Page 55 of WitchBorn

A group of men wandered through the crowd, their gazes examining each booth. I couldn’t recall ever seeing men as heavily armed in the market before. Mother stiffened. They paused at the edge of our display.

“What is this?” The first male demanded.

“Soaps, teas, and scents,” Mother said, her gaze focused on me. Many of the soaps and teas had specific uses like fertility, pain relief, or even to calm the mind.

“Why is your boy not serving the church?”

“We are from far away,” Mother said. “Trading for supplies for the winter.”

“Where is your husband?” The man said.

“He’s working. My boy is about to take supplies to him.”

It was the oddest conversation I could ever recall her having with anyone. They dug through the basket for apa, which was dried meats, mushrooms, and a handful of root vegetables, a variable feast for most. Mother added two jars of preserves to the basket, ignoring the men as they examined everything. She never gave apa preserves.

“You should go before it gets too late,” Mother said to me. “You know how chilly the nights are getting.”

My heart raced as I gathered up my pack, not wanting to leave with a sense of dread building in my gut. But mother took my place in our booth and shooed me away, her gaze at the men pleasantly bland. I headed away from the market feeling their eyes on me and wondering if I should hide the route to apa’s. It would take me longer, meaning I’d arrive well after dark, but I didn’t want them to follow.

Tension finally left my shoulders once night fell and I was several hours walk from the small town and their strange market. I’d convince mother to avoid that one next time. The religious obsession spreading across the land in an odd shift of control. Some markets completely closed or run by religious officials who demanded control of supplies. I recalled an argument mother had with a particular pair of them who demanded her entire stock as a donation. Months’ worth of gathering supplies and creating items for trade, which would have left us starving during the winter. We had left that town and never returned. What would happen if they all followed suit? Would we have anywhere left to go?

Apa’s cave, nested in shadows, sat untouched and quiet as usual. I stalked to the stump, set down the basket, and waited, no longer afraid of the surly beast.

A set of eerie eyes glowed from the opening of the cave, hesitant.

“Come on then,” I said, setting out the display of treats I’d brought, but pausing over the jams. Had mother meant them for apa? I couldn’t recall him ever eating them. I tossed a large hunk of dried meat his way.

After a few long moments of wariness, he crawled from the cave on all fours, more beast than man, and devoured the meat. I threw a few more and after a time he sat at my feet like an affectionate dog rather than a bear infected with darkness, his breath labored. Mother said the blight would eventually take him from this world and it was a kindness to give him aid until the earth took him back.

Any glimpse of the man he’d been had vanished several years prior as if the soul beneath had been suffocated by the writhing darkness. I petted his head, fur matted and coarse, but the shadows couldn’t cling to me.

“Mother doesn’t know of a way to remove the blight. She’s not sure how it started,” I said as I opened a jar of preserves and offered him a taste. He snuffled it, then licked my hand, something I’d have not braved when I was younger. “She misses you.” Mother spoke of apa often, reciting memories of their youth, and the wild love that brought them together. The blight had appeared after one particularly harsh winter when mother arrived at his cave to present me, his newborn son. The madness took several years to really dig into him, and even less time to eat away at what remained of the man beneath the bear’s fur.

Lost in the dark, perhaps? I didn’t understand and he couldn’t tell me.

“I would have liked to know you,” I said and got up. “I should go.” The stretch of moonlight overhead would guide my path. “Mother is waiting.”

Thirty-Seven

FINN

That the dream didn’t end meant something, though the memory shifted ahead to me standing in a familiar clover field, surrounded by moonlight and trees stretching up into the sky. Lena’s favorite grazing spot. Yet there was no sign of her.

Maybe I’d arrived before her?

I sat down beside a tree, exhausted from the trek, and thought to wait for a time. A nuzzle of something to my cheek woke me before I realized I’d fallen asleep, and I opened my eyes expecting Lena, but finding her new fawn. The baby barely had his legs, stumbling about in that ungainly way of the newborns. Mother had hoped he and I would bond, but he was far too little to understand me as Lena could.

“Where’s your mama,” I asked the baby, petting his brow and ears, while I scanned the area. He snuffled me again. “Yes, you’re hungry, I know. Let’s find your mama.”

With the sun rising, sky colored far overhead in a wash of pinks and oranges, I searched for any sign of Lena. The forest sat in strange stillness. The absence of birds at first light made me wonder if a bear or some large predator had wandered into our area.

I paused to listen, straining to hear any movement as I clutched the fawn close to me. Beyond his snuffles, the silence stretched. Where was Lena?

“Let’s head home, little one. My mama will know how to find yours,” I told him. He trailed along as I headed toward home, wary, and quiet as possible. A sense of doom grew in my gut with each step. The forest was never this quiet.

We approached the furthest perimeter, and I noticed the chimes cut from the trees. In the wind, their sound a gentle and soothing tinkle, but a lot of movement in the forest would stir them up as a warning. I bent to retrieve the first fallen strands. The woven vines used to hang the dried bones, pine cones, hallowed bark, and varied light rocks, had been cut. None of the deer were tall enough to reach them, and the smaller inhabitants of the trees, while occasionally stealing a piece of wood or small stone for a nest, usually left them alone.

I gazed along the tree line searching for the rest of the markers, and finding them all gone from the trees. Why?