The Broken Circle: Yarns of the Knitting Witches

by Cheryl Potter

  That first time, the world had ended in ice.

  Now many said the world would end with fire, Lowland fire, unless the Dark Queen was stopped, and the Northland Glacier sealed safely away from those who would plunder once more.

  Crouching beside the stone coffin, Warren ran his hand over its chiseled surface. Although the red ocher used to paint the suns’ rays had faded, he could see remnants of it in the grooved limestone. That Mae possessed a carved lid such as this could only mean one thing.

  “Mae,” he said, trying to catch her attention.

  “Tigris and Eye,” she chanted. “Tiger Eye. Mae!”

  “Mae!” he echoed, coming toward her.

  Abruptly, she broke off her prayer, watching him warily.

  “I’m starting to believe the Crystal Caves are real,” he said. “Look at all these things. They look like they came from the dead.”

  She hesitated, peering up at him as though he asked a trick question.

  “The Crystal Caves do exist, don’t they?” He asked. “And the crypts within. You have been there, more than once. You brought these things back from the tombs of the ancients.”

  “Yes.” She rose and nodded vigorously. “Oh yes, yes, yes.”

  “They say that if you go to the Crystal Caves, you never come back.” Warren looked at her closely. She did not react. “Mae?”

  “Mae,” she agreed, reluctantly.

  “You went there, and you came back, didn’t you?”

  Mae cowered and her voice quavered. “Mae. . . .”

  She was terrified. Of what? For now, she seemed safe enough from the Lowland armies. And he certainly wasn’t going to strike her or surrender her to the Northland Guard for supposed use of magic. He glanced past her down the long passage back to the fire pit. From what he could tell, they were alone.

  “What is it, Mae?”

  Mae clamped her hands over her ears and shook her head wildly.

  Realization dawned as he watched Mae wag her head from side to side, as if her brain contained bees. Mae wasn’t really crazy. But whatever had happened in the Crystal Caves made her behave that way. It wasn’t the glacier-weed smoke or her life as a hermit that prevented her from venturing out to barter with fossickers or sell her spoils. She was trapped by something within. Although she had in her keeping priceless treasure, he wondered what it had cost her. He wondered if any of the treasures were really hers.

  “These things are not yours unchallenged, are they, Mae?” he asked quietly.

  Ignoring him, she cocked her head. Warren listened, too, but heard nothing.

  When she nodded, as if agreeing with unseen inhabitants of the glacier rather than with his question, he finally understood. Somehow the spirits of the ancients had entered Mae, and they wrestled inside her. That was why she held her head, why she chanted and prayed, why she alternated between being mute and murmuring her name repeatedly, as if she was trying to remember who she was.

  Warren took her shoulders gently. “Was it hard to come back?” he whispered.

  “Mae,” she shuddered. “Mae.” She put both hands to her head and shook it so hard that her mane of hair slapped him in the face. “Mae, Mae, Mae, Mamie.”

  “It’s all right,” Warren soothed. “Mae, it’s all right.”

  “Mae,” she cried weakly, growing slack in his arms. She stiffened again and gave him a piercing look. “Mamie.”

  “Do you know how to get to the tombs?” Warren asked.

  Cradled in his arms, Mae shook her head, meaning no. “Nnnn,” she said, her eyes watering.

  Warren persisted. “Could you find your way back again?”

  “Nnnn, nnn, nnn,” she uttered and finally gave up. “Yes,” she said quietly.

  Warren knew then that he had not come to save Mae from the soldiers of either side, or even from imprisonment in the Burnt Holes. He had come to save Mae, all right, but only from herself.

  If only his mother were here, she would know what to do. But this time of year she would be in Middlemarch minding her stall at the fair. It was too risky for him to travel the main track, since he would now be wanted as a deserter. He especially could not travel with a crazy old hag like Mae, who would unavoidably call attention to herself. If he had his bobsled, he could traverse the military road back to Top Notch within three days, and wait in the Sleep Out for his mother’s return. But the Lowlanders had his sled, and who knew if the Teardrop had already spilled as it did each spring? He might not be able to reach their Lavender Rill Farm at all. The chance of meeting Lowlanders on the track was high, plus he dreaded a potential encounter with his father. Warren doubted that his mother knew Kendrick for the traitor that he and Garth saw him as, although maybe she did. Glancing down at Mae, who watched him expectantly, Warren grimaced. War made strange companions, he realized, with a burst of sadness.

