The Once and Future Witches

by Harrow, Alix E.

  Beatrice has been betrayed once before. She is familiar with the cold that spreads from one’s chest to one’s fingertips, numbing the flesh, muffling the pulse. It’s like that old tale about the witch so monstrous she turned men to stone with her gaze, except Beatrice is the monster and the stone both.

  It’s only when she hears a clatter that Beatrice realizes her body is moving. She’s stepped backward into a shelf, toppling jars. Peppercorns scatter across the floor like buckshot.

  The voices in the back room go abruptly silent. A soft curse, hurried footsteps—

  Beatrice is already running, shoving past long strings of drying herbs and necklaces of shriveled flowers, sending more jars tumbling in her wake. She has one hand on the door when she hears her name again. She looks back over one shoulder.

  Behind the counter, obscured by jangling ropes of herbs and yellow clouds of spilled spice, her face wrenched and taut, stands Miss Cleopatra Quinn.

  (She’s beautiful. Even here, even now—her sleeves rolled to the elbow, the tendons of her throat standing rigid beneath her skin, betrayal dying on her lips—there’s a glow to her, as if she carries a lit candle in her chest.)

  Their eyes meet. Beatrice can’t tell how many seconds pass; more than one, certainly.

  “Beatrice, please—”

  It’s the third time she’s heard her name in Quinn’s mouth, and everyone knows the third time is the last. Beatrice drops the derby hat still clamped foolishly beneath her arm.

  She runs. No one follows.

  Juniper listens as Bella tells her the whole sorry thing. Juniper stays quiet for a while after, running her tongue along her teeth, watching her sister pace and fret. “S’too late to call it off.”

  Bella’s shoulders are bowed in a U around her chest, her face white and raw. “I should have asked her to take the oath, should never have trusted her. She practically told me not to.” She wrings her hands. “If we left now we could get to Agnes and the Hull sisters, probably a few others before midnight . . . Oh, what should we do?” If she wrings her hands any more violently Juniper thinks the skin will rub clean off.

  She crosses her ankles. “Depends.”

  “On what?”

  “On who she talked to.” Juniper catches Bella’s eyes and pins her, asks her flat-out, “Do you think your girl ratted us out to the law?”

  Bella stops pacing. She stands framed by the round glow of the window, eyes on the smogged stars. “No,” she whispers. Juniper can’t tell if she really means it or merely wants to.

  But Juniper doesn’t care. She wants the cool whip of the night on her cheeks, the black tangle of robes behind her, the heat of witching in her blood. Damn the danger.

  She stands, her smile wide and wicked. “Then it’s time we get ready.”

  Intery, mintery, cutery-corn,

  Apple seed and apple thorn;

  Feather fine, five-fold

  Turn it all to gold.

  A spell for a golden apple, requiring five feathers & pricked thumb

  James Juniper is just a girl, most of the time. The rest of the Sisters of Avalon are just maids or mill workers, dancers or fortune-tellers, mothers or daughters. Everyday sorts of women with everyday sorts of lives, not worth mentioning in any story worth telling.

  But tonight, beneath the Rose Moon of June, they are witches. They are crones and maidens, villains and temptresses, and all the stories belong to them.

  Juniper likes the city at night better than its daytime self. At night the noise and clatter soften enough to hear the rush of wind through alleys, the padding of stray cats, the chitter and dart of bats. The earth feels closer beneath the cobblestones and the stars shine stubborn through the smog and gas-light. Juniper can almost pretend she’s running through the woods back home, tangle-haired and barefoot. Maybe it’s just the solstice getting closer; Mags always said the holy days are when witching burns brightest, when even mice and men can feel the hot pulse of it beneath the skin of the world.

  The cemetery is locked after dark, the gates high and sharp, but tonight they are witches. Juniper tosses her cedar staff over the top, then braids three hairs together and whispers the words. The Sisters climb the black silk rope, long and supple, and thud into the soft earth of the cemetery one after the other. They slip like shadows among the graves.

