The Once and Future Witches

by Harrow, Alix E.

  Jennie’s mouth goes tight but Inez answers for her. “Mayor Worthington is her father,” she says softly. “She’s sure.”

  The burst of gasps and whispers that follow this is sufficient to wake Eve, who wails her thin, not-right wail while the Sisters of Avalon trade muttered fears and dark pronouncements. He’s ahead in the polls, I heard.

  The mutters trail into heavy silence as each woman feels the weight of an unseen boot pressing down on them.

  “Well. There’s nothing to be done tonight.” Juniper lowers herself into a chair, staff across her knees. “Head home, girls. Get some sleep.”

  They leave in ones and twos, until only Yulia and her cousin remain with the Eastwoods. It’s late, but no one seems to want to go to sleep; they sit around the table, silent and brooding, listening to the faint whistle of Eve’s snores.

  “Yulia?” Bella says, her head resting on Cleo’s shoulder, her eyes sad and far away. “Why don’t you tell us that story you mentioned?”

  Yulia leans back in her chair, balancing on two legs, and begins.

  nce upon a time a young maiden married a prince in a grand castle. She was very happy with her prince, who was young and handsome, until the day he went off to war and left her with nothing but a kiss and a command never to go down to the dungeons.

  With time the kiss faded, and so did the command. One day the maiden went down to the dungeons, where she found an old, old woman languishing in iron chains. Her flesh was pale and drooping, hanging like loose cloth from her bones, and her moans were piteous. The old woman begged for saltwater and bread, and the maiden obliged because she could not stand to see such suffering. The old woman drank the water and then spat on her chains, which melted away.

  The woman leapt from her cell, no longer a weak old crone but a wicked witch. She cackled her triumph and left the castle to seek vengeance on the prince that had kept her caged for so long. The maiden stole a horse from her husband’s stable and took off after the witch, tears of remorse streaming down her cheeks.

  But the maiden could not catch the witch, and she grew lost in the winter woods, her hoof-prints vanishing behind her. Eventually she took shelter in a little round house perched on long stilts, like the scrawny legs of a chicken.

  Inside the house the maiden met another witch, who told her the name of the old woman she had freed from the dungeon: Koschei the Deathless. A long time ago, Koschei bound her soul to a needle, and the needle to an egg, and the egg to a silver chest, which she buried deep beneath the snow. All the long years of living drove her mad, but also made her very powerful. Only by smashing the box, cracking the egg, and breaking the needle would her soul be sundered.

  The maiden left the chicken-legged house with hope in her heart and a map in her hand. She faced many hardships on her journey, but eventually she found the silver box and the egg and the needle, and smote all three across the mountainside. Thus did the Deathless Witch meet her Death, and the maiden rescued her handsome prince.

  The Queen of Spades

  She made a blade

  All on a winter’s day.

  A spell for sharp edges, requiring a crown of cold iron

  On the first of September, James Juniper and her sisters are hidden in the velvet-and-silk halls of Salem’s Sin.

  The air is still summer-hot but there’s a brittleness to it, a whisper like the shush of falling leaves or the burrowing of small creatures. Juniper wants to leave, to follow that whisper all the way back to the banks of the Big Sandy, but she stays shut inside the airless perfume of Salem’s Sin.

  Even Juniper doesn’t dare go out on the day of the election.

  Jennie Lind had been right: the mayor stepped down the previous week. The Post printed a cartoon of a saggy, weak-chinned fellow fleeing a burning building while innocent civilians wailed from the windows—Juniper wondered if it was accident or accuracy that led the artist to omit the mayor’s shadow—and announced a special election on the first of September.

  The number of speeches and rallies and door-to-door campaigners had tripled. New campaign posters papered the streets—Clement Hughes for a Safer Salem! James Bright for a Brighter Future! Vote Gideon Hill—Our Light Against the Darkness!—and every paper of record printed double-length issues full of editorials and interviews and the predictions of an elderly cat that had supposedly foreseen the results of the last four elections accurately. Even the news of fresh witchcraft was shoved to the second and third pages.