  “You are going to have to return all this plunder to the Crystal Caves—you know that, don’t you?”

  Mae crossed her arms defiantly. “No.”

  “Whatever you took, you have to give back.”

  Mae shook her head and began to writhe. He grabbed her to still her quaking.

  “Whatever they took, they have to give back, too,” he said to soothe her, not knowing if this was true. Mae might never regain her sanity, but he felt certain that this was something his mother would have said.

  “Which way are the caves?” Warren asked. “Along this tunnel? Further in?”

  “And in, and in,” Mae gestured, poking his arm over and over. “In, in, in.”

  Warren heaved a sigh. “Mae, we’ve got to give this back.”

  Mae groaned. Shaking her head, she seized an ice pick and pretended to mine. Then she pantomimed filling the wooden barrow and dumping the load.

  “Lowlanders,” Warren guessed. “They broke into the Crystal Caves?”

  She nodded.

  “I thought they didn’t know how to get in. You saw them? And they took things?”

  Mae nodded again. Reverently, she touched the twin suns on the broken coffin lid. When she looked at Warren her eyes glistened.

  “You’re not trying to steal from the ancients,” Warren said. “You’re trying to protect them.” He looked around at the treasure. He finally got it. This cave was a safe house of all she had collected, and she was its warden.

  Mae knelt in the dirt, tears streaking her cheeks. Rocking back and forth, she began to keen.

  “You cannot save the world by yourself,” Warren whispered, sinking to his knees beside her. She rocked harder and wailed louder, as if a storm were passing through her bones.

  Warren waited until her sobs subsided.

  “Who can help, Mae?” he said finally, pulling her to her feet.

  Mae stared the frozen ground and began to mutter. “Ah, ah ah.”

  “Tell me, for I haven’t a clue.”

  She looked up at him. “Auber,” she said with a firm nod.

  “Auber,” he repeated, puzzled, although he began to have an idea of what she was struggling to say. “Was she one of your Twelve?”

  “Auber!” she insisted with a vigorous nod. “Auber, auber, auber. . . .”

  Warren frowned, trying to recall the childhood tales. His mother had a series of anecdotes she called Woolgathering, about how mere schoolgirls became the Potluck Twelve. Didn’t their mistress have a peculiar name that began with A?

  “Auber,” he said thoughtfully.

  Mae happily clutched his arm. A moment later, she sang out, “Aubergine!”

  “Of course,” he said, relieved. “I know who that is. Do you want to leave right now?”

  With a yawn, Mae shook her head and retreated down the corridor toward her bedroll in front of the fire pit. She was spent, Warren thought, as she crawled onto the bedroll and pulled a quilt up under her chin. Here in this dark cave, he could not tell if it was late afternoon, evening, or already
night. He sat down heavily on the rushes next to Mae’s bedroll and unlaced his nailed boots. He was exhausted.

  “Rest up,” Warren said. “We’ll try to leave before first light. Now what can we take so Aubergine will know where you’ve been?”

  Mae patted the pouch around her neck sleepily.

  “Of course,” Warren said. “You’ve had something in there all along.”

  “Mae,” she agreed. Turning to her side, she began to snore softly.

  This advanced-beginner-skill-level cap will keep your ears warm on the coldest of days. The pattern includes sizes for women and men.

  Get the pattern from PotluckYarn.com/epatterns

  But what about the animal still imprisoned in the ice?

  CHAPTER 11

  THE NEW MOON CAST SILVERY LIGHT across the drifts surrounding the sleeping camp high in the foothills. Still Winter Wheat waited, as she had for hours. Huddled in her traveling cloak beneath a snow-laden fir, she was certain that no one in the Lowlander encampment could see her. More than once, passing guards had almost stepped on her. The two night watchmen shivered under thin cloaks, their biceps bare and gleaming with some kind of protective oil or wax perhaps intended to combat cold. It seemed to offer little help. At this altitude and season, and so close to the glacier, the air was thin and chilly, frost-laden. Wheat, however, was comfortable, wearing a fine lace scarf knit from rare Highland wool loosely looped around her neck. The hollow core fiber, while light and lofty, warded the weather wonderfully.

