The Near Witch Page 7

  My eyes strain to make out the deeper shadows near the cut stone cottages, under the thatch eaves where the moonlight cannot reach. I wait, frozen, holding my breath. And then I see it. Something slips across the gap between the houses, caught for a moment by the fractured moonlight. The ghostly form is gone in a blink, vanishing behind a corner.

  I sprint across the grass after the shadow, half tripping, and doing a very poor job of keeping the sound of my presence minimal as I run. I can hear my father’s scolding voice as the twigs snap beneath my feet, and my shoes kick at stones, but I’m so close. I launch into the space between the homes. I catch sight of the figure just before it turns another corner. It pauses and twists as if seeing me, then cuts between the houses, heading north toward the shadow of a hill, vast and black. If it gets there before me, I know the form will vanish, a shadow inside a shadow.

  I run, keeping my eyes leveled on it so that it does not become a part of the night.

  It’s almost there. My lungs start to burn. The figure moves over the tangled earth with sickening speed. I have always been fast, but I can’t make up the ground. The wind whistles in my ears as the figure reaches the base of the hillside and disappears.

  I’ve lost it, whatever it was.

  My legs stop churning, and my boot catches on a low stone and launches me forward into the relative darkness at the foot of the hill. The form is here somewhere, so close I feel as if my fingertips might brush it with every outward grasp as I push myself up. But my fingers meet a sharp rock jutting out from the hill, and nothing more. The wind beats in my ears with my pulse.

  And then the clouds slip in. They sweep silently across the sky and swallow the moon, and just like a candle snuffed out, the world goes dark.

  THE ENTIRE WORLD VANISHES.

  I freeze in my tracks to prevent tumbling into another rock, or a tree, or something worse. Fingers still pressed against the rock, I take a deep breath and wait for the clouds to move on the way they should, since the wind carried them in so quickly. But the clouds aren’t moving. The wind is blowing hard enough to whistle and whine, and yet the clouds seem impossibly frozen overhead, blotting out the moon. I wait for my eyes to adjust, but they don’t. Nothing registers.

  My heart is still racing, and it’s not only from the rush of the hunt. This is different—a twinge I haven’t felt in a long time.

  Fear.

  Fear as I realize the cluster of houses is out of sight. Everything is out of sight. And still, through it all I can feel the presence, the weight of another body nearby.

  The wind changes, twists itself from a simple breeze into something else, something more familiar. It sounds almost like a song. There are no words, but highs and lows, like music, and for a moment I think I might still be in bed, pressed between the sheets. Dreaming. But I’m not. The strange tune makes me dizzy, and I try to block it out, but the world is so dark, there’s nothing else to focus on. The music seems to grow clearer and clearer until I can almost tell which way it’s coming from. I push off the rock and turn, taking a few cautious steps away from the hill, toward where the form was, when I could still see it.

  My fingers reach for my father’s knife, and I slip it from the sheath on my calf and hold it loosely, making my way like a blind man, knowing only that the slope is at my back. I remember running past a few low rocks, a tree, before everything went black, so my steps are wary, feeling for sharp edges. The wind keeps humming, a steady rise and fall, and I swear I know this song. A chill runs through me as I realize where I’ve heard it.

  The wind on the moors is a’singing to me

  The grass and the stones and the far-off sea

  The wind and the sound wrap around me, the rise and fall of the melody growing louder and louder in my ears, and the world begins to spin. I stop walking to keep from falling down. The hair on my neck prickles, and I stifle the urge to scream.

  Be patient with it, Lexi, my father’s voice intrudes.

  I try to calm down, try to slow my pulse, now so loud I can’t hear anything over it. Holding my breath, I wait for the wind song to form a layer, a blanket of noise. Wait for my heart to become part of that blanket instead of a pounding drum in my head. A moment after my nerves start to settle, a new noise comes from a few feet away at the bottom of the hill. A weight steps down on the grass.