  Juniper has felt the last week as a strange respite. The shadows seem to dog them less nimbly, as if they are distracted with some other business, and Hill’s mobs seem more concerned with bullying votes than with witch-hunting. Even the Wiggin woman used her weekly column in The Post to advocate for Mr. Gideon Hill, “the noblest man I have ever had the privilege to meet, who brought me from darkness into light.”

  The Sisters and Daughters have done what they could, but none of them has a vote to cast. The Colored Women’s League raised money to pay poll taxes for the husbands and sons and fathers; the New Salem Women’s Association went door-to-door with little informative pamphlets until one of them had hot tea tossed in her face. Bella wrote a letter to the editor objecting to the “medieval attitudes held by Mr. Gideon Hill and his followers,” and signed it Outis. One of the Hull sisters drew a rather gruesome but effective poster of Gideon Hill tormenting a young maiden in the cells of the Deeps, his cringing dog transformed into a snarling hound, his mild expression into a demented howl. The maiden swoons in her chains, innocent and soft-looking above the words A MODERN INQUISITION: VOTE AGAINST TORTURE!

  “Is that supposed to be me?” Juniper asked, pointing to the maiden.

  “I took certain artistic liberties,” Victoria allowed.

  Now there is nothing to do but wait. Juniper and her sisters sit in the comfortable, shabby back room of Salem’s Sin, watching the sun fade from brass to copper to rose-gold. Strix and Pan rustle in the shadows or circle near the ceiling, restless and worried.

  Pearl’s girls rotate through at irregular intervals, rarely speaking. Juniper might have been puzzled by their odd hours and various states of undress, except that Frankie Black took her aside several weeks ago and explained in plain terms what sort of establishment Salem’s Sin was, causing Juniper to snort coffee through her nose and reconsider several of her assumptions about decency, morality, and sin.

  But there isn’t much business this evening; most of the north end’s wealthiest men are stuffed into boardrooms and elegant parlors, drinking champagne and waiting for the election results to come in like everyone else.

  Juniper rises to renew the wards across the threshold and sills every so often, whispering the words like prayers. Bella sits with her notebook on her knees, not writing anything, and Agnes dozes with Eve in a puffy armchair. Eve’s sleep is troubled, her face flushed and her brow wrinkled in angry furrows.

  An angry woman is a smart woman, Mags used to say. Juniper feels a great swoop of sadness that Mags will never meet her great-granddaughter. She folds her fingers around the locket on her chest, flesh-warm.

  She must fall asleep, because she wakes to find the room sunk into midnight-gloom, lit by a single candle. She sits with Bella for a while, feeling their breathing fall into perfect rhythm and knowing without looking that Agnes is breathing with them. Together they watch the subtle creep of shadows in the alley outside, looking for reaching fingers or sightless heads.

  The next time Juniper wakes it’s to the tap-tap of knuckles at the back door. The candle is a slumped puddle over-spilling its saucer, and the window is graying into morning.

  Bella hurries to the door and Miss Cleopatra Quinn steps through it. All three sisters look up at her, a silent question hanging between them.

  Cleo doesn’t say anything. She merely looks at them, eyes somber and tired.

  “Oh fuck,” Juniper whispers.

  Agnes shoots her one of her brand-new watch-your-mouth-there-are-children-present looks, but her face is
pale. Pan alights on the arm of her chair, neck-feathers bristled.

  “Was it close, at least?” Bella whispers. “Will there be a recount?”

  Cleo slumps into an empty couch. “The Post headline this morning refers to it as a ‘landslide,’ I believe. The Defender prefers the term ‘catastrophe.’”

  Juniper feels a delicate snap in her chest, a final thread of hope breaking. She thinks of Hill’s face—not his smiling, chinless mask, but the true face beneath it, all red gums and grubbing fear. He already possessed some dark, creeping power that lurked in alleys and stole souls; what would he do with the kind of power he could wield in broad daylight?

  A voice swears softly in the doorway behind them: Miss Pearl stands there, clutching a slinky silk robe tight around her throat and staring at Cleo. Juniper notices the seams at the corners of her eyes for the first time, the soft folds of flesh at her throat.

  Bella settles on the couch beside Cleo. “He won’t take office for a while. We’ve still got time, we can prepare.” She sounds like a woman trying to reason with a rifle or a bear trap. From the corner, Strix makes a soft, sorrowing sound.

