The Once and Future Witches

by Alix E. Harrow

Witching isn’t all gone, of course. My grandmother, Mama Mags, says they can’t ever kill magic because it beats like a great red heartbeat on the other side of everything, that if you close your eyes you can feel it thrumming beneath the soles of your feet, thumpthumpthump. It’s just a lot better-behaved than it used to be.

A wise woman keeps her burning on the inside.

Agnes wants to be angry at her—for being so careless and cruel and so terribly young—but she can’t quite manage it. She’s been all of those things herself; she knows the black alchemy that transmutes hurt into hate.

Bella offers, tentatively, “You know the Mother herself started all sorts of trouble, in the stories. I wish…” Her voice lowers. “I think it might have been better for us if we’d had a more troublesome mother.”

Beatrice and her sisters chose nine o’clock in the evening because nine o’clock is a woman’s hour. The dinners have been served and the dishes dried and stacked, the children tucked into bed, the whiskies poured and served to the husbands. It’s the hour where a woman might sit in stillness, scheming and dreaming.

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.

I am terrified and I am terrible. I am fearful and I am something to be feared. She meets Miss Araminta’s eyes, dark and knowing, sharp and soft, and thinks maybe every mother is both things at once.