The Once and Future Witches

by Harrow, Alix E.

  She feels the serpent hardening back to black wood, its venom seeping away.

  Above her Gideon sees the weakness in her face. His eyes glitter in triumph. Juniper knows with cold certainty that he won’t hesitate, that he will pay any price merely to live and keep living.

  Gideon sees her, and smiles at what he sees.

  What he doesn’t see is the woman standing beside him on the balcony, her shadow lying at her feet where it belongs, her will finally her own once more: Miss Grace Wiggin.

  As I lay dying upon the earth,

  I raised my hands to her,

  But she would not even close my lips nor my eyes.

  A spell for a final regret, requiring a betrayal most bitter

  Agnes Amaranth sees her.

  Agnes stands at the edge of the scaffold with her back turned to her own pyre. She sees Gideon’s shadows banished, his power broken. She sees Miss Grace Wiggin slip away from him like a kite with a cut string.

  At first her face remains cool and empty, but then the truth comes boiling to the surface. Confusion first, then revulsion, as if she wants to peel her own flesh from her body. Then rage: pure and white-hot, toothed and fanged, entirely foreign on Miss Wiggin’s docile features.

  She turns to face the man who took her in then took her will, the father who cursed his own daughter. She looks in that moment less like a woman and more like a harpy. Like an ending long overdue, like a reckoning in a white dress.

  Agnes figures Gideon Hill has always chosen his victims with care: the small and strange, the lonely and weak. Old women who lived in the woods and young women with wayward hearts. His own dreamy, bookish nephew. He burned them and blamed them, ate them whole and spat out the seeds and never once worried that one of them would sprout behind him and bear poison fruit. That even the weak can make powerful enemies, if there are enough of them.

  A red light is glowing now in Wiggin’s eyes. Her fingers clutch at her skirts, searching for some weapon or way and finding none. Then her hands land on the pale sash that runs from hip to shoulder. She strokes the neat-stitched lettering slowly, almost wonderingly, before pulling the sash over her head. She holds the white silk like a sword laid flat across her palms. Women are good at making their own ways when they have none.

  Hill doesn’t see it coming. And even if he had—if he turned and saw the sash between Wiggin’s hands and the rage in her face—Agnes doubts he would have believed it until it was too late.

  Wiggin throws the sash over Hill’s head and it settles gently across his throat. Before he can tear it away, before he can even cast an irritable glance downward, it twists tight around his neck.

  “Saints save us.” It’s Bella, staring at Hill with her hands covering her mouth.

  Cleo draws air through her teeth. “But not him.”

  Below them Juniper is looking up at Hill and Wiggin with her mouth open. Her black-yew staff is gone but Agnes doesn’t see a serpent anywhere.

  One of the Inquisitors on the balcony has noticed that the head of the Women’s Christian Union is strangling the mayor. He apparently objects, even if the mayor no longer looks quite as he should, and strides forward.

  “No!” Agnes shouts it uselessly, hopelessly,

  Gideon’s dog—now tall and red-eyed, no longer a dog at all but a wolf with an iron collar around her throat—turns on the Inquisitor. Her teeth snap inches from his flesh, hackles high. Her collar glows a punishing orange, but she does not back down.

  More Inquisitors join the first. Before they can knock the wolf aside, a dark streak of feathers strikes, talons first. Pan joins the wolf, followed by Strix. The three familiars keep the shouting men at bay with teeth and claws and burning eyes. Behind them, Wiggin’s sash tightens across Gideon Hill’s throat. The wolf howls in agony or triumph.

  Hill’s face goes from white to red to mauve, darkening to a bruised, bloated color like meat gone bad. His lips are foam-specked and bitten, still moving in some final, futile spell. His legs kick weaker and weaker, his honeysuckle suit stained with spittle and piss. His wolf staggers.

  All his malice and might, all his centuries of learning, and death came for him just the same. Agnes intends to watch until the very end, until his legs quit kicking and his heart quits beating, but someone shouts her name.

  “Agnes Amaranth!” She ignores it.

  But a baby cries, and Agnes knows that cry. It’s written on her heart and carved into her bones. It echoes in her dreams, haunting her.

