The Year of the Witching(81)

Immanuelle tried to sleep to pass the hours, but if her nightmares didn’t wake her, then the screams of her fellow inmates did. From the stench of sewage alone, she could tell the cells were crowded to capacity with all of the women and girls held in contrition under penalty of witchcraft. She’d heard the Prophet’s guards murmur about the night raids that had occurred while she was still in Ishmel. In hushed whispers, they spoke of little girls being ripped from the arms of their mothers, homes invaded, dozens of women arrested and marched to the Haven under cover of darkness. At long last, the Prophet’s wrath was made manifest.

During her imprisonment, Immanuelle had been confined to a remote cell of her own. She had seen no one, save Apostle Isaac, and a few of the low-ranking Prophet’s guardsmen, who—every day or so—slipped a bowl of water and a moldy hunk of bread through the bars of her cell. As sick as it was, she had almost come to look forward to these daily interrogations, if only because they interrupted the maddening tedium . . . and the solitude, which was even worse. When she was left alone for too long, time didn’t slow so much as it unraveled. And it was in that strange abstraction of timelessness, where the seconds seemed suspended in the torpor of the infinite, that Immanuelle’s thoughts turned dark. That thing within her—the maelstrom, the monster, the witch—stirred to life.

It made her feel dangerous. It made her feel . . . ready.

Almost all the pieces were in place. She had the reversal sigil and she knew the tool she’d need to cast it: the Prophet’s dagger. Now it was just a matter of securing it, which would be no small feat given her current circumstances. But once she had that blade in her hand, all she needed to do was carve the sigil.

Apostle Isaac drew closer by a half step. “Tell me how you’ve sinned.”

Immanuelle thought back to the beginning of her memories. To sitting on Abram’s knee in front of a roaring fire, a book of Holy Scriptures lying open in her lap. She remembered stringing syllables together into words, and those words becoming sentences, and the sentences then becoming psalms and stories. Another memory surfaced, a summer day, years ago, when she and Leah had paddled in the muddy shallows of the river, swimming in secret. She remembered how free she’d felt the first time she let the current take her.

Immanuelle’s chains slithered across the cell floor as she straightened and found her voice. “I lived free—from the Protocol, from the Scriptures, from the Prophet’s law. That’s my only sin.”

The apostle frowned. “Is this your confession?”

“Yes.”

“And do you wish to be cleansed of your sin?”

Immanuelle raised her eyes to the apostle’s, squinting against the glow of the candlelight. She thought of muzzles and gutting blades, bridal veils and shackles. She thought of little girls lashed bloody for forgetting to fasten the top buttons of their dresses. She thought of purging pyres and the witches who’d died screaming on them, and of heads mounted on the spikes of the Haven’s gate. She thought of the Prophet’s gaze crawling over her, of Leah writhing and pleading in the torment of her labor until life had left her and she could scream no more. She thought of the reversal sigil, imagined carving it into the bare flesh of her forearm and calling back the plagues.

“I have no sins to cleanse.”

There was silence in the cell, save for the distant echo of footsteps, the rhythmic drip, drip, drip of the leak in the corner. Here—far below the earth’s surface—the water still tasted of brine and metal, the taint of the blood curse lingering.

Apostle Isaac paced from one end of the cell to the other. It was a show, Immanuelle realized, the way he moved, the way he preached the Scriptures and declared her sins. He wanted to plant terror like a seed. “They say you wandered the Darkwood. Is that so?”

Immanuelle lay back against the wet stones, too weak to stand. Hunger gnawed at her like a rat from within, and it was difficult to think past it. “That’s true.”

“They say you have talked to the demons that dwell there.”

Down the hall, the sound of a door grinding open, a girl shrieking for mercy. “I have.”

“They say they answer your calls.”

“Only sometimes.”

The apostle drew closer. “And these creatures, what are their names?”

“You know them already,” said Immanuelle. “You say them at feasts and on cutting days. You burn them in celebration. Lilith, Delilah, Jael, Mercy.”

The apostle’s brows knit together. The candle’s flame danced on its wick. “And was it the witches who ordered you to cast the curses? Is it their magic you conjure?”

Immanuelle didn’t answer. The truth mattered little in these interrogations.

“You are the daughter of Miriam Moore, is that so?”

“It is.”

“Miriam wandered the Darkwood as well. Did she not?”

“She did.”

Something like triumph passed through the apostle’s eyes. “And is it your mother’s god you pray to in the night? Is it her beasts you call to?”

“They weren’t her beasts. They belong to no one.”

“And yet they obey you.”

Immanuelle shook her head. “They heed no one.”

At that, the apostle smiled, as if the two of them shared some dirty secret. He drew closer, his boots scuffing across the floor, and dropped to a crouch at her side. “But Ezra heeds your every whim, doesn’t he?”