The Broken Circle: Yarns of the Knitting Witches

by Cheryl Potter

  Skye shouldered the rucksack, her eyes cloudy with tears, saying nothing.

  Muttering, Chloe heaved herself to her feet and turned to lumber back to her stall. “All these years, set up beside two of the Twelve and I never knew it.”

  A few minutes later, Skye slipped from the tent and crept toward the stables at the edge of the fairgrounds, careful to keep the hood of her cloak up and her eyes on the ground. The ponies had been unhitched from their traces and stood tied to the back of the wagon. Scavenging what little she could carry, Skye fashioned makeshift pack straps from one leather harness and hung both her mother’s rucksack and her own split-twig baskets from either side of Shep’s withers. She fitted Chuffer’s bit into his mouth and climbed onto his broad back, holding his mate’s lead rope in one hand. Slowly, she urged the ponies to pick their way through the maze of carts and cook fires in the encampment that had sprung up along the river. She and Katarina usually spent the first night of the fair visiting the campfires where traveling minstrels sang the old tales anew. No one knew yarns like Sierra, and by the end of the evening she would always be sought out to tell the last tale.

  There would be no storytelling tonight, Skye thought sorrowfully. She kept her head down, even when a little boy with a squirming puppy peeped at her from a tent flap. “Can I pat your ponies?” he called. “I’ll let you hold my new dog.”

  Behind her, horns heralded the start of the midday fair events. Cheers rose over the bleachers as the sheepdog trials began, while from the mead tent the strains of lute and flute gave way to music promising afternoon revelry. The whole array of noises was nothing but a dull roar to Skye, whose only thought was to escape unnoticed from the fairgrounds, so that she might rescue her mother. She left the shelter of the last tent and rode along the riverbank past the far side of the campground. The rushing torrent was the same River Runne that she and her mother had crossed this morning. The high expansion bridge they had traveled over was guarded on both ends by Northland soldiers, and Skye had little hope of using it without being stopped. She walked the ponies slowly along the river’s edge, scanning the water for a place to ford, but it seemed impossible. Spring run-off swelled the river. It looked too fast and deep for small mountain ponies, even ones as sure-footed as Chuffer and Shep. A few rocks poked above the water, but they looked too slick to use for stepping stones. Discouraged, Skye turned away from the raging river to find herself face to face with the tall sledder she had met at the bridge this morning.

  “Where are you going?” he asked softly.

  Skye looked about wildly but there were no others. “You’ve been following me!”

  “It wasn’t difficult, if that’s what you’re thinking,” he said with an easy smile. “That cloak may allow you to pass unseen, but those two fat ponies are less easily hidden.”

  Skye’s face flushed. “What do you want?” She demanded, backing Chuffer away from the soldier. They were still too close to the river’s edge, and as Chuffer backed into Shep she saw that the pack pony could easily slip down the embankment through the slick muck along the water. “Leave me be.” She tried to urge Chuffer past the tall sled-der. “Don’t follow me.”

  “You have the wrong idea,” he protested, holding his bare palms out to show he bore no weapons. “I am a friend, an ally.”

  “Not likely.” Skye strained at Shep’s tether, but it was too late, the pony was beginning to slide over the edge of the riverbank. If she held on, he would take her and Chuffer with him. She began to sweat inside her cloak. “Get up, Shep,” she urged. “Get up!”

  The tall soldier lunged for Shep’s halter but missed just as the lead left Skye’s hand and disappeared down the muddy bank after the pony. For a fleeting instant Skye considered escaping with Chuffer but she could think only of the rucksack strapped to Shep’s back, along with Chloe’s admonishment, a message from her mother, to let nothing happen to the garments within.

  Helpless on her pony, she watched the soldier flail clumsily down the embankment. What did he mean about passing unseen in her traveling cloak, she wondered? Because there was another one in the rucksack; she had seen Sierra pack it. It was probably fortunate that there was another—Sierra would need it now that the soldiers had taken hers.

