The Near Witch (2 page)

Wren has strayed far ahead now, and Otto casts a look up at me, giving a sideways jerk of his head. I turn and go, making note that Bo lives on the western edge of the village, so the stranger must have circled Near in that direction. Catching up to Wren, I pass by two families from the southern part of town. I slow my pace, careful to keep my sister in my sight.

“No, John, I swear he towers like a bare tree.…” hollers an older woman, holding her arms wide as a scarecrow.

“You’re daft, Berth. I saw him, and he’s old, very old, practically crumbling.”

“He’s a ghost.”

“No such thing as a ghost! He’s a halfling—part man, part crow.”

“Hah! So there’s no ghosts, but there’s half-crow people? You didn’t see him.”

“I did, I swear.”

“He must have been a witch,” a younger woman says. The cluster quiets for a moment before John picks back up too emphatically, passing over the remark.

“No, if he was a crow-thing, then that’s a good omen. Crows are good omens.”

“Crows are terrible omens! You’ve lost your mind, John. I know I said it last week but I was wrong. Today you’ve really lost it….”

I’ve lost Wren.

I look around and finally see a slip of blond hair vanishing into a nearby circle of children. I reach the cluster and find my sister, a good head shorter than most of them but just as loud and twice as quick. They are joining hands, preparing to play a game. A girl a year older than Wren named Cecilia, all edges and elbows in a skirt the color of heather, takes my sister’s hand. Cecilia has a scatter of freckles like muddy flecks across her face, vanishing along her cheekbones and into auburn curls. I watch her swing Wren’s small hand back and forth until a shape stumbles into the dirt nearby, letting out a small sob.

Edgar Drake, a boy with a whitish-blond mop of hair, sits in the dirt, rubbing his palms together.

“Are you all right?” I ask, kneeling down and examining his scraped hands. He bites his lip and manages a nod as I clear the dirt away with my thumbs as gently as possible. He’s Wren’s age, but she seems unbreakable, and he is a patchwork of scratches from always falling down. His mother, the village seamstress, has patched his clothes as many times as she’s patched him. Edgar keeps staring sadly at his fingers.

“What does Helena do,” I ask, offering a smile, “to make it better?” Helena is my closest friend and Edgar’s older sister, and she dotes on him incessantly.

“Kisses it,” he murmurs, still biting his lip. I set an airy kiss on each palm. I wonder if I babied Wren like this, would she be so fragile, so shocked by a knick or scrape? Just then she lets out a raucous laugh and calls to us.

“Edgar, hurry!” she shouts, bouncing on her toes as she waits for the game to start. I help the boy up and he hurries over, nearly tripping again halfway there. Clumsy little boy. He reaches the circle and slides in beside Wren and squeezes her right hand, knocking her shoulder with his.

I watch as the game takes shape. This is the same one I used to play, Tyler on one side, Helena on the other. The spinning game. It starts with a song, the Witch’s Rhyme. The song has been around as long as the bedtime stories of the Near Witch, and those have been around as long as the moor itself, it seems. It is a fearfully addictive tune, so much so that it seems the wind itself has taken to humming it. The children join hands. They begin to move in a slow circle as they sing.

The children sing faster as they pick up speed. The game always reminds me of the way the wind whips up the fallen leaves, spinning them in tight, dizzying rings.

Faster.

And faster, still.

The song starts over.

The words circle round on themselves until eventually the children fall down, tired and laughing. The winner is the last one standing. Wren manages to stay up longer than most, but eventually even she topples into the dirt, breathless and smiling. The children rise unsteadily and prepare to play again as my mind turns slow circles over the mystery of the stranger, with his eyes that seemed to soak up moonlight, and his blurring edges.

Who is he? Why is he here?
And there, softer in my head:
How did he vanish? How did he just break apart?

