The Once and Future Witches

by Alix E. Harrow

The preacher back home says it was God’s will that purged the witches from the world. He says women are sinful by nature and that magic in their hands turns naturally to rot and ruin,

The wayward sisters, hand in hand, Burned and bound, our stolen crown, But what is lost, that can’t be found?

Juniper never thought much about her sisters’ lives after they left Crow County—they’d just walked off the edge of the page and vanished, a pair of unfinished sentences—but she thought a lot about what she’d say if she ever saw them again.

It’s one of those respectable, pocketless affairs that obliges ladies to carry stupid little handbags, so Juniper can’t take so much as a melted candle-stub or a single snake tooth with her. Bella informs her that this is the precise reason why women’s dresses no longer have pockets, to show they bear no witch-ways or ill intentions, and Juniper responds that she has both, thank you very damn much.

Of course she wants a child. Of course she wants to lay its sleeping cheek against her breastbone and smell its milk-sweet breath, to become on its behalf something grander than herself:

Now she watches the shadow oozing through the crowd like spilled ink, coiling around ankles and sliding up skirts, and thinks the price for this must have been even higher.

As the shadow spreads, the crowd shifts. Meanness turns to malice; heckling turns to hate.

Agnes shrugs, because shrugging is easier than talking about guilt and love and the things that still stretch between them after seven years of silence. “How come you invited me?”

Agnes nods, thinking how young and bright her sister looks right now, wishing she could stay that way. Wishing there was room for her inside Agnes’s circle.

“What, like fate?” It’s the first thing Agnes has said since they stepped outside, and both her sisters flinch from the venom of it. “Like destiny?” 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.

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.