The Near Witch (9 page)

I
DON
’
T REMEMBER FALLING ASLEEP
.

I climbed in the window as the dawn was breaking, my mind a nest of questions, and now somehow it is fully morning. I roll over, and Wren is there beside me, her knees drawn up and her head bent down, Dreska’s charm still tied around her wrist. She shivers, curls in even farther. I sometimes forget how small she is.

A moment later her eyes flick open, bold and blue. She’s not even fully awake when she frowns deeply and sits up. Her gaze goes straight to the window.

“What is it?” I ask, my throat thick from sleep.

My sister begins to pick at a thread on the old quilt, her eyes still staring out the window. Wren is not a quiet thing, so to see her so tight-lipped is strange. She begins to hum that silly rhyme, but only sings little pieces to herself, skipping middles so that the sound is fractured, wandering.

“Are you all right?” I ask, sitting up. I run my hands through my hair, trying to untangle it.

She meets my eyes, but does not stop humming.

“Are you worried about Edgar?” I ask. “They’ll find him.”

Her fingers keep pulling at the stray thread as the melody finally trails off. Then she says, “I just wish they’d stop playing.”

“Playing? You think it’s a game?”

She nods very seriously. “They asked me to come play, too, but I said no. I’m not afraid,” she adds quickly, “but it was just, they came so late.”

“What do you mean,
they
, Wren?”

“Ed and Cece.”

“Cecilia?” I ask, the name caught in my throat. Cecilia Porter. The girl who took Wren’s hand in the singing circle, a splash of freckles and a cluster of auburn curls.

Wren leans forward, in the exaggerated way children do when confiding a secret.

“I heard them, out there.” She points to the world beyond the window, soaked in morning light.

“When did you hear them? Last night?”

She nods, matter-of-fact.

“Are you sure you didn’t dream it?”

Wren shakes her head, focusing again on the window.

“Did you see anything out there?”

“No, it was too dark.”

I remember the night wind and the way it curled into almost-voices.

“You’re sure you heard Cecilia’s voice, too?”

Wren nods. “I know I did.” Beyond our room, sounds pour through the house. My uncle’s gruff tone. Bo’s lazy drawl. My mother’s slow, steady words. But the voices are all tense, troubled in their own ways. I swallow, knowing the reason before I’ve heard the child’s name. By the time I throw on my clothes and join the group in the kitchen, the conversation is trailing off.

“…again.”

“…spoken to Maria or Peter?”

“…Alan saw nothing.”

“…would do something like this?”

“What’s happened?” I ask, slipping into a wooden chair. But I already know. My heart sinks as my mother says: “Cecilia.”

“Been taken,” grunts Otto.

“Or walked off,” says Bo, leaning an elbow on the counter.

“Disappeared, nonetheless,” whispers my mother.

“No one knows.”

My chest tightens. Wren knew. Footsteps sound on the threshold, eager and strong, and moments later, Tyler strides into the kitchen.

“Otto,” he says, “the men are gathered.” I notice he’s careful not to say
where
, or what they plan to do. But I’ll find out. I have to. My uncle gives him a curt nod, setting his cup on the table.

Tyler’s eyes find mine, and his chin tips up. I know he is proud at being considered one of the men. He crosses the room to me, taking my hand from my side and kissing it, knowing I’ll endure it in front of my uncle. I can feel the weight of Otto’s eyes as Tyler relishes the moment. I stiffen, waiting for him to release me, but his grip lingers.

“I promise, Lexi,” he says, his mouth a strong line, his eyebrows appropriately knit, “we’ll stop this thief before anyone else comes to harm.” Yes,
we
will, I think, keeping my face a mask of calm. But I don’t trust myself to speak, so I only nod and pull my fingers slowly free. I wait for them to go, already carving out a path to Cecilia’s in my mind. I’ll have to be fast. I can’t afford to have them trample what few clues there are to find.

