The Once and Future Witches

by Harrow, Alix E.

  They stare at her, barely breathing, their faces empty.

  Juniper knows how they feel. Even right afterward, when Juniper was scrubbing the guilt and smoke off her arms in the Big Sandy River, she remembers thinking, Is that it? Her daddy’s death was supposed to feel like vanquishing a foe or winning a war, like the end of the story when the giant crashes to earth and the whole kingdom celebrates.

  But the giant had already stomped everything flat. There was no one left to celebrate except Juniper the Giantkiller, all alone.

  Agnes lowers herself slowly onto the floor beside Juniper. After a while she says, “So how come you left? Who’s watching the farm?”

  Juniper answers her second question. “Cousin Dan.”

  “That dumbshit?”

  “He owns it now. Daddy left the whole thing to him. Even Mags’s place.” A little hut dug into the mountainside with a dirt floor and a cedar-shake roof gone green with moss, worth less than the land it sat on. People in town gossiped and clucked their tongues about Mama Mags, wondering to one another how a person could live all alone like that, but it sounded alright to Juniper. She’d never had any interest in boys or betrothals or the things that came after; she figured she’d spend her days clearing henbit and cudweed from the herb-garden and chatting with the sycamores. In the fall-times maybe she and her red staff would go walking in the hills with a basket over her arm, collecting foxglove and ninebark, snake-skins and bone, sleeping beneath the clean light of stars.

  Daddy took that away from her, like he took everything else.

  “I—I’m sorry, Juniper. I know you always loved that place.” Bella says it soft, as if she’s trying to comfort Juniper, as if she cares.

  Juniper shucks her shoulders, ducking away from her caring. “How’d you two end up in New Salem, anyhow?”

  Neither of them meet her eyes. Bella removes her spectacles and polishes the glass with the bed-sheet. “I w-work for the College, at the library.”

  Agnes gives a small, humorless laugh and mimics Bella’s chopped-short vowels, her schoolteacher voice. “Well, I work for the Baldwin Brothers. At the cotton mill.”

  Juniper sees their eyes meet, cold and cutting, and wonders what the hell they have to hold against one another. They weren’t the ones left in the lion’s den. She leans between them. “And how’d you end up in that square today?”

  Now they look at her, wide and hungry. Bella touches her own breastbone, as if there’s still something lodged there, towing her forward, and Juniper knows they felt it, too: the thing that tugged them together, the spell that burned between them and left a terrible wanting behind it. She can almost see the black tower reflected in their eyes, starlit and rose-eaten, like a promise nearly fulfilled.

  Bella whispers, “What was it?”

  Juniper whispers back, “You know damn well what it was.” Something long gone, something dangerous, something that was supposed to have burned up in the way-back days along with their mother’s mothers.

  Bella hisses “witching,” just as Agnes says “trouble.”

  Agnes pulls herself to her feet, the sunlit wand drawing deep shadows around her frown. There’s no starlight in her eyes, now. “All kinds of trouble. People will be scared, and the law’ll get involved. It’s not like it was back home, where people mostly looked the other way when it came to witching. You saw the witch-yard in the cemetery? They say in the old days it was ankle-deep with the ashes of the women they burned in this city.”

  She shakes her head. “And now there are these Christian Union women running around, and the Morality Party has somebody on the City Council—he’s running for mayor now, I heard. He doesn’t have a chance in hell, but still. Him and his people will eat all this tower business up with a damn spoon.”

  “But don’t you want to—” Juniper begins.

  “What I want is to get some sleep. I have an early shift tomorrow.” Agnes’s voice is clipped and cold as she rummages in a battered trunk. “The police will be out looking, by now. You two should stay here.” She tosses a stack of moth-eaten wool at Juniper, not looking at her. “For the night.”

  For the night. Not forever, not happily ever after.

  Of course not.

  Agnes spreads her own blanket on the floor and rolls a spare skirt into a pillow. Bella struggles upright, gesturing Agnes to her own bed, but Agnes ignores her.

  She lies down on the floor with her body curled tight, a nautilus-shell around her own belly. Juniper glares resentfully at her back before whispering to the pitch pine wand. The witch-light fades and the room darkens from summer-gold to winter-gray.

