The Once and Future Witches

by Alix E. Harrow

She was the wildest of the three. The canny one, the feral one, the one with torn skirts and scraped knees and a green glitter in her eyes, like summer-light through leaves.

they’d just walked off the edge of the page and vanished, a pair of unfinished sentences

Unless there are words and ways waiting among the children’s verses; power passed in secret from mother to daughter, like swords disguised as sewing needles.

Beatrice and her sisters chose nine o’clock in the evening because nine o’clock is a woman’s hour.

Fee and fie, fum and foe, Green and gold, see them grow! A spell for growth, requiring buried seeds & fool’s gold

she supposes a person doesn’t have to love their home in order to miss it.

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.

“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.”

That’s all magic is, really: the space between what you have and what you need.”