The Once and Future Witches

by Alix E. Harrow

That temper will get you burnt at the damn stake, Mama Mags used to tell her. A wise woman keeps her burning on the inside.

And the world comes unsewn.

He loves pieces of her—the thunder-blue of her eyes, the full moon-glow of her breasts in the dark—but he never even met most of her. If he peeled back her pretty skin he’d find nothing soft or sweet at all, just busted glass and ashes and the desperate, animal will to stay alive.

The quiet one, the listening one, the one who knew the feel of a book’s spine in her palm and the weight of words in the air.

Beatrice remembers listening to her grandmother’s stories as if they were doors to someplace else, someplace better. Later, after she was sent away, she would lie in her narrow cot and re-tell them to herself again and again, rubbing them like lucky pennies between her fingers.

Books and tales are as close as she can come to a place where magic is still real, where women and their words have power.

It’s as if the words are a river or an unbridled horse, carrying her helplessly forward. There’s a rhythm to them, a heartbeat that skips at the end of the verse, stuttering over missing words.

Juniper is chilled and dazed, emptied out except for a strange ache in the center of her. A want so vast it can’t fit behind her ribs.

her jaw is hard and square, her shoulders wide, her eyes blazing with a grown woman’s helping of hate.

The Juniper Agnes remembers was all feckless temper and careless laughter; Agnes wonders who taught her to hold a grudge, to feed and tend it like a wild-caught wolf pup until it grew big and mean enough to swallow a man whole.