“Is that even possible?”
“Almost anything is possible if you ask the right questions to the right people and you’re willing to pay the price.”
Immanuelle mulled this for a moment. “How will I know if my grandmother’s still in Ishmel?”
“You won’t. There’s no way to. Leaving Bethel is an act of faith. Vera used to say so herself before she left.”
“You mean before she was exiled?”
He frowned at her as if she’d said something disrespectful or out of turn. “Vera turned her back on this place of her own accord. Left through the gate long before your Prophet had the chance to exile her formally. In fact, she left the night after her boy burned. His body was still on the pyre when she fled.”
Immanuelle cringed at the image of her father, dead on the pyre. “Do you think she’s still out there?”
“I do,” said the priest. “That woman knew how to bleed for what she wanted, and she always had a way with the woods. I’m sure the wilds were kind to her.”
Immanuelle thought back to weeks ago, to the last time she was in the Outskirts. On that day, as she and Martha rode past in the wagon, she’d seen a multitude of tributes strewn along the forest’s edge. Was that how the Outskirters were attempting to avoid the full wrath of the plagues? By feeding the Darkwood in order to win its favor? “You mean she made offerings to the forest in exchange for . . . safety?”
The priest laughed, a brash sound that echoed through the chapel. “The wood protects no one. If you want the dull comforts of safety, you make a blood sacrifice to the Father in the hopes of appeasing Him. But if it’s power you want, you’d best leave your sacrifices at the Mother’s feet.”
“But how do you bleed to buy the Mother’s power?” Immanuelle asked, growing more and more confused. “I imagine it has to be more difficult than nicking your thumb and saying a prayer.”
The priest frowned, clearly growing suspicious. “Why would a girl from the Glades ask a question like that?”
“Passing curiosity,” said Immanuelle, but she could tell the priest knew it was a lie.
He stepped past her, his robes rustling as he walked back to the chapel. “You know, Vera wanted to keep you. Always said that if Daniel and Miriam were to have children, they ought to be raised in the Outskirts.”
“I didn’t know,” Immanuelle whispered, her voice thick with tears. All these years she’d been such a fool, assuming that her family in the Outskirts had no interest in her, that she was alone in the world, apart from the Moores. It was a strange and wonderful revelation, but there was pain in it too. It hurt to think that she’d been kept apart from someone she might have known and loved. Someone who might have loved her, too, and understood her in a way that the Moores simply could not.
“If the gate ever opens for you, then you should go to Vera. You’re all the family she has left. It would do her good to see you.”
Immanuelle turned to look at the small spot on the wall, Ishmel, an islet in the vast sea of the wilderness. “Perhaps I will.”
The two meandered out of the apse, back into the chapel. The chickens were still burning on the altar, and a girl stood by it, feeding the fire with pine needles, moss, sprigs of dried rosemary, and other herbs Immanuelle didn’t know by name.
“If you have no other questions, I really should be getting back to my work.” The priest motioned to the burning altar.
“I do have one more request.”
He raised a brow. “Hopefully not one that pertains to witchcraft and blood magic?”
Immanuelle flushed. “No. Nothing like that. I just wondered if it was possible for me to see the house where my father and grandmother used to live.”
The priest considered this for a moment, then nodded, calling over the girl who tended to the burning offering. She was stunning—tall and dark-skinned, with wide eyes and well-cut cheekbones. Her hair was a few shades darker than Immanuelle’s, and it was carefully braided back into a series of four thick cornrows and collected into a tight bun at the nape of her neck.
“Adrine, this is Immanuelle Moore,” said the priest, and he nodded between the two of them. “You’ll take her to the ruins of the Ward house.”
Adrine appraised her, expressionless, nodded, then turned on her heel and stalked out of the chapel. Immanuelle turned to bid the priest farewell, but he was already praying over the altar, his face veiled by a haze of smoke.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
The doors of the Father’s house are always open to those who serve him faithfully. But the sinner will be turned away.
—THE HOLY SCRIPTURES
IMMANUELLE AND ADRINE walked in silence through the empty streets. The village they passed through was so quiet, Immanuelle might have thought it long deserted. There were no children playing in the streets. No dogs barking. No signs of life at all, save for the vultures circling overhead.
“Everything is so still,” Immanuelle whispered as they passed yet another shuttered house. There were bone wind chimes strung from the rafters of its porch, and they clattered together with a hollow sound when a breeze swept down the street. “The Glades are crawling with the blight sick.”
Adrine wrinkled her nose. “Is that what you’re calling it in the Glades? The blight?”
Immanuelle shook her head, embarrassed by her slip of the tongue. “It’s just . . . my own colloquialism. I’m not sure it has a proper name.”
“We call it an affliction of the soul,” said Adrine. “Our ancestors passed down stories of witches and soothsayers that used to curse men with a similar sickness.”
“So it was used as a kind of weapon?”
Adrine nodded. “In a sense.”
“Do you think there’s a cure for it?”
“I think the sickness is the cure,” said Adrine.
“I’m afraid I don’t understand your meaning.”
