tucked away every piece of herself that was wayward or unruly until she was a pale imitation of herself.

  Bella opens her eyes. She looks down at Cleopatra Quinn: bare-souled and brave, entirely herself.

  Bella cradles her head with ink-smeared hands and draws her upward. Their lips meet in a rush of heat and salt.

  Cleo pulls away, panting slightly. Her thumb brushes the trail of tears on Bella’s cheek. “Is that a yes, Miss Eastwood?”

  Bella nods once and Cleo slides the battered, broken, perfect ring onto her finger.

  Bella laughs a little hysterically. “Don’t you need one, too?” She pats her pockets and finds nothing but a few snapped matchsticks, a candlewick—and a single rose petal, plucked from the ashes of the library. It smells faintly of witchcraft and smoke.

  Bella draws it out and wraps it gently around Cleo’s finger, tucking it between her knuckles. “There. I’ve made an honest woman of you.”

  The rest of the conversation is silent, conducted in the wordless language of skin and heartbeat.

  Later—either several days or merely an hour; Bella has lost track of the winged passage of time—the trapdoor squeals again and Juniper’s voice rasps into the room.

  “You about ready, Bell? Agnes should be back any—Saints save us.” Her sister’s footsteps pause on the ladder. “Is now really the time, ladies?” When neither Cleo nor Bella answer her, being otherwise occupied, Juniper gives an irritated huff.

  They hear the clatter of feet on the ladder and a carrying shout: “I’ll be back in half an hour, and I want everybody’s clothes back where they belong. We’ve got hell to raise.”

  The last time Agnes visited the Workingman it was early summer. She was giddy and coy, half-drunk with hope. Eve still slept safe beneath her ribs; Agnes wore a cloak to match her eyes.

  This time it’s early autumn, and Agnes wears a pair of men’s pants and a tattered cloak the color of mud, with her hair tucked beneath a cap and her features dulled by magic. This time she feels like a lightning-struck tree or a pitted peach, hollowed out, empty; this time Eve is gone.

  The first time she met him, Mr. August Lee was feckless and fearless, with a gambler’s grin and nothing to lose. This time his face is creased with fresh-made lines and his eyes are sober, almost frightened, as if he’s found something he doesn’t want to lose.

  He sits across from Agnes with his haystack hair and his gray wool vest, a scrap of paper held tight in his hands. A covered basket sits on the table between them, smelling of clay and river-water.

  Agnes nods to the li
st in his hand. “Well?” Her voice is cold and flat.

  He scrubs his hand over his beard, brow knit. “Saints, Agnes. I haven’t seen you in over a week. No messages, no mockingbirds”—Agnes flinches, hearing the echo of small bones breaking—“and now you turn up with the Devil’s own groceries and a list of demands, looking like—” But he declines to say what she looks like. Agnes has avoided her own eyes in mirrors and windows, unwilling to look at the open wound of her face.

  “Where’s Eve?” August asks. Agnes knows his voice is gentle, but her ears ache as if he screamed the name. “Here. Look.” From his breast pocket he withdraws a small, smooth-polished thing and sets it upright on the table between them: dark wood, carved into the wary shape of a perched hawk. Agnes can tell from the curve of beak and the sleek taper of wings that it’s an osprey, and from the watchful angle of its body that it’s her hawk, meant to watch over her daughter.

  She pictures August worrying over it in the lengthening evenings, looking out into the lamp-lit dark of the city and hoping that she and Eve are safe. She pictures him turning the wood in his palm and choosing to carve the shape of her soul, dangerous and dark; rendering each talon without flinching from it.

  “My dad would’ve been a wood-carver, if he could. He taught me some.” His voice is still gentle. Her skull still pounds as if he shouted.

  Agnes reaches toward the little hawk without meaning to, fingers trembling, before closing her eyes and pressing her palm flat to the table. “I—I can’t—” She takes a long, steadying breath. “I need to know if you are able to work the spells we have supplied, Mr. Lee.”

  She hears the long sigh of his breath, the sag of his shoulders. “I’m no witch.”

  “I have it on good authority that everyone is a witch, given the proper words and ways.” Agnes tilts her head at the covered basket. “I’ve supplied you with both.”

  August’s eyes flick to the basket and back to her face. Agnes wishes, stupidly, that she could abandon her glamor and let his eyes rest on her true features, feel the warmth of his care on her skin. Perhaps she will find him again after it’s over, if she’s lucky enough to have an after. The future has narrowed in her mind, vanishing toward the moment she holds her daughter again.