The Year of the Witching(52)

And so, the second curse came upon them.





PART II





Blight





CHAPTER TWENTY





A man who knows his past is a man with the power to choose his future.

—FROM THE PARABLES OF THE PROPHET ZACHRIAS





IN THE DAYS that followed, more than two hundred fell ill, succumbing first to the fever, then to the madness after it. Immanuelle heard stories of grown men clawing their eyes from their sockets, chaste women of the faith who stripped off their clothes and fled, naked, into the Darkwood, screaming as they went. Others, mostly little children like Honor, suffered from a different, but perhaps more sinister, affliction and succumbed to the clutches of a sleep as deep as death. As far as Immanuelle knew, none of the healers in Bethel were able to wake them.

Of those who fell ill in the early days of the contagion, sixty died before the Sabbath. To keep the plague from spreading, the dead were burned on purging pyres. But those who fled to the Darkwood in fits of madness were never seen or heard from again.

By all accounts, it was the worst contagion in Bethel’s thousand-year history, and people called it many things—the affliction, the fever, the manic flu—but Immanuelle only ever referred to it by one name, the one written dozens of times in the final pages of her mother’s journal: Blight.

“More water,” Martha demanded, mopping a sheen of sweat from her forehead. Though all the windows were open, each breath of wind brought the hot smoke of the pyres that burned throughout the Glades. “And bring the yarrow.” Under normal circumstances, burning the bodies of the blameless was a grave breach of Holy Protocol. But in a desperate attempt to stop the spread of the disease, the Church made a rare amendment to its sacred law.

Immanuelle obeyed, skirts sweeping around her ankles as she ducked into the kitchen, grabbing a basin of water and a bundle of dried yarrow flower from the herb box beneath the sink. She raced upstairs as fast as she could without tripping on the hem of her skirts and entered the children’s room.

There, she found Anna tightening the knots around Glory’s wrists, tethering her to the headboard to keep her from escaping, as she had tried to do six times since the night she first took ill. Anna tied the cloth cuffs so tight there were bruises around her daughter’s wrists, but it couldn’t be helped. Nearly half of those afflicted with the blight had maimed or even killed themselves in the throes of their madness, jumping out of windows or bashing their own heads in, as Honor had nearly done the night Immanuelle found her.

At her mother’s touch, Glory thrashed and shrieked, legs tangling in her sheets, her cheeks bright with fever.

Immanuelle set the basin beside the bed, took the yarrow from her mouth, and grabbed the bowl on the nightstand. She crushed the blooms as best she could, mashing them into a paste. Then she added a little water—still faintly tinged by the last traces of the blood plague—and mixed the pulp with her fingers.

It was Martha who administered the draught, seizing Glory firmly by the base of her neck and thrusting her upright, the way one holds a squalling newborn. She forced the bowl to her mouth, and Glory thrashed and spat, dragging at her binds, her eyes rolling back in her skull as the draught dribbled between her lips and down her chin.

Honor lay across the room with her eyes closed, her blankets tucked beneath her chin. Immanuelle put a hand to her cheek and winced. The fever raged in her yet. The girl lay so still Immanuelle had to slip a finger beneath her nose just to see if she was breathing. She hadn’t stirred once since the blight had arrived. That night, she’d struck herself into a deep slumber they feared she’d never wake from.

It went on like that for hours—Glory thrashing in her bed, Honor comatose, Anna weeping on a chair in the corner—until Immanuelle couldn’t bear it anymore. She left the farmhouse for the pastures. Days ago, their farmhand, Josiah, had been called back to his own home in the distant Glades to tend to his blight-sick wife. So apart from Immanuelle, there was no one to keep watch over the grazing sheep.

As she crossed the pastures, crook in hand, she weighed the options available to her. Her darkest fears had become reality. The sacrifice she’d made at the pond hadn’t worked after all. Blight was upon them, and if it didn’t end soon, Immanuelle feared the lives of her sisters would be forfeit. But what could she do to stop it?

Her blood offering hadn’t been enough to break the curse, and she had no one to turn to for aid. The Church seemed helpless in the face of such great evil. Immanuelle considered turning to Ezra for help, as she had done before, but decided against it. He’d made it plain that he wanted no part in plagues or witchcraft, no part of her. The last time she’d dragged him into her schemes he’d almost paid a mortal price. It seemed cruel to call upon him again.

But if not Ezra, whom could she turn to? There had to be someone, something. A cure or scheme to stop this. She had to believe that, on principle alone, because if she didn’t, it meant that hope was lost and her sisters were going to die.

A memory surfaced at the back of her mind, an image of her census papers, the witch mark below her name and the names of the Wards who came before her. Was it possible that the very answers she sought—about the plagues, and the witches and a way to defeat them—could be waiting for her in the Outskirts, in the form of the family she had never known? If the witch mark was any indication at all, they were versed in the magic of the Darkwood and the coven that walked its corridors. If there was any help to be found in Bethel, Immanuelle was certain she’d find it with them.