The Once and Future Witches

by Alix E. Harrow

A wise woman keeps her burning on the inside.

She crumples the map in her fist and keeps walking because it’s either run or set something on fire, and she already did that.

She’s asking: Aren’t you tired yet? Of being cast down and cast aside? Of making do with crumbs when once we wore crowns? She’s asking: Aren’t you angry yet?

Every woman draws a circle around herself. Sometimes she has to be the only thing inside it.

The rules aren’t written down anywhere, but the important rules rarely are.

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.

The problem with saving someone, Bella thinks, is that they so often refuse to remain saved.

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?

“If you want to blame someone for a fire, look for the men holding matches.”

That’s all magic is, really: the space between what you have and what you need.”

Men really ought to try offers of fealty rather than flowers.

Agnes would stroke the hair back from Juniper’s forehead and whisper, It’ll be alright. 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.

She begins to believe that the words and ways are whichever ones a woman has, and that a witch is merely a woman who needs more than she has.