The sapling cage, p.20
The Sapling Cage, page 20
“Exactly,” Hex agreed.
“So what about the knights?” I asked. “I mean, the other knights. They’re after us because they think we’re blighters, so they shouldn’t be helping her.”
“She’s stirring everyone up, turning them against anyone who might stop her or the blight,” the older woman said. “Witches, Ilthurians, brigands, the merchant houses, everyone. She’s blaming the blight on witches, of course.”
“We’ve got to stop her,” I said.
“That’s why we’re here,” she agreed. “To convince the Order of the Vine to join us.”
“That shouldn’t take long,” I said.
Somewhere at another table, a crowd of gamblers cheered at something that happened in their game.
The older Ilthurian knight smiled. “Wish I had your confidence.”
TWENTY-ONE
I was wrong, of course. It turns out witches could be a rather stubborn lot, and there was no high crone or someone like that to appeal to.
Witches made decisions by discussion in an open council. In Summerhome, the council met at an amphitheater near the center of town. That first afternoon after our arrival, most of the Order was present. The oldest crones sat closest to the stage in wicker chairs, while the youngest, including apprentices and whelps, perched on stone benches at the outer rim.
Some of the crones were truly monstrous—Ilma’s feathers and claws were far from the strangest transformations. One woman had goat legs, horns, and bat wings. Another was a giant, at least nine feet tall and nearly as wide across the belly and shoulders. A third seemed literally to be made only of skin and bones, a walking skeleton. These were the creatures out of myths and folklore, the kinds of witches mothers tell their children about to scare them into obedience.
I could only imagine what their lives must be like, hunted as freaks and nightmares. They’d taken great risks to leave their homes and join the Order here at Summerhome.
The elder Ilthurian knight from the tavern stood on the stage, with witches on either side of her. Regal in her tabard, her gray hair now braided in rows close to her scalp in the manner of warriors. A sword rested easy on her hip, and the dull steel of chainmail peeked out from under her clothes.
Dam Alectoria introduced the knight as Ilthura Natal, then let her speak. Natal told the crowd what she’d told us before. Duchess Helte had made common cause with the blighters, and she was behind the attacks by the tax knights. She said Ilthurian spies had reported that the other knightly orders were joining in as well. Under the guise of attacking blighters, these knights were attacking all of Helte’s enemies.
Then she told us more.
She told us how the Duchess’s knights had rooted out Ilthurian safehouses in three cities, killing not only the knights but their supporters as well. In Port Cek, the safehouse had doubled as a school for street children, all of whom were slaughtered. She ended her speech on that grim note and was escorted from the stage and out of the amphitheater. She wasn’t invited to remain for the deliberation.
“Dark times and woeful words,” the giantess said, her voice like thunder rolling across the plains. “Every five years, every ten years. Dark times and woeful words. All of this, the Order has survived. We will survive again.”
“You can no more destroy the Order with swords and fire than you can destroy a flock of starlings with an arrow,” the skeletal witch said.
“Go to ground, I say,” a third crone agreed.
I could barely believe what I was hearing.
I wasn’t alone in that, at least. From the middle ranks—from the witches only as old as humans might normally be—loud mumbling clearly signaled dissent. Finally, Dam Alectoria spoke.
“The politics of the Duchess are one thing,” she said. “It’s true there was an Order before the kingdom broke apart, and there might be an Order if the kingdom returns. But the colddead blight is spreading, and that we can’t ignore. Without ley, there is no Order.”
“You met this new magic with fire and spear,” the giantess said. “Your covenant alone. We might meet them with words. We might seek balance, seek compromise.”
“There is no compromise with the destruction of the Great Mother!” Dam Alectoria shouted.
And so it went. For an hour or more, I watched witches argue. Half the time, I was convinced that the witches’ leaderless ways were going to doom us all—if Alectoria had been in charge, it would have been sorted out easily enough. Then I remembered if there were a leader who was not Alectoria, if the skeletal witch had been in charge, for example, things might have gone a lot worse.
