Page 11 of The Year of the Witching

The following entries were shorter, the handwriting a bit sloppier than it had been before, as if the words were written in great haste. Most of them detailed brief encounters Miriam had with Daniel under cover of night or stolen moments after church on Sabbath days. In all of these entries, of which there were dozens, Miriam never once mentioned the Prophet. Still, Immanuelle could sense his presence in the pages, a shadow in the margins, a stain behind the words. And while Immanuelle knew that this story could only ever end in tragedy, she found herself hoping in vain for a different outcome. Miriam’s entries turned from glee tohope to trepidation to outright despair... and after the despair came a kind of helplessness.

There was a months’ long gap between entries and Immanuelle could only assume it accounted for the time Miriam was detained in the Prophet’s Haven. Then:They took him from me. They put him on the pyre. The flames burned high. They made me watch the fire take him.

Immanuelle tried to blink back her tears, but a few fell anyway. She forced herself to turn the page. The next entry was datedSummer in the Year of Omega. It read:I am with child.

The tears flowed freely then, and Immanuelle paused to wipe them away on the sleeve of her nightdress. The following entry was datedWinter of Omega—a full eight months after the one that preceded it. It read:I have seen the evils of this world, and I have loved them.

The entries that followed were progressively stranger. Instead of the sweeping calligraphy Immanuelle had come to know as her mother’s hand, these entries were sloppy, as if she had written them in the dark. The drawings, too, were different. The portraits and landscapes had become frantic scribbles, ink-stained abstractions so mangled Immanuelle could barely decipher them. One depicted a woman bent double, appearing to vomit tree branches. Another was a self-portrait of Miriam standing naked, one arm folded around her breasts, her hair hanging loose down her back. Her pregnant belly was swollen and painted with a crude symbol that reminded Immanuelle of the seals brides wore cut between their eyebrows, only this mark was much larger.

On the opposing page, an image of two twisted figures. They were naked like the other women, and their hands were joined. Both of them bore what Immanuelle initially mistook for the Prophet’s seal between their brows. But upon closer inspection, she noticed the star in the middle of their seal had only sevenpoints, instead of the customary eight. Etched into the corner of the drawing was a title and date:The Lovers, Winter in the Year of Omega. They were the women Immanuelle had seen in the woods. The women who had given her the journal. And they weren’t justanywomen. They were the Lovers, Jael and Mercy, witches and servants of the Dark Mother who’d died in the fires of the Holy War, purged on account of their sin and lechery.

Somehow, defying all logic, they were alive in the Darkwood and her mother hadknownthem. Dwelled with them perhaps. Why else would the witches have given Immanuelle the book? Why else would the book have sketches of the witches? Had the Lovers considered themselves doing Miriam’s bidding when they gave it to Immanuelle? Was this meant to be a kind of inheritance? The fulfillment of a promise they’d made to Miriam long ago?

Shaken, Immanuelle read on. The entries became shorter, fewer, and farther between. Just crude sketches mostly, punctuated here and there by the odd illegible entry. One sketch depicted two oak trees, their trunks carved with strange forked symbols. Just behind the trees, an idyllic little cabin, standing in a small dell in the midst of the forest. It took her a moment to realize what she was looking at. That cabin was the place where Miriam claimed she spent the months of winter after fleeing into the Darkwood.

Immanuelle continued skimming through these strange writings—it seemed odd to call them entries, given how incoherent they’d become. But one drawing caught her eye. In the foreground, there was a face—a hatched line for a mouth, two narrow eyes, full lips, and a crude, long nose that looked broken. In the background, lurking above her shoulder, was the twisted contour of a woman’s naked form. Mounted on her neck was not a head, but something that Immanuelle could only describe as a buck’s skull, crowned with a sprawling rack of antlers.

Lilith.

The name rose to Immanuelle’s mind unbidden, the fragment of a story told only around bonfires or whispered behind cupped hands. Lilith, daughter of the Dark Mother. The Mistress of Sins. Witch Queen of the Woodland. Immanuelle would have known her anywhere.

On the following page, a sketch of a woman emerging from what appeared to be a lake. Like the Lovers, she was naked, and her long black hair hung limp about her shoulders. The image was titledDelilah the Witch of the Water. Beside the drawing, a note:I have seen the Beast and her maidens again. I hear their cries in the woods at night. They call to me, and I call to them. There is no love as pure as that.