  Slipping and sliding, the sledder led Shep up to the grassy knoll where Skye waited. The soldier was covered in so much mud she wanted to laugh. His words were ridiculous, she decided, for she had never passed unseen in all of her life. She opened her mouth, but the laughter died in her throat as she realized her self-deception. She had passed unseen, more than once; she had simply not realized the act for what it was. How easy it had been to explain the magic away as coincidence or circumstance.

  The memories came back to her like fragments of dreams. As a child, she had once taken a loaf of her mother’s fresh-baked bread to the hunters at the Sleep Out lodge. It was cold, so her mother had dressed Skye in her traveling cloak, a miniature of the one she wore now. How startled the moose hunters had been when she appeared, once she took off the garment inside the lodge. How uneasily they behaved toward the small girl they believed had purposefully snuck up on grown men who hunted the most elusive moose in the Middlelands. Skye had been confused, because all she had done was take off the cloak inside the lodge when it made her feel unbearably warm.

  Another time, she had chanced upon Katarina in the mill house, while Sierra visited with Katarina’s mother in the bread kitchen. She remembered standing in the doorway waiting for Katarina to notice her, but the stone wheel ground loudly and Katarina never looked over. The mill house was warm with the yeasty smell of wheat and rye, too hot for her traveling cloak. Averill passed by with a sack of grain and still no one appeared to pay attention to her. She decided to sneak over and tap Katarina on the arm, to surprise her. But instead her cloak slipped off her shoulders and Katarina’s eyes lit up as she beckoned her friend to a pile of burlap sacks next to the grain bins. “Skye, come see! Poppy had her kittens!”

  The tall soldier reached the grassy knoll, holding Shep’s lead rope. “Now tell me what happened,” he insisted, dirty and out of breath. “Where are you going and where is you mother?”

  “You don’t know, soldier boy?” Skye asked, curious now. “Some of your so-called Northland Guard took her away to who knows where because they say she uses magic.”

  “They are not my Guard.” The soldier thrust Shep’s tether into her hands. “I am not one of their foot soldiers, in case you haven’t noticed.”

  “Your clothes,” Skye reasoned, heat rising in her face. “Your accent. You’re not from around here, are you?”

  “No.”

  “You’re a sledder from the Far North,” Skye guessed.

  “My name’s Niles,” he said. “And if you are Skye Blue, I’m a friend of your brother’s.”

  “I had a feeling,” Skye insisted, flush with the familiar heat that only her traveling cloak offered. “I knew it when I saw you.”

  “And I you. Warren’s spoken of you oft enough,” Niles smiled. “He never said you were so pretty.”

  Skye grew redder. “Why did you act that way at the bridge?”

  “Maynard, he’s trouble,” Niles said. “He fears anything to do with magic, crystal or other. And I’ve been in more than enough trouble already to want to cross him. He is dying to report me and draw a new partner.”

  “They’re a small-minded lot here in the Middlelands,” Skye offered. “Sometimes narrow valleys make for narrow vision. Let me tell you something: Where I live at Top Notch, you can see for miles.”

  “How could Maynard like me?” Niles agreed, with a laugh. “I’m from the north.”

  Skye threw back the hood of her traveling cloak and loosened the tie. “We got past you on the bridge because of our cloaks, didn’t we? But we had no power to pass unseen, just the power of persuasion.”

  “One and the same if rightly used,” Niles replied. “Your mother showe
d us what she wanted us to see: a mother and daughter with yarn to sell at a fair.”

  “Maybe crystals do harbor magic.”

  “More than you would believe, and none of it’s been used for much good by either side.”

  Skye’s brow furrowed. “You mean the north and south?’

  “According to the ancients, it was men and women,” Niles said.

  “I know my yarns. And that’s nothing but a tale of old.” Skye gave Niles a level glance. “I really need to find my mother.”

  “And I your brother,” Niles agreed. “What Maynard said is true. No one has seen him. He is called a deserter.”

  “Warren, a deserter?” Skye gave him a troubled look. “Never.”

