The Year of the Witching (18 page)

Immanuelle nodded, satisfied that she’d done what little she could. For a farm girl from the Glades, she had certainly come far. It seemed surreal to her that she was cutting bargains with the Prophet’s heir, reckoning with witches, making plans for the future of Bethel, when just weeks ago the extent of her responsibilities ended with the borders of the Moore land.

But the time for thrilling schemes and grandeur had come to an end. For now, and perhaps forever, the plagues were over. Ezra would go his way, and she hers. Whatever affinity they shared would quickly die. In fact, she doubted they would ever speak in such a candid way again. In due time, Ezra would rise to take his place as Prophet, and Immanuelle would recede into the shadows of his past. She should have been content with that. But she wasn’t.

“Take care of yourself,” said Ezra, and he, like she, seemed to sense this was goodbye. “Please.”

She forced a smile as she pressed to her feet. “You do the same.”

“And if you ever need anything—”

“I won’t,” said Immanuelle, striding to the door. She stalled a beat, her hand on the knob. “But thank you. For all of it. You were a friend to me when I sorely needed one, and I’ll never forget it.”

From the Mother comes disease and fever, pestilence and blight. She curses the earth with rot and sickness, for sin was ushered from Her womb.

—T
HE
H
OLY
S
CRIPTURES

THREE WEEKS PASSED
without any sign of the curses. The beasts of the Darkwood were dormant. No witches called to Immanuelle in the night or haunted her dreams. Had she not seen them firsthand—had she not felt Lilith’s cold fingers lock around her wrist—she might have believed the plagues were over and been lulled into complacency like the rest of Bethel, convinced that whatever evil descended upon them had been purged by the Father’s light.

But Immanuelle
had
seen, and despite her oath to Ezra, it wasn’t easy to forget it.

That evening, Glory and Honor had retired to their beds early, sick with a summer flu. For a while, Immanuelle and the Moore wives stayed awake to tend to them. But after the girls drifted off into the fitful sleep of fever, they too retired to their respective chambers for the night.

With everyone asleep, and the farmhouse quiet, Immanuelle returned to the pages of her mother’s book. This had been her ritual every night since Ezra’s formal investiture as the Prophet’s heir. She turned to her favorite drawing in the book—the portrait
of her father, Daniel Ward, that Miriam had sketched all those years ago.

Now that the plague was over, she felt she had time to mourn her father in a way that she never had before. She’d always lived alongside Miriam’s memory, having grown up in the house of her childhood, but it was different with Daniel. He had never been fully real to her in the way that Miriam was . . . until that evening, weeks ago, when she’d first read her census account at the Haven and seen the witch mark beside her name, the same one that denoted the accounts of so many Wards who’d come before her.

And while a part of her desperately wanted to keep her promise to Ezra and put the past behind her, an even greater part of her wanted to understand the truth of who and what she was. She wanted to know her kin in the Outskirts, and if they suffered from the same temptations she did. She wanted to understand why she was so compelled by the Darkwood, why the witches first gave her Miriam’s journal, why they chose to use her blood as an offering to spawn that horrible plague. Perhaps it was just her pride, but try as she might, she couldn’t resign herself to the life she’d led before. She wanted answers and she knew where to find them: in the Outskirts, with the kin she’d never known.

The only thing that kept her from pursuing answers was her oath to Ezra. Still, she couldn’t help but feel that, of the two of them, she was the one made to sacrifice more. After all, Ezra knew who he was—son of the Prophet, heir of the Church—but the same couldn’t be said about Immanuelle. The question of who and what she was remained, and unless she delved into the mysteries of her past, it always would.

With a sigh, Immanuelle shut the journal and padded across the room to the window, climbed to a perch on its ledge, and brushed back the curtains. The moon was a crescent cut into the night sky. In the distance, the Darkwood was black and motionless, and even
though there was no wind to whisper her name, Immanuelle could still feel its call. The weeks of denial and repression still weren’t enough to silence it. Staring at the trees, she wondered if she would ever be free of that temptation. Or if the Darkwood’s thrall was as intrinsic to her as the Sight was to Ezra.

