The Year of the Witching (19 page)

For the fires of purging are righteous and the Father rejoices at the sight of its flames.

—T
HE
H
OLY
S
CRIPTURES

I
MMANUELLE LEFT FOR
the Outskirts at daybreak. The journey passed in a series of disembodied glimpses, as though she was so overwhelmed at the prospect of meeting her kin she couldn’t process what she was looking at. There was the flash of a man in a mask like a crow’s face, stoking a pyre’s flames with a pitchfork, a shroud-wrapped body in the back of a wagon bouncing with every rut in the road. Blue smoke broke in waves above the treetops, so thick it stung her eyes, and the air rang with the cries of the blight sick.

There were women wandering in nothing more than their slips. Barefoot men shambling along the roads, a few of them shaking, others howling and scratching themselves bloody. As Immanuelle passed a neighboring farm, she saw a girl running through a dying cornfield, arms outstretched toward the Darkwood. She was wearing nothing but a long, bloodstained nightgown, and its skirts tangled around her ankles as she fled. A man tore after her, her father or husband perhaps; the distance made it hard to tell. He caught her around the waist and dragged her kicking and screaming to the dirt just a few feet from the forest’s edge.

Immanuelle averted her eyes. The scene seemed like the sort of indignity that was wrong to bear witness to. Shaken, she walked on, traveling fast down the main road, until she saw the Outskirts emerge from a haze of pyre smoke.

Her heart kicked up to a fast rhythm, even as she slowed to a stop in the middle of the road.

After all of these years of pining, she was finally going to meet her kin.

Immanuelle started forward, noting that the Outskirts were strangely quiet. No children in the streets, no fever-struck fleeing for the forests. The roads were mostly empty, apart from the odd farmer or merchant steering a mule cart. The windows on the houses were shuttered. Dogs were tethered to lampposts and fences; a few of them barked at her as she passed them by. Every so often, a crow shrieked in the distance, but apart from that, the silence was near complete. For whatever reason—whether it be the small population, or some act of mercy on behalf of the witches—the Outskirts were spared the full wrath of the blight plague.

After a long walk through the winding streets, Immanuelle found the village center, where the chapel stood. It was an odd structure. Unlike the Prophet’s Cathedral, which was built from slabs of slate, the Church of the Outskirts was comprised of a rustic thatching of woven branches and saplings. Its windows were set with stained-glassed portraits of strange dark-skinned saints that Immanuelle didn’t know by name. Each of them held some sort of talisman—a lit candle, a cut branch, a red ribbon woven between their fingers, the twisted knob of a knucklebone.

In all her sixteen years, Immanuelle had never seen any saints or effigies in her own likeness. None of the statues and paintings housed in the Prophet’s Cathedral bore any resemblance to her. But when she looked at those saints immortalized in stained
glass, a kind of aching familiarity settled over her, as if something she’d forgotten she’d lost was finally being returned.

The front door was cut from a thick slab of oak, and it looked like it belonged on the hinges of a vault, not a church. Even though it was slightly ajar, Immanuelle had to throw her shoulder against it and heave her full weight into the effort of forcing it open. The room within was dim, cast in a haze of incense smoke so dense her eyes began to sting and fill with tears. There were no pews there, just long, narrow benches that ran half the length of the room, positioned in rows on either side of the aisle. Overhead, a balcony wrapped around the room’s perimeter, where several women stood watching her.

At the aisle’s end was a kind of altar. But unlike the one in the Prophet’s Cathedral, this altar had a raised lip around its edges, creating a sort of shallow basin within, where a small fire burned. A man stood over the offering, his face bathed with smoke. As Immanuelle drew near, she saw that he wore a holy dagger—albeit an old and rusty one. He had a shaved head, and his eyes were the palest shade of amber, a sharp contrast to the rich ebony of his skin. If she had to guess, she’d say he was about Abram’s age, perhaps a little younger. He wore simple robes cut from what appeared to be rough burlap, belted at the waist with a leather cord so long its tassels skimmed the floor. Approaching him, Immanuelle felt a certain gravitas that she had only ever experienced in the woods when Lilith first emerged from the tree line.

