The Year of the Witching(7)
Martha’s cheeks all but drained of color and her lips were bloodless. “You never go into those woods, you hear? There’s evil in them.”
Immanuelle frowned. The way she saw it, sin wasn’t a plague you could catch if you ventured too close. And she wasn’t sure she believed all the legends about the evils in the womb of the Darkwood. In truth, Immanuelle wasn’t sure what she believed, but she was fairly certain a brief shortcut through the forest wouldn’t be her undoing.
Still, no good would come from an argument, and she knew that in a battle of wills, she couldn’t win. Martha had a heart of iron and the kind of unwavering faith that could make stones tremor. It was futile to provoke her.
And so, Immanuelle bit her tongue, bowed her head, and resigned herself to obey.
* * *
THAT NIGHT, IMMANUELLE dreamed of beasts: a girl with a gaping mouth and the yellowed teeth of a coyote; a woman with moth wings who howled at the rising moon. She woke in the early morning to the echo of that cry, the sound slapping back and forth between the walls of her skull.
Bleary-eyed and drunk with exhaustion, Immanuelle dressed clumsily, trying to push the twisted images of the woodland ghouls from her mind as she fumbled into her button-down dress and readied herself for a day at the market.
Slipping out of the sleeping household, Immanuelle strode toward the far pastures. She began most every morning like this—tending to the sheep by the light of dawn. On the rare occasion when she couldn’t—like the week she caught whooping cough a few summers prior—a hired farmhand by the name of Josiah Clark stepped in to fill her role.
Immanuelle found her flock huddled together in the eastern pastures, just beyond the woodland’s shadow. Crows roosted in the branches of the oaks and birches in the nearby forest, though they sang no songs. The silence was as thick as the morning’s fog, and it was broken only by the sound of Immanuelle’s lullaby, which echoed through the foothills and distant fields like a dirge.
It wasn’t a normal lullaby, like the folk songs or nursery rhymes that mothers sing to their children, but rather a rendition of an old mourning hymn she had once heard at a funeral. Her song carried across the pastures, and at the sound her flock moved east, sweeping like a tide across the rolling hills. They were upon her in moments, bleating and trotting happily, pressing up against her skirts. But the yearling ram, Judas, hung back from the rest, his hooves firmly planted and his head hanging low. Despite his age, he was a large and fearsome thing with a shaggy black coat and two sets of horns: the first set jutting like daggers from the crown of his skull, the second curling back behind his ears and piercing along the harsh cut of his jaw.
“Judas,” Immanuelle called above the hiss of wind in the high grass. “Come now, it’s time to go to the market.”
The ram struck the dirt with his hooves, his eyes squinted thin. As he stepped forward, the sheep stirred and parted, the little lambs tripping over their hooves to make way for him. He stopped just a few feet from Immanuelle, his head turned slightly to the side so he could stare at her through the twisted crook of his horn.
“We’re going to the market.” She raised the lead rope for him to see, the slack dangling above the ground. “I’ll need to tether you.”
The ram didn’t move.
Stooping to one knee, Immanuelle eased the loop of the knot over his horns, tugging the rope taut to tighten it. The ram fought her, kicking and bucking and throwing his head, striking the earth with his hooves. But she held fast, bracing her legs and tightening her grip, the rope chafing across her palms as Judas reared and struggled.
“Easy,” she said, never raising her voice above a murmur. “Easy there.”
The ram threw his head a final time and huffed hard, a cloud of steam billowing from his nostrils, thick as pipe smoke on the cold morning air.
“Come on, you old grump.” She urged him along with another tug on the lead rope. “We’ve got to get you to the market.”
The walk through the Glades was long, and despite the initial chill of the morning, the sun was hot. Trails of sweat slipped down Immanuelle’s spine as she trudged along the winding path to town. Had she taken the shortcut through the woodland—instead of the long way around the forest’s edge—she would have been in town already. But she’d promised Martha she’d stay clear of the woods, and she was determined to keep her word.
So Immanuelle trudged on, her knapsack weighing heavy on her shoulders as she went. Her feet ached in her boots, which were a size and a half too small and pinched her heels so badly they blistered. It often seemed like everything she owned was either too big or too small, like she wasn’t fit for the world she was born to.
Halfway to the market, Immanuelle stopped for breakfast. She found a cool spot in the shadow beneath a birch tree and rummaged through the contents of her knapsack for the wedge of cheese and brick-hard brown bread Anna had baked the night prior. She ate quickly, tossed the bread crusts to Judas, who snapped them up and bucked his head, tugging the lead rope so hard she had to seize him by the horns to keep him from bolting.
In the distance, the Darkwood stirred. It almost seemed to call to her as the wind breathed through the branches, like a hissing, secret tongue.
According to legends and the Holy Scriptures, the Darkwood, like all of the cursed and wretched things of the world, had been spawned by the Dark Mother, goddess of the hells. While the Good Father wrought the world with light and flame, breathing life into the dust, She summoned Her evils from the shadows, birthing legions of beasts and demons, mangled creatures and crawling things that lurked in the festering half-world between the living and the dead.