The Once and Future Witches

by Harrow, Alix E.

  The hand pulls her forward, folds her fingers around a broken shard of stone. Then it places the edge of the stone against the wall and drags it in a slow, grinding circle. Weave a circle round, Juniper thinks, drunkenly, and mumbles the words again. Her voice sounds wrong in her ears, clotted and strangled.

  The stone falls from her fingers as she closes the circle. The scratched shape begins, very faintly, to glow.

  She squints at it, stupidly, until the voice clucks its invisible tongue at her and says, Go on, girl.

  Juniper places her palm inside the soft shine of the circle. The cell vanishes around her, whipping into the starlit night.

  One for sorrow,

  Two for mirth,

  Three for a funeral,

  And four for birth,

  Five for life,

  Six for death,

  Seven to find a merry wife.

  A spell for healing, requiring willow bark & silkweed

  Beatrice Belladonna is mildly surprised to discover that she is not dead.

  She is slumped sideways in a ring of white wax with someone’s arms held fast around her and someone’s voice in her ear. “Oh, thank the Saints,” it breathes, and Bella realizes who the arms and the voice belong to. She considers fainting again, simply to luxuriate in the feeling of Quinn’s body against hers.

  “Bella, I think—I think it wants your attention.” With a small, private sigh, Bella opens her eyes.

  There is an owl standing on the bare earth before her, except that no natural owl has ever had feathers so black they seem to swallow light, refusing even to reflect the dappled silver of the moonlight. No owl has ever possessed eyes the color of coals: a deep, solemn red. Behind those eyes Bella senses an echo of that vast thing that paused to consider her, as if the owl is a cinder spit from a much greater fire.

  Witchcraft itself wearing an animal-skin, Mags used to say.

  “Hello,” Bella says shyly. How should one greet a familiar? What does one say to magic fashioned into a shape that suits you?

  Her familiar does not answer, regarding her with that red gaze. It lifts one foot, and Bella notices for the first time the thing clutched in its obsidian claws: a jagged, charred stone.

  It uncurls its talons and the stone rolls toward Bella. Behind her Quinn makes a small, weary sound, like a woman who has seen quite enough strange and uncanny things for one evening and hopes they will soon desist.

  Bella takes the stone. The owl watches her. “Th-thank you?” Bella offers. She doesn’t know if normal owls possess the ability to blink at one in a manner both disappointed and long-suffering, but this one apparently does.

  It loses patience with her and launches itself abruptly skyward. Bella struggles upright. “Wait! Come back, I’m sorry!”

  But it doesn’t leave. It merely sweeps in a low circle above them, wings angled. Three times it circles—Bella thinks of the Sign of the Three and the resonance of form, the repetition of drawn circles in folklore—before it cuts back toward Bella with talons outstretched. She braces for the blow, but the claws rest lightly on her shoulder. The owl weighs no more than the idea of an owl, a suggestion of bone and feather.

  It calls, low and plaintive. Bella digs the point of her stone into the dark earth and drags it in a wide circle, whispering the words once more. Weave a circle round the throne. The circle begins to emit a soft, pearled light, like foxfire. Quinn makes her weary sound again.

  Bella takes her hand and draws it earthward. She presses their palms against the night-cool earth, one beside the other, and Old Salem vanishes.

  They leave nothing behind them but pooled wax and burned earth, and the faint, sweet smell of roses.

  Agnes is not dead, and neither is her daughter.

  She kneels in the place that was St. George’s Square. But now the street-lamps glimmer weakly through a forest of twisted trees, impossibly far away. Stars wheel in wild patterns above her, nearer and brighter than Agnes has ever seen them in New Salem. The sky is broken by an immense blackness, a stone tower overgrown with ivy and climbing roses, its door marked with three winding circles.

  Agnes is looking up at the tower, touching her belly and thinking dreamily, Happy birthday, baby girl, when two women appear in the place that was once St. George’s Square. If Agnes had not recently seen an entire tower appear from thin air, sliding into reality like a fish reeled from sea to air, she might have found this quite shocking.

  “Bella!” She is standing beside Cleopatra Quinn at the tower door, their palms pressed to the woven circles. “How did you—is that an owl?” A tall shadow perches on her oldest sister’s shoulder, regarding Agnes with hot-ember eyes.

