The Sapling Cage, page 16
It wasn’t the whole of our covenant. Several of the witches I knew by sight but not by name were missing.
I worried about what happened to the missing witches. But I also worried about who in the covenant would turn on me if they knew about me. It was a relief to have my secret out, at least to my coven. And oddly, it was a relief to know what I was facing. The Order of the Vine wasn’t going to cast me out, and it wasn’t going to burn me alive. I wasn’t safe, but I also wasn’t in the grave danger I had feared.
The villagers put us up in one of the largest of the beached ships to shelter us from the thunderstorms that swept across the lake almost every afternoon.
I went belowdecks, and Haim was braiding Henomi’s hair, sitting atop a stool like it was her throne. Daidi was pacing, clutching her doll. It felt so familiar, so right, to be back with them, and I smiled. All three of them smiled back, even Daidi.
“Where’s everyone else?” Araneigh asked. “I didn’t see everyone.”
“At least five witches are missing,” Haim said.
“Dead, you mean,” Daidi said. Her smile hadn’t lasted long.
“Missing,” Haim repeated. “Dam Ghin says they’re missing.”
“Dead.”
“I know you hate everyone,” Haim said, “but some of us are worried about our teachers and aren’t just going to give up on them like that. And Dam Ghin wouldn’t lie to us.”
“Dead,” Daidi said, but she said it quietly, and I realized she’d been crying. A fresh scar ran down her cheek and continued on her bare shoulder.
My homecoming no longer felt so joyous.
“How long have you all been here?” Araneigh asked, clearly trying to change the subject.
“A couple days,” Haim said. She finished braiding Henomi’s hair, tying it off with a piece of ribbon, and Araneigh sat down to have her hair braided next.
“My coven’s been here the whole time,” Daidi said. “Dam Yarrow got cut by a sword pretty bad, and Apprentice Gallina didn’t make it out of the circle at all. So we didn’t go far. We figured we could spy on the knights, bury Gallina, and see if we could get Yarrow to Dam Willow for healing.”
“How’d that go?” Araneigh asked.
“Bad,” Daidi said. “The knights found us, and two more witches died, and I got cut real deep, and the ten of us who were left ran away to here. The oldest people in town remember when they had a village witch and say they miss her being around, so they put us up. We’ve only been out at night since, until you showed up.”
“I’m so sorry,” I said.
“It happens,” Daidi said, her voice monotone. “Worst part is, there’s not really any ley around here, just a little bit coming off the lake. Couldn’t do much to heal me, couldn’t do much to help anyone at all.”
“What about you?” I asked Haim.
“We went to my father’s house,” she said. “He hid us in the guest wing.”
I stared, confused.
“Her dad’s Baron Silhin,” Daidi explained. “Meet Haim of Silhin.”
“Haim of the Vine, now, thank you,” Haim said.
“Why would …” I started to ask.
“Fifth daughter of the fifth son goes to the witches,” Haim said. “True for a peasant, true for a king.”
“I’ve never heard that rule,” I said.
“Well, my father had,” Haim said. “I’m glad he had, what’s more.” Then she paused, cleared her throat. “We got a lot done. A lot of research. Dam Ghin put ciphers into the clouds. Got in touch with the rest of the Order, let them know what we’d figured out.”
“Where is the rest of the Order?” I asked.
“Turns out, the blight is spreading across the whole kingdom,” Haim said. “Not just the duchy. Other covenants are following up on other leads. At least, that’s what Dam Ghin says.”
“Dam Ghin Dam Ghin Dam Ghin!” Daidi shouted. “To rot with Dam Ghin.”
“She’s really wise, though,” Haim mumbled, looking down at her hands.
I wanted to figure out some way to get everyone talking nice to one another, but I hadn’t the slightest idea how.
“What about you?” Daidi asked me.
“We ran away from knights for a month, then we found a worson, then Dam Lament used its quills to protect herself long enough to kill a talik.”
“Lorel poked it in the eye first, though,” Araneigh said. “Just jumped in the water and jabbed the talik in the eye with her nails.”
“Whoa,” Haim said.
I blushed.
“That’s what brought us here, isn’t it?” Haim asked. “The talik, it told us to come here?”
“Yeah.”
“I can’t wait till we know magic,” Haim said.
“What’s the first thing you’re going to do when you learn magic?” I asked. “Each of you.”
“I’m going to make trees grow everywhere I can,” Haim said.
Daidi laughed mockingly.
“What about you?” I asked her.
“Kill Haim’s trees,” she said. “Not with blight. Just fire.”
I’d asked because I wanted everyone to be friendly. It clearly wasn’t working.
“What about you, Lorel?” Daidi asked. “Flowers and sunshine and making everyone happy all the time?”
I was going to turn myself into a girl. But I couldn’t tell them that. And I didn’t want to lie.
“Make myself pretty,” I said.
“To rot with pretty,” Daidi answered, like I figured she would.
“Araneigh?” Henomi asked quietly. “What are you going to do?”
“Trees,” Araneigh said. “I’m with Haim on the trees.”
