Chapter 19

CHAPTER NINETEEN

MAEVYTH

W ind bit my cheeks as I trudged along a dirt road with a basket full of figs that Lolla had requested I pick up from the village market. Prior to heading out, I’d tucked Raivox away into a moderately-sized crate of blankets, and stored him in the shed behind the Mortuary until my return. My hope was that he’d stay out of trouble, seeing as I’d be gone half the morning.

While in town, I’d visited Mrs. Chalmsley, offering the older woman, whose husband had been banished years ago, the usual bread and broth with a few berries, but saw no sign of the newly-homeless mother and her child from The Banishing.

The ominous border of The Eating Woods stood just off the road, stirring memories of The Banished Man’s haunting face. The visual, so vivid in my head, raised the hairs on my flesh, and when I clamped my eyes to switch my focus to something else, I opened them to find the ghostly image of the Lyverian girl watching me from the trees. “Stop it, stop it!” I smacked at my head, desperate for distraction.

On passing the misty meadow, where the old hovel stood alongside the woods, I noticed The Crone Witch watching me, as she tossed what I presumed to be alfalfa and grain to a black goat penned in a wooden enclosure. Humiliation warmed my cheeks, imagining what I must’ve looked like just then, swatting at myself as if I’d lost my senses.

She waved me over, and without much command from my head, my feet carried me across the open field, toward her. “You got sick,” she said, swapping one tin bucket for the next to feed her animals.

“For a bit. Fever. It passed after a few days.”

“It didn’t pass .” Chickens clustered inside the coop where she tossed cracked corn. “It became a part of you.”

“Part of me? What does that mean?”

Resting her hand atop the fence, she paused, watching them peck at the ground. “Your blood is their blood now.”

“Whose blood?” Nothing she said was making sense.

“The dead, Girl.” Huffing, she swapped the cracked corn for a bucket of water and filled a trough. “Blood given for blood taken. Can’t be undone now.” Blood taken. It was then I knew she’d seen me kill and bury the raven. “Your ties with the dead were eternal the moment you pricked yourself on the bone and sealed it with the blood.” Nabbing her cane propped against the fence, she hobbled toward a small stable, and pondering her words, I followed after her.

“What do the dead have to do with the raven?”

“They guide the soul to the after, and you share its blood now,” she explained, shoving barley straw into a netted bag. “You walk between realms of the dead and living. The world you’ve known, and the one that has remained hidden from you.”

Walking between the living and dead? What a terrible existence that would be. Not to mention, such a thing would only further cement my place as the pariah of the parish.

She was wrong. I shook my head, refusing to believe such a thing. The hallucinations I’d suffered up until that point had merely been brought on by my illness. Perhaps a lingering effect of the infection. “What you speak of is blasphemy. The governor says only the cursed speak to the dead.”

“Is it a curse, or a gift? Some believe communing with the dead is as much a blessing as a burden.”

“How could speaking with the dead possibly be a blessing?”

“It is in what they tell you. What they know of the other side.”

I chewed on those thoughts for a moment, trying to wrap my head around what The Banished Man, or Danyra, could’ve possibly tried to communicate to me. Were there secrets smuggled beyond the barrier of life? What would I have been tasked to do with such knowledge?

“And if I were … cursed. How do I rid myself of this affliction?”

“There is no ridding it. The gods chose, and you are their vessel.” She swiped up a waterskin hanging just outside one of the stalls. After swallowing a large gulp, she wiped her mouth on the back of a wrinkled hand and held it up in offering.

With a raise of my palm, I politely declined. “I didn’t ask for this. The bird was suffering. I only wanted to end its misery.”

“Then, it seems you chose, as well.” Brow quirked, she hobbled past me, and just as before, I fell into step after her. Around the other side of the shack, she led me to a garden of frost-weathered plants, their brown stems standing proud, from which she plucked the tips with her fingers. Some she pocketed, others she gathered in her palm. I recognized those as sickhash root, sometimes given to children before bed to make them sleep.

“This village … they already shun me.” I lifted the skirt of my dress, where the dried remnants of saliva marked where a passerby in a carriage had spat on me coming home from town. “Visions of the dead will only further their suspicions of me.”

“Yes. The poor little babe, left behind by her mother with a black rose laid upon her chest. The bassinet at the edge of The Eating Woods. You hardly cried that night.” She hobbled back toward me and shoved the palmed pickings into my chest.

