The Once and Future Witches

by Alix E. Harrow

cheeks as it passes. “Or we could win it all. If we stop worrying so much about what a woman should and shouldn’t do, what’s respectable and what’s not. If we stand and fight, all of us together.

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. She doesn’t much care for fate.

silence. She can feel glances winging past her. “It’s a risk just to be a woman, in my experience. No matter how healthy or hardworking she is.” A great weariness washes over her as she says it, a grim bone-tiredness that makes her want to walk away and keep walking, until she finds someplace soft and green and safe to have her child. But no such place exists.

“You’re here because you want more for yourselves, better for your daughters. Because it’s easy to ignore a woman.”

A girl is such an easy thing to break: weak and fragile, all alone, all yours. But they aren’t girls anymore, and they don’t belong to anyone. And they aren’t alone.

I am terrified and I am terrible. I am fearful and I am something to be feared.

“Chosen? If you three were chosen, it was by circumstance. By your own need. That’s all magic is, really: the space between what you have and what you need.”

“And so is every woman who says what she shouldn’t or wants what she can’t have, who fights for her fair share.”

The backlash will come one day, the way it always does. I know the world won’t change easy, that more women will burn before it does, but at least I got to see the beginning. Bella says I could linger as long as I liked, being dead and all.