The Once and Future Witches

by Alix E. Harrow

Juniper ought to remember that there are places where guts don’t matter. Dark cellars, little white rooms where they lock you up until you lose the dangerous habit of courage.

She thinks distantly that it might be nice to burn, because at least she’ll never have to see Miss Quinn’s cat’s grin and wonder why she betrayed them.

she knows what happens to women who go to jail with babies in their bellies: they lose them. Either before birth, from rough treatment and poor food, or after it, when some flint-faced doctor rips the baby from their bodies and takes her away, still squalling.

May she snatch me through the doors of Hell And take me down with her to dwell. A spell for opening certain doors, requiring stars & scars

“Why,” Quinn answers, with a showman’s sweep of her wand, “the Underground Railroad, of course.”

“But their work was plagued with delays and setbacks, missing tools, mistakes. Because they were busy building something else beneath all that marble and money. Something that would let them move through the city without fear, whenever they pleased.” Quinn gestures with the wand at the endless tunnel around them, smooth and hollow as the burrow of some vast snake. “They taught their sons and daughters, and the secret was passed down to us.”

The Last Living Descendants of the Black Witch of Old Salem, the captions read, Still Hungry for Vengeance?

And I found you: a librarian with a clever face and hungry eyes who knew more than she ought to.

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.

Maybe it will be enough to save their wild, wayward sister from a world that despises wayward women.

“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.

Magic comes roaring through the crack, through the three women who stand in Salem’s past and present. Juniper feels the heat of it crack the cobbles beneath Agnes’s feet and blacken the earth beneath Bella; around her, the Deeps boil.

One for sorrow, Two for mirth, Three for a funeral, And four for birth, Five for life, Six for death, Seven to find a merry wife. A spell for healing, requiring willow bark & silkweed

“Hello,” Bella says shyly. How should one greet a familiar? What does one say to magic fashioned into a shape that suits you?

The Lost Way of Avalon isn’t a miracle or a magical relic or a fanciful artifact. It’s merely the truth, written and bound, preserved against time and malice. It’s— “A library,”

Juniper doesn’t much miss her body; it’s a broken, burnt thing, so full of pain there’s hardly any room left for her.

Once when she was setting his dinner tray on his lap he’d touched her wrist in a way that made her stomach twist sickly.

Juniper remembers: the snake teeth waiting always in her pocket, ever since Mama Mags folded her fingers around them and told her to keep them secret and safe, just in case.

But he was kind to her for the same reason a man is kind to a mad dog: for fear of her teeth.

“I did write, June. Once a week at first. When you never wrote back, I thought you must want nothing to do with me. I thought maybe you’d heard… rumors.”

Agnes echoes her. “The first thing I bought when I got to the city was a postcard. You never answered, and after a while I stopped trying.”

Juniper wonders if her daddy paid the postman to lose those letters, or if he burned them himself. She wonders if she ever shoveled their ashes from the woodstove, unknow...

Their closeness had always bothered him. When they were little he was forever playing them one against the other, favoring the youngest, blaming one for the sins of her sisters, finding the cracks between them and wedging them wider. But it never seemed to stick. The three of them remained a single thing, inviolate. So he split...

But—Juniper looks up at her gray-eyed sisters, here with ...

“She got scared and quit,” Quinn clarifies.

She wonders what it would feel like to mourn your daddy rather than merely outlive him.

I don’t know how a man could contrive to hang himself on a meat hook without a little help.”

“Sometimes you can’t fight. Sometimes you can only survive.”

Juniper recognizes the thing she sees there: the despair of a woman trapped good and proper, who knows no one is coming to save her.

You aren’t supposed to be alone. You aren’t supposed to be locked in a green-tiled room, chained and drugged, with nothing but the dull grate of men’s voices for company.

“You were just a child.” Bella tries to sound measured and calm, as if it is a distant hurt long forgotten, rather than an ice-shard still buried in her breast.

Her hair drifts gently upward, as if gravity is an absent-minded god who has forgotten her for this single, desperate second.

she knows that face, has seen it reflected back at her from her sisters: the terrible resignation of someone who is accustomed to pain. Who suffered too many blows, too young, and is always waiting for the next to fall.

James Juniper is the wild sister, fearless as a fox and curious as a crow; she goes first into the tower.

but the Maiden is none of those things. She’s the fierce one, the feral one, the witch who lives free in the wild woods. She’s the siren and the selkie, the virgin and the valkyrie; Artemis and Athena. She’s the little girl in the red cloak who doesn’t run from the wolf but walks arm in arm with him deeper into the woods.

Agnes Amaranth is the strong sister, steady as a stone and twice as hard; she walks second into the tower.

She’s never liked mother-stories much. They make her think of her own mother and wish she’d been someone else, someone who would’ve sent their daddy running for the hills the first time he raised a hand against her. Someone like the Mother herself.

but the Mother is none of those things. She’s the brave one, the ruthless one, the witch who traded the birthing-chamber for the battlefield, the kitchen for the knife. She is bloody Boadicea and heartless Hera, the mother who became a monster.

Beatrice Belladonna is the wise sister, quiet and clever as an owl in the rafters;

the Crone is none of those things. She’s the canny one, the knowing one, the too-wise witch who knows the words to every curse and the ingredients for every poison. She is Baba Yaga and Black Anna; she is the wicked fairy who hands out curses rather than christening-gifts.

“Took you long enough.” That’s the antlered woman, with a voice like snake teeth and briars. “Well.” Juniper shrugs. “We were busy. And you were dead.”

Lady bird, lady bird, fly away home. A spell for flight, requiring rowan & starlight

“We bound ourselves to the words themselves, Belladonna. We won’t fade until children forget their rhymes and mothers lose their lullabies, until the last witch forgets the last word.”

“Avalon wasn’t the first library. Alexandria, Antioch, Avicenna… They keep burning us. We keep rising again.”

If we could catch him at some kind of public speech, maybe, or a parade. He’s bound to hold one eventually, man like him.”

Rain, rain go away Come again another day. A spell to delay a coming storm, requiring mere luck

“I believe this is yours, if you’ll have it.” Cleo’s voice is less sure now, higher than usual. “As am I.”

The rest of the conversation is silent, conducted in the wordless language of skin and heartbeat.

“Because there’s no other way. Because the witches always burn in the end. Because I want my daughter back.”

“You have it.” His voice is too low, rough with unsaid things. “I am yours to command, Agnes Amaranth.”