The Once and Future Witches

by Alix E. Harrow

“I’ve read the Sisters Grimm a dozen times, every edition I could find. I’ve made a good start on the other folklorists—Charlotte Perrault, Andrea Lang—but if there are any secret instructions or notes tucked inside them they’re faded, stained… lost.”

bright-eyed and black-hearted, vicious and vulnerable, a girl who knows so little of the world and far too much.

Juniper described by one of her sisters

Agnes swallows hard into the silence. She can feel glances winging past her. “It’s a risk just to be a woman, in my experience. No matter how healthy or hardworking she is.”

Juniper claps her on the back, slightly too hard. “Oh, there will be, Yulia my friend. I got an idea.” Beatrice looks up to meet Agnes’s eyes. She and Agnes are still wary with one another, careful as cats, but at this moment Beatrice is certain they are both wondering the same thing: whether there is anything in the world more sinister than their youngest sister in possession of an idea.

Moly and spite a woman make, May every man his true form take. A spell for swine, requiring wine & wicked intent

She finds it in an obscure translation of Homer, tucked between a verse about cruel arts and noxious herbs. Beatrice is no Classicist, but she’s certain she’s never seen these lines in any other version of the Odyssey. She assumes they are the addition of the translator, a Miss Alexandra Pope.

Old Salem, where witching rose again in the New World, despite centuries of shackles and stakes. Where Tituba and Osborne and Good and the rest of them had worked their wonders and terrors, walking the streets with black beasts at their heels. Where men feared to tread and women feared nothing at all. Until the honorable Judge Geoffrey Hawthorn arrived with his troop of Inquisitors. Legally speaking, they ought to have announced themselves and made their arrests, separated the sinners from the sheep, held lengthy trials, and permitted each witch to confess her sins as she was bound to the stake. Hawthorn felt it would be more efficient to skip to the end. He and his men came in the night, silent except for the snap of lit torches.

Beatrice proceeds on foot, stepping across the invisible line that divides one neighborhood from the next—although New Cairo isn’t so much a neighborhood within New Salem as it is an assault upon it.

Mr. Blackwell does not look especially displeased to be faced with an unsolvable puzzle; he looks instead like a man receiving an early birthday gift.

a trio of boarding school girls of the kind who wear black chokers and worship the Brontë sisters.

"Brontë sisters"? Why not Brontë brothers?

Or perhaps if we read the inscription aloud—” Bella bends closer to the door, where words are written in foreign-looking script. “Maleficae quondam, maleficaeque futurae.”

The summer of ninety-three

Black Anna;

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Annis

back when the world was safe again. It never was, but still they called us from time to time.” “Old Salem,” Bella whispered. “And Wiesensteig in the fifteen-sixties, before that, and the Auld Kirk Green at the end of the century. Navarre in the early sixteen-hundreds.