Maybe she didn’t have a choice. Was it foolish of her to think that she did?

A dull ache throbbed in her stomach, and Immanuelle startled to attention. It took her a few long moments to realize what it was: the pains of her bleed. Sure enough, when she raised the skirts of her nightdress and checked her undergarments, she found them wet and red, stained through.

Slipping off the ledge of her windowsill, Immanuelle left her bedroom and climbed down the attic steps. She crept into the washroom and took her basket of rags from the cabinet beneath the sink. Anna had showed her how to cut them so they’d be comfortable to wear but also thick enough to staunch her flow.

She fit them into her undergarments, then washed her hands in the sink. As she did so, she was conscious of how tired she looked in the mirror, her bloodshot eyes shadowed by dark bags. She was walking back to her room when she heard a sharp rapping on the back door of the farmhouse. It was midnight, far too late for visitors. But the knocking continued, its rhythm steady as a heartbeat.

Moving a hand to the wall, she slipped into the hallway and down the stairs, entering the front parlor. There, she found Glory standing in front of Martha’s armchair, her eyes closed.

Immanuelle relaxed then, as Glory had been known to stroll in her sleep. The girl wasn’t adventurous in her waking hours, but at night it wasn’t uncommon to find her roaming the halls in her dreams. The Moores locked the doors every evening, just to keep her from wandering into the woods.

“Glory.” Immanuelle put her hands to the girl’s shoulders, trying to shake her awake. She could feel the heat of fever burning through the fabric of her nightgown. “You’re walking in your dreams again. Will we have to tether your wrists to your headboard to keep you from wandering awa—”

Another crack. This one struck with the hollow sound of a bone breaking—and it had come from the kitchen.

Immanuelle’s hands fell from Glory’s shoulders. Following the sound, she eased through the front room, pausing to lift a heavy bookend off the hearth’s mantel. As she rounded the corner and entered the kitchen, she raised it high above her head, ready to strike whatever stranger had found their way into their home.

But there was no intruder.

Across the kitchen, standing in the shadow of the threshold, was Honor, her forehead pressed to the door. Her back arched as she threw herself forward, and her head struck the wood with a stomach-churning crunch. Blood streamed down the bridge of her nose.

Immanuelle broke forward, the bookend clattering to the floor.

Honor struck the door again, with so much force the windows rattled in their casings. Then Immanuelle was upon her, dragging the child away, crying for help. Honor lay in her arms, stiff and stoic, burning with fever, deaf to her cries.

And so, the second curse came upon them.

A man who knows his past is a man with the power to choose his future.

—F
ROM
T
HE
P
ARABLES OF THE
P
ROPHET
Z
ACHRIAS

IN THE DAYS
that followed, more than two hundred fell ill, succumbing first to the fever, then to the madness after it. Immanuelle heard stories of grown men clawing their eyes from their sockets, chaste women of the faith who stripped off their clothes and fled, naked, into the Darkwood, screaming as they went. Others, mostly little children like Honor, suffered from a different, but perhaps more sinister, affliction and succumbed to the clutches of a sleep as deep as death. As far as Immanuelle knew, none of the healers in Bethel were able to wake them.

Of those who fell ill in the early days of the contagion, sixty died before the Sabbath. To keep the plague from spreading, the dead were burned on purging pyres. But those who fled to the Darkwood in fits of madness were never seen or heard from again.

By all accounts, it was the worst contagion in Bethel’s thousand-year history, and people called it many things—the affliction, the fever, the manic flu—but Immanuelle only ever referred to it by one name, the one written dozens of times in the final pages of her mother’s journal:
Blight.

“More water,” Martha demanded, mopping a sheen of sweat
from her forehead. Though all the windows were open, each breath of wind brought the hot smoke of the pyres that burned throughout the Glades. “And bring the yarrow.” Under normal circumstances, burning the bodies of the blameless was a grave breach of Holy Protocol. But in a desperate attempt to stop the spread of the disease, the Church made a rare amendment to its sacred law.

