The Sapling Cage, page 8
I flushed with pride.
“Lord Eddercop isn’t the father though, not in the usual way,” Dam Willow said.
“Who are her parents, then?” I asked.
“It’s not my right to tell you.”
Curiosity ate away at me, but I decided not to pry further. It probably wouldn’t have done any good, but also, Dam Willow was right. That wasn’t my business. I didn’t know if even Araneigh knew.
I spent another half an hour hulling and chopping nuts, listening to Willow’s one-sided gossip to Heavens. She talked about the forest, and she talked about old witches I’d never heard of, and she talked about strands of ley as though they were people—which had gone where, which had mingled with which others, which had faded into nothing.
Dam Heavens spiced the food, pulling vials and jars of herbs and powders from the many pockets of her cloak. Some were familiar—rosemary, poppy, mint—while others were completely unknown to me.
A covenant eats at gloaming, I learned, which is what witches called twilight. There was some strange rule about attuning the body to ley when so many witches are in one place. The three of us rushed to make sure the meal was ready by the time the sun disappeared.
When the sun was low and the evening chill had set in, I carried basket after basket of bread to the central clearing in camp. A bonfire’s worth of wood sat ready to be lit, and stumps were scattered around as seats.
On my final trip, Dam Willow and I carried a cauldron of soup between us on a thick branch. By then, the covenant was gathered. Crones and some of the infirm sat on the stumps, and the rest of the witches sat on the ground. The three covens each sat apart. Ours was the smallest by far, even though Dam Fia had joined us for dinner; each of the others had at least a dozen witches. Dam Lament was there without her crutch.
Most everyone held lanterns or candles, though a few women held white flame in their hands. All were silent figures in black. The sun was gone; only dusk remained. Another moment of simple beauty. A frightening beauty—I could scarcely imagine the power of those witches together—but a beauty nonetheless. A beauty I would get to be part of.
The whelps sat together, off to the side. I wasn’t excited about rejoining them because of Hex, but I trudged over regardless. We broke bread, dipped it into the soup, and ate in silence.
The whelps from the other covens gulped down their food ferociously. I chalked it up to the hard morning practice which had left two of them bloody.
When the last glimmer of dusk disappeared, a handbell tolled, and everyone put down their food. Apparently they really meant it about eating dinner only in gloaming. I’d eaten enough, but not as much as I’d wanted.
With the meal over, conversation erupted as all the witches and whelps said all the things one normally would say during a meal. Araneigh told me excitedly that Dam Lament had been able to get healed because of the ley pooled around the camp. Dam Willow came over to compliment me on the bread and to tell the rest of the whelps I’d made it from scratch, then hobbled away.
Hex looked like she was going to say something rude, to accuse me of kissing up to the witches, but everyone else told me how great the food was, so she said nothing. Maybe it was unkind of me to assume, maybe she hadn’t planned on doing that. Still, I was on edge around her.
Dam Willow had gone to sit with the witches of my coven. That made sense—she didn’t have a coven of her own. Neither did Dam Fia. The pair sat and talked quietly and conspiratorially with the rest of our coven. At some point, all seven of them left the grove entirely. When they returned, Rose had her birdcage with her.
After some time, once most of the conversations had petered out, four witches—one from each coven plus Dam Willow, our host—stood next to the stacked firewood and everyone grew silent.
Dam Alectoria spoke. “Every day we survive is a night we chance to live,” she said. She really had a knack for public speaking. Even without magic, her voice carried through the night.
“The night is ours and we are of it,” replied the other three, and much of the crowd.
With that, Dam Alectoria gestured at the fire and it sprang into being, fifteen feet high in its first moment, casting sparks to the very highest boughs of the forest. Heat and light poured out.
The crones circled the fire, two walking sunwise, the others counter, singing an atonal witch song. Most of the whelps around me were excited, but Hex looked afraid. Daidi reached over and held Hex’s hand.
