The Once and Future Witches

by Alix E. Harrow

it’s either run or set something on fire, and she already did that.

in speaking them aloud, she had touched a match to an invisible fuse.

Sometimes a thing is too dangerous to be written down or said straight out. Sometimes you have to slip it in slantwise, half-hidden.”

Stay mad, baby girl.

Wickedness is in the eye of the beholder, baby.

May sticks and stones break your bones, And serpents stop your heart.

it’s time for the women’s movement to become the witches’ movement.”

Honey to keep things close, salt to keep things out.

Some stories were never written down. Some stories were passed by whisper and song, mother to daughter to sister.

Surely you are not such a coward.” “Oh, I assure you I am.”

“I may not be a witch, Miss Eastwood, but I’m quite a tolerable librarian.”

“What if they didn’t start as witch-burnings? What if they were book-burnings, in the beginning?”

“I don’t think they were burning bloodlines out, at all—I think they were burning knowledge. Books, and the women who wrote them.

I think… I think they stole the words and ways from us, and left us nothing but our wills.”

perhaps they have to make the miracle themselves.

Maiden, Mother, and Crone, Guard the bed that I lie on, One to watch, One to pray, One to keep the shadows at bay.

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?

“If you want to blame someone for a fire, look for the men holding matches.”

And if it hurts either way, surely she should at least enjoy the sin for which she suffers.

witchcraft isn’t one thing but many things, all the ways and words women have found to wreak their wills on the world.

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

They keep burning us. We keep rising again.”