The Near Witch

by V. E. Schwab

I fall into a chair at the table, rapping my fingers on the old scarred wood. Mother slides a scraper across a board and gathers up a few small pieces of clinging dough, too caked with flour to use for bread. Wren happily takes the lump and begins shaping the mass into a heart, a bowl, a person.

  Another ritual.

  My mother gives Wren these bits of dough each morning, letting her shape them, ruin them, and shape them again until she’s happy. Then my mother will bake toys that only last until the end of the day.

  It feels wrong to have rituals right now, for things to continue in their carved-out way when something has cut through the routine.

  The room fills with heavy quiet. I lean forward. I stand up. I need to give the group of men time to get far enough away that I don’t risk crossing paths, but I can’t just sit here.

  If everyone is looking for Edgar, they won’t be looking for the stranger. Now is my chance. I turn to leave, and pause halfway to the hall.

  I expect my mother to stop me, to warn or lecture or say anything, anything at all, but she doesn’t even look up.

  She would have stopped me, once, fixed me with her strong eyes. She would have made me fight for it. Now she just turns to the oven and begins to hum.

  I sigh and slip out into the hall.

  Halfway to the front door, a shape springs up before me and I nearly run into Wren. How she got from the table to here without a sound, I do not know.

  “Where are you going?” she asks.

  I kneel, looking at her face-to-face, my hands resting on her shoulders. “I’m going to the sisters, Wren,” I say, surprised by how quietly it comes out.

  Her eyes widen, blue circles like pieces of sky. “Is it a secret?” she whispers back. In my sister’s world, secrets are almost as much fun as games.

  “Very much so,” I say, my fingers dancing down her arms to her hands, cupping them in mine. I bring our cradled hands up to my lips, whispering into the small place between her palms. “Can you keep it for me?”

  Wren smiles and pulls her hands back to her, still cupping the secret as she might a butterfly. And with that, I kiss my sister’s hair and hurry out.

  * * *

  Half an hour later, I stumble through the grove and up the path to the sisters’ cottage. The windows are thrown open, but the house is quiet, and I slow my step, trying to muffle the sound of my approach so I don’t attract notice. I have no desire to face the stony expressions of the sisters right now.

  I veer left to the shed, and there on the nail is the gray cloak with its blackened edges. As difficult as it is, I slow to a creep and soundlessly approach the shed. People tend to put their weight on the balls of their feet when they don’t want to be heard, but in truth, it’s better to walk heel to toe, distributing the weight in slow, smooth motions. I circle around the leaning wooden structure. It is the kind with only one opening, the door in front of me. Either he’s in there, or he’s not. I press my ear to the rotting wood. Nothing.

  I chew my lip, weighing my options. I don’t want to frighten him off. But I don’t want to let him slip away either. I had hoped to catch him off guard, but it seems there’s no one here to catch.

  “Hello?” I say at last, my ear still pressed against the door. I can hear my own word vibrate through the boards, and I pull back slightly. “I just want to talk,” I add, my voice softer, lower, the kind of voice for sharing secrets. It’s not a voice I use often, except with Wren. It’s the voice my father used to tell me stories. “Please talk to me.”

  Nothing. I pull the door open, and it groans, but the small space inside is bare. The door swings shut as I step back. Where is he? I wonder, running my fingers over the gray cloak on the nail, the fabric old and worn. All this time lost coming here instead of trailing Otto into town, instead of looking for Edgar.

  “What a waste,” I murmur into the wooden boards. They groan in reply. My eyes widen as I push off the shed and whip around the corner. The stranger won’t slip away again.

  And there he is. Almost close enough to touch. He stands there against the moor and looks at me—stares at me—with his large eyes, an even gray like coals or river stones without the slick of water. The wind runs through his dark hair and over clothes that might once have been a color but are now gray, or might once have been black but are now faded. Just like his cloak. He crosses his arms as if he’s cold.

  “You.” That’s all I manage to say. There is something startlingly familiar about him. I have never seen anyone so fair-skinned and dark-haired, with such cool, colorless eyes. And yet, the light that dances in them, and that strange pull, like gravity tipped over…

  “Who are you?” I ask.

