The sapling cage, p.4
The Sapling Cage, page 4
The gloom was overwhelming, and my feet hurt more than they’d ever hurt before. We were waiting for something, but I didn’t know what, in a manor carved with scenes of what strange death might await someone in the forest. I wasn’t scared, though, I realized. Alectoria, needle-thin, and Ilma, imposing and powerful, seemed more than a match for anything that might come our way.
Just as the shadows grew too deep to make out detail in the carved reliefs, the front door slammed open and a slight man tromped in, holding a lantern in front of him, with a dead goat slung across one shoulder. For a moment, he was silhouetted against a flash of lightning. Then he used his lantern to light a series of thick, well-used candles on a table by the door, and I could see well again.
He looked like the kind of man who prefers life in a dusty cabin and only comes to town once a blue moon. He wore rawhide breeches and a blouse and a belt hung with three knives, and his skin was as dark as a southern sailor’s. A vicious smile cracked white through his black-and-white beard, and he looked at each of us in turn, meeting our eyes.
There was something to his gaze, some sort of spell. He held my eyes for half a moment and I felt his power.
Another figure came through the still-open door. A girl, maybe my age or a year or two younger. Her hair was black and straight like mine, but her eyes were a much lighter brown. She held a dead rabbit in each fist and walked with none of the solemnity of the older man—her father, I guessed. She shared his coloration if none of his features.
“Three witches new since last you spent an evening,” the man said. He looked at the three of us on the ground. I didn’t like him looking at me.
“Lord Eddercop,” Dam Alectoria said, rising to greet the man, “only a new apprentice and two new whelps. I present to you Rose of the Vine, who came to this coven only lately, after her sisters and her previous mentor were destroyed. I present to you Whelp Hex of the Vine, a child of the ocean sent as balance. I present to you Whelp Lorel of the Vine, a child of the country sent as balance.”
“Under my roof and in my manor, you are blessed and you are welcome to the well. You are welcome to the table, you are welcome to the stable, you are welcome to the nights and to the days. Obey only the law of solace.”
“Thank you,” Dam Alectoria said, as though she understood what he was talking about. “We would join you in dinner and leave with the sun.”
Eddercop nodded. The door to the outside swung shut and the door to the inside swung open. Magic, I assumed.
I should have been scared, probably. Eddercop meant “spider” in the Old King’s tongue. It was a name I’d heard before, from the eldest men who’d passed through Ledston. Eddercop was the name of a dryad.
I smiled. This was the life I was meant to live.
Since no one seemed particularly bothered to keep an eye on me, I spent the time before dinner wandering the halls of the house. It wasn’t just the entryway that was decorated. Every wall of every room was covered in forest scenes, carved in the same style and perhaps by the same hand.
The manor was unlike any building I’d ever seen or imagined. From the outside, it was massive. Inside, the rooms were tiny, windows were rare, and it felt more like a cave than a house. I walked with a candle lantern held at my side. I saw no one, and I saw no sign that anyone but the man and the girl lived there.
I passed through parlors and long-empty bedrooms, through studies and libraries, and eventually I came upon a music room. A lyre sat on a stand in the corner, and a harpsichord dominated one wall. Both were carved with forest scenes. A skylight let the stars peer into the room.
“Do you play?” I heard as I inspected the harpsichord. I turned and saw the girl standing in the doorway.
“No,” I said. “My dad plays a little at the public house in Port Cek.”
She brushed past me to take a seat on the stool, cracked her fingers, and played while I stood and listened. A complex song, her fingers moved too fast for me to track. After a few bars, she tripped up on the rhythm, slammed her fists on the keys, then started over. She reached the same part and messed up again. Fists against the keys. On her third time, she went slower, and though her tempo kept slipping in and out, she made it through a whole movement of the song.
Grell had always played simple songs, sailor songs. Whatever this girl was playing, it was something completely different. A forest song, I decided, dense and intricate.
She stood up, grimacing. Clearly she wasn’t proud of her performance.
“What’s your name?” I asked her.
“Araneigh.”
“Are you Lord Eddercop’s daughter? Are you dryads?”
“Yes and no, to both questions,” she said.
“What does that mean?” I asked.
“Come with me into the forest,” she said instead of answering.
“What?”
“I want to show you something.”
She didn’t speak in poetry the way her father—or her not-father—did, but her words were riddles nonetheless.
I followed her, of course. She was the first person who’d offered me anything close to friendship or real kindness, even if she was a creature of the forest.
We left the manor through a side door, its handle and hinges hidden in the carved wall, and were immediately in the thick of the woods. The rain had slowed to a drizzle, falling onto the leaves of fruit and nut trees. Black walnut, white oak. Crabapple, mulberry. The forest, at least right here, was cultivated.
Araneigh led me through narrow, twisting paths; the single candle of my lantern was scarcely enough to light my way. She could have been leading me anywhere. She could have been leading me into a web. She could have been planning to eat me. It was too late to turn back.
I didn’t want to turn back.
She stopped in the darkness, and I didn’t notice in time and ran into her. She laughed, and as simple as that, I trusted her.
