The Once and Future Witches

“And even if Beatrice stumbled on an ancient spell, she lacks the witch-blood to wield it. Books and tales are as close as she can come to a place where magic is still real, where women and their words have power.”

Bella and her sisters initially proceed from the assumption that witch powers are transmitted through a bloodline. This suggests an exclusivity that proves to be untrue by the end of the novel. In this quote, Bella also emphasizes the magical power of words, foreshadowing how the Last Three have infused their magic into fairy tales and legends. 

“‘Witching and women’s rights. Suffrage and spells. They’re both…’ She gestures in midair again. ‘They’re both a kind of power, aren’t they? The kind we aren’t allowed to have.’ The kind I want, says the hungry shine of her eyes.”

Juniper gravitates to the suffragettes because they offer the promise of power. She is quick to see the similarity between magical power and political power. To the men of New Salem, the political kind isn’t quite as frightening, yet both kinds pose a threat to the status quo.

“The Women’s Association wants one kind of power—the kind you can wear in public or argue in the courtroom or write on a slip of paper and drop in a ballot box—and […] Juniper wants another. The kind that cuts, the kind with sharp teeth and talons.”

Once Juniper sees the connection between politics and magic as two kinds of power, she is equally quick to notice the distinction between them. The suffragettes want socially sanctioned power: The vote is respectable in the eyes of men, but magic is not.

“Juniper can feel the terms shifting around them, the boundaries bending. She can see faces—mostly women, mostly young—watching them with fascinated hunger in their eyes.”

Juniper has just staged her suffrage rally by using magic. This intrigues the young female spectators because it opens their eyes to forbidden possibilities. Magical power isn’t something that men alone can grant; it’s something that women can take for themselves. 

“To see her daughter grow free and fearless, walking tall through the dark woods of the world, armed and armored. To whisper in her ear each night: Don’t forget what you are. Everything.”

Agnes imagines a future conversation with her daughter. Her emphasis on the word “everything” is a contradiction to the message her father taught his daughters. At several points in the book, he attempts to ingrain an unforgettable message that they are nothing. Agnes is proof that the message didn’t last; witchcraft restored her confidence in herself, and she wants to transmit this power to the next generation.

“‘You’re here because you want more for yourselves, better for your daughters. Because it’s easy to ignore a woman.’ Juniper’s lips twist in a feral smile. ‘But a hell of a lot harder to ignore a witch.’”

Juniper addresses the attendees at the first meeting of the Sisters of Avalon. The meeting was advertised in the newspapers as a new group of suffragettes, but Juniper makes it clear that suffragettes are merely women, and the men in power can ignore them. The men in power fear witches too much to ignore them. 

“Juniper wishes, with a poisonous twist in her stomach, that her daddy could see them. A girl is such an easy thing to break: weak and fragile, all alone, all yours. But they aren’t girls anymore, and they don’t belong to anyone. And they aren’t alone.”

Juniper’s observation evokes the book’s central theme. Male tactics of control depend upon a divide-and-conquer strategy. By assembling a group of witches in New Salem, the Eastwood sisters are not alone. Their strength lies in their unity. 

“She decides she doesn’t care, that maybe trust is neither lost nor found, broken nor mended, but merely given. Decided, despite the risk.”

Bella weighs whether or not she can trust Quinn. Due to her father’s machinations, Bella has spent the better part of her life mistrusting her sisters. After overcoming this familial hurdle, she is now ready to make a similar leap of faith by drawing Quinn into her confidence. This gesture further weakens the barriers that have always kept women separated from one another. 

“Must a thing be bound and shelved in order to matter? Some stories were never written down. Some stories were passed by whisper and song, mother to daughter to sister.”

Quinn rebukes Bella for failing to take informal communication seriously. As a librarian, she has been conditioned to believe the only words that matter are printed. She fails to see that casual verbal messages and nonsense rhymes are a form of code. Their offhanded nature belies their serious intent to subvert the powers that be. 

“She’d been so taken by him, so seduced by the admiration in his eyes. But she should have known no man ever loved a woman’s strength—they only love the place where it runs out. They love a strong will finally broken, a straight spine bent.”

Agnes is suspicious of Lee in large part because her father conditioned her to mistrust all males. While she is correct that the men in power want to keep women dependent, she is wrong about Lee. It will take several more encounters before she is willing to trust him. She must learn the same lesson that Bella has so recently mastered. 

“Their daddy was a curse. He left them scarred and sundered, broken so badly they can never be put back together again. But maybe tonight—just for a little while—they can pretend. Maybe they can stand hand in hand, once lost but now found.”

Agnes has proven the most resistant to supporting her sisters in their magical aspirations. She is focused on her own survival and that of her unborn daughter. This quote demonstrates her resolve to help her siblings one last time before she returns to hiding in the shadows. 

“The problem with saving someone, Bella thinks, is that they so often refuse to remain saved. They careen back out into the perilous world, inviting every danger and calamity, quite careless of the labor it took to rescue them in the first place.”

