The Once and Future Witches

by Harrow, Alix E.

  Bella has seen the undertakers’ carriages before—black-painted wagons with ST. CHARITY HOSPITAL written in stark white capitals on the side—but she always imagined it would be several long decades before she rode in one herself.

  She also imagined she would be alone, and dead, rather than pressed beside her sisters on the floorboards, very much alive and praying the baby won’t cry as they clatter and jounce across the city.

  Mr. Lee met them behind the hospital with several of his friends—scruffy, disreputable fellows who seemed well versed in mayhem—a cheap black suit, and a matched pair of carthorses that were persuaded to pull the carriage despite the smell of rot and arsenic. Mr. Lee helped them one after the other into the coach. His hand lingered around Agnes’s, his mouth half-open, but the driver hyahed and August vanished into the gloom.

  Now the city passes in ghoulish flashes through the high windows: the flare of a lit torch in a bare hand; shouted curses and prayers; the stamp of feet marching in unnatural synchrony. The sour smell of wet smoke clings to her skin like grease, burying even the corpse-stink of the carriage.

  A drifting flake of ash filters through the window and settles soft as snow on Bella’s cheek. She wonders what mystery or magic it once held, now lost to the flames. Her tears slide silently to her temples and trickle through her hair.

  The carriage rattles over trolley tracks and missing cobbles, the street roughening beneath them. The noise shifts from angry shouts to worried voices, pitched low. The clop of hooves falls quiet and the carriage sways to a stop.

  Knuckles tap twice on the roof, and the three Eastwoods—four, Bella supposes, catching the delicate curve of her niece’s cheek in the moonlight—stumble out into the night.

  They’re on a street she doesn’t know, standing in the shadowed dark between two gas-lamps. Bodies move in the darkness around them, hurrying steps and hushed voices. Bella hears the snick of locks turning in latches, even the muffled thump of a hammer nailing shutters closed over a window, as New Cairo battens itself like a ship before a coming storm.

  The driver tips his cap to them, addressing Agnes more than either of the others. “Mr. Lee begs you to send word to the Workingman, Misses Eastwood, once you’re settled. He assures me you have your methods.”

  Agnes sweeps her stained cloak around herself and nods regally. “Thank you, sir.” She falters, suddenly more woman than witch. “And thank him, for me? Tell him—” But she doesn’t seem to know what she wants to tell him.

  The driver grants her another grave tip of his hat. “I will, miss.” Then, far less formally, “Trust August to fall for the most wanted woman in New Salem.”

  He flicks the reins and Juniper’s affronted mutter (“I thought I was the most wanted woman in New Salem”) is lost in the muffled clop of hooves.

  Bella is blinking up at the stars, squinting through smudged spectacles at the distant street sign. “Ah—this way.” Bella walks south and her sisters follow a half-step behind her, scuttling like field mice beneath a full moon.

  No one sits on stoops or plays cards on street-corners. The barrooms are dark and vacant. The only people they pass are clusters of men carrying cudgels and hammers, and long-cloaked women with hard, fearless expressions that make Bella think there are reasons the police don’t like to patrol Cairo after sundown.

  She turns twice and doubles back once before she finds Nut Street. But the night market isn’t what she remembers: the stalls and rugs are being rolled away, wares packed hastily into canvas sacks and crates, dark cloaks pulled over colorful skirts. Eyes turn and catch on Bella and her sisters—three white women and two black birds and one red-haired baby—but Bella ignores them.

  She finds Araminta’s shop and staggers through the door, weak-kneed and reeling. Araminta herself (Quinn’s mother, Bella thinks with a small, internal wail) sits behind the counter. “Now what’s going on—” she begins, but then she catches sight of Bella’s face. Her eyes flick to Agnes, too pale and shivering in the warm evening. “I’ll fetch her.”

  The three of them stand, swaying slightly, until Quinn appears wearing a half-buttoned gentleman’s shirt over her nightdress. “Bella!” She reaches toward Bella as if she wants to hold her, but at that moment Agnes says unff and slumps sideways against a shelf of tiny wooden drawers.