I keep an eye on Wren while hovering on the outskirts of conversations. Several people claim to have seen the shadowy form, but I do not believe them all. I accept that he passed west at Bo’s, north by me. He seems to have walked the invisible line that separates Near from the moor, though how he recognized the boundary I do not know.

The children’s laughter is replaced by a familiar voice, and I turn to find Helena sitting on one of the low walls that taper out along the edge of the square. A group of men and women crowd around her, perhaps the only villagers in the square who aren’t talking. In fact, they are all silent, and Helena herself is the object of their attention. She catches my eye and winks before turning back to her audience.

“I saw him,” she says. “It was dark, but I know it was him.”

She pulls a ribbon from her hair and winds it around her wrist, letting white-blond strands, the same color as Edgar’s, fall over her shoulders. Helena, who never manages to be loud enough, bold enough, is drenched in sun and soaking up every drop of the attention being paid her.

I frown. She isn’t lying. Her pale cheeks always flush at the first wisp of a fib, but these words pour out smooth and sure, her cheeks their usual pink.

“He was tall, thin, with dark, dark hair that fell around his face.”

The crowd murmurs collectively, growing as people peel themselves away from other groups. Word spreads through the town square that someone has had a good long look at the stranger. I press through the bodies until I am at her side, the questions bubbling up around us. I squeeze her arm.

“There you are!” she says, pulling me close.

“What’s going on?” I ask, but my question is swallowed by a dozen others.

“Did he speak to you?”

“Which way was he headed?”

“How tall was he?”

“Give her air,” I say, noticing my uncle over their heads, across the square. He has seen the gathering crowd around Helena, and is turning toward us to investigate. “A moment’s air.” I tug Helena aside.

“Did you really see him?” I hiss in her ear.

“I did!” she hisses back. “And Lexi, he was gorgeous. And strange. And young! If only you could have seen him, too.”

“If only,” I whisper. There are too many voices chirping about the stranger, and too many eyes looking for him. I won’t add mine to them. Not yet.

The group around us has grown, and the questions redouble. Otto is crossing the square.

“Tell us, Helena.”

“Tell us what you saw.”

“Tell us where he is,” says a male voice, his tone tinged with something more severe than curiosity. Bo.

Helena turns back to her audience to answer, but I grab her arm and pull her to me, a bit forcefully. She gives a small cry.

“Lexi!” she whispers. “Easy.”

“Hel, it’s important. Do you know where he is now?”

“Indeed,” she says. Her eyes shine. “Don’t you? Lexi the great tracker, surely you’ve deduced.”

Otto is at the edge of the crowd, touching Bo’s shoulder. The latter whispers something to him.

“Helena Drake,” Otto calls over everyone. “A word.”

She hops down from the wall. My fingers tighten around her arm.

“Don’t tell him.”

She looks back over her shoulder at me. “Why on earth not?”

“You know my uncle. All he wants is to see the stranger gone.” Gone, and everything back the way it was, safe and same. Her pale brows knit. “Just a head start, Helena. Give me that. To warn him.”

The crowd parts for my uncle.

“Good day, Mr. Harris,” Helena says.

Across the square, a bell sounds, followed by another, lower, and a third, lower still. The Council. Otto pauses, turning toward the noise. Three men as old as dirt wait at the door to one of the houses, standing on the steps to be seen. Master Eli, Master Tomas, and Master Matthew. Their voices are withered with age, and so they use their bells instead of shouting to draw their crowd close. They don’t actually do anything but grow older. The Council started out as the three men who faced the Near Witch and cast her out. But these skeletal men on the steps are Council only in title, the inheritors of power. Still, there is something in their eyes, something cold and sharp that makes the children whisper and the adults look down.

People diligently make their way toward the old men. My uncle frowns, torn between questioning Helena and following the crowd. He huffs and pivots, walking back across the square. Helena casts one last look at me and bobs after him.

This is my only chance.

