The Sapling Cage, page 2
When I wore those dresses, I couldn’t stop smiling.
“You’re beautiful,” Lane said. She was smiling too. She thought for a minute, then dug through the wardrobe. She pulled out a necklace. A black stone pendant hung from a delicate steel chain. She held it out to me. No one in town had anything so nice.
“Your mother didn’t say anything about taking any jewelry,” I said.
“She’s dead. Take it. As a thank you.”
I took it and put it on. It hung just above the low neckline of the long dress, the stone cool and comforting against my chest. Despite how I was born, I was going to get to be a witch. Despite how I was born, I was going to get to live as a woman.
Lane squeezed me. She was crying into my neck. “Thank you,” she whispered.
“Of course.” I started crying too.
I slept in my long dress that night. I wanted to get used to wearing it, and also I just didn’t want to take it off. I slept in one of the empty rooms in the manor. A windstorm howled outside and branches cracked in the distance.
I dreamt about a witch with translucent skin. I saw her skull and her veins and her teeth like I was looking through foggy glass. She was a real woman, a real witch, who’d wandered through town when I was an infant. I’d dreamt about her ever since.
That night, though, I was a witch, and the glass-faced witch was with me, next to me, tied to me with thick hemp rope. We were in a boat. Hands lifted us out of the boat and threw us overboard, and we sank, and I was drowning, tied to the glass-faced witch.
Mother’s May came and went with no sign of the coven. No word from anyone passing through, either, though of course I had to be careful with my inquiries. Witches weren’t beloved everywhere across Cekon. None of the baronies outlawed witchcraft outright, but not everyone knew and appreciated the social utility of witchcraft, and very few of the knightly brotherhoods would raise a hand or a sword to protect witches. Some knights saw witches as a threat to their power and hunted them. If I told the wrong knights we were expecting witches, I might even get them killed.
Most of the news was talk of strife far to the north. Duchess Helte had pressed some ancient and dubious claim and annexed some baron’s holdings. The news felt impossibly distant.
I tried to make myself useful at the stables, but as the days wore on, I got more and more anxious and distracted. One day I forgot to fasten a buckle and a passing merchant fell from her horse and injured her back. After that, my mother told me it was about time she got used to running the place alone anyway, which left me with too much time to worry.
What would witches do to an impostor? Would they kick me out, turn me into a sow, or kill me? They’d probably just kick me out. Maybe.
My mother took to eating dinner with us at Lane’s house, particularly after she fired me and I spent more of my time baking and cooking.
Five days after Mother’s May, I was reaching my breaking point. We ate on the back porch, where the overgrown garden kept away prying eyes, and I wore my short dress. The sun was just below the horizon. We were mopping up the last of a turnip and barley soup with fresh-baked bread, and I just couldn’t keep my feelings cooped up anymore.
“I give up,” I said. “This waiting, it’s going to kill me. Or the witches will kill me, or people will kill me for being a witch. Better I just give up. I’ll go be a sailor or something instead. Sailors see the world too.”
Lane looked up, her brown eyes just starting to go wide with fear. If I backed out, the coven would take her instead.
“You can do anything you want with your life, Lorel,” my mother said. I always knew a lecture was coming when she used my name. “And I don’t wish you were off to be a witch. But you made a promise to Lane.”
“I didn’t say I promise,” I said. As soon as the words came out of my mouth, I regretted them.
“Saying you promise isn’t the only way to promise.”
“It’s okay,” Lane said. “It was nice of you to offer, but if you back out, it’s okay.”
I didn’t like my mom being mean to me and I didn’t like Lane being nice to me. I didn’t like much of anything at all.
The Ledston bell tolled, twice.
The Ledston bell rang once for friendly knights and merchants come to town, twice for friendly brigands and witches and other people the Baron didn’t approve of, three times for royalty, and cacophonously for any of the above who looked like they might stir up trouble.
“Never mind,” I said, standing up. “I’ll do it.”