  “Yes, I think so,” Bella burbles. Her own eyes are feverish and over-bright, spinning in a manner that causes Agnes some concern. “Strix varia, I suspect, though with the coloring it’s difficult to be sure. Ovid thought them vampires and ill omens, the silly man—just look how handsome he is!” Bella pauses in this delirium to draw a finger down her owl’s breast. A thought seems to strike her. She wheels, looking up at the vastness of the tower, then back to Quinn and Agnes. “Do you feel anything? Any particular power awakening?”

  A small, uncertain silence falls as the three of them wait for some mysterious and ancient magic to flood their veins, filling them with the lost majesty of their fore-mothers.

  “I don’t think so,” says Agnes.

  “No,” says Cleo.

  “Neither do I. Well, perhaps there’s some ritual or key inside—a series of clues which reveal a secret chamber, like one of Miss Doyle’s mysteries! Or perhaps if we read the inscription aloud—” Bella bends closer to the door, where words are written in foreign-looking script. “Maleficae quondam, maleficaeque futurae.”

  Nothing happens.

  Before Bella can try anything else, a fourth woman appears at the tower door. Her shift hangs in ash-streaked tatters, clinging to damp flesh, revealing the dark blooms of bruises. Her head is bowed, face hidden by a black tangle of hair. Her breath is a wet rattle.

  The woman straightens. As she turns, Agnes sees the red ruin of her throat, a mess of bloody pink and dead white that she can’t look at very long.

  Juniper is beaming at them, lips cracked, teeth bloody. Her eyes are a deep gray-green, like the shadows of summer leaves, softer and sweeter than Agnes has ever seen them—until they land on the creature perched on Bella’s shoulder.

  “Oh, horseshit.” Juniper’s voice is somehow both wet and scorched, terrible to hear. “How come you get one before me?”

  Then, with a strange, boneless grace, she collapses.

  Bella is not dead. But, but she thinks her sister might be.

  Agnes reaches her first. “June? June, baby? Help me, damn you! Get her inside!” It takes Bella a long moment to realize Agnes is addressing her, and another to crouch down beside her sister’s broken-doll body. She hesitates to touch her—she’s an open wound, a collection of bruises and burns and abuses—but between them Bella and Agnes haul her awkwardly upright.

  Quinn pulls hard on the iron ring of the tower door. It opens easily, as if some tidy caretaker has kept its hinges oiled all these centuries.

  Bella and Agnes lay their sister on the cool flagstone floor with her hair haloed around her and her throat gaping like a second mouth.

  Bella looks a little wildly into the shadows, hoping for a glowing chalice or an ivory wand or perhaps a magical potion labeled Drink me!

  There is nothing. Only soft darkness cut with silver shafts of moonlight, and a faint, dry smell that makes Bella’s heart lift inexplicably in her chest.

  Agnes’s voice is hesitant, swallowed by the vast dark above them. “Someone will see, soon, and then they’ll come for us. What do we do?”

  But Bella isn’t listening. She is breathing in that smell—dust and parchment, leather and cotton, ink made from oil and oak-gall and soot—with a wild suspicion swelling in her chest.

  She fumbles a matchbook from her skirt and drags the
tip across the flagstones. The light flares, reflected in the deep amber of Quinn’s eyes, illuminating a too-small circle of flagstones. At the very edge of the circle Bella can make out the faint outlines of shelves lining the tower walls. The glass shine of jars. Long benches and scarred tables scattered with leaves and bones and nameless things, as if some untidy woman had been brewing witch-ways just hours before.

  Bella stands, lifting the match higher in trembling fingers, wishing for a lamp or torch or even a candle.

  From her shoulder, the owl ruffles its feathers. It stretches forward—Bella doesn’t know if a true owl could extend its neck to such an uncanny length, or if the rules are different for familiars—and plucks the guttering match from her fingers. It makes a neat toss-and-catch motion with its head and swallows the match whole, flame and all.

  “Oh! Don’t—” Bella makes a helpless gesture, far too late. Golden light is blooming in the shadowed center of the owl, like a candle seen through smoked glass. It glows brighter, spreading until the owl shines the deep gold of a well-tended fire, only the very tips of its claws and wings still edged in black. It spreads its wings and takes luminous flight.

