Every daddy teaches his sons how to spell ax-handles against breaking and rooftops against leaking. Back home every mama teaches her daughters a few little charms to keep the soup-pot from boiling over or make the peonies bloom out of season. Witch-blood runs thick in the sewers, the saying goes. Most respectable folk can’t even light a candle with witching, these days, but us poor folk still dabble here and there. It’s just a lot better-behaved than it used to be.
My grandmother, Mama Mags, says they can’t ever kill magic because it beats like a great red heartbeat on the other side of everything, that if you close your eyes you can feel it thrumming beneath the soles of your feet, thumpthumpthump. The dragons were slain and the witches were burned and the night belonged to men with torches and crosses. It used to be witches were wild as crows and fearless as foxes, because magic blazed bright and the night was theirs.īut then came the plague and the purges. They conversed with dragons on lonely mountaintops and rode rowan-wood brooms across full moons they charmed the stars to dance beside them on the summer solstice and rode to battle with familiars at their heels. Witches lurked in every tangled wood and waited at every midnight-crossroad with sharp-toothed smiles. It used to be the air was so thick with magic you could taste it on your tongue like ash. I devoured it in enormous gulps, and utterly loved it' Kat Howard, author of The Unkindness of Ghosts 'Compelling, exhilarating and magical - a must-read' Booklist (starred review)'Delightful. Praise for The Once and Future Witches:'A brilliant dazzle of a book.
Stalked by shadows and sickness, hunted by forces who will not suffer a witch to vote - and perhaps not even to live - the sisters must delve into the oldest magics, draw new alliances, and heal the bond between them if they want to survive. But when the three Eastwood sisters join the suffragists of New Salem, they begin to pursue the forgotten ways that might turn the women's movement into the witch's movement. If the modern woman wants any measure of power, she must find it at the ballot box. There used to be, in the wild, dark days before the burnings began, but now witching is nothing but tidy charms and nursery rhymes. a tale that will sweep you away' Yangsze Choo, New York Times bestselling author of The Night Tiger'A gorgeous and thrilling paean to the ferocious power of women' Laini Taylor, New York Times bestselling author of Strange the DreamerIn 1893, there's no such thing as witches.
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