The Near Witch Read online

“Let’s go,” calls my uncle, my mother in tow. Otto eyes the knife at my waist one last time, but only grumbles and sets off down the path. I smile and follow.

  The town of Near is shaped like a circle. There’s no wall around it, but everyone seems to know where it ends and where the countryside begins. Stone walls snake through the village, no higher than my waist and half swallowed by the weeds and wild grass. They wander past clusters of cottages scattered among empty hills or fields, until you reach the center of town, where the structures stand almost side by side. The center of town is filled with seamstresses and carpenters and those who can do their work shoulder to shoulder. Most of the villagers live close to the town square. No one ventures onto the moor if they can help it, but a few cottages, such as our own, and the Thorne sisters’, dot the edges, sitting right up against the seam where Near meets the moor. Only hunters and witches live out this way, they say.

  Soon the thickest circle of houses sprouts up into sight. The buildings, all cut stone trimmed in wood and topped with thatch, are huddled together. The newer houses are paler, the older ones darkened by storms and licked by moss and weed. Narrow, well-walked paths run between and around and through everything.

  And I can see even from a distance that the center of Near is bustling with people.

  News spreads like weeds in a place so small.

  When we reach the town square, most of the villagers are already floating about, gossiping and grumbling in turn. As they arrive, they break up into clusters, splitting into smaller and smaller groups. It reminds me of the clouds in reverse. Otto breaks off to find Bo and the rest of his men, probably to dole out orders. My mother sees a few of the other mothers, and gives them a tired wave. She lets go of Wren’s hand, and my sister flutters off into the crowd.

  “Look after her,” she says to me, already turning away, gliding in the direction of a group across the square.

  I have other plans, but the protest dies in my throat. My mother doesn’t beg. She just gives me the look. The look that says, My husband is dead and my brother-in-law is demanding enough, and I have so little time to myself, and unless you want to be a burden on your poor mother, you’ll be a good daughter and look after your sister. All in a look. In some ways, my mother is a powerful woman. I nod and follow Wren, tuning my ears to the voices, almost all rumors, buzzing and bustling around me.

  Wren leads me past Otto and Bo, the two talking in low tones. Bo, a narrow man with a slight limp, is several years younger than my uncle. His nose is long, and his brown hair curls across his forehead but recedes to either side, making him look pointed.

  “…saw him by my house,” Bo is saying. “Early enough that it wasn’t too dark, late enough that I didn’t trust my eyes entirely.…”

  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 wind on the moors is a’singing to me

  The grass and the stones and the far-off sea

  The crows all watching on the low stone wall

  The flowers in the yard all stretching tall

  To the garden we children went every day

  To hear the witch and watch her play

  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.

  She spoke to the earth and the earth it cracked

  Spoke to the wind and it whistled back

  Spoke to the river and the river whirled

  Spoke to the fire and the fire curled

  But little boy Jack he stayed too long

  Listened too close to the witch’s song

  Faster.

  Six different flowers on the little boy’s bed

  Her house it burned and the witch she fled

  Cast out, thrown out, on the moor

  Near Witch, Moor Witch, now no more

  And faster, still.

  The witch still a’singing her hills to sleep

  Her voice is high and her voice is deep

  Under the door the sounds all sweep

  Through the glass the words all creep

  The Near Witch is a’singing to me

  The song starts over.

  The wind on the moors is a’singing to me…

  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.

  MY 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 th
e 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.