The Near Witch Read online

  At the stump, I lift the ax, my fingers sliding into my father’s grooves.

  “It was a foolish task,” I add. “I couldn’t find him. He’s gone.”

  The ax drives deep into the stump, sticking with a heavy thud.

  “So I came home. And here I am. Relax, Uncle. All is well.” I dust my hands off, let one come to rest on Otto’s shoulder. “So, what did Helena have to say?”

  “Not enough,” says Otto, looking down at my father’s boots. “Says she saw something, a shadow, maybe our stranger, in the clearing by her house. Claims she doesn’t know which way he went. That he just vanished.”

  “Helena’s always loved a good story,” I offer. “She can make one out of nothing.” It is a lie, of course. She prefers to have me tell the stories to her.

  Otto isn’t even listening. He’s looking over me, and his eyes are even farther away. Dark, lost eyes.

  “What happens next?” I ask.

  He blinks. “For now, we wait.”

  I manage to nod calmly before I turn away, the frown creeping across my face. I don’t trust for a minute that that’s all my uncle has in mind.

  Tonight there is no moon, and therefore no moonlight playing on the walls. Nothing to entertain those who cannot sleep. I am unbearably awake, but not because of the stranger.

  It’s the wind.

  That same sad note is back again, weaving through the air, and there’s something else, a sound that makes me shiver. No matter how I turn away or bury my face in the sheets, I keep hearing something—or someone—calling, just loud enough to pierce the walls. The voice is surely something more than wind, curling and twisting itself into highs and lows, like muffled music. I know that if only I could lean closer, words would become clear, distinct. Words that wouldn’t break apart before I can wrap my mind around them.

  I push the covers back, careful not to wake Wren, and let my feet slide to the wooden floor. Then I remember my father’s words and pull my feet back into bed, hovering awkwardly on the edge, halfway between the motion of standing and slipping back down.

  The trees all whisper, leaves gossiping. The stones are heavy thinkers, the sullen silent types. He used to make up stories for everything in nature, giving it all voices, lives. If the moor wind ever sings, you mustn’t listen, not with all of your ears. Use only the edges. Listen the way you’d look out the corners of your eyes. The wind is lonely, love, and always looking for company.

  My father had lessons and he had stories, and it was up to me to learn the difference between the two.

  The wind howls and I discard my father’s warning, stretching my ears to meet the sound, to unravel it. My head begins to ache dully as I listen, trying to make words where there are none. I give up, slipping back beneath the sheets, folding myself into my cocoon so that the wind song comes through broken.

  Just as I’m about to find sleep, Wren shifts beside me. She rouses, and I hear the soft padding of feet as she slides from the bed and crosses the room, slipping out in search of our mother’s bed.

  But something is off.

  There’s a slight creak, the sound of footsteps over one of the two warped boards between the bed and the window. I sit up. Wren is standing, framed by glass and wooden borders, her blond hair almost white in the darkness. Without the shell of blankets, I can hear the wind again, the music on it, and the almost-words that hum against my skull.

  “Wren?” I whisper, but she doesn’t turn around. Am I dreaming?

  She reaches one hand up to the clasp pinning the window shut, and turns it. Her small fingers curl around the bottom lip of the window, trying to slide it up, but it weighs too much for her. It has always weighed too much. I realize for the first time that the shutters are open beyond the window glass. I don’t remember unlocking them, but there they are, thrown back, exposing the night beyond. Wren presses her fingers against the wooden lip, and somehow the window begins to slide up a fraction.

  “Wren!”

  I’m out of bed and at her side before she can get any farther, pulling her back into the room and closing the gap where the cool air is seeping in. I look for something out on the moor, something that would have drawn my sister to the window, but there is nothing. Nothing but the usual black-and-white night, the stray trees and rocks and the humming wind. I turn to face Wren, barring her path, and she blinks, the kind of startled blinks of a person waking suddenly. At my back the wind presses against the glass, and then it seems to break, dissolving into the dark.

