The Once and Future Witches

by Harrow, Alix E.

  Agnes is shaking her head. “She doesn’t remember, Bell.”

  Juniper doesn’t want to ask. She asks. “What don’t I remember?”

  Agnes meets her eyes, gray to gray. “The day in the barn. When Daddy found out—what he found out.” Her eyes flick to Bella, bitter cold, then back to Juniper. “We were trapped against the wall. He was coming closer. And then there you were, standing between us, scrawny and fierce. You told him to leave us alone, or else, and he laughed at you. So . . .” Agnes trails away, but Juniper remembers.

  Juniper remembers: the arc of her spine as she looked up at her father.

  Juniper remembers: the snake teeth waiting always in her pocket, ever since Mama Mags folded her fingers around them and told her to keep them secret and safe, just in case.

  Juniper remembers: something snapping inside her. Her patience, her tolerance, her last straw.

  May sticks and stones break your bones and serpents stop your heart. She didn’t have her cedar staff back then. But she had a tobacco-stake from the barn floor, crusted with dirt and chickenshit, and she had the words.

  And she had the will. Almost.

  At the very last second, as she watched her daddy writhing on the barn floor, a snake the color of dust wrapped around his ankle, her will had wavered. Maybe she didn’t hate him quite enough; maybe she just didn’t want to hate herself.

  Afterward, when she was alone except for the wet crackle of her daddy’s breathing, she sent the memory of that snake down into the deepest oceans of herself, where she couldn’t see it, because her sisters were gone and she couldn’t stand to know it was her own fault.

  Juniper feels tears trickling down her temples, burrowing in her hair. Her daddy had been different after the fire: slower, more cautious, less likely to raise a hand in anger. She thought it was gratitude, maybe, for all the putrid hours she spent changing his bandages and spoon-feeding him. But he was kind to her for the same reason a man is kind to a mad dog: for fear of her teeth.

  Turns out he wasn’t quite scared enough.

  “That’s why you never came back, then.” Because they saw what she was. A monster, a murderess. A dragon red in tooth and claw, and only princesses were rescued from towers. “That’s why you never wrote.”

  But Bella’s voice cuts across hers. “I did write, June. Once a week at first. When you never wrote back, I thought you must want nothing to do with me. I thought maybe you’d heard . . . rumors.” Juniper tries hard to focus on her face, a hovering smear with sad eyes.

  Agnes echoes her. “The first thing I bought when I got to the city was a postcard. You never answered, and after a while I stopped trying.”

  “But—oh.” Juniper wonders if her daddy paid the postman to lose those letters, or if he burned them himself. She wonders if she ever shoveled their ashes from the woodstove, unknowing, and if her daddy watched her when she did.

  Their closeness had always bothered him. When they were little he was forever playing them one against the other, favoring the youngest, blaming one for the sins of her sisters, finding the cracks between them and wedging them wider. But it never seemed to stick. The three of them remained a single thing, inviolate. So he split them apart and spent seven years tearing at the last threads that bound them together.

  But—Juniper looks up at her gray-eyed sisters, here with her now—he failed.

  “Agnes. Bell. I—”

  “I do hate to interrupt, but it’s nearly dawn. Our time is short.” Quinn is standing in the doorway, pointing out to the thin line of gray visible on the horizon.

  Juniper’s sisters get to their feet. Juniper wishes they would come back. She wants to ask what happened to the other Sisters and how they called back the Lost Way and if they think it’s possible that Mama Mags’s ghost visited her in the Deeps—but the stones are so cool on her skin and the air is so heavy on her eyes.

  She wakes once, briefly, when a hand touches her cheek, and Agnes says, “Goodbye, Juniper.” Then, more stiffly, “Goodbye, Bella.”

  “You know where to find us if you change your mind.”

  Juniper doesn’t know if Agnes replies, because she drifts away.

  There are still voices around her, murmuring and whispering, but they don’t belong to her sisters. They belong to three someone-elses, and they sound like the soft sighs of turning pages, the rustles of rose petals one against another, the silent touch of strange stars.

  Agnes looks behind her once before she leaves the tower.

