Page 47 of Anathema

“What do the dead have to do with the raven?”

“They guide the soul to the after, and you share its blood now,” she explained, shoving barley straw into a netted bag. “You walk between realms of the dead and living. The world you’ve known, and the one that has remained hidden from you.”

Walking between the living and dead? What a terrible existence that would be. Not to mention, such a thing would only further cement my place as the pariah of the parish.

She was wrong. I shook my head, refusing to believe such a thing. The hallucinations I’d suffered up until that point had merely been brought on by my illness. Perhaps a lingering effect of the infection. “What you speak of is blasphemy. The governor says only the cursed speak to the dead.”

“Is it a curse, or a gift? Some believe communing with the dead is as much a blessing as a burden.”

“How could speaking with the dead possibly be a blessing?”

“It is in what they tell you. What they know of the other side.”

I chewed on those thoughts for a moment, trying to wrap my head around what The Banished Man, or Danyra, could’ve possibly tried to communicate to me. Were there secrets smuggled beyond the barrier of life? What would I have been tasked to do with such knowledge?

“And if I were … cursed. How do I rid myself of this affliction?”

“There is no ridding it. The gods chose, and you are their vessel.” She swiped up a waterskin hanging just outside one of the stalls. After swallowing a large gulp, she wiped her mouth on the back of a wrinkled hand and held it up in offering.

With a raise of my palm, I politely declined. “I didn’t ask for this. The bird was suffering. I only wanted to end its misery.”

“Then, it seems you chose, as well.” Brow quirked, she hobbled past me, and just as before, I fell into step after her. Around the other side of the shack, she led me to a garden of frost-weathered plants, their brown stems standing proud, from which she plucked the tips with her fingers. Some she pocketed, others she gathered in her palm. I recognized those as sickhash root, sometimes given to children before bed to make them sleep.

“This village … they already shun me.” I lifted the skirt of my dress, where the dried remnants of saliva marked where a passerby in a carriage had spat on me coming home from town. “Visions of the dead will only further their suspicions of me.”

“Yes. The poor little babe, left behind by her mother with a black rose laid upon her chest. The bassinet at the edge of The Eating Woods. You hardly cried that night.” She hobbled back toward me and shoved the palmed pickings into my chest.

I mindlessly accepted her gift, but my focus snapped onto her words. “You saw me there? Did you see my mother?”

“No,” she said, finally plopping down in a rocker on her porch. From beside her, she reached into a quilted bag and retrieved what looked to be a long pipe. She crushed the dried flowers from her pocket, and deposited the broken bits into the pipe’s chamber, staring off for a moment. “But I felt the pain. Hands trembling against your cold, cherubic cheeks. I tasted those salty tears left behind.”

“You were the one who found me.”

Snapping a flint striker, she lit the contents of the pipe, her cheeks caving as she drew in the smoke and let it seep from the corners of her mouth. “I could’ve left you for the beast in the woods. Perhaps I should’ve.”

“You know what lives in the woods? What eats the souls of sinners?”

She gave a mirthless chuckle and took another puff of her pipe. “I’ve seen more than that, Girl.”

The scent of the weeds reminded me of chicklebane, a spicy flower Grandfather Bronwick added to his wine that was known to relax the muscles.

“What have you seen?” I asked, intrigued by her every word.

“Why should I say? Are you foolish enough to venture into those woods yourself?”

“Not with the monster.”

“Ah, yes. The angel of judgment who punishes sins. Or is it the wrathavor? The soulless creature that feeds on the flesh of man.”

“What do you believe?”

“Man feeds its cravings, but it longs for something else. Something that lies beyond the crooked trees and ravaged bones.”

Beyond the crooked trees? “What is it? What lies there?”

“What is it?” she echoed. “You want to know what wicked diablerie lies beyond The Eating Woods?” The wood creaked as she slowly rocked in her chair, holding the bowl of the pipe in her palm. “A gateway to another world. I was no more than your age when I ventured into that dark forest.”

Eyes wide, I lowered myself to one of the steps to her porch. “You breached the archway?”

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