  “Lexi? What’s wrong?” she asks, and I must seem crazed, stretching myself across the window frame and looking at my sister as if she’s possessed. I peel myself from my post, ushering her back to bed. On my way I light the three candles, and they burst to life and fill the room with yellow light. Wren slides beneath the covers, and I climb in beside her, resting my back against the headboard, facing the candles and the window and the night beyond.

  KNOCK. KNOCK. KNOCK.

  I curl deeper beneath the blankets. I can tell by the smell alone that it’s morning. Bread and late-summer air. I don’t know when I fell asleep, or if I only slipped into that space between…

  Knock. Knock. Knock.

  I hear the front door open.

  My shoulders and neck are stiff, my head pounding and my thoughts too thick as I pull myself from the bed and lean back against it. I listen, but the voices at the door are too low to be deciphered through the walls. One grumble is distinct enough, and I wonder how long Otto has been here. I pull my clothes on and open my bedroom door, pausing in the doorway.

  “Sometimes boys wander off, Jacob,” says Otto.

  Jacob Drake?

  “Think,” adds my uncle. “Where might he have gone?”

  “No,” answers a thin, nervous voice. It is indeed Mr. Drake, Helena and Edgar’s father. “He wouldn’t. He’s afraid of the dark…Afraid of the day, too.” He adds a sad, strangled chuckle.

  I hear Otto pacing back and forth. “Well, don’t just stand there,” he says finally. “Come in. You too, Bo.”

  I wait until they’ve gone into the kitchen before slipping in behind them.

  “Could someone have taken him?” asks Otto, accepting a mug of coffee from my mother.

  Mr. Drake is slight and unimposing, with hair that must once have been as white-blond as Helena’s and Edgar’s, but now is flecked with silver. He stands in the middle of the kitchen, crossing his arms and then uncrossing them as he and Otto talk.

  “No, no, no,” he mumbles. “Who? Who’d have taken him?”

  “Did anyone see anything?”

  My mother is kneading dough, and shakes her head slowly. Bo limps over to the table and leans against it. The limp is subtle, the relic of a bad fall a few years back, but it makes his steps sound uneven on the floorboards. He chews on a wedge of berry-flecked bread, eyes darting between the other two men.

  “What’s going on?” I ask.

  “Edgar’s gone,” says Mr. Drake, turning tired eyes toward me.

  My stomach drops. “What do you mean, gone?”

  There’s a knock at the door, and Mother disappears to answer it, Otto still trying to calm Mr. Drake down.

  “Let’s talk this out,” says my uncle. “Walk me through it.…”

  Mother reappears, an old man on her heels. Not old like the sisters, who seem to crumble and yet never change. Simply old. Master Eli. From the Council. His iron-gray hair looks sharp, trailing across his gaunt face. I take a small step back to make room. Mr. Drake and Otto have their heads bowed together, talking, Bo leaning in with one shoulder as if only half interested. They all look up as Master Eli takes a seat.

  “What do we know?” he rasps. Something creaks, and I don’t know if it’s him or the chair. Otto straightens, turning to address the Council member.

  “Edgar vanished from his bed last night,” he explains. “There’s been no sign of him. No sign of struggle. We’ll call together a search party. He can’t have gone far.”

  “I just
don’t understand,” mumbles Mr. Drake.

  Otto offers a determined frown and sets his mug down. I notice that his hands are red, and he’s still wearing his butcher’s smock. He clamps his hand on Mr. Drake’s slight shoulder and promises that they will find his son. When he lets go, his fingers leave behind a smudge of half-dried blood.

  “We don’t know any more than that yet, Eli,” he says. My uncle is probably the only man in town who can get away with calling the Council members by their names but not their titles. A small benefit of his station, and one he apparently enjoys.

  “Poor boy,” murmurs my mother, and I turn to see her comforting Wren, who seems perplexed. I can tell my sister thinks our mother is overreacting.

  “Stop worrying,” Wren says, trying to get free. “He’s just playing a game.”

  “Hush, dear,” says my mother, casting a glance at the rest of the room. Master Eli gives her a strange look, and it’s hard to tell if it’s pity or something harsher. His eyes are dark, set deep beneath his brow. His face crinkles up like paper.

