The Year of the Witching(56)
“I didn’t know,” Immanuelle whispered, her voice thick with tears. All these years she’d been such a fool, assuming that her family in the Outskirts had no interest in her, that she was alone in the world, apart from the Moores. It was a strange and wonderful revelation, but there was pain in it too. It hurt to think that she’d been kept apart from someone she might have known and loved. Someone who might have loved her, too, and understood her in a way that the Moores simply could not.
“If the gate ever opens for you, then you should go to Vera. You’re all the family she has left. It would do her good to see you.”
Immanuelle turned to look at the small spot on the wall, Ishmel, an islet in the vast sea of the wilderness. “Perhaps I will.”
The two meandered out of the apse, back into the chapel. The chickens were still burning on the altar, and a girl stood by it, feeding the fire with pine needles, moss, sprigs of dried rosemary, and other herbs Immanuelle didn’t know by name.
“If you have no other questions, I really should be getting back to my work.” The priest motioned to the burning altar.
“I do have one more request.”
He raised a brow. “Hopefully not one that pertains to witchcraft and blood magic?”
Immanuelle flushed. “No. Nothing like that. I just wondered if it was possible for me to see the house where my father and grandmother used to live.”
The priest considered this for a moment, then nodded, calling over the girl who tended to the burning offering. She was stunning—tall and dark-skinned, with wide eyes and well-cut cheekbones. Her hair was a few shades darker than Immanuelle’s, and it was carefully braided back into a series of four thick cornrows and collected into a tight bun at the nape of her neck.
“Adrine, this is Immanuelle Moore,” said the priest, and he nodded between the two of them. “You’ll take her to the ruins of the Ward house.”
Adrine appraised her, expressionless, nodded, then turned on her heel and stalked out of the chapel. Immanuelle turned to bid the priest farewell, but he was already praying over the altar, his face veiled by a haze of smoke.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
The doors of the Father’s house are always open to those who serve him faithfully. But the sinner will be turned away.
—THE HOLY SCRIPTURES
IMMANUELLE AND ADRINE walked in silence through the empty streets. The village they passed through was so quiet, Immanuelle might have thought it long deserted. There were no children playing in the streets. No dogs barking. No signs of life at all, save for the vultures circling overhead.
“Everything is so still,” Immanuelle whispered as they passed yet another shuttered house. There were bone wind chimes strung from the rafters of its porch, and they clattered together with a hollow sound when a breeze swept down the street. “The Glades are crawling with the blight sick.”
Adrine wrinkled her nose. “Is that what you’re calling it in the Glades? The blight?”
Immanuelle shook her head, embarrassed by her slip of the tongue. “It’s just . . . my own colloquialism. I’m not sure it has a proper name.”
“We call it an affliction of the soul,” said Adrine. “Our ancestors passed down stories of witches and soothsayers that used to curse men with a similar sickness.”
“So it was used as a kind of weapon?”
Adrine nodded. “In a sense.”
“Do you think there’s a cure for it?”
“I think the sickness is the cure,” said Adrine.
“I’m afraid I don’t understand your meaning.”
“Sometimes the things that seem like they’re hurting us are really a part of healing. When a child is sick and you bleed them, to them the bite of the knife seems like a punishment, when really it’s the cure. When your people purge, you do great harm, but you see the violence and the fire as a cure for sins that are far worse. Maybe this sickness is much the same. Maybe it’s a kind of purging, meant to root out a deeper evil.”
Immanuelle mulled that theory as the two started down another path. This one diverged from the main road, weaving through a series of slums. Here, the stench of sewage was thick on the air. The streets were mostly packed earth and mud, and several times Immanuelle stepped into ruts so deep the muck reached the top of her boots. The main road that weaved through the slums was narrow, the houses so tightly packed that at times the alleys between them were little more than shoulder width. Most of the homes were far too modest to have luxuries like glass windows, but Immanuelle caught glimpses inside these strange abodes when the wind blew their curtains back. There were families huddled together in prayer, children playing with corn-husk dolls, a mother nursing her baby, a black cat sleeping peacefully at the foot of a long bed mat. It was clear to Immanuelle that despite their squalor, none of the inhabitants had been touched by the blight.
Immanuelle was relieved when the little outcrop of houses gave way, once again, to open grassland. In the Glades—where wealthy farmers coveted every spare scrap of land—these wild ranges would have been farmed and converted into capital. But here, the land was left entirely untouched, save for the lone road that cut through it.
In the distance, the Darkwood lurked, the trees so dense they seemed almost impenetrable. Here the forest’s pull was far stronger than it was in the Glades, the trees sang to her when the wind moved through them, and it was a struggle for Immanuelle to keep to the path instead of drifting toward them.