The Once and Future Witches

by Alix E. Harrow

  You aren’t supposed to be alone. You aren’t supposed to be locked in a green-tiled room, chained and drugged, with nothing but the dull grate of men’s voices for company. A doctor with his sleeves rolled to the wrist, his hands bare and pink and somehow repellent, grime crusted beneath his nails; an assistant or two with towels slung over their shoulders and nameless stains spattering their aprons; a pair of men in uniforms, who look down at her like she is a prize they intend to stuff and mount on their mantels. A nurse flits among them sometimes, young and sorry-looking as she sweeps and straightens.

  The pain is still there, cutting like a clarion call through the fog, but Agnes can’t answer it. She can only lie there with spittle trailing from the corner of her mouth, clawing like an animal inside the cage of her body. She counts ceiling tiles to distract herself. She prays. She tells herself witch-tales, but the missing mothers seem to taunt her, wailing from the margins while their daughters sleep in the cinders and flee into tangled woods and marry beastly husbands.

  The pain comes again, urgent and vast, and Agnes feels her body straining and failing at some important task. Then the foreign scrape of fingers inside her, probing, pulling, conducting some secret evaluation and finding her wanting.

  A sigh from the doctor, precisely like Mr. Malton sighing over a jammed loom. Agnes imagines her blood replaced with oil, her joints with gears; a misbehaving machine instead of a woman.

  The doctor addresses the officers, rather than Agnes. “There’s been no progression at all. We’ll want to think about extraction, if you boys want her to survive to stand trial.” One of the assistants rattles in a metal cart behind him and produces a long silver object. From the corner of her eye Agnes catches the ugly curve of a hook.

  She thrashes against her shackles, her wild scream reduced to a choked moan. None of them look at her, except the nurse, whose eyes are huge and sad, her hands tight on the handle of her broom.

  Agnes wants to bite her. She wants to claw and curse them all, to bring all the centuries of Avalon crashing down on their heads—but she walked away from all that, convinced the cost of power was too high, failing to calculate the cost of being without it.

  She wonders if her sisters feel the echo of her toothless rage. She wonders if they would come to her, if they could.

  Agnes feels her eyes widen, very slightly.

  She finds that, if she focuses every ounce of fury into her left hand, she can curl her nails into her own flesh. She can drive them deep into her own palm until blood wells ruby-bright. She can unclench her hand and let the blood trickle to the point of her dangling finger and draw a blotched shape on the sheet beneath her: a red circle. She can even whisper the words, though her tongue is limp and wet in her mouth.

  She can pray that her sisters are watching.

  Juniper watches her sister’s skin turn from ivory to alabaster to wax. Her features remain slack, but her fingers are curled into her own palm just above the ugly iron of her shackle. Agnes’s fist clenches so tightly Juniper sees the dark gleam of blood gathering.

  She flinches away. “We’ve got to get there somehow, Bell. Call the tower back into the square, if you have to. Undo the binding.” But that would leave the library exposed and send every police officer and zealot into the streets to hunt witches. Would they even make it to Agnes before they were caught?

  She expects Bella to object, to cling to her books like a mother protecting several thousand of her favorite children, but when she looks up she sees that Bella is, inexplicably, smiling. Her eyes are on the pool of water.

  “I don’t think that will be necessary. Look.”

  Juniper looks.

  The red gleam beneath Agnes’s fingernails has become a fistful of blood. One finger is extended, stretching at a painful angle, smearing the bed-sheet with shocking crimson. The finger moves slowly, as if it requires all Agnes’s strength to keep it in motion, and it takes Juniper a startled moment to see what she has drawn.

  A circle. A way where there was none.

  “Hold on, Ag.” Juniper whispers it to the water. Bella is already filling her arms with glass jars and paper bags, books and notes. Her owl swoops silently to her shoulder and she reaches a hand to stroke its onyx feathers. Juniper thinks she looks like a proper witch from one of Mags’s stories, about to curse her enemies or ride a thundercloud into battle.

  They return to the tower door and this time when they press their palms to the carved sign they think of Agnes and her circle of blood, the red path she drew them through the dark.

