The Once and Future Witches - Alix E. Harrow Page 0,23

streets behave oddly—peeling away from dark doorways and coiling out of alleyways, trailing after her like the black hem of a long cloak—Beatrice does not notice.

Bye baby bunting,

Mother’s gone a-hunting

A spell to end what hasn’t yet begun, requiring pennyroyal & regret

Two weeks after she found her long-lost sisters and lost them again, Agnes Amaranth is standing in a dim back-alley shop just off St. Fortitude. There is no sign or title on the door, but Agnes knows she’s in the right place: she can smell the wild scent of herbs and earth, just like Mags’s hut, out of place in the cobbled gray of New Salem.

The proprietress is a handsome Greek woman with black curls and dark-painted eyes. She introduces herself, in an accent that rolls and purls, as Madame Zina Card: palmist, spiritualist, card-reader, and midwife.

But Agnes hasn’t come to have her fortune told or her palms read. “Pennyroyal, please,” she says, and it’s enough.

Madame Zina gives her a weighing look, as though checking to see whether Agnes knows what she’s asked for and why, then unlocks a cupboard and tucks a few dried sprigs into a brown paper sack.

“Steep the pennyroyal in river-water—boil it good, mind—and stir it seven times with a silver spoon. The words cost extra.” Madame Zina’s eyes linger on the eggshell swell of Agnes’s belly. She’s barely showing, but only women in a particular state come to visit Zina’s shop asking for pennyroyal.

Agnes shakes her head once. “I already have them.” Mags told them to her when she was sixteen. She hasn’t forgotten.

Madame Zina nods amiably and hands her the brown paper sack sealed with wax. Concern crimps her black brows. “No need to look so glum, girl. I don’t know what your man or your god has told you, but there’s no sin to it. It’s just the way of the world, older than the Three themselves. Not every woman wants a child.”

Agnes almost laughs at her: Of course she wants a child. Of course she wants to lay its sleeping cheek against her breastbone and smell its milk-sweet breath, to become on its behalf something grander than herself: a castle or a sword, stone or steel, all the things her mother wasn’t.

But Agnes wanted to take care of her sisters, once. She won’t bring another life into the world just to fail it, too.

She doesn’t know how to put any of her foolish, doomed wanting into words, so she shrugs at Madame Zina, feeling the bones of her shoulders grate.

“Let me read the cards for you. Free of charge.” Zina gestures to an armchair that looks like it was once pink or cream but is now the greasy color of unwashed skin. Ragged red curtains droop over the arm.

“No, thank you.”

Zina runs her tongue over her teeth, eyes narrowed. “I could read hers, if you like.” Her eyes are on Agnes’s belly.

Agnes sits as if something heavy has hit the backs of her knees.

Zina settles herself across from her and produces a pack of over-sized cards with gold stars painted on their backs and edges gone soft with use.

“Her past.” She flips over the Three of Swords, showing a ruby-red heart with three swords run cleanly through it. Agnes thinks of her sundered sisters and the terrible wounds they’ve dealt one another, seven years old and still unhealed, and shifts uncomfortably in the chair.

“Her present.” Zina lays out three cards this time: the Witch of Swords, the Witch of Wands, and the Witch of Cups. Agnes almost smiles to see them. The Witch of Swords even looks a little like Juniper—her hair a wild splatter of ink, her expression fierce.

“Her future.” The Eight of Swords, showing a woman bound and blind, surrounded by enemies. The Hanged Woman, dangling upside down like a sacrificial animal on the altar. Agnes avoids her gaze.

Zina sets the deck on the table and taps it once. “You draw the last one.”

Agnes reaches out her hand but a sudden wind whips through the open window—night-cool and tricksome, scented faintly with roses—and scatters the deck across the floor. The wind riffles like fingers through the fallen cards before whispering into silence. It leaves a single card face up: the Tower, shadowed and tall.

Agnes’s blood burns at the sight of it. “Here—” She claws the cards off the floor and shoves them at Zina. “Let me choose properly.”

Zina purses her lips as if she thinks Agnes is being a little stupid, but shuffles the deck. She knocks the edges on