Witchlanders
Authors: 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
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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.
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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
Chapter 2: The Skin of the Sea
Chapter 5: The Right Hand of Aata
Chapter 11: The Crouching Spider
Chapter 16: The Goddess Has Stained Your Eyes
Chapter 18: In the Chamber of Aata and Aayse
Chapter 21: A Casting of Bones
Chapter 23: All the Nightmares
Chapter 25: The Many Eyes of Kar
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 groupâHadley Dyer, Kathy Stinson, and Paula Wingâread 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
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 songsâand those who do, find that their brothers are scattered to the winds
.
â
The Magician's Enchiridion
CHAPTER 1FLOWERS 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 witchesâloose-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 moneyâthat was what she used to say.
Yet here she wasâholding 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 . . .”