  She turns away from her cold triumph to see August Lee climbing the scaffold steps with her name on his lips and her daughter cradled against his chest.

  Agnes isn’t aware of reaching for her until she feels the rightness of Eve’s weight against her arms and hears the endless nonsense-stream of her own voice (Baby girl, little love, it’s alright, Mama’s here, I’ve got you). Her ribs ache as if something feathered is trying to escape them, like vast wings.

  She smells sawdust and feels the careful weight of arms around her. She leans her cheek against August’s chest and the arms settle. His skin is still warm with witching.

  In the hollow between them she looks down into her daughter’s solemn eyes, shining with stars and flames and the beginnings of ten thousand stories. Once there was a girl who was stolen and won back. Once there was a girl who was raised by three witches. Once there was a girl who rose like a phoenix from her mother’s ashes and winged into the light of a new world.

  August releases her and presses a smooth branch into her palm. “Rowan-wood, just like you asked.” It smells raw and green, cool against the burning air.

  “Me and my boys will keep the crowd back.”

  Agnes looks up at him, this man who loves all of her, this knight who has gotten his tales crossed and fallen in love with the witch instead of the princess. Here he stands with her at the end, ash-streaked and sweating, and it seems perfectly clear to her what comes next in the story.

  She kisses him. Despite the screaming crowd and the too-close lick of flames, despite the bruised sting of her lips and the startled blue of his eyes. His palm rises uncertainly, hovering above the line of her jaw. His lips are hesitant against hers. Agnes presses harder, teeth against skin, reminding him what she is. He burns back at her, all want and heat, fingers tangling in her hair.

  It ends too soon, not a kiss so much as a promise, hope translated into flesh.

  She releases his collar and August touches his bitten lips with the expression of a person who has suffered a religious revelation or a recent head injury.

  “Agnes—” His voice is pleasingly hoarse.

  She meets his eyes and lifts her chin in challenge. “Come find me, Mr. Lee. When it’s over.”

  He touches his hand to his heart and she knows he will. Trusts it, body and blood.

  Agnes grips her rowan-wood broomstick in one hand and reaches for her sister with the other. Bella’s fingers catch tight around hers. “Where’s June? There’s still the banishing to work.”

  Agnes sees her. Juniper is still standing in the crowd below, looking up at Grace Wiggin as she’s finally dragged away by bitten and bleeding Inquisitors. At her feet, Gideon Hill lies dead. His wolf has curled beside him, her slender nose on his chest, her eyes closed.

  Juniper should be triumphant or gleeful or at least grimly satisfied—but instead she is perfectly still, staring. There’s a bloodless terror in her face that makes the hair on Agnes’s arms prickle. She has seen her sister raging and weeping, laughing and lying and a hundred other things; she has never seen her afraid.

  Juniper knows what a man looks like when he dies. He looks sick and scared and finally sorry, like a skinflint villager when the Piper comes to collect. He looks impotent, weak, unlikely ever to hurt you again.

  Gideon Hill doesn’t look like that.

  His face is bruised-black and his eyes are wet rubies, blood-streaked, but his expression at the very end is placid, almost bored. Just before the end he meets Juniper’s eyes—as the crow
d wails and panics around them, as Wiggin’s fingers go white around the sash, her face lit with that wild, killing hate—and smiles.

  His fist dangles over the raw-wood edge of the balcony. His fingers slacken as he dies and a bright ribbon flutters free: a single curl of hair, soft as feather-down.

  Red as blood.

  All the king’s horses and all the king’s men

  couldn’t put Georgie together again.

  A spell to sunder a soul, requiring a death long overdue

  Of all the souls James Juniper has seen this summer—four, by her accounting—Gideon Hill’s is the foulest.

  It leaks like hot tar from his open mouth and pools on the balcony beneath him, wet and black. Juniper figures that’s what happens to a soul when it lingers too long, feeding on stolen shadows: it goes to rot, like a diseased organ.

  His soul leaks away from his body, away from the wolf who lies with him—shouldn’t a familiar vanish, when its master dies?—and drips between the boards.

