The Near Witch

by Victoria Schwab

  “He doesn’t think you’re weak…and neither do I.” He angles his head down until our foreheads almost touch. “Otto thinks you’ve been to see the stranger. That’s why you keep running off.”

  “Why would he—”

  “And I think,” he whispers, “he’s right.”

  “And why would I do that?” I push past him and head back down the hall. Tyler follows.

  “He’s dangerous, Lexi.”

  “You don’t know that,” I say too quickly, adding, “and neither do I.”

  Tyler grabs my arm, pushing me back against the wall. “When did you see him?”

  He puts his hands up on either side of my shoulders, caging me.

  “This isn’t about that stranger,” I say slowly. “This is about Cecilia and Edgar.”

  “How do you know they’re not connected?”

  “I don’t,” I say. “And I was going to sneak out today—”

  “To see him?”

  “No!” I push against his chest, but he doesn’t budge. “To search for clues, for tracks, for anything that might lead us to the children!”

  He presses closer, his weight pinning me. “Don’t lie to me!”

  “Tyler Ward.” My mother’s voice slips through us. She stands in the kitchen doorway, dusted with flour, eyes calm and blue.

  Tyler and I stand frozen, my mother’s presence dousing us like water.

  At last he straightens his shoulders and runs a hand through his hair. “Yes, Mrs. Harris?”

  “I need a few more logs for the hearth.” She gestures to the front yard. “Would you mind?”

  Tyler looks back at me for one long moment, before smiling thinly. “Not at all.” He walks out, shutting the front door firmly behind him.

  I slump back against the wall. My mother retreats into the kitchen.

  I stare at the closed door for several moments before my head clears, and I realize what my mother has given me. A chance. I take a deep breath and follow her into the kitchen, ready to convince her, and find her adding sticks to the fire, a healthy stack of wood already beside the hearth. Her eyes find mine. And they aren’t empty. She wipes her hands on her apron, points to the open kitchen window, and says only one word.

  One perfect, sharp word.

  “Go.”

  MY BOOTS ARE CINCHED and I take off, winding a course around the back of the house, behind a small hill and safely out of sight of the chopping block in the front yard. My mind traces over the village, mapping out north, south, east, and west, and all that’s in between.

  My mother might swear by kneading, but I swear by walking, by running. Moving. I haven’t stopped moving in three years.

  As my boots pound across the moor, I think of the music that weaves over these hills at night. The adults don’t seem to notice, or if they do, they haven’t said. But Wren hears it clearly, and I hear something that crumbles just before I can make sense of it. Why?

  I reach the town square, and the place is cast in a strange quiet. Just a couple of days ago it was brimming with villagers, but now there’s no one, just a stretch of cobbled ground and a few low and tapering walls.

  Who will be next? I come to a stop and try to think of the spinning game. Edgar was on one side of Wren, Cecilia on the other, and now they’re both missing. How many others were playing? I remember a wiry young boy, maybe eight.

  Riley Thatcher, next to the twin girls, Rose and Lilly; their older brother, Ben. Was Emily Harp there? She’s a small girl, Wren’s age, with dark braids. Her family lives at the southern edge of Near, so she and Wren don’t play together often, but I remember her because their birthdays are only a month apart. I rack my brain but can’t seem to reconstruct the circle fully. Rose and Lilly are not yet four years old, and their brother is only a year younger than I am. But Riley and Emily…have they heard the voices of their friends at night?

  Who am I missing?

  Wren. A small voice in the back of my mind adds my little sister to the list. I wince and shake my head.

  First things first. Cecilia.

  The village is quiet and the doors are closed.

  Cecilia’s house comes into sight, one of a small cluster just behind the town square. Considering the proximity of the buildings, whoever took the little girl was not afraid of getting caught. I make my way toward the clump of houses, in the hopes that there are clues the men have not found.

  I am getting close when a familiar voice pours out from an open door, one of those tones that catches your ear no matter how softly it speaks. Lower than Magda’s, it spills out sharp enough to cut. Dreska. My feet catch up on the weedy earth, and I nearly trip. The sisters almost never set foot in the village.

