Witchlanders

by Lena Coakley

  WITCHLANDERS

  ATHENEUM BOOKS FOR YOUNG READERS

  An imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing Division

  1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, New York 10020

  www.SimonandSchuster.com

  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real

  locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are products

  of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons,

  living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2011 by Cathleen Coakley

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

  ATHENEUM BOOKS FOR YOUNG READERS is a registered trademark of

  Simon & Schuster, Inc.

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  Book design by Sonia Chaghatzbanian

  The text for this book is set in Goudy Old Style.

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  First Edition

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  CIP data for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

  ISBN 978-1-4424-2004-5

  ISBN 978-1-4424-2006-9 (eBook)

  To the memory of Agnes “Mardi” Short

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  Part One

  Chapter 1: Flowers and Bones

  Chapter 2: The Skin of the Sea

  Chapter 3: The White Witch

  Chapter 4: Barbiza

  Chapter 5: The Right Hand of Aata

  Chapter 6: Maiden’s Woe

  Chapter 7: A Spot Upriver

  Chapter 8: The Chilling

  Chapter 9: The Coven

  Part Two

  Chapter 10: Haunted

  Chapter 11: The Crouching Spider

  Chapter 12: Assassin’s Heart

  Chapter 13: Dreadhounds

  Chapter 14: Assassin’s Key

  Chapter 15: The Best Jokes

  Chapter 16: The Goddess Has Stained Your Eyes

  Part Three

  Chapter 17: Talat-Sa

  Chapter 18: In the Chamber of Aata and Aayse

  Chapter 19: Yarma

  Chapter 20: The Black Witch

  Chapter 21: A Casting of Bones

  Chapter 22: Thieves

  Chapter 23: All the Nightmares

  Chapter 24: The Tomb

  Chapter 25: The Many Eyes of Kar

  Chapter 26: The Gormy Man

  Chapter 27: Raiken’s Farm

  Chapter 28: The Bitterlands

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This book took many years to write, and in that time I have received the support of many wonderful writers and readers. Much of the first draft was written on Aino Anto’s dining room table, while she wrote twice as much in half the time and then made me tea. Patient readers of early drafts were: Karen Krossing, Richard Ungar, Cheryl Rainfield, Karen Rankin (twice!), Anne Laurel Carter, Georgia Watterson, Wendy Lewis, the students in Peter Carver’s writing class, and Peter Carver himself. Hadley Dyer was kind enough to use my manuscript in her Ryerson University courses on children’s publishing, and her students gave me some very useful comments. Most importantly, my writing group—Hadley Dyer, Kathy Stinson, and Paula Wing—read this book so many times they could probably recite it with me. Thank you all.

  But even with all that help, this book would have been so much less without my agent, Steven Malk of Writers House, and my editor, Caitlyn Dlouhy. Thank you both. If this book sings at all, it is because of you.

  I’d also like to gratefully acknowledge the City of Toronto, who gave me a grant to complete this novel through the Toronto Arts Council at a time when I needed it most.

  And finally I’d like to thank my family, especially my late grandmother, Agnes Short, who read me so many books as a child that I still have her voice in my head when I read to myself. This book is for her.

  WITCHLANDERS

  PART ONE

  The Great God Kar sings the world into being. He is singing even now. If he stopped, everything from the mountains to the oceans to the ink on this page would disappear.

  Kar’s magic comes from harmony, and yet the God is alone, singing with his many mouths and tongues, watching mankind with his thousand eyes.

  Once, all men could hear his songs. They joined their voices with their brothers, imitating the harmonies of creation, until they made a magic that rivaled even Kar’s.

  And so the jealous God sealed up their ears to his music.

  He created war and discord. Now few can hear his songs—and those who do, find that their brothers are scattered to the winds.

  —The Magician’s Enchiridion

  CHAPTER 1

  FLOWERS AND BONES

  Ryder woke to the sound of clattering bones. A red curtain separated the sleeping area from the main room of the cottage, and he could see the faint flickering of candles through the fabric.

  “Skyla,” he whispered.

  Even in his sleep he’d known there was something wrong. A feeling of dread lay heavy in his stomach. Next to him in the long bed, Ryder’s two younger sisters were quiet. Pima, the little one, lay diagonally with the covers bunched up around her. Her mouth was open, and she was snoring gently. Skyla was pressed into the corner.

  “Sky . . . ,” he began again.

  “I know,” she said. There was nothing sleepy about her voice. He wondered how long she’d been awake.

  “Why didn’t you do something?” Ryder flung off the bit of tattered blanket that covered his legs. “Why didn’t you wake me?”

  The dirt floor was cold under his bare feet. He’d grown tall in the past year, too tall for the low door frame that led to the main part of the cottage, and he hunched a little as he peered around the red curtain.

  Mabis, his mother, was squatting on the floor, picking up bones. A goat’s femur, a horse’s rib. They were dark with age and etched with thin lines. She placed each one into a wooden bowl as large as the wheel of a donkey cart.

  “Tell me who it is,” she murmured. “Tell me.” Smoke from the fire hung around the room, making rings around the candles.