Immanuelle obeyed, skirts sweeping around her ankles as she ducked into the kitchen, grabbing a basin of water and a bundle of dried yarrow flower from the herb box beneath the sink. She raced upstairs as fast as she could without tripping on the hem of her skirts and entered the children’s room.

There, she found Anna tightening the knots around Glory’s wrists, tethering her to the headboard to keep her from escaping, as she had tried to do six times since the night she first took ill. Anna tied the cloth cuffs so tight there were bruises around her daughter’s wrists, but it couldn’t be helped. Nearly half of those afflicted with the blight had maimed or even killed themselves in the throes of their madness, jumping out of windows or bashing their own heads in, as Honor had nearly done the night Immanuelle found her.

At her mother’s touch, Glory thrashed and shrieked, legs tangling in her sheets, her cheeks bright with fever.

Immanuelle set the basin beside the bed, took the yarrow from her mouth, and grabbed the bowl on the nightstand. She crushed the blooms as best she could, mashing them into a paste. Then she added a little water—still faintly tinged by the last traces of the blood plague—and mixed the pulp with her fingers.

It was Martha who administered the draught, seizing Glory firmly by the base of her neck and thrusting her upright, the way one holds a squalling newborn. She forced the bowl to her mouth, and Glory thrashed and spat, dragging at her binds, her eyes rolling back in her skull as the draught dribbled between her lips and down her chin.

Honor lay across the room with her eyes closed, her blankets tucked beneath her chin. Immanuelle put a hand to her cheek and winced. The fever raged in her yet. The girl lay so still Immanuelle had to slip a finger beneath her nose just to see if she was breathing. She hadn’t stirred once since the blight had arrived. That night, she’d struck herself into a deep slumber they feared she’d never wake from.

It went on like that for hours—Glory thrashing in her bed, Honor comatose, Anna weeping on a chair in the corner—until Immanuelle couldn’t bear it anymore. She left the farmhouse for the pastures. Days ago, their farmhand, Josiah, had been called back to his own home in the distant Glades to tend to his blight-sick wife. So apart from Immanuelle, there was no one to keep watch over the grazing sheep.

As she crossed the pastures, crook in hand, she weighed the options available to her. Her darkest fears had become reality. The sacrifice she’d made at the pond hadn’t worked after all. Blight was upon them, and if it didn’t end soon, Immanuelle feared the lives of her sisters would be forfeit. But what could she do to stop it?

Her blood offering hadn’t been enough to break the curse, and she had no one to turn to for aid. The Church seemed helpless in the face of such great evil. Immanuelle considered turning to Ezra for help, as she had done before, but decided against it. He’d made it plain that he wanted no part in plagues or witchcraft, no part of her. The last time she’d dragged him into her schemes he’d almost paid a mortal price. It seemed cruel to call upon him again.

But if not Ezra, whom could she turn to? There had to be someone, something. A cure or scheme to stop this. She had to believe that, on principle alone, because if she didn’t, it meant that hope was lost and her sisters were going to die.

A memory surfaced at the back of her mind, an image of her
census papers, the witch mark below her name and the names of the Wards who came before her. Was it possible that the very answers she sought—about the plagues, and the witches and a way to defeat them—could be waiting for her in the Outskirts, in the form of the family she had never known? If the witch mark was any indication at all, they were versed in the magic of the Darkwood and the coven that walked its corridors. If there was any help to be found in Bethel, Immanuelle was certain she’d find it with them.

But how could she slip away to the Outskirts unnoticed, with Honor and Glory as sick as they were? There was no way she could excuse her absence for more than an hour, and she would need at least a day to find her kin in the Outskirts.

Immanuelle frowned, staring past the flock of grazing sheep, to the windows of Abram’s workshop glowing in the distance. An idea took shape at the back of her mind.

Abram.
Of course.

