The sapling cage, p.12
The Sapling Cage, page 12
We weren’t going to leave the beach until the next morning. A few of the witches went back to swimming, but with none of the joy they’d had the day before. The beach itself seemed cursed by the ashes of what we’d done.
A lone figure, bent-backed and ancient, stood over those ashes, looking out over the lake. Dam Willow. I went to stand next to her. It was hard to imagine losing a friend in such a terrible way.
“Ah, the Ledston girl,” Dam Willow said. Only a hint of the sweetness in her voice remained. It was still there, though, under the sadness.
“I’m sorry about what happened,” I said.
“I’m sorry too, of course,” Dam Willow said. “It happens, when you get older, though. Everyone you know changes, or dies, or changes and then dies, or dies and then changes. That’s the way of it.”
She turned to look at me. I wanted to look away from her odd goat’s eyes, but I made myself meet her gaze.
“You’re different than the other whelps,” she said. “I watched you, I’ve watched all of you. You’re different.”
“Oh?” I said, trying not to let worry show on my face.
“More feminine, somehow,” Dam Willow said. “I can’t quite put my finger on it.”
Relief and warmth both flowed through me.
“I was never like that. Never feminine. Dam Heavens, though. She was. You remind me of her.” She took a sharp breath in, whistling by accident. “Like how she used to be. How I’d like to remember her. Before, you know.”
“Oh,” I said. I didn’t have words.
“But I’ve said too much, when I meant to stand here and mourn in silence. Mourn Dam Heavens, mourn Dam Fia, mourn my long-lost youth. Mourn how we age, dependent on the whims of something so chaotic as ley.”
She turned away from me and looked out over the lake.
“Can you blame her?” she asked. “Always running, always chasing after wisps and strands of power. It’s exhausting.”
“She killed Dam Fia,” I said.
“Aye. That she did. That she ought not have done. I don’t blame us for burning her for it, either. It’s just … it’s just nothing. I’m an old woman, and I’m tired. And I appreciate a girl like you hearing me out.”
“Of course.”
“Go play. Go be young, go be alive.”
I walked away, my head swimming. I didn’t know what to make of her. I started to feel a cold coming on, probably from lack of sleep. I decided to make my way up one of the creeks that fed the lake, to find a place to be alone and bathe.
Despite the thick canopy, there was one spot with direct sun. Birds sang their songs in the trees. I scanned the bushes around me, then took off my dress and walked naked out into the water to wash. Best way to fight a cold is to stay clean, my mom said. My dads said the opposite. I was my mother’s child.
I lay on my back in the sunshine, floating on the water, my peace only interrupted by my occasional sneezing. Sure, being around the witches was scary, but everything worth doing was scary. Being alive was scary. It was still better than the alternative. I was glad I wasn’t Dam Fia, or Dam Heavens. Or even Dam Willow, for all her power.
I scrubbed at my scalp with my nails—which I’d grown long now that I didn’t have to pretend I didn’t like girl stuff—and rinsed off almost a week’s sweat and grime. My skin was goosebumped from the water, yet the sun was burning hot, and the contrast was wonderful.
Something rustled in the bushes beside the creek and I shot upright. A face. Someone was watching.
I sank to my knees, hiding myself below the water, but I heard a gasp and it was clearly too late. I stood up and ran out of the water. Hex stood up and ran off.
She’d seen me. She would tell.
I had one chance, only one chance. Teeth thrashing, claws grasping, I had to scare her into silence. I threw on my dress and ran after Hex.
She had run upstream, away from camp, and I followed her as quietly and quickly as I could. Her footfalls soon grew too faint to hear over the burble of the creek, and after less than a minute I was sure I’d lost her.
I stood in the thick of the forest, in a spot where the trees were younger and denser. Which meant that someone had cut down this piece of forest at some point, most likely. Which meant loggers, or maybe homesteaders. I set off further into the young forest, and sure enough, I passed the stump of an ancient tree. From there, I found a deer path. From there, I found the decrepit remains of a hunter’s cabin.
