Witchlanders

by Lena Coakley

  A look of anger flashed across Kef’s face, breaking through his calm serenity. “Coven life means something to some people, Ryder. It means something to me.”

  “Well it doesn’t mean a thing to me, so you can just pack up your tents and go. My sisters are staying.”

  Kef took a deep breath as if to recover his composure. “You don’t understand. There are reasons why Skyla and Pima should come with us, must come with us.” Ryder felt himself flush with anger. “Even your mother sees it’s for the best.”

  “You don’t seem to be hearing me, Kef.” Ryder drew himself up to his full height.

  “We’re having a peaceful conversation. I see no reason to change that.”

  “Are we?” Ryder stepped forward, his hands tightening into fists. When they were boys, Kef’s few extra years had given him the advantage, but now Ryder was both the taller and the heavier of the two.

  Kef stepped back again in alarm. “She’s sick!” he said abruptly. “She’s worse than you know.”

  Ryder froze. The words made no sense to him at first, but they seemed to strike him in the chest like an arrow. His hands fell to his sides.

  “I’m sorry,” Kef said. “I practiced what I was going to say and . . . that wasn’t it.”

  “You mean Mabis,” said Ryder, shaking his head. “She’s fine.”

  “The others think differently, and . . . and I do too. My parents were dyers, Ryder. They taught me about plants like maiden’s woe and darkroot. They’re dangerous. I think your mother’s in trouble.”

  “Mabis knows what she’s doing.”

  Kef pulled nervously at his braided beard. “Don’t you think there might be a reason she’s letting your sisters go to the coven—the coven she hates? She wants to spare them. She knows what’s coming.”

  “No!”

  “I’m sorry, Ryder. I’ve done this very badly, I know.” Again he tried to put a hand on Ryder’s shoulder, but Ryder turned away with a hiss, hating the pity in his friend’s eyes.

  “You’re wrong,” Ryder insisted.

  For a while, the two of them stood in tense silence. The dry hicca stalks made a shushing sound in the breeze. In the valley, small points of orange light began to appear—villagers celebrating the end of the harvest with great bonfires.

  “You might not remember this,” Kef said softly. “But when we were small, a stranger followed the river to the village.” He hesitated, searching for words. “This man, he’d gotten a taste for maiden’s woe in the summer when it was thick and plentiful, and by the time the chilling came, he couldn’t live without it. My parents took him in at first, but he got so violent they couldn’t let him stay.” Kef turned to Ryder now with emotion in his voice. “I remember him, Ryder. I remember him begging for maiden’s woe like he was begging for his life. Eventually the miller took him in, but—”

  Ryder interrupted. “I know what you’re trying to say, but Mabis isn’t like him. She’s strong.”

  Kef shook his head. “It’s no use lying to you. Your mother will resist the flowers for a time, three days at most. Then she will give in to her craving and eat as many as she can—I saw it today when she came to throw for us. This can go on and on, but when the chilling comes and the river freezes, there won’t be any flowers left. There will be nothing to feed her hunger, and after a few days it will become unbearable.” This time, Ryder didn’t shake off the hand Kef set on his shoulder. “I’m not saying she’ll die of it. I honestly don’t know how many die and how many live, but she will become a person your sisters shouldn’t see.”

  Ryder’s thoughts blurred into one another. “But . . . I just have to keep her away from them,” he said weakly. “I just have to find where she’s getting them and pull them all up!”

  “Even if you could, it wouldn’t help her now.” Kef’s words were hard, final.

  Ryder struggled to speak, struggled to find the argument that would refute what Kef was telling him. It couldn’t be true. He could fix this. If he could just find out where she was getting the flowers . . . Ryder gulped for air. He felt like the hand of the Goddess had just come down and swept him to the ground.

  “That man,” he said. “What happened to him?”

  Kef hesitated.

  “Tell me!” Ryder demanded, his voice breaking.

  “He died at the miller’s, so I was told, begging for the black trumpets with his last breath. No one ever learned his name.”