  The witch-yard is tucked on the eastern edge of the cemetery: a half-acre of weeds and scraggled grass, without so much as a cracked headstone or a wooden cross. A witch was never buried beneath her name; instead, her ashes were sown with salt to prevent her soul from lingering longer than it should, then scattered over unhallowed ground. Juniper looks at that barren, sour earth and feels a leaden weight in her limbs: grief, maybe, for all the women they burned before her.

  The fence around the witch-yard is less a fence than a suggestion; their skirts snag on rusted iron and sagging posts as they step across it. They flock to the center, where a single stunted hawthorn claws the sky.

  Stillness falls. The cemetery is silent except for the rustle of wind through black-dyed cloth.

  Juniper looks from face to moon-silvered face: Agnes with her belly hard and full; worried-looking Bella; Frankie Black and Florence Pearl, their arms long and bare; Jennie Lind and Gertrude Bonnin; a dozen other girls with eyes like bared blades and bloody promises, standing on the ashes of their ancestors.

  Juniper wishes, with a poisonous twist in her stomach, that her daddy could see them. A girl is such an easy thing to break: weak and fragile, all alone, all yours. But they aren’t girls anymore, and they don’t belong to anyone. And they aren’t alone.

  Come and get us now, you bastard.

  Her fist is tight around the feather in her pocket, and for a red second she wants to snap it. What good are golden apples? They should be raining brimstone or poisoning wells, making every man in New Salem shake in his damned boots. Last week they’d found a spell to call storms, a sailor’s rhyme about red skies at morning and red skies at night, but Agnes shook her head. “I thought you wanted to recruit more women to the cause.”

  “It’d recruit the hell out of me,” Juniper said, truthfully.

  “Yes, well, you’re a plague and a calamity and you should be locked up for the safety of the city.” Agnes held the apple up to the window, where it glowed a rich, impossible yellow. “All of us grew up on stories of wicked witches. The villages they cursed, the plagues they brewed. We need to show people what else we have to offer, give them better stories.”

  Now Agnes clears her throat at Juniper’s side. She steps forward to bury five apple seeds at the base of the hawthorn. She kneels in the dirt, hair loose and shining around her shoulders, lips forming the words for growth and greening. Some of the others whisper them with her. Fee and fie, fum and foe.

  The hawthorn creaks. It groans and whines in a manner not unlike Mama Mags on a cold morning, when frost creeps white up the mountainside. Then it grows. The knobbled branches swell; the roots twist through the earth; the dry curls of leaves turn glossy emerald. Buds sprout, unfurl, bloom, fade, fall—an entire springtime in a second. Fruit swells, hard and green and then waxy red, ready for the plucking.

  When Agnes stops speaking, there is an apple tree in the witch-yard where the hawthorn once stood, its crown spread high and proud, its boughs heavy with unnatural fruit.

  Juniper puts her thumb to her mouth and bites until she tastes warm copper. She reaches for an apple and smears her blood across its flesh, red on red. Beside her she sees the others mimic her, hands lifting up, blood running down their wrists, feathers clutched tight.

  They speak the words together, and it’s just like Bella said it would be: stronger for the sharing. Grander, wilder, hotter—the witching burns into the world and the apples blush gold. Except it’s not just the apples: yellow creeps up stems and twines around branches, runs along the branched veins of the leaves. Juniper and her Sisters keep speaking the words and the magic keeps burning and the gold keeps spreading until the entire tre
e stands bright and metal, as if Queen Midas herself strolled out of legend to trail her fingers along its bark.

  The chanting stops. Silence falls, broken only by the calls of night-birds and the clink-clink of wind through golden leaves. The tree seems to emit its own buttery light, like a torch burning in the night, and Juniper sees the shine of it reflected in the upturned faces of the Sisters of Avalon. Each of them has the awed, slack expression of a woman who has witnessed an impossibility: a miracle, a revelation. A better story, glowing gold in the darkness.

  Juniper glances sideways at Agnes, who looks younger and softer in the golden light. Juniper reaches for her hand without thinking, the way she did when they were girls, except now her palm is tacky with her own blood. “So maybe you were right,” she whispers.

  “Of course I was.” Agnes folds her fingers around hers and squeezes once.

  Juniper limps forward. With the scuffed end of her staff she scrapes a sign into the dirt: three circles, bound one to the other.