A bitter seed formed in the pit of Immanuelle’s belly. Her hands shook as she turned the journal’s final pages. Of everything she’d seen thus far, these scribbled drawings were the most troublesome. The accompanying words were so tangled it was almost impossible to decipher them. But Immanuelle was able to parse one phrase that appeared and reappeared over and over again in the backgrounds of drawings, crushed into the margins of scribbled entries:Her blood begets blood. Her blood begets blood.Her blood begets blood.

Immanuelle read on, and as she did, the drawings became progressively more abstract. Some pages were just spattered with ink, others with a series of dashes inflicted so violently the marks ripped the pages to shreds. Of these final illustrations, if you could even call them that, there was only one that Immanuelle could distinguish. It, no,she—because, for some unfathomable reason, Immanuelle was sure it was a she—was a maelstrom. A mangle of teeth and eyes and rendered flesh. The tulip folds of what might have been the creature’s groin or perhaps an open mouth. Broken fingers and disembodied eyes with slits for pupils. Inexplicably, the ink still looked wet, and it rippled toward the edgesof the paper as if threatening to spill onto the bed, soak the sheets black.

The final entry of the journal was unlike any of those that came before it. Every inch of those two pages was covered with the same four words:Blood. Blight. Darkness. Slaughter. Blood. Blight. Darkness. Slaughter. Blood. Blight. Darkness. Slaughter. Blood. Blight. Darkness. Slaughter...

On and on it went.

Just below the storm of those words, a scribbled footnote at the bottom of the journal’s final page:Father help them. Father help us all.

CHAPTERSIX

I first saw you by the riverside. There was sun on your cheeks and wind in your curls, and you sat with your feet in the water, smiling at me. I don’t think I’d felt real fear until that moment, but Father as my witness, I feared you.

—FROM THEFINALLETTERS OFDANIELWARD

EIGHT DAYS PASSEDwithout event. In the mornings, Immanuelle sent the sheep to pasture. Sometimes she walked the children to school. She sold her wool at the market and avoided the temptations of the book tent and the woods. On the Sabbath, she went to the cathedral and laid her sins at the feet of the Prophet. She closed her eyes in prayer and did not open them. She sang her hymns with so much vigor she went hoarse halfway through the service and had to whisper her way through the remaining hours of worship. At home, she did not disobey Martha or bicker with Glory.

She kept to the creeds and commandments.

But in the nights, after the rest of the Moores had retired to their bedrooms and the children were asleep, Immanuelle slipped her mother’s journal from beneath her pillow and read it with reverence, the way Martha pored over the pages of the Prophet’s Holy Scriptures.

In her dreams, she saw the women of the woods. Their tangled legs and grasping fingers. The dead gazes that stared, unseeing, into the black of the forest’s corridors, their lips split apart as ifthey’d been caught in the midst of a kiss. And in the morning, when Immanuelle woke from those wretched dreams—sweating cold, her legs tangled in her sheets—she thought only of the Darkwood and her growing desire to return to it once more.

THE MORNING OFLeah’s cutting and her binding to the Prophet, Immanuelle woke with her mother’s journal beneath her cheek. She sat up with a start, smoothing the pages before she snapped it shut and slipped it under her mattress.

After forcing her feet into her muck boots, she trudged downstairs and out the back door, crossing through the farmyard and down into the paddock to let the sheep out to pasture. Then, in preparation for the buggy ride to the cathedral, she took the old mule from his shack and brushed him down, then fed and bridled him.

Across the fields and pastures was the black of the woods, the trees cast into shadow by the light of the rising sun. Immanuelle found herself looking for faces among the branches, the Lovers she’d seen in the woods that night, the figures sketched in her mother’s journal.

But she saw nothing. The distant woods were still.

By the time Immanuelle returned to the farmhouse, the Moore daughters were eating breakfast in the dining room. Honor sat at the table, spooning up the last of her gruel, and Glory studied her reflection in the bottom of a polished pot, tugging at her braids and frowning.

Anna wore her Sabbath best. Her hair was heaped atop her head and adorned with wildflowers. She was beaming; she always beamed on cutting days.

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