The Once and Future Witches - Alix E. Harrow Page 0,1

miles from home with nothing but loose change and witch-ways in her pockets and no place to go.

She sways on the platform, buffeted and jostled by folk who have plenty of someplaces to go. Steam hisses and swirls from the engine, curling catlike around her skirts. Posters and ads flutter on the wall. One of them is a list of New Salem city ordinances and the associated fines for littering, profanity, debauchery, indecency, and vagrancy. One of them shows an irritable-looking Lady Liberty with her fist raised into the air and invites ALL LADIES WHO TIRE OF TYRANNY to attend the New Salem Women’s Association rally in St. George’s Square at six o’clock on the equinox.

One of them shows Juniper’s own face in blurred black and white above the words MISS JAMES JUNIPER EASTWOOD. SEVENTEEN YEARS OF AGE, WANTED FOR MURDER & SUSPECTED WITCHCRAFT.

Hell. They must have found him. She’d thought burning the house would muddy things a little more.

Juniper meets her own eyes on the poster and pulls her cloak’s hood a little higher.

Boots ring dully on the platform: a man in a neat black uniform strolls toward her, baton slap-slapping in his palm, eyes narrowed.

Juniper gives him her best wide-eyed smile, hand sweating on her staff. “Morning, mister. I’m headed to . . .” She needs a purpose, a somewhere-to-be. Her eyes flick to the irritable Lady Liberty poster. “St. George’s Square. Could you tell me how to get there?” She squeezes her accent for every country cent it’s worth, pooling her vowels like spilled honey.

The officer looks her up and down: hacked-off hair scraping against her jaw, dirt-seamed knuckles, muddy boots. He grunts a mean laugh. “Saints save us, even the hicks want the vote.”

Juniper’s never thought much about voting or suffrage or women’s rights, but his tone makes her chin jerk up. “That a crime?”

It’s only after the words come whipping out of her mouth that Juniper reflects on how unwise it is to antagonize an officer of the law. Particularly when there is a poster with your face on it directly behind the officer’s head.

That temper will get you burnt at the damn stake, Mama Mags used to tell her. A wise woman keeps her burning on the inside. But Bella was the wise one, and she left home a long time ago.

Sweat stings Juniper’s neck, nettle-sharp. She watches the veins purpling in the officer’s throat, sees the silver-shined buttons straining on his chest, and slides her hands into her skirt pockets. Her fingers find a pair of candle-stubs and a pitch pine wand; a horseshoe nail and a silver tangle of cobweb; a pair of snake’s teeth she swears she won’t use again.

Heat gathers in her palms; words wait in her throat.

Maybe the officer won’t recognize her, with her hair cut short and her cloak hood pulled high. Maybe he’ll just yell and stomp like a ruffled rooster and let her go. Or maybe he’ll haul her into the station and she’ll end up swinging from a New Salem scaffold with the witch-mark drawn on her chest in clotted ash. Juniper declines to wait and find out.

The will. Heat is already boiling up her wrists, licking like whiskey through her veins.

The words. They singe her tongue as she whispers them into the clatter and noise of the station. “A tangled web she weaves—”

The way. Juniper pricks her thumb on the nail and holds the spiderweb tight.

She feels the magic flick into the world, a cinder spit from some great unseen fire, and the officer claws at his own face. He swears and sputters as if he’s stumbled face-first into a cobweb. Passersby are pointing, beginning to laugh.

Juniper slips away while he’s still swiping at his eyes. A puff of steam, a passing crowd of railroad workers with their lunch pails swinging at their sides, and she’s out the station doors. She runs in her hitching fashion, staff clacking on cobbles.

Growing up, Juniper had imagined New Salem as something like Heaven, if Heaven had trolleys and gas-lamps—bright and clean and rich, far removed from the sin of Old Salem—but now she finds it chilly and colorless, as if all that clean living has leached the shine out of everything. The buildings are all grayish and sober, without so much as a flower-box or calico curtain peeking through the windows. The people are grayish and sober, too, their expressions suggesting each of them is on their way to an urgent but troublesome task, their collars starched