  Then the shop is full of low voices and reaching hands, the shuffle of feet as they hurry into the back room and make a pallet of pillows and spare quilts. They settle Agnes in the center while Araminta sings a spell against fever and another against blood loss, feet shuffling, a chalk map of stars drawn hastily on the floor. Juniper cradles Eve with her lower lip caught between her teeth, looking awkward and fierce and full of unwieldy, fresh-hatched love.

  Araminta presses her palm to Agnes’s forehead as the song ends and nods once. Juniper nests beside Agnes, the baby swaddled between them, and Araminta hauls herself upright and picks her way over to Quinn and Bella. “They’ll keep for the night.”

  She looks at her daughter and the corner of her mouth twitches. “Get some sleep, you two.”

  Quinn ducks her head and heads up a narrow flight of stairs and Bella watches her go with a silent sinking in her heart.

  Halfway up, Quinn turns. She meets Bella’s eyes and extends her hand, palm up. An invitation, a question, a challenge. Bella hears Juniper’s voice: Are you such a coward?

  Bella isn’t.

  Quinn’s hand is warm and dry. She leads Bella up the stairs to a room she recognizes. There’s the bed with its saffron quilt, gone gray in the gloom. There’s the pillow where Bella woke with the memory of warmth beside her.

  Quinn sits on the foot of the bed and slides the gentleman’s shirt from her shoulders. Her arms beneath it are bare and long, velveteen in the dark, her nightdress ghostly white. She looks like a living Saint, the street-lamp painting a glowing halo behind her head.

  Bella thinks she should probably leave.

  (Bella does not want to leave.)

  Quinn smooths the quilt beneath her, a gentle invitation. Bella doesn’t move or speak, as if her body is a fractious animal that will betray her given the slightest loosening of the reins.

  “You can leave if you like.” Quinn’s voice is carefully neutral. “There’s room beside your sisters.”

  “No, thank you,” Bella breathes.

  The white flash of Quinn’s teeth in the dark. Her chin tilts in a come here flick, and this invitation is less gentle, warmer and sweeter and far more dangerous.

  Bella makes an inarticulate sound, swallows, and tries again. “Mr. Quinn—”

  “Does not live at this address, nor has he ever.” Bella blinks several times and Quinn explains gently, “The two of us grew up together, and understood very young that neither of us was interested in . . . the usual arrangement. He lives in Baltimore with a very nice gentleman friend and a spoiled dog named Lord Byron.”

  “I . . . oh.” Bella has not previously imagined any arrangements other than the usual one; she feels simultaneously too young and too old, terribly naive.

  She looks again at the space beside Quinn. She sits.

  “It’s gone, you know.” Bella’s voice is hoarse from swallowed smoke. “All of it. The hoarded magic of witches, lost in a single night. It would have been safe if we’d just left it hidden where the Last Three put it, but we didn’t. I didn’t. And now it’s gone and all our hope with it.”

  Bella thinks of all the women who followed them down this dangerous rabbit hole, all the Sisters hoping for the ways and words to change the bitter stories they were handed. “What have I done?” It comes out tear-thick, warbling.

  “What have we done, I think you mean,” Quinn says dryly. “Who found the spell in Old Salem, again?”

  “You did, of course, I didn’t mean—”

  “So is it my fault, as well?”

  “No!”

  “And who got herself locked in jail and needed saving in the first place? And who had the baby early and kept you all dist
racted at the worst possible moment? Is it your sisters’ fault, too?” Quinn shakes her head. “If you want to blame someone for a fire, look for the men holding matches.”

  “I . . . suppose.”

  Quinn turns sideways on the bed, facing Bella. “But let’s look at what you’ve done, Belladonna Eastwood. You called back the Lost Way of Avalon and spread its secrets around half the city. You saved both your sisters’ lives. You stood for something. You lost something. But . . .” Quinn’s hands rise to either side of Bella’s face to slide her spectacles from her temples. Bella finds it necessary to remind her heart to keep beating and her lungs to keep pumping. “You gained something, too, I think.”

  Quinn is close enough now that Bella can feel the heat of her skin, see the black swell of her pupils.

  Bella wants very badly to kiss her.

