The Once and Future Witches

by Harrow, Alix E.

  Agnes feels that will thrumming beneath her breastbone, a rush of desire. She wants to live. She wants to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with her sisters and shout a new story into the dark. She wants to look into her daughter’s eyes and see Juniper’s wildness and Bella’s wisdom, the wheel of stars and the snap of flames, all the everything she is and will be shining back at her.

  Agnes is aware that she is crying, and that the tears are hissing against her skin. She is aware that the pain is an animal that has slipped its leash, biting and thrashing deep inside her, and that it carries her daughter closer.

  That what they are doing—binding three lives together, holding a woman to life even while her pulse stutters and jolts—is an impossible reckless thing that only her dumbshit sister would think of, and that they are doing it anyway. Because she doesn’t want to die and they refuse to let her.

  That power fills her, scorching her veins and blackening her bones, and it is outside her, too, watching her. Weighing her, this not-yetmother who will not die, who will break the laws of the universe rather than leave her daughter alone.

  Somewhere in the blackness beyond her closed eyes, a hawk cries.

  Then the silent rush of wings and the weightless bite of talons. Agnes opens her eyes to see the savage hook of a beak, the onyx shine of feathers. An eye like a comet, caught and polished.

  In the brief lull before the pain and power surge again, it occurs to Agnes that Juniper will be insufferably, inconsolably jealous.

  The pain crests. The hawk calls again, a wild shriek.

  A final push, and Juniper is whooping and Bella is sobbing—“She’s beautiful, Ag, she’s perfect”—and someone, some new person who hadn’t existed a moment before, is wailing.

  Oh, baby girl.

  Time skips forward again and Agnes is lying back against a soft mound of pillows with a precious, burning thing clutched against her chest. She stares down into a small, furrowed face, faintly imperious, like a tiny deity who hasn’t seen much of the world yet but is already unimpressed. Her fists are two pink curls, and her eyes—open, staring solemnly back at Agnes, as if the two of them were instructed to memorize one another’s faces—are a nameless color somewhere between midnight and ash.

  “She—is she steaming?” Juniper sounds only mildly concerned, as if perhaps all babies steam for the first few days.

  Bella is fussing with boiled water and clean linen, scrubbing away the streaks of red and gummy white. “She’s just fine, I’m sure. It must be an effect of all that witching.”

  The baby’s head is still glossy and wet, but already Agnes can see her hair is an unlikely shade of ruby red, like the deepest heart of a bonfire or the burning eye of a familiar.

  Agnes glances sideways at the bird now perched on the bed rail. A river hawk, she thinks, all sharp angles and vicious curves, black as char. It looks down at the baby in her arms with the same fierce tenderness that Agnes feels, a love that has teeth and talons.

  Agnes presses her lips to her daughter’s fiery hair and feels her life cleaving, splitting cleanly into two pieces: the time before, and the time after.

  The mattress shifts beside her. “What’ll you name her?” Juniper’s voice is reverent. Her hand hovers above the baby’s head, not touching her, as if she isn’t sure she ought to be near anything that fragile and precious.

  Agnes has thought of many names—Calliope for her mother or Magdalena for her mother’s mother, Ivy for power or Rose for beauty—but now a different name unfurls from her lips, snapping like a banner on the battlefield. “Eve.”

  A sinful name, a shocking name. A name that broke the first world and walked into the new one, unbound and unbowed.

  Juniper laughs, a low rasp. “And her mother’s-name?”

  Agnes wants something deep-rooted and determined, something that grows in overturned earth and tumbled rocks. She thinks of the tough, silvery weed that was always threatening to overtake Mama Mags’s herb-garden: cudweed, she called it, or—“Everlasting. Eve Everlasting.”

  Juniper dares to cup her palm around her niece’s ruby head, to whisper, “Eve Everlasting. Give ’em hell, baby girl.”

  “She will,” Agnes promises. She finds her fingers clutching the swaddled sheets. “And so will I, I swear. I’m sorry to you both for running away, for hiding. I thought . . .” She thought it was safer to creep and cower, to be no one rather than someone. Like her mother taught her. “I will not be a mother like ours was.”