These witches were used to arguing, but they did it in a way I’d never seen before. They actually listened to one another. The giantess came around, for example, and ended up arguing in favor of fighting blighters and offering limited support to the Ilthurian cause. The devil—I don’t know what else to call the woman with goat legs and bat wings—fully supported mobilizing for war and killing Helte.
The only consensus that was reached, after hours of debate, was that blighters were enemies of the Order and that the entire Order ought to support the vendetta declared by our covenant against them. Dam Lament’s recounting of Dam Ghin’s death at the hands of the blighters finally won people over on that point.
Still, no plans were made. Nothing concrete was determined. We’d be at Summerhome for a while as they hashed out plans.
On our way back to the coven’s house, we met a merchant walking up the road with a heavy sack over one shoulder.
“Mail for the witches,” he said from behind a thick white mustache.
He opened the sack. Dam Ilma reached in with her claws and pulled out four envelopes immediately—more magic. One for Dam Rose, two for Dam Ilma, and one for me.
“Thank you,” Dam Ilma said, handing the man a coin.
With a quiet nod of his head, he kept walking.
“Never any mail for me,” Araneigh complained as we walked in the front door of our decrepit mansion. Most of the time, I envied her strange and magical upbringing. Just then, though, I was glad I had family.
“You miss your father?” Dam Sorrel asked.
“No,” Araneigh said. Then she answered honestly: “Yes.”
“Write him sometime,” she said. “I’m sure he’d be happy to hear from you.”
“Maybe.” Araneigh left the conversation by walking over to the harpsichord. Soon she had its cover off and was trying to tune it by ear.
I sat down on a stone bench nearby.
The letter was from Lane, that was obvious. It bore the Tower Knights’ gray seal.
Lorel of the Vine,
It’s … it’s a bad time to be caught writing to a witch. You might not hear from me for a while, and I’m sorry for that. You probably shouldn’t write me back, either.
I miss you, you’re wonderful. I’m worried. I’m worried something awful. The knights … there’s bad talk going on. Real bad talk.
I figure you’re in Blackcliff, I listen in when the knights talk about you all. They’re planning something. Not us Tower Knights, but Sir Hamal can’t keep us neutral forever. The blight’s spreading, and people are hungry, and the Duchess is promising to end all that and bring food to everyone and says that it’s you witches in the way.
I don’t believe it. Sir Hamal doesn’t believe it.
But … Lorel. I think you should run. Get away from the witches. Get out of Blackcliff. They’re coming for you. All the brotherhoods, all of them but ours.
If you run to Oldking, a lot of us Tower Knights hang out at a tavern called Dead City at the docks. If you don’t run to Oldking, just run somewhere.
Run.
I swear I say this with love,
Lane of the Lead and the Tower
I showed the letter to Dam Alectoria. I didn’t know what else to do. I wasn’t afraid, not really. I knew I should have been. Instead, I was excited. A new kind of excitement, a guilty kind of excitement.
“You going to do it?” Alectoria asked. “You going to run?”
“Of course not,” I said. “I just … if all the knights are planning to attack us here, shouldn’t we all run?”
“Maybe,” Alectoria said. “Maybe.” She looked thoughtful, but that was all she said of it.
Nearly all the witches ate dinner together that night, sitting with our covens in the grand hall of a ramshackle old hotel. Eating inside, at a table, felt like a strange and unnecessary formality after so long eating under the open sky. But the food was wonderful, and more varied than I’d had in ages: fresh venison, roasted root vegetables, and a thick porridge sweetened with honey. Next chance I had, I would find the cooks and volunteer.
After dinner, we marched in a silent procession to the lake. An unevenly maintained boardwalk surrounded the entire thing, and we tromped along it until the Order lined the entire shore.