I mindlessly accepted her gift, but my focus snapped onto her words. “You saw me there? Did you see my mother?”

“No,” she said, finally plopping down in a rocker on her porch. From beside her, she reached into a quilted bag and retrieved what looked to be a long pipe. She crushed the dried flowers from her pocket, and deposited the broken bits into the pipe’s chamber, staring off for a moment. “But I felt the pain. Hands trembling against your cold, cherubic cheeks. I tasted those salty tears left behind.”

“You were the one who found me.”

Snapping a flint striker, she lit the contents of the pipe, her cheeks caving as she drew in the smoke and let it seep from the corners of her mouth. “I could’ve left you for the beast in the woods. Perhaps I should’ve.”

“You know what lives in the woods? What eats the souls of sinners?”

She gave a mirthless chuckle and took another puff of her pipe. “I’ve seen more than that, Girl.”

The scent of the weeds reminded me of chicklebane, a spicy flower Grandfather Bronwick added to his wine that was known to relax the muscles.

“What have you seen?” I asked, intrigued by her every word.

“Why should I say? Are you foolish enough to venture into those woods yourself?”

“Not with the monster.”

“Ah, yes. The angel of judgment who punishes sins. Or is it the wrathavor? The soulless creature that feeds on the flesh of man.”

“What do you believe?”

“Man feeds its cravings, but it longs for something else. Something that lies beyond the crooked trees and ravaged bones.”

Beyond the crooked trees? “What is it? What lies there?”

“ What is it ?” she echoed. “You want to know what wicked diablerie lies beyond The Eating Woods ?” The wood creaked as she slowly rocked in her chair, holding the bowl of the pipe in her palm. “A gateway to another world. I was no more than your age when I ventured into that dark forest.”

Eyes wide, I lowered myself to one of the steps to her porch. “You breached the archway?”

“Had no choice. Winter was cold, and food was scarce.” Another puff of her pipe, and she upped the pace of her rocking. “My brother and I had chased a rabbit deep into the trees before we came upon the beast. His skin like the bark of a tree. Eyes soulless pools of black.” She stared off as if she were looking at the beast right then. “You see the dead, Girl. But have you ever stared death in the face yourself?”

Jaw slack with my absolute engrossment, I shook my head.

“As it consumed my brother, tearing the skin from his bones, I escaped. I ran until the air burned in my chest. And that’s when I saw it. That shimmering veil. Like a wall of liquid glass.” Her eyes held a spark of awe. “I dared myself to reach through.”

“Did you?” I asked, rapt with fascination, having always wondered what existed beyond those crooked trees.

“No. An inexplicable fear came over me.”

“More fearful than being consumed by the monster?”

“Yes.” The enchantment in her eyes from a moment ago faded to a troubled expression. “I fled the forest and never returned.”

“The governor said no one has ever returned from the woods.” It wasn’t that I meant to challenge her. On the contrary, I wanted to know he was wrong.

“Yes. And so he calls me The Crone Witch. He tells you that I lure children into the woods with fantastical stories, and share their flesh with the beast.” Our own governor, whose son she’d saved from death, had branded her with that horrible rumor.

“If you found yourself stood before the archway now, would you still fear it?”

“Yes. You’d do well to stay away from the forest.”

While it felt like an end to our conversation, I sat a moment longer, wanting so badly to ask her if my sister had sought her out, but I didn’t. I certainly didn’t want to be responsible for anyone having gotten a whiff of Aleysia’s pregnancy.

“Did your egg hatch?” The witch asked, the question severing my thoughts.

“Yes. A baby … bird.”

“Is it now? Rather large egg for a bird, don’t you think?”

“You’ve not seen large birds in these parts?”

“Not such that warrant an egg so large.” She drew another puff of her pipe. “And what did you do with it?”

“I let it go,” I lied. “Would’ve drawn too much attention.”

She made a grunting sound in her throat and waved her hand. “Probably better off. That wretched grandmother of yours would’ve surely destroyed it.”

I didn’t say anything to that. Agatha was wretched—on that, the witch and I agreed.

“Go on now. I’ve much to do.”

“Of course. I’m sorry to have kept you.” I gathered my basket of figs, offering her a few of them, which she accepted with a nod, and headed in the direction of home.