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It used to be the air was so thick with magic you could taste it on your tongue like ash.
Our daddy never taught us shit, except what a fox teaches chickens—how to run, how to tremble, how to outlive the bastard
She said proper witching is just a conversation with that red heartbeat, which only ever takes three things: the will to listen to it, the words to speak with it, and the way to let it into the world. The will, the words, and the way.
Every woman draws a circle around herself. Sometimes she has to be the only thing inside it
He sounds bewildered, like his proposal was a mathematical equation and Agnes produced the incorrect response. Like a nice boy told no for the first time in his nice life.
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.
She didn’t think throwing down the tyranny of man would take so many meetings, but apparently it does.
She holds her palms flat to her belly and thinks, Stay mad, baby girl
The preacher called it the Devil’s darkest work, but Mags said it was just women’s work, like everything else.
Fate is a story people tell themselves so they can believe everything happens for a reason, that the whole awful world is fitted together like some perfect machine, with blood for oil and bones for brass. That every child locked in her cellar or girl chained to her loom is in her right and proper place.
Every man who has ever wronged a woman, which is just about every man.
“Yes, well, you’re a plague and a calamity and you should be locked up for the safety of the city.”
She thinks of Jonah in the belly of the whale and the little red witch inside the wolf and wonders if either of them felt a little relieved to be eaten, to be taken away from the world and permitted to curl in the suffocating black, alone.
“Must a thing be bound and shelved in order to matter? Some stories were never written down. Some stories were passed by whisper and song, mother to daughter to sister. Bits and pieces were lost over the centuries, I’m sure, details shifted, but not all of them
She’d been so taken by him, so seduced by the admiration in his eyes. But she should have known no man ever loved a woman’s strength—they only love the place where it runs out. They love a strong will finally broken, a straight spine bent.
they’re supposed to be real witches, with familiars and broomsticks and pointed hats, instead of three desperate young women.
“You fret and worry, but your hands are steady as stones.”
The problem with saving someone, Bella thinks, is that they so often refuse to remain saved. They careen back out into the perilous world, inviting every danger and calamity, quite careless of the labor it took to rescue them in the first place.
He was a dreamer, always on about the eight-hour day and workers’ rights and utopia. It’s just that dreamers generally wind up fighting.
“Sometimes you can’t fight. Sometimes you can only survive.”
“If you want to blame someone for a fire, look for the men holding matches.”
I am terrified and I am terrible. I am fearful and I am something to be feared.
“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.”
She thinks of herself now as a librarian awkwardly bereft of a library, obliged to build her own.
She thinks how upside-down it is that she started this fight out of rage—spite and fury and sour hate—and that she’ll finish it for something else entirely.
Together they dared to dream of a better world, where women weren’t broken and sisters weren’t sundered and rage wasn’t swallowed, over and over again.
It seems to her it has happened this way before and will happen again, until there are no witches left to burn or no men left to burn them.