“Sometimes the things that seem like they’re hurting us are really a part of healing. When a child is sick and you bleed them, to them the bite of the knife seems like a punishment, when really it’s the cure. When your people purge, you do great harm, but you see the violence and the fire as a cure for sins that are far worse. Maybe this sickness is much the same. Maybe it’s a kind of purging, meant to root out a deeper evil.”
Immanuelle mulled that theory as the two started down another path. This one diverged from the main road, weaving through a series of slums. Here, the stench of sewage was thick on the air. The streets were mostly packed earth and mud, and several times Immanuelle stepped into ruts so deep the muck reached the top of her boots. The main road that weaved through the slums was narrow, the houses so tightly packed that at times the alleys between them were little more than shoulder width. Most of the homes were far too modest to have luxuries like glass windows, but Immanuelle caught glimpses inside these strange abodes when the wind blew their curtains back. There were families huddled together in prayer, children playing with corn-husk dolls, a mother nursing her baby, a black cat sleeping peacefully at the foot of a long bed mat. It was clear to Immanuelle that despite their squalor, none of the inhabitants had been touched by the blight.
Immanuelle was relieved when the little outcrop of houses gave way, once again, to open grassland. In the Glades—where wealthy farmers coveted every spare scrap of land—these wild ranges would have been farmed and converted into capital. But here, the land was left entirely untouched, save for the lone road that cut through it.
In the distance, the Darkwood lurked, the trees so dense they seemed almost impenetrable. Here the forest’s pull was far stronger than it was in the Glades, the trees sang to her when the wind moved through them, and it was a struggle for Immanuelle to keep to the path instead of drifting toward them.
“We’re here,” said Adrine, and she motioned to a wide plot of land, just beyond the reach of the forest where the gras
s grew waist-high. Immanuelle stepped off the road, into the meadow, and it was only as she drew closer that she saw the charred bones of the house’s ruins and the cracked stones of what used to be its foundation.
By the wreckage alone, she could tell that the house was far larger than the ones in the shanty village they’d passed through. In fact, it may have rivaled the size of the Moore house in its day. It was clear that despite their residing in the Outskirts, the Wards had been of good standing. Only a family of consequence could afford such a large home.
Immanuelle lifted her skirts, stepped gingerly over a charred piece of timber that may have been a rafter. She walked the perimeter of the house once, stepping carefully through the debris, then stopped and dropped to a crouch beside one of the large slate foundation stones. Up close, she saw that it was deeply carved with a strange symbol—a cross in the center of a circle—that looked like a letter in some foreign alphabet. The longer she stared at it, the more it reminded her of the witch’s mark.
“What is this symbol?” Immanuelle asked, tracing it with her fingertips. Despite the unrelenting heat of the midday sun, the stone was strangely cold.
“It’s a sigil,” said Adrine, stepping forward. “It’s our custom to carve the foundation stones of our houses with them. For luck, prosperity, protection.”
“What does this one mean?”
“It’s a siphon,” said the girl, whispering now though as far as Immanuelle could tell there was no one around to hear them.
“And what is it siphoning?”
Adrine looked reluctant to answer. “Power. From the forest.”
“And that one?” Immanuelle pointed across the ruins of the house to another foundation stone. This one was carved with a series of eight overlapping gashes that looked as though they were inflicted in anger.
“A shield,” said Adrine. “Meant to repel danger.”
Immanuelle didn’t need to ask about the marking on the next foundation stone. “The witch’s mark.”
Immanuelle walked to the last of the four stones, which stood at the far corner of the ruin, nearest the forest. It was capsized and cracked into two large pieces. The girls had to work together, rolling the stones over—as spiders and worms writhed in the newly exposed soil—and push the broken pieces back together. Immanuelle brushed the dirt off the stone to see it clearly, and when she did, Adrine drew back so quickly she nearly stumbled over a fallen rafter.
Immanuelle peered down at the marking, ran her fingers along the cuts in the stone. It looked innocuous enough, just a small hexagon with a series of crosses cut through its center. “What is it?”
“We should go.”
Immanuelle frowned. “Why?”
“Because that’s a cursing seal,” said Adrine in a hiss. “It’s meant to do harm.”
“But we don’t intend any ill will.”
“Doesn’t matter. Who knows what the sigil’s caster intended when they made that mark.”
“But it’s been years,” said Immanuelle, “and the house is long abandoned. There can’t be any power left in these stones now.”
“Once a sigil is made and a curse is cast, it’s done,” said Adrine, clearly exasperated with her. “It doesn’t matter if a person leaves or dies or forgets; the power that mark was made to represent lives on.”
A pit formed in Immanuelle’s stomach as she thought about the witches, and the plagues they cast with her blood. “So you’re saying that curses live on forever?”
“I’m saying that it’s difficult, often impossible, to undo what’s already been done. When you make a mark, it’s there forever. It can be altered but never fully erased.”
If what Adrine said was true, it meant there was little hope of breaking the cycle of the plagues. It seemed that the dark power of the woods would have to run its course. But what did that mean for Honor and Glory and the rest of the blight sick? Would they even survive long enough to see the plague’s end?