I slip out along the wall, away from my uncle and the cluster of villagers. Leaving the square, I catch sight of Wren with the other children. My mother is beside her now. Otto is taking his spot nearest the three old men, his Protector face on. I won’t be missed.

“As you have heard,” says Master Tomas over the quieting crowd. He is a head taller than even Otto, and his voice, though withered, has a remarkable way of traveling. “We have a stranger in our midst.…”

I duck between two houses, picking up a path that leads east.

Helena’s right: I do know where the stranger is.

Almost everyone had already gathered in the square when we arrived. Except for two. Not that they like to put in appearances. But the presence of a stranger should have been enough to bring even the Thorne sisters into Near. Unless they’re the ones keeping him.

I weave through the lanes, heading east, until the sounds of the village die away and the wind picks up.

M
Y FATHER TAUGHT ME
a lot about witches.

Witches can call down rain or summon stones. They can make fire leap and dance. They can move the earth. They can control an element. The way Magda and Dreska Thorne can. I asked them once what they were, and they said
old
.
Old as rocks.
But that’s not the whole of it. The Thorne sisters are witches, through and through. And witches are not so welcome here.

I make my way to the sisters’ house. The path beneath my shoes is faint and narrow, but never fully fades, despite the fact that so few walk it. The way has worn itself into the earth. The sisters’ cottage sits beyond a grove and atop a hill. I know how many steps it will take to reach their home, both from my own or from the center of Near, every kind of flower that grows on the way, every rise and fall of the ground.

My father used to take me there.

And even now that he’s gone, I come this way. I’ve been to their cottage many times, drawn to their odd charm, to watch them gather weeds or to toss out a question or a cheerful hello. Everyone else in the village turns their back on the sisters, pretends they are not here, and seems to do a decent job of forgetting. But to me they are like gravity, with their own strange pull, and whenever I have nowhere to go, my feet take me toward their house. It’s the same gravity I felt at the window last night, pulling me to the stranger on the moor, a kind of weight I’ve never fully understood. But my father taught me to trust it as much as my eyes, so I do.

I remember the first time he took me to see the sisters. I must have been eight or so, older than Wren is now. The whole house smelled of dirt, rich and heavy and fresh at once. I remember Dreska’s sharp green eyes, and Magda’s crooked smile, crooked spine, crooked everything. They’ve never let me back inside, not since he died.

The trees creep up around me as I enter the grove.

I stop, knowing at once I’m not alone. Something is breathing, moving, just beyond my sight. I hold my breath, letting the breeze and the hush and the sighing moor slip away into ambient noise. I scan with my ears, waiting for a sound to emerge from the sea of whispers, scan with my eyes, waiting for something to move.

My father taught me how to track, how to read the ground and the trees. He taught me that everything has a language, that if you knew the language, you could make the world talk.
The grass and the dirt hold secrets
, he’d say.
The wind and the water carry stories and warnings.
Everyone knows that witches are born, not made, but growing up I used to think he’d found some way to cheat, to coax the world to work for him.

Something moves through the trees just to my right.

I spin as a cluster of branches peels itself away from a trunk. Not branches, I realize. Horns. A deer slips between the trees on stiltlike legs. I sigh and turn back to the path, when a shadow twitches, deeper in the grove.

A flash of dark fabric.

I blink, and it is gone, but I would swear I saw it, a glimpse of a gray cloak between the trees.

A sharp crack issues behind me, and I jump and spin to find Magda, small and hunched and staring at me. Her left eye is a cool blue, but her right eye is made of something dark and solid like rotted wood, and her two-toned gaze is inches from my face. I let out a breath I didn’t know I’d been holding, as the old woman shakes her head, all silver hair and weathered skin. She chuckles, crooked fingers curving around her basket.

“You might be good at tracking, dearie, but you startle like a rabbit.” She pokes me with a long bony finger. “No, not much for being tracked.”

I glance back, but the shadow is gone.

“Hello, Magda,” I say. “I was on my way to see you.”

