The Once and Future Witches

New Salem, 1893. Witches are supposed to be gone: the old magic died in the burnings, and what remains is tidy charms and nursery rhymes. A woman who wants power has one road left, the ballot box.

Three sisters, James Juniper, Agnes Amaranth and Beatrice Belladonna Eastwood, join the city's suffragists. Among the women of the movement they start hunting for forgotten words and old ways of working magic, hoping to turn a campaign for the vote into something closer to a witch's movement.

The cost arrives quickly. Shadows and sickness stalk the sisters, and forces that will not tolerate a witch voting, or perhaps living, are hunting them. To survive they must dig into the oldest magics, find new allies, and mend the bond between the three of them.

This is historical fantasy that reimagines the fight for women's suffrage as a revolution run partly by spells. Motherhood and sisterhood sit at its centre. The tone is defiant and charged with danger, and the stakes are personal as well as political.