  She would sound like she is muttering to herself at something she spilled or misplaced, except that there’s another voice picking up when one of her sentences ends, old but less distinct.

  “I was there,” Dreska snaps, and I wince for the recipient. The stones of the house seem to grind together. “You were not, Tomas. You were not even a thought in your parents’ minds, and your parents were not thoughts, and their parents were not thoughts. But I was there.…”

  I risk a glance around the half-open door, see Dreska leaning on her cane as she jabs a gnarled finger into Master Tomas’s chest. No one ever lifts their voice, let alone their hand, against the Council members, and especially against Master Tomas, the oldest of the three. His hair is a shock of white, his skin as paper-thin as Master Eli’s. But his eyes are light, somewhere between green and gray, and always narrowed. Even though he’s ancient, he is frighteningly tall and stick straight, not curved with age like the others. He stands just inside the door, looking down at Dreska.

  “That may be so.” His voice is frail, tired. “But you do not know—”

  “Look at the signs.” She cuts him off. “Do you see them? I do. You are supposed to be keepers of secrets and forgotten truths. How can you not see.…” She trails off. The house trembles.

  “I do see, Dreska, but if you were there to see her alive, you were also there to see her die.”

  “I was. I bore witness to your ancestors’ crimes. You have wrought this—” she rasps, when he cuts in again, his nose crinkling as if he’s caught scent of something foul.

  His voice dips low, and I cannot hear without walking straight into the room. The only word I make out is witch. And then Dreska lets out a hiss like water on hot coals.

  “Don’t test me, Dreska Thorne—” says the old man, louder. “A tree grows, it rots, and new things grow.” His pale eyes gleam at her. “A tree does not rot only to come back up from the ground fully formed, bark and all.…And you should know…”

  But Dreska has had enough, it seems. She throws up her hands, waves them at the man as if he had a few dying flames on his bony shoulders, and storms out. I shove myself as far back from the doorway as possible, and pretend I’ve just come this way. But it wouldn’t have mattered if I’d been standing right there in Dreska’s path. She hobbles past me, muttering to herself.

  “Fools all,” she says to no one, plucking a smooth dark stone from the dirt. She limps away from the three houses that belong to the Council, and turns to the east, where another, larger cluster huddles against the gray day. Dreska uses her cane to unearth a few more rocks and a couple of good twigs before making the effort of stooping down to collect them in her dirty apron. I follow and watch, wondering what on earth she’s up to.

  “Sticks and stones, Lexi Harris,” she says quite suddenly, as if that answers everything.

  “Will break my bones?” I finish.

  “No, silly girl, sticks and stones. For building birds.” She half sings in her raspy way as she hobbles along. “Gathered from the village floor, nailed to every village door, watchful eyes turned out at night, keep the evils out of sight.” She looks to me, still tottering like a knocked glass before it resettles. She is waiting for some recognition, some reply. When I give her nothing, she shakes her head, bending to fetch another stick
from the road. She turns and raps me with it, smiling at its strength. I rub my arm.

  “Goodness, I forget how little children know,” she says, poking me with the end of the stick. “Long ago, long before the Witch’s Rhyme ever became popular, we knew a dozen others. Back when people still had sense. Back when I was a child.”

  I know that everyone must start out young, but it’s impossible for me to imagine Magda and Dreska as anything but what they are now, crooked and old. Or rather, I can conjure something to mind, but the result is a grotesque thing, only a few inches shorter than Dreska and just as wrinkled, with a voice as high as Wren’s and a broader smile, but no more teeth.

  I close my eyes, trying to unmake the image. When I open them again, Dreska has hobbled down the path that curves south around the village to her home.

  “Dreska,” I say, closing the distance between us. “Wren said she heard her friends’ voices calling her onto the moor. I can’t quite hear them, the words fall apart before I can make sense of them, and the adults don’t seem to notice anything at all.” Her green eyes harden on me, as if seeing me for the first time. “But everyone leaves a mark, and there are none. All I can think is that something else is luring them away, something…” I want to say witches. Craft. But I can’t bring myself to say it to her. There are only two witches in Near, and neither of them would do this.