“My name is Immanuelle Moore—”

“No need,” he said and turned back to the fire. Beside it, on a small stone pedestal, was a group of young chickens, bound together by their necks. The priest picked them up by the rope and released them into the flames with the mutter of something that might have been a prayer, but it was so brief Immanuelle couldn’t
tell. The scent of burnt feathers and seared meat mingled with the thick stench of the incense. “I know who you are.”

“How?”

The priest chuckled, like she’d told a particularly witty joke. “There are few of us who don’t. Tell me, what brings you to the Outskirts today?”

“I’m here for my family.”

“And why do you seek them now?”

“Because I’m ready.”

The priest raised an eyebrow. Appraised her through the rolling smoke. “You weren’t before?”

Immanuelle squared her shoulders. “I was scared before. But I’m not anymore. So I’d like to see them, if you could point me in the right direction.”

The priest’s expression shifted from cold to pitying. “I’m afraid you’ve come to the wrong place, Ms. Moore. There are no Wards here.”

The wind left her, as though she took a punch to the stomach. She leaned forward, braced herself on the back of a pew. “They’re all gone? Dead?”

“No. Not all of them. As far as I know, your grandmother, Vera Ward, is the last of your living kin. But she left Bethel just days after your father was murdered.”

So there was hope after all. Perhaps all wasn’t lost. “Do you know where she is?”

The priest nodded to the right. Immanuelle followed him down a narrow aisle between two benches and into a little room off the chapel. It looked much like the adjoining apses and galleries of the Prophet’s Cathedral, only this space was much smaller. Its walls were painted with the sprawling mural of Bethel and the territories beyond it. On the far wall were the Glades, Outskirts, and Holy Grounds, with the appropriate designations for famous
landmarks like the tomb of the first prophet, the Haven, the Church of the Outskirts, and of course the Prophet’s Cathedral. Surrounding it all was the Darkwood . . . only it wasn’t painted that way. In the mural, the forest took the form of a naked woman, curled fetal around Bethel.

Immanuelle stared at the fresco for a long time in breathless silence, tracing the woman’s form, trying and failing to parse its meaning. Eventually, her gaze fell to a short verse etched into a wooden plaque on the right side of the wall:
The forest is sentient in a way man is not. She sees with a thousand eyes and forgets nothing
.

“Is that from the Holy Scriptures?” she asked.

The priest shook his head. “Not one you’ll find in your holy book. Consider it . . . an unsanctioned addendum.”

“Is it meant to be a reference to the Mother or the forest?”

“Both,” said the priest. “The Mother
is
the forest. She is the soul, and the Darkwood is Her body. To us, the two entities are intrinsic. One is the same as the other.”

Immanuelle touched a spot toward the edge of the woodland, tracing the path of the tree line that ran along the Moore land. “I’ve never heard it explained that way before.”

“That’s because your people aren’t schooled in the ways of the Mother.”

Immanuelle didn’t like the way he said “your people,” as if to erase the blood tie that bound her to the Outskirts and the Wards. But she made no mention of that discrepancy. Instead, she turned her attention back to the mural, tilting her head to study the map above her. The ceiling loomed high, and it was painted with the faint outlines of maps, but the illustrations were far more abstract than the ones that depicted Bethel. She saw a few names she recognized—Hebron, Gall, Valta. “The heathen cities?”

“In the words of your Prophet, yes.”

“Is that where I’ll find my grandmother?”

The priest shook his head and tapped a small blank spot in the wilds just north of Bethel. The village was labeled Ishmel. To Immanuelle’s immense surprise, it wasn’t far from Bethel. Judging by the scale of the map, it was only a few leagues from the Hallowed Gate. She guessed that with a good horse, a trained scout could ride there in no more than a day or so.