  Bella stands with a pair of silver shears in one hand and an open book in the other, that eerie owl perched like a gargoyle on her shoulder, looking like the Crone herself come back from the dead. Juniper lies pale and still on the flagstones, a maiden laid out for sacrifice.

  The sight of them tugs at Agnes. She wants to turn back and take her place between them, play the part of the middle sister and the Mother—but she doesn’t.

  She pushes through the door and kneels briefly beneath the shadowed trees. She scoops a palmful of earth and leaf-litter into a glass and whispers the words over it: Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. She prays it is enough.

  The night is quiet except for the whisper-touch of leaves and the distant toll of church bells ringing the solstice-morning service. The branches of trees drag against her skirts like friendly fingers, half-familiar; she remembers all the times she chased Juniper through thickets of mountain laurel and holly back home.

  Agnes slips from the woods and takes three steps before she realizes she is not alone: there are birds roosting on every lamp-post and iron bench, crowding the sills and rooftops of the College and City Hall, silent as falling feathers—

  And there is a woman standing several feet in front of her, right where the cobbles turn to dark, leaf-strewn earth.

  Her face is tilted up to look at the tower, her skin ivory in the unsettling shine of constellations that have doubled in number and abandoned their usual patterns, unnaturally bright despite the electric orange glow of the city.

  She isn’t wearing her usual white sash or her starched skirt, and her Gibson Girl hair has deflated somewhat, but Agnes knows that face: Miss Grace Wiggin, head of the Women’s Christian Union and famed crusader against suffrage, witchcraft, alcohol, gambling, prostitution, immigration, miscegenation, and unionizing.

  Agnes goes very still, feeling like some wild creature caught in the lamp-light. Wiggin’s face turns toward her slowly, as if she has difficulty tearing her eyes from the tower. Tears glitter in them, and a quarter-teaspoon of longing.

  “Did you do this?” Her voice is thin, lost-sounding, nothing like the shrill clarion call Agnes remembers.

  Agnes inclines her head, feeling an unsteady surge of pride. I did this, with my sisters. They called it from bottomless time, sang it straight into the middle of sober, sinless New Salem. Grace Wiggin and her ladies-in-waiting seem suddenly less worrisome, almost humorous.

  Wiggin’s eyes focus on her for the first time, her lip curling. “And did you not fear for the soul of your child? Have you no mother’s natural instincts?”

  Agnes considers slapping her. “What about you, Miss Wiggin? Do you not fear for your reputation, out alone at night? Have you no shame?”

  An odd, childish flash of guilt crosses the woman’s face. “I was out for a walk. I happened to be looking up and saw the stars shifting, changing, and the birds gathering . . . Then I smelled the roses.”

  Mags always said the solstices and equinoxes were the times magic burned closest to the surface of things, when any self-respecting hedge-witch or wild-hearted woman ought to be outdoors, with moonlight on her skin and night around her shoulders.

  What is a proper young woman doing out on the summer solstice, watching the sky? Why do her eyes keep reeling back to the tower, like moths to flames?

  Agnes is struck by the sudden suspicion that Grace Wiggin doesn’t hate witching at all. “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”

  “It’s vile. Wicked.” But the words have a hollow, l
earned-by-rote ring. Agnes waits, watching the tense roll of muscles in Wiggin’s face, wondering how long the woman will keep talking rather than screaming for help, and if it will be long enough for Bella to make the tower disappear.

  That longing look is back in Wiggin’s eyes, stronger now. “My mother used to make my dolls dance, when I was a girl. I begged her to teach the words to me and she did, and more besides. I liked to learn them. It made me feel—” She doesn’t say how it made her feel, but Agnes knows: like her voice had power, like her will had weight.

  “What happened to her?”

  Bitterness seeps into Wiggin’s face, aging it. “She was caught killing the unborn.” Agnes thinks of Mags and the narrow path back to her house, Madame Zina with her gauzy veils and fake card-readings. “They made me go to the hanging. I was a Lost Angel, after that.”