  Bella settles on her other side. “Neither was she, once. You were five when she died, but I was seven.” Agnes has always envied Bella those two extra years. “I remember her the way she used to be. I think she thought if she made herself small enough and quiet enough, she would be safe.”

  She was wrong. Bella doesn’t need to say it.

  Agnes swallows the salt in her throat and leans very carefully against her sister. A silence blooms between them, the gentle calm following a storm. Agnes is several steps past exhaustion but can’t seem to close her eyes. She’s mesmerized by the ammonite curl of her daughter’s left ear, the delicate fall of her red lashes against the soft shape of her face.

  She is studying the soft line of her cheek, wondering if she sees a hint of her sister’s square jaw, when the hawk mantles beside her. Its wings snap wide, as if to defend itself against some invisible attack. The owl on Bella’s shoulder does the same, eyes wide and round.

  “Goodness!” Bella flinches from the slap of feathers, trying to stroke a calming finger down its breast, but it launches itself upward. The hawk joins it, circling near the ceiling on midnight wings. The pattern they draw is a warning, like vultures spiraling above some dying thing. A growing light gleams dull amber on their feathers, the rising sun, or the distant, electric glow of the Fair.

  Agnes is looking up at them, clutching her daughter, when there’s a loud bang against the ward door.

  “Agnes! Are you in there?” More banging, a desperate fist. “Hyssop, for Chrissake!”

  Bella looks at Agnes and Agnes nods. She unlocks the door and Mr. August Lee falls through it.

  His hair is tangled and dark with rain, his eyes wild. There’s a gray smear across one cheek and a smell rising from his clothes, trailing like a shadow behind him: acrid and sour, ugly in some way Agnes doesn’t understand.

  “Is she alive? Is the baby—” August’s eyes rove between the three of them, fastening onto Agnes and the tight-wrapped bundle held to her breast. The relief in his face washes over her like daybreak.

  Juniper says, sullenly, “They’re just fine, thank you very much,” but August doesn’t seem to hear her. He moves to Agnes’s bedside and kneels, still looking at her with that stripped-bare delight. Agnes turns her hand palm up on the sheet and he presses his forehead against it. “I’m sorry,” he says into the mattress. “I got your message, but you weren’t there. I looked and looked. Finally someone told me you’d been taken, but I didn’t know where—”

  “It’s all right.” She strokes her thumb across his brow, because she can, because she likes the weight of his head in her hand and the bent line of his neck. “I had my sisters.” The binding thrums between them, a cat’s purr, and it occurs to Agnes that she was dead wrong.

  She thought survival was a selfish thing, a circle drawn tight around your heart. She thought the more people you let inside that circle the more ways the world had to hurt you, the more ways you could fail them and be failed in turn. But what if it’s the opposite, and there are more people to catch you when you fall? What if there’s an invisible tipping point somewhere along the way when one becomes three becomes infinite, when there are so many of you inside that circle that you become hydra-headed, invincible?

  August is silent, head still pressed to her hand as if all he wants in the world is to feel the heat of her pulse.

  “Well.” Juniper clears her throat. “Not to interrupt, but it’s time we get gone. Before somebody notices this whole hospital is asleep or follows this fool here.”
But she sounds less sullen, even faintly approving, as if she rather likes the sight of a man on his knees.

  August looks up with a shadow looming in his face. “Where are you going? Is it that tower?”

  Juniper shrugs at him, already turning to draw a circle on the white-tile wall. The birds still circle above her like some grave portent.

  “You can’t go back there.”

  “Excuse me?” Juniper wheels, chin thrust forward. “And why the hell not?”

  But Agnes already knows why, because Agnes has finally recognized the smell rising from August’s clothes: wild roses and fire.

  “Because,” August answers, “the tower is burning.”

  Wade in the water with me,

  My daughter all dressed in red.

  Wade in the water, and dress in white instead.

  A song to stop bleeding after a hard birth, requiring twice-blessed water & the Serpent-Bearer

  James Juniper looks at the man kneeling beside her sister—at the gray smear on his cheekbone and the sorry angle of his shoulders—and tells him, very gently, “Bullshit.”

