The Year of the Witching

by Alexis Henderson

  “This is it,” said Ezra with a wave of his hand. “The Prophet’s library.”

  “It’s huge.”

  “I suppose it is,” said Ezra, as though he hadn’t considered it that way before. And perhaps he hadn’t. After all, the grandeur of the Haven was all he had ever known. He motioned for Immanuelle to follow him through the shelves to the stairway that twisted down from the organ deck. Gathering her skirts, Immanuelle climbed after him, and Ezra, ever the gentleman, offered her his hand.

  “This is the restricted section,” he said as they ascended. “All texts relating to the dark craft are kept here. If you’re seeking information about the plagues, this is where you’ll find it.”

  Immanuelle risked a glance down to the ground floor, far below. The drop was so far it was almost dizzying. “I don’t think I’ve ever been this high up.”

  “One day I’ll have to take you up to the cathedral’s bell tower. That view is far better than this one.” Ezra scaled the last of the stairs, stopped in front of the gate, and unlocked it with a small rusty key he produced from his pocket. He held it open for her and ushered her through with a pass of his hand.

  Immanuelle stepped past him onto the overhang. It was larger than she’d expected, but most of the floor space was taken up by a series of nine tall shelves that stretched from the stairs to the far wall. Almost all the books housed there were chained to the shelves they sat on.

  Ezra immediately began to comb through the collection. Clouds of dust, as thick as smoke, bloomed in the air as he slid books off the shelves, their rusty chains rattling.

  “Do you often come up here to read?” Immanuelle asked, trailing after him down the aisles.

  “No,” said Ezra. “The last time I was up here, I was nine years old. I didn’t have my dagger then, so I scaled the gate to get in. Broke my elbow when I landed on the other side, but I still managed to flip through a few books before I was found.”

  “Were they worth the pain?”

  Ezra smiled ruefully and shook his head. “No, but the expression on my father’s face when he realized I’d managed to successfully break into one of the most restricted places in all of Bethel certainly was.”

  Immanuelle tried to hide her smile by turning to the bookcase nearest her. Many of the books shelved there were so old, Immanuelle feared they might collapse into a pile of dust if she touched them. Some were little more than a few sheets of crumbling paper strung together with bits of twine. Others were just journals like her mother’s, penned by prophets of the past.

  It was these collections that Immanuelle and Ezra began to sort through, searching for references to the plagues. It was slow and at times painstaking work, but Immanuelle found she didn’t mind it. At first, it was rather exhilarating, to read the words of men who’d died so long ago. But her enthusiasm waned when she realized the immensity of the task that lay before her. There were hundreds of books in the overhang alone, and thousands more below. It would take years to sort through them all.

  For hours they combed through the collection, with little to show for it, and Immanuelle was close to giving up on her search when she spotted a lone book on an empty shelf in the far corner of the organ deck. Cradling the tome in her arms, Immanuelle scraped a frosting of dust away with a pass of her fingers and flipped open the cover. The title page read: The Unholy Four: A Compendium and was dated the Year of the Harrow. There was no author cited.

  What followed was a history of the witches and their crimes—from the dawn of the coven’s rebellion to their defeat at the hands of David Ford seven years later. At first, Immanuelle assumed the book was limited to the events of the Holy War, but as she flipped through its pages she realized it delved deep into the practice of witchcraft and the heathen power Lilith’s coven wielded against the Bethelan armies. Among these accounts one practice, specifically, caught Immanuelle’s eye—the feeding of the Mother.

  It described, in broad terms, a ritualistic offering that took place in a lake at the heart of the woods, known only as the Mother’s Belly. While the book had many redactions—pages that were ripped out or painted with black ink to block the words—Immanuelle was able to gather the gist of the practice. The book claimed that those who made blood offerings to the Mother in this unholy place were often rewarded with dark power.

