Page 26 of The Year of the Witching

Ezra immediately began to comb through the collection. Clouds of dust, as thick as smoke, bloomed in the air as he slid books off the shelves, their rusty chains rattling.

“Do you often come up here to read?” Immanuelle asked, trailing after him down the aisles.

“No,” said Ezra. “The last time I was up here, I was nine years old. I didn’t have my dagger then, so I scaled the gate to get in. Broke my elbow when I landed on the other side, but I still managed to flip through a few books before I was found.”

“Were they worth the pain?”

Ezra smiled ruefully and shook his head. “No, but theexpression on my father’s face when he realized I’d managed to successfully break into one of the most restricted places in all of Bethel certainly was.”

Immanuelle tried to hide her smile by turning to the bookcase nearest her. Many of the books shelved there were so old, Immanuelle feared they might collapse into a pile of dust if she touched them. Some were little more than a few sheets of crumbling paper strung together with bits of twine. Others were just journals like her mother’s, penned by prophets of the past.

It was these collections that Immanuelle and Ezra began to sort through, searching for references to the plagues. It was slow and at times painstaking work, but Immanuelle found she didn’t mind it. At first, it was rather exhilarating, to read the words of men who’d died so long ago. But her enthusiasm waned when she realized the immensity of the task that lay before her. There were hundreds of books in the overhang alone, and thousands more below. It would take years to sort through them all.

For hours they combed through the collection, with little to show for it, and Immanuelle was close to giving up on her search when she spotted a lone book on an empty shelf in the far corner of the organ deck. Cradling the tome in her arms, Immanuelle scraped a frosting of dust away with a pass of her fingers and flipped open the cover. The title page read:The Unholy Four: A Compendiumand was dated theYear of the Harrow. There was no author cited.

What followed was a history of the witches and their crimes—from the dawn of the coven’s rebellion to their defeat at the hands of David Ford seven years later. At first, Immanuelle assumed the book was limited to the events of the Holy War, but as she flipped through its pages she realized it delved deep into the practice of witchcraft and the heathen power Lilith’s coven wielded against the Bethelan armies. Among these accounts one practice, specifically, caught Immanuelle’s eye—the feeding of the Mother.

It described, in broad terms, a ritualistic offering that took place in a lake at the heart of the woods, known only as the Mother’s Belly. While the book had many redactions—pages that were ripped out or painted with black ink to block the words—Immanuelle was able to gather the gist of the practice. The book claimed that those who made blood offerings to the Mother in this unholy place were often rewarded with dark power.

According to the account, there were rumors that Lilith and her ilk made sacrifices at the Mother’s Belly in order to win power and favor. There were reports of witches who cut their wrists in the middle of the lake, let their blood flow into the water to sate the Mother’s hunger. Some claimed that Lilith tossed the severed heads of crusader war captives into the water’s depths. One passage described witches who squatted in the shallows with their skirts raised to their knees, allowing their monthly bleed to flow into the water. The book also noted that in the wake of the war—when Lilith and her coven were defeated—David Ford and his army of crusaders executed witches in the pond, drowning them for their sins against the Church.

The following passage noted that all these offerings were preceded by a kind of prayer or call that the Darkwood hearkened to. The witches sang an incantation that sounded like the hiss and hush of wind in the forest’s trees. Others waded into the depths of the pond, whispering their most earnest wishes to the wood as they went. But it was apparent to Immanuelle that the Darkwood demanded a prayer before an offering was made, and she got the impression that it was not so much what one said but rather the act of saying it that mattered most. Bleeding wasn’t enough. The Darkwood wanted the souls that came seeking its power to beg for it first.

Below these gruesome accounts was a detailed illustration of a pond in the middle of the woods. Immanuelle’s hands began toshake violently, trembling across the page. It was a near-perfect rendering of the pond where she’d first encountered Lilith and Delilah. Every detail of that drawing aligned with her memory.

This was all the confirmation that Immanuelle needed. That pond, where she’d first encountered Lilith, was the Dark Mother’s altar, and Immanuelle’s first blood was the sacrifice. It was plain to her that if she wanted to end the plague, she would have to return to that pond and make a second offering to reverse the first.

But there was a problem with her plan: Immanuelle had not the slightest idea how to get back to the pond. The forest was vast and disorienting. It would take her days, if not weeks, to locate the pond, if she was able to locate it at all.

Immanuelle closed the book, scrambled to her feet, and went to Ezra. “I need to see a map of Bethel. Can you find one for me?”

Ezra raised an eyebrow, but to Immanuelle’s immense relief, he didn’t question her. He just nodded toward the stairway as if to say,After you. Upon descending, he disappeared down a long aisle of bookshelves. After a few long moments, he returned with a massive tome, its front cover about as wide as Immanuelle’s shoulders were broad.

“This way.” He nodded toward the front of the chapel. Immanuelle followed him to a cracked stone slab with a single wooden chair pulled up to it. It took her a moment to realize it was an altar, where the first of the faith must have made their sacrifices.

Behind it was a stained-glass window that stretched from the cathedral floor to its vaulted ceiling some twenty feet overhead. On the left-hand side of the pane were depictions of holy crusaders on horseback, surging across the plains, their swords blazing with the Father’s fire. And upon closer inspection, Immanuelle saw His face in the great eye of the sun, watching as His children charged into battle.

On the opposite side of the pane was a maelstrom of the hells, a legion of beasts and witches fleeing the Father’s flames. Looming above her spawn in a veil of night was the Dark Mother. She wore the moon as a crown, and she was weeping tears of blood.

An iron plaque beneath the window read:The Holy War.

“It’s something, isn’t it?” said Ezra, staring up at the panes of stained glass, his cheeks washed red by the sunlight casting in through the fire’s flames. “An entire legion turned to ash, all on a whim.”

Immanuelle stared at him, stunned quiet. His words came close to outright blasphemy, a sin that might provoke a public lashing if Ezra were anything less than the Prophet’s successor. Her gaze tracked to the left corner of the window, where a small, dark-skinned boy cowered as the Father’s flames devoured a woman that might have been his mother.

“But it wasn’t a whim,” she said at last, finding her voice. “The crusaders called upon the Good Father to deliver them from the witches, and He answered their prayers with holy fire. He saved them all from ruin, from damnation at the hands of the Dark Mother. Those flames were His blessing.”

Ezra’s eyes narrowed, and he gazed up at that window with obvious contempt. “So the Scriptures say.”

“You don’t believe them?”

“All I’m saying is that if I was an all-powerful god who could do as I pleased, I would have found another way to end the war.” He looked back at Immanuelle. “Wouldn’t you?”

“I’m not a god, so I couldn’t say. I can’t presume to know the Father’s will. And if I did know it, I’m certain there would be no cause for doubts or questions.”

“Spoken like a true believer,” said Ezra, but he made it sound like an insult.

After a few moments of searching, he found the right page andmotioned to it with a pass of his hand. There, inked into what appeared to be vellum, was a map. It outlined the boundaries of Bethel: the western wall, the village and market square, the sprawling Holy Grounds, and the rolling pastures of the Glades beyond them. In the far left-hand corner of the map, reduced to little more than a scribble, were the Outskirts. And encircling it all were wide swathes of shadow, marked with a simple footnote:The Darkwood.

---