“Upstairs with you,” my mother said to Lane. “Out of sight. You look too much like your mother.”
Lane darted over and hugged me. She pulled back to look at me, like she was trying to say something, then she gave up, shook her head, and ran into the house.
“Are you going through with this?” my mother asked.
I stood up straight, smoothed out my dress. “Of course,”
I said. “I made a promise.”
My arms shook uncontrollably at my side as I walked to the center of town, and it was all I could do to concentrate on my breathing.
“We have come for the daughter of Leona of the Lead.”
Five witches stood shoulder to shoulder in the center of the town square.
My whole childhood, I’d wanted to know about witches. It was always hard to separate rumor from truth, but I knew a few things. I knew that every full-fledged witch was the other’s equal, for one thing.
Each of these five wore black from head to toe, despite the warm evening and the heat radiating from the cobbles beneath their boots. One was roughly my mother’s age, with the ivory-pale skin and narrow nose of someone from the far north. Two of them were as old as anyone I’d ever seen. Two of them could scarcely have been twenty.
One of the youngest had a fresh wound cut across her face and stood with the help of a crutch. Two of the others had bandaged arms. They must have had trouble on the way. Maybe that was why they were so late. Most of them were armed with spears or axes or swords. The uninjured young one carried what looked like a birdcage, covered with a cloth embroidered in the indecipherable runes of witchcraft.
Behind them, a girl my age stood shyly, like she didn’t know quite what to do. Another recruit, most likely. She wore the most beautiful black cloak, made of glistening sea-wool. Its hood had a long pointed tail. That was a good cloak for a witch.
“I’m Lorel,” I said. I lie the best when I sort of just avoid telling the truth instead of lying outright, so I didn’t mention that I only had one name. I stepped forward.
One witch, one of the crones, broke from the line and circled me, looking me over. The rest of the witches carried baskets of wicker on their backs, but this woman bore a casket, child-sized, instead.
“Lorel of the Lead,” she said.
My name was just Lorel, as my family bore no titles, but who was I to correct a witch who’d likely been born before my long-dead great grandmother?
She stopped in front of me. “Do you come willing or merely accepting?” she asked. There was an old scar on her cheek, a crescent moon white against her dark olive skin.
“I come willing,” I said. My voice wavered as I spoke. What had I gotten myself into? With eyes as old and wise as hers, how could she not see right through me?
The witch smiled. Some of her teeth were yellow, some of her teeth were black. One of her teeth was capped in gold, another capped in pearl. The contrast between them all was unnerving. “Not many come willing, not these past years.”
“Why?” I asked.
She ignored my question and went back to stand in the line.
Only a handful of people had gathered to see the strange procession. The herbalist, a few farmers, the midwife—River’s mother. If any one of them said anything about me dressed up like a girl, the whole plan would fall apart.
My mother stood among the onlookers, balancing my wicker basket of clothes on her hip, holding it by one of the woven shoulder straps.
“Lorel of the Lead, I summon you into the Order of the Vine. Today and forever, you are Lorel of the Vine.”
I nodded. I knew no courtly manners for an event like this.
“Do you have anything to bring with you?”
“Just clothes,” I said.
My mother walked toward me then, setting the basket down by my feet. Tears welled in the corners of her eyes.
“You’ve been like a daughter to me,” my mother said. She winked, then hugged me for a moment. “Go off and be your best self.”
The crone looked between me and my mother for a brief moment, as if noticing the similarities in our features, but she said nothing.
With no more formality, the line of witches turned and walked out of town. I grabbed my basket of clothes and hurried after. They hadn’t seen through me. I was going to be a witch. I wasn’t shaking anymore. I was grinning.
TWO
For half an hour or more, we walked in silence. Even the nightbirds seemed to grow quiet at our passing.
We left Ledston, but we didn’t stay long on South Ede. Not a few hundred paces from the stables, we cut north into the hills on an old hunter’s trail.