It had been abandoned longer than I’d been alive, maybe longer than my mother had been alive. The roof had long since collapsed, the forest doing its best to reclaim it. Still, the stone foundation came up to my knees, and the stone chimney thrust high overhead among the tops of the young pines.
Three small figures in black leaned against that chimney. One of them was chewing on a stalk of grass, another was tossing pebbles at a tree.
They didn’t notice I was there, and I ducked behind a rotten log and peered out from around it.
Hex, Daidi, Araneigh.
Hex would tell. If she hadn’t yet, I could run over and interrupt her. If she’d already told, then I was sunk.
I listened.
They weren’t talking about me.
“You’ll never make it that far,” Daidi said.
“Maybe you will,” Araneigh said.
“No, she won’t.”
“Even if I get home, you know what they do to witches?” Hex asked. “And I bet that includes whelps. They tie a stone to your feet and row you out to sea and throw you overboard and that’s it. I’ve seen it happen with my own eyes three times. Two of those three probably weren’t even witches, so what are the odds anyone’s gonna believe I’m not one?”
She was going to run away.
I’d been stuck in my own head, thinking about my own problems. I’d been so busy thinking of Hex like she was one of the seventeen Lords of the Nether that I hadn’t thought about how miserable she was. How she’d been, in essence, sold to the Order.
“Join up with some brigands,” Daidi said.
“Opposite problem. Those honorless lumps would just drag me right back here so that the Order will love them.”
She could join the Ilthurians, though.
I sneezed.
Araneigh pulled a hunter’s axe from under her cloak and approached warily, while Daidi scanned the woods and Hex looked down at her feet like she’d been caught doing something wrong.
“It’s me,” I said, standing. “Lorel.”
“Oh Great Mother, you scared us half to death,” Araneigh said. She hooked her axe back through its loop on her belt. “How much of that did you hear?”
“You could join the Ilthurians,” I said. “Ilthura Espen, he’s probably still in Set Porlock. He’d take you.”
“That …” Hex said, scrunching up her face as she thought it over, “that might work.”
“I’ll help,” I said. “You’ll need help.”
“Anything to get rid of a girl you know is better than you?” Daidi asked. If she’d been a boy from my village, she would have snarled when she said it. Instead, she smiled too sweetly at me. “We don’t need your help.”
“Oh, no, she’s coming with us,” Hex said. She didn’t need to put the emphasis on she. Her point came across anyhow. “If she doesn’t want me to tell anyone her secret, she’ll help, and she won’t have a chance to rat me out. We’ll leave tonight.”
All my sympathy for Hex was gone like it had never been there.
I took a deep breath, trying to look dramatic, but instead I sneezed again.
“Yeah,” I said, wiping my nose on my bare arm. “I told you I’d help. I’ll help.”
ELEVEN
“So how’d you do it?” Hex asked. She’d cornered me as I walked back to camp from the woods, where I had walked far off the path to use the bathroom after dinner. We talked in hushed tones at the edge of camp. “Did you kill a little girl, pretend to be her?”
“I traded places with my friend.”
“Why?” she asked. “Don’t answer that. I know why. Because it’s easy for you to want to be a witch, because for you it’s a choice. I mean, it’s not a choice you were supposed to get, since you’re a boy.”
“I hate being a boy. I wasn’t supposed to be a boy.”
“I hate being a witch. I wasn’t supposed to be a witch.”
“At least you have a plan to get out of being a witch,” I said.
“I always thought you had been sold like a basket of apples and grew up to like it. That’s why I hated you. But I can’t hate you now. You’re too stupid to hate.”
I flinched a little at her words. She still had the power to sting me.
“Why d’you only hate me, not any of the others?”
Thunder cracked in the distance and the wind picked up. The sky had been clear and blue only an hour before.