  A loud wailing sound rose up from the direction of the cottage, and both of them turned. It was Pima’s voice, sounding the way Ryder felt. Someone had told her she was leaving home, he guessed, and she didn’t like the idea any better than he did. He tried to imagine what it would be like not to wake up to her sharp little knees climbing all over him.

  Up on the prayer hill, one of the black tents sagged, then came gracefully down. The witches were getting ready to leave.

  “You’re not going tonight, are you?” Ryder asked, a ripping feeling in his chest. He thought he’d at least have one more night with Skyla and Pima.

  Kef nodded. “Visser and Aata’s Right Hand are eager to get back to the mountain. You can send word to the coven if—” He stopped and corrected himself. “You can send word to the coven when your mother is herself again, and we will send your sisters back.”

  Ryder shook his head dully. Skyla wouldn’t want to come back. And why should she? His own dreams were dead and buried under sixtyweights of earth—why should he do the same to hers? “You should go,” Ryder said, his voice ragged.

  “What will you—?”

  “Just go now. Please, Kef,” he said.

  Kef nodded and withdrew.

  Ryder looked down into the valley, the lights from the bonfires blurring in front of his eyes. A year ago the whole family, including Fa, had celebrated the harvest in the village. Ryder remembered going to a dance in someone’s hay barn. He’d hated it. The only person he had danced with was Pima. Toward the end of the evening, he had found a quiet place to watch without being seen, a place where no one would come up to him and say, “Look how tall he is,” or “Where’s your beard?” or “Have you met Farmer Someone’s daughter?” Ryder had watched his mother and father dance that night. They held hands, swinging each other around the floor, Mabis’s hair flying around them in a circle. It was only a year ago, but his mother had looked so young and pretty then.

  “Stupid woman,” Ryder whispered to the night. “Stupid, stupid woman. Why did you even start?”

  And then Ryder bent down low into the hicca stalks and cried silently into the earth.

  CHAPTER 7

  A SPOT UPRIVER

  “Long ago there lived two sisters,” said Mabis. “Twins. They were alike in every way except that one, Aayse, could not speak.” She sat in bed, staring intently at the space where Ryder was standing, but she didn’t seem to see him.

  “I brought you some tea.”

  Mabis smiled and made a wide gesture with her arms, as if she had an audience for her story, as if invisible children were sitting on the dirt floor of the sleeping room. “Not being able to speak taught Aayse about the great silences.”

  “Mabis.” Ryder sat down on the edge of the bed. He needed to get her to eat; she was getting thinner by the day.

  His mother blinked her eyes. “You never call me Maba anymore.”

  It was true. Ryder had invented the name when he was little—a cross between Mabis and Ma—but at some point both he and Skyla had stopped using it, though he couldn’t have said when.

  His mother took the cup and inhaled the steam. “Mallon leaves, nice and sweet.” But she held the tea in her lap and didn’t drink. Ryder saw that the inner parts of her lips were black.

  “Oh, Mabis, not again.”

  His mother looked at him blankly. She no longer used telling the future as an excuse for taking the flower. More often than not, she offered no excuse at all.

  Ryder still couldn’t guess where she got the maiden’s woe. It appeared from nowhere. W
hen he checked the riverbank it was always empty, and Mabis could slip away like a shadow when his back was turned, with only an occasional wet footprint or damp sleeve to prove she’d been gone.

  “What happened to your will?” he asked softly.

  Her eyes drifted back to him. “It lasted as long as I needed it.”

  “You know that every time you take the flower it makes it worse. It will just be harder for you when the chilling comes.”

  His mother settled back against the wooden bed frame, the tea forgotten. “Don’t scold.”

  Ryder smelled the maiden’s woe on her breath. Sometimes he thought the sickly sweet aroma was seeping out of her pores. He knew from her lips that she must have eaten the flower that morning, but it didn’t seem to affect her as it used to. Often her lips would be black but her eyes would be lucid and clear; other times she would rave like a madwoman.

  “I’ve been thinking about your father,” Mabis said. “It’s been such a quiet year without his stories.”

  “I know.” Ryder had never liked hearing Fa tell “The Life of Aata and Aayse,” the story Mabis had been reciting. It reminded Ryder of the gulf between them: Fa believed it and Ryder didn’t. Now he found he missed hearing all his father’s tales, even that one. “If I made you some honey-cakes, would you eat them?”

