The Near Witch (17 page)

F
IVE HILLS DUE EAST, IN A SMALL FOREST
.

I repeat the words over and over in my head as I slip barefoot from the window to the ground beneath, and slide on my boots. I look back at Wren fast asleep, and say a silent prayer that her charm continues to work. I tighten my boots and latch the shutters, checking twice that they won’t open, before I turn to face the moor and make my way to the sisters’ house.

When I get there, the windows are dark and the roof blots out the moonlight so that the space hugging the house is a ring of black.

“Cole,” I whisper, and then I catch the faint movement as my eyes adjust to the shadowed house and the glaring moon beyond. He’s leaning back against the cottage stones, arms crossed and chin tucked against his chest as if he’s fallen asleep while standing. But as I draw near, he looks up.

“Well, Lexi,” he says, coming to meet me. “Have you got a plan now?”

I smile in the dark. “I said I would.”

Cole gives a silent nod and takes my hand, and we hurry to the edge of the sisters’ hill. I tell him about the afternoon, about Matthew, about the five hills and the forest separating us from the Near Witch. We pass the small scorched plot where the witch lived, reaching the place where the sisters’ hill gives way to the moor. We pause, as if we are standing at the edge of a cliff, looking out to sea. And for a moment I am utterly terrified by how vast the world is. For a moment the five hills seem like five mountains, and then like five worlds. Doubt begins to creep in. What if we’re wrong? What if Matthew lied?

But then the wind begins to blow, just enough against my back to urge me forward. Cole’s hand tightens around mine, and with that, we set out for the first hill.

The sisters’ house is quickly lost from sight. We keep the rising moon in front of us, and under its silvery light I scan the untouched earth for any signs of trespass. But the land is messy and wild, and it’s hard to tell what’s untouched, really, in a place where everything looks tousled. Now and then I kneel, sure I’ve caught sight of a step, or a trace, but it’s only the moor playing tricks.

I notice a few sticks snapped cleanly by the weight of a foot. Up close it is clearly the work of a deer’s hoof, not a child’s foot, and an old break at that, nearly swallowed by rain and dirt and change.

We make our way up the second hill.

“Where did you learn to hunt and track?” Cole asks.

I stop and kneel, my fingers tracing a stone embedded in the weeds, smooth and dark like the ones the sisters used for eyes on the wooden crows. I lift it, rubbing the dirt away with my thumb.

“My father taught me.”

Cole kneels next to me. “What happened to him?”

I let the smooth stone fall back to the earth with a small thud.

I know my father’s story. I know it as well as the ones he told me, but I cannot tell it in the same practiced way. It’s written in my blood and bones and memory instead of on pieces of paper. I wish I could tell it as a tale and not his life and my loss. But I don’t know how yet. A small broken piece of me hopes I never know how, because my father wasn’t just a bedtime story.

“If you don’t want to…” he says.

I take a deep breath and begin to descend the second hill.

“My father was a tracker. The best,” I say as Cole falls in step behind me. “He was a big man, but he could make himself as small and silent as a field mouse. And he had this laugh that shook the leaves from the trees.

“You can ask anyone in Near, and they’ll tell you about his strength or his skill, but I will always remember him for that laugh, and for the way he could make his booming voice soft and warm when he told me stories.

“People loved him so much they gave him a title, right beneath the Council. They called him their Protector. He watched over the village, and even the moor seemed to trust him. As if he knew how to be both, to walk the line between person and witch. That’s how I always thought of him, growing up. I wanted to learn to walk that line, too.”

“Is that why you keep calling this”—he gestures to himself and the breeze tousling his hair and his cloak—“a gift?”

“I can’t help but think that if…if I were like you, I’d never feel alone. My father had this way with the moor,” I explain. “Like he knew what it wanted, like it confided in him. I know witches are born, not made, but I honestly thought he’d found some way to speak to the moor, to make the land and the weather answer to him. I thought that it was the ultimate gift, to be connected to something so vast.”

“It is the loneliest feeling in the world,” says Cole. “I don’t feel like a person. I want to feel pain, and joy, and love. Those are the things that connect humans to each other. They’re much stronger threads than those connecting me to the wind.”

I frown. I’d never thought of it that way. “So, you don’t feel those things?”

