The Sapling Cage, page 3
Lament walked without her crutch, though a look of pain sat on her face and she took occasional sips from a glass vial from her pouch.
“Is that a potion?” I asked the second time I saw her drink from it.
“It is.”
“If you have a potion for healing, why do you have a crutch?” Before she answered, I submitted my own suggestion. “Is it a balance thing?”
“Oh, this is every bit as much a crutch as the one I left at camp,” she said. “It’s something that will keep me together while I heal. It doesn’t do the healing for me. You’d have to be in a place of great magic to make a potion like that, and it wouldn’t keep long on the trail even if you did.”
The sun inched over the horizon while we walked, and soon we stood on the rocky shore at the base of the falls.
“It’s beautiful,” Hex said. She hadn’t spoken the entire walk.
She was right. There are prettier waterfalls in these hills, but the Giant’s Shower was a wide ribbon of water that fell twenty feet into a perfect swimming pool.
“How does this work?” I asked. “It takes a full hunting party to bring down a boar, doesn’t it?” I didn’t want to kill a boar. I didn’t even like killing rats in the stables.
“Yeah, but we’re witches, so we’re going to cheat,” Hex spat out, glaring at Dam Lament.
“Can you see the magic in this place, Lorel?” Lament asked. “It’s coming up from the water, like mist.”
“No,” I said.
“Then this is your first lesson. Magic flows through the world like winds. Sometimes it follows waterways, or veins of ore, or root systems, or wanderers. It’s always changing course, and it’s always taking different routes. It’s always in motion, though it moves faster where it’s hot and slower where it’s cold. That’s why the most powerful witches stay in motion themselves. They follow the chaotic winds of magic.”
“I think witches stay in motion because everyone hates them,” Hex offered. She picked up a stone and skipped it across the water. It disappeared behind the falls.
“Whelp Hex, you will learn discipline,” Lament said. It was impossible to read her expression through the wound on her face. “If not because respecting your teachers is its own reward, then because if you can’t control your own chaotic nature, you’ll never control the chaos of magic.”
“To rot with magic,” Hex said. “To rot with the Order of the Vine, and to rot with both of you.” She took a step closer to me, her spear held across her chest. The blade gleamed sharp in the morning sun.
I didn’t panic, because I didn’t have time to panic. She shoved me with the haft of the weapon and I lost my footing and tumbled backwards, crashing into the cold, cold water. It was snowmelt, the kind of water that will leach every bit of your warmth and strength and cause your muscles to seize. Some mornings, I loved to dive into water like that, to feel the shock of it. But I’d never done it in a linen dress, and I’d always done it by choice. I spluttered and dragged myself up onto the rocks, gasping for air.
I lay on my back, heaving, staring at the dawn but unable to focus on anything except the cold and my surprise.
“She …” I tried to get out, “she …”
“I saw,” Lament said.
I staggered to my feet and looked around. Hex was gone.
“Did you …” I could barely speak between chattering teeth.
“I didn’t turn her into a fish, no,” Lament said. “She ran off. Back to camp, I assume. I don’t interfere with the quarrels of whelps.”
“Yeah, well, thanks for nothing,” I said.
“We’d better get you out of that dress, warm you up.” Lament took a step closer to me.
“No!” I shouted. The witch stopped in her tracks. “No …” I said. I fought to keep my limbs from shaking. “I’ll be fine.”
“Are you sure?” Lament asked.
“I’m fine,” I repeated. I couldn’t be found out. Not so soon. “Can we get back to the lesson?”
Lament stared at me. She was probably trying to figure out my motives, trying to figure out what was going on in my head. Three breaths later, she nodded.
“Every school of magic perceives energy differently, because learning to see magic is learning to apply a metaphor to reality. When I look out at the pool at the base of the falls, I see a flowing mist of color. Mostly turquoise, with some streaks of lavender running throughout. The blue and the green would particularly help cast any curse that calms or paralyzes its victim, while the purple is good for causing ill fortune. I see what my sisters would see, what you will one day see, because it’s what we’ve trained ourselves to see.
“To perform magic, I siphon the energy, called ley, into my working. An iron magician from the kingdom of Oxley would see a writhing mass of phantom blades, and he would find the tool he needed and grasp it by the hilt, pulling it free and using it to carve reality to his whims. A Metlurian animist, if she made it to the northern half of the world, would see a single life force, an entity. A faerie. The animist would ask the faerie for a boon.”
Shivering made it hard to focus on her words, but what she said was fascinating enough to distract me from the cold a little. My first lesson as a witch.
“It’s the same energy,” Lament continued, “but all three of us would perceive it differently, interact with it differently. Not only that, we’d be able to accomplish different works.”
“How can there be a faerie in this lake at the same time as there isn’t?” I asked.
“That’s the power of words, of teachings. The way in which we understand the world shapes our ability to interact with the world.”
“What if I learn your way … our way … and later learn to see the faeries? Would I be able to see the ley and the spirits both?”
“No,” Lament said. “At best, you would have to choose. More likely, your brain would choose for you. It can only support one framework at a time. Holding two competing worldviews would tear you apart, as every time you saw energy the two ideas would war in your mind.”