  “It isn’t—”

  “It is. Avalon would have to be somewhere in order for anybody to burn it, and I happen to know it’s nowhere.”

  “It isn’t. It’s standing in the middle of St. George’s Square and it’s burning. Look out the window! You can see the light from here!”

  Juniper doesn’t want to look out the window, doesn’t want to know the light glowing red on the underbellies of the clouds isn’t coming from the rising sun.

  “Listen, we bound that tower and buried the binding, and warded the place we buried it. So excuse me if I don’t—”

  “June.” It’s Agnes, her voice tired and cracked, pitched low so as not to wake the baby.

  Juniper shoots August a now look what you did glare. “It’s alright, Ag. I’m sure Mr. Lee is mistaken.”

  “June.” And there’s a sorriness in her voice that makes Juniper want to shout or stuff her fingers in her ears, anything so she doesn’t hear what she says next. “There were men at the graveyard. The tree was uprooted. I think they must have found the binding.”

  Juniper doesn’t say anything. She stares at her sister, and then at August, who is climbing wearily to his feet. “It’s madness out there. I ran past people carrying torches, shouting about burning the witches out of their nest at last. They said the black tower had come back, and they said Gideon Hill was going to burn it.”

  “Bullshit,” Juniper says again, but the word wobbles in her mouth. Agnes is looking up at her with a slick shine of tears in her eyes, and Bella has both hands pressed to her mouth.

  Juniper looks away from them, anywhere else. Her eye catches on the bloody circle now dried and crusted on the bed-sheet beside her sister.

  The trick to doing something stupid is to do it very quickly, before anyone can shout wait!

  Juniper presses her palm to the circle and speaks the words, and then she is pulled sideways into the burning black.

  Juniper hasn’t yet been to Hell—although, according to her daddy, the preacher, Miss Hurston, and the New Salem Police Department, it’s only a matter of time—but she figures when she gets there it’ll look a lot like St. George’s Square does now: fire and ash and ruination.

  The door beneath her hand is burning, blue flames licking across charred wood, eating the inscription and sign both. She reels back, curling her hand to her chest, and stares up at the tower that was her hope and her home. Fire leaps from every window, fattened by the pages of ten thousand books and scrolls, by all the words and ways of witches preserved for so many centuries. Ivy and rose-vines wither and blacken, peeling away from the stone in long twists of ash. The trees wear hungry red crowns, like doomed queens, and birds caw and flap in frenzied circles.

  Beneath the hungry roar of the flames Juniper thinks she hears a keening sound, low and distant, like women’s voices joined together in some sad lamentation. Or maybe the sound comes from her own heart as she watches the last hope of witches rising into the sky on wings of ash and cinder.

  Through the white haze of smoke and the hiss of rain Juniper sees people ringing the square. Men and women stand with lit torches in raised fists, Hill’s symbol brought to hideous life. She can’t tell through the waver of heat and light if their shadows are their own. She isn’t sure she cares.

  Behind the men and their torches—his eyes dancing with merry flames, his pale skin flushed—stands Gideon Hill. A willowy blond woman clutches his arm, looking up at him with such empty devotion that Juniper shivers.

  Hill’s mouth is moving, issuing proclamations or commands or spells. The crowd is too mesmerized by their violent delights to wonder why the flames burn so unnaturally hot, heedless of the rain, or to notice the woman who now stands at the base of the tower, her hair fire-whipped, her tears hissing to steam before they leave her eyes.

  Only Hill sees her. His nostrils flare like a hound catching a long-sought scent, and his eyes lift above the heads of his vicious, frothing flock. Juniper feels them like hooks in her skin.

  “You were cleverer than I thought, little witch.” Hill is separated from her by fifty men and a roaring blaze, but his voice is a whisper in her ear. “But not clever enough.”

  The sound of his voice drags her back down into the Deeps, sends shadow-fingers prying between her teeth. She spits. It sizzles where it strikes.

  She sees the white glimmer of Hill’s smile through the haze. At his side Grace Wiggin frowns very faintly, as if she senses his attention wandering.