  It splashes to the cobbles and runs like black water along the cracks. It’s hard to be sure through the trampling feet of the crowd, but Juniper thinks it’s heading dead north. Toward her.

  She looks back to the scaffold behind her, where her sisters are silhouetted by flames. Bella and Cleo are shoulder-to-shoulder, rowan branches in their hands. August is shouting to his men, guarding the platform against the rioting crowd.

  Agnes is looking down into the face of her daughter, smiling with such love that Juniper’s throat seizes. She thinks all of it—the Deeps and Avalon, the scar around her neck and the coals in her heart—might be worth it, if only Agnes and Eve make it out of this twice-damned city together.

  Then Juniper thinks of the ruby curl of hair falling from the balcony. The smile on Hill’s lips as he died. The Crone’s voice saying something from the body he was stealing.

  She understands that Gideon’s soul isn’t headed for her, after all. It’s headed for the scaffold, for the only truly pure thing Juniper has ever seen in the world, the only thing neither she nor her sisters could ever bring themselves to harm.

  Eve.

  And she understands that she only has one choice, and that it’s a losing one.

  First she curses—Gideon Hill and his damn shadows, herself and her terrible choices, the world that demands such a steep price just for living—then she says the words.

  Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, mine to yours and yours to mine.

  The words Mama Mags used to bind split seams, then sisters, then her own soul. Surely they would work now, for Juniper.

  Bindings usually involve ways and means, objects and complicated affinities, but Juniper has nothing but the taste of Gideon Hill’s bridle between her teeth, the scars of his collar around her throat, and her own will, which does not waver.

  She reaches for his soul as it runs past her, curls her fingers into it. It twists in her hands, fighting to escape, but her will is a hammer and anvil, a stone and a sledge. She doesn’t let go. She says the words again and the shadow goes limp and cold in her hands.

  Juniper fights the urge to toss it to the ground and stamp it like a roach. But she couldn’t even if she wanted to: it’s streaking up her arms, twining upward. She feels it climb her collarbone and writhe up her neck, pressing like a cold finger between her lips and pouring itself down her throat. It’s like drinking pond-slime or January mud, thick and foul and unnatural. She retches at the oily touch of his soul inside her.

  A laugh rings from somewhere inside her skull, sickly familiar, and a voice whispers: I wanted you to stay with me, James Juniper, and now you always will.

  He swallows her whole. The world goes black as the belly of a whale.

  Bella sees the shadow reaching toward the scaffold.

  She sees her sister step—stupidly, bravely, perfectly predictably—into its path. The darkness flows up her arms and slips into her mouth, stretching black tendrils up her cheeks and filling her eyes with shadows. Bella feels it through the thing between them, a suffocating, poisonous cold.

  Juniper stiffens, her mouth open in a silent howl, her fingers clawing at her own chest as if a weed has taken root inside her. Bella’s scream is lost in the howling chaos of the crowd.

  Only Cleo hears her. “What is it? Oh, Saints.” She sees Juniper, her spine bent in an unnatural arc, her nails digging into her own skin. Her eyes are black as graves.

  Bella is aware that her own lips are moving, a breathless chant of oh no, oh no, oh no. “He’s taking her, just like he took the others.”

  “She’s got a strong will, your sister. Maybe she can stop him.”

  “No, she can’t.” Bella knows it, feels it through the binding between them. Her breath catches. The binding. “Not alone.”

  She shoves her will toward Juniper, every scrap of fear and fury and desperate love she possesses, and prays it’s enough.

  Juniper flinches. Her neck snaps toward the scaffold and her lips peel back from her teeth in a snarl that doesn’t belong to her—then it passes. Her spine unbends. Her shoulders square, familiar and stubborn. The blackness recedes from her eyes and leaves them clear silver, entirely her own.

  She meets Bella’s worried gaze and gives her a tired half-smile. Bella feels a giddy rush of relief.

  Until she sees movement at Juniper’s side. The black wolf—the one that lay beside its master’s body on the balcony—is standing now beside her sister, looking up at her with red, red eyes.