  Cleo shakes her head once. “In light of the city’s great need—witches running loose, murderers not apprehended, recent evidence of black magic, et cetera—he’s taking immediate control. The Fair is closing early, the police force is expanding. He spoke this morning from the steps of the capitol.” She withdraws a flyer from her skirt pocket and passes it among them.

  Bella gasps as she reads it. Agnes sighs. Juniper swears.

  To protect our BELOVED CITIZENS against the ongoing scourge of WITCHCRAFT, the city of New Salem is obliged to adopt a new set of ORDINANCES:

  For Immediate Effect

  1. Any and all practitioners of WITCHCRAFT (including hedge-witches, street-witches, fortune-tellers, abortionists, midwives, suffragists, prostitutes, radicals, or other unnatural women) will be placed under immediate arrest and subject to TRIAL BY FIRE.

  2. Any and all individuals harboring (offering aid to, sympathizing with, housing, feeding, or assisting) a known practitioner of WITCHCRAFT will be subject to arrest, imprisonment of up to ninety (90) days, and a fine of no less than $100.

  3. Any individual or establishment selling materials known to be associated with the practice of WITCHCRAFT—herbs, potions, spells, bones, sacrificial animals, bodily substances, chalk, candles of particular colors, Satanic texts—will be subject to arrest, imprisonment of up to seven (7) years, and seizure of all assets.

  4. The GEORGIAN INQUISITORS will be immediately reassembled and granted all former legal powers and privileges historically associated with their rank, with the sole purpose of enforcing the above ordinances, with special priority granted to the infamous EASTWOOD SISTERS.

  The words trial by fire swim hideously in Juniper’s vision. “They can’t do this.”

  Cleo laughs. It isn’t a very good laugh. “They already have.”

  “But it’s not legal. It can’t be. I wasn’t the best student but Miss Hurston made us recite the Constitution in second grade.”

  “The Constitution? What, exactly, do you think the Constitution is? A magic spell? A dragon, perhaps, that will swoop down to defend you in your most desperate hour?” Cleo straightens in her seat. Juniper doesn’t think she’s ever seen a face so full of scorn. “I assure you it has only ever been a piece of paper, and it has only ever applied to a very few persons.”

  Juniper opens her mouth to argue or apologize, she doesn’t know which, but Cleo is already standing, reaching for her derby hat. “I’m going home. I have to report to my mother, and help them prepare for . . . whatever comes.”

  “Cleo, wait—” Bella reaches for her hand but Cleo shifts slightly away.

  She reaches for the door, looking back at Bella with her face hard. “It will be worse for me and mine. It always is.” She steps across their wards and out into the dull-iron dawn.

  There is a brief, strained silence, broken by Miss Pearl. “I think you ought to leave, too.” She holds the list of new ordinances in her lacquered nails. The whiteness of her face makes her mouth look like a wound, red and shining.

  Juniper feels her eyebrows shoot high. “Excuse me?”

  Pearl folds the page in neat quarters and tucks it down the front of her dress. Her fingers tremble very slightly. “Leave. Now. It just got a lot more dangerous to harbor witches or whores, and I can’t risk both at once.”

  Juniper and her sisters stare at her, mute and accusing. The red slash of her lips thins. “I know it’s not fair or right. But I owe my girls more than I owe you three. I want you gone before noon.”

  Her silk robe swishes as she turns to leave. “And take some tonic for the baby. Talk to Frankie before you go.”

  Agnes and her sisters have nowhere to go, so they go nowhere: the South Sybil boarding house.

  They move across the city with their cloaks drawn high and their faces disguised by Miss Pearl’s creams and potions, walking carefully apart from one another. They pass churches with their doors thrown wide, bells clanging in celebration; men with brass badges toasting one another in the streets; a knot of women with white sashes handing out wreaths and roses.

  At the bridge they are forced to wait, standing among a cheering crowd as a procession of white horses passes. Gideon Hill himself rides in the center, looking stern and somehow noble, transformed by the glow of adulation into more than himself, more than a man: a painted icon or an angel. Agnes hunches to disguise the baby wrapped tight against her chest, watching Gideon through her lashes. She is almost surprised by how much she hates him, and how familiar the hate feels in her chest: the bitter, futile hatred of the weak for the powerful, the small for the strong.