Tyler turns to Otto, waits for his orders. My uncle looks between us.

“Tyler, you’ll be staying here, with Lexi.”

“What?” we both say at once, frowning. No. I cannot lose this day.

“But, Otto—” starts Tyler.

“You will stay here, Tyler.” He turns to me. “As will you. Together.”

“If you want us together, then let us both come search,” I press.

“Head back to town,” my uncle says to Bo. “I’ll be right behind you.” Bo hoists his gun and disappears.

Tyler slumps back against the table, arms crossed.

Otto’s gun is leaning in the corner, and he takes it up without another word. As he passes my mother, he gives her hand a small squeeze. Maybe it’s meant to say
Don’t worry
, or
I’ll fix
this
, but my mother only bends her head over her work. As he passes me, I touch my uncle’s sleeve.

“Please,” I say, trying to keep the anger from rising up in my throat, trying to sound soft, “let me help you search. You said…”

Otto looks at me, and for a moment his mask slips, revealing something tired, tense.

“I said
we’ll see
, and I’ve decided it’s not a good idea. You’re safer here.” I glance at Tyler. That depends on my uncle’s definition of safe.

“I want to help.” I wonder if the strange, windblown trail will be beside Cecilia’s house as well. Where will it lead? “I
can
help you.”

His free hand closes on my shoulder.

“If you want to help, then look after your mother and your sister. I can’t afford to worry about you or Wren right now. So stay put until we figure out what’s going on, all right?” He pulls away, and just like that, the mask goes up again, and his face is all hard lines that are beginning to look more like cracks to me.

“Please, Lexi,” he calls as he leaves the room. “Just stay put.”

I follow Otto to the front door and watch him sink from sight, swallowed by the hills between us and the village.

“I’m sorry, Uncle,” I say to his shrinking shadow. “I can’t.”

Fingers come to rest on my shoulder. Tyler kisses the back of my hair.

I turn on him, surprised to see him looking as frustrated as I feel.

“Let me ask you,” he says, looking out over my head at the path Otto took. “Why do you think he made us stay?”

“How should I know, Tyler? Maybe because I’m a girl, and he thinks me too weak to help, or do anything, for that matter.”

“He doesn’t think you’re weak…and neither do I.” He angles his head down until our foreheads almost touch. “Otto thinks you’ve been to see the stranger. That’s why you keep running off.”

“Why would he—”

“And I think,” he whispers, “he’s right.”

“And why would I do that?” I push past him and head back down the hall. Tyler follows.

“He’s dangerous, Lexi.”

“You don’t know that,” I say too quickly, adding, “and neither do I.”

Tyler grabs my arm, pushing me back against the wall. “When did you see him?”

He puts his hands up on either side of my shoulders, caging me.

“This isn’t about that stranger,” I say slowly. “This is about Cecilia and Edgar.”

“How do you know they’re not connected?”

“I don’t,” I say. “And I
was
going to sneak out today—”

“To see him?”

“No!” I push against his chest, but he doesn’t budge. “To search for clues, for tracks, for
anything
that might lead us to the children!”

He presses closer, his weight pinning me. “Don’t
lie
to me!”

“Tyler Ward.” My mother’s voice slips through us. She stands in the kitchen doorway, dusted with flour, eyes calm and blue.

Tyler and I stand frozen, my mother’s presence dousing us like water.

At last he straightens his shoulders and runs a hand through his hair. “Yes, Mrs. Harris?”

“I need a few more logs for the hearth.” She gestures to the front yard. “Would you mind?”

Tyler looks back at me for one long moment, before smiling thinly. “Not at all.” He walks out, shutting the front door firmly behind him.

I slump back against the wall. My mother retreats into the kitchen.

I stare at the closed door for several moments before my head clears, and I realize what my mother has given me. A chance. I take a deep breath and follow her into the kitchen, ready to convince her, and find her adding sticks to the fire, a healthy stack of wood already beside the hearth. Her eyes find mine. And they aren’t empty. She wipes her hands on her apron, points to the open kitchen window, and says only one word.