  The thought arrives without parentheses, a wild rush of wanting that Bella knows better than to give in to. She’ll be punished, afterward, bruised or beaten or locked up until she learns to forget again. Except—and she doesn’t know why this simple arithmetic has never occurred to her—isn’t she already being punished, in her loneliness? And if it hurts either way, surely she should at least enjoy the sin for which she suffers.

  Bella looks down at her own hands, steady as stones. She feels the even beat of her heart. They taught her to be afraid, but somewhere along the way she lost the trick of it.

  She lifts her hand to Quinn’s cheek, cups her palm around the curve of her jaw. Quinn holds very still, barely breathing.

  “May I kiss you, Cleo?” She does not stutter.

  Quinn exhales profanities.

  “Is that a ye—” The end of Bella’s question is lost, stolen along with her breath.

  It isn’t so much a kiss as a conflagration: of need and want long deferred, of lost hope and the wild abandon of two bodies colliding while the world burns around them.

  Somewhere in the urgent fumble of buttons and clasps and the rushing rhythm of their breath, the touch of starlight on skin and the secret taste of salt, a treacherous thought occurs to Bella: that she would burn Avalon seven times over as long as it led her here, to this room and this saffron-yellow bed.

  Afterward, when they lie together like a pair of clasped hands, one fitted perfectly beside the other, Bella lies awake. She resists the soft tug of sleep for as long as she can, because the sooner she sleeps the sooner dawn will arrive with all its hard truths. Already she feels the weight of the world hovering above them, waiting to settle.

  “Cleo?” Her name tastes like cloves on Bella’s tongue. “Tell me a story?”

  And Cleo does.

  his is the story of how Aunt Nancy stole all the words for her daughters and granddaughters and great-granddaughters. Aunt Nancy was an old, old woman—or perhaps she was a young woman, or a spider, or a hare, or all four at once—with clouds of cobweb for hair and shining black buttons for eyes, when her littlest great-granddaughter cried that she wanted to learn her letters.

  Now Aunt Nancy would do anything for her grandchildren, so she went to the man in the big house and asked if he would please teach her to write. The man laughed at her, this little old woman with her cobwebbed hair. There was even a little black spider dangling beside her ear, watching him with tiny red eyes. In the end the man swore he would teach her to read and write if she brought him the smile of a coyote and the teeth of a hen, the tears of a snake and the cry of a spider.

  Aunt Nancy smiled and thanked him very prettily and he laughed again, because she was so old and foolish that she didn’t even know an impossible task when she heard one.

  She hobbled back to her cabin in the woods. She sat on the porch and looked at the stars and sang a little song:

  Cottontail and sly-fox

  Terrapin and titmouse,

  Come one, come all,

  To your Aunt Nancy’s house.

  And all the animals of the farm and forest began to creep forward as she sang, because Aunt Nancy knew plenty of words and ways already.

  The next day Aunt Nancy returned to the big house with the smile of a coyote, the teeth of a hen, the tears of a snake, and the cry of a spider. But the man spurned her payment, claiming it was a trick or a ploy, that she was a witch and he would see her burned at the stake before he taught her a single letter. He ordered her to leave, and Aunt Nancy left.

  But every evening after that, when the man read books to his children before bed, there was a spider watching him from the window, black as night and cinder-eyed. And, in time, Aunt Nancy taught her great-granddaughter her letters.

  Hide away, hide away, hide away with me,

  Hide away, hide away home.

  A song to avert an unwanted eye, requiring sympathy & the Southern Crown

  Beatrice Belladonna wakes just before dawn with her head pillowed on the soft meat of Cleo’s shoulder. Cleo is still sleeping, her heart thudding slow and even in Bella’s ear.

  Bella pulls herself to one elbow and studies her, not counting the seconds: the clever arch of her brow, the polished shine of her skin, the hollow place where her collarbones meet. Bella thinks of all their long afternoons together at Avalon, annotating and translating, adrift in a private sea of words and ways.

  Ashes, now, all of it. Men are probably wading through the wreckage at this very moment, smearing the remains beneath their boots. Laughing at the lost hope of witches.

  The thought is a knife in her stomach.

