The Once and Future Witches

by Alix E. Harrow

  Agnes strokes her bare skin with one knuckle. Eve doesn’t move.

  Terror jolts through her, spine to skull. Pan appears at her shoulder, voicing a piercing hawk’s cry. Eve’s eyelids give the barest flutter.

  Agnes says, firmly and calmly, “No.”

  This isn’t how the story goes; she doesn’t cower in the dark while her daughter dies. She doesn’t lie back and let the tide of the world have its way with her, like her mother did.

  She stands and paces, rustling through empty jars and turning out every pocket. A handful of thorns, black-pearl seeds, a few twists of herbs, curled and brittle. Not enough. There has to be someone in this city with the witch-ways or words she needs, or someone who will find them for her. She thinks of circles and bindings and joined hands. Of Mr. August Lee, who came when she called him.

  She fumbles in her skirt pocket for her last mockingbird feather, raggedy and crimped. She pricks her palm with the hollow point and whispers the words. Hush little baby, don’t say a word.

  Heat snakes through her veins. Agnes unlatches the window and sends the feather into the sky along with a whispered name. “Tell him to meet me”—she hesitates, unwilling to say the words South Sybil out loud in case some unfriendly shadow is listening in the alley—“at the corner of Lamentation and Sixteenth,” she finishes.

  Agnes rubs pale dye into her hair and ties a maid’s apron around her waist. She wraps her daughter in gray wool—her head lolls, a thin line of white gleaming beneath the red of her lashes—and steps across their wards and into the hall. For a long moment she stands there, warring with herself, before lifting her hand to knock at the door to No. 12.

  A pair of blondish, round-cheeked girls answer the door, so similar they can only be twins. All their hearty Kansas aunts and cousins must be at work. They blink up at Agnes, neither one recognizing the grayhaired maid standing in the hall as their former neighbor.

  “I need someone to watch my baby girl while I run to the grocer’s. Please, just for a minute. She’s sick.”

  The girls look at one another, communicating in the same silent language Agnes once shared with her sisters. They nod, and Agnes sets Eve in their arms with shaking hands. Better to keep her hidden away than risk someone on the street spotting a red curl.

  Agnes hurries up the street with her head bent and her shoulders hunched, trying to look harmless and timid and forgettable. Every now and then her gaze crosses another woman’s and she sees the same desperate innocence in their faces. It sends a shiver of fury through her.

  She arrives at the corner of St. Lamentation and Sixteenth before August. She circles the block rather than lingering, ducking her head politely at a pair of patrolling Inquisitors.

  He still isn’t there when she returns. Fearful questions clamor in her skull—was he detained or delayed? Was he already in the Deeps, outed as a witch-sympathizer?—but she keeps her feet shuffling and her face slack. A flash of shadow tells her Pan is hovering somewhere high above her.

  She circles the block again. This time August’s absence is a bell tolling in her chest, a low warning. If he could have come to her, he would have: it was written in the tilt of his smile, the shine of his eyes when he looked at her.

  Had her mockingbird failed somehow? Had it gotten lost or eaten or—her heart vanishes mid-beat, a breathless silence—intercepted?

  Agnes feels something falling inside her from a very great height, a silent rushing.

  She runs. She runs as if there are wolves or shadows at her heels. Her body jars with the running, her breasts tender, her belly weak, but she doesn’t stop.

  Eve, Eve, EveEveEve.

  She crashes through the boarding-house door, heaving up the steps. She doesn’t bother to knock at No. 12. The door bangs against the cracked plaster. “Where is she? Is she safe?”

  The blond girls are holding one another on the floor, shoulders shivering with sobs. One of them looks up at Agnes with the shine of tears on her cheeks, one eye puffing with the promise of a bruise. “They c-came knocking right after you left. They said—”

  But Agnes can’t hear her because she’s listening to the silence running beneath her, the terrible absence of the sound she’s heard every second for seven days: the dry, desperate rattle of her daughter’s breath.

  The silence swells inside her. It presses against her ribs and pops in her ears, until Agnes is nothing but pale skin wrapped around a soundless scream.

  Her own voice has a distant, underwater warble. “Who?”