  The tower vanishes.

  Agnes is alone.

  Until she isn’t.

  The air of the hospital skews sideways, a dizzy rushing, and afterward there are two hands pressed to the bloody circle on her bed-sheet. One of them is long and narrow, the fingertips stained with ink; the other is wide, sun-brown, marked with pale scars from thorns and thickets.

  Her sisters.

  Who were watching, who came when she called.

  They stand above her like a matched pair of Old Testament angels, the kind with flaming swords and vengeful hearts. Stories spin through Agnes’s head again, except this time she isn’t thinking of the dead mothers or their lost daughters. She’s thinking about the witches—the women who dispensed the glass slippers and curses and poison apples, who wreaked their wills on the world and damned the consequences.

  There is a moment of crystalline silence while the gathered men stare at the three women and the black owl. Then comes Bella’s voice, perfectly calm, and the sharp smell of herbs crushed between fingers. A wicked crack splits the air, very much like a small bone snapping.

  The police officers fall sideways, clutching at their ribs and howling. The doctor lunges for Juniper, but she’s already holding the hospital push broom in her hands. The handle cracks across his face with an unpleasant crunch. Bella whispers again and a heavy drowsiness descends on the room. The pair of assistants crumple to the floor and the howling officers fall silent.

  The ward is quiet except for the heavy drag of bodies being hauled across the floor. The doctor rouses once, voice rising in a high whine. There are a few more thuds of broom-handle on flesh and he falls quiet.

  Bella tsks. “Honestly, Juniper. The sleeping spell would have done just as well.”

  “Sure.” Agnes can hear Juniper’s shrug in her voice, followed by a final, satisfied thwack of the broomstick.

  Bella chants over Agnes’s head—Soundly she sleeps beneath bright skies, Agnes Amaranth awake, arise!—and gives a sharp whistle.

  The drug lifts from Agnes like a rising fog. She pants relief, limbs seizing against the chains. She cranes her neck upward and sees the sorry-eyed nurse holding open the narrow door of what looks like a supply closet while Juniper stuffs the limp bodies inside it. “Now go tell them the doctor doesn’t want any interruptions—or better yet, take this.” Juniper hands the nurse a small canvas sack. “You remember the words? Once you work it, hightail it home. With my thanks, Lacey.”

  Agnes wants to ask how they know one another and if every damn woman in this city is a witch, but another roll of pain sends her elsewhere, inward-facing, blind.

  When it passes, her sisters are hovering above her. Their hands are gentle on hers, unbending her blood-gummed fingers, and their eyes are so full of love and worry that Agnes feels the pain receding a little. An owl calls from somewhere, a soft crooning that makes Agnes think of full-moon nights back home.

  “We’re here now.” Juniper’s voice is low and smoke-streaked, as soft as she can make it. “Bella’s spelled the door and Lacey’s sent half the hospital straight to sleep. It’ll be all right.”

  “I shouldn’t have—I should have—” Agnes’s tongue is still slow, her speech slurred. “The doctor said the baby wasn’t coming, that she would have to be extracted.”

  Bella tuts, setting glass jars in a neat line on the bedside table and clutching her black leather notebook. “I’m sure he did. But I remind you that he was mere
ly a man. Whereas we”—she looks over her spectacles at Agnes and gives her a very small smile—“are witches.”

  Bella opens a heavy tome titled Obstetrix Magna and smooths the pages with a slightly shaking hand, wishing she felt as certain as she sounded. “Juniper, can you take care of these?” She gestures to Agnes’s shackles, but Juniper is already chanting her rhyme, Bend and break, bend and break, and the chains are blushing red. The iron rusts and flakes, as if several decades of rain and weather have passed in a handful of seconds.

  Juniper snaps the chains with vicious glee, the scar around her throat gleaming white.

  Agnes pulls her arms inward, cradling her own belly. She doesn’t scream or moan, but a low, animal growl leaves her lips. Juniper looks a little wildly at Bella. “Can’t you do anything?”