  According to the account, there were rumors that Lilith and her ilk made sacrifices at the Mother’s Belly in order to win power and favor. There were reports of witches who cut their wrists in the middle of the lake, let their blood flow into the water to sate the Mother’s hunger. Some claimed that Lilith tossed the severed heads of crusader war captives into the water’s depths. One passage described witches who squatted in the shallows with their skirts raised to their knees, allowing their monthly bleed to flow into the water. The book also noted that in the wake of the war—when Lilith and her coven were defeated—David Ford and his army of crusaders executed witches in the pond, drowning them for their sins against the Church.

  The following passage noted that all these offerings were preceded by a kind of prayer or call that the Darkwood hearkened to. The witches sang an incantation that sounded like the hiss and hush of wind in the forest’s trees. Others waded into the depths of the pond, whispering their most earnest wishes to the wood as they went. But it was apparent to Immanuelle that the Darkwood demanded a prayer before an offering was made, and she got the impression that it was not so much what one said but rather the act of saying it that mattered most. Bleeding wasn’t enough. The Darkwood wanted the souls that came seeking its power to beg for it first.

  Below these gruesome accounts was a detailed illustration of a pond in the middle of the woods. Immanuelle’s hands began to shake violently, trembling across the page. It was a near-perfect rendering of the pond where she’d first encountered Lilith and Delilah. Every detail of that drawing aligned with her memory.

  This was all the confirmation that Immanuelle needed. That pond, where she’d first encountered Lilith, was the Dark Mother’s altar, and Immanuelle’s first blood was the sacrifice. It was plain to her that if she wanted to end the plague, she would have to return to that pond and make a second offering to reverse the first.

  But there was a problem with her plan: Immanuelle had not the slightest idea how to get back to the pond. The forest was vast and disorienting. It would take her days, if not weeks, to locate the pond, if she was able to locate it at all.

  Immanuelle closed the book, scrambled to her feet, and went to Ezra. “I need to see a map of Bethel. Can you find one for me?”

  Ezra raised an eyebrow, but to Immanuelle’s immense relief, he didn’t question her. He just nodded toward the stairway as if to say, After you. Upon descending, he disappeared down a long aisle of bookshelves. After a few long moments, he returned with a massive tome, its front cover about as wide as Immanuelle’s shoulders were broad.

  “This way.” He nodded toward the front of the chapel. Immanuelle followed him to a cracked stone slab with a single wooden chair pulled up to it. It took her a moment to realize it was an altar, where the first of the faith must have made their sacrifices.

  Behind it was a stained-glass window that stretched from the cathedral floor to its vaulted ceiling some twenty feet overhead. On the left-hand side of the pane were depictions of holy crusaders on horseback, surging across the plains, their swords blazing with the Father’s fire. And upon closer inspection, Immanuelle saw His face in the great eye of the sun, watching as His children charged into battle.

  On the opposite side of the pane was a maelstrom of the hells, a legion of beasts and witches fleeing the Father’s flames. Looming above her spawn in a veil of night was the Dark Mother. She wore the moon as a crown, and she was weeping tears of blood.

  An iron plaque beneath the window read: The Holy War.

  “It’s something, isn’t it?” said Ezra, staring up at the panes of stained glass
, his cheeks washed red by the sunlight casting in through the fire’s flames. “An entire legion turned to ash, all on a whim.”

  Immanuelle stared at him, stunned quiet. His words came close to outright blasphemy, a sin that might provoke a public lashing if Ezra were anything less than the Prophet’s successor. Her gaze tracked to the left corner of the window, where a small, dark-skinned boy cowered as the Father’s flames devoured a woman that might have been his mother.

  “But it wasn’t a whim,” she said at last, finding her voice. “The crusaders called upon the Good Father to deliver them from the witches, and He answered their prayers with holy fire. He saved them all from ruin, from damnation at the hands of the Dark Mother. Those flames were His blessing.”

  Ezra’s eyes narrowed, and he gazed up at that window with obvious contempt. “So the Scriptures say.”

  “You don’t believe them?”

  “All I’m saying is that if I was an all-powerful god who could do as I pleased, I would have found another way to end the war.” He looked back at Immanuelle. “Wouldn’t you?”