  Skyla slipped in beside Ryder, and together they watched as their mother rose from the floor. Mabis looked furtively around, squinting toward the sleeping area, but they were well hidden in the shadows. She seemed to satisfy herself that she was alone, and staggered to the lit fireplace, grabbing an iron poker.

  “Did you check the fireplace?” Ryder whispered. “I told you to check the fireplace.”

  “I did,” Skyla insisted.

  Mabis climbed onto a wooden chair and up onto the large table their father had made. She was wearing her reds. It was the traditional costume of the mountain witches—loose-fitting pants and a quilted tunic with embroidery along the edge. Ryder had seen his mother wear reds only a few times before. They had a dramatic effect on people that Mabis liked to keep in reserve. Usually they were packed carefully at the bottom of a wooden blanket chest; now the tunic was buttoned up wrong, and there was a greasy stain down the side of her leg.

  Her sleeves slid down her brown arms as she reached up with the poker. From the rafters fell a cloth bag tied with string. Ryder cursed inwardly. He’d thought he knew all her hiding places.

  Mabis knelt on the tabletop and set down the poker. Greedily she opened the bag. A shower of black flowers, each the size of a baby’s fist, fell to the table.

  “Maiden’s woe,” Skyla breathed.


  Ryder nodded, noticing the black stain on his mother’s lips; it wasn’t the first she’d had that night. Maiden’s woe was a river plant whose flowers bloomed in the shallows. Ryder had pulled up all he could find, but the plants grew like weeds this time of year; if he missed even the smallest bit of root, they came back twice as thick. As he watched, his mother pushed two of the black flowers into her mouth and grimaced.

  “She promised,” Skyla whispered.

  “Promised,” Ryder muttered as if the word were a curse. He started forward, but Skyla grabbed him by the arm.

  “Wait!” she said. “Just . . . wait.” Ryder frowned but held back. His first impulse was to confront his mother, but Skyla’s judgment was usually sound; perhaps she had some reason to suspect a second hiding place.

  Mabis had left the table now and was kneeling over the great bowl, shaking it with both hands. She could do this half the night, Ryder knew: stir the bones, shake them, mumble at them, then pour them out onto the floor and pretend to read like some ancient witch doing a casting.

  When Ryder’s father was alive, Mabis threw the bones only for customers. Telling the future was something she did for money. Of course, the villagers in the valley knew that she was not a real witch, not anymore. She didn’t live in the mountain coven, devoting her life to the Goddess and studying the teachings of Aata and Aayse; she had given that up long ago. But real witches didn’t concern themselves with the daily problems of the village, and Mabis’s prophecies were full of common sense, if vague, and so she had a tidy business.

  What villagers never saw was how Ryder’s father would frown when the door closed behind them, how Mabis would laugh, jingling their coins in her hand. Any fool who believed a pile of bones could tell the future didn’t deserve to keep his money—that was what she used to say.

  Yet here she was—holding a bowl of bones over her head. She shook it one, two, three times, then spilled its contents onto the floor with a loud clatter. The room fell silent. Mabis looked toward the sleeping area and cocked her head, listening, but Ryder and Skyla stayed quiet. Ryder glanced back at Pima, but his littlest sister was still asleep.

  Finally Mabis turned back to the bones, circling them like an animal stalking prey. Skyla seemed to hold her breath; she lifted herself up on her toes, craning her neck. Ryder could see his sister was trying to make out the pattern the bones made on the floor, but what did she think was there? After a while, Mabis moved back to the table and popped two more of the dark blooms into her mouth.

  “I’ve seen enough.” Ryder stepped forward again, and again Skyla pulled him back. “What in Aata’s name is wrong with you?” he hissed. “There’s always another hiding place, Skyla. We can’t just watch . . .”

  His sister looked up at him with somber eyes. Her pale eyebrows stood out against her brown face, and even in the dim light, her hair glinted like polished metal.

  “You can’t go now. You’re not supposed to interrupt a witch’s reading once the bones are thrown.”

  “What witch? What reading?”

  Those eyes again. His sister looked like Fa sometimes with that wise look. “Maybe . . . maybe she really can see the future. Maybe something bad is going to happen. Shouldn’t we know?”

  Ryder swallowed his annoyance. He knew all he needed to know: Throwing the bones was just his mother’s excuse for taking the flowers, and the mad visions she had afterward were not the future, just the inside of her own bewildered mind.

  “You really are getting gullible, Sky,” he said, and before she could stop him again, he strode into the main room of the cottage.

  Mabis’s head snapped up when he entered. In spite of himself, Ryder was taken aback. Her yellow hair was loose and tangled, and her eyes glittered strangely in the firelight. His recriminations died on his lips.

  “Do you see it?” she asked, gesturing to the casting. Her voice had a kind of fragile hope, as if pleading to be believed. “Someone has arrived. There’s a stranger in the mountains.”

  “Go to bed now,” he said. “Please.” His mother just stood there, swaying slightly.

  The walls of the cramped cottage seemed to lean in on him. No one had put the cheese away, he noticed—good market cheese he’d bought for a treat, not their own homemade. Dirty wooden plates were stacked by the door, waiting to be washed in the river. Mabis had sent her children to bed insisting she would clean up, and Ryder had been so tired from his other chores that he’d decided to believe her.