He hesitates. “I do. But it’s easy to forget. To lose yourself.”

And I want to say that I understand, that I too have felt that lost, but I just nod.

We climb the third hill, and Cole says nothing, so I go on.

“Whenever my father went out, he began by first thanking the moor,” I say. “He would look up to the clouds, and down to the grass, and then out to the hills, and whisper a prayer.”

We crest the third hill. The world dips away around us, and I focus on the fourth hill ahead, instead of the sickening lightness that floods my head and chest when I speak about my father, stealing all the space for air.

“‘I entrust myself to you, the moor,’ he’d whisper. ‘I am born of the moor, as is my family. I take from the moor. I give back to the moor.’ Every time he set foot on the hills he would pray, and for a very long time the moor kept him safe.”

We make our way down an uneven slope, and I glance over at Cole, who is keeping his eyes leveled on the wind as it weaves through blades of wild grass, listening.

“He was always drawn to the sisters. I think it was the same feeling that drew me to you.…” Cole’s eyes find mine, and I feel my words trying to crawl back down my throat. I continue.

“Anyway, things were even worse then. Near was a place made stubborn by time, and the people had turned away from the moor. They were afraid of it. Ever since the Near Witch and the Council, ages ago.”

We climb the fourth hill.

“The Council has always led Near through fear. Fear of what
had
happened. What might happen again.

“As my father got older, he grew closer to the sisters, watching what they could do, moving the earth and making things grow in a way that nothing in town would. They only do charms now, but he said they used to be so strong they could make plants grow up from barren earth with a single touch. They could draw houses of stone up from nothing. My father asked the Council why they clung to such old fears—why they didn’t embrace the sisters and their gifts. The Near Witch had been gone for centuries. Near had named him its Protector, and he was watching the town wither because of old fears. But the Council did not want things to change.”

“What happened?”

“They tried to silence him,” I say. “They called him foolish, and when that didn’t stop him, they took away his title as Protector and gave it to Otto. Nothing was the same after that. Otto publicly denounced him. They didn’t speak for two years.”

We reach the top of the fourth hill.

“Even after Otto’s betrayal, my father didn’t give up. He tried to change their minds, tried to show them how the village could thrive with the sisters’ help.”

“Did it work?”

“Little by little,” I say with a thin smile. “Some people began to listen to him. At first only a few were willing to trust the sisters, and then more, and more. Magda and Dreska began to come into town, began to speak to the people and teach them ways to build gardens and coax things to grow. And it looked like the villagers would finally begin to soften.”

I take a long breath, trying to keep it from wavering.

“Until one day.”

The valley below us is cast in shadow. Looking down, it seems like an abyss. With every step I take, I feel as though the darkness will swallow me, will creep up over my boots and my cloak.

Something cracks behind us. We both spin, scanning the night and the way we came, but all is empty.

I sigh.

Probably just deer.

“One day,” I go on, my throat and my chest and my eyes burning as we descend, “he was out on the hills to the south. It had been a rainy autumn and then a very dry winter, and the earth was cracked, not on top, but deep down, where you can’t see. He was halfway up the hill, when there was a landslide. The slope crumbled, and he was pinned underneath.…It took hours for them to find him. They brought him home, but his body was broken. It took three days for him to…”

I swallow, but some words won’t come out. Instead I say, “It’s amazing how much can change in one day, let alone three. In those three days, I watched my uncle stiffen. I watched my mother became a ghost. I watched my father die. I tried to take in every word he said, tried to commit them to memory, tried not to break inside.

“Otto came and sat by the bed. They spoke for the first time in two years. Most of the things they said were too quiet for anyone to hear. But once I heard Otto raise his voice.

“‘Flesh and blood and foolishness.’ That’s what he said. Over and over.

“My uncle sat with his head bent for three days. But he never left. He didn’t sound angry. He sounded sad. Lost. I think Otto blamed himself somehow.

“But my father never blamed him. And he never blamed the moor. On the third day, he said good-bye. His voice always carried through our house, no matter how soft he spoke. The walls just made way for him. He asked the moor to watch over his family, his town. The last thing he said, after he had made his peace with everyone and everything, was, ‘I entrust myself to you, the moor.’” I close my eyes.