The five of us talked the rest of the day, almost like friends. Even though Daidi cut in with cruelty and laughter every chance she could, I think she was happy to see us. Maybe that shouldn’t have mattered so much to me, but it did. She’d had a worse time than any of us, and it wasn’t fair. The world wasn’t fair, to be sure, but believing that the world wasn’t fair always seemed like a terrible excuse for never trying to make anything better.
Flowers and sunshine and making everyone happy. That seemed like a good use for magic.
The Wanderer was an old mountain, a mountain whose jagged edges had been worn down by the rains of millennia. Its trees were pine and oak, cut through with poison ivy and brambles and flowers.
We ate dinner in the mountain’s long shadow, sheltered between the two largest wrecked ships. We had no fire, lest we draw attention to ourselves. We had no bread, because there was no flour. Our reunion dinner had stew, and it had worry, but it didn’t have much in the way of joy.
The witches talked for hours, and all the bad news was confirmed: blight was spreading across the whole of Cekon, and with it, the hatred of witches. Solo practitioners everywhere were joining covens and covenants for protection or else moving further into the woods, mountains, and swamps, away from prying eyes and vengeful blades. The one lead was what Dam Lament had given her eye to learn—that there was something under the mountain.
The witches around me were worried, there was no doubt about that. Dam Lament would die before she’d admit fear, but she showed it in her usual way: a scowl. Dam Rose and Dam Sorrel were less afraid to let their emotions show, and they both wept openly and let the women around them support them.
I’d always assumed I wanted to be like Dam Lament, dependable and tough. I was already plenty good at hiding my emotions, even from myself. Maybe I had more to learn from Sorrel and Rose.
Even Dam Alectoria was afraid, but she carried determination in her voice when she spoke. Like my mother always told me, bravery isn’t the absence of fear, but the presence of courage.
It was Dam Ghin, though, who said the final piece of the night. She was an elder, a crone, but her voice didn’t carry the weight of the decades like those of the other crones I had met. Her voice was soft, her words considered, like each one was almost too valuable to let leave her lips.
“Do not lose hope, sisters,” she said, her eyes twinkling like the stars above. “We know where they are. We are witches of the Order of the Vine. Our Order has existed since time before memory, and if we don’t stop the blighters, whoever they are, then we’ll be the last of us. Only some corruption of our magic will remain. I do not fear my own death, but I will not allow the death of the Order. Tonight, we’ll end this.”
After Dam Ghin spoke, Dam Rose led us back to the ship.
“Stay inside, no matter what you hear tonight,” she said while we all stood on deck. “Don’t let anyone in who isn’t from our covenant, no matter who they are, no matter what they say.”
“What’s happening?” Haim asked.
“Get some rest,” Dam Rose answered.
“We can help,” I said. “Whatever you’re doing, we can help.”
Dam Rose shook her head sadly, then turned and walked away. She climbed down over the side of the ship and was gone.
“Well, to rot with that,” Araneigh said. She stood next to the guardrail and squinted. “They’re going up the mountain.”
I walked up next to her and looked. Black silhouettes moved among the trees, climbing steep paths. Steel glinted off the weapons of the witches. There was so little ley here, they’d need those weapons.
“That doesn’t make sense,” Daidi said.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“From what you told me, they’re looking for something at the root of the mountain.”
“They saw a blighter camp,” I said. “I heard Dam Lament say so.”
“Maybe,” Daidi said. “But there are cave mouths down here, and half the cave was carved out by giants. An old fisherman told me about it, told me never to wander alone in the woods at night, because the white worms crawl out from the cave mouths and steal children. Make them work the old giant’s mines and then eat them. I found a few of the caves, but never went in.”
“White worms?” Henomi asked.
“There’re no white wyrms anymore,” Araneigh said. “And it’s wyrms, with a y. Beasts that look like dragons, not slimy things that crawl in the ground. My father told me so, and he would know.”
Daidi turned to Henomi to answer her. “The white worms, wyrms, whatever, the fisherman says they crawl on ten legs, and they’re as big as a wolf, and they have translucent scales. They see as much with the antennae all over their bodies as they do with their eyes.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Haim said, “and they talk in riddles, and their nests are made of bones, and come on, if they were real, we’d know it. How long did the fisherman claim it had been since anyone saw one?”
“When he was a boy,” Daidi said, “his friend got taken by one.”
“When he was a boy,” Haim said, “his friend ran away from home, because look at this place!”
“They used to be real,” Araneigh said. “My father told me. And if there are blighters under the mountain, maybe there are wyrms too. But they don’t matter. What matters is that there are blighters, we have to do something about them.”
“No, we don’t,” Haim said. “The witches are dealing with it.”
“So what?” Daidi asked, moving over to stand next to Araneigh. “We’re witches too. This is our chance to prove that to ourselves and to the dams. I know the way.”
“If the witches know the blighters are headquartered at the root of the mountain,” Haim said, “and they’re confronting them atop the mountain, there’s a reason for it.”
“We’ll just scout out the caves, be real quiet,” Araneigh said. “Then when the witches come back in the morning empty-handed, we can tell them what we’ve figured out.”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“It won’t be as simple as that,” Haim said.