  I spin back toward the sound just as the clouds abandon the moon overhead, shedding slivers of light that seem as bright as beacons after the heavy dark. The light glints off my knife, and the few scattered rocks, and the shadowed form, finally illuminating the outline of a man. I lunge, knocking him back against the slope. My free hand pins his shoulder, my knee on his chest.

  The light grazes his throat and his jaw and his cheekbones, just the way it did when I first saw him beyond my window. I am looking into the same dark eyes that refused to meet my own on the hill by the sisters’ house.

  “What are you doing here?” I ask, the hunting knife against his throat. My heart is racing and my fingers tighten around the handle, and yet he neither flinches nor makes a sound, but simply blinks.

  Slowly, the blade slides back to my side, but my knee lingers on his chest, pressing him into the grass.

  “Why are you out here?” I ask again, biting back my annoyance, both at the fact he was able to sneak up on me, and the fact that I’m silently grateful he’s here. He stares up at me appraisingly, his eyes as black as the night around us, and says nothing.

  “Answer me, Cole,” I warn, raising my blade. His jaw tenses, and he looks away.

  “It’s not safe out here. Not at night,” he says at last. His voice is clear and smooth at once, cutting through the wind in an odd way, more parallel than perpendicular. “And my name isn’t Cole.”

  “So you were following me?” I ask, pushing myself off him, trying not to let him see that I am shaking.

  “I saw you out alone.” He gets to his feet in an impossibly graceful motion, his gray cloak spilling over his shoulders. “I wanted to make sure you were all right.”

  “Why wouldn’t I be?” I ask, too quickly. I take a deep breath. “Why did you run away?”

  I wait, but he doesn’t answer, instead studying the ground with an attention that’s clearly avoidance. Finally he says, “Easier than trying to explain.”

  The last of the clouds slide away, and the moonlight illuminates the moor around us.

  “You should go back to the sisters’ house.” I look around at the hill and the cluster of cottages behind us. When he doesn’t move or speak, I turn to face him. “I mean it, Cole. If anyone sees you here…”

  “You saw me here.”

  “Yes, but I don’t think you took Edgar. Someone else might. You do realize you were in the village, by Edgar’s house, the night after he went missing. You can see how it would look.”

  “So were you.”

  “But I’m from here. And I’m a tracker. My father was too. What are you?” I wince at how harsh my voice sounds.

  “Once I realized what you were doing, I thought I could help,” he says, and it’s barely a whisper. I’m amazed I can hear it over the blustering wind.

  “How?”

  His dark eyebrows arch up. “I have good eyes. I thought I might find something. A clue or a trace.”

  “Or cover something up?” I know it sounds mean, but these are the questions my uncle will ask. The accusations he would make if he found the stranger in the western part of town tonight.

  “You know it’s not like that,” he says, and he sounds frustrated. “I haven’t done anything wrong.”

  I sigh. “I’m sorry, Cole.” I look up at the moon, amazed at how far it’s traveled across the sky. Around us, the night is growing bitter, and my head feels cloudy, tired. I’m losing time. “I’ve got to go.”

  I take a step back toward the houses, my hands still trembling faintly from the chase and the penetrating dark. Cole seems torn about what to do, his body turning one way, his head another. The moon casts enough ligh
t to make his skin glow. With his pale face, dark eyes, and sad mouth, he seems made of black and white, just like the world at night.

  I begin to walk away when he speaks up.

  “Lexi, wait,” he says, reaching out for my wrist. He seems to reconsider and pulls back, but his fingertips graze my arm. It catches me off guard. “Maybe I can help, if you’ll let me.”

  I turn back to him. “How?”

  “I told you I have good eyes. And I think I found something. It’s faint, but there. I’m sure of it.” He holds his hand out, gesturing back to the cluster of homes across the tangled grass.

  I hesitate. When I don’t answer, he adds, “Just take a look.” I nod. Cole leads me around the cluster of homes and to the west, to the field where I was when I first caught sight of the shadow. Edgar’s window stares out at us, the dim light within making it glow faintly. Cole walks with me up to the window, and I swallow as I notice that he seems to make no sound. His feet touch the ground, leaving slight prints, but there’s no crunch of leaves or drying grass beneath his shoes. My father would be impressed.