“I’m going to show you something horrible,” she said, “and then I’ll show you something beautiful.”
She turned to a fir tree next to her.
“Touch it,” she said.
I did. It was as cold as snowmelt. I jerked my hand back.
She walked a few paces further, and I followed her, and the temperature around us dropped to winter. My lantern lit frost all around us.
“There were trees like this back at home,” I said. “What is it?”
“My father calls it colddead, but won’t tell me more,” Araneigh said. “He doesn’t know what causes it, though, I’ve figured that much.”
I touched another tree, then another. They were like pillars of ice. A sense of unease swept over me.
“It’s horrible,” I said. Two trees had been bad enough. An entire forest was something awful.
“Now something beautiful,” she said, and she grabbed my hand and ran back toward the manor.
Stairs, narrow and treacherous, led up to the roof of the house. Above the trees, it was bright enough to see without the lantern. Araneigh took me to one of the watchtowers, walking up the narrow stairs without a banister. I followed her, though I felt a little queasy as we walked into the sky and the whole forest opened out beneath us. No, the whole world, out to the mountains in every direction, lit by the moon. The stars crowded the sky. The view was worth a little fear.
“You were right,” I said. “It’s beautiful.”
“I just wanted to look one last time,” Araneigh said.
“One last time?”
“I’m coming with you, in the morning. I’m going to be a witch.”
I didn’t hide my smile.
We were late to dinner, and all eyes turned to the pair of us when we walked into a dining room barely large enough for its long table. Rose looked relieved when we arrived. Dam Lament looked angry. Lord Eddercop was inscrutable. Hex … Hex looked like she would flay the skin from my flesh if it were in her power.
Araneigh went to sit next to her father, and I sat in the only place available—next to Hex.
Dinner was goat and rabbit, charred and served alone without ornament or spice. Four bowls of rough salt and four bottles of red wine sat in the center of the table. We ate off of clay plates—their rims carved by the same hand as the walls, it appeared—and drank straight from the bottles, each passed around the table widdershins. The wine was thick, almost brandy. It went to my head fast.
Even though I’d seen the dead goat—and its nonhuman head—with my own eyes, I imagined it hunted like the creatures in the art around me, as a human-headed animal. I drove the thought from my mind because the day’s hike had left me starving and I didn’t want to turn my stomach with worries like that.
“On your journey, were there three dead men?” Lord Eddercop asked from his throne-like chair at the end of the table.
“No,” Dam Alectoria replied. “We had no trouble.”
“Trouble follows witches whether you’ve seen it or not,” Eddercop said. “Since the days were last darkest, since the nights were last longest, there’ve been troubles.” He took an entire leg of the goat in his hand—though he was not a large man—and bit into it. Blood ran down into his beard. He made no move to wipe it clean.
“There have,” Alectoria agreed.
“Why?” Eddercop asked.
Alectoria sighed. I perked up my ears to hear. “When have you known witches to pass freely?”
“A hundred years ago,” he answered. He answered like he’d been there. Perhaps he had. “There’s a bad hunt coming.”
When Eddercop said “a bad hunt,” Dam Alectoria reached up and touched the crescent moon scar on her cheek.
“We know a bit about the bad hunt,” Dam Lament said. I looked at her wounds with newfound curiosity.
“I hope my daughter will survive.”
“I make no promises to you, Lord Eddercop,” Alectoria said.
“Of course.”
With that, the conversation ended. For a moment, we were silent but for the sounds of eating and drinking. Eventually, the witches began to speak with one another in low voices about the day, about spells, about the flow of ley across the land. No one spoke about the things I wanted to know, however: who was Lord Eddercop, and who was Araneigh? What was the bad hunt that was coming? What was the colddead?
I sat between Hex and Rose, and neither one talked. Neither Eddercop nor Alectoria said another word, and I ate my dinner of flesh, drinking thick wine to wash it down.
When I stood at the end of the meal, the room spun fast. Had someone drugged the wine?
No, it was just wine.
More wine, and thicker, than I’d ever had. I’d grown up with wine at supper, but always watered. My mother drank her own wine watered more often than not.
I steadied myself on the chair.
“Whelp Hex,” Dam Lament said, “help Whelp Lorel to bed.”
“No,” I said, “I’ll be fine.”
“I can do it,” Rose said, starting to stand.
“Let the whelps take care of one another,” Dam Lament said.
Was this revenge, for the hunt the other day? Some kind of lesson? Or was she just oblivious? I took a step toward the door, but for some reason stumbled and fell to my hands and knees.
“I’ll help her,” Hex said. How could the witches not hear the malice in her voice?
She got an arm under my shoulder and helped me to my feet.
“No,” I said again. “I’ve got it.”
Someone laughed. It might have been me. I couldn’t tell.
“Come on,” Hex said. With her to steady me, we made it out of the dining room and through the maze of halls.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
“I’m putting you to bed,” Hex said. I wanted to believe her.
As we walked—well, as I staggered with help—through the manor, the forest decor took on a new level of creepiness. The trees blurred past me, the bloody hunts blurred past me, and there was something deeper, darker, hidden in those woods. I was lost in that forest, and I didn’t want to find the monster at its heart.
