The Near Witch (23 page)

Another gun sounds, this time not muffled by the wind. They’re in the forest.

“We’re almost done,” Cole calls, his hands plunged to the elbows in the mossy rot.

My eyes dart across the horizon line, searching between the trees. I try to hear, to tune my ears to the sounds of feet and men, but no sound reaches me.

Cole hands me another bone. Some of the smaller ones are strung together by weeds and roots, weaving through the hollow middles like marrow. At least it makes them easier to find, I tell myself, cringing as Cole passes me a foot, most of the bones still connected, hanging in a limp cluster by tendril and moss. I load it into the basket and hop down to the ground, turning my back on Cole and the nest of trees for a moment. I think I can hear a man’s voice, far off but on this side of the wind wall. Otto. Through the trees the autumn light is growing thin as the sun slips closer to the ground. The days have grown shorter as they’ve grown colder.

And then I smell smoke.

“Cole,” I say.

“I know,” he replies. “I’m almost done.”

But something is wrong. Otto would never let this happen, not before he’d searched every inch for the children. The men and the fire are coming from different directions. Otto’s voice winds in from the right, and thin trails of black smoke begin to waft in from the left.

I scour the forest floor, hoping once more to spot the children. My sister. My eyes run through the trees and down the trunks and over the dirt, and then, they snag. The dirt. The dirt beneath my feet is dry, matted with tendrils of weeds and patches of moss, settled. But a few feet away, beside the cocoon, the dirt is different. Freshly tilled. The witch’s words rage in my ears.
Don’t you dare disturb my garden.

Oh no. No, no, no.

I fall to my knees beside the fresh earth, begin to dig with my hands, pushing the dirt to either side. There’s nothing. Nothing. And then my fingertips feel something smooth and soft.

A cheek.

Cole calls out to me from within the huddle of trees, a question, I think, but all I can hear is my pulse and the Near Witch’s words and the vague melody on the air. I hear him climbing through the tangled mass of tree limbs, trying to free himself from the nest. The wind and smoke sweep through as I dig, unearthing a child’s face.

Wren. She’s not breathing. Her skin is pale, her nightgown spread gently around her, her hair still impossibly straight. No, no, Wren. We’re supposed to be able to stop this. Supposed to be able to set things right. I stifle the urge to scream, and instead uncover her chest and press my ear against it, listening for a pulse. I hear it, slow and low and steady. My own heart lurches with relief as I pull my sister’s shoulders from the earth.

“Help me, Cole!” I shout. And then he’s there beside me, clearing the ground around her body, exposing her legs, her bare feet. Then he begins to push aside the surrounding dirt. Soon more faces appear. Edgar. Cecilia. Emily. Riley. Five children in all, tucked beneath the garden bed. I realize Cole is speaking.

“Lexi,” he’s saying. “Come.” He pries my fingers from Wren’s arms, and I realize I’ve been gripping, clenching. I can hear the voices now, growing closer. Smoke is filling the clearing, and I hear the crackle of burning wood.

“Lexi, take the bones, you’ve got to go.”

I shake my head, brushing Wren’s blond hair, caked in dirt, from her pale face.

“I can’t. I can’t leave her.”

“The search party is coming,” he says more forcefully. “You have to get the bones back to the sisters before the sun sets.”

I shake my head. “No. No, the fire. I can’t leave my sister.”

“Look at me.” He kneels down, his cool hand guiding my chin up. “I’ll stay. I can use the wind to keep the fire back from Wren and the others, but you’ve got to run. One of us has to take the bones, and I’m not leaving you here.”

My fingers loosen on Wren’s body, but I can’t let go.

“Lexi, please. We’re running out of time.” Nearby branches snap beneath heavy feet. But Wren feels like dead weight in my lap, so cold, and I cannot make my legs move. And then a crack so loud and close that it’s amazing the searchers aren’t there on top of us already. Fire licks the clearing from one side, men’s voices call from the other.

“Go. Get to the sisters’ house. I’ll catch up.” He looks down at the children, then back at me. “We’ll all catch up. I promise.”

The crows overhead flutter nervously, and I see the panic in Cole’s eyes and let him guide me to my feet, my sister’s blond hair sliding from my dress back to the dirt. I feel my legs again beneath me as I look up through the canopy and see that the sky is changing, darkening. Cole hands me the basket and lifts Wren into his arms. The wind curls up around him, around the other children. They begin to blur, but I don’t know if it’s from the wind or from tears, as I turn, gripping the basket of bones, and leave the clearing. The forest closes in a curtain behind me, and my world is swallowed by smoke and fire and trees.