  Juniper lies on the floor beside Agnes and tries to keep her fists from clenching and her teeth from grinding. Her body is strung tight from a night and a day spent running, sleeping only in rattling snatches on the train.

  She shuffles and tosses and thinks of their old four-poster bed in the attic. She had trouble sleeping even as a girl, counting whip-poor-will calls and waiting for their daddy’s unsteady steps to fall quiet. On bad nights Agnes would stroke her hair and Bella would whisper witch-tales in the dark.

  “You up, Bell?” The sound of her own voice surprises Juniper. “You still remember any stories?”

  At first she thinks that Bella won’t answer her. Will tell her she’s too old for tales of maidens and crones and spinning wheels. But her voice rises above the creak and rustle of the boarding house and Juniper can almost believe she is still ten years old, still one-of-three instead of one-alone.

  “Once upon a time . . .”

  nce upon a time there was a king and queen who longed for a child but couldn’t have one. They tried spells and prayers and charms, but after many long years the kingdom still had no heir. In desperation they held a grand feast and invited six witches to bless their kingdom. The six witches granted six fair gifts—peace and prosperity, good health and good harvests, agreeable weather and biddable peasants—but just as the feast was ending, a seventh witch arrived. She was young and graceful and had the sort of face that launches ships and eats hearts. She wore a coal-black adder twined around her left arm and a sharp-toothed smile on her lips.

  She told the king and queen that, since they failed to invite her to their feast, she brought a curse instead of a blessing: one day a young maiden would prick her finger on a spindle and the castle would fall into an endless sleep from which no one could wake it.

  The king took all reasonable precautions. He ordered all the spinning wheels burned and permitted no unwed women within the castle walls. He kept his throne for one-and-twenty years.

  Until the day a strange maiden arrived at the castle gates. The guards should have turned her away, but it had been too long since the seventh witch had been seen, and the Maiden knew the ways and words to make them forget their orders. She wore her familiar like a black-glass necklace around her throat.

  The Maiden strode unseen through the castle, smiling as she went, until she climbed to the top of the tallest tower, where a spinning wheel waited for her. She reached her pale finger to the spindle’s end.

  There are many versions of this story, but there is always a pricked finger. There are always three drops of the Maiden’s blood.

  Her blood touched the castle floor and a spell drifted through the castle. Every living creature fell into a sudden slumber. Pies burned in the ovens and spears clattered to the floor; cats slept with their claws outstretched toward sleeping mice, and dogs lay down beside foxes.

  In the whole castle only the Maiden moved. She stole the king’s crown from his brow and settled it on her own head.

  The Maiden ruled for one hundred years. She might have ruled forever—who can say what ways a witch might find to live beyond their years?—except that a brave knight heard tales of a cursed kingdom and rode to its rescue. The Maiden retreated to the tallest tower and grew rose-briars around it, vicious and sharpspined, so thick even the knight and his shining sword couldn’t cut through them.

  The knight set fi
re to the tower, instead. As the witch burned, her spell was broken and the rest of the castle woke from its endless sleep. The knight plucked the witch’s crown from the ashes and presented it to the king on bended knee. The king pulled him to his feet and announced that he and the queen had finally found a fitting heir.

  The knight and the kingdom lived happily ever after, although no rose ever bloomed for miles around, no matter how rich the soil or how talented the gardener. And there were still stories about a young woman who walked in the deep woods sometimes, with a black snake beside her.

  Sister, sister,

  Look around,

  Something’s lost

  And must be found!

  A spell to find what can’t be found, requiring a pinch of salt & a sharp eye

  Agnes Amaranth lies awake long after her sister’s story. She thinks about witching and wanting and thrones without heirs, babies unborn. She thinks about the second pulse in her belly and the memory of pennyroyal on her tongue.

  She must fall asleep eventually, because when she opens her eyes she sees sunrise tip-toeing into the room. Bile bubbles in her throat and she retches into the chamber pot as quietly as she can. Neither of her sisters stir.

