The Once and Future Witches - Alix E. Harrow Page 0,2

and their skirts buttoned tight.

Maybe it’s the absence of witching; Mags said magic invited a certain amount of mess, which was why the honeysuckle grew three times as fast around her house and songbirds roosted under her eaves no matter the season. In New Salem—the City Without Sin, where the trolleys run on time and every street wears a Saint’s name—the only birds are pigeons and the only green is the faint shine of slime in the gutters.

A trolley jangles past several inches from Juniper’s toes and its driver swears at her. Juniper swears back.

She keeps going because there’s no place to stop. There are no mossy stumps or blue pine groves; every corner and stoop is filled up with people. Workers and maids, priests and officers, men with pocket-watches and ladies with big hats and children selling buns and newspapers and shriveled-up flowers. Juniper tries asking directions twice but the answers are baffling, riddle-like (follow St. Vincent’s to Fourth-and-Winthrop, cross the Thorn, and head straight). Within an hour she’s been invited to a boxing match, accosted by a gentleman who wants to discuss the relationship between the equinox and the end-times, and given a map that has nothing marked on it but thirty-nine churches.

Juniper stares down at the map, knotted and foreign and unhelpful, and wants to go the hell home.

Home is twenty-three acres on the west side of the Big Sandy River. Home is dogwoods blooming like pink-tipped pearls in the deep woods and the sharp smell of spring onions underfoot, the overgrown patch where the old barn burned and the mountainside so green and wet and alive it makes her eyes ache. Home is the place that beats like a second heart behind Juniper’s ribs.

Home was her sisters, once. But they left and never came back—never even sent so much as a two-cent postcard—and now neither will Juniper.

Red rage swells in Juniper’s chest. She crumples the map in her fist and keeps walking because it’s either run or set something on fire, and she already did that.

She walks faster, faster, stumbling a little on her bad leg, shouldering past wide bustles and fashionable half-capes, following nothing but her own heartbeat and perhaps the faintest thread of something else.

She passes apothecaries and grocers and an entire shop just for shoes. Another one for hats, with a window full of faceless heads covered in lace and froth and frippery. A cemetery that sprawls like a separate city behind a high iron fence, its lawn clipped short and its headstones straight as stone soldiers. Juniper’s eye is drawn to the blighted, barren witch-yard at its edges, where the ashes of the condemned are salted and spread; nothing grows in the yard but a single hawthorn, knobbled as a knuckle.

She crosses a bridge stretched over a river the color of day-old gravy. The city grows taller and grayer around her, the light swallowed by limestone buildings with domes and columns and men in suits guarding the entrances. Even the trolleys are on their best behavior, gliding past on smooth rails.

The street pours into a broad square. Linden trees line its edges, pruned into unnatural sameness, and people flock around the center.

“—why, we ask, should women wait in the shadows while their fathers and husbands determine our fates? Why should we—we doting mothers, we beloved sisters, we treasured daughters—be barred from that most fundamental of rights: the right to vote?”

The voice is urgent and piercing, rising high above the city rumble. Juniper sees a woman standing in the middle of the square wearing a white-curled wig like some small, unfortunate animal pinned to her head. A bronze Saint George glares down at her and women press near her, waving signs and banners.

Juniper figures she’s found St. George’s Square and the New Salem Women’s Association rally after all.

She’s never seen a real live suffragist. In the Sunday cartoons they’re drawn scraggle-haired and long-nosed, suspiciously witchy. But these women don’t look much like witches. They look more like the models in Ivory soap ads, all puffed and white and fancy. Their dresses are ironed and pleated, their hats feathered, their shoes shined and smart.

They part around Juniper as she shoves forward, looking sideways at the seasick roll of her gait, the Crow County mud still clinging to her hem. She doesn’t notice; her eyes are on the strident little woman at the foot of the statue. A badge on her chest reads Miss Cady Stone, NSWA President.

“It seems that our elected politicians disagree with