  “It’s a game,” Wren persists. “I’m sure of it.”

  But I am not so sure. I saw my little sister try to climb out the window last night. I reach for Wren’s hand as the men in the kitchen gather their guns and murmur the names of a dozen others they can recruit.

  “Otto,” Bo chimes in for the first time, “the rest are waiting in town for word. Where will we start looking?”

  “We’ll meet the others in the square. We can start there and work our way out to all sides.”

  “That’s a waste,” I cut in. “You should start at Edgar’s house and head out toward the village perimeter, not in toward the center.”

  “Lexi,” warns Otto, casting a glance around the room. Bo wrinkles his nose. Mr. Drake turns away. Master Eli leans back in his chair and looks vaguely amused. Vaguely. Otto turns red.

  “Edgar’s house is in the west,” I press, “so you start there and work away from the village. It doesn’t make much sense to spend time heading inward.”

  “And why is that?” asks Master Eli. His amusement is cool and cutting. His eyes seem to say, Foolish little girl.

  “If someone did take Edgar,” I explain calmly, “they’d never try to hide him in town. There’s too many people in too small a space. They’d take him out, away from the houses. Toward the moor.”

  The old man’s smile fades as he turns back to my uncle, waiting. Otto picks up the cue.

  “Lexi, I’m sure your mother could use help with the baking. Go be useful.” I have to clench my jaw to keep from answering. “Let’s go,” he says, turning his back on me.

  Bo and Mr. Drake follow Otto. Master Eli pushes himself to his feet. I can hear his bones cracking and popping into place. He passes Otto and pauses, resting a skeletal hand on my uncle’s shoulder.

  “Do you have a plan?” he asks, and I swear his deep-set eyes swivel back in my direction.

  Otto looks offended, but he quickly checks himself.

  “Yes, of course.”

  Master Eli gives a short nod and continues past my uncle, who turns on his heel and lifts his gun from the counter.

  “Let me go with you, Otto,” I say.

  “Not today, Lexi,” my uncle says, his voice a fraction softer without the other men around. “I can’t.”

  “All children,” says Master Eli from the door frame, “are to remain at home until the culprit is caught and the boy found.”

  “I’m not a child, Master.” And I certainly won’t be bossed by you, I add silently.

  “Close enough.” And then he’s gone. Otto follows him out. I linger in the doorway, just out of sight, and hear them as they reach the front door and join the two other men, boots scuffing the threshold.

  “What about the stranger?” asks Mr. Drake, and my chest tightens. The stranger. I’d almost forgotten about him. Almost.

  “He appears here in the village, and the next night a child vanishes,” says Bo.

  “I knew something like this would happen,” grunts Otto. “I should have dealt with him yesterday.”

  “No one blames you for waiting.”

  “You know where he is?” asks Mr. Drake.

  “Of course we know.”

  “We are relatively certain,” corrects Master Eli in a creaking voice, “that he is with the Thorne sisters. If he’s still in town.”

  “Why would a stranger take Edgar?” asks the boy’s father softly.

  “More likely a stranger than any of us,” says Otto. I hear him shift his gun in his arms.

  “Why would anyone take him?”

  “Start with what we know.”

  “And what is that?”

  “There is a stranger in the town of Near. And now a boy is missing.”

  That’s not much, I think.

  “First things first. The boy. We’ll deal with the stranger later.”

  The door swings closed and the men are gone. I wait for the sound of their boots to fade before retreating into the kitchen. My mother goes back to her bread, her mouth settling into a thin line, a faint crease between her eyes as her fingers find their way absently over loaf pans and proofing bowls. Back to work, as if nothing’s changed. As if there isn’t a growing mass of questions, all tangled up.

  I fall into a chair at the table, rapping my fingers on the old scarred wood. Mother slides a scraper across a board and gathers up a few small pieces of clinging dough, too caked with flour to use for bread. Wren happily takes the lump and begins shaping the mass into a heart, a bowl, a person.