  I wait for Dreska to say something, anything, to pick up where my sentence trailed off, but she just stares at me with her sharp eyes. Finally, she blinks.

  “Are you coming?” she asks, turning back toward the path, away from the cluster of homes. When I hesitate, she adds, “You’re young and foolish, Lexi Harris, but no more so than the rest of Near. Maybe even a good deal less. Like your father.” She frowns when she says it, as if she isn’t convinced that my taking after him is a good thing.

  I want to go with her, see Cole again, watch her transform the apron full of sticks and stones into something more, and ask her questions that she might finally answer. But I have to finish this first.

  “I’ll come by soon,” I say, looking back in the direction of Cecilia’s house. “I promise.”

  Dreska shrugs, or I think she does; she might just be shifting her weight. She veers off onto the almost invisible path toward her cottage.

  At the last moment, I say, “The Near Witch was real,” adding a softer, “right?” But when she doesn’t turn around, I think she hasn’t heard.

  I walk on, when I hear her call back. “Of course she was. Stories are always born from something.” And then she is gone, swallowed up by the hills.

  I turn toward Cecilia’s house. Dreska didn’t laugh at me, didn’t brush my questions off. I feel like I’ve earned a key to a door that no one else has been allowed, not since my father. “Like your father,” she said, and those three words wrap around me like armor. I reach the house, casting a last glance about for signs of my uncle, before knocking quickly on the door. Moments later it falls open, and I’m dragged in.

  CECILIA’S HOUSE IS A TANGLE of bodies.

  My newfound strength begins to leach away as hands guide me in, and the bodies shift to make room. The last time I saw so many in such a small space, it was for my father’s wake. Even the mood is the same. Too much bustling and shifting and chatting, as if it can all cover up the worry and pain. And loss. They act as if Cecilia’s already dead. I feel as though I’ve swallowed rocks.

  All around the room the women are whispering, wringing hands and bowing heads together.

  “They aren’t searching hard enough.”

  “Why hasn’t Otto found them?”

  “First Edgar, now Cece. How long can this go on?”

  Cecilia’s mother, Mrs. Porter, is sitting on the edge of a kitchen chair, her twiggish arms clutching another woman’s shoulder as her sobs burst out in spasms. Her friend shushes her. I wind through the room.

  “The window, the window,” Mrs. Porter says over and over. “It was latched inside and out. How could…” She shakes her head and continues in this way, rambling, repeating herself as the women weave themselves around her. I scan the room in search of my uncle, but he’s nowhere to be found. No men are, in fact. They must all be out searching. I draw near, wanting to comfort her but not knowing how. Someone touches my elbow, mutters my name. I press my way through the sea of women until I’m there beside her.

  “Mrs. Porter,” I say softly, and she looks up. I kneel so that I’m looking up at her. She is back to staring at her clasped hands, muttering of windows.

  “Did you notice anything odd?”

  She shakes her head harder, her eyes red. She opens her mouth but doesn’t speak, and I think for a moment she might scream. The question earns me stern looks from around the room, and a couple of clucking sounds, as if I’m just supposed to sit and sob with everyone else.

  “Mrs. Porter,” I persist.

  “I told them already,” she says, her head still swaying side to side. “The window. We keep the window latched. Cece—” She stifles a cry. “She liked to wander, so we put two latches on the window, one inside and one out. I locked them. I know I did. But this morning they were both open.”

  I frown. “Did Cecilia say anything last night…out of the ordinary?”

  “No, nothing,” she whispers, her voice hoarse, thin. “She seemed cheerful, humming and playing.”

  My skin prickles. “Humming? Did you know the song?”

  She gives a small shrug. “You know the children, always singing something.…”

  “Try to remember,” I press. Her eyes are still fixed on a piece of wall across the room.