  “He knew the Goddess and her prophets better than any of those coven witches—for all their talk.”

  “I could open a pot of sourberries.”

  “Fish,” she said. “I’d eat a fish.”

  “It’s the wrong time of year.”

  Mabis shrugged. She put her tea aside and brought her knees up to her chest, brown feet showing below her patched nightdress. “Fish or nothing.” She smiled, and her voice took on a singsong tone again:

  “We live between the two great silences: the silence that existed before the world began, and the silence that waits for us at the end of all things. The prophet Aayse understood these silences. They are where all magic comes from. They are the fabric the Goddess used to make the world.”

  Mabis paused, then frowned. “I can almost believe it,” she said. “But not quite. Once I did.” She hugged her knees tighter. “I used to believe in Aata and Aayse. I used to believe that the Goddess made me and made the world and would gather me into her arms when I died. I just can’t anymore.”

  “Why would you even want to?”

  Mabis looked up, surprised by the question, and her voice cracked with emotion when she spoke. “Because I want to see your father again.”

  Ryder felt a lump in his throat, as if he’d swallowed a stone. As he watched, his mother’s face twisted, and her eyes grew shiny with tears.

  “Don’t,” he said. “Don’t think about it.” A tear rolled down her cheek. Ryder sat frozen beside her, not knowing what to say, uncomfortable in the silence.

  “Oh, Ryder, what have I done? Your father broke his youth trying to plow this land. I might as well have fed him poison with a spoon.”

  “Stop,” he said softly, putting a hand over hers. “Please stop. That wasn’t your fault. He loved it here. He loved this farm.”

  Tears continued to roll down her cheeks. “He always said the soil was too rocky here for hicca, but . . . I couldn’t live in the valley. I thought I was giving up the coven, but I only half gave it up. I kept my bones. I lived between the witches and the village, halfway up the mountain and halfway down. . . .”

  She wiped her messy face with the sleeve of her nightdress and smiled sheepishly, as if part of her knew that she wasn’t the kind of person who suddenly burst into tears. A feeling of helplessness welled up inside Ryder, and he struggled to push it back down. He should be on a ship right now, he thought, exploring distant countries, not watching his mother fall apart, not watching her get thinner and thinner with nothing to be done. Ryder had gained nothing by staying home and giving up his dreams, nothing at all.

  “Mabis, why did you leave the coven?” he asked. He put the cup of tea back into her hand as if it held some cure for her sorrow.

  “I lost my faith. I’ve told you that.”

  “But why?”

  “Oh . . .” Mabis twisted the wooden cup, sloshing tea onto her nightdress. “I saw something. Something I wasn’t supposed to see. Something . . . I was going to say horrible, but it wasn’t really. Something I couldn’t understand. There are secrets in the coven, Ryder. Secrets valley people could never guess. Secrets even many of the witches don’t know.” She sighed. “I wish I could talk to my sister. When I made the firecall, I was sure that Lilla would come.”

  Ryder put his hand over hers to stop the tea from spilling. “Mabis, you know that Lilla Red Bird is dead.”

  His mother nodded. “Dead and buried.” He was relieved by the finality of her words. It was one thing to want to see her husband again, another to forget that someone had been dead for twenty years. “Still, I hoped she would come. I so wanted to talk to her. There are things I need to ask.”

  Ryder looked away. He was so tired. How much more of Mabis’s ravings could he put up with? “I’ll make the honeycakes now.”

  “No. Not honeycakes. Too sweet.”

  “Bread, then.”

  “No,” said Mabis firmly. “Fish.”

  “You don’t even like fish. And my nets aren’t mended. You’d eat some bread—I know you would.” He rose to go.

  As he was pushing aside the red curtain, Mabis called him back. “What is it like to have a Baen in your head?”

  Ryder stopped short. “What?” It was such a strange thing for her to say, and yet . . . for some reason he couldn’t brush the words aside as more of his mother’s ramblings.