“I figured as much,” she says, winking her good eye. For a moment only her dark eye stares back at me, and I shiver.

“Come on, then.” She sets off through the grove, toward the hill and her house. “We’ll have tea.”

In three years, I have not been invited in.

Now Magda leads me back toward the cottage in silence as the clouds darken overhead. It is slow going because it takes three of her steps to match my one. The wind is up, and my hair is escaping its braid, curling defiantly around my face and neck as Magda totters along beside me.

I am a good head taller than she is, but I imagine she is a good head shorter than she once was, so it seems unfair to compare our heights. She moves more like a windblown leaf than an old woman, bouncing along the ground and changing course as we make our way up the hill to the house she shares with her sister.

Growing up in Near, I’ve heard a dozen stories about witches. My father hated those tales, told me they were made up by the Council to frighten people. “Fear is a strange thing,” he used to say. “It has the power to make people close their eyes, turn away. Nothing good grows out of fear.”

The cottage sits waiting for us, as warped as the two women it was built to hold, the spine of the structure cocked halfway up, the roofing on another angle entirely. None of the stacked stones look comfortable or well-seated, like the ones in the town center. This house is as old as Near itself, sagging over the centuries. It sits on the eastern edge of the village, bordered on one side by a low stone wall, and on the other by a dilapidated shed. Between the stone wall and the house are two rectangular patches. One is a small bordered stretch of dirt that Magda calls her garden, and the other is nothing more than a swatch of bare ground where nothing seems to grow. It might be the only place in Near not overrun by weeds. I don’t like the second patch. It seems unnatural. Beyond the cottage, the moor takes hold, much the way it does to the north of my home, all rolling hills and stones and scattered trees.

“Coming?” asks Magda, from the doorway.

Overhead, the clouds have gathered and grown dark.

My foot hovers on the threshold. But why? I have no reason to fear the Thorne sisters or their home.

I take a deep breath and step across.

It still smells like earth, rich and heavy and safe. That hasn’t changed. But the room seems darker now than it did when I was here with my father. It might be the gathering clouds and the coming fall, or the fact that he isn’t towering beside me, lighting the room with his smile. I fight back a chill as Magda sets her basket down on a long wooden table and lets out a heavy sigh.

“Sit, dearie, sit,” she says with a wave to one of the chairs.

I slide into it.

Magda hobbles up to the hearth, where the wood is stacked and waiting. She casts a short glance back over her shoulder at me. And then she brings her fingers up, very slowly, inching through the air. I lean forward, waiting to see if she’ll actually let me see her craft, if she’ll coax twigs together, or somehow bubble flint up from the dirt hearth floor. The sisters don’t make a point of giving demonstrations, so all I have are a few stolen glances when the ground rippled or stones shifted, the strange gravity I feel when I’m close, and the villagers’ fear.

Magda’s hand rises over the hearth and up to the mantel, where her fingers close around a long thin stick. Just a match. My heart sinks and I sag back into my seat as Magda strikes the match against the stone of the hearth and lights the fire. She turns back to me.

“What’s wrong, dearie?” Something shimmers in her eyes. “You look disappointed.”

“Nothing,” I say, sitting up straighter and intertwining my hands beneath the table. The fire crackles to life under the kettle, and Magda returns to the table and the basket atop it. From it she unpacks several clods of dirt, a few moor flowers, weeds, some seeds, a stone or two she’s found. Magda collects her pieces of the world daily. I imagine it’s all for charms. Small craft. Now and then a piece of the sisters’ work will find its way into a villager’s pocket, or around their neck, even if they claim to not believe in it. I swear I’ve seen a charm stitched into the skirt of Helena’s dress, most likely meant to attract Tyler Ward’s attention. She can have him.

Aside from the odd collection on the table, the Thorne sisters’ house is remarkably normal. If I tell Wren I was here, inside a witch’s home, she’ll want to know how odd it was. It’ll be a shame to disappoint her.