  Another ritual.

  My mother gives Wren these bits of dough each morning, letting her shape them, ruin them, and shape them again until she’s happy. Then my mother will bake toys that only last until the end of the day.

  It feels wrong to have rituals right now, for things to continue in their carved-out way when something has cut through the routine.

  The room fills with heavy quiet. I lean forward. I stand up. I need to give the group of men time to get far enough away that I don’t risk crossing paths, but I can’t just sit here.

  If everyone is looking for Edgar, they won’t be looking for the stranger. Now is my chance. I turn to leave, and pause halfway to the hall.

  I expect my mother to stop me, to warn or lecture or say anything, anything at all, but she doesn’t even look up.

  She would have stopped me, once, fixed me with her strong eyes. She would have made me fight for it. Now she just turns to the oven and begins to hum.

  I sigh and slip out into the hall.

  Halfway to the front door, a shape springs up before me and I nearly run into Wren. How she got from the table to here without a sound, I do not know.

  “Where are you going?” she asks.

  I kneel, looking at her face-to-face, my hands resting on her shoulders. “I’m going to the sisters, Wren,” I say, surprised by how quietly it comes out.

  Her eyes widen, blue circles like pieces of sky. “Is it a secret?” she whispers back. In my sister’s world, secrets are almost as much fun as games.

  “Very much so,” I say, my fingers dancing down her arms to her hands, cupping them in mine. I bring our cradled hands up to my lips, whispering into the small place between her palms. “Can you keep it for me?”

  Wren smiles and pulls her hands back to her, still cupping the secret as she might a butterfly. And with that, I kiss my sister’s hair and hurry out.

  Half an hour later, I stumble through the grove and up the path to the sisters’ cottage. The windows are thrown open, but the house is quiet, and I slow my step, trying to muffle the sound of my approach so I don’t attract notice. I have no desire to face the stony expressions of the sisters right now.

  I veer left to the shed, and there on the nail is the gray cloak with its blackened edges. As difficult as it is, I slow to a creep and soundlessly approach the shed. People tend to put their weight on the balls of their feet when they don’t want to be heard, but in truth, it’s bette
r to walk heel to toe, distributing the weight in slow, smooth motions. I circle around the leaning wooden structure. It is the kind with only one opening, the door in front of me. Either he’s in there, or he’s not. I press my ear to the rotting wood. Nothing.

  I chew my lip, weighing my options. I don’t want to frighten him off. But I don’t want to let him slip away either. I had hoped to catch him off guard, but it seems there’s no one here to catch.

  “Hello?” I say at last, my ear still pressed against the door. I can hear my own word vibrate through the boards, and I pull back slightly. “I just want to talk,” I add, my voice softer, lower, the kind of voice for sharing secrets. It’s not a voice I use often, except with Wren. It’s the voice my father used to tell me stories. “Please talk to me.”

  Nothing. I pull the door open, and it groans, but the small space inside is bare. The door swings shut as I step back. Where is he? I wonder, running my fingers over the gray cloak on the nail, the fabric old and worn. All this time lost coming here instead of trailing Otto into town, instead of looking for Edgar.

  “What a waste,” I murmur into the wooden boards. They groan in reply. My eyes widen as I push off the shed and whip around the corner. The stranger won’t slip away again.

  And there he is. Almost close enough to touch. He stands there against the moor and looks at me––stares at me––with his large eyes, an even gray like coals or river stones without the slick of water. The wind runs through his dark hair and over clothes that might once have been a color but are now gray, or might once have been black but are now faded. Just like his cloak. He crosses his arms as if he’s cold.

  “You.” That’s all I manage to say. There is something startlingly familiar about him. I have never seen anyone so fair-skinned and dark-haired, with such cool, colorless eyes. And yet, the light that dances in them, and that strange pull, like gravity tipped over.…

  “Who are you?” I ask.

  He cocks his head, and I realize for the first time how young he is. He cannot be much older than I am, a few inches taller, and too thin. But flesh and blood, not the phantom on the moor beyond my window who seemed to bleed right into the night.