One perfect, sharp word.

“Go.”

M
Y BOOTS ARE CINCHED
and I take off, winding a course around the back of the house, behind a small hill and safely out of sight of the chopping block in the front yard. My mind traces over the village, mapping out north, south, east, and west, and all that’s in between.

My mother might swear by kneading, but I swear by walking, by running. Moving. I haven’t stopped moving in three years.

As my boots pound across the moor, I think of the music that weaves over these hills at night. The adults don’t seem to notice, or if they do, they haven’t said. But Wren hears it clearly, and I hear
something
that crumbles just before I can make sense of it. Why?

I reach the town square, and the place is cast in a strange quiet. Just a couple of days ago it was brimming with villagers, but now there’s no one, just a stretch of cobbled ground and a few low and tapering walls.

Who will be next? I come to a stop and try to think of the spinning game. Edgar was on one side of Wren, Cecilia on the other, and now they’re both missing. How many others were playing? I remember a wiry young boy, maybe eight.

Riley Thatcher, next to the twin girls, Rose and Lilly; their older brother, Ben. Was Emily Harp there? She’s a small girl, Wren’s age, with dark braids. Her family lives at the southern edge of Near, so she and Wren don’t play together often, but I remember her because their birthdays are only a month apart. I rack my brain but can’t seem to reconstruct the circle fully. Rose and Lilly are not yet four years old, and their brother is only a year younger than I am. But Riley and Emily…have they heard the voices of their friends at night?

Who am I missing?

Wren
. A small voice in the back of my mind adds my little sister to the list. I wince and shake my head.

First things first. Cecilia.

The village is quiet and the doors are closed.

Cecilia’s house comes into sight, one of a small cluster just behind the town square. Considering the proximity of the buildings, whoever took the little girl was not afraid of getting caught. I make my way toward the clump of houses, in the hopes that there are clues the men have not found.

I am getting close when a familiar voice pours out from an open door, one of those tones that catches your ear no matter how softly it speaks. Lower than Magda’s, it spills out sharp enough to cut. Dreska. My feet catch up on the weedy earth, and I nearly trip. The sisters almost never set foot in the village.

She would sound like she is muttering to herself at something she spilled or misplaced, except that there’s another voice picking up when one of her sentences ends, old but less distinct.

“I was there,” Dreska snaps, and I wince for the recipient. The stones of the house seem to grind together. “You were not, Tomas. You were not even a thought in your parents’ minds, and your parents were not thoughts, and
their
parents were not thoughts. But
I
was there.…”

I risk a glance around the half-open door, see Dreska leaning on her cane as she jabs a gnarled finger into Master Tomas’s chest. No one ever lifts their voice, let alone their hand, against the Council members, and especially against Master Tomas, the oldest of the three. His hair is a shock of white, his skin as paper-thin as Master Eli’s. But his eyes are light, somewhere between green and gray, and always narrowed. Even though he’s ancient, he is frighteningly tall and stick straight, not curved with age like the others. He stands just inside the door, looking down at Dreska.

“That may be so.” His voice is frail, tired. “But you do not know—”

“Look at the signs.” She cuts him off. “Do you see them? I do. You are supposed to be keepers of secrets and forgotten truths. How can you not see.…” She trails off. The house trembles.

“I do see, Dreska, but if you were there to see her alive, you were also there to see her die.”

“I was. I bore witness to your ancestors’ crimes. You have wrought this—” she rasps, when he cuts in again, his nose crinkling as if he’s caught scent of something foul.

His voice dips low, and I cannot hear without walking straight into the room. The only word I make out is
witch
. And then Dreska lets out a hiss like water on hot coals.