  She swallows and begins to hum a quiet tune, full of broken notes and awkward pauses, but I know it. A chill runs through me as her voice trails off. My fingers are digging into my palms, and I wince as I flex my hands, leaving tiny crescents on my skin.

  “Is there anything else you can tell me? Anything—”

  “That’s quite enough, Lexi,” warns one of the women, and I realize Mrs. Porter’s song has trailed off from the melody and into quiet sobs. Suddenly there are several pairs of eyes narrowing on me. I place my hands over Mrs. Porter’s, give a small squeeze, and whisper an apology as I push myself up. My eyes scan the room, trying to pick out something, anything.

  A doorway leads into a hall, and suddenly I want nothing more than to get there, into that hollow space and away from these women.

  The bent form of Mrs. Porter reminds me too much of my own mother, hunched first over my father’s bed, and then over her baking, mourning silently as the village spilled out of our house. A tangle of arms and legs, hugs and kisses and stroked hair, the low murmur of prayers, the gentle grip of fingers.

  I slip down the hall toward Cecilia’s room, turn the handle, and vanish within.

  The covers have been tossed back. There is a rug beyond the bed, one corner flicked up as if a small pair of feet scuffed along the floor, still half asleep.

  And there, the window, now shut. I run my fingers over the inside latch. There’s a mirroring one on the other side. The outside latch is still open, but the inside one has been locked again. I push the metal bar to the side, and the latch slides free. I test the frame with my fingers, but the wood is old, stiff. I doubt a child of six could move it up. I pull, and the wood slides up a foot with a loud groan, forcing me to cast a quick glance behind me. Beyond the window, the weedy ground rolls away, and the only signs of trespass are a few trampled patches several yards off, where men’s boots have pressed the grass flat. There are no signs of a fall or a jump, no place just outside the window where feet met the ground. No marks at all. I’m about to turn back when I remember Cole, and the wind-swept path.

  At first I see nothing, nothing but a few roofs in the distance. And then, slowly, the world shifts, some shapes settling back, others jumping out. A shadow appears, longer than it should be, given how high the sun is. It almost looks as if the tangled grass is bending, arcing away, just the way it did by Edgar’s house. I
gather my skirt and bring my boot up to the sill, shifting my weight so I can jump through.

  “Run him out of town.”

  I lurch back into the room, pressing myself to the wall beside the window. My breath catches so fast in my throat I almost choke. My uncle and several others have rounded the corner of Cecilia’s house, grumbling as they stop just beyond the window.

  “And let him get away?”

  “Risk him coming back? No.” The voice cuts through the fresh air, gruff and low. Otto. My fingers wrap around the thin curtain by the window.

  “Eric says he saw him around here in the middle of the night,” joins Mr. Ward. “Says he’s sure of it.” Eric Porter. Cecilia’s father.

  “What time?” asks Otto.

  “Late. Eric says he couldn’t sleep, was standing on the porch, and he swears he saw that boy lurking.”

  A lie. It has to be. Cole said he saw me and decided to follow. He would never have been over this way. And then we never came by here together. My fingers tighten on the fabric until my knuckles go white. Fear must be making phantoms.

  “Is that all the evidence you’ve got?” counters Bo, with a sickening air of disinterest. I can picture him shrugging as he digs the dirt from under his nails with his hunting knife.

  “He’s a creep,” spits Tyler, and I remember his face in the hall, wounded pride and something worse.

  Tyler. If he’s here, then Otto knows I’m not at home. I swallow and press myself into the wall beside the window. I had better make the most of today.

  “What more do we need?” adds Tyler.

  “Sadly, boy,” joins an old man, sounding tired but patient, “a bit more than that.” I know the voice. Slow and even. The third member of the Council, Master Matthew.

  “But that’s not all Eric said,” Mr. Ward presses. “He said he was watching the stranger, real close, and that one moment he was there, and the next he just broke apart. Vanished.”

  My heart lurches as I remember that first night I saw Cole. My ears ring with the sound of shutters slamming closed.