  When we’ve almost reached the house, he turns around, looking out at the field much the way I did before.

  “I already looked here,” I say, frowning.

  “I know,” he says, gesturing to the heather and the knee-high grass. “It’s faint. Do you see it?”

  I squint, trying to find the object, the clue.

  “Don’t try so hard,” he says. “Look at the big picture.” He sounds just like my father, quiet, patient. I try to relax my eyes, pull back and take in the field. I draw a small breath in.

  “See?”

  And I do. It’s subtle, and I am so attuned to details that I never would have seen it. The field. It ripples. There are no footsteps, no traces in the dirt, but the grass and heather bend ever so slightly, as if someone walked along the tops of them. As if the wind blew them over and they haven’t had enough time to straighten up. A narrow strip of the wild grass leans like a path.

  “But how?” I ask, half to myself, finding Cole’s eyes. He frowns, giving a slight shake of his head. I look back at the trace. I don’t understand it. But it’s something. The windblown path veers north. I pull away from Edgar’s house and begin to follow it out into the field.

  “Don’t,” Cole says. “You shouldn’t go alone.”

  “Why not? Because I’m a girl?”

  “No,” he says, his expression unreadable. “No one should walk out here alone.” And after the strange darkness and the dizzying wind, I half believe he’s right.

  “Then you’d better come with me,” I say, taking a few steps forward.

  He hovers behind me, rocking his weight, and for a moment it looks as if he’s not going to follow. He seems to change his mind at the last minute, though, and falls into step beside me. We follow the almost invisible path, the windblown road. It seems impossible that it could lead me to Edgar, since there are no signs of his small feet. Then again, it seems impossible that the path could be there at all.

  The moon shines down, and the moor doesn’t look nearly so frightening now. I chide myself for ever having been scared. The wind dies away, and silence slips over us. Every now and then I punctuate the quiet with a question—What is it like, where you come from? What brought you to Near? Where is your family?—but he never answers. I’m growing used to his not talking, but Cole is so unnaturally silent—silent steps, silent motions—that I feel he might fade away, so I tell him about myself, hoping to perhaps coax something more than a look from him.

  “My mother is a baker,” I say. “She bakes all morning, and I deliver bread around the village. It’s why I know the shortest path to any house. It’s why I can walk the road at night. I’ve walked them all a thousand times.”

  I glance at Cole, who looks back, surprisingly interested in my rambling. I go on. “My little sister, Wren, turned five this spring. She has this garden…” I say whatever comes to mind, the words tumbling out with ease.

  The trail fades in and out ahead of us, vanishing altogether where the grass is low or the ground is bare, but always picking up again before we’ve lost it. It leads us up around the northern edge of Near, and I pause as my uncle’s house comes into sight. Cole stops beside me, following my gaze to the darkened house.

  “Near is like a circle,” I say quietly, scanning for signs of Otto’s patrol, or Otto himself. “Or a compass. My family lives at the northern edge, the sisters at the eastern one.”

  “Why do you live so far from the center?” Cole asks, and I have to bite back a smile at the fact he’s speaking again. It’s not a whisper, but it blends right in with the easy wind, soft and clear.

  “They say only hunters and witches live out this far.”

  Cole tenses almost imperceptibly beside me. “And which are you?” he asks, flashing a thin attempt at a smile. I wonder if witches are frowned on where he comes from, and almost ask, but don’t want to silence him now that he’s finally willing to speak.

  “My father was a hunter,” I say. “And a tracker. There’s less need for hunting these days, since a few families keep livestock, but our family always hunted, so we lived on the edge of town. My father’s gone now. My uncle lives just beside us, right there,” I add, pointing to his cottage, where the windows are finally dark. “He’s a butcher. And the sisters, well…” I don’t finish the sentence. It seems wrong to call Magda and Dreska witches, if they haven’t told him themselves. I don’t want to frighten him. And besides, it’s not my place. Cole seems content to let the conversation die away.