“Yeah,” Henomi said. “It’s a stupid plan. But I’m still going.”
“Why?” Haim asked.
“Having each other’s backs right now is more important than being right or safe,” Henomi answered.
“Can’t argue with that,” Daidi said.
“I could,” Haim said. “What about you, Lorel?”
“Henomi’s right,” I said. My voice shook a little as I said it. “I don’t like the idea at all, if I’m being honest. But Dam Fia told me something once. She said that anything a coven does, it is as though it has been done by every member of that coven. Or something like that. I think she said it better. I wish I could ask her, but I can’t, because she’s dead, she was killed by a blighter. And our covens are doing something. Which means we do it too.”
“If we can help, we have to,” Henomi said. “The Great Mother asks that of us.”
“Oh, good, let’s get ourselves killed,” Haim grumbled. Still, she went belowdecks and came back with a lantern and an axe.
SIXTEEN
We scoured the woods for almost an hour before we found a cave mouth, a single crack, waist-high, cut into a wall of limestone that glistened with falling water.
“We’re doing this?” I asked.
“We’re doing this,” Henomi agreed. Her bravery was infectious.
I got onto my hands and knees and crawled into the cave. It was so narrow I had to hold the lantern ahead of me, not at my side, so I couldn’t see much of anything.
The tunnel opened up after a couple dozen yards, and I stood up and gaped at my surroundings. I was so taken by the beauty of the cave that I didn’t notice the other whelps until they were standing next to me.
“Would you look at that?” Haim asked.
I was looking.
There were several cave systems near Ledston that Lane and I had explored as children. Every one was different, but they were different like eyes were different from person to person. This one was as different from those as a pond was to the ocean: different not only in scale, but in form and power.
Crystals shone on every bit of the cathedral-sized room we’d entered, every stalagmite and stalactite, every crevice and cranny and crawlspace. My lantern caught on a million prisms, and color washed over the place, bright and proud. The ceiling was lost somewhere in the reflected light above us, and for a moment I lost all sense of direction, any idea of up and down.
I sat on a natural ledge of bright stone and tried to collect myself. Haim stood over me, still gazing with mouth and eyes wide open.
The silence of the cave was punctuated by the distant slow drip of water, a scurrying and scraping that left me uneasy, and occasional far-off voices. I couldn’t make out words, but I could tell they carried fear.
The others heard the voices too, and we set off to the far end of the hall. Twice, I nearly stepped into a hole. Once I caught myself; once Araneigh caught me by the collar of my dress and saved me from sliding down into the rainbow light.
The voices got no louder, no more distinct, and I couldn’t tell which of the dozens or hundreds of tunnels they might be coming from.
“What do we do?” Haim asked when we reached the far end of the hall.
“We’ll just figure out where the voices are coming from, that’s all,” I said. “Then we can go back.”
“How, though?” Henomi asked.
“We follow the ley,” I answered, “if there is any.”
“What?” Haim asked.
“That makes sense,” Araneigh said. “If I was a blighter, I’d go where the ley flows to, to suck it up.”
“We can’t see ley,” Haim said.
“Lorel and I can,” Araneigh answered.
It was too bright. We shuttered our lanterns and in an instant, the darkness was absolute.
“Hey!” Henomi yelped, terror in her voice.
“It’s okay,” I said. “It’s easier to see it in the …”
I saw it. A thick, dim band of purple snaked across my vision, pulsing with blue. As soon as I focused my eyes on it, it went away, of course. But it didn’t take long to find it again. It didn’t illuminate at all. Light that didn’t illuminate.
Purple is a color of ill fortune, I remembered. Useful for cursing your enemies.
I unhooded the lantern and lost the ley current, but it didn’t matter. I remembered its path: it had come down through the roof and disappeared into a crevasse in the wall.
“Come on,” I said, “this way.”
We made our way deeper into the cave, stopping every few minutes to block the light and see the way again. Not every room was as magnificent as the first chamber, but each had its own beauty.
Most importantly, the voices grew louder. After walking for a long time, we could find our way purely from sound. The voices were clearer now. The scraping, scratching, and scuttling were clearer too.
We stood in a passage too narrow to walk two abreast, ankle-deep in snow-cold water, staring into a crawlspace set into the wall at waist height that angled sharply down into the rock.
The noises were coming from that hole, loud now that we were close.
“Found what we needed,” Henomi said. “Time to go back.”
“Sure,” Araneigh said. “I’m going to take a look first, though.”
With that, she climbed up to the hole and disappeared through it. Daidi went next, then Haim.
“Don’t leave me,” Henomi said to me.
“Sure,” I said. “They’ll be right back.” I wasn’t confident, though. I was just pretending to be. Henomi had bolstered my strength, it was time to bolster hers.
Long moments went by. Then the noises grew quiet.
“Help us!” I heard through the hole. I couldn’t figure out whose voice it was.
“Don’t!” another voice rang out. This one sounded like Araneigh. “Get the witches, get the crones, get the Order! But don’t come alone!”
“No more witches, no more crones,” the first voice responded, singing, “come alone, come alone.”