Immanuelle might not have been able to win Martha over . . . but perhaps Abram would be more sympathetic. He was kindhearted, gentler than Martha, and less pious than Anna. Perhaps he would see the merit in her desires to reach out to her kin in the Outskirts.

Emboldened by this idea, Immanuelle herded the last of the sheep into the corral where they spent their nights and started toward Abram’s workshop. It was a humble space. The wood floors were dusted with a thick carpet of sawdust. As usual, a series of half-finished projects cluttered the workspace—a pair of tree-trunk side tables, a stool, and a dollhouse that was no doubt intended to be a gift for Honor’s birthday.

Paintings adorned the walls, all of them her mother’s. There were sweeping landscapes on wood panels, parchment painted with faint watercolor flowers, a few still lifes. There was even a
self-portrait, which featured Miriam, smiling, with her hair unbound.

Immanuelle peered over Abram’s shoulder to see what he was working on and stopped dead. There, on the table, was a small, half-carved coffin. It was big enough for only one member of the Moore family: Honor.

“She’s still . . . with us,” said Abram without looking up from his work. “I just want to be ready . . . if the worst comes.”

Immanuelle began to shake. “She’s going to wake up.”

“Perhaps. But if she doesn’t . . . I have to be prepared . . . Always promised myself . . . that if I had to . . . bury another child . . . I would do it properly. In a coffin . . . of my own making. I missed that chance . . . with your mother. I’ll not . . . have it happen again. Even if . . . I have to collect . . . her bones from the . . . pyre, I intend . . . to give her . . . a proper burial. Should it . . . come to that.”

Immanuelle knew what he referred to. Bethelan custom mandated that the blameless were buried and the sinful were burned, in the hopes that the flames of the pyre would purge them of their sins and allow them passage into the realm of purgatory. On account of her crimes, Miriam had died in dishonor and, as a result, she never had a proper coffin or burial plot in the graveyard where her ancestors were laid to rest. “Do you miss her?”

“More than you know.”

Immanuelle took a seat on the stool beside him. “And do you regret breaking Protocol to hide her here, years ago?”

Abram’s hand tightened around his chisel, but he shook his head.

“Even though it was a sin?”

“Better to take sin upon . . . one’s own shoulders . . . than allow harm . . . to befall others. Sometimes a person . . . has an obligation . . . to act in the interest of the . . . greater good.”

This was her moment, and Immanuelle was quick to seize it. “During that time, did my mother ever speak of my father?”

Abram faltered, then lowered his tool. “More than she did . . . anyone else. When the madness . . . took her she used . . . to call for him. Claimed his ghost . . . was wandering the . . . halls. She’d say he was . . . calling her home. I like to think . . . that he did in the end.”

Immanuelle’s throat clenched so tightly she could barely speak. “I want to go to the Outskirts, Pa. I want to know the people that knew him. I want to meet his kin.
My
kin.”

Abram remained expressionless. He returned to his work, scuffing a bit of sandpaper along the wall of the coffin. “Why now?”

“Because if I don’t do it now, I may never get the chance to. What with the fever spreading.”

“When do you . . . want to go?”

“Tomorrow, if possible. But I’d rather Martha not know. It would only trouble her.”

“So you’ve come to ask for my blessing?”

“That and your help. Perhaps you could distract Martha.”

“You mean lie . . . for you. Mislead her . . . into believing something that . . . isn’t true.”

Immanuelle flinched but nodded. “Like you said, sometimes a person has an obligation to act in the interest of the greater good even if it means they have to sin in order to do it. And is it not good for me to meet my kin while I still have the chance to?”

Abram offered her a rare smile. She could have sworn he looked almost proud of her. “Pity you weren’t . . . born a boy. Would’ve made a . . . fine apostle with your penchant . . . for talking in circles.”

“So you’ll do it?” Immanuelle whispered, barely believing her good fortune. “You’ll help me get to the Outskirts?”

Abram paused to blow sawdust from the inside of the coffin. “What won’t I do . . . for you?”