The Once and Future Witches

by Harrow, Alix E.

  An owl and an osprey fly beside them. Agnes wonders if any of them notice a third creature winging with them, black as sin, nearly invisible against the night. Or perhaps they see it and think nothing of it. Every crow is black, after all.

  Perhaps, from so far below, they can’t see the way the crow’s eyes burn like the last stubborn coals of a dying fire, or the way they stare at some distant point in the sky, as if he’s flying to meet someone just on the other side of nowhere.

  How many miles to Babylon?

  Threescore miles and ten.

  Can I get there by candlelight?

  There and back again.

  A spell for safe travel, requiring a lit candle & seventy steps

  On the spring equinox of 1894 there is still snow lingering on the streets of Chicago. It gathers along curbs, sooty and sullen, waiting to crumble over boot-tops and soak the trailing hems of cloaks, while the wind sneaks down collars and beneath the brims of hats.

  Agnes Amaranth doesn’t mind it; she will be leaving soon.

  She steps into the early evening alley with her cloak pulled tight around her neck and her ears full of the hum and song of women’s voices. Agnes came to Chicago following a story she read on the second and third pages of the papers, well below all the hysterical headlines about witches and burnings (CHAOS REIGNS IN NEW SALEM; VOODOO REVOLT SHAKES RICHMOND; COVEN DISCOVERED IN ST. LOUIS—WILL YOUR CITY BE NEXT?). It’s a story about a lowly button-sewer at Hart & Shaffner Garment Factory who took issue with her employer’s decision to cut women’s wages and instigated a strike. The strike was met with brutal beatings and the illegal-but-unpunished burning of at least one accused witch. Agnes suspected such brutality wouldn’t break the garment-workers’ rebelliousness at all, but merely harden it, like beaten steel.

  She wasn’t mistaken. In the dim basement of a settlement house, Agnes met a collection of women with clenched jaws and iron spines, their eyes bruised with too many long shifts, their knuckles swollen with too many hours bent around a needle. Their English was sparse and shifting, interspersed with lilting strings of foreign words and unfamiliar vowels, but they brought their daughters to translate for them, and both women and children looked at Agnes with a mix of skepticism and hope.

  One of the older women asked, in a voice like pipe smoke and lead, “And who are you, exactly?”

  Agnes’s arms were bare beneath her cloak, and she spread them wide. “A sister. A friend. A woman in want of a better world.” She smiled her witchiest smile. “I have in my possession certain ways and words you might find useful—from what I’ve read, you already have the will.”

  There were whispers and glances. Some women shuffled out, unwilling to add witchcraft to the list of their crimes, but some edged nearer. Some remembered the words their mothers sang to them on winter nights and the spells their aunts chanted on the solstice; some of them had tasted power, and wanted more.

  Agnes gave them the words on thin slips of paper, rolled tight. There were words for binding tongues and breaking machines, for healing hurts and causing them, for setting fires and walking through them unscathed. The papers disappeared up sleeves and beneath aprons and waited, like hidden knives, for their moment.

  One of the girls—young and fierce-looking, with the wary black eyes of a winter fox—stared at the paper in her hands with such intensity Agnes thought it might burst into spontaneous flame. Her fingertips were pressed white where she held the paper.

  Agnes is not, therefore, entirely surprised to hear soft footsteps padding after her down the snow-spotted alley. She does not look behind her. She turns down an even narrower lane, crisscrossed with drooping laundry and lined with dim doorways, before turning around.

  “Bessie, wasn’t it?”

  The girl flinches, eyes huge and feral, but tosses her head in denial. “They call me Bessie when I get here. Bas Sheva is my name.” Her accent makes Agnes think of hip-deep snow and rich furs, and a little of Yulia. The Domontoviches stayed in New Salem, living in the west wing of Inez and Jennie’s well-warded house. Agnes visited once over the winter, and found the manor transformed into a sunny, sprawling safe house. A place to run, for any woman who wants it.

  “How may I help you, Bas Sheva?”

