Then there are the others my sisters bring with them. Stragglers and lost girls, outcasts and outlaws. Girls running from their suitors or fathers or uncles or neighbors; from weddings and boarding schools and convents; from desperation and despair and the siren call of wading into rivers with stones in their pockets.
I give them a place to hide and to rest, to gather the frayed ends of themselves. And sometimes, if they ask, I give them more. I teach them which herbs to pick and which words to say, which spells work best on the Milk Moon and which require the heat of summer. I teach them every bit of witching Mags taught me and every spell Bella and Cleo drag back, and send them out into the world like thistleseeds tossed into the wind. I hope they might take root and grow tall, thorned and beautiful.
I suspect they will. Already I can feel the world shifting around me, changing like a riverbank beneath rising water. The papers Bella brings home talk about burning factories and brutal men found dead, about a sewing circle caught spreading seditious spells and a Colorado mining town where no man dared to tread. Out west the Indian Wars are going poorly—or well, according to my line of thinking—and there are rumors of rebellion in Old Cairo.
I guess something rose from my ashes, after all. Makes me wonder if maybe those phoenix stories were never really about birds in the first place.
The backlash will come one day, the way it always does. I know the world won’t change easy, that more women will burn before it does, but at least I got to see the beginning. Bella says I could linger as long as I liked, being dead and all.
I don’t figure I’ll stay longer than is natural. One day when Eve is long grown and my sisters grown old, when perhaps the lost girls come less often to visit me because the world is less cruel, I’ll just lay myself down to rest beside the Maiden and Mother and Crone. The Three will become Four and the Eastwoods will fade into myth and rumor and fire-lit witch-tale.
It’s dusk now. Very soon the air will twist and two women will appear on either side of me. Their cheeks will be flushed with the heat of witching and their cloaks will twist in the autumn wind that still blows in Avalon, even in springtime. One of them will be tall and narrow and clever-looking, eyes bright behind her spectacles; one of them will be sweet-faced and sturdy, a baby clinging tight to her chest.
I will smile up at them and see for a moment not my sisters but as the first notes of a half-familiar song, the first lines of a story that has been told before and will be told again:
Once upon a time there were three witches.
Acknowledgments
If I were to tell you the tale of writing this book, it would go like this: Once there was a girl with a story she wanted to tell. She’d told stories before, so she set sail boldly. Very soon she found herself lost at sea, besieged by plot twists and broken arcs, murky metaphors and shifting themes. She had the words, but she lost her way and her will.
Fortunately, she wasn’t alone. She had her agent, Kate McKean, to answer even the most dramatic late-night emails with common sense and comfort. Nivia Evans, her editor, to see the story she was trying to tell and help her chart a course toward it. Lisa Marie Pompilio to make it beautiful; Roland Ottewell and Andy Ball to make it right; Ellen Wright and the rest of the Orbit/Redhook team to share it with the world.
She had Andy Ball, Edward James, and Niels Grotum to provide last-second Latin consultations; the courtyard of the Madison County Public Library to provide sunshine and silence; the Moonscribers to provide wit and wine.
She had the most generous and insightful early readers anyone could ask for: Laura Blackwell, E. Catherine Tobler, Lee Mandelo, and Ziv Wities. Without them she would have surely sunk, all souls feared lost.
She had babysitting and brunch from Taye and Camille; a constant supply of love and puns from her brothers; bottomless faith from her parents even when she lost all faith in herself.
She had Finn and Felix, who were far too busy writing their own stories to worry much about their mother’s.
And she had Nick. Her north star, her compass, her lighthouse, her once-upon-a-time and her happily-ever-after. Who sailed beside her through every storm and never once doubted she would bring them safely into harbor.
After a year at sea—after a hundred dark nights beneath nameless constellations, after missed deadlines and scrapped chapters—she did. The girl stood on the shore, under-slept and over-caffeinated, her story told.
She thought she might tell another.
extras
about the author
Alix E. Harrow is an ex-historian with lots of opinions and excessive library fines, currently living in Kentucky with her husband and their semi-feral children. Her short fiction has been nominated for the Hugo, Nebula and Locus awards. The Ten Thousand Doors of January was her debut novel. Find her on Twitter at @AlixEHarrow.
Find out more about Alix E. Harrow and other Orbit authors by registering online for the free monthly newsletter at www.orbitbooks.net.
if you enjoyed
THE ONCE AND FUTURE WITCHES
look out for
A DECLARATION OF THE RIGHTS OF MAGICIANS
by
H. G. Parry
It is the Age of Enlightenment – of new and magical political movements, from the necromancer Robespierre calling for revolution in France to the weather mage Toussaint L’Ouverture leading the slaves of Haiti in their fight for freedom, to the bold new Prime Minister William Pitt weighing the legalization of magic among commoners in Britain and abolition throughout its colonies overseas.
But amid all of the upheaval of the enlightened world, there is an unknown force inciting all of human civilisation into violent conflict. And it will require the combined efforts of revolutionaries, magicians, and abolitionists to unmask this hidden enemy before the whole world falls to chaos.
West Africa
They came the summer she was six. She and her brother were alone in the house when strangers broke in, armed with muskets and knives. Her brother yelled to her to run, but she stumbled on the ground outside, and a pair of hands seized her. They took her brother too. She never knew what happened to her parents.
When she saw the blanched white faces and pale eyes of the men to whom she was to be sold, her attempts at bravery broke, and she burst into tears. Her brother and his friends had told stories about the ghosts that came and took people away. The ghosts lived in a hollow world, they said, that roamed the sea and swallowed people up. The people brought to them were placed under evil magic, so that their minds fell asleep and their bodies belonged to the ghosts.
The man who sold her told her that it wasn’t true. The ghosts were men, white men, and they were from a country over the sea. They didn’t want to feed her to their hollow world—which was called a ship and was used for traveling oceans. They only wanted her to work for them in their own country. It was true about the magic, though. They would feed it to her on the first day. From then on, she would belong to them.
They took the men and older boys into the ship first. Her brother crying out to her as she was torn away from his arms wrenched her heart in two. It was the last time she would hear her name for a very long time.
It was dark in the belly of the ship, and the fetid stench was worse than anything she had ever imagined. She cried and fought not to go down, but one of the men cuffed her hard so she was dizzy, and before her head could recover she was lying in a tiny, filthy space with shackles about her wrists and ankles. The metal was cold, and sticky with someone else’s blood.