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Bye baby bunting, Mother’s gone a-hunting A spell to end what hasn’t yet begun, requiring pennyroyal & regret
“No need to look so glum, girl. I don’t know what your man or your god has told you, but there’s no sin to it. It’s just the way of the world, older than the Three themselves. Not every woman wants a child.”
She knows what trouble looks like when it comes slinking through the open window to tug at the loose threads of your fate.
Middle sisters are forgotten or failed or ill-fated, but at least they survive, mostly; mothers rarely make it past the first line. They die, as gently and easily as flowers wilting, and leave their three daughters exposed to all the wickedness of the world.
Because survival is a selfish thing.
“So take me someplace more private.” She gives Beatrice another of those highly inappropriate looks
The rules aren’t written down anywhere, but the important rules rarely are.
Beatrice isn’t listened to very often.
She didn’t think throwing down the tyranny of man would take so many meetings, but apparently it does.
“It’ll do her good to see a woman take that no and shove it back down somebody’s throat.”
She holds her palms flat to her belly and thinks, Stay mad, baby girl.
Witching is a small, shameful thing, worked in kitchens and bedrooms and boarding houses, half-secret. But here they are in broad daylight, calling white cloaks from nowhere.
Juniper’s mother was never anything to her but a secondhand story from her sisters, a curl of hair in a locket.
There was a whole pack of boys that used to trail after Agnes; Juniper and Bella used to come up with names for them. She thinks the Adkins boy was Cow Pie, or maybe Butter Brains.
Mags had helped them all, every one, and buried their secrets deep in the woods. The preacher called it the Devil’s darkest work, but Mags said it was just women’s work, like everything else.
Juniper knows exactly how he was looking at her: like she was a colt that needed breaking or a nail that needed hammering, some misbehaving thing that could be knocked back into place.
she knows the black alchemy that transmutes hurt into hate.
It felt so good to be the one hurting, instead of being hurt.
A familiar isn’t a spell or a pet. It’s witchcraft itself wearing an animal-skin. If a woman talks long and deep enough to magic, sometimes the magic talks back.
“I should have come back for you, no matter what. I was scared.”
My maiden, my maiden, Let down your long hair, Braided tight and shining bright, A way where once was none. A spell to escape, requiring three hairs & nimble fingers
“That we aren’t going to get a damn thing by asking nice and minding our manners. That we need to make use of every weapon we have, or they’ll beat us bloody in the streets.”
“That it’s time for the women’s movement to become the witches’ movement.”
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.
“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.”
It ought to be about, I don’t know, sisterhood or union—” “The Ladies Union of Giving the Bastards What’s Coming to Them.”
“You get three days for bearing. When she’s four she can work in the rag-pickers’ room.”
but these were women who knew the difference between wanting and needing. The vote couldn’t feed their children or shorten their shifts. It couldn’t cure a fever or keep a husband faithful or stop Mr. Malton’s reaching fingers. Maybe witching could.
“And their husbands will treat them kindly? They won’t lose their paychecks in barrooms or gambling halls, they won’t die young, they won’t beat their wives for back-talk or a burned dinner?”
“It’s a risk just to be a woman, in my experience. No matter how healthy or hardworking she is.”
But no such place exists. A voice very like Juniper’s whispers, Yet, in her ear.
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.
“Welcome,” she begins, her voice clear and bright, “to the first meeting of the Sisters of Avalon.”
“My brother gets fifty cents a day at the mill. I get a quarter for the same damn work.”
“You’re here because you want more for yourselves, better for your daughters. Because it’s easy to ignore a woman.” Juniper’s lips twist in a feral smile. “But a hell of a lot harder to ignore a witch.”
“Why not at least try? Join us. Learn from us, teach us, fight with us, for all that more you want.”
Tell your tale and tell it true, cross my heart and hope to die, strike me down if I lie.
“We want them long and loose, witchy as all hell. And for Saints’ sake, make sure they have pockets.”
is true. What was lost has been found. Even the stars are not the stars I knew as a girl. Come soonest, my love. If we burn, let us burn together, S. Good October 10, 1783 Salem
There is very little Beatrice would like to do more than escort Miss Cleopatra Quinn to the Fair and buy her little fried cakes.
Beatrice is unable to continue this line of inquiry because Miss Quinn tucks her hand casually, almost thoughtlessly, around her elbow, and Beatrice becomes incapable of further speech.
But Beatrice hasn’t much mentioned her own family, for the same reason a person doesn’t much mention carrion at the dinner table.
Beatrice can barely hear her over the memory of hot wax hissing on the back of her bent neck, the ache of her knees on the chapel floor. Her hands bound together in forced prayer, cords cutting deep. A dozen clever cruelties that drove every desire from her body save one: to make them stop.
One day he came for Agnes, and Agnes threw me before him like a bone to a wolf.”
And Beatrice watched her sister choose. I saw Beatrice with the preacher’s girl last Sunday.
“Surely trust is never truly broken, but merely lost.” Beatrice’s lips twist. “And what is lost, that can’t be found?”
Fee and fie, fum and foe, Green and gold, see them grow! A spell for growth, requiring buried seeds & fool’s gold
Trap. She thinks the word and feels the iron bite as it closes around her.
gray—“I hereby place James Juniper Eastwood and her accomplices under arrest, to be tried for the crime of murder by witchcraft.”
The second thing she feels is the familiar chill of flesh turning to stone, the numbness that follows betrayal.