  “Maybe not,” Niles shrugged. “But he’s gone. He slipped out of our unit after a battle between the Lowlanders and a Middleland detachment in the foothills beneath the Northland Glacier. We watched from above with our sleds and could do nothing. He left without a word.”

  “That doesn’t sound like him at all. There must have been a reason.”

  “When I reported back to the garrison at Bordertown, no one had seen him for days,”

  Niles said. “Our detail was broken up and we all were reassigned lest there be more traitors and deserters among us. So now I am here.” He wiped sweat from his brow. “It’s too warm down here.”

  “We can find him,” Skye insisted. “And my mother. Come with me!”

  Niles shook his head. “Then I would be called deserter, too. The best way for me to help is to stay with the army. I’ll hear more that way. Maybe I’ll see something.” He scanned the fairgrounds and then the sun, no longer high in the sky. “You need to go. Quickly.”

  “How am I ever going to ford this river?”

  “There is only one way.” Niles turned toward the checkpoint. “Come, let’s get you across that bridge.”

  “The soldiers will see me.” Skye patted Chuffer’s neck. “You said yourself that I can’t pass unseen with mountain ponies.”

  “No worries,” Niles grinned. “This soldier will lead you. I may not hail from around here, but I do know how to ride a mountain horse. Does this pack pony have a bridle?”

  “In the saddle bag.”

  Niles fitted Shep’s bridle and swung a long leg across the stout pony’s back. He looked so comical that Skye laughed.

  Ignoring her, Niles flashed a grin and kicked Shep into a mountain pony’s lilting trot. “Come on,” he urged. “Let’s get you out of here.”

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  “How much for the coin?”

  CHAPTER 2

  ESMERALDE, DRESSED IN BLACK, limped up the roadside. She seemed oblivious to the stream of fairgoers traveling in the opposite direction. Her heavy medicine satchel, which she called her Possibles Bag, smacked soundly against her side with each step. The others on the road ignored her, just a crone in dark raiment at the side of the road, giving way to swifter foot traffic but still plodding along stolidly. Her old boots, trodden down in the back, gave witness to better days. A finely knit beret perched at a crazy angle on her head, over unbrushed hair, dark but lightly threaded with gray. Only her clear gray eyes betrayed her as something more than she seemed.

  After a fitful night, Esmeralde rose to consult the resources in her felted bag. All signs had pointed north toward Bordertown, as

  Indigo Rose had foretold. Esmeralde would have preferred that the signs point south to the Middlemarch fair, full of frivolities. She loved the music and dance, arts and crafts, fiber and frolic, and, best of all, visiting with old friends. A few rounds of the fermented wine called Crystal Cordial that she carried in her flask would loosen tongues and lighten hearts. She often came away from the fair days having gained useful information.

  Thinking of her stall mates in the great hall, she sighed. She could do without the affectionate prattle of Chloe the button lady, but she yearned for the lore of Sierra Blue and the chance to trade for one of Sierra’s whimsical garments. Esmeralde knew that talk of the Twelve was unsafe at a fair filled with folk from all the lands, especially now that magic crystals had been forbidden. But Esmeralde still treasured Sierra’s tales of old, retold around the campfire at night. She never grew weary of the legends of the ancients, known in these parts as the First Folk. They had ruled the north, which had been the only land. Eventually, they discovered the magic crystals and stumbled upon ways to harness the stones’ power. According to fable, ruling nature was not something the First Folk were meant to do, and it was their ancient folly that sent the world into the first age of ice.

  Sierra was a born storyteller. Esmeralde didn’t care whether Sierra’s well-told tales were true or merely fables. As a child, Esmeralde had watched as Sierra sat close to Mamie Verde, when the old woman could still utter enough words to teach the tales, and learned each story verbatim. Tales of the ancients were just musty yarns no one heeded these days. Esmeralde believed all would do better to notice what she perceived as veiled warnings hidden in the stories. No matter whether the stories were true or not, Sierra was entertaining and knew her yarns well.