I knew this part of the forest well. Madrone and pine crowded out the night sky, but if we followed the right paths, we’d find our way to the only mature grove of birch in the barony.
A few of the witches carried tallow lanterns, and the faint light cast strange shadows among the trees. The youngest witch hovered near the other recruit and me, a faint smile on her lips. She was as willowy as a tree, with a wide nose, and she held that mysterious birdcage instead of a lantern.
After we turned south along the creek, I knew where we were headed. Another five minutes and we were there.
The long-abandoned hut had walls of rough-hewn marble blocks, some as large as a mule. It had been built by giants, I’d heard. It stood just at the edge of the creek, though a thousand years of erosion had begun to wear away at its foundation. A glint of the gibbous moon reflected off the water, but it was hard to see the building clearly in the dark forest. That didn’t matter. Lane and I had been there a hundred times. When we were younger, we’d climbed over the roof to pretend to be brigands fighting off imaginary knights, or we’d dug holes in the ground nearby to plant an imaginary garden. The past few years, we’d come just to talk, to sit in the window frame and watch birds in the trees nearby. We’d never stayed overnight, though. It was haunted, we’d told one another. Witches probably slept there and did their magic in the firepit at its center.
We’d been right, apparently.
The coven formed a semicircle around the ten-foot-tall doorway, and the young witch herded me and the other recruit to the side.
It was one of the crones, the one who’d inspected me in the square, who broke the spell of silence. “Lorel of the Vine, present yourself.”
The other recruit stared at me, her eyes filled with … what? Worry? Fear? Certainly, whatever the initiation rite entailed, it wouldn’t hurt me. Would it?
I approached the semicircle.
“When you were nothing but a whim in your mother’s belly, myself and two others of the Vine drove a monster away from Ledston. You’ve heard this story?”
I nodded. This witch must be Dam Alectoria, because her two companions died on the tusks of Sir Hillock the Monster after he’d transformed himself into a boar. I’d heard the story a thousand times in a thousand ways, because the confrontation had taken place on market day and everyone who saw it seemed to have seen something slightly different.
“Why were you promised to the Order?” Dam Alectoria asked.
“To replace the lives the Order lost defending Ledston,” I answered, without thinking much about it.
“No,” Dam Alectoria said. “We lost two lives, yet we only asked for one. Why were you promised to the Order?”
The question caught me off guard the second time. I looked at the other witches as though their faces might betray the answer.
“Because …” I stammered. I thought hard about the little I knew of witches. Pacts and bargains were so much a part of the stories. “Because everything must bear a cost?”
“Not a cost like merchants might ask,” Dam Alectoria said. She smiled at my answer even as she corrected me. “But power without sacrifice is the only real evil in this world. Ledston wanted us, wanted the power we represent. We asked for sacrifice to maintain balance. This is the first lesson, the lesson which all the others come from. There is no good in this world. The two opposing forces at work are balance and evil.”
“What if I hadn’t wanted to be a witch?” I asked.
Alectoria’s mesmerizing smile grew wider. “Then balance would have come in other ways.”
I was that balance. Since Lane hadn’t joined the witches, I had. My mother had made that sacrifice in place of Leona. Had she known that?
The middle-aged witch began a song. I didn’t understand the words, if there were words, and the melody followed no pattern or notes I could recognize. It was an alien music, unsettling. More like birdsong or the cries of foxes than the music that people make. When a second witch joined her, though, she harmonized somehow. Then a third. Then the singers stepped aside and formed a triangle around us.
It was magic. For the first time in my life, I was witnessing magic.
The strange music felt like a wall around me, holding me in. The world beyond the singers was an endless expanse of red light. The trees were gone. The hut was gone. The other recruit was gone. It was just me and the witches. I was dizzy.
“Lorel of the Vine,” the witches said, each in their own voices but so coordinated it was like one entity spoke through them. The three singers somehow continued to sing while they spoke. “Will you accept the teachings of the Order?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Will you pursue balance and accept the cost of power?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Will you protect your sisters of the Vine and accept their protection in return?”
