The Year of the Witching(34)

On the opposite side of the pane was a maelstrom of the hells, a legion of beasts and witches fleeing the Father’s flames. Looming above her spawn in a veil of night was the Dark Mother. She wore the moon as a crown, and she was weeping tears of blood.

An iron plaque beneath the window read: The Holy War.

“It’s something, isn’t it?” said Ezra, staring up at the panes of stained glass, his cheeks washed red by the sunlight casting in through the fire’s flames. “An entire legion turned to ash, all on a whim.”

Immanuelle stared at him, stunned quiet. His words came close to outright blasphemy, a sin that might provoke a public lashing if Ezra were anything less than the Prophet’s successor. Her gaze tracked to the left corner of the window, where a small, dark-skinned boy cowered as the Father’s flames devoured a woman that might have been his mother.

“But it wasn’t a whim,” she said at last, finding her voice. “The crusaders called upon the Good Father to deliver them from the witches, and He answered their prayers with holy fire. He saved them all from ruin, from damnation at the hands of the Dark Mother. Those flames were His blessing.”

Ezra’s eyes narrowed, and he gazed up at that window with obvious contempt. “So the Scriptures say.”

“You don’t believe them?”

“All I’m saying is that if I was an all-powerful god who could do as I pleased, I would have found another way to end the war.” He looked back at Immanuelle. “Wouldn’t you?”

“I’m not a god, so I couldn’t say. I can’t presume to know the Father’s will. And if I did know it, I’m certain there would be no cause for doubts or questions.”

“Spoken like a true believer,” said Ezra, but he made it sound like an insult.

After a few moments of searching, he found the right page and motioned to it with a pass of his hand. There, inked into what appeared to be vellum, was a map. It outlined the boundaries of Bethel: the western wall, the village and market square, the sprawling Holy Grounds, and the rolling pastures of the Glades beyond them. In the far left-hand corner of the map, reduced to little more than a scribble, were the Outskirts. And encircling it all were wide swathes of shadow, marked with a simple footnote: The Darkwood.

“Did you find what you were looking for?” Ezra’s voice echoed in the quiet.

Immanuelle shook her head. The pond where she’d encountered Lilith wasn’t marked anywhere. “Would the library have something more specific? Like a map of the Darkwood?”

Ezra frowned. Once again, she wondered if she’d gone too far, or trusted him too easily. “As far as I know, there’s no map of the forest,” he said, and he closed the book. “But I might be able to help you. I used to play in the Darkwood when I was younger, and I still know the area well enough. There’s a good chance that if you know where you want to go, I can get you there.”

Immanuelle gaped. “You went into the woods as . . . a child?”

“Sometimes, when I found a way to sneak out of the Haven.” Ezra shrugged like it was nothing, but he looked a little proud. “Of course, I never stayed after sundown. I wasn’t too keen on the idea of the woodland witches ripping the flesh off my bones.”

Immanuelle shivered, thinking back to the witches, with their hungry eyes and hooked fingers. “You’d have been lucky if that’s all they did.”

He scoffed, like it was a joke, like all the legends of the Darkwood were merely fodder for wives’ tales.

“You don’t believe the stories?” she asked, incredulous. “You don’t believe the witches are real?”

“It isn’t a question of belief.”

“Then what is it?”

He took his time to think over his answer. At last, he said, “It’s a question of who’s being creative with the truth.”

Immanuelle wasn’t entirely sure what he meant by that, but it felt close to blasphemy. “Creative truths don’t explain away centuries of disappearances in the woods.”

“People don’t disappear in the woods. They escape. That’s why they never return: because they don’t want to.”

Immanuelle couldn’t imagine anyone intentionally leaving Bethel. After all, where would they go? To the godless, heathen cities in the west? To the lifeless ruins in the east? No one would seek solace in places like those. Beyond Bethel, there was nothing. There was no other place to go. “And all the missing children? What happened to all of them?”

Ezra shrugged. “The Darkwood is a dangerous place. Predators have to eat, and out there a defenseless child is just food for the wolves.”

“Then where are all the bodies? The bones?”

“Nature has a way of cleaning up its messes. My guess is the animals get to the corpses before anyone else has the chance to.”

“And what about the blood plague?”

“What about it?”

“Well, if it didn’t come from the forest, then what’s the source of it all? Is it really so hard for you to believe that there could be something in the Darkwood that wants its due? That the legends are true, and the witches who died never left, and now they want . . .” She traced her fingers across the carvings on the altar, recognizing the words from David Ford’s tombstone: Blood for blood. “Vengeance.”