  An ungainly tenderness takes root in Agnes’s chest. She rebels against it—surely her circle needn’t be large enough to include women like Grace Wiggin, for the love of God—but it’s as if Wiggin’s face has become a window, or maybe a mirror. Agnes can see the frightened, hurting girl she once was, with a heart full of hate and nowhere to send it.

  “Listen. You don’t have to keep doing . . . what you do. You don’t have to keep helping a man like Gideon Hill just because he—”

  The sound of his name shatters the fragile thing between them. Wiggin’s eyes are shards of flint; her fingers clutch the shawl tighter around her shoulders. “How dare you—Mr. Hill is the noblest—the bravest—” A fervent, unnatural rage chokes her words.

  Agnes is wondering if Wiggin is going to attack her, clawing and hissing like a cat, when the tower vanishes.

  The stars and the tangled woods and the dark earth—all of it falls out of the world like coins dropping into an invisible pocket. Nothing remains of the Lost Way of Avalon except a mischievous wind, and the feral scent of magic and roses in the air. Wiggin staggers sideways, mouth open in horror. She spins back to Agnes with her skin waxen and yellow in the first streaks of true dawn. “You’ll burn for this,” she hisses. “He’ll make sure of it.”

  And then she screams. “Help! Someone help! There are witches in New Salem!”

  Agnes runs, pausing only to draw an X on the cobbles and whisper August’s spell into the dawn. Her hair rises from her shoulders and the baby’s weight lifts from her hips, and she runs with the vial knocking against her thigh and Wiggin’s voice ringing in her ears like a curse, or a prophecy.

  She runs west, keeping to the side-streets and narrow alleys, dodging the lamp-lighters and night-soil men, hiding in doorways when she hears the ring of hooves on stone. At the cemetery she pauses, chewing her lip, before climbing the fence and winding her way back to the witch-yard, where their golden tree still stands, grand and gleaming, far too heavy to move.

  Agnes buries the glass vial of earth among its roots. She scores a symbol into the soft metal of the tree’s trunk—three circles, intertwined—and whispers the words. The sign begins to glow, very faintly, and her fingers hover above it, wanting to touch it and be drawn back to the tower and the woods and the wild story her sisters are writing together.

  But Agnes is through with all that. She saved her sister, and now she must survive for her daughter.

  She walks home, weary and sore-footed. At first she hides when she sees officers riding past on their tall grays, but soon she realizes they hardly notice her. She is nothing, once again.

  London Bridge is falling down, falling down,

  iron bars will bend and break, bend and break,

  My fair maiden.

  A spell for rust, requiring saltwater & joined hands

  Juniper wakes to a series of mysteries. The first mystery is her own skin, which she remembers as a battered, mistreated thing, like a worn-out suit of clothes. But it feels whole and smooth beneath her hands. Even—her fingers tremble as they reach her throat—the place where the iron collar burned itself to ash. It ought to be a scabbed, gluey ruin, weeping yellow and red, but there’s nothing but knots of taut flesh.

  The second mystery is the room, which is round and sunny, and which she has never seen before in her life. There are three beds set beneath three arched windows, and three woven rugs overlapping on a wooden floor. Juniper thinks a little giddily of witch-tales about three bears and lost maidens. There’s a just-rightness to the room that Juniper can’t quite name, until she realizes it reminds her of the attic where they slept as girls. It was the only part of the house she was sorry to burn.

  The third mystery is the most subtle and the most troubling: the light is all wrong. It feels like the middle of the day, but the sun falls slantwise through the windows, heavy and gold as a ripe apple. It’s autumn sunlight, Juniper is sure of it, and she wonders dizzily if she slept through summer.

  She finds no answers in the quiet dancing of the dust motes, or in the green tendrils of ivy and rose that curl over the window ledges. She rustles in a chest at the foot of her bed and finds a wide-sleeved robe in undyed wool, with a single silver clasp in the shape of an S, or maybe a snake. She pulls it over her head, ignoring the pop and groan of muscles that would prefer to lie back down in the featherbed, and climbs down the ladder.

  It ends at the top of a staircase that corkscrews downward. Along its dizzy route there are doors and alcoves, chairs piled with cushions and windows with wide benches beneath them. And books. An amount and variety of books that Juniper finds frankly excessive.