I
SPRINT THROUGH THE DEAD FOREST
, and the light slips lower and lower, impossibly fast toward the horizon. Something wrenches me back. My cloak has snagged on a low limb, and I fight to wrest it free. The limb snaps, and I stumble on.

I trust myself unto the moor
…I try to recite my father’s prayer, but the words feel hollow. I try a second time before abandoning the prayer.

Please
, I beg the forest instead.

I break through the tree line and onto the open hills.

Please
, I beg the sky and the tangled grass.

Please protect them.
I cannot entrust my sister to the ground so soon. I cannot give her back to the moor the way we did my father. I cannot let Cole’s world burn a second time.

From the top of the hill I see that the forest is engulfed in flames.

I clutch the basket as I run, the lower curve of the sun touching the hills, the golden circle skimming the wild grass. I fight the urge to look back, to slow down. I have to reach the sisters. The moor rolls away beneath me, and I imagine that I can feel a cool wind at my back, pushing me on.

I reach the last hill before the sisters’ house. Just one more. One rise and one valley and then up, and I’ll be there.

I am about to exhale when the ground gives a sudden lurch beneath my feet, and a fierce gust of wind tears through, ripping the basket from my hands. I hit the ground hard. Pain shoots through my head. White noise fills my ears. I wince as I try to push myself up, make it to my hands and knees before my head spins and I have to stop.

I’m still trying to figure out what happened when I see the basket of bones overturned, spilling white shards out onto the hillside. The ground ripples beneath me as I push myself shakily up. Something trickles down my face, and when I wipe it away, I find a dark smudge on my hand. The sun is bleeding, too, right into the horizon, and the whole world has turned a sickly red.

I turn around, looking down the hill, then up toward the top. My internal compass seems to have been knocked straight out of my head by the impact, and I am barely able to hear my own voice above the ringing in my ears. Up is good, I think slowly. I need to get up.

I fumble along the ground, scattered with bones, kneeling to collect as many as I can. Light explodes in front of my eyes, but I force myself to focus.

Several feet away, the basket twitches. Or rather, something
inside
the basket twitches just as the sun dips beneath the hills. An arm bone juts out, writhing as the moor climbs up around it, covering the eerie white in dirt and weeds.

I whisper a curse, staggering back from the forearm now sliding across the ground and trying to connect itself to a stray wrist. It searches for fingers among the weeds.

Run
, screams a voice inside my head.

I half crawl up the hill backward, keeping my eyes focused on the body picking itself up in front of me. The sun is now almost entirely out of sight. My retreat is too awkward, too slow, but I can’t turn away from the thing before me, the wild grass crawling over the bones as they collect themselves. A foot finds a leg. Ribs find a spine. I manage to unsheath my father’s knife as I stumble up the last hill. What I am going to do with it, I have no idea.

An arm, now fully assembled, digs into the basket and retrieves the skull, the wildflower still planted above the eye. And in the grass-covered palm, the dirt and weeds climb up over the skull, two stray stones clambering into the gaping holes where the roots wait like sinews.

I near the top of the hill by the time the witch recovers her head and turns it toward me. The skull, now growing grassy hair, still sits in the palm of her hand as the rest of her body assembles.

The Near Witch levels her stone eyes and opens her mossy lips and speaks in a windy voice.

“You ruined my garden.”

“You stole my sister,” I snap, raising the knife like I have a clue what to do with it.

The wind around us begins to blow harder.

“Hush, hush,” she coos with her half-formed mouth, pieces of dirt crumbling from her lips. The ground shifts beneath me. My heel hits a new groove in the hillside, and I stumble back to the slanted ground.

“Quiet, little thing.” She smiles, and the words are a tangible force, heavy in the air. They come over the wind like a spell, and before I can get up, the moor is upon me, roots and tangled grass climbing up around my arms and legs, pinning me to the ground. The brambles cut into my skin. I gasp as they tighten, and I saw at the roots with the knife, snapping them only to find a dozen more climbing up over my boot, my calf. My arms free, I hack at the weeds binding my ankles as the Near Witch approaches. She begins with a limp, her back leg still attaching itself, but as she draws near, her stride is as smooth as my mother’s. Several weeds around my leg snap beneath my knife. She reaches out for me.

“I told you,” she growls, her stone eyes glinting, her words traveling loud and clear through the air, “not to disturb my garden.”

Finally the last strands break beneath my father’s knife. Before they can redouble, I kick out as hard as I can with my boot. When it collides with the Near Witch, she stumbles back, half crumbles against the moor, still weak at the edges. But before she can fall down the hill, the grass and the dirt beneath coil up to catch her.

I reach the hilltop as she recovers. With every step, a few strands of the moor grow up, adding themselves to her limbs, thickening her.

