The Near Witch Read online

  “Strange as strange,” says Bo. “What do you think of it?”

  “I think I best find the boy, and fast.”

  “You can’t make something appear from nothing,” offers Bo with a shrug.

  “I have to,” says Otto, taking a long drink. “It’s my job.”

  The two men fall into silence, staring down into their cups, and I slip away. I pull the dark green cloak close around my shoulders and leave the men to their drinking, turning my attention toward the village. Edgar’s house sits in a cluster of three or four to the west, a flat rim of field between that group of homes and the next. If there’s a clue as to who took Edgar, and where, and how, then I’ll find it.

  I set out, the wind pushing me gently on.

  * * *

  In the moonlight the moor is a vast ghost of a place. Thin lines of fog leave the wild grass shimmering, and the breeze blows over the hills in slow waves. As the first cluster of homes comes into sight across the field, I wonder if the search party even bothered to look for the little boy’s footprints. They wouldn’t have been as deep as deer tracks. But there would have been something, a trace of life and movement. The ground around the house should be disturbed, should give some indication of which way Edgar went. Everyone leaves a mark.

  In fact, that’s what worries me. Everyone leaves a mark, and now a dozen bodies have been stomping through and around the house, crushing clues underfoot. I doubt I will ever be able to uncover them without the light of day, and bringing a candle or a lamp would have been too risky, especially with a night patrol. I can’t afford for Otto’s men to discover me. Even if they don’t shoot me, my own private search will be at an end, and I’ll likely find myself under house arrest. For my own safety, my own good, I scoff. Lot of good it did Edgar, tucked sleeping in his bed.

  No, here darkness must be my ally. My father used to say that the night could tell secrets just as well as the day, and I’ll have to hope he’s right.

  I make my way down the path that winds like a vein toward the heart of town, doing my best to avoid tripping on loose stones.

  A crow floats overhead like a smudge on the night sky. The houses sit closer now, small yards separating them, and I slow my pace, making sure to spread my weight out through my stride, trying to make less noise than the wind around me. Someone coughs, and a moment later a man steps forward from one of the houses, a shadow against the dim light within. I freeze on the path, fingers twining around the edges of my cloak to keep it from billowing. The man leans in his doorway, smoking a pipe, a rifle in the crook of his arm just below a yellow band. I remember my uncle’s words. Shoot on sight. I swallow hard. Another voice murmurs from inside the house, and the man glances back. In that moment, I slip from the path, darting for the darkness between two unlit cottages. Pressing myself against the wall of one, just beside a woodpile, I can see the fourth house, the farthest west. Edgar’s house.

  There is a light on inside, deep enough within that only a faint glow reaches the windows. I approach and kneel at the base of each one, letting my fingers and eyes linger on the ground beneath, searching for disturbance, for any sign of a foot or a hand landing. I reach Helena’s window (I used to be jealous that she had her own room, but it seems impossible to envy her right now) and pause as I consider knocking gently on the glass. Given that a boy just vanished from this house, this seems a very bad idea. I touch my fingers to the pane and hope that my friend is well asleep within, then continue around the house. I linger at the last window, the one I know belongs to Edgar. This would have been the one they say was found open. I crouch at the ground, squinting in the faint light.

  It’s just as I thought. The surface is a web of prints: adult shoes, boots, slippers, old steps that slide, and younger ones that stomp. A battleground for feet. Still muddy from the rains, the earth has held on to many marks, but none of them small or boyish.

  I stand up, fighting back frustration. Think, think. Maybe farther out the stomping of men will subside and give way to traces of smaller feet.

  I lean back against the house, my head resting on the wall just beside the window frame, and let my eyes follow the line of sight outward from the window. In this direction lies a field, a stretch of wild grass and heather and rocks between this cluster of homes and the next, nested like eggs in the distance. Silvery moonlight spills out over the field, and I walk into it, taking slow steps, my eyes flicking from the tall grass brushing my legs to the hill ahead. The wind picks up enough to make the weeds rustle and sway.

  A body exhales behind me.