  Bella’s mouth is crimped tight even in sleep, as if her lips are untrustworthy things. The last time Agnes saw her she was weeping silently as she packed her things, watching Agnes with her eyes huge and sad, as if she didn’t deserve every bit of what she got. Clearly she’s landed on her feet, working in a fancy library with her beloved books.

  Juniper sleeps in a heedless, childlike sprawl, all elbows and knees. The toes of her left foot are curled with scars, the puckered flesh reaching up her ankle in a shape almost like fingers. Agnes wonders how long it took to heal and if it still hurts.

  Her eyes fall on the battered brass locket lying against Juniper’s collarbone. She remembers it swinging from Mags’s neck, the way she’d hold it sometimes and look up the mountainside with her eyes misted over. Mags never talked much about the daughter she lost—their mother, who drew her last breath just as Juniper drew her first—but Agnes could see her mother in the shape of her grandmother’s silences: the scabbed-over places, the wounded days when Mags stayed in bed with the quilts pulled high.

  Agnes lights the stove and cuts butter into a skillet, letting the pop and sizzle wake the others. They stretch and yawn, watching her crack eggs and boil coffee.

  They take their tin plates in silence. Juniper eats like it’s been days since she saw a square meal. Bella picks at her food, staring out the window. Agnes breathes carefully through her mouth and tries not to look at the slick jelly of the egg whites.

  When the food is gone there’s nothing to do but leave. Part ways. Settle back into their own stories and forget about lost towers and lost sisters.

  None of them moves. Juniper fidgets, trailing her finger through the runny yolk as it dries.

  “So.” Agnes pretends she’s speaking to a stranger, just another boarding-house girl passing through. “Where will you go now?”

  She’s hoping Juniper will say: Straight the hell back home. Or maybe even: To find good, honest work like my big sister. Instead her mouth curls with a reckless little smile and she says, “To join up with those suffrage ladies just as fast as I can.”

  Bella’s eyes swivel away from the window for the first time. She covers her mouth with her palm and says faintly, “Oh, my.”

  Agnes resists the urge to roll her eyes. “Why? So you can wear a fancy dress and wave a sign? Get laughed at? Don’t waste your time.”

  Juniper’s smile hardens. “Voting doesn’t seem like a waste of time to me.” She’s still fooling with her egg yolk, swirling it into gummy circles. Agnes’s stomach heaves.

  “Look, all that ‘votes for women’ stuff sounds real noble and all, but they don’t mean women like you and me. They mean nice uptown ladies with big hats and too much time on their hands. It doesn’t matter to you or me who gets to be mayor or president, anyhow.”

  Juniper shrugs at her, sullen, childish, and Agnes drops her voice lower. “Daddy’s dead, June. You can’t piss him off anymore.”

  Juniper’s head snaps up, eyes boiling green, hair tangled like a black hedge of roses around her face. “You think I still give a single shit about him?” She hisses it so hot and mean that Agnes thinks she must give two or three shits, at least. “Someone or some-witch worked a spell yesterday. The kind that hasn’t been seen since our great-great-great-grandmama’s days. It felt . . .” Juniper’s jaw works. She taps her chest and Agnes knows she’s trying to find words to describe the swell of power, the sweet sedition of magic in her veins. “It felt impossible. Important. Don’t you want to know where it came from? Don’t you think it maybe had something to do with the herd of suffragists running around the square?”

  “I know that’s what the police’ll think. Half the papers already call them witches. Don’t be a fool, June, please—”

  Agnes is interrupted by Bella, who lunges from her seat at the foot of the bed to seize Juniper’s plate. She clutches it, peering through her spectacles at the trio of yolky circles Juniper has drawn on its surface. “What’s this?”

  Juniper blinks down at the remains of her breakfast. “Uh. Eggs?”

  “The design, June. Where did you see this?”

  Juniper lifts one shoulder. “On the tower door, I guess.”

  Bella’s head tilts, owl-like. “On the what?”

  “You didn’t see the door? On my side of the tower there was a door, old and wooden, all overgrown with roses, and there were three circles on it, overlapping. And words, too, but I couldn’t make sense of them.”