“I’d rather see faeries,” I said.
“You say that only because you’ve never seen them, and because you’ve never spoken with an animist about the toll consorting with fey would take on you.”
I knew she was probably right, but that didn’t mean I didn’t want to see faeries.
“So what are we going to do with this magic coming off the water?” I asked. “Hex said we’re going to cheat.”
Lament took a tiny vial from her pouch and uncorked it. A vile odor of tar and sickly sweet rot poured out into the air. Lament dipped one long, sharp fingernail into the black liquid within. I watched closely, mesmerized. A single drop sat on her nail, and Lament knelt down beside the pool.
“Great Mother, every child must sleep,” she incanted, as she dipped her finger in the water. “Great Mother, every child must dream.”
I tensed up, waiting for a blast of magic, or for the world to turn red around us like it had the night before, or for … really for anything to happen.
Nothing did.
Lament stepped away from the water and ushered me toward the tree line a few paces from the rocks.
“Now?” I asked.
“Now nothing,” Lament said. “Now we wait.”
“What did you do?”
“Now we wait without talking.”
I shut up.
It was cold in the shade, and I felt rivulets of water running down the small of my back, dripping down into my shoes.
I couldn’t go home. I wasn’t allowed to complain. I couldn’t do anything but wait.
Lament stood next to me, towering over me, and it bothered me that I couldn’t figure out what she thought of me. Was I even safe? She hadn’t intervened when Hex had attacked me. Would she intervene if a boar did?
After an interminable wait, which could have been ten minutes or an hour but felt like a month, a fawn came out of the forest and approached the pool. It looked around nervously for predators, then reached its neck down and drank its fill.
One large flat rock jutted out over the pool. I had dived off that rock half a hundred times, sunned myself on that rock half a hundred times. The fawn saw a patch of sunlight on the rock and walked into it. It was beautiful. It lay down and went to sleep.
Lament had poisoned the water with a sleeping spell, but instead of a boar, we’d caught a fawn.
“Kill it,” Lament said. She said it like she was commanding a horse, firm and unwavering.
“What?”
“Aim for its neck, that will kill it quick but keep the meat good.”
“It’s a fawn,” I said.
“Kill it, whelp.”
I hesitated, the boar spear in my hand.
“Kill it!”
I stepped out from the trees and approached.
Is this what it took to be a witch?
The fawn slept soundly, curled in on itself, its head tucked between its legs, its back covered in white spots. It couldn’t yet be a year old. If it was without its mother, its mother was likely dead. If I didn’t kill it, a wolf would.
The spear was heavy and awkward in my hands. I could press the blade against the creature’s throat, then step down on the cross guard. That would be easier.
The spearhead was shaking. I was shaking. Maybe I was crying. I was cold and miserable and I didn’t want to kill anything.
“Kill it!” Lament yelled, louder than before.
The spear clattered against the rock when I dropped it, and I fell next, collapsing from stress and fear. I put my arms around the baby deer, and it was warm, the only warm thing I’d felt that morning. I cried.
“No,” I said, loudly at first, then I whispered. “No.”
My clothes and my eyes were both almost dry by the time we made it back to camp empty-handed. Dam Lament said nothing the entire walk. By the end of it, she was struggling some with her wounded leg. Her potion must have worn off. I offered her a shoulder to lean on, but she ignored me.
The sun had long since cleared the horizon, and the witches were up and about. Three sat in a triangle a few paces apart from one another in some kind of meditation, while Alectoria stirred a cauldron that smelled like barley.
Hex sat by the stream, her legs dangling into the water. She looked up as we approached, but looked away just as quickly.
Dam Alectoria approached Lament, offering her the crutch.
“Anything?” she asked.
This was it. Lament would say that I didn’t have what it took to be a witch, and with luck, they’d just send me home.
“Nothing,” Lament said. “No luck.”
“A shame.” The older woman walked off.
“Why did—” I started to ask.
“Look, whelp. I wanted meat to thicken our stew. You wanted to save the fawn. You got what you wanted, and I didn’t get what I wanted, and that’s the way the world works sometimes. I can’t exactly force you to kill, can I?”
She hobbled off without another word.
I didn’t understand witches very well at all.
A rock splashed in the water, startling me. I turned, and Hex was throwing stones into the creek. It wouldn’t do to make an enemy of the only girl my age—better that I clear the air between us. I approached.
“I understand what you meant by cheating,” I told her.
“Leave me alone, whelp.” She threw another stone, this time at a tree on the far side of the creek.
“I couldn’t do it,” I said. “I couldn’t kill a baby deer.”
“Well aren’t you just as high and noble as the Duchess.”
She threw another stone. She had perfect form, and it cracked into a dead branch, scattering pine needles into the wind.
I didn’t say anything, because I couldn’t figure out what to say.
She didn’t say anything, because clearly she didn’t want to.
I walked away and ate porridge by myself.
THREE
I think most of being a witch is walking.
It suited me fine that we spent the whole next day walking. Staying in motion was a good way to avoid focusing on my troubles and fears. We didn’t move fast, owing to Lament’s leg, but no one seemed to begrudge her slowing us down.