  I spin, but no one’s there. The cluster of homes sits quietly half a field away, dark except for one or two dim lights. It might have been the wind, but it is high, and the sound was low. I resume my search when I hear it again. Someone is here, too close.

  My eyes strain to make out the deeper shadows near the cut stone cottages, under the thatch eaves where the moonlight cannot reach. I wait, frozen, holding my breath. And then I see it. Something slips across the gap between the houses, caught for a moment by the fractured moonlight. The ghostly form is gone in a blink, vanishing behind a corner.

  I sprint across the grass after the shadow, half tripping, and doing a very poor job of keeping the sound of my presence minimal as I run. I can hear my father’s scolding voice as the twigs snap beneath my feet, and my shoes kick at stones, but I’m so close. I launch into the space between the homes. I catch sight of the figure just before it turns another corner. It pauses and twists as if seeing me, then cuts between the houses, heading north toward the shadow of a hill, vast and black. If it gets there before me, I know the form will vanish, a shadow inside a shadow.

  I run, keeping my eyes leveled on it so that it does not become a part of the night.

  It’s almost there. My lungs start to burn. The figure moves over the tangled earth with sickening speed. I have always been fast, but I can’t make up the ground. The wind whistles in my ears as the figure reaches the base of the hillside and disappears.

  I’ve lost it, whatever it was.

  My legs stop churning, and my boot catches on a low stone and launches me forward into the relative darkness at the foot of the hill. The form is here somewhere, so close I feel as if my fingertips might brush it with every outward grasp as I push myself up. But my fingers meet a sharp rock jutting out from the hill, and nothing more. The wind beats in my ears with my pulse.

  And then the clouds slip in. They sweep silently across the sky and swallow the moon, and just like a candle snuffed out, the world goes dark.

  8

  The entire world vanishes.

  I freeze in my tracks to prevent tumbling into another rock, or a tree, or something worse. Fingers still pressed against the rock, I take a deep breath and wait for the clouds to move on the way they should, since the wind carried them in so quickly. But the clouds aren’t moving. The wind is blowing hard enough to whistle and whine, and yet the clouds seem impossibly frozen overhead, blotting out the moon. I wait for my eyes to adjust, but they don’t. Nothing registers.

  My heart is still racing, and it’s not only from the rush of the hunt. This is different—a twinge I haven’t felt in a long time.

  Fear.

  Fear as I realize the cluster of houses is out of sight. Everything is out of sight. And still, through it all I can feel the presence, the weight of another body nearby.

  The wind changes, twists itself from a simple breeze into something else, something more familiar. It sounds almost like a song. There are no words, but highs and lows, like music, and for a moment I think I might still be in bed, pressed between the sheets. Dreaming. But I’m not. The strange tune makes me dizzy, and I try to block it out, but the world is so dark, there’s nothing else to focus on. The music seems to grow clearer and clearer until I can almost tell which way it’s coming from. I push off the rock and turn, taking a few cautious steps away from the hill, toward where the form was, when I could still see it.

  My fingers reach for my
father’s knife, and I slip it from the sheath on my calf and hold it loosely, making my way like a blind man, knowing only that the slope is at my back. I remember running past a few low rocks, a tree, before everything went black, so my steps are wary, feeling for sharp edges. The wind keeps humming, a steady rise and fall, and I swear I know this song. A chill runs through me as I realize where I’ve heard it.

  The wind on the moors is a’singing to me

  The grass and the stone and the far-off sea

  The wind and the sound wrap around me, the rise and fall of the melody growing louder and louder in my ears, and the world begins to spin. I stop walking to keep from falling down. The hair on my neck prickles, and I stifle the urge to scream.

  Be patient with it, Lexi, my father’s voice intrudes.

  I try to calm down, try to slow my pulse, now so loud I can’t hear anything over it. Holding my breath, I wait for the wind song to form a layer, a blanket of noise. Wait for my heart to become part of that blanket instead of a pounding drum in my head. A moment after my nerves start to settle, a new noise comes from a few feet away at the bottom of the hill. A weight steps down on the grass.