Bella is exasperated by Juniper’s recklessness. No sooner do the elder siblings rescue her from prison than she goes forth to stir up more trouble. Juniper herself belatedly realizes how selfish her actions have been, prioritizing her ambition over the needs of others. Ironically, it is the selfish, reckless sister who ends up sacrificing all to rid the world of Hill’s malignant presence.

“What if there’s an invisible tipping point somewhere along the way when one becomes three becomes infinite, when there are so many of you inside that circle that you become hydra-headed, invincible?”

For the first time, Agnes considers the benefits of trust. She has always proceeded on the assumption that she is alone in the world and that others can’t be trusted. Her pregnancy and Lee’s affection cause her to reassess this belief. For the first time, she recognizes the benefit of strength in numbers.

“I am terrified and I am terrible. I am fearful and I am something to be feared. She meets Miss Araminta’s eyes, dark and knowing, sharp and soft, and thinks maybe every mother is both things at once.”

Agnes experiences the full weight of motherhood, merging with her role within the Last Three as the Mother. In doing so, she subverts patriarchal notions of motherhood as exclusively soft and nurturing. The violently protective aspects of motherhood are an uncomfortable construct and aren’t consistent with conventional notions of docile femininity. 

“She tells him […] her growing suspicion that witchcraft isn’t one thing but many things, all the ways and words women have found to wreak their wills on the world.”

Bella articulates a new theory of witchcraft in her conversation with Blackwell. She is accustomed to social hierarchies and originally applied those same notions to witchcraft, thinking it requires bound grimoires or magical bloodlines. In this quote, she articulates a much more egalitarian concept of what it means to be a witch and what it means to be a woman. 

“Of course this is the choice. It’s always this choice, in the end—sacrifice someone else, trade one heart for another, buy your survival at the price of someone else’s. Save yourself but leave your sister behind.”

Hill has just proposed that Agnes betray her sisters to save her daughter. This tactic has served controlling men well over the centuries. During the course of the novel, Agnes has come to realize that there is always a third option not presented. To find another way that involves solidarity rather than betrayal. 

“Chosen? If you three were chosen, it was by circumstance. By your own need. That’s all magic is, really: the space between what you have and what you need.”

The Last Three offer this comment to the Eastwoods. Once again, these words take magic out of the realm of hierarchy and places power in the hands of all women. The sisters became the new three because they needed to reconstitute their relationship with one another. 

“Agnes repeats the words to herself, rolling them over her tongue. They taste like grave-dirt and vengeance, like death long overdue. Pan’s claws flex around her shoulder, pricking her flesh. You are not invincible, Gideon Hill.”

Agnes has found the third way in the impossible choice that Hill has offered her. It is especially ironic that the magic words needed to bring him down come from Humpty Dumpty: A nonsensical children’s rhyme escapes the notice of the powerful because it seems utterly innocuous. Magic has survived because it is concealed in words that convey no overt threat.

“All for one and one for all, a dead-even trade that adds up to infinity. She thinks how upside-down it is that she started this fight out of rage—spite and fury and sour hate—and that she’ll finish it for something else entirely.”

Juniper began her reign of terror as a form of payback for the abuse she suffered at her father’s hands. Her reckless vendetta endangered both her sisters and her friends because she was pursuing a solitary war. At this point in the story, she has come to recognize the value of solidarity, too. She decides that sometimes, a single life needs to be sacrificed for the good of all and she is ready to make that sacrifice. 

“She knows that history digs a shallow grave, and that the past is always waiting to rise again.”

Bella utters these ominous words as she reviews the trial transcripts of the Old Salem witch trials. She knows what awaits the Eastwoods once they surrender themselves to the law. At the same time, she fails to see another interpretation of her words. History has also dug a shallow grave in the legend of the Last Three Witches. Their own past is also waiting to rise again. 

“I am a witch […] And so is every woman who says what she shouldn’t or wants what she can’t have, who fights for her fair share.”

Agnes makes this confession from the scaffold. She recognizes that witches are not a special class of people who possess inherent supernatural powers. They are simply women who refuse to submit to unjust laws that want to relegate them to the status of second-class human beings. Witches are not demons, but disruptors.

“Here she thought she had escaped Hill’s trap, refused his too-high price, but in the end she’d merely delayed it. In the end it’s still your life or your freedom, your sister or your daughter, and someone still has to pay.”

Agnes comes to the heartbreaking realization that a sacrifice is required to end Hill’s toxic influence over the world. What she fails to see at this point is that Juniper’s sacrifice will not be in vain. The youngest Eastwood has rescued magic for humankind, and magic will rescue her from oblivion. 

“Bella begins to believe that the Library of Avalon was only ever a sliver of witchcraft in the first place. She begins to believe that the words and ways are whichever ones a woman has, and that a witch is merely a woman who needs more than she has.”

This same statement has been made many times before in the novel: Witchcraft is equated with female power. While male authority fears female power and tries to suppress it and demonize it, witchcraft is nothing more than the desire to create a better life for oneself and others.