The witches were more talkative in the morning, and I finally met the rest of them. Dam Ilma was the second crone. Her skin was a pale and sickly gray, her skin an intriguing maze of wrinkles and folds. She was as fat as Dam Alectoria was thin, and the two of them walked all day without any sign of tiring.
The middle-aged witch was quiet and always seemed to have a smile on her face. Her name was Dam Sorrel. She was so calm, pleasant, and unassuming that she was, somehow, the most frightening. It wasn’t just the sword at her waist and the shield on her back.
The witch with a birdcage wasn’t a witch yet at all, it turned out. Rose was Dam Sorrel’s apprentice. She was also, alongside Dam Lament, assigned to shepherd us whelps. Rose and Lament didn’t always walk with us, but they constantly kept eyes on us. Rose answered my questions and seemed to delight in anticipating them. I liked her immediately.
The seven of us followed hidden but well-trodden trails that Rose called witchways—winding paths that most closely aligned to the movement of magical energy. Some of that energy flowed like rivers and streams while some buffeted around like winds. Leypaths, leylines, leywinds, and leystorms. At least, that was what Rose told me. I still couldn’t see or sense any of it. Rose told me that would come in time. I tried to take her word for it.
Most of the day, I just stared at the woods as we walked past. I did ask Rose about her birdcage, but she simply shook her head. I knew almost nothing about the runes—witches adorned their clothes with them sometimes, but none of the witches who’d passed through Ledston had ever spoken about their meanings.
Our path took us west, roughly parallel to South Ede. Twice, the trail spat us out onto the cobbled trade road itself, once to make use of the Landsman River Bridge and once to skirt a marshy patch. Each time, before we stepped out onto the road, Dam Ilma went ahead armed with a fistful of magic charms to make sure we wouldn’t run afoul of any knights. Dam Alectoria was never far behind.
“Why do those two walk up front?” I asked Rose in the evening when we stopped to refill our water skins in a creek.
“Witches get more powerful as they get older,” Rose said. “Not just because of experience and learning. The crones say it’s that their bodies become more comfortable with the earth and the ley.”
“It’s a curse,” Alectoria grumbled, walking over. I’d assumed she was way out of earshot. “Your body wants so hard to return to the earth that everything you do hurts. My body won’t respond to half the commands I give it, but the earth responds twice as well. One reason we follow the ley is that some of us—none in this coven, but some of the crones you’ll meet soon enough—would literally fall apart without magic.”
“So you’re up front because you’re, I don’t know, the most sensitive to the ley? Or because you need it the most to keep going?”
“No, you half-wit,” Alectoria said, without a trace of anger or frustration in her voice, “we’re up front because if we run into people who don’t like us, we’ll destroy them.”
Not an hour later, we stumbled out of the woods into a glade. The sun was low in the sky, turning the early stalks of wild wheat a golden-red hue, and the nightflowers bloomed sapphire and purple. A storm gathered on the eastern horizon behind us. In the west, the sky was a wash of fire. I didn’t know that I’d ever seen something so beautiful.
If only my mom, or Lane, were there to share the experience with me. I didn’t want to cry, not in front of the coven, but loneliness came over me like I’d never felt it before. It was like how I felt at the end of every summer, leaving Ledston for Port Cek. But in Port Cek, I had my dads and a few friends. With the coven, I had no one.
I could sneak off somewhere soon and cry alone.
No. I was Lorel of the Vine, a whelp and soon a witch. I didn’t need to cry anymore.
As the path wound through the glade, an ancient manor house came into view, just inside the forest on the far side of the clearing. Its thin spires of white marble jutted above the canopy, each with wooden plank stairs spiraling around their exterior. These were the watchtowers of the old kingdom. There were a few along the road to Port Cek, but these were out of the way, in the forest, incorporated into the manor.
The manor was built in another forgotten style, only a single story tall aside from its towers, with gray stone walls that wove through the trees of the forest, broken by mismatched glass windows. Its towers might have kept watch over the forest for half a thousand years, while the house built around them had likely only stood for a couple hundred.
What it must be like to live there! The forest at your back, the glade at your front, and the Old King’s watchtowers to look over it all!
The path turned from packed dirt to cobbles as it approached the manor, and the silent line of black-clad witches in front of me marched up to a sort of stone pavilion at the front entryway. Ilma pounded on the wooden door three times with her massive fist.
The door opened on its own, and we went in.
We sat in silence in a small entry hall. A narrow bench lined each wall, and two witches sat on each one. Rose sat between Hex and me on the floor against one wall. The small casket Alectoria carried like a pack rested against the wall next to her feet.
The only light came from a window set into the ceiling, and soon it was dimmed by the coming of a storm and the fading of the day. Rain beat a slow rhythm against the glass, and lightning occasionally cracked the sky. There were only two doors: the one we had entered through and another at the opposite end of the hall.
Every inch of the wooden walls was carved into elaborate forest scenes. In some, animal-headed humans hunted human-headed animals, but these were few and far between. It was mostly just tree after tree, carved deep into the wood.