  The other girl answers this time, reaching an arm around her sister. “Inquisitors. A pair of them, wearing those red-cross uniforms. They knocked and Clara answered, and they said they were looking for a baby girl.” Her eyes shift a little, uncertain. “They said a w-witch had snatched her straight from her mother’s arms and run off with her.” Her arm tightens around her sister, as if she thinks Agnes might snatch one of them next.

  “And where”—her voice is still perfectly calm; only the very tips of her fingers tremble—“did they take her?”

  “Don’t know,” says the girl. “They—they said if you had any questions you could take them up with the mayor.”

  The mayor. The girl sounds doubtful as she says it, because even a little girl knows mayors don’t meet with witches. But Agnes recognizes it for what it is: an invitation.

  A trap, into which she would walk willingly and open-eyed, because he has stolen her daughter away from her and there is nothing she would not do to get her back.

  The girls gasp and clutch at one another. It’s only when one of them pants, “What—what is that?” that Agnes becomes aware that Pan has materialized on her shoulder, talons biting through her blouse. “You are a witch!”

  “Yes,” Agnes answers distantly. “And they should have thought of that before they took what was mine.”

  And then she’s back in the street, stumbling over cobblestones and shoving past strangers. She’s crossing the Thorn, heading for St. George’s Square, before it occurs to her, with a faraway flick of annoyance, that her sisters will follow her into the trap. That they will feel her fear through the binding between them and come running, and then Gideon Hill will have all three—four, Agnes thinks, with a swallowed scream—Eastwoods in his palm.

  She thinks how very tiresome it is to love and be loved. She can’t even risk her life properly, because it no longer belongs solely to her.

  A feathered shadow sweeps across her. Pan. What is he, really? A piece of magic itself, flown through from the other side and tethered to her soul. An else-wise, otherworldly creature that doesn’t particularly care what is and isn’t possible.

  Agnes cranes her neck upward. “Warn them for me, Pan. Tell them to stay away.” She feels the hot spark of his eyes on her. “Please.” He shrieks back to her, a shivering, wild sound entirely out of place in the civilized sprawl of New Salem.

  Agnes runs.

  Bella thinks at first it’s a roll of thunder cracking over the city, out of season, or perhaps a distant earthquake. Some vast, shattering thing, blind and angry.

  Then she realizes it’s her sister’s heart splitting in two.

  The spell of warding dies on her lips. “Three bless and keep me,” she whispers.

  Miss Araminta Wells and another pair of women look over at her, harassed. “Thought we were working these wards together,” Araminta drawls.

  They’re standing at the north end of Nut Street, their fingers crusted with salt, their pockets weighted with thistle and chalk. The canniest and cleverest members of the Daughters of Tituba have gathered to work what wards they can while others ferry the youngest and oldest occupants of New Cairo into the tunnels, blindfolded. Bella provided them with all the words and ways she could and a list of addresses and households willing to shelter them until Hill’s raid was over.

  Araminta held the list, running her thumb over the names in tidy writing: Miss Florentine Lee, 201 Spinner’s Row, Room No. 44 (3 persons). Mr. Henry Blackwell, 186 St. Je
rome St. (15 persons).

  “I keep waiting for you to disappoint me,” she said querulously, before bustling off to gather supplies from her cellar.

  “That’s more or less a declaration of love, from my mother,” Cleo sighed at her elbow.

  Now Araminta glowers as she watches Bella. “What is it? Who is it?” She bites hard into the words, like a woman used to bad news and dark portents.

  “It’s Agnes.” But Bella thinks: It’s Eve. Surely nothing else could crack her sister’s heart like that. Bella catches the worried O of Cleo’s mouth, but she can’t seem to focus on anything except the splitting of her sister’s heart. “I’m sorry. I said I would stay but I have to go.”

  “Go, child,” Araminta tells her. “We’ll finish without you.” Her mouth works for another second, as if there’s something unpleasant caught in her teeth. “And call on the Daughters, if you have need of us.” She touches her breast pocket and Bella hears the crinkle of folded paper.

  She wheels to Cleo and presses her hand once, too hard. “Meet me tonight. Back at South Sybil.”