  I spin back toward the sound just as the clouds abandon the moon overhead, shedding slivers of light that seem as bright as beacons after the heavy dark. The light glints off my knife, and the few scattered rocks, and the shadowed form, finally illuminating the outline of a man. I lunge, knocking him back against the slope. My free hand pins his shoulder, my knee on his chest.

  The light grazes his throat and his jaw and his cheekbones, just the way it did when I first saw him beyond my window. I am looking into the same dark eyes that refused to meet my own on the hill by the sisters’ house.

  “What are you doing here?” I ask, the hunting knife against his throat. My heart is racing and my fingers tighten around the handle, and yet he neither flinches nor makes a sound, but simply blinks.

  Slowly, the blade slides back to my side, but my knee lingers on his chest, pressing him into the grass.

  “Why are you out here?” I ask again, biting back my annoyance, both at the fact he was able to sneak up on me, and the fact that I’m silently grateful he’s here. He stares up at me appraisingly, his eyes as black as the night around us, and says nothing.

  “Answer me, Cole,” I warn, raising my blade. His jaw tenses, and he looks away.

  “It’s not safe out here. Not at night,” he says at last. His voice is clear and smooth at once, cutting through the wind in an odd way, more parallel than perpendicular. “And my name isn’t Cole.”

  “So you were following me?” I ask, pushing myself off him, trying not to let him see that I am shaking.

  “I saw you out alone.” He gets to his feet in an impossibly graceful motion, his gray cloak spilling over his shoulders. “I wanted to make sure you were all right.”

  “Why wouldn’t I be?” I ask, too quickly. I take a deep breath. “Why did you run away?”

  I wait, but he doesn’t answer, instead studying the ground with an attention that’s clearly avoidance. Finally he says, “Easier than trying to explain.”

  The last of the clouds slide away, and the moonlight illuminates the moor around us.

  “You should go back to the sisters’ house.” I look around at the hill and the cluster of cottages behind us. When he doesn’t move or speak, I turn to face him. “I mean it, Cole. If anyone sees you here…”

  “You saw me here.”

  “Yes, but I don’t think you took Edgar. Someone else might. You do realize you were in the village, by Edgar’s house, the night after he went missing. You can see how it would look.”

  “So were you.”

  “But I’m from here. And I’m a tracker. My father was too. What are you?” I wince at how harsh my voice sounds.

  “Once I realized what you were doing, I thought I could help,” he says, and it’s barely a whisper. I’m amazed I can hear it over the blustering wind.

  “How?”

  His dark eyebrows arch up. “I have good eyes. I thought I might find something. A clue or a trace.”

  “Or cover something up?” I know it sounds mean, but these are the questions my uncle will ask. The accusations he would make if he found the stranger in the western part of town tonight.

  “You know it’s not like that,” he says, and he sounds frustrated. “I haven’t done anything wrong.”

  I sigh. “I’m sorry, Cole.” I look up at the moon, amazed at how far it’s traveled across the sky. Around us, the night is growing bitter, and my head feels cloudy, tired. I’m losing time. “I’ve got to go.”

  I take a step back toward the houses, my hands still trembling faintly from the chase and the penetrating dark. Cole seems torn about what to do, his body turning one way, his head another. The moon casts enough light to make his skin glow. With his pale face, dark eyes, and sad mouth, he seems made of black and white, just like the world at night.

  I begin to walk away when he speaks up.

  “Lexi, wait,” he says, reaching out for my wrist. He seems to reconsider and pulls back, but his fingertips graze my arm. It catches me off guard. “Maybe I can help, if you’ll let me.”

  I turn back to him. “How?”

  “I told you I have good eyes. And I think I found something. It’s faint, but there. I’m sure of it.” He holds his hand out, gesturing back to the cluster of homes across the tangled grass.

  I hesitate. When I don’t answer, he adds, “Just take a look.” I nod. Cole leads me around the cluster of homes and to the west, to the field where I was when I first caught sight of the shadow. Edgar’s window stares out at us, the dim light within making it glow faintly. Cole walks with me up to the window, and I swallow as I notice that he seems to make no sound. His feet touch the ground, leaving slight prints, but there’s no crunch of leaves or drying grass beneath his shoes. My father would be impressed.

