The Once and Future Witches

by Alix E. Harrow

“Because my father and mother are adamant in their belief that they raised a son, instead of a daughter.” She lets the statement stand for a moment before adding, gently, “I never had a brother, Juniper.”

“This fight.” Jennie rubs the broken bridge of her nose. “To just—live, to be—is one that I was signed up for before I was even born. I don’t get to walk away.”

thinking about bindings and blood and the sideways logic of love: all for one and one for all, a dead-even trade that adds up to infinity.

Now I lay thee down to sleep, I pray the Lord your soul to keep. A spell for sleep, requiring crushed lavender & a whisper

Once upon a time there were three sisters. They were born in a forgotten kingdom that smelled of honeysuckle and mud, where the Big Sandy ran wide and the sycamores shone white as knuckle-bones on the banks. The sisters had no mother and a no-good father, but they had each other; it might have been enough.

The sisters survived their breaking. They learned to swallow their rage and their loneliness, their heartbreak and their hate, until one day they found one another again in a faraway city. Together they dared to dream of a better world, where women weren’t broken and sisters weren’t sundered and rage wasn’t swallowed, over and over again. They began to build a new kingdom from rhymes and rumors, witch-tales and will. It might have been enough.

But their new kingdom was stolen from them, burned to rubble and ash. (Two, Juniper whispers.) The three sisters survived the fire. They hid in attics and cellars, flitting like secrets through the streets, chased by shadows and torches. Perhaps they should have disappeared entirely—swallowed their rage and faded from the city like a bad dream, crept into some hillside town in need of a witch to cure their coughs and charm their crops, and been forgotten. It might have been enough. But their baby girl was stolen from them. (Three, Juniper hisses into the half-light. Anybody who knows stories knows that after three comes the ending, the comeuppance. The reckoning.)

Now the three sisters run toward their reckoning with the setting sun at their backs and whisper...

They wear no disguises, have indeed dressed the part: their cloaks are ragged and dark, their skirts black velvet a...

Agnes isn’t surprised, not really. She knows powerful men only keep their promises when they have to, and they never have to.

“P-please, sir,” she begs him, because he expects her to beg, because men are stupid when they think they’ve won. Because it might work.

A few of them, though, will see the fury in their eyes, blazing even through the callous caricature, and suspect that behind every witch is a woman wronged.

Remember, remember till the fifth of December! I know no reason why a single season Should ever be forgot. A spell to recall what is forgotten, requiring saltpeter & a single tear

James Juniper thought Gideon Hill was just like her daddy: a cowardly shit of a man who only felt whole when he was breaking something.

Juniper knows every scar and knob of her daddy’s knuckles.

Their eyes are bright and empty, shining like wet stones in their skulls; their shadows pool like oil behind them, viscous and misshapen.

May sticks and stones break your bones, and serpents stop your heart.

Vicious, venomous words that burn her throat and scorch her tongue. Words that require a furious will behind them.

Juniper has always had a brimming cup of hate inside her, a well of rage that never runs dry, but it seems to her now that she has to reach deeper to find what she needs, that ...

As I lay dying upon the earth, I raised my hands to her, But she would not even close my lips nor my eyes. A spell for a final regret, requiring a betrayal most bitter

Women are good at making their own ways when they have none.

Agnes isn’t aware of reaching for her until she feels the rightness of Eve’s weight against her arms and hears the endless nonsense-stream of her own voice (Baby girl, little love, it’s alright, Mama’s here, I’ve got you). Her ribs ache as if something feathered is trying to escape them, like vast wings.

Once there was a girl who was stolen and won back. Once there was a girl who was raised by three witches. Once there was a girl who rose like a phoenix from her mother’s ashes and winged into the light of a new world.

I wanted you to stay with me, James Juniper, and now you always will.

But Juniper learned spite in the cradle. She knows all about long odds and losing choices, about grit and spine. She plants her feet and holds fast.

“Take care of her, won’t you? She’s got to have it better than we did. A mama that sticks around, maybe even a daddy worth a damn.”

She wishes she could stay right where she is, with the frost-bitten edge of the wind in her hair and the wild wheel of stars above her and the beat of her sisters’ hearts beside her. She wishes she could run away.

She wishes she were one of those firebirds from Mags’s stories, that something might rise from her ashes.

Ring around the roses, A pocket full of posies, Ashes, ashes, We all rise up. A spell to bind a soul, requiring an untimely death & a destination

Agnes Amaranth screams. The wolf howls. The crowd roars. And beneath all that desperate noise Agnes hears the soft, inevitable sound of her own heart breaking.

In the end it’s still your life or your freedom, your sister or your daughter, and someone still has to pay.

Agnes is the strong sister, the steady sister who stands unflinching, but now she looks away. She cannot bear to watch her sister burn.

Juniper is the wild sister, the sly sister, never caught, always running, but she can’t run from this.

She hears singing as she dies, distant and familiar. A children’s rhyme she used to chant with her sisters on summer evenings when they were young and whole, when the world was soft and green and small, when they thought they could hold hands forever, unbroken.

What is magic, anyway, if not a way when there is none?

Bella is the wise sister, the bookish one, the knowing one, but she doesn’t know whether it was enough.

Agnes wants to climb into the fire and burn alongside her sister. She wants to scream until her throat is flayed raw from screaming, until the whole city has to stop and look and see what they have wrought. She wants to step into nowhere and call Juniper’s name.

It’s only in Agnes’s head that she hears a small, wild girl begging her: Don’t leave me.

They had lost too much—a library called back and then burned; a sister found and then lost forever—but not everything. Not the sound of her daughter flying with moon-shine on her skin, laughing.

But then Bella and Agnes called the tower back out of nowhere, and I held my baby niece in my arms, and all those regrets faded like cheap newsprint in the rain.