Immanuelle thought of the prophetic entry at the end of her mother’s journal: Blood. Blight. Darkness. . . . Slaughter. It was clear that if they didn’t find a way to break the curse, then there would be a mortal price to pay. There had to be a way to stop it, and based on everything she’d gathered thus far, her best chance was to decode the sigils, the language of the witches’ magic. If the people of Bethel had any hope of defeating Lilith’s plagues, they would need to understand them, know what they were fighting against.
Immanuelle slung her knapsack off her shoulder, dug through its contents, and produced a slip of paper and a small nub of graphite. Carefully, she smoothed the blank sheet of paper across the stone and rubbed the graphite back and forth across it, creating the perfect transfer image of the foundation stone. She proceeded to make copies of the next three sigils after that, then collected all of the slips, folded them carefully, and slipped them back into her knapsack for safekeeping. She turned back to Adrine. “How do you know so much about these markings, anyway?”
“They’re a part of our language.”
“You mean your origin tongue?”
Adrine nodded. “These marks are just words to us. It’s the intention behind them that makes the sigils something more . . . something dangerous.”
Immanuelle crossed through the ruins of the house and into the narrow stretch of land between it and the Darkwood. A few paces away were the abandoned bones of what might have been an outhouse or a small work shed like Abram’s. Beyond that, just a dark, dense stretch of the forest. Its thrall was almost intoxicating.
Immanuelle started toward it and tripped, her boot catching on what she thought was an upturned rock. But when she searched for the source of her near fall, what she found was a small stepping-stone and several more just after it, each of them leading to the sprawling forest beyond the property. Immanuelle followed the path to the feet of two large twin oaks standing side by side, their branches tangling overhead to form a kind of archway. Each of their trunks was carved with matching sigils: one long dash that reached from the start of the first branch down to the roots, the top of which was cut with what appeared to be twenty shorter dashes of varying lengths.
Adrine shook her head. “I don’t know those sigils.”
“I do,” Immanuelle whispered, reaching into the depths of her knapsack. She opened her mother’s journal to the page that depicted the cabin where she claimed to have spent the winter. In the foreground of the drawing were two large oaks carved with marks identical to those on the trees in front of her.
Immanuelle edged closer, scuffed her boot through the fallen leaves, uncovering a series of stepping-stones that led into the depths of the Darkwood, to the cabin where her mother endured her last winter. She pressed a hand to the sigil-carved trunk of the nearest oak, half turned to face Adrine.
But the girl merely shook her head. “I’ll not go with you. Not in there.”
Immanuelle only nodded, a part of her relieved. It was as if she was jealous over the forest, like she wanted its secrets for herself, and herself alone. And so, without so much as pausing to look back, Immanuelle gathered her skirts and stepped past the looming oaks and into the shadows of the Darkwood.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
I made a home in the woods. I thatched a roof and built the walls. And it was there, in a room of stick and stone, that the bargain was struck, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.
—MIRIAM MOORE
THE SOUTHERN WOODS were different from those that ran along the Glades. They were thicker, crowded with solemn pines that whispered when the wind moved through their needles. The rest of the world seemed to fall away as Immanuelle walked through the trees. Sunlight dimmed and the shadows thickened, threatening to swallow her up. The path she attempted to follow was quickly devoured by the snarling thicket. She couldn’t feel the stepping-stones beneath her boots any longer. And while she knew she should have been afraid,
all she felt was a horrible sense of completion. Like she was exactly where she was meant to be.
Immanuelle didn’t know how long she walked, but it was nearing midday when she came upon a cabin. One glance at the place and she knew it was long abandoned. She wouldn’t have been surprised if its original owners were Bethel’s founders, who’d settled in the forest centuries ago. The whole house seemed to stoop on the stones of its foundation, warped and decrepit like an old man leaning on his cane.
In truth, it was less a house than a shanty. It had only one door and one window. The roof was sunken, and the porch was so thoroughly rotten, its blackened planks crumbled beneath her boots. Immanuelle put a hand to the door and pushed it open.
She entered a cramped room that smelled of mildew. To her left sat a side table, its surface cluttered with an arrangement of melted candles. On the far wall, there was a fireplace with a cracked mirror pinned above the mantel, just big enough to house the reflection of a person’s face. In the center of the room was a rusted bed frame.
Immanuelle.
She turned, seeking the voice’s owner, but instead she found something she’d missed upon first glance. Just to the right of the fireplace was a billowing white cloth, and behind it, a narrow threshold. Raising a shaking hand, Immanuelle drew the shroud away. It drifted to the floor in a cloud of swirling dust motes, revealing a short hallway, lightless, save for a single ray of sunshine that illuminated the room at its end.
Immanuelle reached into her knapsack, withdrawing first her oil lamp, then a single matchstick. She struck the latter alight on the stones of the fireplace, then lit the lamp and turned back to the hallway. The red glow of the flame spilled across the walls as she walked.
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