  He cocks his head, and I realize for the first time how young he is. He cannot be much older than I am, a few inches taller, and too thin. But flesh and blood, not the phantom on the moor beyond my window who seemed to bleed right into the night.

  “Where did you come from?” I ask, examining his features, his clothes, painted in shades of gray. He looks out over my shoulder and says nothing. “Why are you here?”

  Still nothing.

  “A boy’s gone missing today. Did you know?” I ask, searching for some recognition in his eyes, some sign of guilt.

  He sets his jaw and strides past me, back toward the shed and the sisters’ house. I follow him, but as we reach the shack he still shows no sign of stopping to speak to me. I grab his arm and pull him back. He winces at my touch, withdraws so fast that he stumbles back against the wooden slats. And now he will not even look at me, turning his eyes away and onto the moor.

  “Say something!” I cross my arms. He lets his weight sag against the shed. “Did you take Edgar?”

  His brow furrows, and his eyes finally return to mine.

  “Why would I do that?”

  So he can speak. Not only that, but his voice is smooth and strangely hollow, echoing. He seems to wish he hadn’t spoken, because he closes his eyes and swallows as if he could take the words back.

  “Why did you hide from me yesterday?”

  “Why were you trying to find me?” he replies.

  “I told you. There’s a boy missing.”

  “Today there is. But you tried to find me yesterday.” The challenge flickers in his eyes, but it dies away just as fast. And he’s right, I wanted to see him yesterday, when Edgar was safe and sound. I wanted to see if he was real.

  “There are no strangers in the town of Near,” I say, as if that explains everything.

  “Nor am I in it.” He gestures to the ground at his feet, and I understand. We are officially out of town, on the open moors. He pushes himself off the wall and stands to his full height, looking down at me.

  He is not a phantom or a ghost, not a crow-thing or an old man. He’s just a boy, as solid and real as I am. My hand did not go through his skin, and his back made a sound as it met the shed. And yet, he is not like me. He is not like anyone I have ever seen. Not just his ghostly skin and dark features, but his voice, his manner.

  “I’m Lexi. What’s your name?” I ask.

  He seems to be mute again.

  “Well, if you won’t tell me, I’m going to give you one.”

  He looks up, and I swear I can see a sad smile tease the edges of his lips. But he says nothing, and the smile—if it was one—slides back beneath the pale surface.

  “Maybe I’ll call you Robert or Nathan,” I say, watching his face. His eyes. His hair. “Ah, maybe Cole.”

  “Cole?” he says quietly. His forehead wrinkles up. “Why?”

  “Your hair and your eyes—you look like coal. Like ashes.”

  He frowns and turns his eyes back to the ground.

  “You don’t like it?”

  “No,” he says. “I don’t.”

  “Well, too bad,” I say lightly. “Unless you give me your name, I’m going to have to call you Cole.”

  “I don’t have a name,” he says, and sighs, as if talking so much is tiresome.

  “Everyone has a n
ame.”

  Silence falls between us. The boy watches the grass, and I watch him. He fidgets, as if being here with me is uncomfortable, as if my gaze is painful.

  “What’s a waste?” he says suddenly.

  “Excuse me?”

  “You said that to the shed door, that it was a waste. What did you mean?”

  I cross my arms. The wind is picking up.

  “Coming all this way to find you, and having you not be here. That would have been a waste.”

  “Do they have any idea what might have happened to him?” he says after a moment. “The missing boy?”

  “No.” I turn back toward the sisters’ house, hoping they have some answers. “No one knows.” Myself included. I am no closer to finding Edgar than I was this morning. I don’t know why I felt the need to come here instead, to question a boy who hardly has a word to say. I look back one last time. “You should have come into the village and introduced yourself. Now they will suspect you.”

  “Do you suspect me?”

  My feet stop. “I do not know you.”