  This morning, before she set out on the road, Esmeralde had pulled out of her pack the medicinal herbs and salves she would have sold in her stall at the fair. They were simple remedies for childhood ailments and common colds. Then she had rummaged in the back room of her cottage and ransacked her dark pantry—for what? What had Indigo Rose said to bring? She could not remember. There were too many wax-sealed tinctures and corked vials on her dusty shelves to make a wild guess. She brought them all, and thus was now walking heavily on her right leg, balancing the weight of the clanking vessels that rhythmically slapped in the bag she held against her left side.

  Esmeralde was not really lame, though she had discovered it helped to look that way. Already this morning, a farm family had made space for her to ride a distance among squirming sheepdog puppies in exchange for a few coppers’ worth of soothing mint tea. Numerous others along the muddy track had glanced her way to inquire about stronger remedies, but she had averted her eyes and feigned ignorance. The sun had risen high in the sky, while dark clouds in the west threatened rain. Once she crossed the broad trestle bridge into Banebridge, she would be just a short hike from Indigo Rose’s greenhouse garden, which overlooked the river valley. Together, over the bubbling dye pot, both women hoped that all would be made clear—or as clear as things got these days. So far, she and Indigo had seen nothing over the dye pot other than cloudy shapes; and the night sky had yielded only an ordinary display of moon and stars. The vision they had been expecting for almost twenty years had failed to show itself.

  Yesterday Esmeralde and Indigo had made a pact. They would search for the Fire in the Sky one last time, and if it did not come they would take matters into their own hands. To play it safe, Esmeralde had journeyed to her cottage below the wooded Copse, where trees tore at travelers who strayed off the track. There she scanned the night sky to the south, while Indigo looked to the north from her greenhouse garden above Banebridge. Esmeralde had watched until the stars began to wink out at dawn, a dawn that yet again lacked the red call. Esmeralde had become increasingly certain that Aubergine would never call them all together, as she had promised. Maybe the frozen crystals had lost their fire. Maybe they were just lost. Perhaps they were tucked on a rafter in the back room of the Potluck, out of Smokey Jo’s reach.

  Esmeralde was done waiting. She and Indigo would decide this day how best to take matters of the Twelve into their own hands.

  Any of the remaining Twelve had most likely gone to the fair.

  Esmeralde imagined that Sierra had journeyed down from Top Notch, unless the Teardrop had spilled—and if it had not already, it would this day. No one needed tea leaves or potions to forecast flood.
The wet air and the whiff of smoke that burned her throat as she walked the broad track toward Banebridge were signs enough.

  If Sierra had trekked to Middlemarch to sell her garments, then Esmeralde believed she had put herself in danger. The clear crystal Esmeralde employed as a compass had definitely pointed north when she pulled it from her Possibles Bag this morning. In fact, when she turned the jagged point of the stone south, it had clouded, which was a sure warning to any who wielded magic shards. Whether soldiers from the Northland Guard had halted Sierra at the Middlemarch bridge and had discovered her crystal shaded garments, or whether they had waited and stolen everything in her stall that was Potluck-dyed, Esmeralde felt sure that the magical knitwear had been seized.

  Perhaps Sierra, blithely unaware as she sometimes was, had also been taken captive. As always, Sierra would have been too complacent, too certain of her disguise as a farm wife, and too far removed at Top Notch to sense the unrest brewing and the trouble that would come with it.

  Not for the first time, Esmeralde pondered Sierra’s husband Kendrick, who had been inexplicably placed in Sierra’s path twenty years ago and diverted her from her destiny as Aubergine’s successor. Esmeralde had never been able to fully divine where Kendrick’s allegiance lay.

  That troubled her. Almost immediately after the circle of Twelve broke apart, Kendrick had wooed and wed Sierra, and taken her to a remote area full of secret snowy trails to the north that Esmeralde suspected were now only used by the Lowlanders. In the villages along the main track to Bordertown, rumors of the Twelve had begun to surface recently, and not by accident. Esmeralde had heard that Northlanders intended to hunt down and imprison the legendary knitting witches for supposed misuse of magic. In addition to assembling the remnants of the Twelve, Esmeralde sought to discover who had infiltrated their broken circle and was now informing the Northlanders.