  She finds herself standing, slipping back into her stinking dress from the night before. She looks back once at the sleeping sprawl of Cleo’s body, an offering at an undeserving altar, before tip-toeing down the narrow stairs.

  Her sisters are still sleeping, nested close together. The binding between them seems to hum as Bella passes, and for a dizzy second she feels two hearts beating beside hers, two chests rising and falling, as if they are no longer entirely separate from one another. It ought to worry her, but there’s a rightness to it, like three strands braiding together.

  Bella catches the pale ghost of her own reflection in a hall mirror. Her face is subtly different, as if Cleo worked some arcane spell in the night: her hair is loose and long, her cheeks warm, her lips bitten pink. If this is the consequence of her sinfulness, perhaps she ought to sin more often.

  Bella leaves her reflection behind and steps into the spice shop proper. She rattles briefly behind the counter, emerging with a pair of dull silver shears, and is inching toward the door when a voice stops her.

  “Leaving already, Miss Belladonna?”

  She wheels to find Quinn’s mother perched on a stool with a steaming mug curled in one hand and a black silk wrap around her head. She clucks her tongue. “Without so much as a thank-you.”

  Bella tucks the shears behind her back, a guilty schoolgirl. “Thank you, Miss . . .”

  “Miss Araminta Andromeda Wells. And just where were you going?”

  “I—nowhere.”

  Miss Wells considers her for a second or possibly a century. She sighs. “Come here, girl.” It does not occur to Bella to disobey. “I’d send you through the tunnels, but the doors only open for Daughters, and you don’t have the mark.” She taps Bella’s wrist, right where Cleo bears her scarred pattern of stars. “This’ll have to do.”

  Bella stands very still as Miss Wells hums a tune beneath her breath. She removes an ink-pen from her dressing gown pocket and draws a shape on the soft white of Bella’s palm: a spiral of lines and diamonds, a starry crown. Bella thinks it’s the same shape Cleo drew on the brick wall on St. Mary-of-Egypt Avenue when they ran from the rioters. She closes her hand tight around the marks, warm with witching.

  “Thank you, Miss Wells.”

  “Cleo’s a good girl,” Araminta answers, somewhat obscurely. She amends, “Well, no, she isn’t. She’s always been curious as a cat and twice as sly. But she’s mine, and she deserves . . .” She trails away, pursing and unpursing her lips, before finishing, “Make sure you come back.”

>   Bella gives her a grave bow, hand over her heart.

  The streets of New Cairo are still, the houses shut tight against the madness of men with lit torches. The stale, dead smell of smoke hangs thick in the air.

  It grows stronger as Bella draws closer to the city’s heart, muffling sound, obscuring the first gray streaks of dawn. There are people in the streets now—paper-boys and maids, workingmen heading west, street-cleaners and lamp-lighters—but they move with hunched shoulders and red eyes, as if the whole city is recovering from a night of drunken rage. Their eyes slide over Bella as if she is made of glass; none of them see the black-winged bird that keeps pace with her, high above.

  A block south of the square she starts noticing white dust gathering in the cracks between cobblestones, clotting the gutters. There is a dizzy second when she mistakes it for snow before she recognizes it for what it is: ash.

  At the final corner Bella ducks into the doorway of a closed shop. A gray drift of ash is gathered on the threshold, with a single rose petal lying atop it. The petal survived the fire with its edges only lightly charred, the center still soft pink. Bella bends and slips it into her skirt pocket.

  She keeps her hand pressed over it as she peers around the edge of the shop and into the square.

  The tower stands tall and terrible, strangely naked without its cloak of roses and ivy. The windows are desolate holes, revealing the hollow heart of the place that was once a library, a haven, a home. The woods around it are a smoking graveyard, the burnt stumps of trees leaning like headstones.

  It seems to Bella she hears women weeping, softly and steadily, but the only people present are the men who pluck at the still-smoking ruins with shovels and rakes, sifting tentatively through the ash as if they are expecting vengeful witches to come soaring out of the coals on flaming broomsticks.

  Someone stands among them, staring up at the corpse of the tower with a small, contented smile, like a man at the end of some long and arduous journey. He strokes the spine of the black dog beside him, who stands with her tail tucked between her legs.