  “I’m not a god, so I couldn’t say. I can’t presume to know the Father’s will. And if I did know it, I’m certain there would be no cause for doubts or questions.”

  “Spoken like a true believer,” said Ezra, but he made it sound like an insult.

  After a few moments of searching, he found the right page and motioned to it with a pass of his hand. There, inked into what appeared to be vellum, was a map. It outlined the boundaries of Bethel: the western wall, the village and market square, the sprawling Holy Grounds, and the rolling pastures of the Glades beyond them. In the far left-hand corner of the map, reduced to little more than a scribble, were the Outskirts. And encircling it all were wide swathes of shadow, marked with a simple footnote: The Darkwood.

  “Did you find what you were looking for?” Ezra’s voice echoed in the quiet.

  Immanuelle shook her head. The pond where she’d encountered Lilith wasn’t marked anywhere. “Would the library have something more specific? Like a map of the Darkwood?”

  Ezra frowned. Once again, she wondered if she’d gone too far, or trusted him too easily. “As far as I know, there’s no map of the forest,” he said, and he closed the book. “But I might be able to help you. I used to play in the Darkwood when I was younger, and I still know the area well enough. There’s a good chance that if you know where you want to go, I can get you there.”

  Immanuelle gaped. “You went into the woods as . . . a child?”

  “Sometimes, when I found a way to sneak out of the Haven.” Ezra shrugged like it was nothing, but he looked a little proud. “Of course, I never stayed after sundown. I wasn’t too keen on the idea of the woodland witches ripping the flesh off my bones.”

  Immanuelle shivered, thinking back to the witches, with their hungry eyes and hooked fingers. “You’d have been lucky if that’s all they did.”

  He scoffed, like it was a joke, like all the legends of the Darkwood were merely fodder for wives’ tales.

  “You don’t believe the stories?” she asked, incredulous. “You don’t believe the witches are real?”

  “It isn’t a question of belief.”

  “Then what is it?”

  He took his time to think over his answer. At last, he said, “It’s a question of who’s being creative with the truth.”

  Immanuelle wasn’t entirely sure what he meant by that, but it felt close to blasphemy. “Creative truths don’t explain away centuries of disappearances in the woods.”

  “People don’t disappear in the woods. They escape. That’s why they never return: because they don’t want to.”

  Immanuelle couldn’t imagine anyone intentionally leaving Bethel. After all, where would they go? To the godless, heathen cities in the west? To the lifeless ruins in the east? No one would seek solace in places like those. Beyond Bethel, there was nothing. There was no other place to go. “And all the missing children? What happened to all of them?”

  Ezra shrugged. “The Darkwood is a dangerous place. Predators have to eat, and out there a defenseless child is just food for the wolves.”

  “Then where are all the bodies? The bones?”

  “Nature has a way of cleaning up its messes. My guess is the animals get to the corpses before anyone else has the chance to.”

  “And what about the blood plague?”

  “What about it?”

  “Well, if it didn’t come from the forest, then what’s the source of it all? Is it really so hard for you to believe that there could be something in the Darkwood that wants its due? That the legends are true, and the witches who died never left, and now they want . . .” She traced her fingers across the carvings on the altar, recognizing the words from David Ford’s tombstone: Blood for blood. “Vengeance.”

  Ezra started to reply, but before he had the chance to speak, there was the jangle of keys and the sharp click of a lock’s bolt slipping out of place. He twisted to face her, his expression panicked. “There’s a door at the back of the library, behind the shelves of the medical section. It leads to a flight of stairs that feeds into the cellars. Go down the hall, through the doors at its end. I’ll meet you by the front gate.” The doors opened with a resounding groan. “Go, now!”

  Immanuelle broke for the two nearest shelves, ducking behind them as a lone man crossed into the center aisle. “Back in the library again?”

  Although the voice was hoarse, Immanuelle immediately recognized it from past Sabbaths and feasts.

  It belonged to the Prophet.

  “I thought I might do some research,” said Ezra.