  She doesn’t answer, but her eyes skitter hungrily over every inch of Agnes, from the sleek silk of her hair to the ragged black of her cloak. They linger on her face, as if mentally comparing it to the etchings on wanted posters and cartoons in the papers. “You’re one of them, aren’t you?”

  Agnes has found it unwise to advertise her identity. Witch-hunters have sprouted like thistles across the country, along with wanted posters listing rather gratifying sums of money in reward for information leading to her arrest. She travels in disguise, under false names and befuddling magics, and never lingers long in one place. Although she’s found herself in Chicago several times over the winter.

  So when Bas Sheva asks her name Agnes widens her eyes and says, “One of who?”

  The girl glares before she says, low and quick, “The First Three.”

  Agnes should deny it. But there’s something about this girl—the desperation or the fury or the fingerprint bruises circling her wrist—that makes Agnes nod her head once.

  Bas Sheva’s face ignites. She licks her lips. “Then I wonder if—I want—” Agnes suspects she struggles less with her English and more with the immensity of her desire, the hollow shape of her hunger. The light in her eyes reminds Agnes strongly of her youngest sister.

  “Here, girl. Speak these words and draw a circle, and you’ll find the place you need to go.” Agnes steps closer and sings her a rhyme about wayward sisters and stolen crowns. She doesn’t write them down—these words are too precious, too dangerous to risk anything more than a whisper—but she doesn’t have to. The girl’s lips move over the syllables like hands running over a key. “Not tonight, though. It’s the equinox. We’ll be busy.”

  The girl bows her head, hesitates, and withdraws a small pewter charm from her skirt: a delicate case bearing a series of branched and rooted symbols that might be letters. She presses it into Agnes’s hand. “My great-grandmother knew certain words she should not. Hang these at your daughter’s door. For protection.”

  Agnes slips it into her pocket and presses her palm over it. “Thank you.”

  Agnes watches Bas Sheva leave—shoulders braced, hair dark and wind-tangled—and allows herself to pretend for a moment that she is a different young woman in a different city. The wind whips her tears dry before they fall.

  She is several strides farther down the alley when a low, teasing voice speaks behind her. “Evening, miss.”

  She squints into a nearby doorway but can’t seem to make her eyes focus on the shape inside it. The voice whispers again and two figures come into sudden focus: a bearded man with a gambler’s grin and a red scarf, and a rosy-cheeked baby girl perched in the crook of his arm. Curls spill like flames from beneath her woolen cap.

  The girl raises both arms to Agnes and demands, in the tone of a monarch who has been kept waiting longer than she is accustomed to by her underlings, “Mama!”

  “Hello, loves.” Eve falls into her arms with a satisfied oomph and immediately grabs two fistfuls of Agnes’s hair.

  Mr. August Lee watches them with his smile pulled crooked and wry. August returned to Chicago six weeks previously along with a smallish gang of men from New Salem, with the intention of spreading women’s witching among his old friends and malcontents, and seeing if perhaps certain concessions couldn’t be won from the Pullman Palace Car Company after all. He claims his work will be done before summer, when he will join Agnes with whatever fight she’s found for them next.

  “Weren’t you two supposed to be lying low at the Everly Club?” Miss Pearl had provided Agnes with the name and address of a madam sympathetic to the cause of witches and working-women, who was willing to trade certain words and ways and hard-to-come-by herbs in exchange for safe harbor.

 
; August shrugs. “Inquisitors showed up asking questions, looking for trouble.”

  “And did they find any?”

  August’s eyes spark like flint against hers. “A bit, yes. More than they bargained for, in fact.” He touches his jaw, where a bruise is beginning to bloom beneath his beard. “I took care of them, but I thought it best to leave the Club, so as not to draw more unwelcome attention. Besides”—he grabs Eve’s toe and wiggles it—“her Ladyship wanted her mama.”

  Agnes kisses her daughter’s cap and breathes the summery smell of her, all sunshine and sweat despite the icy chill of the wind. She glances up at the sky, dimming quickly into darkness. “Perhaps I ought to stay tonight, if—”

  August brushes this away. “No, you two go on. I’ll find us a place to stay and draw a circle for your return.” He chucks Eve under the chin and she burbles pleasantly at him. “Give them my regards.”