In an instant, we were all in the red world. There were no trees, there was no fire. There were only witches and sky. Someone was singing that red song, the fox song, witch song, but I couldn’t see who.
“A few of us have been studying this blight, what the dryad has called the colddead,” Dam Alectoria said. Her voice wasn’t raised anymore. She spoke as though it were just her and me at a table, but of course she was talking to everyone. “Here’s what we’ve found.”
Dam Sorrel stood up and spoke next. “A lot of us know the basic seed of the colddead blight. When you draw ley, you can overdraw it. Overdrawing ley strips life itself away—usually from the witch, but a few of us have figured out how to divert that death to nearby plants, animals, or other people. It’s not a sustainable practice.
“That’s the basic principle of colddead, but none of us had ever imagined blight on the scale of an entire forest. No caster could hold enough power in their body to even make use of it. That’s what we had assumed.”
“Then we found this,” Dam Alectoria said. Rose handed her the cage and the older witch took off its cloth covering. Somehow, in the witchlight, I could see its contents close up even though I was far away. By concentrating, I could see anything and anyone close up if I wanted to, from any angle. It was dizzying, so I focused my attention back on the cage and the strange plant within. Inside the ornate golden cage was a sapling, no more than a foot high, with leaves that shone every color of the rainbow, bright enough to break through the red wash of the witchlight. The sapling grew from a skull. A human skull. Maybe a child’s. I turned away. It was too terrible to consider.
“This tree holds ley like a gourd holds water,” Dam Alectoria said. “We found it in this cage in a colddead forest while chasing blighters. None of us in our coven knew what to make of it. Dam Willow had some ideas, however.”
“I remember the Order of the Wand,” Dam Willow said, her voice sugar-sweet as she lifted the cage and gazed at its contents.
I looked over at the other whelps. If Dam Willow remembered the Order of the Wand, she was far, far older than any human—even a witch—had any right to be. Henomi was crying softly, her head resting on Haim’s shoulder.
“That Order looked at ley like they looked at books. They studied it, probed at it,” Dam Willow said. “They knew how to store ley, a little ley, in their wands. They did not overdraw.”
“The forests have been blighted by a magician or magicians overdrawing ley to store in cages like this one,” Dam Sorrel said. “We think they plant a seed inside a skull within these golden bars, then funnel power into it until it sprouts. None of us have tried to replicate it, it’s all speculation. Sunlight seems to drain the leyplant, so we’ve kept it under cloth. But we know this cage contains an immense amount of power, though none of us have tried to draw from it. The blighters are gathering power, at the expense of life and ley.”
“To what end?” someone asked.
Dam Alectoria shook her head. “I don’t know.” She draped the cloth back over the beautiful ley tree and the world was completely red again.
“Whose skull is it?” someone else asked.
“We don’t know. Best guess, it’s someone who died within the last year. But maybe someone killed for this purpose.”
It hit me in the gut. Whoever had built this had murdered a forest. Whoever had built this had murdered a child.
“If this is just a different method of working with magic, then we must accept it,” a voice called out. What a terrible thing to say. I concentrated on the voice and saw who it was, as if I were next to her: Dam Heavens, the quiet witch I’d cooked with all afternoon.
“Like Nethers we will accept it!” Dam Lament called out. “It’s imbalance and imbalance again. Colddead blight is an evil. Keeping ley captive, keeping it only for yourself, is an evil. Killing people to store ley in their skulls is evil.”
“They’re summoning monsters,” Dam Fia said. “Demons from the Nethers. Bringing them here by ritual, by inflicting pain, and leaving them to live in the blight.”
More people spoke. Dam Heavens didn’t voice her opinions again, but Dam Lament and Dam Fia argued powerfully against blight magic, the colddead magic. Destroying the earth was the last thing that most witches wanted to do. Only a few of those present defended the blighters’ magic, and not for long. The main discussion focused on how to treat the blighters, whoever they were. Some argued that if witches brought the blighters to light and to justice, the knights and the Duchess would stop harassing the Order of the Vine. Other witches argued that it was a bad idea to try to appease the nobility.