When I open them, the fifth hill looms ahead of us, and we make our trek up, everything in me aching. I falter, but Cole is there and catches my arm. His touch is cool even through my sleeve, and he looks as though he wants to say something, but there’s nothing to say.

His hands are soft and strong at once, and his fingers tell me he is there.

I burrow against his cloak, still half lost in the words. I squeeze my eyes shut. The words have scraped my throat raw. Maybe one day the words will pour out like so many others, easy and smooth and on their own. Right now they take pieces of me with them. I regain myself and pull away, and know that we must keep moving. The cracking sound comes again behind us, but we press on.

We are almost to the top of the fifth hill.

Overhead, a single crow wanders like a black cloud.

It comes into sight as it nears the moon, the blue-white light dancing on its black feathers. But once it glides past, back into the thicker dark, it vanishes. Still, I can hear its wings on the wind, and it makes me shiver. I think of the Near Witch and her dozen crows. We must be close. The crow crosses into the light again before heading farther east, dipping below the line of the fifth hill.

Cole and I make our way up the hill, but after several feet he pauses, frowning as he tilts his head, as if listening to some far-off sound.

That’s when I realize that the wind around us has been growing thicker, building so gradually I didn’t notice, not until now when it begins to ripple, not with Cole’s low tones, but higher, almost musical ones. Cole winces beside me, but we press on toward the hilltop. The wind seems to be spilling over the hill, pushing us back, and we have to lean forward hard to keep from falling.

“We’re almost there,” I say.

The wind surges around us, pushing and pulling. One gust shoves us back from the lip of the hill, the wavering tone so strong that I can almost hear the words of the rhyme on it. The next nearly flattens us against the matted grass. It vibrates through my bones.

A gust draws back, as if for breath, and in that moment we push to the top of the hill. The world beyond unfolds. Five hills due east and…I see it.

The forest.

“
C
OLE, LOOK
!”
I
SHOUT
, pointing to the shadow of the trees in the valley below.

But he doesn’t answer. I turn back just as he staggers and collapses to the grass, holding his head.

“What? What is it?” I ask, dropping to my knees beside him.

“The music. It’s like crossing two tones,” he says, wincing. “It hurts to hear it.”

The wind picks up and Cole bows his head, taking deep breaths. I can see him struggling to stay calm, to stay in control. The wind is fighting with itself, ripping the air from his lungs.

The clouds above slide toward the bright moon, and I don’t know what to do. I reach down to help Cole, but he shakes his head and pushes himself up slowly, the wind whipping his cloak back behind him. It ripples and snaps in the air. He points down to the forest in the valley below.

“It’s her,” he shouts, breathless, over the wind. “She’s controlling…all of it at once…pulling it in toward her.”

And then the light goes out, and all is black.

No longer blue-grays and blue-whites and blue-blacks.

Just black.

The wind around us has changed, too; all the noise and force condensed into one crisp melody.

Then the night itself begins to shift.

A strange glow not overhead, but below us, in the valley. The forest.

It is as if the moon and the trees have switched places. The sky is plunged into the heavy cloud-lidded darkness that seems to come every night, but in the valley below, the trees—or the places between the trees, it is impossible to tell the source—are fully lit, glowing. The woods are alight like an ember, bluish white and cradled by the rolling hills. It’s like a beacon, I think with a chill. So this is what happens when the world goes black. The forest steals the light from the sky. Cole straightens beside me, taking ragged breaths. I cannot stop staring at the glowing trees. It is strange and magical. Almost lovely. The wind song has become simply a song, clear and articulate, as if made by an instrument instead of the air. It is all a perfect dream.

The music continues, clearer than ever, and it’s hard to listen with only the edges of my ears, because I never noticed how beautiful it is. It’s still on the wind, made by the wind itself, but it is wafting toward us like the scent of my mother’s bread, oddly filling.

A gust blows through, so strong and sudden it nearly tears the melody apart. The same low, sad strain I’d heard that first night, like a second layer. Cole. But the music persists, pulling itself together on the other side.

My feet carry me forward, drawn toward the trees of their own accord, and I can’t help but feel like a moth, a fluttering insect blind to everything except the impossible glowing forest. I take a few silent steps down the hill before Cole’s fingers tighten around my wrist.