“Yes.”
First one singer dropped the thread of the music, then another. Finally, the third sang one last note, and the wall of sound went down. The red plains disappeared and the forest returned. It was like I’d been spinning and suddenly I’d stopped.
I couldn’t decide if I should throw up, sit down, or pass out.
I passed out.
I woke just before dawn with the first morning call of a thrush. Birdsong reminded me of the witches’ eerie song the night before, and the magic it brought about.
I opened my eyes and stared for a while at the smooth bronze skin of the large madrone tree above me, its limbs like muscles. I was on my back on a flat rock beside the river. Cold seeped through the stone and into me, and I had only a threadbare wool blanket for warmth, yet I’d slept well.
Someone had put me to bed.
Someone might have seen my body.
Frenzied with fear, I lifted the blanket to check, but I was still in the same dress I’d worn the night before. I turned on my side and saw a few witches still sleeping, with one quietly preparing a morning fire. I hadn’t been found out, then, or they would have left me. Or worse.
I should have been sore after sleeping on rock, but when I stood up, nothing in my body complained. I’d never had a better night’s sleep.
“Morning, whelp,” the young witch with the wound across her face said to me. She leaned heavily on her crutch, but her shoulders were broad and she looked strong. The wound across her face was healing badly, a stripe of blood red edged by the gross pale white of dying skin. It ran from her temple to her chin, just missing her eye.
“I’m scarcely a whelp,” I said.
“If you make it a year, you’re an apprentice. Then, when we decide you’re ready, a witch. Right now, though, you’re a whelp.”
“Okay,” I said, though I still bristled at the label.
“I’m Dam Lament,” she offered by way of introduction.
It had always seemed strange to me that witches used the same formal titles as knights. A woman knight was a dam, a man knight was a sir. All witches were dams, of course. Would I be a sir?
“Lorel,” I said.
“I know.”
Of course she knew. I blushed my embarrassment.
“You know how to handle a boar spear, Lorel? You’re a tall enough girl.”
“I’ve never used one,” I said, stumbling over my words. “The other … I mean the boys in my village …”
“Wouldn’t let a girl in on the hunt, then?” Lament asked.
Something like that. The men in town had always brought boys along to hunt, and occasionally one of the older girls, but I’d never been invited. I was too scrawny. Too feminine.
“Well, today you’ll come with me. I bet you know this area.”
“I do,” I said. “This hut, my friend Lane and I come here all the time, and there are crayfish in the creek, and if you go about ten minutes upstream, you’ll reach a pool where …”
But my audience was walking away from me while I rattled on.
“Whelp Hex,” Lament said, nudging the other recruit with the foot of her crutch. “It’s time to be up.”
“I want to sleep,” the other recruit said, curled on her side. Lane always complained when she was woken up, too.
“The Great Mother never sleeps, and it’s a curse that any of us must at all,” Lament said.
“To rot with the Great Mother. Sleeping is great, and it’s not even daytime yet, not really.”
“Don’t care, don’t care, get up or I’ll turn you into a fish.”
Would she really? She sounded like she meant it.
Hex rose to her feet. She was a few inches shorter than me, but wider set and strong. No one could replace Lane, not really, but I was happy I might find a friend.
“Grab a spear,” Lament told her. “We’re off to hunt.”
I took them up a trail to the pool at the base of the falls. Lane and I had seen deer drinking from the water there, as well as occasional boar tracks.
The spear Lament gave me was half again as tall as me. It had a witchbladed spearhead—that’s what I’d heard it called when the blade of a weapon looks like a flame or a slithering snake—and a crossbar underneath the head to keep whatever you stabbed from continuing to run at you. It was hard to walk through the trees with a long pole like that. Hex looked comfortable with hers, keeping it out of the low-hanging branches while staying aware of its blade.