We made it to a bedroom with two simple cots. There in the doorway, still ten feet away from the nearest bed, Hex let me go. I stood on my own feet. The room was spinning still, but less than it had been. I’d be alright.
I took one step toward the bed.
Hex was watching me, waiting for me to fall.
I took another step. I could make it.
I took a few more steps and was almost to the bed. I could somehow taste how comfortable it would be to lie down, to sleep, to let this endless day of marching end.
Hex kicked my leg out from under me.
I fell and hit my face on the edge of the cot, which tumbled over atop me.
“You’re the dumbest girl I’ve ever met,” she said.
I cried. I curled into a ball and cried, there on the floor, while my tormentor stood above me. Witches aren’t supposed to cry. Sixteen-year-olds aren’t supposed to cry.
“Leave me alone,” I said. “If you can’t be nice then just leave me alone.”
“Stupid girl,” Hex said. She nudged me with her foot, as if she was going to kick me again, then stomped off to the far side of the room.
I wanted to go home to Ledston. The monster at the center of the house, I was pretty sure, was Hex. I wasn’t scared of the witches, I wasn’t scared of our host, I wasn’t scared of witch hunters or beasts or demons or the Duchess. I was scared of Hex. I was scared of what terrible things she’d say or do to me next.
With her eyes on me, I righted my cot, lay down, and tried to sleep.
It took a long, long time.
Daylight broke through a skylight, and I was up and out of bed with a newfound resolve as soon as its first rays found my face. I would see this through. I could handle Hex. I was a witch—well, I was going to be a witch—and you don’t mess with a witch.
Hex was still asleep, so I walked on the balls of my feet across the room until I stood over her. I wasn’t sure what I would do to her until I saw her hair, in three long braids hanging almost to the floor. I tied them to the thin wooden frame of the cot, simple as tying up a horse. Then I left the room.
I followed the sounds of voices back to the entry hall, where I found the entire coven waiting. Our host was nowhere to be seen, but Araneigh was there, in a beautiful but simple black dress.
“Where’s Whelp Hex?” Rose asked. “Still sleeping?”
I heard a distant crash and guttural yell.
I kept my face neutral as best I could. “I think she just woke up.”
FOUR
We left the manor and headed north, following a wide creek toward its source in the mountains. Araneigh came with us. Half the day later, with the sun at its highest point, the witches initiated her into the Order of the Vine. They waded out into the creek, dangerously close to the top of a waterfall, and sang their ritual song. Since I was outside the ritual space, I wasn’t transported to a field of red but rather watched as the witches themselves flickered in and out of sight.
Water flowed right through where they should have been. They were in a different world. I had been in a different world.
Next to me, Hex glared.
“What’s your problem?” I asked.
She kept glaring.
After the ritual, Araneigh slept in the shade of an oak for nearly an hour before we pressed on. We were out of the forest, walking a well-trodden path that wound alongside the creek as it cut across a rocky field.
“I’ve never felt anything quite like that,” Araneigh said. She, Hex, and I walked at the back of the coven.
“I hated it,” Hex said. “I hated feeling so out of control.”
“It wasn’t so bad,” Araneigh said. “But I guess I grew up around magic.”
“Did you come willingly?” Hex asked. “Or did they make you.”
“That’s … that’s hard to answer. I always knew I was promised to the witches. I’ve always known I would wind up here.”
The three of us talked most of the afternoon. It wasn’t a three-way conversation, though. Hex and Araneigh talked, and Araneigh and I talked. We were competing for Araneigh’s attention. We must have both wanted a friend. At least, I did, and I assumed Hex did too. Araneigh complimented Hex’s sea-wool cloak with the tail on the hood; I shared her admiration but kept it to myself.
The path got steeper as we pushed further into the mountains. Eventually we were climbing on switchbacks, and it was hard going.
“We just left Ede,” Araneigh announced when we crossed a stone bridge over a ravine.
Just two days’ hike and I was further north than I’d ever been in my life. I’d never been outside the barony. A hundred and fifty years ago, when the kingdom of Cekon still had a monarch, the border between the baronies and duchies and earldoms within it might not have mattered so much. But they certainly did now. And I had left the barony.
Late in the afternoon, we left the main road and walked into a strange town on a narrow stretch of flat ground that wrapped around the side of the mountain. On the east side of the path, stone buildings with slate roofs perched perilously on the edge of the cliff. On the west side, residences were carved into the mountain itself. To the north lay more pine forest, the same as we had walked through already.
There were still hours before sundown, but we saw no one on the street or in any window.
The town stood in the shadow of two towers above it on the slope. One was black and built of the distinctive large stones used by giants, so tall it rivaled the mountain peaks. The other was green-and-black granite, smaller in every way. Both were ancient, standing in defiance of gravity and time.
“This town must be Umbrin,” Araneigh told me and Hex. “The giants built their tower to watch over the human workers. The other one was built by the humans, during their revolt.”
“We heard you’ve called upon the Order of the Vine,” Dam Ilma bellowed into the empty street.
Long moments passed before a man, gaunt and lightskinned, came out of the nearest house, deep bags under his eyes.