  Bella can. She claws through the Obstetrix Magna, past alarming illustrations of wombs and veins and infants with small ivory horns or flames for hair. Her fingers find the pages she marked back in the tower, where there are spells to draw fevers from the womb and persuade blood to remain in the body, to ease the pains of labor and steady the heart of the unborn.

  “Juniper.” Bella fumbles in her brown sack and finds a little tin of black-stained grease. “Draw a seven-pointed star around the bed, if you please.”

  Juniper daubs the unsteady shape of a star while Bella circles, whispering and chanting. She tucks jasmine flower beneath her tongue and hyacinth in her hair. She rings a silver bell seven times and watches Agnes’s body unfurl a little further with each soft peal.

  It’s a strong working. Bella can tell by the scorch of power in her veins and the hot smell of witching in the air. Juniper’s cheeks are flushed red from the effort of helping her, and Strix mantles on her shoulder.

  Agnes sighs back down against the sheets, the trapped-animal terror receding from her face. Her gaze is unclouded, lucid for the first time since they arrived. “Thank you,” she breathes. “I didn’t know if you’d come.”

  “Jesus, Ag.” Juniper shakes her head. “Have a little faith.”

  “I used to. Until . . .” Agnes slants a bitter look at Bella.

  Juniper says, “That was a long time ago,” just as Bella asks, “Until what?”

  A contraction doubles Agnes around her belly, lips white, but her gaze stays clear and sharp as a bared blade. “Until—you—betrayed me,” she pants.

  “I betrayed you?”

  “You were the only one I told about the baby. Because you were the only one I trusted.” The words are spat poison, meant to wound, but Bella doesn’t flinch.

  Because they aren’t true. Because she and her sister have wasted seven years hating one another for crimes neither one committed.

  “Oh, Agnes.” Bella’s own voice sounds weary in her ears, worn thin by the weight of that single summer afternoon seven years ago. “I never told our daddy a damn thing.”

  Agnes’s face makes Bella think of a ship in a dying wind, sails slack, as if the force that drove her has suddenly disappeared.

  “Then how? How did he know?”

  “The Adkins boy.”

  “I never told him shit—”

  Bella shakes her head. “He saw you in the woods, afterward.” Bella heard his tap-tap on their door, and her daddy’s hollered answer. Then low voices rising quickly, and that butter-brained boy saying, I’m sure, sir, I saw her bury it under a hornbeam. “I think he was hoping if he told Daddy you’d be cornered into a quick wedding.” Bella’s lip curls. “He didn’t know our daddy. After he left, Daddy went looking for you. I followed.”

  She thought maybe she could help somehow, but she’d stood paralyzed as her daddy drew closer and closer to Agnes. As Agnes screamed that Bella was a liar, a sinner, an unnatural creature. Her story came out in jumbled sobs—going into the church cellar for fresh candles and finding Bella with the preacher’s daughter, half-naked and ruby-lipped, reveling in sin—but even a poorly told story has power. Their father understood. He turned on her, too, and Bella begged—Please, no, please—

  Bella had met her sister’s eyes and seen nothing but a terrible, leaden cold. Hate, she thought then.

  Now she thinks of the witch-queen who sent shards of ice into warm hearts and soft eyes, turning them against the ones they loved best. Now she thinks she isn’t the only one familiar with betrayal.

  “I never told, Agnes. I swear.”

  Agnes shuts her eyes. “I thought—I didn’t—Saints, Bell.” A ragged whisper. “What did I do to us?”

  “You were just a child.” Bella tries to sound measured and calm, as if it is a distant hurt long forgotten, rather than an ice-shard still buried in her breast.

  “So were you.” Agnes clutches at the hard ball of her belly, breath catching. “I shouldn’t have said it. Even if you had told, I shouldn’t have turned on you.” There are tears mingling with the sweat on Agnes’s face now, more dripping from the end of Bella’s nose. She recalls dizzily that it was true love’s tears that melted the ice in the story.

  “I’m sorry,” Agnes whispers.

  “It’s all right,” Bella whispers back.

  Another contraction wracks Agnes before she can answer. Bella can see the pain of it biting deep, even with the witching to ease it, and a tremor of fear moves through her. Perhaps even witching won’t be enough.