  She’s about to tell them all to head home when something rustles in the grave-strewn dark at Juniper’s back. A fox, she thinks, or a cat.

  But the rustle spreads. It echoes from every direction, a sudden swell of sound. Juniper spins to see shadows standing, black-cloaked figures rising from behind gravestones with silver badges glinting on their chests. She sees hands reaching, dark cloths whipped aside, and then the witch-yard is flooded with the blinding light of a dozen lanterns.

  The light hits them like the stroke of midnight breaking some invisible spell. The glow of the golden tree turns sickly yellow and the wheeling stars become pale pinpricks above them. The wind dies, the night-birds fall silent. The witches are made into mere women once more.

  Juniper swears, eyes stinging. Around her she hears the gasps and screams of the others—her sisters and Sisters, the girls and women who followed her into this—

  Trap. She thinks the word and feels the iron bite as it closes around her.

  She’s still tear-blind and staggering when she hears a man’s voice echoing weirdly off the gravestones. It’s a familiar voice—oily, too high—but it’s only when Juniper hears the soft whimper of a dog that she realizes who it belongs to: Mr. Gideon Hill.

  “For the safety of our fair city and the good of her people”—she can hear the smile in his voice, cloying and gray—“I hereby place James Juniper Eastwood and her accomplices under arrest, to be tried for the crime of murder by witchcraft.”

  The first thing Beatrice feels is a rush of very foolish relief: there’s been some sort of mistake! Surely none of them, whatever their sins and faults, are murderers.

  Then Beatrice sees her youngest sister’s face—bloodless and hard, her eyes flicking through every expression except surprise—and thinks perhaps she is mistaken in that assumption.

  The second thing she feels is the familiar chill of flesh turning to stone, the numbness that follows betrayal. These men were huddled in the cemetery past midnight, waiting. Forewarned.

  One of the figures scuttles forward, his lantern held high: a middle-aged, unremarkable man with a dog skulking at his heels like a reluctant shadow. It takes Beatrice far too long to recognize him, given that his face is plastered on campaign posters across three-quarters of the city. The Gideon Hill of the ads and newspapers is noble, even dashing, with ruddy cheeks and flaxen hair. In the lantern-glare he seems to have no color at all.

  His eyes flick to the golden tree behind the Sisters and his lips twist in the patronizing cousin of a smile. “Most impressive, ladies.” The eyes move to the ground, where Juniper scratched the sign of the Last Three, and the smile vanishes. His voice rises. “You have besmirched our fair city with your sinful ways. But no longer!” Beatrice is busy turning to stone and drowning in panic, but she spares a second to think, Besmirched? and wonder exactly which pulpy novels Mr. Hill has been reading. “James Juniper, come with us if you please. The rest of you will be taken in for questioning.”

  Beatrice knows enough about witch-trials to hear the violence waiting beneath the word questioning: the hiss of hot iron on flesh, the crack of a whip.

  The line of men at Hill’s back seems to hesitate. They shuffle and murmur, perhaps reluctant to lay hands on black-gowned women meeting beneath the full moon, perhaps remembering all the stories they heard as boys.

  Mr. Hill stamps his foot at them. “Sergeant, tell your men—”

  But Juniper cuts him off. “Easy now, Hill.” Her voice is a slow, careless drawl, nearly friendly; it reminds Beatrice of the sheriff talking their daddy down from some drunken rant: Easy now, James. “No need to get hysterical.”

  Juniper strolls away from the golden tree and limps over the fence, leaning heavy on her staff, just a young crippled girl with cropped hair. She lifts one hand in sarcastic surrender. “Do you think you brought enough boys, Sergeant? Or do you want to run back for a couple more?”

  Her expression is scornful, a little bored, as if this is all a lot of fuss and mess, but Beatrice feels her terror shrieking through the line between them and knows it’s nothing but stubbornness and guts keeping her standing.

  Juniper ought to remember that there are places where guts don’t matter. Dark cellars, little white rooms where they lock you up until you lose the dangerous habit of courage.