  Juniper limps in slow spirals through the tower, badly missing her red-cedar staff, trailing one hand along the spines: soft calfskin, brittle leather, ragged cotton, burlap, eelskin, iron, titles stamped in gold and char, something that whispers sweetly as she touches it and something else that stings. She’s a little surprised she doesn’t find her oldest sister lying on the steps, expired from sheer glee.

  Then, as she passes a delicately carved door, Juniper hears Bella’s voice. “—was thinking we ought to start with the medicinal texts. The fever is horrendous this year, and think what a coup it would be if we cured it!”

  Juniper is standing halfway up a tower, right against the stone of the outer wall. By every natural law, there should be nothing but empty air behind the little carved door. But when she opens it she finds a smallish room paneled in dark oak, with a wide table presently buried beneath scrolls and books and scattered ink-pens. Bella leans over one side, spectacles perched on her nose, and Quinn sits at the other, lips quirked at some private joke.

  “June!” Bella straightens. “When did you get up? What possessed you to walk down all those stairs on your own?” She shuffles Juniper over to a chair with much muttering and flapping of hands.

  “I’m fine,” Juniper says, but her voice sounds like the drag of a match-tip against stone, harsh and grating. She fends off an offered shawl and cushion. “Jesus. Morning, Cleo.”

  “Morning.”

  “Where’s that big black bird of yours, Bell? And how do I get one?”

  Bella circles the table and resettles herself on the arm of Quinn’s chair. “Strix, you mean? He comes and goes as he pleases. Sometimes he vanishes altogether, back to the other side.”

  “Huh. And where’s Agnes?” Juniper reaches for her without thinking, forgetting that the spell that bound them is done and over now. But the invisible line between them is still there. She can feel Agnes somewhere in the city, toiling away.

  It takes Juniper far too long to realize that Bella has not answered her, that she’s even now shuffling a stack of pages on her desk rather than meeting Juniper’s eyes. “Agnes is . . . no longer an active member of the Sisters of Avalon. By her own volition.”

  “What?”

  “She got scared and quit,” Quinn clarifies.

  Juniper feels a petulant heat in her throat. It was supposed to be the three of them together again, one for all and all for one. “But she was here. She called back the Lost Way with us. And you’re telling me she just split?”

  Bella says, sof
tly, “She’s got more than just her own neck to look out for, remember.” It’s the closest Juniper has heard Bella come to defending their sister. “And it’s more dangerous now. Look.” Bella unfolds a waxy-looking poster from a stack on her desk and hands it over.

  Juniper meets her own eyes on the page: her face is sketched in charcoal, standing between her sisters. Juniper is drawn tangle-haired and snarling, like the kind of witch who lives in the woods and runs with wolves; Bella is sharp-boned and thin, like the witch who lives in a spun-sugar house and eats little children; Agnes is all curves and lips, more like the witch who lures men to her bed and leaves them cold and white in the morning. The caption reads: THE SISTERS EASTWOOD: WANTED FOR MURDER & MOST WICKED WITCHCRAFT, and offers a generous reward for information regarding their whereabouts.

  Juniper looks down at their monstrous faces and feels a bitter twist in her gut. If it’s a villain they want, who is she to deny them?

  Bella folds the poster away. “There are rumors, too, Quinn tells me. Hysterical theories about your escape and a black tower seen on the solstice. The square is still full of birds, apparently. A few churches have begun holding nightly vigils against the return of witching—they’re telling their congregations that the fever is a punishment sent by either God or the Devil, they can’t seem to agree which—oh, quit grinning like that, June, this is serious!”

  “Jesus, Bell, lighten—”

  “There have been nineteen arrests since the solstice.” Quinn speaks very slowly and clearly, as if she thinks Juniper might need things spelled out in one-syllable words. “Mostly harmless street-witches—an abortionist, a fortune-teller, a woman who claimed to speak with the dead. There have been raids, too, women beaten bloody for nothing but a few feathers in their pockets or a questionable spice-rack.”

  Juniper is not grinning anymore. She hears Agnes asking her what comes after, what it costs. “Are the Sisters alright?”