  She smooths sweaty tendrils of hair back from Agnes’s brow.

  Agnes looks up at her, pale and tired and scared. “Will you stay with me?”

  “Yes,” Bella answers. In her chest she feels that cold sliver of ice melt into blood-warm water. “Always.”

  Juniper doesn’t know much about birthing, but she knows it shouldn’t take this damn long.

  She and Bella hover on either side of Agnes like a pair of black-cloaked gargoyles, standing vigil. It seems to go alright at first. Agnes pants and swears and strains against some invisible enemy, the veins blue and taut in her throat. But the baby doesn’t come, and each contraction wrings her like a rag, twists something vital out of her. Bella flicks back through her books, hissing and muttering, tossing herbs in ever-wilder circles.

  The baby doesn’t come.

  Agnes is supposed to be the strong one, but Juniper can see they’re coming to the end of her strength. Bella is supposed to be the wise one, but she’s running out of words. Juniper figures that leaves her, the wild one, with her wild will.

  She casts around for anything that might help her sister cling to life, that might bind a woman to the world. The word bind rattles like a thrown pebble in her skull, rippling outward, and Juniper thinks: Why the hell not?

  She plucks a single hair from her head. She tugs another one from Bella. (“Ow! What in the world—” “Hush.”) The last hair she takes is from Agnes, who doesn’t seem to notice.

  Juniper twirls the strands in her fingers, three shades of shining black, and twists them into a slender wisp of braid. As she braids she sings the words to herself: Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Little words, old words, to bind a split seam or a stray thread. Why not a life?

  Beside her Bella gives a little gasp. “A binding? That’s—what happens if s-she dies, and takes us with her—”

  Juniper ignores her, and eventually Bella shuts the hell up and helps.

  They speak the words together, circling round, rising and falling. The thing between them sings like a plucked string. and it’s suddenly clear as daylight to Juniper that it’s a binding, too, worn thin with time. She might wonder who worked it and why, except that she’s busy pouring her whole heart into her witching.

  Juniper sees the spell plucking at Agnes, reeling her back toward life, but Agnes doesn’t want to come. Her head lolls against the sheets, sweat-sheened, and her eyes glitter from somewhere deep in her skull.

  Juniper climbs carefully onto the bed beside her, fitting herself around the heat and hurt of her sister’s body. She tucks her cheek in the hollow between Agnes’s chin and collar, the way she did as a girl, and keeps speaking the words. Yours to mi
ne and mine to yours.

  “June. Baby.” Agnes’s voice is a hum against her cheek, a whisper in her ear. “Take care of her. Promise me you’ll take care of her.”

  The words falter on Juniper’s lips; the spell sags. “I promise,” she says, and feels the promise weave a circle around her heart, a binding far older and stronger than any witchcraft.

  Agnes softens after that, a final surrender.

  Juniper thinks of the mornings when Mama Mags would come back from a hard birth with blood beneath her nails and heartache in her eyes. She would stare out at the white curls of mist rising like ghosts from the valley, rubbing her thumb across the brass shine of her locket. It’s just the way of things.

  Juniper is old enough by now to know that the way of things is, generally speaking, horseshit. It’s cruelty and loss; locked doors and losing choices; sundered sisters and missing mothers.

  What the hell good is witching, if it can’t change the way of things?

  Juniper puts her lips against the shining dark of her sister’s hair and whispers, “Listen to me, Agnes. This isn’t how it goes. This isn’t how the story ends. All this—me and you and Bell—is just the beginning.” A shudder moves through Agnes, a laugh or a sob, but her eyes are closed.

  Juniper’s arm tightens around Agnes’s shoulders and her voice rasps low. “Don’t leave me.”

  Agnes opens her eyes and Juniper sees a spark burning somewhere deep down in the dark of them. Her fingers find Juniper’s on one side and Bella’s on the other, so they form a circle between them.

  Agnes’s lips begin to move. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust—

  Agnes speaks the words until they aren’t words anymore. Until they become clasped hands and bound threads, a circle woven from sister to sister to sister. Until the rules of the world bend beneath the weight of their will.