  They find South Sybil half-abandoned, strangely desolate. The landlady’s door swings gently in the breeze, revealing a disheveled little room with no one inside it. In the halls every other door is marked with ashen Xs, whether for plague or for witchcraft they can’t tell.

  It’s an absurd risk to return here, where Gideon and his shadows surely spied on them before, but Juniper argued that the sheer nerve of the thing would be some protection in itself. And neither Bella nor Agnes could think of anywhere else to run.

  No. 7 is entirely empty. Agnes’s few possessions have been tumbled and shaken from their places, as if some careless giant picked up her room and rattled it once or twice, and there’s a sickly, rotten-food sweetness in the air, but it otherwise looks very much like the room where the Sisters of Avalon first signed their names in Bella’s book.

  Juniper wards the threshold and windowsills while Bella picks at piles of laundry and tangled sheets, trying to restore some sense of order. “Well. It’s only for a night or two.” Bella is clearly trying for a hearty, bracing tone, but landing closer to bleak. “Perhaps tomorrow we can reach out to the Sisters. Discuss our strategy.”

  Maybe Juniper or Agnes would have answered her, but Eve coughs in her sleep and begins to wail, fists clenched, tiny tears pearling at the corners of her eyes.

  As if she knows what’s coming, as if she knows there’s no such thing as the Sisters of Avalon any longer.

  There is a balm in Gilead

  To make the wounded whole.

  A song to cure a stubborn sickness, requiring feverfew & the Big Dipper

  Three days later, Agnes Amaranth is alone at South Sybil. She’s thinking back over the summer and trying to pinpoint the moment they should have stopped, given up, run away. Perhaps after Avalon burned, or after Juniper’s arrest. Perhaps even before all that, as soon as they saw the shape of the tower in the sky and felt the wild wind of elsewhere on their cheeks.

  All she knows for certain is that they should have left before the election. Now there are Inquisitors patrolling the streets every dusk and dawn, armed officers at every trolley stop and train station. Now women are arrested and dragged past jeering crowds, their dresses torn and their throats collared, and the Deeps echo with the wails of caged wom
en. Now Hill’s purge has begun, and it’s too late to run.

  Agnes’s sisters are both off doing what they can, which isn’t enough. Juniper left at dusk to hassle the patrols of Inquisitors, leading them on a merry chase and granting their targets time to run. She kissed Eve’s cheek and strode into the hall with her black-yew staff gripped tight and her jaw set.

  Bella left even before that, escorted by an impassive, oak-skinned woman into the tunnels to confer with Cleo and the other Daughters. The papers reported that Mayor Hill was recruiting “concerned citizens” to help settle the unsettled south side, massing a small army of men and torches at the edge of New Cairo. Cleo and her mother were trying to ward what could be warded and funnel the young and old out of harm’s way.

  “I’ll ask Araminta if she has any feverfew left. Or anything else that might . . .” Bella didn’t seem to know how to finish the sentence, but merely cast a worried look at Eve.

  Agnes and her sisters had cast every spell and charm they could find to drive back the fever, to soothe her racking cough. Agnes fell asleep each night chanting spells like prayers, stroking the bloody red of her daughter’s curls, but none of it seemed to last.

  Now their witch-ways have run out. Now her daughter’s every breath rattles like dead leaves across pavement, as if autumn itself slunk down her throat and burrowed in her small chest. Now Agnes curls around her body on the narrow bed, willing her skin to cool.

  She thinks a little sunlight might help, a little clean September air in her lungs, but she keeps the doors and windows shut tight and draws a salt-circle around their bed. A new wanted poster appeared on the streets the previous day, offering a generous reward for “an infant with red curls, cruelly stolen from her rightful mother; Eastwoods suspected.” Juniper brought it home crumpled in her fist.

  So Agnes stays hidden, waiting.

  Sometime after dawn Eve falls into a deeper sleep. At first Agnes is grateful, after a long night of coughing and fussing. But the longer she sleeps the less grateful Agnes becomes. Eve’s arms lie limp on the quilt, chest flushed pink, tiny fists unclenched. Even the frown-lines on her brow have unfolded.