  Again my eyes snag on him. There is something in him, distant and sad, this thin boy, his hollow eyes and his singed travel cloak. I cannot stand to blink while looking at him, in case he is not there when I open my eyes. He lifts his chin, as if trying to hear a far-off voice. For a moment he looks unbearably lost, and then he turns and walks away, out into the hills, seeming to put as many weeds and wildflowers between us as possible.

  I trudge back toward the sisters’ house, checking the angle of the sun in the sky. I’m losing time. How long do I have until Otto returns home? I should have just followed the search party. But I can’t fault myself for wanting to talk to the stranger. I needed to see him for myself, to know if he did this, if he’s involved.

  I kick a stone. Now I have only more questions.

  I pass the sisters’ house, heading for the path home.

  “Lexi,” says Magda, calling me back. I spot her kneeling in the plot of dirt just beside the cottage. The patch that Magda calls her garden.

  “You lied to me,” I say, when I’m close enough, “about the stranger. He’s here.”

  Magda cocks her head at me. “We told you we knew nothing about him. And we don’t.” She looks past me and out onto the moors. I follow her gaze. Far beyond the house, a thin shape wanders over the hills that dip away from the sisters’ house in slow waves. On one of these rises, the boy in gray pauses, looking north, away from Near.

  I frown and turn back to Magda, who is hunched over in the small patch of dirt again.

  “Why did you call me back?” I ask, scuffing my boot along the patch of barren earth.

  Magda doesn’t answer, just goes on whispering something to no one at all, and brushing her gnarled fingers back and forth over the empty plot. I squat beside her.

  “What are you doing, Magda?”

  “Growing flowers, of course.” She gestures to the dirt, where not so much as a weedy stem is poking through the soil. “Little rusty, is all.”

  Normally I’d be intrigued and would want to linger, on the off chance that I could catch a glimpse of Magda’s craft. Hoping that she’d forget I was there beside her, and show it. But I don’t have time today.

  “Did you plant seeds?” I ask.

  At this, she gives a dry laugh and whispers a few more things in the direction of the soil.

  “No, dearie. I don’t need any seeds. And besides, I’m growing moor flowers. Wildflowers.”

  “I didn’t know you could, in this soil.”

  “You can’t, of course. That’s the point. Flowers are freethinking things. They grow where they please. I’d like to see you try and tell a moor flower where to grow.” Magda sits back and rubs her hands together.

  I look down at the empty plot. I’m more than an hour behind Otto’s men, with nothing to show for it. And for all I know, my uncle could be making his way home this minute. Maybe Magda knows something. Anything. Whether she’ll tell me is another story.

  “Magda, there’s a boy missing. Edgar. He’s five—”

  “Little blond thing, yes? What happened?” she asks, turning her good eye up at me.

  “No one knows. He vanished from his bed last night. They haven’t found any trace yet.”

  Magda’s face changes a fraction, the lines deepening, her bad eye growing darker and her good eye focused on nothing. She looks about to say something, but she changes her mind.

  “Do you think someone took him?” I ask. Magda frowns and nods.

  “The ground’s like skin, it grows in layers,” she says, pinching some soil in her crooked fingers. “What’s on top peels back. What’s underneath can work its way up, eventually.”

  I sigh, frustrated. Every now and then Magda does this, talking nonsense. In her mind it might very well be a logical train of thought, but it’s a pity the rest of the world can’t follow. I should have known she couldn’t, or wouldn’t, help me.

  “The wind is lonely…” Magda adds in a voice so soft I almost miss it. The words snag on something, a memory.

  “What did you—” I begin.

  “Lexi Harris,” says Dreska, appearing in the doorway. She motions at me with her cane, and I push myself to my feet and go to her. Taking my hand, she sets a small bundle in my palm. It’s a pouch on a string, and it smells like the moor grass and the rain and wet stones.

  “Give this to your sister,” she says. “Tell her to wear it. For safety.”

  “So you did hear about Edgar.”

  Dreska gives a grim nod and folds my fingers over the charm. “We’ve made them for all the children.”

  “I’ll give it to her.” I slide the pouch into my pocket and turn to go.