  Agnes kisses him once—and if she lingers longer than is strictly decent, if his hand is lower and warmer on her waist than it ought to be, she finds she doesn’t care.

  She turns away and draws a stick of white chalk from her pocket. She sketches a neat design on the wall: three white circles, interwoven. Her daughter’s small fingers splay beside hers on the soot-stained brick for a half-second before the two of them are pulled into elsewhere, or perhaps nowhere.

  There is a house down in Orleans they call the Rising Sun.

  It’s been the ruin of many a woman,

  By God I won’t be one.

  A spell against conception, requiring a red dawn & a drawn star

  By the spring equinox of 1894, the city of New Orleans has slid past spring and is flirting shamelessly with summer. The air is soft and heavy, magnolia-sweet, and the sun drapes itself like a warm cat around bare shoulders.

  Beatrice Belladonna has been in the city for three weeks now, staying in a rented room in the Upper Ninth Ward, and hopes to stay longer.

  She is sitting now at a broad desk with the breeze plucking at her endless stacks and piles of notes. More than half of them are written in Miss Quinn’s careless, slanting handwriting, dashed off during her many meetings and interviews—which always seem to occur in midnight graveyards or abandoned bell-towers and involve a great deal of danger—and then jammed haphazardly in a pocket or purse when the authorities arrived.

  Cleo dismisses Bella’s concerns with airy waves of her long fingers. “Writing a book is dangerous business, if done correctly.”

  Over the winter Cleo received a not-insubstantial contract from John Wiley & Sons to write a book chronicling the sudden upsetting rise of witchcraft among the sharecroppers and freed-women of the South. Her editor desired a lurid account of cannibal-witches and voodoo queens, a book so scandalous it would provoke fainting spells and lengthy speeches about the moral decay of the nation, and which would sell like ice cream on the fourth of July.

  Cleo intends to oblige him, to a certain degree; her working title is Southern Horrors, and it so far contains many hair-raising tales of hexed landlords and haunted sheriffs, of boo-hags and haints and courtesans with poison smiles, although it is conspicuously free of specific names or locations.

  It also contains a number of engraved illustrations. Above the depictions of mayhem and murder there are inky black skies pricked with white stars in very particular patterns. If a person happens to know their constellations, and if they bear no ill intent toward witches or women, they might reveal certain words and ways that John Wiley & Sons never intended to publish.

  Bella serves mostly as her typist and assistant, assembling notes and organizing chapters, but she also devotes considerable hours to their other, much more ambitious and secret undertaking: to restore what has been burned, to find again what has been lost. To rebuild the Library of Avalon.

  Bella and Cleo collect spells wherever they go, hidden in rumors and stories, preserved in rhymes and hymns and sewing samplers, and record them as accurately as they can. Already Bella has begun a dozen new spell-books: grimoires and guides, books of weather and medicine and beauty and death. She’s written the words and ways from the smallest household spells—charms to sort bad eggs from good or remove stubborn stains from white sheets—to curses that will stop hearts or poison wells or heal bones.

  Many of the spells sound strange to Bella’s ear, nothing like Mama Mags’s rhymes. They come in odd forms and unlikely languages—Spanish prayers and Creole songs and Choctaw stories, star-patterns and dances and drum-beats—and not all of them are easily translated to ink and paper. Bella begins to believe that the Library of Avalon was only ever a sliver of witchcraft in the first place. She begins to believe that the words and ways are whichever ones a woman has, and that a witch is merely a woman who needs more than she has.

  Mr. Blackwell agrees. Bella sends him pages of notes and ideas every other week and he returns long missives stained with tea and wine, dotted with helpful questions and possibilities. He also includes regular updates on the state of New Salem and the Sisters of Avalon. Bella is amused by the frequency with which Miss Electa Gage’s name recurs; she will not be surprised to hear news of their engagement soon.

  Most days Bella is hopeful, proud of the work they’ve accomplished in a mere six months—but sometimes a certain melancholy takes her. Some days when she steps back into the tower she is overwhelmed by the scent of ash and grief, haunted by its hollow heart. On those days what they have gained seems to pall before the immensity of what they have lost.