  His laugh shivers in the air beside her. It’s a relieved sound, almost giddy, and Juniper remembers the terrible fear that worked in his eyes. “I knew when you escaped that you must have found it, somehow. Dragged it back from wherever those hags took it. You hid it well, but anything lost can be found, can it not?”

  Juniper thinks of the wards they’d set so carefully around the witch-yard, salt and thistle; she pictures shadow-hands plucking and pulling at them until they unraveled.

  “You have given me the thing I have wanted above all others, James Juniper.” The voice is passionless but sincere, and Juniper is struck by the certainty that he is telling the truth. “I am very grateful.”

  His laugh echoes across the square and she wants to charge through the crowd and wrap her hands around his throat, curse him eyeless and earless and tongueless—except there’s a dark shimmer at her feet: shadows, many-armed, languorous as well-fed snakes, oozing across the scorched earth toward her. She whirls, presses her burned hand back to the hot ashes of the door, speaks the words a second time—

  And she is on her knees in the stinking silence of the hospital ward, with hot tears tracking through the char on her cheeks.

  Agnes knows from the broken slope of Juniper’s shoulders, from the reek of ashes and roses she brings with her, that August was telling the truth.

  A wail rises: Bella, keening as if her own flesh and blood is burning along with the library. Her hands scrabble for the drawn circle on the sheet.

  Juniper catches her tight around the waist. “It’s too late. It’s gone, Bell. He’s won.” Her voice is even rougher than before, twice-burned by fire. Bella sags against her youngest sister, weeping, and Juniper shushes her. August looks at the floor, a stranger intruding on their mourning.

  They stay like that, suspended in grief like gnats in amber. Agnes knows with cold clarity that soon someone will wake from their spell and raise the alarm. Rioters and officers will turn up looking for more witches to burn, and they’ll find three sisters and a little witch-girl with hair the color of heart’s blood. They’ll rip her from Agnes’s arms.

  She looks down at her daughter—her hair drying in bright swirls of red, her cheeks round and slack in sleep—and thinks: Let the bastards try.

  “We have to go,” she says, very calmly. None of them move, mired in the selfishness of grief. Agnes raises her voice. “We have to go right now. Before they come for us, and
for Eve.”

  At Eve’s name Juniper looks up, blinking scorched eyes. “Where? They’ll be watching the train station and the trolley lines, and I bet the streets are crawling. We might make it to Salem’s Sin, maybe—”

  Bella cuts her off, sounding surprisingly firm despite the snot and tears. “We can go to Cleo’s in New Cairo. People are scared of the south side these days, and they have the means to hide us.” Agnes suspects it isn’t merely logic that drives Bella. Bella frowns at the clouds out the window and adds, inanely, “It’s the full moon, too.”

  Juniper shakes her head. “We’ll be moving slow, and they’ll be looking for three women and a baby. It’s too far.”

  Bella might have argued, but Agnes turns to August and says simply, “Help us. Please.”

  She knows from the warm twist of his smile that he hears it not as a command, but as an act of blind trust, the sort of thing one comrade might ask of another as they stand back-to-back, surrounded.

  His eyes catch hers and hold steady. “It’s far.” He glances at the push broom propped against the wall, slightly splintered from Juniper’s misuse. “Unless—can you—?”

  Juniper’s laugh is a bitter crack. “No.”

  “Well, I could get my boys to help.” He trails off, worry creasing his face. “But it’ll be rough going. Are you sure you ought to move, so soon after . . .” His eyes flick nervously to the bloodied sheets in the corner.

  Agnes’s voice goes very dry. “I’ll manage, Mr. Lee.”

  “Are you sure? I always heard a woman shouldn’t—”

  A hawk’s scream silences him. Agnes strokes the wing of her familiar. “Do you doubt me? Truly?”

  Mr. Lee rocks back, like a man in a gust of fierce wind. He looks at her—at the black river hawk perched at her side and the redheaded baby clutched to her bare breast and the scorching heat of her eyes—and nods so deeply it’s nearly a bow. “Never again,” he breathes.

  He turns to leave and calls over his shoulder, “Meet me behind the hospital in half an hour.”