  “That way,” he says, gesturing to the place where the grass grows taller and the path appears again, arcing past the houses and down toward the east. East, where through the darkness, beyond the grove, and up the hill, the sisters live. I cast a single glance toward home, the bedroom shutters still closed tight, and we press on.

  The wind-brushed path runs parallel to the old dirt one that leans toward the eastern edge and the sisters’ house, and I walk along it by muscle memory in the dead of night. The path becomes fainter, though the grass is tall, and we continue in silence.

  I pause a moment, leaning against a rock. The world tips dreamily.

  “You’re tired,” he says.

  I shrug, but linger another moment.

  “I’m fine,” I say, straightening. “Tell me a story.” I yawn as we continue walking along the narrow dirt lane, the windblown path always to our left. “It’ll help keep me awake.”

  I don’t want just any story; I want his. I want to know of the world beyond Near and the way they speak and the stories they tell and why he is here, in his singed gray cloak, and why he is keeping his words so close.

  “I don’t know any,” he says. He gazes over the field to the grove in the distance, sitting like a knot of shadows.

  “Make one up,” I say, glancing back now at the blue-black world that falls away behind us. Cole looks back too, frowning as if he sees something different, more troublesome or alive than the simple landscape, but he says nothing, seems to grow thinner before my eyes.

  “All right,” I say at last. “I’ll start, then. Any requests?”

  The silence is so long that I think he hasn’t heard me. The wind around us hums. Finally he speaks.

  “Tell me about the Near Witch.”

  My eyebrows rise.

  “Where did you hear about that?”

  “The sisters,” he says. The words don’t come out easily, like he’s just testing them. I wonder if he’s lying.

  “Do you believe in witches, Cole?”

  His eyes find mine, and for a moment he seems perfectly solid.

  “Where I came from, witches were real enough,” he says. There’s a strange bitterness in his voice. Where I came from. I cling to those words, the first hints. “But I don’t know about here.”

  “Near knows of witches, too. Or at least we used to.”

  “What do you mean?”

  I start walking again. Cole follow
s.

  “People know, but they try to forget,” I say, shaking my head. “They see witches as scary stories, as monsters. When my father was alive, things were better. He believed that witches were blessings. They are closer to nature than any human, because it is a part of them. But most people think witches are cursed.”

  “The sisters too?” he asks slowly, and I offer a sad smile. So he does know more than he lets on.

  “If you ask them if they’re witches, they’ll just turn away or wink or make some sharp comment. They must have been powerful, once. But they dried up. Or tried to.”

  I look at Cole.

  “Witches are connected to the moor. I think my father wanted to have that connection, too. And he got closer than most, but the fact that he couldn’t made him respect witches even more.”

  Cole seems even paler, if that’s possible. The wind is picking up.

  “And the Near Witch?”

  “She’s the reason, I think, that the people here are the way they are. Or so they claim. She’s been gone so long. Now it all feels like a story more than history, to be honest. Like a fairy tale.”

  “But you believe it, don’t you?” he asks.

  “I do.” I realize, only after I’ve said it, that it’s true. “At least the bones of it.”

  He waits.

  “All right,” I say, sensing his curiosity, “I’ll tell you the story the way my father did.”

  My voice slips low and soft as I draw out my father’s hunting knife. It’s nicked along one edge but still dangerously sharp. I let my fingers slide into the impressions on the handle as I picture the writing on the page in my father’s book, overlapping in my head with his low, sweet voice. I take a deep breath, let it out the way he always did when he was going to tell a story, and begin.

  “LONG, LONG AGO, THE NEAR WITCH lived in a small house on the farthest edge of the village. She was very old and very young, depending on which way she turned her head, for no one knows the age of witches. The moor streams were her blood and the moor grass was her skin, and her smile was kind and sharp at once like the moon on the moors in the black, black night. The Near Witch knew how to speak to the world in its language, and sometimes you didn’t know if the sound you heard beneath your door was the howling of the wind or the Near Witch singing the hills to sleep. It all sounded the same.…”