“Don’t test me, Dreska Thorne—” says the old man, louder. “A tree grows, it rots, and new things grow.” His pale eyes gleam at her. “A tree does not rot only to come back up from the ground fully formed, bark and all.…And you should know…”

But Dreska has had enough, it seems. She throws up her hands, waves them at the man as if he had a few dying flames on his bony shoulders, and storms out. I shove myself as far back from the doorway as possible, and pretend I’ve just come this way. But it wouldn’t have mattered if I’d been standing right there in Dreska’s path. She hobbles past me, muttering to herself.

“Fools all,” she says to no one, plucking a smooth dark stone from the dirt. She limps away from the three houses that belong to the Council, and turns to the east, where another, larger cluster huddles against the gray day. Dreska uses her cane to unearth a few more rocks and a couple of good twigs before making the effort of stooping down to collect them in her dirty apron. I follow and watch, wondering what on earth she’s up to.

“Sticks and stones, Lexi Harris,” she says quite suddenly, as if that answers everything.

“Will break my bones?” I finish.

“No, silly girl,
sticks and stones
. For building birds.” She half sings in her raspy way as she hobbles along. “Gathered from the village floor, nailed to every village door, watchful eyes turned out at night, keep the evils out of sight.” She looks to me, still tottering like a knocked glass before it resettles. She is waiting for some recognition, some reply. When I give her nothing, she shakes her head, bending to fetch another stick from the road. She turns and raps me with it, smiling at its strength. I rub my arm.

“Goodness, I forget how little children know,” she says, poking me with the end of the stick. “Long ago, long before the Witch’s Rhyme ever became popular, we knew a dozen others. Back when people still had sense. Back when I was a child.”

I know that everyone must start out young, but it’s impossible for me to imagine Magda and Dreska as anything but what they are now, crooked and old. Or rather, I can conjure something to mind, but the result is a grotesque thing, only a few inches shorter than Dreska and just as wrinkled, with a voice as high as Wren’s and a broader smile, but no more teeth.

I close my eyes, trying to unmake the image. When I open them again, Dreska has hobbled down the path that curves south around the village to her home.

“Dreska,” I say, closing the distance between us. “Wren said she heard her friends’ voices calling her onto the moor. I can’t quite hear them, the words fall apart before I can make sense of them, and the adults don’t seem to notice anything at all.” Her green eyes harden on me, as if seeing me for the first time. “But everyone leaves a mark, and there are none. All I can think is that something else is luring them away, something…” I want to say witches. Craft. But I can’t bring myself to say it to her. There are only two witches in Near, and neither of them would do this.

I wait for Dreska to say something, anything, to pick up where my sentence trailed off, but she just stares at me with her sharp eyes. Finally, she blinks.

“Are you coming?” she asks, turning back toward the path, away from the cluster of homes. When I hesitate, she adds, “You’re young and foolish, Lexi Harris, but no more so than the rest of Near. Maybe even a good deal less. Like your father.” She frowns when she says it, as if she isn’t convinced that my taking after him is a good thing.

I want to go with her, see Cole again, watch her transform the apron full of sticks and stones into something more, and ask her questions that she might finally answer. But I have to finish this first.

“I’ll come by soon,” I say, looking back in the direction of Cecilia’s house. “I promise.”

Dreska shrugs, or I think she does; she might just be shifting her weight. She veers off onto the almost invisible path toward her cottage.

At the last moment, I say, “The Near Witch was real,” adding a softer, “right?” But when she doesn’t turn around, I think she hasn’t heard.

I walk on, when I hear her call back. “Of course she was. Stories are always born from something.” And then she is gone, swallowed up by the hills.

I turn toward Cecilia’s house. Dreska didn’t laugh at me, didn’t brush my questions off. I feel like I’ve earned a key to a door that no one else has been allowed, not since my father. “Like your father,” she said, and those three words wrap around me like armor. I reach the house, casting a last glance about for signs of my uncle, before knocking quickly on the door. Moments later it falls open, and I’m dragged in.