After a lengthy discussion, Dam Alectoria said, “It’s settled, then? We will deal with the blighters ourselves, without handing them over to any other justice.” Her job wasn’t to pronounce judgment, or to make a decision, but to bring together all the ideas of the entire covenant into a compromise that met the most needs. My dads had taught me this practice, which was common among the merchant sailors who’d collectivized.
“It’s settled,” many voices agreed.
“For the forests, and the world, for the majesty of the sky and the earth, in the name of the Great Mother, we declare this vendetta,” Dam Alectoria intoned.
I couldn’t tell if the oath itself was magic. Around witches, it was hard to tell what was supernatural and what was mundane.
The song stopped, and we left that red light. The world returned to normal, lit only by fire. Soon, an apprentice I didn’t know escorted us whelps to bed.
Only once we were in the tent did I think through what it meant to sleep in the same room with all the girls. Daidi changed into nightclothes. A few of them slept naked under thick wool blankets. Haim, though, kept all her clothes on when she lay down for bed, only taking off her cloak. I had to figure something out for the long term, but that night I was happy to just follow Haim’s lead and lie down without changing.
In my cot, I clasped my hands over my chest, closed my eyes, and took hours to still my mind enough to fall asleep.
SEVEN
When a witch I didn’t recognize came into the tent and cleared her throat, I sat bolt upright in bed. The sun wasn’t even out yet.
I wasn’t sure what I’d actually heard the night before and what I’d dreamed. There had been chanting and singing. Fox cries. All night, fox cries.
What does a covenant get up to at night, once its whelps are asleep?
“We will meet in the clearing today,” the witch said, then turned and walked into the darkness outside.
I hadn’t been able to see her face under her hood, and it was a bit like I’d dreamed her. The morning was cold, and I lingered a moment with a wool blanket around my shoulders before I got up, slipped on my boots and cloak, and followed the rest of the whelps into the morning.
We met by the ashes of the bonfire, the grove lit now by a triangle of braziers, three to a side. Each of the three sides glowed a different hue. One red, one blue, one purple. As I walked past, I realized each fire was cold, and each fire burned no fuel.
Our teacher, who’d woken us, paced with her hands clasped in front of her waist. When the wind crept through the trees and caught her loose robes, I saw she was skeletally thin. When she took down her hood, I gasped.
I’d seen her before. In my dreams.
The glass-faced witch was my teacher.
“Good morning to you,” the teacher said. Her voice was unnervingly normal.
Why was her face like that?
“Good morning,” we replied.
“There are three new faces in the firelight. Araneigh of the Vine. Hex of the Vine. Lorel of the Vine.” She looked at me, specifically. “Lorel of the Vine, I knew your mother. Leona of the Lead. She was a good woman, a faithful friend of the Order.”
I just nodded.
“My name is Dam Ghin. For those of you who are new, all things can be understood in threes. It’s better, for our work, to understand the world in threes instead of opposites, in triangles instead of squares. There are three seasons in the witch’s calendar, not four. Birth, life, and death. Spring, summer, and fall. Birth begins with the year’s end solstice and runs until Mother’s May, the first equinox. Life runs from Mother’s May to Geron’s Veil, the second equinox. Then death takes hold until the sun begins its return. This is one way of understanding. There are also ways of working with circles, in which there are no seasons, no days, only flux like the moon. But you can’t build a wall with circles. You can build a wall with triangles. We’ll start with triangles.”
She walked to the centermost purple brazier, and we followed along behind her.
“There are three basic ways of enacting your will upon the world. There is action, there are words, and there is magic. A witch worth her cloak is versed in all three. We will be teaching you all three. Because it is summer, the season of life, we will be studying action. In the season of life, ley runs fast and full. The same as a flooded river will sweep away the swimmer, the summer ley will drown the uninitiated. But in the warm air, our muscles work best, our bodies work best. Come the season of death, there will be words. Come the season of birth, there will be magic.”