Though Araneigh and I and the other whelps were invited to witness what came next, no one explained it. One crone, whom I’d never seen before, walked out onto the lake, dropping petals as she went. Standing on the surface of the water in the center of the lake, she sang.
I couldn’t tell if her words were magic or not. It sounded less like witch song and more like the opera I’d heard in Port Cek. I saw ley run up her body in tendrils, up her legs and into her mouth, but we never entered the red realm of witchlight. She just sang, in some language I’d never heard.
Her song began in the gloaming and finished in the black of night, lit only by the full moon above her. I was mesmerized the entire time. It was so soulful, so mournful. When at last she ended, she glowed with lavender ley like a human torch.
She strode back out to the edge of the lake and walked a sunwise circle. She clasped hands with each of us, even the whelps. When I felt her skin—dry like old paper, yet familiar and comfortable—some of the ley flowed over me and sank into my skin. I didn’t feel it as anything, but I saw it.
It took her a long time to complete the full circle, and I got antsy. There were more than a hundred covens, most with at least ten witches. Magic was always interesting, but it was more interesting when I knew what was happening. I looked over—Araneigh was bored too.
We caught one another’s eyes, and I reached out my hand. She took it. I wasn’t bored anymore, as simple as that. We intertwined our fingers and held tight. The moon and the stars could have gone out, and the Lords of the Nether could have ridden to battle against the Great Mother, and everything could have been consumed by darkness. I wouldn’t have cared.
After the ritual, Araneigh and I started back to the coven’s mansion. When we stood in front of the door, I didn’t feel ready to go in. It might have been the ley, it might have been Araneigh, it might have just been the end of an overwhelming day.
“Do you want to go explore?” I asked.
Araneigh looked sleepy, but she smiled nonetheless.
Lanterns and cauldron fires and the cold light of magical flame dotted the landscape down by the lake—one fire seemed to be on the surface of the lake itself—so I led us up, away from it all. The city was protected from the outside world by the rim of the volcano, but it didn’t take long to find a set of stairs that climbed that natural wall.
It took longer to get up it. Even conditioned by months of walking, I was out of breath by the time we reached the top.
It was worth it, though. A walkway ran a few hundred yards in each direction at the top. Probably where guards had kept their posts in centuries past.
We could see the whole of Summerhome, as well as miles and miles of moonlit fields and roads and towns surrounding us. The height bothered me, a little, but I felt more secure with Araneigh next to me.
“Sometimes I miss my forest,” Araneigh said. “Then I see things like this and I’m glad I left.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“I wish all this world-ending bad-hunt colddead knights and Duchess nonsense wasn’t happening,” she said. “Not just because it’s hard and it’s scary, but because it would be nice to just … to just live the life I thought I was going to have. To just learn witchcraft and get to know you and the other girls—I guess I shouldn’t say it that way, ‘other girls,’ since you’re not a—”
“I don’t mind if you call me a girl,” I said. “I prefer it.”
She smiled. “Get to know you and the other girls and just … learn to take care of each other and the forests and not be constantly about to die.”
“I wish that too,” I said. But I wasn’t as certain. For some reason, the sense of urgency kept me feeling alive. And it kept my mind off my own troubles.
“What’re you going to do, about, you know …” Araneigh asked. “About not getting caught? I keep thinking about that, I keep worrying about you. Learn disguise magic, maybe?”
“There’s a ritual,” I said. “It turns out I’m not the first boy who’s done this. Who’d rather be a girl, who’s joined the witches.”
“A ritual to turn you into a woman?”
“Yeah,” I said. I told her what I knew.
“Oh no,” she said, concern in her voice. That wasn’t what I expected her to say. “But I … but if you transform yourself … there’s nothing wrong with the way you are now.”
It dawned on me all at once.
“You’re only attracted to boys,” I said. I tried to keep the accusation out of my voice. We hadn’t even discussed the fact that she’d kissed me, that we were flirting, any of that, and here I was challenging it.
