The Year of the Witching(20)
Upon their arrival, the congregation erupted into applause. Men raised their fists, shouting curses to the wind.
The first apostle stepped forward with the first witch, a small wicker figure barely bigger than Honor.
“That’s Mercy,” said Anna, taking time to school her daughters in the particulars of the faith.
The next apostle held his witch high above his head, so her nightgown lashed and fluttered on the wind. When her skirt flapped up, exposing what would be her modesty, a few of the bolder men jeered. “Harlot! Whore!”
“And who might she be?” Anna pointed as the apostle carried the figure toward the roaring flames.
“That’s Jael,” said Immanuelle, and she shuddered when she said the name, remembering the wretched creature she’d encountered in the Darkwood days before. “The second Lover.”
“Aye,” said Anna, and her lip curled in disgust. “That’s her. And she’s a mean one too. Wicked and cunning like the Dark Mother Herself.” She snaked out a hand to tickle Honor’s belly. The girl shrieked and giggled, kicking her legs beneath the table, the plates and cups jumping a bit when her boot struck its leg.
The third witch followed. She wore a dress not so unlike Immanuelle’s, only her bodice was stuffed with straw to emulate the swell of a pregnant woman’s belly.
“Delilah,” said Martha. “Witch of the Water. Hell’s own whore.”
It was Ezra who carried the last witch, bearing her on an iron cross. The figure was twice the size of the others, and she was naked, her body a thatch-work of birch branches. The arms of a sapling twisted from either side of her head, forming a rack of antlers.
Anna didn’t say her name out loud, though she cheered when Ezra carried her near. But Glory and Honor fell silent in her wake, cringing a little as the shadow of the last witch slipped past them.
Her name surfaced from the depths of Immanuelle’s mind: Lilith. First daughter of the Dark Mother. Witch Queen of the Woodland who reigned in wrath, slaying any and all who opposed her.
Each of the apostles raised his witch overhead and staked her deep into the soil, so that the figures stood upright on their iron crosses. The Prophet raised his torch, a flaming branch nearly as long as Immanuelle was tall. Then he moved it to the witches, lighting each of them in turn. The Lovers, Jael and Mercy, first, then the Witch of the Water, Delilah.
Immanuelle tasted something sour at the back of her throat, and her stomach twisted. The sound of blood pounding through her ears briefly drowned out the jeering crowds.
Lilith was the last witch to burn that night, and the Prophet made the most of the moment. He raised his blazing branch high above his head and thrust it between her horns, the way one might wield a sword. His eyes held the glow of the torch flame, the embers seeming to spark in the pits of his pupils.
In silence, Immanuelle watched Lilith burn, watched the flames chew her up and swallow her, even as the rest of the guests returned to their food and chatter. She watched the witches burn until the fires died and Lilith’s blackened bones were the only thing that remained, smoking on the arms of the iron cross.
* * *
IMMANUELLE FLED THE feast, her belly warmed by barley wine, her head thick. She passed children running rings around the charred remains of the witch pyres, hollering hymns above the music of the fiddler. She passed Leah and the Prophet and the throng of his other wives. She passed the Moores unseen.
Immanuelle staggered around the cathedral to the graveyard behind it. There, she broke to her knees and heaved, retching barley wine into the thicket. She pushed to her feet, dizzy, took a few steps forward, and heaved again. Her sick splattered a nearby tombstone and seeped, reeking, into the dirt.
Shaking despite the summer heat, Immanuelle breathed deeply to steady herself and wiped her mouth on her sleeve.
She had been foolish to think she could banish the memory of the witches. What she’d seen in the woods that day was real. The Lovers weren’t passing figments. They’d been flesh and blood, as real as she was. The journal, the letters, the forbidden forest—none of it would leave her, and she couldn’t leave it. No amount of prayer or penance would banish it.
What she’d seen in the woods had become a part of her . . . and it was a part of her that she knew she needed to kill, and quickly.
Pushing herself off the ground, Immanuelle wandered the cemetery, weaving between the headstones, reading epitaphs in an attempt to clear her head. Some of them belonged to prophets and apostles of ages past, but most marked the resting places of the crusader soldiers who died in the civil war to overthrow the witches. A few were mass graves, and the stones that marked these simply read: In remembrance of the Father’s Men and the dark they purged. As for the witches, there were no monuments to mark their graves. Their bones and memories lay within the Darkwood.
At the center of the cemetery was a thick slab of marble, nearly two stories tall, hewn into a pinnacle that jutted from the soil like a half-buried bone. Immanuelle knelt to read the inscription at the foot of the monument, though she didn’t have to. Like most everyone in Bethel, she knew it by heart.
It read: Here lies the Father’s first prophet, David Ford, Spring in the Year of the Flame to Winter in the Year of the Wake. Below that, words gouged deep into the stone read: Blood for blood.
Immanuelle shivered. Buried beneath her feet were the bones of the Witch Killer, the prophet who’d purged and burned and cleansed Bethel of evil. For it was David Ford who’d ordered Lilith and the rest of her coven to the pyre, who’d set the fire and stoked the flames. Every purge began with him and the war he’d waged during the Dark Days.