  “Mabis,” he said firmly. “Listen to me—we need you now. The hicca will freeze on the stalks if we don’t get it harvested.” He crossed toward her. “I can’t do everything. The chilling could come any day.”

  “Watch your feet!” Mabis took his elbow. “Watch out for the bones.” She gestured to the floor. “Try to see it, Ryder. Just try. Start with the anchor bone—the small one—that’s the key. See how it touches the shadow man? Place the pattern in your mind and the vision will come.”

  “Mabis, you’re talking gibberish.” She never did this, never tried to teach her children how to read, though Skyla had often asked to learn. Mabis had always said the witches made it all up, so why bother to pass it on? “Don’t you understand? If you don’t help with the harvest, we might not have enough to eat this winter.”

  “The stranger in the mountains is just the beginning. Terrible things are coming.”

  “Stop it! Stop it now. You sound like a madwoman.”

  She turned away from him in disgust. “Your father would have believed.”

  Ryder frowned, stung by the bitterness in her voice, as if he were the one disappointing her. Could it be that she really saw something? He let himself consider the idea for just a moment before shaking his head.

  “No,” he said firmly. “If throwing the bones were real—which it isn’t, you’ve told me a hundred times—but if it were, then there would be witches in the coven doing it right now, doing it better than you. And if there was something terrible coming, they’d tell us—they’d have told us already. Isn’t that why they’re up there? Isn’t that why we pay our tithes? So they can guard the border and keep us safe?” Mabis had stopped listening to his argument and was looking blankly into space. “Mabis?”

  Her eyes startled him when she looked up; they were so bright and blue and wild. “I see the future,” she whispered. “I’m seeing it right now.”

  “You’re not.” His voice quavered a little. “Stop it. You’re not even looking at the casting.”

  “A great witch doesn’t need bones. I can see the future written in the flecks of your eyes.” She touched his face with cold hands, holding him by the chin. “Stay still. I almost have it all.”

  Worry stabbed through him. She was like a feral creature gazing out at him from a deep wood, seeing and not seeing. It frightened him. He should have gone to the river every day and made sure every bit of that weed was gone.

  “An assassin is coming.” She seemed alarmed now, afraid. “An assassin in the mountains. Right across the border. He mustn’t succeed!” His mother’s gaze left his face and slid to the table by the fire. “Just one more flower and I’ll know everything.”

  “No,” Ryder said, stepping away from her. “No. This is nonsense.” In three long strides he crossed the room and gathered up every one of the black blooms.

  “What are you doing?” Mabis stumbled forward and bones scattered. Ryder looked around the small room, flowers in his hands. His eyes lighted on the fireplace.

  “Don’t!” she shouted. Lunging forward, she lost her balance, bones under her feet. She fell heavily onto one knee. Ryder seized the opportunity and tossed the maiden’s woe into the fire. The black trumpets hissed and popped, sending sparks up the chimney.

  Mabis struggled to her feet and ran toward him. “I need them!” she pleaded, sounding desperate. Just in time, Ryder grabbed her wrist and stopped her from plunging her hand into the flames. Mabis turned on him. Her face, lit by firelight, was twisted with rage. Before Ryd
er could do anything, she slapped him across the cheek. Hard.

  Silence.

  Skyla rushed in from behind the curtain. “Mabis, stop it!” she cried. But by then there was nothing to stop. Mabis was leaning against the fireplace, avoiding their gaze, her breath coming in shallow gasps.

  “Do you see?” Ryder hissed at Skyla. “This has nothing to do with the bones, with the future.”

  His sister’s eyes were wide with fright. From the sleeping area, Pima’s voice came loud and shrill.

  “Maba, I want Maba!”

  “Just go help Pima, will you?” Ryder told his sister.

  “I’ll go,” said his mother. Her voice was small, and she still didn’t meet his eyes.

  “No! Pima can’t see you like this.”

  His mother winced. Skyla took a breath and nodded, then went off to comfort the crying four-year-old. When she was gone, Ryder turned to his mother. “This has got to stop.”

  “I’m so sorry,” she said. She sank to the floor with her back against the wall.

  “Sorry,” he repeated, putting his hand to his cheek.

  He dropped down next to her on the floor, and for a while neither of them spoke. Outside, trees creaked in the wind. The stones of the fireplace were warm against his back. He tried to hold on to his anger, but as he sat there he felt it slipping away from him, leaving a hollowness in his chest. Skyla was singing softly to Pima in the other room—a lullaby of Fa’s—and without warning, a feeling of loss pierced him. He’d become used to it since Fa died, surprise attacks of emotions that came out of nowhere, left him breathless. But he realized it wasn’t his father that he was missing so painfully at this moment. It was his mother. His mother as she used to be. Mabis had been like iron once. She’d been like stone. Nothing could break her. And he’d felt entirely safe.

  Slowly Mabis got to her knees and reached for something under the table. One of her bones, the smallest one, had skittered there in the scuffle. She tossed it into his lap before sitting heavily back down.

  “What’s this?” he said.