  Three faces turn upward to watch as it spirals upward through the tower. In its shining wake they see an endless staircase that circles and twines along the walls, so aimless and haphazard it looks grown rather than built. Landings and ladders sprout from the stairs like branches, lustrous and worn smooth with use, and doors nestle in the shadows, although Bella can’t imagine they open onto anything but empty air. And nestled between them—in leaning stacks and on tidy shelves, in calfskin and cracked leather, their pages gold-limned by the owl’s light—there are books. More books than Bella has ever seen, in a lifetime devoted to books.

  Her owl fades back to pooled ink as the match burns out. It roosts somewhere high above them, invisible but for the red gleam of its gaze.

  Bella closes her eyes. There’s an odd bubbling in her chest. It takes her a moment to identify it as giddy laughter. The Lost Way of Avalon isn’t a miracle or a magical relic or a fanciful artifact. It’s merely the truth, written and bound, preserved against time and malice. It’s—

  “A library,” Quinn breathes.

  “A library?” Agnes is the only one of them still crouched beside Juniper, her fingers bunched in the damp white of her shift. “What the hell are we supposed to do with a library?”

  Bella is drifting toward the nearest shelf, squinting at the moonlit label written in antique calligraphy. Jinxes—Mortal, perilous, purely amusing. The next label reads: Weatherworking—Storms, floods, locust-plagues, directly above Changelings—Made from clay, stone, dealings with fae folk. The one beneath that is Medicinal—Burns, bites, bruising.

  Quinn reads them over her shoulder. Even in the dimness Bella can see the keen shine of her eyes, the hunger of her half-smile as she looks at the books. She is a woman who understands the value of words, especially the ones they don’t want you to say.

  Bella reaches for a volume bound in cherry-wood with brass hinges along the spine. The title is burned into the cover in square capitals: THE BOOK OF MARGERY MEM, Being a Translation of her Curative Receipts.

  Bella steps into a sliver of moonlight as she opens it, sees the lost words and forgotten ways preserved in a thousand tidy lines of ink. Witchcraft, pure as dragon’s blood and bright as stardust, unspoken for centuries.

  “With this, Agnes, we could do more or less anything we pleased. Speak with wolves or bring stones to life or turn Mayor Worthington into a weevil.” She turns back to Agnes, still crouched over Juniper’s still body, white with worry. “But we’ll begin with saving our sister.”

  Juniper doesn’t much miss her body; it’s a broken, burnt thing, so full of pain there’s hardly any room left for her. She drifts above it instead, watching with detached affection while her sisters fret over the red mess of her neck, peel the cotton shift from her bruised flesh. That Quinn woman stands above them with dried herbs in one hand and a book in the other, reading aloud.

  Her words tug at Juniper. She tries to ignore them, but they reel her downward, closer and closer to the shipwreck of her body. Then her sisters take up the words in tear-streaked voices. One for sorrow, two for mirth, three for a funeral, four for birth—

  Bella lays a sprig of green across Juniper’s throat, still speaking the spell, knocking her knuckles on the stones.

  The words are a trap. They pin her inside her own body alongside every bruise and burn. Her screams are hoarse, thin things.

  The pain eases with each knock of her sisters’ knuckles, each round of one for sorrow, two for mirth. A blissful coolness follows behind it, like creek-water on a hot day.

  Juniper lies still, listening to the even beat of her blood and the tiny, invisible motions of skin reknitting and blisters shrinking. Her sisters are talking above her, their voices falling from some great height down to her ears.

  “They’ll be here soon.” That’s Agnes, tense with fear.

  “Who?” Bella sounds profoundly un-Bella-like, giddy and pleased and thoroughly unworried. Juniper wonders if she’s drunk.

  “Everyone! Police, mobs with pitchforks, Hill and his friends! We have to go!” There’s something very important Juniper needs to tell them about Hill, about witchcraft and stolen shadows with watching eyes, but the thought sinks into the blessed coolness and vanishes.

  Bella sobers. “I am not leaving this library for those depraved people to discover.” Library?