  It would do nothing to protect her from bungling Lowlanders, however. Wheat snatched her foot back as a young Lowland guard almost trod on it while making his rounds. Her grunt of surprise was buried beneath the sound of his teeth chattering. The distant tinkle of a bell let her know that Tracks was afoot in the valley below. She didn’t know whether her ram had been captured in a pen or was foraging with her flock.

  A pulse of heat surged through her shepherd’s staff. It was time to move. Hesitating, Wheat rose from her crouch, rubbing an ache in the small of her back as she straightened herself and removed the hood from the crook. The twin cabochon crystals tied to its end burned with renewed vigor, as she had hoped they would. The amber glow outlined the scarab beetles. Wheat was flooded with relief. The revival of her crystals gave her the confidence that she needed to fear no one, perhaps not even the Dark Queen, with whom she had apprenticed when they were both girls.

  Although half-forgotten now, the talents that Wheat had brought to the Potluck Twelve had been useful. She understood all creatures, and they trusted her. Even as a child, she was able to gentle most wild things, whether they bore fiber or fur, feathers or fish scales. Over the years, she had become a fiber savant, and this gift served her well. She had been in demand for her expertise at the larger sheep farms and fiber festivals, or cooperatives where fleece and fur were sorted and graded for market. Yet she had less prosaic skills as well. In Wheat’s eyes, crystal-dyed fibers glowed with a unique aura, no matter what the light. The magical properties of these yarns and of the resulting garments were visible to her even now, in a world bereft of magic.

  Wheat possessed other lore, bits of animal husbandry she rarely had the opportunity to use. As she sat waiting in the dark for the Lowlanders in the camp to slumber, she wondered if the renewed vigor of her amber jewels was powerful enough for what she meant to do.

  She looked over at the sledge, with its burden of ice encasing a barely perceptible dark form. In the past, the crystallized beetles had helped Wheat transform butterflies from their cocoons and awaken ground hogs from hibernation. She wondered if the being inside the ice, for she was sure it was not simply a shadow, might be one of the First Folk, frozen. Or perhaps it was one of the ancient dead. Alone with her thoughts in the darkness, she had come to believe the Lowlanders had stolen their heavy load from the legendary tombs of the Crystal Caves. What she feared most was that this unfortunate creature had frozen while still alive, and would slowly suffocate as the ice around it melted. If so, it would die without her help.

  Creature or no creature, Wheat’s first allegiance was to her sheep. She must attend to her flock and somehow see them to safety. After that, she might have the time to discover if she could do anything for the mysterious form in the ice.

  The sooty stench lingering over the camp made it easy for Wheat to move swiftly, avoiding the tents of the sleeping soldiers. Their clothing smelled of burnt rags and fish oil. She could tell where they lay without looking. As she circled the tents, the bleating of her sheep grew louder, until finally she could make them out through the gloom, in a small clearing below the encampment. Wheat’s heart sank as she saw the dark outlines of her little ewes cramped together in a crude enclosure fashioned from dead brush. A smudge torch thrust into a bank of snow illuminated the nearby sledge with its great chunk of ice, lashed to the sleigh bed with thick hemp ropes. Between the sled runners a Lowland boy dozed, wrapped in one of their thin capes, emblazoned with an orange sun. The painted fabric could not warm him.

  Wheat threw back the hood of her cloak so that she could better assess the situation, although now she was visible to anyone who glanced her way. Quickly, she stole toward the sledge. She held her staff high, looking for Tracks in the makeshift pen. Her eyes searched the enclosure, but her ram was not among the flock. Although she could no longer hear his bell, she could sense him nearby, and so could the ewes and lambs. Restlessly, the spotted Jacobs balked and pushed against each other, threatening to trample several newborns while the sleeping guard shivered and snored.