  If Cleo answers, it’s lost in the frantic thump of her feet and the mutter of spells as Bella runs.

  She follows the echo of Agnes’s fury north out of New Cairo. At Second Street she grabs the rail of a passing trolley and steps aboard, glaring with such ferocity that the conductor elects to look the other way.

  The city whitens around her. Police stroll past, batons swinging jauntily, and Inquisitors strut in their still-fresh uniforms. None of them notice a hunched, white-haired woman clinging to the trolley as it jangles past, or the flitting shadow of an owl’s wing above them.

  Bella sees the dome of City Hall ahead and tastes the sour bite of fear in her throat. Why would Agnes be at the square? Why would she leave the safety of their circled wards?

  She hops down from the trolley and stumbles against a plain-looking woman pushing a frilly pram, limping on every other step. It’s only after the woman hisses in her ear, “Saints, Bell, you look older than Mags,” that she realizes the pram is empty.

  “June! Did you feel it? Do you know what’s happening?”

  Juniper’s face is blotched and pale beneath her disguise. “Something bad. She’s running this way, seems like, but Lord knows why.”

  A bird swoops suddenly between them, a ragged snatch of midnight. Bella lifts her arm and feels the bite of talons before she realizes the bird does not belong to her. “Pan? What are you doing here? Where’s Agnes? Someone will see!”

  He ignores her, eyes red and reproachful. He opens his beak and a human voice echoes out of it. “Stay away. Please. Stay away.”

  The voice belongs, quite unmistakably and impossibly, to their sister.

  Pan closes his beak and vanishes in a swirl of ash and smoke, leaving the two of them surrounded by mutters and staring eyes. Bella wipes a smudge of char from her spectacles. “I didn’t know they could do that.”

  Voices and running steps rise around them. Juniper grabs her sleeve and hauls her into an alley. “What do we do?”

  Bella snorts, half-hysterical. “Didn’t you listen to any of my witch-tales?” Juniper marches her onward, whispering words and spitting over her shoulder. It hisses on the cobblestones and rises like steam behind them, obscuring their escape.

  “In the stories, it’s generally best to do whatever the hell the talking animal tells you.”

  May the Devil take you down

  And break your golden crown.

  A mortal curse, requiring hemlock & hate

  The mayor’s office is all oiled leather and oak paneling. The walls are lined with paintings in gilt frames, displaying the usual association of horses and Saints and men in powdered wigs. An especially noble-looking Saint George of Hyll does battle with a dragon the color of hellfire, hounds baying at his side.

  A dark-stained desk hulks in the middle of the room. On its surface, between neat stacks of papers and the dark shine of an inkwell, lies a mockingbird. A clawed shadow is cast across it, pinning its wings at precise and hideous angles. Its ribcage throbs in panic.

  Agnes Amaranth looks away, swallowing hard. Pan croons on her shoulder.

  Mr. Gideon Hill stands at the tall window, watching the scurry and bustle of the street below with his hand resting on the iron collar of the dog at his side. The five o’clock slant of the light draws deep shadows behind them.

  The dog faces Agnes first, its tail giving the faintest, cowardly wave. Mr. Hill turns to Agnes with a mannered smile, as if she is a necessary but tiresome guest. “Ah, Miss Agnes Eastwood, I presume.” Agnes’s disguise is a careless one: the windswept braid over her shoulder is already threaded with sleek black and her eyes are boiling back to silver. “But surely Miss Tattershall ought to have shown you in?”

  “The receptionist?”

  “Yes.”

  Agnes shrugs without looking away from him. “She’s sleeping.” Her head had knocked against her desk with a hollow, split-melon sound, but her eyes remained peacefully closed. Agnes supposes it was possible that she overdid it—Bella mentioned princesses who slept for centuries and dozing gentlemen who missed entire wars—but she finds she doesn’t much care.

  “How generous of you.” Hill does not appear in the least relieved about Miss Tattershall’s fate. His gaze on her is—strange. Almost wary, as if he is waiting for her to produce a pistol or a spell from her skirt pockets.