  When we’ve almost reached the house, he turns around, looking out at the field much the way I did before.

  “I already looked here,” I say, frowning.

  “I know,” he says, gesturing to the heather and the knee-high grass. “It’s faint. Do you see it?”

  I squint, trying to find the object, the clue.

  “Don’t try so hard,” he says. “Look at the big picture.” He sounds just like my father, quiet, patient. I try to relax my eyes, pull back and take in the field. I draw a small breath in.

  “See?”

  And I do. It’s subtle, and I am so attuned to details that I never would have seen it. The field. It ripples. There are no footsteps, no traces in the dirt, but the grass and heather bend ever so slightly, as if someone walked along the tops of them. As if the wind blew them over and they haven’t had enough time to straighten up. A narrow strip of the wild grass leans like a path.

  “But how?” I ask, half to myself, finding Cole’s eyes. He frowns, giving a slight shake of his head. I look back at the trace. I don’t understand it. But it’s something. The windblown path veers north. I pull away from Edgar’s house and begin to follow it out into the field.

  “Don’t,” Cole says. “You shouldn’t go alone.”

  “Why not? Because I’m a girl?”

  “No,” he says, his expression unreadable. “No one should walk out here alone.” And after the strange darkness and the dizzying wind, I half believe he’s right.

  “Then you’d better come with me,” I say, taking a few steps forward.

  He hovers behind me, rocking his weight, and for a moment it looks as if he’s not going to follow. He seems to change his mind at the last minute, though, and falls into step beside me. We follow the almost invisible path, the windblown road. It seems impossible that it could lead me to Edgar, since there are no signs of his small feet. Then again, it seems impossible that the path could be there at all.

  The moon shines down, and the moor doesn’t look nearly so frightening now. I chide myself for ever having been scared. The wind dies away, and sil
ence slips over us. Every now and then I punctuate the quiet with a question—What is it like, where you come from? What brought you to Near? Where is your family?—but he never answers. I’m growing used to his not talking, but Cole is so unnaturally silent—silent steps, silent motions—that I feel he might fade away, so I tell him about myself, hoping to perhaps coax something more than a look from him.

  “My mother is a baker,” I say. “She bakes all morning, and I deliver bread around the village. It’s why I know the shortest path to any house. It’s why I can walk the road at night. I’ve walked them all a thousand times.”

  I glance at Cole, who looks back, surprisingly interested in my rambling. I go on. “My little sister, Wren, turned five this spring. She has this garden…” I say whatever comes to mind, the words tumbling out with ease.

  The trail fades in and out ahead of us, vanishing altogether where the grass is low or the ground is bare, but always picking up again before we’ve lost it. It leads us up around the northern edge of Near, and I pause as my uncle’s house comes into sight. Cole stops beside me, following my gaze to the darkened house.

  “Near is like a circle,” I say quietly, scanning for signs of Otto’s patrol, or Otto himself. “Or a compass. My family lives at the northern edge, the sisters at the eastern one.”

  “Why do you live so far from the center?” Cole asks, and I have to bite back a smile at the fact he’s speaking again. It’s not a whisper, but it blends right in with the easy wind, soft and clear.

  “They say only hunters and witches live out this far.”

  Cole tenses almost imperceptibly beside me. “And which are you?” he asks, flashing a thin attempt at a smile. I wonder if witches are frowned on where he comes from, and almost ask, but don’t want to silence him now that he’s finally willing to speak.

  “My father was a hunter,” I say. “And a tracker. There’s less need for hunting these days, since a few families keep livestock, but our family always hunted, so we lived on the edge of town. My father’s gone now. My uncle lives just beside us, right there,” I add, pointing to his cottage, where the windows are finally dark. “He’s a butcher. And the sisters, well…” I don’t finish the sentence. It seems wrong to call Magda and Dreska witches, if they haven’t told him themselves. I don’t want to frighten him. And besides, it’s not my place. Cole seems content to let the conversation die away.