I take another step back, and I can feel the hill slope down behind me. I dare to look back, and a small gasp of relief escapes when I see the low stone wall tapering off like a tail down the moor, and beside it, the sisters’ house.

“How dare you.”

I feel the words, the cold air against my skin. I spin, and the Near Witch is inches from my face, her mossy lips turned down in anger.

Her bone fingers, now covered in weeds, fly forward, closing around my throat. I clench my fist, feeling the warm wood of my father’s knife, and bring it down in a single swipe, severing the witch’s hand. It falls away, and so do I, tumbling down the hill several feet before I manage to stop. But she’s already coming, putting her hand back onto her wrist. I manage to get my feet beneath me, sliding to the bottom of the hill. Glancing back at the sisters’ house, I catch sight of a stone tomb, open, waiting. They did it. The structure sits, a rectangular vault, where before was only barren earth and that shifting pile of stones. Magda and Dreska made a house just big enough to hold the witch’s bones. I’ve got to get her there.

I turn back to face the witch, and brace myself, but she stops moving. She pauses, for only a moment, as her eyes snag on the cottage and, beside it, the small garden, full of flowers, all in bloom, despite the fall chill. Half a dozen different kinds, in perfect rows. Clearly the sisters’ craft hasn’t withered away entirely over the years.

Something moves by the low stone wall, a flash of gray. It launches itself over and onto the moor toward me, traveling so fast it almost blurs.

“Cole?”

The word jars the Near Witch from her reverie, and her stone eyes flash to me, glistening. She lunges just as Cole reaches me, throwing his body in front of mine. And then a sound, a fierce crack, a dozen times louder than any breaking branch, loud enough to make the moors shiver and the witch turn, angry and fast, in the direction of it.

“Now, Cole!” I shout, and in that moment the wind tears through, catching the witch off guard. It forces us to the ground as the air slams into her, carrying her in one large gust past us to the garden and the tomb where her house once sat. The bones clatter against the stones of the tomb with such force that the structure collapses over them, a mound of rock and weedy earth, and bones somewhere beneath.

And suddenly, everything is quiet.

The kind of stifling quiet of blocked ears, booming pressure before sound returns. Cole’s hands are on his knees as he tries to breathe. My head is spinning, and I sit, dazed, on the grass, watching as weeds begin to creep slowly over the tomb, blossoming wildflowers until the stone structure seems as old as the sisters’ house, half eaten by the moor. It’s over. I can’t take my eyes from the small stone tomb, expecting it to shake, to crumble and unleash the angry, moor-made witch. But no sound, no motion comes.

And then I catch sight of the glinting metal back by the low stone wall, the source of the violent crack. Otto is standing, his rifle still raised against his shoulder, looking as singed as Cole. He continues to gaze down the barrel at the two of us, sitting half dead on the moor, and I can imagine him leveling the sight on Cole, for just a moment too long, wondering. Finally he lowers the gun, and Mr. Ward and Tyler hop the low wall and hurry toward us. Cole must have brought them. Behind my eyes the scene plays out, the fire spreading through the forest and his pleas for the men to come quick, to help him. Did they hesitate? Did they wonder?

I can see other men now walking up behind my uncle, and in their arms are forms, cradled and small. The children. Otto climbs the wall, too, as Magda and Dreska appear from their house and totter over. Magda’s hand brushes the tomb as she passes it, looking pleased. Dreska follows behind, touching it once. Cole sits, breathless and pale, beside me.

“You made it,” I gasp.

“I promised.”

The sun is gone, and the night seems to have swept in, only the last edges of light strung across a few stray clouds.

And then Otto is standing over us. He gives me a measured gaze before turning his attention to Cole.

My uncle stares down at the pale and bloodied boy on the ground beside me. His face is just as dirty, his clothing singed. The two look as though they’ve been through the same battle. Cole looks back at Otto, not with anger or fear. What happened in the forest? Otto looks to the children, then to the stone tomb. After a long moment, his eyes fall back on Cole, who is shifting his weight, about to push himself to his feet. Otto holds out his hand, and Cole takes it.

The sisters are examining the children, all five set on the ground beside the low stone wall. They still aren’t moving. Then Wren fidgets, rolls onto her side, asleep. Asleep. My head spins with relief.

When I look back at Otto, he has not let go of Cole’s hand, eclipsing it in his own.

“Thank you,” he says at last, so low it sounds more like a grumble than actual words. But I can hear it, and so can Cole, and so can Tyler, judging by his hard expression. Otto’s hand falls away, and Cole looks to me, and I cannot wipe the smile from my face. He steps to me, takes me into his arms. The wind curls around us. And for the first time in what seems like forever, everything feels right. In its place.