  From what Wheat could see, the sledge had never been outfitted to be drawn by horses or oxen. Maybe the parched lands of the South could no longer sustain beasts of burden or perhaps Southerners did not domesticate them, as the Middlelanders did. She had heard of cultures in which common folk worshipped cows and let them run wild in the townships, and of folk who would rather eat a horse than harness it. Maybe the Lowlanders needed to eat horsemeat for strength. It was clear that men pulled their sleds. Abandoned tethers, three to a side, lay folded on the deck above the sled runners. They were attached to the well-used harnesses that she had seen Lowland soldiers wearing.

  Wheat approached the chunk of ice in silence, fighting a sudden, strange urge to sink to her knees in wonder. She tilted her staff toward what appeared to be an ice-locked face and pressed her free hand to the jagged exterior, letting the cabochons twirl freely around the crook of her staff. She felt nothing but the frozen surface at first, and she thought the being within the ice had to be dead. Then she sensed a pulse of warmth. Did that mean it was alive? Softly, the crystals of her staff clicked and clacked, until, coming together in unison, they overlapped in a circle of bright light, daring her to find out.

  Wheat glanced beyond the sleigh to her bleating sheep and then behind her to the sleeping camp. Where was Tracks? She needed him to understand what had to be done, and they were running out of time. Dawn broke early in the mountains, especially this late in the spring. Steam rose from Wheat’s knitted cape, and sweat ran down her back as she fought the urge to shed her traveling cloak.

  She breathed once.

  Twice.

  And decided that she needed to crack the ice like an enormous eggshell so that the being inside would have a chance to breathe. The scarab beetles lit from within like torches, flickering as they crossed. Slowly and carefully, Wheat bent to focus the light. The hazy amber glow became a crescent of burning heat as it grew smaller and more intense. Her hand shaking with the effort, Wheat tilted the staff. She aimed the pinpoint of fire into a crack in the ice. A hiss of fog erupted. Wheat watched, hopefully, willing the dark thing inside to stir from its slumber, but nothing happened. She focused the fiery beam again and again, boring a fissure along a fault line in the ice face until she thought she felt the dark thing shrink away from the heat.

  A trickle of water dripped from the icy crevasse onto the neck of the Lowland boy sleeping beneath the
sledge, and he stirred. Wheat remembered that he would be able to see her, since both she and her staff had shed their hoods. His wide eyes stared at her, but he didn’t move, perhaps from fear.

  “Shhh,” Wheat warned, as she felt the dark thing in the ice begin to shift.

  The guard was no more than a youth. There was no need to harm him. Aware of the telltale warmth that accompanied the persuasive power offered by Sierra’s traveling cloaks, she brought a gloved finger to her lips. The boy nodded sleepily.

  Mindful that Lowlanders communicated with each other in a language of hand and eye gestures rather than one based on sound, Wheat brought the flat of her hand down in a shut-eye gesture. The guard lowered his lids obediently. Once again, he snored while the dark thing began to struggle and the sheep trapped in the brush enclosure bleated unhappily.

  She sensed the small ram’s approach before she saw him. “Tracks,” she whispered into the dark. “Little Tracks. Finally!”

  Before long, she heard his bell, a faint tinkle getting closer. She looked around to catch him poking his spotted head from a newly trod side path she had not noticed, perhaps an escape route to the lower valley. The ram took a few steps toward her and then turned and trotted briskly in the direction he had come from. As he approached her once more, she stroked his neck fondly, for she understood completely. Her flock need not become Lowland fodder, for Tracks had scouted a narrow path to safety that the Lowlanders would be unable to follow with their weaponry and the cumbersome sledge. Wheat looked over the pen, locating the twig gate that had been latched with a leather thong. With luck and some sort of diversion, she might free the whole flock.

  The cabochons swirled to and fro, hitting and sparking against each other, burning random cinder holes in the snow. Wheat raised her gloved hand and caught the jewels to still them. She feared the light and the hiss caused by the bright beetles outlined in amber would awaken the camp before long. The ancient chunk of glacier had begun to give way along the fissure line, dripping freely. As the crack widened, rivulets of thawing water leaked down the frozen face. Wheat caught a scent of the dark thing.