The Year of the Witching(15)

Sometimes I think we share a soul. His pain has become mine. And mine his.

A few pages later . . .

I love him. He taught me how. I don’t think I knew how to choose to love until I met him.

The following entries were shorter, the handwriting a bit sloppier than it had been before, as if the words were written in great haste. Most of them detailed brief encounters Miriam had with Daniel under cover of night or stolen moments after church on Sabbath days. In all of these entries, of which there were dozens, Miriam never once mentioned the Prophet. Still, Immanuelle could sense his presence in the pages, a shadow in the margins, a stain behind the words. And while Immanuelle knew that this story could only ever end in tragedy, she found herself hoping in vain for a different outcome. Miriam’s entries turned from glee to hope to trepidation to outright despair . . . and after the despair came a kind of helplessness.

There was a months’ long gap between entries and Immanuelle could only assume it accounted for the time Miriam was detained in the Prophet’s Haven. Then: They took him from me. They put him on the pyre. The flames burned high. They made me watch the fire take him.

Immanuelle tried to blink back her tears, but a few fell anyway. She forced herself to turn the page. The next entry was dated Summer in the Year of Omega. It read: I am with child.

The tears flowed freely then, and Immanuelle paused to wipe them away on the sleeve of her nightdress. The following entry was dated Winter of Omega—a full eight months after the one that preceded it. It read: I have seen the evils of this world, and I have loved them.

The entries that followed were progressively stranger. Instead of the sweeping calligraphy Immanuelle had come to know as her mother’s hand, these entries were sloppy, as if she had written them in the dark. The drawings, too, were different. The portraits and landscapes had become frantic scribbles, ink-stained abstractions so mangled Immanuelle could barely decipher them. One depicted a woman bent double, appearing to vomit tree branches. Another was a self-portrait of Miriam standing naked, one arm folded around her breasts, her hair hanging loose down her back. Her pregnant belly was swollen and painted with a crude symbol that reminded Immanuelle of the seals brides wore cut between their eyebrows, only this mark was much larger.

On the opposing page, an image of two twisted figures. They were naked like the other women, and their hands were joined. Both of them bore what Immanuelle initially mistook for the Prophet’s seal between their brows. But upon closer inspection, she noticed the star in the middle of their seal had only seven points, instead of the customary eight. Etched into the corner of the drawing was a title and date: The Lovers, Winter in the Year of Omega. They were the women Immanuelle had seen in the woods. The women who had given her the journal. And they weren’t just any women. They were the Lovers, Jael and Mercy, witches and servants of the Dark Mother who’d died in the fires of the Holy War, purged on account of their sin and lechery.

Somehow, defying all logic, they were alive in the Darkwood and her mother had known them. Dwelled with them perhaps. Why else would the witches have given Immanuelle the book? Why else would the book have sketches of the witches? Had the Lovers considered themselves doing Miriam’s bidding when they gave it to Immanuelle? Was this meant to be a kind of inheritance? The fulfillment of a promise they’d made to Miriam long ago?

Shaken, Immanuelle read on. The entries became shorter, fewer, and farther between. Just crude sketches mostly, punctuated here and there by the odd illegible entry. One sketch depicted two oak trees, their trunks carved with strange forked symbols. Just behind the trees, an idyllic little cabin, standing in a small dell in the midst of the forest. It took her a moment to realize what she was looking at. That cabin was the place where Miriam claimed she spent the months of winter after fleeing into the Darkwood.

Immanuelle continued skimming through these strange writings—it seemed odd to call them entries, given how incoherent they’d become. But one drawing caught her eye. In the foreground, there was a face—a hatched line for a mouth, two narrow eyes, full lips, and a crude, long nose that looked broken. In the background, lurking above her shoulder, was the twisted contour of a woman’s naked form. Mounted on her neck was not a head, but something that Immanuelle could only describe as a buck’s skull, crowned with a sprawling rack of antlers.

Lilith.

The name rose to Immanuelle’s mind unbidden, the fragment of a story told only around bonfires or whispered behind cupped hands. Lilith, daughter of the Dark Mother. The Mistress of Sins. Witch Queen of the Woodland. Immanuelle would have known her anywhere.

On the following page, a sketch of a woman emerging from what appeared to be a lake. Like the Lovers, she was naked, and her long black hair hung limp about her shoulders. The image was titled Delilah the Witch of the Water. Beside the drawing, a note: I have seen the Beast and her maidens again. I hear their cries in the woods at night. They call to me, and I call to them. There is no love as pure as that.

A bitter seed formed in the pit of Immanuelle’s belly. Her hands shook as she turned the journal’s final pages. Of everything she’d seen thus far, these scribbled drawings were the most troublesome. The accompanying words were so tangled it was almost impossible to decipher them. But Immanuelle was able to parse one phrase that appeared and reappeared over and over again in the backgrounds of drawings, crushed into the margins of scribbled entries: Her blood begets blood. Her blood begets blood. Her blood begets blood.