  “Lexi,” says Magda. “I called you back for the same reason I invited you in yesterday. Because of him. I wondered whether you had heard talk of a stranger in Near.” She points a dirt-caked fingernail at the stranger on the moor. I cast a last glance at the boy, his back still to us. He slides to the ground, and suddenly he doesn’t look like a person, just a rock or a fallen tree jutting up from the tangled grass.

  “Others will be looking for him, too,” says Dreska.

  I understand her meaning. “I won’t tell. I am my father’s daughter.”

  “We do hope you are.”

  I head back down the path, but turn and add, “You really don’t know anything about him? Where he’s from?”

  “He is safer here,” murmurs Magda, cupping dirt.

  “He is keeping secrets,” I say.

  “Aren’t we all,” says Dreska with a dry laugh. “You do not believe he took Edgar.” It is not a question. But she is right.

  “No, I don’t think he did it,” I call, heading home. “But I mean to find out who did.”

  6

  I make it home before Otto, and for that I am thankful. The high sun slides across the afternoon sky, and it’s too late now to risk going into town, too great a chance of running into the search party. There’s no sign of Wren or my mother, but the house is warm and smells of heated stones and bread. I realize how hungry I am. Half a loaf sits on the counter, along with some cold chicken, left out from lunch. I cut a couple pieces of each and devour them, relishing the freedom of solitude and being able to simply eat, rather than be delicate about it.

  Feeling much better, I duck into my room, kicking off my boots and smoothing my hair. I pace the space at the foot of the bed and try to make sense of the day. My father taught me to listen to my gut, and my gut says that this strange, hollow boy did not take Edgar. But that doesn’t mean I trust him yet. I do not understand him yet. And I do not like the way my chest tightens when my eyes snag on him, as it does for wild things.

  Something else tugs at me, and I remember Magda’s whispered words: The wind is lonely.

  I know that line.

  I cross to the small table by the window, the one with the leaning candles and the cluster of books, my fingers going straight to the one in the middle. The cove
r is green and pocked with indents, like the ones my father’s fingers made on the knife and the ax. But these are from my fingers, my marks of use as much as his.

  The frayed pages of the book smell earthy and rich, as though there is a part of the moor between the covers instead of paper. Whenever my father told a story, I asked him to put it down in here. The book is strangely heavy, like a stone, and I slip onto the bed with it, tracing my fingers over the soft cover before cracking it open and skimming the pages with my thumb. Three years ago, my father’s handwriting vanished from this book, and mine took over.

  There were so many blank pages left in his wake. I tried, now and then, to remember a snippet he might have forgotten to write down. Out walking, or delivering bread, or chopping wood, a sentence would sneak up on me in his rich voice, and I’d race to my room to write it down.

  The wind is lonely.

  I know that phrase.

  I turn to an entry dated a few months after my hand replaced his:

  Clouds seem like such sociable things in the moor sky. Father said they were the most spiritual things on the moors, that they went on pilgrimages every day, setting out as the sun rose, and coming together to pray. The rain, he teased—

  The entry stops. Here and there the page ripples, dotted with small wet circles.

  I flip back through the book, searching for an earlier entry, one he would have written himself. My thumb catches the corner of a page near the beginning, pinning it back.

  Of course. It’s from the story I thought of last night.

  If the moor wind ever sings, you mustn’t listen, not with all of your ears. Use only the edges. Listen the way you’d look out the corners of your eyes. The wind is lonely, and always looking for company.

  I run my fingers over the page. Why would Magda quote my father’s words?

  And then I see it. At the bottom of the page in my father’s small script, the letters M. T. Magda Thorne. This story doesn’t belong to my father—he only copied it. But what does it mean now, coming from Magda’s lips in the garden?

  The front door opens with a soft groan, and I blink and close the book. How long have I been sitting here, wondering on bedtime poems? Wren’s patter of feet reaches me from the hall, her light bouncing steps on the floorboards. I can’t hear my mother’s, but I know she must be with her. Pushing myself up from the bed, I clutch the book to my chest and head into the kitchen.