“I don’t know,” Hex said. “The first time I pushed you in the water, I was just mad at you. And when I knocked you down at Araneigh’s house. But then you embarrassed me, over and over again. You tied me to the bed. And you’re always trying to make me look stupid in front of Araneigh.”
“I am not,” I said.
She glared at me.
“Okay. I was.”
“Look, I’m not trying to say I’m sorry,” Hex said, “because I’m not sorry—”
“I’m not sorry either,” I cut in.
“We both got a bad deal. After you help me get out of this, I won’t tell anyone, and you can stay a witch long enough to learn how to curse yourself with womanhood or whatever your plan is.”
“You can curse yourself with womanhood?”
“For the love of …” Hex yelped, but then she saw Dam Ghin passing by and lowered her voice. “Have you given this no thought at all?”
Even after months with the witches, I still hadn’t really figured out what was possible. I just knew I wanted to be a witch, and a girl.
We stared at one another for an uncomfortable length of time. Two enemies joined by common—or comparable—purpose. I didn’t trust that she wouldn’t betray me, and she probably didn’t trust me either.
The rain came suddenly, with only a few seconds of drizzle before it poured. We gave up trying to stare one another down and ran for the safety of the kitchen tarp.
A few of the apprentices sang to the ivy that crept up nearby trees, and soon it grew and wove a roof over our heads and walls down the sides. We stayed dry and warm underneath while the storm raged.
I helped in the kitchen, for lack of anything else to do. Dam Willow had gone home, and the witches who were cooking barely spared a word for me. Dinner was stew. Always stew. No bread, either, because there was no oven and we rarely had any flour.
At dinner that night, Daidi was cordial with me, and thanked me for helping make the stew, but it was obvious from the tone in her voice and the softness in her eyes that she wasn’t excited to lose her best friend. Her only friend.
I knew I should have promised her, right then and there, that I’d be her friend once Hex was gone. But I didn’t want to. I wasn’t going to.
Hex bit at her nails and left her hair unbraided. She had talked back to Dam Ghin during lessons, which none of us ever did. The stress of knowing she was going to leave was clearly tearing her apart.
That night, those of us involved in the plan went to bed fully dressed, just with our boots off. In the middle of the night, the witches rose from their bedrolls all at once and, still in their nightclothes, walked out into the storm in a single-file line. Off to do whatever it was witches got up to in the middle of the night, perhaps some ritual.
I threw off my blanket and sat up. Daidi, Araneigh, Hex, and I looked at each other. We put our boots back on and donned our cloaks.
“Where are you going?” Henomi asked, rubbing her eyes.
“Nowhere,” I lied, entirely too obviously.
“Goodbye, Henomi,” Hex said.
“Goodnight, Hex,” Henomi replied. Perhaps she’d misheard her, or been too sleepy to understand.
The four of us followed the swollen creek to the road, sometimes wading through ankle-deep muck in the process. Between the trees and the clouds, not the slightest glimmer of moonlight reached us. Hex, warm in her sea-wool cloak, walked at the front of our group with a lantern while the rest of us picked our way over roots and rock as best we could.
After ten minutes, we reached the road. The ancient king’s roads were well built, if oddly placed, and our lantern light glinted off the road’s thick paving stones which stood above the flood.
“Hold.”
The word came from above us, from the trees, startling us. Daidi jumped.
A figure in black swung down from a nearby branch to stand on the cobbles, a battle-axe held loosely at her side. Even with her face hidden in the depths of her hood, I recognized Dam Lament.
“What are you doing?” Lament asked.
Hex stepped forward, keeping Lament’s attention—and ire—firmly on herself. “As we please,” she said.
Dam Lament laughed. “What is it you please to do?”
“I’m leaving,” Hex said. “I don’t want to be a witch, so I won’t be one. Even if you throw me in the creek and drown me, I won’t be a witch.”
Dam Lament said nothing to that. The rain kept up its steady rhythm as it fell from the leaves and needles above us.