She turned away from me and looked back out over the landscape below.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I mean, yes. But then I got to know you, when I thought you were a girl, and I started to think maybe I liked you. Then I figured out you were a boy and it all made sense, why I liked you, and here we are.”
“It doesn’t matter anyway,” I said. “Only two people in this world know the ritual. Dam Catkin and Dam Willow. And with the world in the middle of ending, I don’t know when I’d be able to do it, even if I knew how. I don’t know if I want it, either.”
“You don’t?”
“I know I should want it. I know it would make everything easier. Well, it would make some things easier. I know it would be easier to be accepted as a woman, absolutely. But … is that reason enough to change my body? So that people believe me when I say that I feel like I’m a woman? So that I’m allowed to be a witch?”
“You don’t need it,” Araneigh said, reaching out to me.
She liked me the way that I was, but maybe not the way that I might become. I wanted to bat her hand away and storm off. But I didn’t have the heart to. So I let her hand rest on my shoulder, and I resented it, and I resented her.
The landscape was beautiful, though.
We slept in the tower room, in separate beds, and the distance between us had never been greater. Not like we were fighting. Just that we, well, we didn’t know. I woke before her on purpose and dressed. Even though she already knew my secret, even though she was asleep, I turned away from her as I got dressed. Maybe I was embarrassed, maybe shy. I didn’t really know. I just still didn’t want anyone to see me, especially not her.
I went down to the main hall. No one was around, and it was cold and lightless, so I stepped out onto the stone street outside and stood in the sun. I watched patterns of ley float through the air, subtle and shifting.
Araneigh joined me soon after. She must have heard me get up. She watched the ley with me, and somehow, even without talking, I felt the distance between us fading just a little.
Not long after, Henomi came running up the street, breathless.
“They came and took them,” she said. “Witches, ten of them. Came into our room and searched everything, every corner. Dumped out our baskets, everything. Then they took them.”
“Took who?” I asked.
“Haim and Daidi,” Henomi said. “They came and took Haim and Daidi. I didn’t recognize the witches who did it. They weren’t from our covenant.”
“Where?” I asked. “Where did they take them?!”
“Don’t know,” Henomi said.
“We’re going to go find out,” I said.
I didn’t even turn around to see if they would follow me. I started down the street.
I turned the first corner and stopped just in time to avoid running into Dam Lament and Dam Rose.
“What’s going on?!” I shouted.
A shadow caught my eye and I turned around. Araneigh and Henomi stood immediately next to me.
“Haim and Daidi have been accused of blight magic,” Lament said.
“This is garbage,” I said. “Where are they? We can’t let the witches have them.”
“This is serious, Lorel,” Lament said.
“What, are they going to kill them or something?” I didn’t even think it was possible as I said it, but the look in Lament’s eyes told me it was worse than I’d realized.
“Where are they?” I repeated.
“During the ritual, last night, the singer poured ley into all of us. But with Haim and Daidi, the ley wouldn’t take. The crones say it skimmed off their skin like oil on water. And … that’s the same test we gave to Dam Heavens. When you work blight, it burns you. Keeps the ley from touching you.”
“That was the point of the ritual?” I asked. “To figure out who was impure?”
“Calm down,” Lament said. She didn’t say it kindly.
“Daidi and Haim, they did it for us,” Araneigh said. “They healed us.”
“Healed who?” Rose asked.
“Me,” Araneigh said. “The white wyrm almost killed me.”
“And me,” Henomi said. “I was bleeding something bad.”
“That it?” Lament asked.
I took a deep breath. “And me. I fell. I was broken. They healed me.”
“Don’t tell anyone,” Dam Lament said. She met each of our gazes in turn. “You didn’t tell us, and you’ll never tell anyone else.”
“What’s going to happen to them?” Henomi asked.
“Nothing,” I said. “Nothing’s going to happen to them, because we’re not going to let anything happen to them.”