  Beatrice takes a half-step toward her, but Juniper turns back to face the women still circled around the tree. “Ladies,” she says, and smiles. It’s such a Juniper-ish smile—fey and foolish and dangerous, like an animal spinning to face its hunter, bare-toothed—that Beatrice knows abruptly what she’s about to do. She hears Agnes shout no!

  “Hemlock.”

  Juniper flings herself backward into Gideon Hill. They topple—him swearing, her howling and thrashing, swinging her staff—and the Sisters of Avalon scatter like a broken string of pearls.

  Beatrice watches them running in a dozen directions, screaming, stumbling, leaving scraps of black hung on the broken spokes of the fence. They dodge through the headstones, some of them caught by reaching hands, borne to the earth, some of them vanishing like smoke into the night. Beatrice knows she ought to be running with them, but she’s still made of stone, unmoving.

  There’s a tangle of bodies where Juniper once stood. Beatrice catches the shine of boots, the sick thud of fists on flesh. Hill struggles free. He stands panting, wiping blood from his split lip with an absent expression, as if he doesn’t feel any particular way about being violently tackled by a witch.

  A pair of officers lumber toward the tree where Beatrice stands still as limestone. She thinks distantly that it might be nice to burn, because at least she’ll never have to see Miss Quinn’s cat’s grin and wonder why she betrayed them.

  Someone shoves her between the shoulder blades, hard.

  “Run, damn you!” Agnes hisses.

  Beatrice runs.

  Agnes should have started running as soon as she heard the first scuff of cloak on stone, as soon as she understood they’d walked into a trap.

  She stayed. While Juniper flung herself at Gideon Hill, while Bella stood there like a damn statue, while her little sister’s blood turned thick and gelid in her palm.

  The last time Juniper got herself in trouble, Agnes had rushed to save her without a second thought. But this time the men are wearing badges on their chests. This time Agnes will wind up in a jail cell, and she knows what happens to women who go to jail with babies in their bellies: they lose them. Either before birth, from rough treatment and poor food, or after it, when some flint-faced doctor rips the baby from their bodies and takes her away, still squalling. Agnes’s daughter would end up in the New Salem Home for Lost Angels. If she isn’t over-lain or shipped out west, Agnes might see her sometimes playing in the alleys, pox-scarred and undersized, with bitter black stones for eyes.

  No. Not for anything. Not for the vote or the Sisters or even her own true-blood sisters.

  She gives Bella a good shove and runs without looking back, one arm wra
pped tight around her belly. Hands reach for her and she twists away from them. They tangle in her long cloak and she scrabbles for the clasp, sending it winging free behind her.

  Each footfall is a slap against her stomach, jarring her hips. Her hair clings sweaty and tangled against her neck. She dodges behind a white pillar of stone and doubles over, heaving, choking back coughs.

  There are boot-steps and raised voices behind her, growing nearer.

  She fumbles a candle-stub from her pocket and draws a shaky, desperate X of wax on the stone. It’s men’s magic—“good for a quick getaway,” Mr. Lee had said, smiling his crooked smile. She gave him an arch look. “And are you often in need of getaways, Mr. Lee?”

  “Oh, weekly, Miss Eastwood.”

  Across the room, Juniper made a blech sound.

  Now Agnes pants the string of Latin he taught them. Lightness fills her, as if her bones are hollowing out. A black twist of hair unpeels from her neck and floats lazily upward, as if gravity has briefly forgotten its business.

  She runs again. This time she’s a thrown stone skipped across a pond, a gull skimming above the waves, there and gone again. The sounds of pursuit fade behind her.

  Agnes braids a rope of hair for herself and climbs back over the cemetery gate. She runs alone through the quiet streets, her feet weightless and silent. She thinks of the Hanged Woman lying flat on Madame Zina’s tabletop, of Juniper disappearing beneath a wave of knuckles and boots.

  She slows, staring down at the palm where her sister’s blood is cracking and flaking. Don’t leave me, Juniper begged her. Take care of them, her mother told her.

  But hadn’t that been her mother’s job, first? She failed her daughters; Agnes will not fail her own.

  She closes her fist and keeps running.

  Beatrice is aware that she isn’t going to make it. It’s too dark and the graveyard is too full of humps and hollows and tilted stones, and she can’t see through the blur of tears in her eyes.