The Year of the Witching(54)
There were women wandering in nothing more than their slips. Barefoot men shambling along the roads, a few of them shaking, others howling and scratching themselves bloody. As Immanuelle passed a neighboring farm, she saw a girl running through a dying cornfield, arms outstretched toward the Darkwood. She was wearing nothing but a long, bloodstained nightgown, and its skirts tangled around her ankles as she fled. A man tore after her, her father or husband perhaps; the distance made it hard to tell. He caught her around the waist and dragged her kicking and screaming to the dirt just a few feet from the forest’s edge.
Immanuelle averted her eyes. The scene seemed like the sort of indignity that was wrong to bear witness to. Shaken, she walked on, traveling fast down the main road, until she saw the Outskirts emerge from a haze of pyre smoke.
Her heart kicked up to a fast rhythm, even as she slowed to a stop in the middle of the road.
After all of these years of pining, she was finally going to meet her kin.
Immanuelle started forward, noting that the Outskirts were strangely quiet. No children in the streets, no fever-struck fleeing for the forests. The roads were mostly empty, apart from the odd farmer or merchant steering a mule cart. The windows on the houses were shuttered. Dogs were tethered to lampposts and fences; a few of them barked at her as she passed them by. Every so often, a crow shrieked in the distance, but apart from that, the silence was near complete. For whatever reason—whether it be the small population, or some act of mercy on behalf of the witches—the Outskirts were spared the full wrath of the blight plague.
After a long walk through the winding streets, Immanuelle found the village center, where the chapel stood. It was an odd structure. Unlike the Prophet’s Cathedral, which was built from slabs of slate, the Church of the Outskirts was comprised of a rustic thatching of woven branches and saplings. Its windows were set with stained-glassed portraits of strange dark-skinned saints that Immanuelle didn’t know by name. Each of them held some sort of talisman—a lit candle, a cut branch, a red ribbon woven between their fingers, the twisted knob of a knucklebone.
In all her sixteen years, Immanuelle had never seen any saints or effigies in her own likeness. None of the statues and paintings housed in the Prophet’s Cathedral bore any resemblance to her. But when she looked at those saints immortalized in stained glass, a kind of aching familiarity settled over her, as if something she’d forgotten she’d lost was finally being returned.
The front door was cut from a thick slab of oak, and it looked like it belonged on the hinges of a vault, not a church. Even though it was slightly ajar, Immanuelle had to throw her shoulder against it and heave her full weight into the effort of forcing it open. The room within was dim, cast in a haze of incense smoke so dense her eyes began to sting and fill with tears. There were no pews there, just long, narrow benches that ran half the length of the room, positioned in rows on either side of the aisle. Overhead, a balcony wrapped around the room’s perimeter, where several women stood watching her.
At the aisle’s end was a kind of altar. But unlike the one in the Prophet’s Cathedral, this altar had a raised lip around its edges, creating a sort of shallow basin within, where a small fire burned. A man stood over the offering, his face bathed with smoke. As Immanuelle drew near, she saw that he wore a holy dagger—albeit an old and rusty one. He had a shaved head, and his eyes were the palest shade of amber, a sharp contrast to the rich ebony of his skin. If she had to guess, she’d say he was about Abram’s age, perhaps a little younger. He wore simple robes cut from what appeared to be rough burlap, belted at the waist with a leather cord so long its tassels skimmed the floor. Approaching him, Immanuelle felt a certain gravitas that she had only ever experienced in the woods when Lilith first emerged from the tree line.
“My name is Immanuelle Moore—”
“No need,” he said and turned back to the fire. Beside it, on a small stone pedestal, was a group of young chickens, bound together by their necks. The priest picked them up by the rope and released them into the flames with the mutter of something that might have been a prayer, but it was so brief Immanuelle couldn’t tell. The scent of burnt feathers and seared meat mingled with the thick stench of the incense. “I know who you are.”
“How?”
The priest chuckled, like she’d told a particularly witty joke. “There are few of us who don’t. Tell me, what brings you to the Outskirts today?”
“I’m here for my family.”
“And why do you seek them now?”
“Because I’m ready.”
The priest raised an eyebrow. Appraised her through the rolling smoke. “You weren’t before?”
Immanuelle squared her shoulders. “I was scared before. But I’m not anymore. So I’d like to see them, if you could point me in the right direction.”
The priest’s expression shifted from cold to pitying. “I’m afraid you’ve come to the wrong place, Ms. Moore. There are no Wards here.”
The wind left her, as though she took a punch to the stomach. She leaned forward, braced herself on the back of a pew. “They’re all gone? Dead?”
“No. Not all of them. As far as I know, your grandmother, Vera Ward, is the last of your living kin. But she left Bethel just days after your father was murdered.”
So there was hope after all. Perhaps all wasn’t lost. “Do you know where she is?”