“Magda,” I say, “I came here because I wanted to ask you—”

“Tea’s not boiled yet, and I’m too old to talk and stand at the same time. Give me a moment.”

I bite my lip and wait as patiently as possible as Magda hobbles around, gathering cups. The breeze begins to scratch and hiss against the windowpanes. The congregation of clouds is thickening. The kettle boils.

“Don’t mind that, dearie, just the moor chatting away,” Magda says, noticing the way my eyes wander to the window. She pours the water through an old wire mesh that does little to catch the leaves, and into heavy cups. Finally, she takes a seat.

“Does the moor really speak?” I ask, watching the tea in the cup grow dark.

“Not in the way we do, you and I. Not with words. But it has its secrets, yes.” Secrets. That’s how my father used to put it, too.

“What does it sound like? What does it feel like?” I ask, half to myself. “I imagine it must feel like more, rather than less. I wish I could—”

“Lexi Harris, you could eat dirt every day and wear only weeds, and you’d be no closer to any of it than you already are.”

The voice belongs to Dreska Thorne. One moment the gathering storm was locked outside, and the next the door had blown open from the force of it and left her on the threshold.

Dreska is just as old as her sister, maybe even older. The fact that the Thorne sisters are still standing, or hobbling, is a sure sign of their craft. They’ve been around as long as the Council, and not just Tomas and Matthew and Eli, but their ancestors, the
real
Council. As long as the Near Witch. As long as Near itself. Hundreds of years. I imagine I see small pieces crumbling off them, but when I look again, they are still all there.

Dreska is muttering to herself as she leans into the door, and finally succeeds in forcing it shut before turning to us. When her eyes land on me, I wince. Magda is round and Dreska is sharp, one a ball and the other a ball of points. Even Dreska’s cane is sharp. She looks as if she’s cut from rocks, and when she’s angry or annoyed, her corners actually seem to sharpen. Where one of Magda’s eyes is dark as rotted wood or stone, both of Dreska’s are a fierce green, the color of moss on stones. And they’re now leveled at me. I swallow hard.

I sat here in this chair once as my father curled his fingers gently on my shoulder and spoke to the sisters, and Dreska looked at him with something like kindness, like softness. I remember it so clearly because I’ve never seen her look that way at anyone ever again.

Beyond the house, the rain starts, thick drops tapping on the stones.

“Dreska’s right, dearie.” Magda cuts through the silence as she spoons three lumps of a brownish sugar into her tea. She doesn’t stir, lets it sink to the bottom and form a grainy film. “Born is born. You were born the way you are.”

Magda’s cracked hands find their way to my chin.

“Just because you can’t coax water to run backward, or make trees uproot themselves—”

“A skill most don’t look on fondly,” Dreska interjects.

“—doesn’t mean you aren’t a part of this place,” finishes Magda. “All moor-born souls have the moor in them.” She gazes into the teacup, her good eye unfocusing over the darkening water. “It’s what makes the wind stir something in us when it blows. It’s what keeps us here, always close to home.”

“Speaking of home, why are you in ours?” asks Dreska sternly.

“She was on her way to see us,” says Magda, still staring into her tea. “I invited her in.”

“Why,” asks Dreska, drawing out the word, “would you do that?”

“It seemed a wise idea,” says Magda, giving her sister a heavy look.

Neither speaks.

I clear my throat.

Both sisters look to me.

“Well you’re here now,” says Dreska. “What brought you this way?”

“I want to ask you,” I say at last, “about the stranger.”

Dreska’s keen green eyes narrow, sharp in their nest of wrinkles. The house stones seem to grumble and grate against each other. The rain beats against the windows as the sisters hold a conversation built entirely of nods, glances, and weighted breath. Some people say that siblings have their own language, and I think it’s true of Magda and Dreska. I only know English, and they know English and Sister and Moor, and goodness knows what else. A moment later, Magda sighs and pushes to her feet.