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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.”
Beatrice rubs her thumb along the spine of her notebook, stuffed full of her most private thoughts and theories, her wildest suppositions and most dangerous inquiries. Her own heart, sewn and bound. It should be difficult to hand it over to a near-stranger, even impossible. It isn’t.
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.
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.
trust is neither lost nor found, broken nor mended, but merely given. Decided, despite the risk
The wayward sisters, hand in hand, Burned and bound, our stolen crown, But what is lost, that can’t be found? Cauldron bubble, toil and trouble, Weave a circle round the throne, Maiden, mother, and crone. A spell to find what has been lost, requiring maiden’s blood, mother’s milk, crone’s tears & a fierce will
She feels something snap in her chest, as if her heart is a broken bone poorly set, which has to break again before it can heal right.
“What if they didn’t start as witch-burnings? What if they were book-burnings, in the beginning?”
they stole the words and ways from us, and left us nothing but our wills.”
Agnes presses her lips to her daughter’s fiery hair and feels her life cleaving, splitting cleanly into two pieces: the time before, and the time after.
witchcraft isn’t one thing but many things, all the ways and words women have found to wreak their wills on the world.
Maidens are supposed to be sweet, soft creatures who braid daisy-crowns and turn themselves into laurel trees rather than suffer the loss of their innocence, 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.
Mothers are supposed to be weak, weepy creatures, women who give birth to their children and drift peacefully into death, 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.
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.
It seems to her it has happened this way before and will happen again, until there are no witches left to burn or no men left to burn them.
‘witches once and witches in the future.’”
“I am a witch.” Agnes shouts it a second time, louder, flinging her voice into the night. “And so are my sisters, and so will be my daughter and my daughter’s daughter.”
“And so is every woman who says what she shouldn’t or wants what she can’t have, who fights for her fair share.”
Queen Anne, Queen Anne, you sit in the sun—
As fair as a lily as white as a wand.
The witches didn’t stop chanting when Hill’s shadow vanished. The sunlight now is blinding, hot, boiling down on black wool and autumn cloaks, and the spell itself is becoming something more than itself, something that swallows lies and sheds truth.
But a baby cries, and Agnes knows that cry. It’s written on
her heart and carved into her bones. It echoes in her dreams, haunting her.
(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.
Agnes looks up at him, this man who loves all of her, this knight who has gotten his tales crossed and fallen in love with the witch instead of the princess.
Agnes presses harder, teeth against skin, reminding him what she is. He burns back at her, all want and heat, fingers tangling in her hair.
her mother died for her and now Juniper will die for Eve. Maybe Eve will be the one to finally redeem all those generations of debt, all the sacrifices of the women who came before her.
How many miles to Babylon? Threescore miles and ten. Can I get there by candlelight? There and back again. A spell for safe travel, requiring a lit candle & seventy steps
“Hello, loves.” Eve falls into her arms with a satisfied oomph and immediately grabs two fistfuls of Agnes’s hair.
There is a house down in Orleans they call the Rising Sun. It’s been the ruin of many a woman, By God I won’t be one. A spell against conception, requiring a red dawn & a drawn star
I guess something rose from my ashes, after all. Makes me wonder if maybe those phoenix stories were never really about birds in the first place.