  Juniper figures a few hundred years of always getting his own way has spoiled Mr. Gideon Hill. He’s grown used to weak wills and whispered words, to women bound and burning.

  But Juniper learned spite in the cradle. She knows all about long odds and losing choices, about grit and spine. She plants her feet and holds fast.

  He might still have won, in the end—Gideon Hill who was once George of Hyll, who has been stealing souls for centuries before Juniper or her mother or her mother’s mother were even born—except that Juniper is not alone.

  Bella’s will floods her heart like the first warm wind of spring. It drives the chill back, presses Hill down inside her until he’s nothing but a shard of ice between her ribs.

  A mocking voice hisses in her head. How long do you think you can keep this up? How long can you resist me?

  Not forever, she knows—he’s a tumor in her breast, waiting for the moment her attention slips or her will flags—but she doesn’t need forever.

  Long enough, you bastard, she thinks, and takes a single step. It’s harder than it ought to be, like there’s a weight pulling hard against her, like her muscles aren’t quite her own. A warm weight leans against her leg and she looks down to meet a pair of mournful red eyes: Gideon Hill’s familiar, still wearing her iron collar. Still bound to her master, following him loyally to his next body.

  For the last time.

  Juniper digs her fingers into her dark ruff and the two of them walk back to the scaffold, to her sisters and the stake, to the flames that curl like fingers into the sky, beckoning.

  Bella watches her sister walk back to the scaffold as if she’s wading through knee-deep water. As if each step costs her dearly but she is bound to take it anyway.

  There are people running and shoving around her—well-dressed gentlemen fleeing in terror, shouting Inquisitors with blood smeared on their white tunics, mad-eyed men clutching stones and broken bottles, looking for wicked witches to kill—but none of them seem willing to touch the young woman and the black wolf.

  Bella reaches for her hands as she climbs the steps, but Juniper flinches away from her touch. Her hands curl back on themselves as if they’re smeared with something foul. She buries one of them in the black fur of the wolf at her side.

  “June! What happened? Did he bind himself to you somehow?”

  Juniper shrugs one shoulder and doesn’t meet her eyes. “No.”

  “Then how—what—”

  “I bound him to me.”

  Bella considers bursti
ng into tears. “Oh June, why?”

  Juniper still isn’t looking at her. Bella follows the line of her gaze and sees Agnes shushing a wailing Eve. Juniper shrugs again. “Had to.”

  “Well, we can fix it somehow. We can find a way to banish him, or contain him. A warding spell, maybe, or a healing—”

  “There’s no time, Bell.” Juniper says it very gently, like a doctor telling a patient some unfortunate news. She tilts her chin at Agnes and Eve. “Take care of her, won’t you? She’s got to have it better than we did. A mama that sticks around, maybe even a daddy worth a damn.” Juniper squints speculatively at August, who is standing guard at the scaffold steps with an iron bar in his hand and the frenzied expression of someone fully prepared to lay down his life.

  “She’ll need you and Cleo, too, to teach her the words and ways. Mags would like that, I figure.” Juniper smiles at her oldest sister. It’s the kind of smile that has farewells and regrets tucked in the corners. Bella doesn’t like it in the least.

  “June, what exactly—”

  Juniper limps closer and kisses Bella once on the cheek, her lips cracked and hot. Bella falls silent.

  Juniper steps around her and pauses in front of Agnes. Agnes frowns at the wolf padding beside her, points up at the stars with the rowan branch in her hand. But Juniper shakes her head. Her hand hovers above the feather-down curl of Eve’s head, not quite touching her, trembling very slightly.

  Agnes asks her a question and Juniper answers, still wearing that smile shaped like a goodbye. She kisses Agnes’s cheek, too.

  It’s only as she turns away and stands staring into the flames—her hair fluttering in the heat, her eyes steady—that Bella understands what she’s going to do.

  Juniper doesn’t have much time, but she has time enough to say goodbye to her sisters.

  Agnes is clutching Eve in one arm and her rowan bough in the other, scowling at Juniper. “Where’s Gideon? Why is that thing following you?” Her eyes flick to the wolf still walking patiently at her side. “It’s time to go, June.” Agnes points up at the sky.