The Once and Future Witches

by Alix E. Harrow

she understands what Miss Stone is asking. She’s asking: Aren’t you tired yet? Of being cast down and cast aside? Of making do with crumbs when once we wore crowns? She’s asking: Aren’t you angry yet?

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 Association has battled for decades to afford women the same respect and legal rights enjoyed by men. It is a battle we are losing: the American public still sees women as housewives at best and witches at worst. We may be either beloved or burned, but never trusted with any degree of power.

But all the caring was beaten and burned out of her, and now she’s just hate with a heartbeat.

She’d been so taken by him, so seduced by the admiration in his eyes. 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.

“But she might still fail.” “And yet you will try anyway.” “Yes.” “For your sister.” Or perhaps for all of them: for the little girls thrown in cellars and the grown women sent to workhouses, the mothers who shouldn’t have died and the witches who shouldn’t have burned. For all the women punished merely for wanting what they shouldn’t have. Beatrice settles for another “Yes.”

Agnes has thought of many names—Calliope for her mother or Magdalena for her mother’s mother, Ivy for power or Rose for beauty—but now a different name unfurls from her lips, snapping like a banner on the battlefield. “Eve.” A sinful name, a shocking name. A name that broke the first world and walked into the new one, unbound and unbowed.

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

George of Hyll was not a Saint then. He was merely a witch, no different than the witches he hunted—except that he was a man, and man’s power was God-given.