“Wait,” he urges, but even he seems dazed by the light.

“What is that place?” I ask. I feel him beside me. I do not see him there, because I cannot seem to tear my eyes from the glow.

And then, one hill over, a dark shape moves. A small silhouette, like a child, cloaked in a deeper darkness, as if wrapped up in night itself. The shape flits over the moor toward the tree line with unnatural lightness and speed, as if propelled, half carried by the wind and the grass. As if its feet do not touch the ground.

It dances down into the valley and up to the forest.

“No,” I say, calling out to the form as it nears the moonlit grove. Cole does not let go.

“Can’t you see?” I ask him, wrenching free. “It’s a child. We have to save her.”

I break away from Cole and into a sprint, stumbling down the hill, and I can feel him right beside me. He is speaking, asking me to slow down, to wait, and something else, but the wind is up against my ears, and I can’t tear my eyes from the figure cast in silhouette against the glowing trees. Maybe it’s a small girl with blond hair that won’t mess, and a chirpy voice. The
maybe
seems to transform the shape before my eyes into my bubbly little sister.

I hit the base of the hill too hard and fast, and stumble to my hands and knees. The tangled earth cuts into my fingers and shins, but the burn of it is lost as Cole helps me to my feet. I’m amazed at how close the forest is. It looked farther away, but now that we’re standing in the valley with it, the thin branches and slips of leaves are visible in the blue-white light.

“Wren?” I shout, but the small child does not turn to us, does not even cast a glance over her shoulder. She walks straight into the forest and is instantly lost from view.

I shout her name again, rushing toward the tree line, but Cole’s grip is no longer gentle, his voice no longer a suggestion.

“No, Lexi. It’s not her. Something’s wrong.” The wind is still growing, but the music is gone, and now it’s just howling and angry. Cole winces, turning his head away from the source of the sound, the forest. I twist free and make it several feet, almost close enough to touch a half-broken branch that juts into the clearing, when it happens. A dozen crows erupt from the canopy of the forest, bursting from the jagged line of trees, blacker than the night and screaming in their raspy tones. The wind rises and falls with the words in my head.

A dozen crows perched on the low stone wall.

Cole and I step back together. Cold comes over me, nerve-bristling. I hear branches cracking. Dead branches on the forest floor, snapping beneath the weight of something. Someone. I manage to take another step back and so does Cole, and we are caught somewhere between the need to flee and a horrible curiosity that digs into our bones and slows them down. My sister might be in that forest. I cannot run. I cannot leave her.

But something else is in the forest, too. Something is making the branches crack, the shape of it drawing closer and closer through the trees. And then I see it.

Five white lines curl around a thin tree near the front of the forest. I gasp. Finger bones. Fear wins a little, and I slide back a few feet. Two glistening circles hover just behind the narrow tree, like river rocks. The finger bones release their hold on the tree and reach forward, out toward me. And as they do, as they graze the open air of the small valley, they grow moss. Dirt and weeds coil around the bones like muscle and flesh, sinewy and slick. Cole reaches me, putting himself between me and the woods. The shimmering circles slip forward, and they are indeed river rocks, set like lifeless eyes into a face of moss. A woman’s face. Just beneath the eyes, the earthy skin tugs itself apart, and the woman hisses. She opens her mouth, and what comes out at first aren’t words at all but wind, and a raspy hint of voice, as if her throat is clogged with dirt.

The branches snap beneath her bare moss feet as she steps forward from the glowing woods. She breathes out and the wind picks up hard enough to bend everything down, to make the world bow. The grass presses flat to the earth, and even the forest seems to lean. I can’t hear anything but the white noise of it and the witch’s voice.

“Don’t you dare,” she hisses. I shrink back, but Cole is standing straight. His eyes are as dark as the witch’s, swallowing the light from the forest.

“We have to get the child!” I shout to him over the wind. We step forward, and another gust of wind rushes against our backs, but it breaks uselessly like water on rocks when it meets the forest and the witch. She inhales, and the wind howls around her, amplifying her words so that they surround us, seeming to come from everywhere.

“DON’T YOU DARE DISTURB MY GARDEN,” she booms. The sound echoes through the world, and then falls apart, breaking into hisses and howls.