  Agnes makes a wordless growl, but Quinn says calmly, “Hide it, then. If you can bind hats to cloaks and hide them away, why not a tower?”

  There is a small silence, while the words ashes to ashes, dust to dust rattle loosely through Juniper’s skull. Then Bella says, “That is—quite brilliant, Cleo,” with such admiration in her voice that it’s almost indelicate. “But one of us will need to leave, to work the binding and find a safe place to hide it. And draw the Sign to give us a way back out.”

  “I’ll do it,” Agnes offers quietly.

  Bella’s voice cools for some reason. “Of course. I had forgotten you were already leaving.”

  Juniper finds the voices above her blurring together after this, devolving into a jumble of plans and mutters and hurry nows. She would be content to lie there, basking in the absence of pain, except—

  “Wait!” Her voice is still all kinds of wrong, thin and hoarse. “Thank you. For saving me.”

  There’s a shush of skirts and Agnes’s face appears above her. “Hush, baby.” Her voice is warm and low and bossy as hell, just like when they were girls.

  “I didn’t think you’d come. Now that you know about Daddy.”

  “It’s true, then.” Agnes sounds neither surprised nor especially upset. Just tired.

  Juniper swallows and gasps a little with the pain of it. “It’s true.”

  “Oh, June.” Bella kneels on her other side, her face long and sharp beside Agnes’s. “Why? After all those years.”

  “He got sick. He was always getting sick after the fire—weak lungs, the doctor said. This time was worse. He spent weeks laid up in bed, coughing up blood and slime.” Juniper remembers sleeping on the floor by his bed so she could tend to him in the night, listening to the wet rattle of his breath. “The doctor said there was nothing he could do. He had a lawyer come draw up a will and gave Daddy a brown bottle for the pain. Whatever it was made him . . .” Strange. Feeble. Not himself. He looked at her sometimes with his eyes all wet and shining and called her by her mother’s-name. Once when she was setting his dinner tray on his lap he’d touched her wrist in a way that made her stomach twist sickly. That night she slept outside, letting the cold wind scour her clean.

  Her sisters’ faces are grave and silent above her. Juniper closes her eyes. “One day near the end he started carrying on about sin and regret and how he was sorry I wasn’t born a son. He said at least Dan would do right by the farm. And that’s when I knew he’d taken it from me, all of it.” E
ven now, the ghost of that rage is enough to choke her. That land belonged to her, by birthright and blood.

  Bella begins, softly, “So that’s why.”

  “No.” Juniper swallows again, feels the pucker and rip of the wound in her throat. “I wanted to, but I didn’t. Till he started apologizing for . . . other things. The cellar. The two of you leaving. Our mother.” Her voice wobbles on the last word. Juniper doesn’t know why; she’s never even met the woman, never known her as anything but a curl of hair in Mama Mags’s locket, the reason her sisters wore black on her birthday. “He said he—that he—”

  Juniper had understood then that her daddy—her flesh and blood, her enemy, her only-thing-left—was a murderer. And then, as the snake’s teeth bit into her palm, she understood that she and her daddy had one thing in common.

  A warm hand slides into hers. Bella starts to speak but Juniper cuts her off. “Did you know? The two of you?”

  Above her Juniper feels her sisters look at one another and then away. “Not really,” Bella says just as Agnes says, “Yes.”

  There’s a brief pause before Agnes amends, “When her pains started, Mama told me to go ring the bell, but Daddy caught my wrist . . .” Juniper hears the bitter guilt in her voice. “I don’t know if he meant for it to happen. But he knew how hard her births had been before.”

  “You should have told me,” Juniper says, but she doesn’t know if she means it. What would it have been like to grow up knowing that? Is this the reason her sisters were always a little less wild than she was, a little more frightened?

  “You should have told us,” Bella answers, a little waspishly. “Before you were dragged off to prison.”

  “I thought if you knew what I did, what I am, you might . . .” Hate me, leave me, turn around and never come back.

  “But surely you didn’t think it would surprise us. After what we saw.” At Bella’s words, Juniper feels that unseen something swimming up from the deeps of wherever it lives inside her. She wants to look away from it, to send it back down where it belongs, but she’s tired and hurting and cracked wide with confession. It looms closer.