“Is there any way to get word to her?”

The priest shook his head. “It’s illegal to send letters past the gate, and even if you could get a letter through, there’s no promise you’d receive a response. I doubt Vera would send a letter back to Bethel and risk the wrath of the Church. If you want to talk to her, you’ll have to do it in the flesh. Find someone to smuggle you through the Hallowed Gate, and someone else to smuggle you back in again.”

“Is that even possible?”

“Almost anything is possible if you ask the right questions to the right people and you’re willing to pay the price.”

Immanuelle mulled this for a moment. “How will I know if my grandmother’s still in Ishmel?”

“You won’t. There’s no way to. Leaving Bethel is an act of faith. Vera used to say so herself before she left.”

“You mean before she was exiled?”

He frowned at her as if she’d said something disrespectful or out of turn. “Vera turned her back on this place of her own accord. Left through the gate long before your Prophet had the chance to exile her formally. In fact, she left the night after her boy burned. His body was still on the pyre when she fled.”

Immanuelle cringed at the image of her father, dead on the pyre. “Do you think she’s still out there?”

“I do,” said the priest. “That woman knew how to bleed for
what she wanted, and she always had a way with the woods. I’m sure the wilds were kind to her.”

Immanuelle thought back to weeks ago, to the last time she was in the Outskirts. On that day, as she and Martha rode past in the wagon, she’d seen a multitude of tributes strewn along the forest’s edge. Was that how the Outskirters were attempting to avoid the full wrath of the plagues? By feeding the Darkwood in order to win its favor? “You mean she made offerings to the forest in exchange for . . . safety?”

The priest laughed, a brash sound that echoed through the chapel. “The wood protects no one. If you want the dull comforts of safety, you make a blood sacrifice to the Father in the hopes of appeasing Him. But if it’s power you want, you’d best leave your sacrifices at the Mother’s feet.”

“But how do you bleed to buy the Mother’s power?” Immanuelle asked, growing more and more confused. “I imagine it has to be more difficult than nicking your thumb and saying a prayer.”

The priest frowned, clearly growing suspicious. “Why would a girl from the Glades ask a question like that?”

“Passing curiosity,” said Immanuelle, but she could tell the priest knew it was a lie.

He stepped past her, his robes rustling as he walked back to the chapel. “You know, Vera wanted to keep you. Always said that if Daniel and Miriam were to have children, they ought to be raised in the Outskirts.”

“I didn’t know,” Immanuelle whispered, her voice thick with tears. All these years she’d been such a fool, assuming that her family in the Outskirts had no interest in her, that she was alone in the world, apart from the Moores. It was a strange and wonderful revelation, but there was pain in it too. It hurt to think that she’d been kept apart from someone she might have known and
loved. Someone who might have loved her, too, and understood her in a way that the Moores simply could not.

“If the gate ever opens for you, then you should go to Vera. You’re all the family she has left. It would do her good to see you.”

Immanuelle turned to look at the small spot on the wall, Ishmel, an islet in the vast sea of the wilderness. “Perhaps I will.”

The two meandered out of the apse, back into the chapel. The chickens were still burning on the altar, and a girl stood by it, feeding the fire with pine needles, moss, sprigs of dried rosemary, and other herbs Immanuelle didn’t know by name.

“If you have no other questions, I really should be getting back to my work.” The priest motioned to the burning altar.

“I do have one more request.”

He raised a brow. “Hopefully not one that pertains to witchcraft and blood magic?”

Immanuelle flushed. “No. Nothing like that. I just wondered if it was possible for me to see the house where my father and grandmother used to live.”

The priest considered this for a moment, then nodded, calling over the girl who tended to the burning offering. She was stunning—tall and dark-skinned, with wide eyes and well-cut cheekbones. Her hair was a few shades darker than Immanuelle’s, and it was carefully braided back into a series of four thick cornrows and collected into a tight bun at the nape of her neck.