Page 50 of The Year of the Witching

“You mean your origin tongue?”

Adrine nodded. “These marks are just words to us. It’s the intention behind them that makes the sigils something more... something dangerous.”

Immanuelle crossed through the ruins of the house and into the narrow stretch of land between it and the Darkwood. A few paces away were the abandoned bones of what might have been an outhouse or a small work shed like Abram’s. Beyond that, just a dark, dense stretch of the forest. Its thrall was almost intoxicating.

Immanuelle started toward it and tripped, her boot catching on what she thought was an upturned rock. But when she searched for the source of her near fall, what she found was a small stepping-stone and several more just after it, each of them leading to the sprawling forest beyond the property. Immanuelle followed the path to the feet of two large twin oaks standing side by side, their branches tangling overhead to form a kind of archway. Each of their trunks was carved with matching sigils: one long dash that reached from the start of the first branch down to the roots, the top of which was cut with what appeared to be twenty shorter dashes of varying lengths.

Adrine shook her head. “I don’t know those sigils.”

“I do,” Immanuelle whispered, reaching into the depths of her knapsack. She opened her mother’s journal to the page that depicted the cabin where she claimed to have spent the winter. In the foreground of the drawing were two large oaks carved with marks identical to those on the trees in front of her.

Immanuelle edged closer, scuffed her boot through the fallen leaves, uncovering a series of stepping-stones that led into the depths of the Darkwood, to the cabin where her mother endured her last winter. She pressed a hand to the sigil-carved trunk of the nearest oak, half turned to face Adrine.

But the girl merely shook her head. “I’ll not go with you. Not in there.”

Immanuelle only nodded, a part of her relieved. It was as if she was jealous over the forest, like she wanted its secrets for herself, and herself alone. And so, without so much as pausing to look back, Immanuelle gathered her skirts and stepped past the looming oaks and into the shadows of the Darkwood.

CHAPTERTWENTY-THREE

I made a home in the woods. I thatched a roof and built the walls. And it was there, in a room of stick and stone, that the bargain was struck, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

—MIRIAMMOORE

THE SOUTHERN WOODSwere different from those that ran along the Glades. They were thicker, crowded with solemn pines that whispered when the wind moved through their needles. The rest of the world seemed to fall away as Immanuelle walked through the trees. Sunlight dimmed and the shadows thickened, threatening to swallow her up. The path she attempted to follow was quickly devoured by the snarling thicket. She couldn’t feel the stepping-stones beneath her boots any longer. And while she knew she should have been afraid, all she felt was a horrible sense of completion. Like she was exactly where she was meant to be.

Immanuelle didn’t know how long she walked, but it was nearing midday when she came upon a cabin. One glance at the place and she knew it was long abandoned. She wouldn’t have been surprised if its original owners were Bethel’s founders, who’d settled in the forest centuries ago. The whole house seemed to stoop on the stones of its foundation, warped and decrepit like an old man leaning on his cane.

In truth, it was less a house than a shanty. It had only one doorand one window. The roof was sunken, and the porch was so thoroughly rotten, its blackened planks crumbled beneath her boots. Immanuelle put a hand to the door and pushed it open.

She entered a cramped room that smelled of mildew. To her left sat a side table, its surface cluttered with an arrangement of melted candles. On the far wall, there was a fireplace with a cracked mirror pinned above the mantel, just big enough to house the reflection of a person’s face. In the center of the room was a rusted bed frame.

Immanuelle.

She turned, seeking the voice’s owner, but instead she found something she’d missed upon first glance. Just to the right of the fireplace was a billowing white cloth, and behind it, a narrow threshold. Raising a shaking hand, Immanuelle drew the shroud away. It drifted to the floor in a cloud of swirling dust motes, revealing a short hallway, lightless, save for a single ray of sunshine that illuminated the room at its end.

Immanuelle reached into her knapsack, withdrawing first her oil lamp, then a single matchstick. She struck the latter alight on the stones of the fireplace, then lit the lamp and turned back to the hallway. The red glow of the flame spilled across the walls as she walked.

At the end of the hall she paused, raising her lamp high to reveal a windowless room, empty save for the circle of ash at its center. Cut crudely into the ceiling above was a small hole to let out the smoke. Scattered throughout the ashes were bones: a mix of hooves and horns, ribs, vertebrae, and, in the midst of the shards, what appeared to be the complete skeleton of a ram—minus the skull.

But it was the walls that drew Immanuelle’s attention. They were carved all over with markings, shapes and words that ran together and overlapped, so there was scarcely an inch of the paneling left unmarred.

And the writings had been made by a hand she recognized: her mother’s.

The realization hit her all at once. This was the cabin—thecabin Miriam had written about in her journal.

Miriam’s words crawled like vines across the walls. They repeated the same phrase, over and over:The maiden will bear a daughter, they will call her Immanuelle, and she will redeem the flock with wrath and plague.

Immanuelle traced the carvings with a trembling hand, following their path from one wall to the next. The carvings could be separated into three distinct shapes: one on the left wall, one on the right, and another on the far wall between them, where the two marks became one. It took her some time to recognize these shapes for what they were—sigils, just like the ones she’d seen on the foundation stones of the Ward house.

Three shapes. Three...seals.

Immanuelle stooped to set down the oil lamp, then slid her knapsack off her shoulder and withdrew the slips of paper on which she had copied the foundation stones’ sigils. It took her only a few moments to sort through the different symbols until she found the cursing seal. Immanuelle held the paper up to the wall to compare the two marks and found them to be a perfect match in everything but scale.

Swallowing her mounting dread, Immanuelle moved on.

The sigil on the left wall was not a match to any of the sigils carved into the foundation stones. It was a striking twisted shape, looking almost like folded hands or meshed fingers. But despite that, it looked distinctly familiar to her. After a few moments of puzzling in silence—assessing the mark from different angles, tracing the cuts with her fingertips—it came to her. Stooping to one knee, she snatched her mother’s journal from her knapsack, flipped through it to the page of her second self-portrait, theabstract illustration she’d sketched in the days after her return from the wood. In the image, she stood naked, arms half wrapped around her modesty, her swollen belly painted with a sigil... the same one that was carved into the wall. If the first seal was a curse, then this second was, perhaps, theconceptionof it. A kind of birthing sigil, if you will. A mark of creation.

Puzzled, Immanuelle moved on to the last sigil, the one on the far wall, the only one that she immediately recognized, because she had seen it every day all of her life. It was the same seal that brides wore, carved between their brows—a symbol of union, a binding sigil.

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