The Once and Future Witches - Alix E. Harrow Page 0,153

the earth, laying her palm among the soft green shoots of grass. “I don’t know that the words and ways matter all that much, Bell.” She hears Bella make a small, librarianish sound of objection. “Or maybe they matter, but not as much as will.” Agnes swallows once, hard. “And I promise you I don’t lack the will.”

Her sisters speak the spell with her. Little Girl Blue, come blow your horn.

There’s a little of Mama Mags lingering in the words, her sparrow-bright eyes and her tobacco-stained teeth. Agnes wishes she could call her spirit up from wherever it sleeps or drifts, just to cry once more against her breast.

Her sisters stumble at the final line, uncertain who they are waking, but Agnes fills in the gap. “Maiden, Mother, and Crone, awake, arise!” and whistles, sharp and high.

It’s a small spell, like Bella said, a hedge-witch’s cure for a drowsy babe or a touch of Devil’s-fever. But Agnes feeds her will into it until her skin burns and her blood boils, until the magic sinks down into the black earth of nowhere and finds—a silent pulse. A secret, a whisper.

The sisters fall silent. The heat wicks away from Agnes’s flesh.

“Did it work?” Juniper’s voice rings too loud in the hush of nowhere.

Agnes ignores her, still reaching after that secret whisper in the dark, but it’s gone. Vanished. Tears slick her eyes, blurring the gray-green earth before her.

But then: “Gone, all of it gone, after all that work—”

“—disgraceful, what they’ve done to the place—”

Voices, querulous and strange, their accents lilting and lisping. Just on the other side of the tower door.

One of them shushes the others, and then—“In our day eavesdropping could get your ears turned into parsnips and your lips sewn shut. Come in, if you’re coming.”

James Juniper is the wild sister, fearless as a fox and curious as a crow; she goes first into the tower.

Inside she finds a ruin: snowdrifts of ash and char, the skeleton of the staircase still clinging to the walls, greasy soot blackening every stone.

And three women.

There is a strangeness to them, a blurred shine like moonlight on moving water, but it seems to fade even as Juniper watches, until they are as real and solid as the stone beneath their feet.

The first thing Juniper thinks is that none of them look like their storybook illustrations. They’re either uglier or more beautiful, she can’t tell which, riddled with scars and specks and the small imperfections that divide the real from the make-believe. And in the drawings the Three are always a matched set, like a single woman caught and preserved at three different ages. Sometimes they’re sisters; sometimes they’re grandmother and mother and daughter.

Juniper thinks the women standing in the tower are unlikely to share any ancestor besides the first witch herself.

One of them is gnarled and golden, with white-streaked hair and delicate lines of script tattooed across the veined backs of her hands. Her robes are wide-sleeved and monkish, black as ink.

One of them is beautiful and brown, with scars stippling her cheeks and a sword strapped crosswise over one shoulder. Her armor is overlapping scales, shining black as old blood.

One of them is pale and fey, with ivory antlers sprouting from matted dark hair and yellowed teeth strung in a necklace around her throat. Her dress is ragged and torn, black as a moonless night.

She meets Juniper’s eyes and Juniper feels a thrill of recognition.

Juniper always loved maiden-stories best. 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.

Juniper knows her by the savage green of her eyes, the vicious curve of her smile. An adder drapes over her shoulders like a strip of dark velvet, like the carved-yew snake of Juniper’s staff come to life. Juniper’s smile could be the Maiden’s own, sharp and white, mirrored back across the centuries.

Agnes Amaranth is the strong sister, steady as a stone and twice as hard; she walks second into the tower.

She’s never liked mother-stories much. They make her think of her own mother and wish she’d