“Well?” Hex demanded.
“Well what?”
“Are you going to let us pass?”
Dam Lament sighed. “Some sisters would have your hide for leaving, or even talking to one of us like that. Have your hide literally. Make a cloak out of you. Not most of us, but some. I don’t know what I’m going to do with you. I suppose you think you’re off to Set Porlock? Off to what, join the brigands? Maybe the Ilthurians? All of you?”
“Just me,” Hex said, looking back over her shoulder to indicate the basket she carried.
“And you dragged the rest of these whelps along?”
“We weren’t going to let her travel the woods alone,” I said. I stepped forward and stood next to Hex.
Daidi and Araneigh stepped forward too.
For the first time, I saw Dam Lament’s face. For all the good it did me: her face was as emotionally expressive as a sword.
“One day, the lot of you will be witches,” Dam Lament said. “If you live that long. The fate of the Order is your fate too. And it looks like you’ve made up your mind about what’s best.”
“So you’ll let us go?” Hex asked.
“I’m not going to stop you.”
Hex started crying, all at once, with relief. Daidi put her arm around Hex, and Hex buried her head on Daidi’s shoulder.
“The roads aren’t safe,” Dam Lament said. “I’ve been keeping watch, and there are brigands. They’re likely trying to find our camp. I have a hard time imagining what they think they could do if they succeeded, but I don’t have a hard time imagining what they could do to a small group like you.”
“Come with us then,” I said. “Keep us safe.”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because I think you should go back to camp. I think Hex is too young to know what she wants. I think she should stay and make up her mind after she comes of age.”
“We’ll be okay,” Daidi said. “We’ve been practicing together. We know how to defend ourselves.”
“I’m not going to argue with you,” Dam Lament said. She jumped up, caught the branch, and pulled herself back into the tree, never letting go of the axe. It must have been hell on her to have been wounded so long. And as skilled a warrior as she was, she must have a good sense of what did and didn’t count as danger.
The only thing worse than dealing with Dam Lament’s disappointment was dealing with her indifference.
Hex started off down the road, picking up a large branch as a cudgel. I found one too. I didn’t share Daidi’s faith in our abilities to fend off brigands, but it still felt better to have that weight of wood in my hands.
We didn’t go far along the road before we passed a patch of blight. It was easy to see in the dark and the rain because the ice-cold trees turned everything to mist around them.
The blight kept going and going, and the fog got denser. We walked maybe ten minutes in that white darkness, my ears at attention for every little noise of the forest. Once, I jumped at my own shadow as I rounded a bend and caught up with the lantern.
I didn’t hear the brigands though, not until it was too late.
“Well, little girls,” someone said.
I jumped again, my heart rising into my throat. This time, the voice came from the fog to our right. We stopped, most of us. Araneigh darted into the dark of the forest to our left.
Five people stepped out onto the road and into the light. The largest wore a boar skull as a necklace—the man from the tavern. The man who had plenty of reason to dislike witches.
“One step closer and we’ll turn you back into a pig,” I said.
The lead brigand flinched, and his friends laughed at his moment of weakness. Why would anyone want friends who laugh at your weakness?
“I don’t think so,” the man said. “I don’t think you can. I think you’re children, lost in the woods. We’ll take good care of you. We’ll even bring you back home, once the Order pays us a good ransom.”
Hex stepped forward, hefted her club, and swung all in one motion like we’d practiced. The man stepped back and Hex only managed to crack the boar skull.
We were outmatched in every way—numbers, size, training, equipment.
Teeth thrashing, claws grasping.
I stepped to the closest brigand, a woman with gray hair and gray clothes, and thrust the end of the club at her face. It was a move I’d trained in practice: thrust at her face, then swing while she flinched.
The brigand didn’t flinch, though.
She just moved her head a few inches back, out of my range. The flat of her axe struck my jaw and I fell to the ground. It was over before it began. I don’t know that one of us landed a single blow.