  But the tower is no longer lost, nor is it a ruin. The trees surrounding it are flecked with green-furred buds and the rose-vines have crept up to the first window. There aren’t any blooms yet, but Bella has seen tight curls of red hidden among the thorns, waiting.

  Bella and Agnes swept out the ashes and hauled burned scraps from the tower. They scrubbed the scorch marks with lye and hung twists of lavender and cat-mint in the windows. Mr. August Lee turned up with a number of useful tools—many of which were stamped with company names and certainly did not belong to him—and helped the sisters fell and cure the timber they needed. It sits now in neat stacks, drying. By summer perhaps they will have a staircase again, and the beginnings of bookshelves. All they have now is a rope ladder leading up to the little round room at the top of the tower, where three beds still stand in a neat circle.

  Bella and Cleo have spent many nights in the tower—when Cleo provokes some particular outrage, or when Eve goes through one of her long phases of refusing to sleep except when held in someone’s arms, and that someone is walking beneath the trees, humming Greensleeves. Bella likes it there. Although sometimes after a visit to Avalon she finds corrections and additions to her notes, written in a querulous hand and signed with three circles intertwined.

  This evening Bella is not working on spells or stories; she’s typing out the final pages of her first and most precious book. All winter she’s been transcribing and editing her little black notebook, making additions and subtractions, badgering Agnes and Cleo where her own memory fails her, sometimes despairing of ever weaving the thing into anything believably book-shaped.

  It will never find a publisher—what publisher would risk moral and legal condemnation from the Church, most major political parties, the government, and every law enforcement organization?—and even if it did, most readers wouldn’t believe half of it. But it will be the first book she gives to the Library of Avalon: part story and part grimoire, part history and part myth. A new witch-tale, for a new world.

  It’s the title that’s taken her longest. Cleo suggested gently that Our Own Stories was a little vague, and Bella spent the next month moaning and dithering. “A Vindication of the Rights of Witches? The Everywoman’s Guide to Modern Witchcraft? A Memoir of the First Three—”

  “You are certainly not the First Three Witches of the West, no matter what they’re calling you.”

  “No, of course, I just—”

  “Nor were the Last Three truly the last anything, as it turns out,”
Cleo added, musingly. “History is a circle, and you people are always looking for the beginnings and ends of it.”

  She swept out and left Bella to think about endings and beginnings and circles. She thought of the Sign of the Three burned into the door of Avalon and the phrase inscribed above it, and found that—if she took certain liberties with the Latin—it made a perfectly serviceable title.

  The light is fading as Bella tears the final page from the typewriter and lays it neatly on the stack. There’s still one last chapter to be added, but her part is done.

  The moon rises like a silver dollar in the window and the church bells ring in the equinox-eve service. Cleo will be out late, attending a gathering of the Orleans chapter of her organization, the Daughters of Laveau. Bella will be spending the equinox elsewhere.

  She tidies her papers and clears a small space on her desk. She lays a single rose on the bare wood, and beside it a smooth golden ring.

  The ring isn’t much to look at—without diamonds or engravings—but the metal is warm to the touch even days after the casting. Bella found a goldsmith in the Garden Quarter who permitted her to inspect the gold before casting. Bella smiled and thanked him, and then bound spells to every gram of metal. The ring ought to offer some protection from unfriendly eyes and ill wishes, from cold iron and hot coals, bad dreams and mean dogs and broken bones.

  She tucks a scrap of paper beneath the ring: Yours, if you will have it. As am I.

  Bella dons a half-cloak and a historically inaccurate hat, black and pointed, and draws a charcoal circle on the floorboards. She whispers the words and steps into elsewhere.

  Epilogue

  I figure since I’m the one who started the story, I should be the one to finish it.

  It’s the spring equinox of 1894 and I’m sitting with my back against the sun-warmed wood of the tower door, rose-vines pricking the soft meat of my arms and meadow-grass shushing against the bare soles of my feet. A crow perches on my knee, watching me write with a cocked head and a candleflame eye.