  “You hear him in your dreams, don’t you?” she asked, as if the idea both fascinated and repelled her. “Is he telling you to murder people? Is he telling you to worship his disgusting gods?”

  “Who?” Ryder’s mind spun.

  “Your friend,” said Mabis. “The stranger in the mountains. The Baen in the mountains.” A Baen in the mountains. In Ryder’s mind something slipped into place, something fit together like a key turning in a lock. Hello? Is someone there? “Those people killed your grandfather, you know. At Barbiza. Just because he wore red.” She said it like an accusation, as if he could somehow be responsible for something that had happened before he was born.

  “I thought it was monsters you believed in now,” Ryder said carefully. “You haven’t talked about assassins in the mountains since before the witches came.”

  Mabis drew herself up haughtily. “One prophecy doesn’t cancel out another. I foresee many things: assassins, dreadhounds . . .” Her voice grew graver as she spoke. “Monsters. Bonfires burning black.” She squeezed her eyes shut. “But I don’t need any gift of prophecy to see that Baen. He’s burrowed into your head like a needleworm.”

  A great shiver coursed through him. The possibility that a Baen might be in his head, giving him nightmares, made him feel like he needed to bathe in the river.

  “I don’t think the blackhairs can help doing it,” she went on. “It used to happen every once in a while when the two races lived together—someone would start having dreams, usually a young witch or someone like you, someone born to magic.”

  “Born to . . . ?”

  “He is my punishment, this Baen. My punishment for robbing you of what you are. It’s funny. I worked so hard to make sure the witches didn’t get you. But magic found you just the same—just not the magic I was worried about.” She pulled the threadbare blanket around her shoulders.

  Ryder shook himself, as if he could shake off the strange inkling that some of what she was telling him might be true.

  “No. There is no Baen in my head. And I’m not ‘born to magic,’ of all things.” But he couldn’t help remembering what Kef had said, that Lilla Red Bird had made a prophecy about him once.

  “Oh, there’s not much time!” she said, sounding suddenly desperate. She got out of bed with the blanket still wrapped around her and beg
an to pace the tiny room. “There’s not much time to make you understand. Somehow I always knew I’d lose Skyla—but you I tried to keep. It’s rare, the gift of magic. The witches hide how rare it really is, but you have it, just like my sister did.”

  “I don’t believe you!” Ryder cried out. “It’s the maiden’s woe that’s making you say these things. . . .”

  “Ryder, Ryder. Please try to understand! Part of the reason I wanted to keep you from magic is because I saw what it did to my sister. Lilla saw too much, and the war, it shattered her. No one talks about that when they tell stories about Lilla Red Bird, the great warrior witch; no one talks about what she had to become. I just wanted to keep you safe.”

  “I can’t listen to you anymore—there are things to be done.”

  “Ryder, please,” she began. She reached out a hand as if to catch his sleeve, but then she stopped herself and sat back down on the bed. “Yes.” The troubled look on his mother’s face abruptly disappeared, and she smiled warmly up at him with stained teeth. “Things to do. Like catching my fish.”

  Ryder made a fist in frustration, struggling to keep his voice calm. “I told you. My nets aren’t mended—”

  “That’s too bad,” Mabis interrupted with a sigh. She settled herself back onto the bed and leaned against the headboard. “Because I know a secret way to get upriver. And upriver is where the fish are lazy and easy to catch.”

  Ryder froze. Upriver. Where the maiden’s woe came from.

  “I’ll tell you all about it,” she went on. “But in return, you have to promise to catch me a nice, plump fish.”

  Ryder tried to keep his face placid, but he could feel the smile curling at the corner of his lips. “I guess you win,” he said. “Fish it is.”

  A sandbar. It was so simple. A sandbar split the river down its center. It was covered with water, of course—that was why Ryder and Skyla had never noticed it before—but once he knew it was there, Ryder could see the ripples parting around it, could see that the water wasn’t so dark where it was. He had only to wade into the river at a shallow point, then follow the length of the sandbar upstream. Places that would have taken half a day to reach by land—by hacking a path out of thick underbrush or climbing over slippery rocks—Ryder could get to in almost no time at all. He saw parts of the riverbank he had never seen before.