The Once and Future Witches

by Alix E. Harrow

“No. In fact we have been instructed to inform the authorities if we see you on the premises.” Miss Munley slants an unreadable look at Beatrice and adds, “So I would advise you to leave the premises at once. Before I see you.”

Mr. Blackwell does not look especially displeased to be faced with an unsolvable puzzle; he looks instead like a man receiving an early birthday gift.

Agnes imagines leaning close and sinking her teeth into his lip, biting until the taste of blood overcame the taste of tears on her tongue. 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.

bone-colored bracken,

“And yet you will try anyway.” “Yes.” “For your sister.” Or perhaps for all of them: for the little girls thrown in cellars and the grown women sent to workhouses, the mothers who shouldn’t have died and the witches who shouldn’t have burned. For all the women punished merely for wanting what they shouldn’t have.

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?

That evening Miss Lee feeds them a cabbage-and-ham stew which Juniper doubts has done more than meet a ham once in passing.

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

“You have it.” His voice is too low, rough with unsaid things. “I am yours to command, Agnes Amaranth.” Agnes feels a heady heat through her, like summer wine. Men really ought to try offers of fealty rather than flowers.

Over the winter Cleo received a not-insubstantial contract from John Wiley & Sons to write a book chronicling the sudden upsetting rise of witchcraft among the sharecroppers and freed-women of the South.