  Bella’s face goes taut, intent in a way that Agnes recalls from their childhood, when Bella would get to the good part of a book. “What language was it? And did the circles have eyes? Or tails? Could they have been serpents, do you think?”

  “Maybe. Why?”

  But Bella ignores the question. Her eyes are searching Juniper’s face now. They land on her lips, where Agnes can see the dark blush of a bruise and the tattered red of torn skin. Bella lifts her fingertips toward it, her expression filled with wonder or maybe terror. “Maiden’s blood,” she whispers. Juniper flinches from her touch.

  Bella’s fingers fall away. Juniper’s plate clangs to the floor. “Excuse me. I’m sorry. I have to go. Very sorry.” She tosses the words behind her like coins for beggars, a careless jumble, as she reaches for the door.

  “What? You’re leaving?” Juniper is sputtering, cheeks reddening. “But I just found you! You can’t just leave.” Agnes hears the unspoken again hovering in the air, but Bella is already gone, calling back carelessly, “I rent a room in Bethlehem Heights, between Second and Sanctity, if you need me.”

  Agnes watches her leave with a strange hollowness in her chest. “Well.” She scrapes her sister’s eggs back into the pan with unnecessary force. “Good riddance.”

  Juniper whirls. “And why’s that?”

  “Because Bella can’t keep her damn mouth shut! God knows what Daddy would have done if you hadn’t—” Agnes shivers hard, as if winter has come early, as if she’s sixteen again and her daddy is coming toward her with that red glow in his eyes.

  Juniper doesn’t seem to have heard her. There’s a glassy vacancy in her face that makes Agnes think of a little girl watching her father yell with her hands pressed over her ears, refusing to hear.

  Agnes unpeels her fingernails from her palms and carefully doesn’t look at the cedar staff propped by the door. “My shift starts soon. I’ll talk to Mr. Malton, see if they need another girl on the floor. You can”—she swallows, feeling the bounds of her circle stretch like seams that might split, and makes herself finish—“you can stay here. Till you’re on your feet.”

  But Juniper lifts her chin, looks down her crooked nose at Agnes. “I’m not working at some factory. I already told you: I’m signing up with the suffrage ladies. I’m going to find that tower. Fight for somethin
g.”

  It’s such a youngest-sister thing to say that Agnes wants to slap her. In the witch-tales it’s always the youngest who is the best-beloved, the most-worthy, the one bound for some grander destiny than her sisters. The other two are too ugly or selfish or boring to get fairy godmothers or even beastly husbands. The stories never mentioned boardinghouse rent or laundry or aching knuckles from a double-shift at the mill. They never mentioned babies that needed feeding or choices that needed making.

  Agnes swallows all those horseshit stories. “That’s all well and good, but causes don’t pay much, I heard. They don’t feed you or give you a place to sleep. You need to—”

  Juniper’s lips peel back in a sudden animal snarl. “I don’t need a thrice-damned thing from you.” She takes a step closer, finger aimed like an arrow at Agnes’s chest. “You left, remember? I made it seven years without you and I sure as shit don’t need you now.”

  Guilt worms in Agnes’s belly, but she keeps her face set. “I did what I had to.”

  Juniper turns away, pulling on her cloak, running fingers through her black-bracken hair. “Bella knows something, seems like. Is Bethlehem Heights a county or a city?”

  Agnes blinks. “It’s a neighborhood. On the east side, just past the College.”

  “Don’t see why a city should need more than one name. So where’s Second and Sanctity?”

  “The streets are numbered, June. You just follow the grid.”

  Juniper shoots her a harassed look. “How’s that supposed to help if I don’t know where—” Her face goes blank. Her eyes trace some invisible line through the air. “Never mind. Don’t need a damn grid, after all.” She takes the cedar staff and limps into the hall as if she knows precisely where she’s going.

  Which, Agnes realizes, she does. She feels it, too: a tugging between her ribs. An invisible kite-string stretched tight between her and her sisters, thrumming with unsaid things and unfinished business. It feels like a beckoning finger, a hand shoving between her shoulder blades, a voice whispering a witch-tale about three sisters lost and found.