Disappointment hit me like a physical blow inside my chest. I’d have to wait nine months to learn magic.
“This isn’t an absolute rule,” the teacher said. “Nature abhors most absolutes. So do witches. You will pick up things, and learn more about ley, before the year’s rebirth. But we take whelps at Mother’s May so we can teach them action and words before magic.”
So that morning, before the sun rose, we learned action. We learned to fight.
That day, our practice weapons were battle-axes with wooden heads but balanced with iron in the handles, and I learned why some of the whelps were bloody when we had met them the day before. I was assigned to practice with Haim while Hex was with Daidi. They had become friends already, and I didn’t like the way they looked at me, like coyotes circling prey, waiting for weakness.
We drilled strikes, parries, and dodges with wood until the sun rose, then we practiced throwing with steel. I was miserably bad at throwing axes. Haim hit the target every time, and Hex was nearly as good.
Once the sun was up, apprentices and witches came in and out of the glade to spar with one another. They more or less ignored us.
After throwing practice, we fought.
“Witches do not fight duels,” the teacher said as she passed the wooden axes back out. “We do not fight for sport, we do not fight to prove our point or defend our honor. We fight because action is one way to express our will upon the world. What are some situations in which we might wish to express our will through action?”
“To not get killed,” Haim said, holding the long-hafted axe comfortably at her side.
“Probably the number one reason, yes,” Dam Ghin said. “In which case, you will likely be fighting outnumbered. New whelps, any other ideas?”
“To stop someone from doing something we don’t approve of,” Araneigh said.
“Quite right,” the teacher said. “In which case, if at all possible, it will be us who outnumber or are prepared to overpower our opponents. Anyone else?”
She looked at Hex, who glared back at her. “To free oneself from captors,” she said.
“Of course,” the teacher agreed. “Though words and magic might do you better overall in that situation, action—including fighting—would likely play a part.”
I was struggling to think of an answer, but the teacher seemed satisfied with what everyone else had said.
“Now,” she said, “until the sun is at its peak, we’ll play games.”
They weren’t games like I’d played in Ledston. Some of them were vicious games, in which one person, unarmed, had to defend herself against two or four armed attackers. Each game continued until all of us watching agreed that, had the weapons been sharp and their wielders swinging full force, either the victim or all her attackers would be dead. Other times both sides were armed, or started in different situations, or with different numbers of people on each side.
There was never any time to think during the games. I’d hoped to rely on my intelligence, but everything happened too fast. I had a hard time not flinching away from the wooden axes, because though we struck one another as softly as we could, we struck one another a lot, and things were moving fast, and it hurt.
Frankly, I was terrified. I couldn’t see how I would get through the day without being seriously injured. Or worse, discovered. I didn’t know what would happen if anyone struck me between the legs or anyone came in close contact with my body.
Whenever I was in a game with Hex or Daidi, I was even more afraid. Hex knew it, and she played it to her advantage. I lost every time when she attacked me. Even one time when she was unarmed, she wrestled my axe from me and swung it at my head, only slowing down at the last second to lightly tap me on the forehead.
Daidi didn’t seem to hate me, not yet, but she had a fire inside her. She fought like she meant it, like she hated the world and was angry at everything and everyone.
Whenever anyone wrestled me to the ground, I called out that I was dead or I let them win with their weapons. I was terrified every time someone touched my thigh or my waist.
It was all too much for me. I was exhausted and hungry and using muscles I didn’t ever use. I was afraid of the axes. I was afraid of everything. Hex was going to hurt me, and I wasn’t going to learn magic.
The last game of the day was a fight between myself and both Haim and Henomi. They had the advantage and they pressed it, closing in on me. I blocked one axe by knocking Henomi’s arm out of the way, then sidestepped the other as I brought my axe down.
