The Once and Future Witches

by Alix E. Harrow

My grandmother, Mama Mags, says they can’t ever kill magic because it beats like a great red heartbeat on the other side of everything, that if you close your eyes you can feel it thrumming beneath the soles of your feet, thumpthumpthump.

wickedness was like beauty: in the eye of the beholder.

Maybe we’re just the very beginning, and all the fuss and mess we made was nothing but the first strike of the flint, the first shower of sparks. There’s still no such thing as witches. But there will be.

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

The Crone wept, and as her tears touched the stone floor, the tower trembled and fell. Or perhaps it vanished outside of time and memory and took the Crone with it. Perhaps she waits still for her stolen daughter to call out to her. The only certainty is the tears themselves.

Beatrice is very familiar with despair. It’s followed her since St. Hale’s, trailing like a loyal black dog behind her, nipping sometimes at her heels. Now she greets it calmly, almost gladly, like a childhood friend.

Agnes knows despair. She first met it on the night her mother died—a black hound that curled on her chest, bending her ribs inward—and has often heard the pad of its steps following her up the boarding-house stairs.

Juniper has never met despair. She’s caught glimpses of some black creature edging nearer—when her sisters abandoned her, when she lay down on the fresh-turned earth of her grandmother’s grave—but she’s driven it back with fire and fury, every time.

Hope flutters in Beatrice’s chest, broken-winged. It hurts far worse than despair.

A strong woman wouldn’t cry just because someone was worried about her.

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.

She’s given up on hope, but she can’t seem to leave the habit of waiting behind.

But perhaps they weren’t born for greatness, after all; perhaps no one was.

She thought survival was a selfish thing, a circle drawn tight around your heart. She thought the more people you let inside that circle the more ways the world had to hurt you, the more ways you could fail them and be failed in turn. But what if it’s the opposite, and there are more people to catch you when you fall? What if there’s an invisible tipping point somewhere along the way when one becomes three becomes infinite, when there are so many of you inside that circle that you become hydra-headed, invincible?

The trick to doing something stupid is to do it very quickly, before anyone can shout wait!

Except—and she doesn’t know why this simple arithmetic has never occurred to her—isn’t she already being punished, in her loneliness? And if it hurts either way, surely she should at least enjoy the sin for which she suffers.

“What’s wrong with loving somebody, anyhow?” Agnes hissed. “Doesn’t she deserve a little happiness?”

Bella knows her by her fingertips: ink-stained, tattooed with words in a dozen dead languages. A delicate asp coils around one wrist.

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

“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.”

She knows that history digs a shallow grave, and that the past is always waiting to rise again.

“What happened to your ring, woman?” Cleo murmurs into Bella’s hair. “I let you out of my sight for ten minutes.” “It’s your fault, really, for letting me out of your sight.” “I don’t make the same mistake twice.” Cleo’s hand finds hers and holds it so tightly her knuckle-bones creak.

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 perhaps her well is not so bottomless after all.

Even as a child Juniper knew it was a lie. But it was the kind of lie that became true in the telling, because at least there was someone in the world who loved her enough to lie.