The Once and Future Witches - Alix E. Harrow Page 0,25

the image printed in bold black and red: a raised fist holding a burning torch against the night. Smoke coils from the flames, forming ghoulish faces and animal bodies and distorted words: SIN, SUFFRAGE, WITCHCRAFT. Smaller, saner lettering across the top urges citizens to Vote Gideon Hill! Our Light Against the Darkness!

Three men stand clustered ahead of Agnes, holding paste buckets and stacks of posters, each wearing bronze pins engraved with Hill’s lit torch. There’s something vaguely unsettling about them—the odd synchrony of their movements, maybe, or the fervid glaze of their eyes, or the way their shadows seem sluggish, moving a half-second behind their owners.

“Tell your husband—vote Hill!” one of them says as she passes.

“Our light against the darkness!” says the second.

“Can’t be too careful, with women’s witching back on the loose.” The third extends one of the posters toward her.

Agnes should take it and bob her head politely—she knows better than to start shit with zealots—but she doesn’t. Instead she spits on the ground between them, splattering the man’s boots with cotton-colored slime.

She doesn’t know why she did it. Maybe she’s tired of knowing better, of minding her place. Maybe because she can feel her wild younger sister with her in the city, tugging her toward trouble.

Agnes and the man stare together at the spit sliding off his boot, glistening like the snotty trail of a snail. He stands very still, but Agnes notes distantly that the arms of his shadow are moving, reaching toward her skirts.

And then she’s running, refusing to find out what those shadow-hands will do to her, or what the hell kind of witchcraft is on the loose in New Salem.

She runs down Twenty-Second and turns on St. Jude’s and then she’s back in Room No. 7 of the South Sybil boarding house, panting and holding her barely showing belly. She withdraws Zina’s brown paper bag from her apron.

Pennyroyal and a half-cup of river-water: all it takes to keep that circle drawn tight around her heart. To stay alone, and survive.

She did it once before—drank it down in one bitter swallow, felt nothing but rib-shaking relief when the cramps knotted her belly—and never regretted it.

Now she finds herself setting the brown paper sack on the floor, unopened. Lying down in her narrow bed and wishing her oldest sister was here to whisper a story to her.

Or to the spark inside her, that second heart beating stubbornly on.

Queen Anne, Queen Anne

You sit in the sun

Fair as a lily and white as a wand.

A spell to shed light, requiring heartwood & heat

Beatrice Belladonna dreams of Agnes that night, but when she wakes only Juniper is there in the stuffy dark of her attic room.

She knows by the damp gleam of Juniper’s eyes that she’s awake, too, but neither of them mentions their middle sister. There are many things they don’t mention.

Yet Juniper keeps sleeping in her room and Beatrice keeps letting her, and she supposes it could just go on this way: Juniper spending her days busy with the Association and coming home with pins and sashes and rolled-up signs that need painting, Beatrice spending her library shifts following whispers and witch-tales toward the Lost Way, never quite telling her little sister what she knows or thinks she knows—maybe because it feels too unlikely, too impossible; maybe because it doesn’t feel impossible enough.

Maybe because she worries what a woman like Juniper might do if the power of witching is won back.

Spring in New Salem is a gray, sulking creature, and by the middle of April Beatrice feels like a tall, bespectacled mushroom. Juniper has taken to lighting her pitch pine wand in the evenings just to feel sunlight on her skin, talking wistfully about the bluebells and bloodroot in flower back home.

Beatrice asks her once when she plans to return to Crow County—she’s sure their cousin Dan would let Juniper live in Mags’s old house for nothing or nearly nothing, even if he is a dumbshit—but Juniper’s face closes up like a house with drawn shutters. The witch-light fades from the wand-tip, leaving them in chill darkness. Beatrice adds it to the list of unmentionable things between them.

The next morning Juniper leaves early for the Association and Beatrice reads her paper alone at the breakfast table. She has recently become a subscriber to The New Salem Defender in addition to The Post. This, she assures herself, is merely part of her increasing interest in political news and has nothing to do with the tingle in her