  The Prophet nodded, doubling back so he stood by a shelf that was only a few feet from Immanuelle. She retreated, trying her best to step lightly on the cobbles.

  The Prophet lingered, nothing but a few books between them. Up close, Immanuelle was certain she didn’t mistake the poorly veiled contempt in his expression when he regarded Ezra. His upper lip curled a bit when he spoke. “Research on what?”

  Ezra’s eyes went to Immanuelle. Go, his gaze seemed to say. But she crouched, frozen, behind the shelf, afraid she’d be caught by the Prophet if she moved so much as an inch.

  Ezra shifted his attention back to his father, his expression unreadable. “Mother is suffering from her . . . bruising affliction yet again. I was looking for a way to ease her pain, but I’m beginning to think I won’t find a cure behind these walls.”

  The Prophet flinched at the veiled threat, his composure failing him for a moment. But he regained himself quickly, slid a book off the shelf nearest to him, a thick tome with no title, and thumbed slowly through the pages. “If your mother is ailing, have her call upon a physician. I have more important work for you.”

  Ezra went very still, as if he feared he’d say something he’d regret. When he spoke, his voice was strained. “What would you have me do?”

  The Prophet turned to place his book back on the shelf, and Immanuelle ducked down an adjacent aisle to avoid being seen. There, she found the door. It was small, a good half a foot shorter than she, as if it was made for a child. She was reaching for the handle when she heard the Prophet say, “I need the census accounts of all the women in Bethel.”

  A chill raked down Immanuelle’s spine. Hastily, she slipped through the door and began to draw it shut behind her. The creaking of the hinges echoed through the library.

  “Did you hear that?” The Prophet’s voice was sharp.

  Immanuelle froze, her hand still on the latch. She peered through the crack between the door and its frame. She knew she ought to retreat down the corridor as instructed, but she couldn’t pull her eyes from the scene unfolding before her.

  The Prophet coughed, harshly, into the crook of his elbow. When he spoke again, his voice was just a thin rasp. “I could have sworn I heard something.”

 
Ezra pushed off the altar and strode down the center aisle. “Just the stones settling, most likely. The Haven has old bones.”

  “That it does.” The Prophet’s voice echoed as he moved down the aisle where Immanuelle had hidden just moments before. She could have sworn he was limping a bit, but perhaps it only looked that way because of her odd vantage point.

  She held her breath as the Prophet drew nearer still, and she cowered behind the door now, knowing she ought to leave. But she needed to know about the names of Bethel’s women. What did the Prophet want with them? What if he had seen something in a vision, or he suspected one of them was behind the plague? What if he suspected her?

  The Prophet’s heavy footsteps were mere paces from the door now.

  “Father, the names,” Ezra called out, drawing his attention away. “If I’m to pull the records of all the women in Bethel, that must be at least eight or nine thousand.”

  “Likely more than that.” The Prophet walked on past the door, much to Immanuelle’s relief. She risked another peek through the crack. “Make the selections from the census and send the records to my quarters. I want all of the accounts on my desk by the week’s end. Have the scribes help you, if necessary. I don’t care if they have to work through the night to see it through. I want it done. Am I understood?”

  Ezra dipped his head. “Is that all you require of me?”

  The Prophet mulled this, gazing at Ezra with something akin to disgust. It was a known fact that the Prophet’s chosen son was not often his favorite. Immanuelle imagined it was not an easy thing for a man to stare into the face of his own undoing. The Holy Scriptures were filled with stories of prophets who had tried to kill their heirs in order to extend their own lives and reigns. In turn, several heirs had tried to kill their predecessors to hasten their rise to power.

  Watching the Prophet and Ezra then, Immanuelle was reminded of those horrible histories—of violence against son and father, master and apprentice, schisms that threatened to tear the Church apart. The tension between the two of them was as sinister as it was palpable. In that moment, Ezra and the Prophet were enemies before they were kin. One the ruination of the other. Immanuelle could not help but think it was a horrible thing to behold, regardless of whether the Father had ordained it.