  Her pockets are empty except for the weak remnants of her witching: the crumbled dust of herbs, a few sweat-damp matches, the waxen stub of a candle.

  “My daughter, Mr. Hill. Where is she?” She wonders if he hears the shake in her voice, and whether he mistakes it for fear.

  Hill strolls to the dark island of his desk and sits, dog padding meekly behind him. It folds itself beneath his chair, looking at her with sorry black eyes, while its master steeples his hands above the mockingbird. It writhes, desperate, trapped.

  “If you read the new city ordinances closely, you will find they specifically revoke the parental rights of known witches or witchsympathizers,” he observes.

  “She’s mine. She belongs to me.” Every ruby-red curl of her hair, every soft fingernail. Agnes feels the absence of her weight like a spreading bruise on her arms.

  Hill’s eyes are still watchful, calculating, as if he is prodding a caged creature to see what it might do. “She belongs to the city of New Salem, Miss Eastwood. She will be—”

  Agnes snaps the match in her pocket and hisses the words August taught her months before, when the city still hummed with springtime and she still thought spells and sisterhood could alter the cruel workings of the world.

  She doesn’t need to borrow her sisters’ will this time, does not even need the familiar perched like a red-eyed gargoyle on her shoulder; her own will might level cities.

  The room shatters. Bright shards zing through the air as every pane of glass in Hill’s office fractures and bursts.

  In the silence that follows, the September breeze sings through the jagged holes of the windows, tossing glittering specks of glass-dust into the air. Ink spreads from the cracked inkwell and pools like black blood over his desk.

  Agnes feels a damp trickle down her jaw, a stinging line across her cheekbone. Hill appears entirely untouched.

  He brushes a splinter of glass from his shirtsleeve and continues speaking, perfectly even. “—taken in by the New Salem Home for Lost Angels until such time as a more fit mother may be found. Or”—and in the sliver of space following that word she feels the jaws of his trap closing around her—“until I grant you a pardon for your past crimes and restore her legal custody to you.”

  Agnes goes very still. Pan’s talons curl into her shoulder.

  Hill’s smile is a marionette’s cheery lie, red and white painted over dead wood. “But first, tell me: do you and your sisters still visit the tower?”

  “Do we—why would we?”

  “Well, Miss Eastwood, I’ve been looking for the three of you
for weeks now.”

  “You and everybody else in this damn city.” A summer with Juniper has put a little bit of Crow County back in her voice. She almost wishes Juniper were here now, half-full of horseshit and brave as brass, before remembering she wants her to remain far away.

  “When I look for a thing I find it.” Hill flicks his chin and the shadows in the room roil, sprouting wriggling fingers and reaching hands. “But I didn’t find you. I caught glimpses—Miss James running about, a few houses warded better than they ought to be—but nothing certain. If the child hadn’t fallen ill, if your messenger hadn’t flown into my hands . . . who knows?” The mockingbird pants on the desk, open-beaked. “I wondered if perhaps you’d called their tower back again and hidden your binding better this time.”

  Agnes almost laughs at him. It isn’t some ancient witchcraft that’s kept them hidden—it’s merely the ordinary women of New Salem, the laundresses and maids and housewives who opened their doors despite the risk.

  “Well, we haven’t.” And why would he care if they had? What is it to him if they crouch in the burnt ruins of a tower that was once a library?

  “I wonder if you are telling me the truth.” His marionette-smile has worn thin; rotted wood is showing through the paint. “The three of you have become very adept at witching, very quickly.” His eyes flick to Pan and away. “Did you, perhaps, receive instruction?”

  “No.” Their teachers were desperate need and decades of rage; the hoarded words of their mothers and grandmothers; one another.

  “Don’t lie to me.” Agnes hears the lick of fear in his voice and sweat pricks her palms. Her daddy was never more dangerous than when he was afraid, and he was always afraid: that they might wriggle out of his grasp, that he was weak, that someone somewhere was laughing at him.

  “If you love your daughter, you will tell me now: have you spoken to them?” There’s something broken about him, Juniper told them. Something sick. It’s only now that Agnes can see it, the terror and madness seeping through the cracks. “Are they still there? Still hiding from me?”