Cole tightens one arm around me, never letting his eyes stray from the moor-made thing that is the Near Witch, and he looks paralyzed; but then his eyes narrow, and the wind surges at our backs again. His free hand flies up, and the air behind us pours over our heads and fills the space between the Near Witch and us like a wall. It blows so hard that the world beyond the wind is distorted, rippling. Then the Near Witch lets out a sound between a growl and a laugh, and just like that, the wall breaks and slams into us, throwing us back onto the grass.

In that moment the trees go black again, and the moon reclaims the sky, and we are left in the valley by the darkened forest, with the moon full and bright overhead. Cole breathes heavily beside me.

“What just happened?” I whisper, pushing myself to my knees and helping him up. His arm wraps tightly around me, but now I worry it’s as much to hold himself up as to keep me close. His eyes meet mine, and then he kisses me, and it isn’t cool and smooth, but warm and desperate, and afraid. Not just afraid of the witch, but of what he’s done. He presses his mouth to mine, as if he can force normalcy and humanity and flesh and blood back into himself, and erase the image of the Near Witch’s eyes, which were the mirror image of his own.

And that’s when we hear the cracking sound again, the one that followed us over the hills. Footsteps. Heavy boots at the top of the hill. Cole tears his lips from mine, and we both look up. I see the glint of the rifles before I meet my uncle’s eyes. Otto. Bo. And Tyler. We are all as frozen as the trees and the rocks around us, staring at each other. I see my uncle’s grip on his gun tighten as his eyes make their way from me to Cole. Tyler curses, the sound spilling down the valley. I have never seen so much hatred in his eyes. His blond hair glows white in the moonlight, but his blue eyes look black from here. I can feel his gaze as it winds around the contours of my body, taking in the way it fits with Cole’s. Five people, all waiting for one to move. The three men on the hill stare down at us as if we are deer. It happens all at once.

Otto’s gun catches the moonlight as he lifts it.

Bo cocks his head.

Tyler steps forward.

Cole’s arms tighten around my waist as he brings the side of his face to mine and whispers, “Don’t let go.”

Before I can ask what he means, the wind picks up around us, whipping so fiercely that the world once again begins to bleed away. The grass flattens as the gust tears up the hill toward the men with such force that I find myself waiting for the sound of impact, the crash, but there’s only the whistling wind filling my ears and Cole’s voice weaving effortlessly through it.

“Run.”

And then we’re plunging into the forest.

Branches tear at our cloaks and sleeves and skin as we weave through the trees, trying to skirt the edge of the forest. Half-rotten roots curl up from the ground. I keep my fingers on Cole’s arm, running as much by feel as anything, letting his motions ripple through me, my feet finding the spaces left by his.

We keep the clearing to our left, and the deeper forest to our right. The center of the forest is black and cold and quiet. Every time I begin to veer toward it, remembering the little-girl-shaped shadow and the five bone fingers, Cole forces me back to the rim of the trees.

“I haven’t bought us much time,” he calls back. “Who knows how long…the wind will hold.” He sounds breathless, and I feel him begin to thin beneath my fingers, turning to something more like mist than skin.

“Cole,” I say, tightening my grip. He slows enough to look back at me, eyes shining.

“I’ll be all right,” he says, reading the worry in my eyes. His arm feels solid again beneath my touch. “But we have to hurry.” We set off, my lungs burning, skin buzzing from fear and cold.

“Matthew must have told them!” I say.

Behind us, branches snap underfoot.

The men are in the forest.

I glance back, but all I can see are black branches, the moonlight slanting in on our left. I stumble and fall back a step, my hand sliding down Cole’s arm, his wrist, until our fingers are knotted. Men’s voices echo in the dark. Growing softer. They have taken a path deeper into the woods.

Cole turns suddenly left, and we break through the trees at the edge of the forest. The moon is high and bright again, showering the moor in light, exposing everything. Including us.

We make a break for it, up the hill, everything in me burning, desperate for air and rest. When I think my lungs and legs won’t make it, the wind picks up, presses against my back, urging me on. I reach the top of the hill, Cole’s fingers still twisted in mine, and risk a glance back at the forest below, at the three men just surfacing again. Before they look up at the hill, we’re gone.