Page 41 of The Year of the Witching

Gathering her skirts in one hand, Immanuelle followed Ezra down the hall and up a winding flight of stairs. At the top was an iron door which Ezra kicked open, nearly dropping his books in the process. He turned to look at her. “Are you coming in or not?”

Immanuelle had never entered a man’s chambers before and she was certain Martha would skin her to the bone if she ever so much as suspected her of such a grave and salacious transgression. She stalled for a beat, then nodded.

As soon as she was past the threshold, Ezra dumped his bookson a nearby table and drew the door shut. Overhead, the chandelier shivered, crystals rattling together. Immanuelle noticed that the ceiling was painted like the heavens, dotted with planets and stars and etched with the shapes of constellations, some so large they spanned the room from one end to the other. The stone walls were hung with tapestries and portraits of stern-looking saints and apostles of ages long past. On the right half of the room was a large iron bed draped with dark brocade and a few thick sheepskins. Just beyond it, a wooden desk built in the blunt fashion of a butcher’s block, its surface strewn with quills and parchment paper.

Opposite the door was a hearth that ran the length of the wall. Above it, hand painted across the bricks, was a map of the world beyond the Bethelan territories. Immanuelle saw the names of all the heathen cities: Gall in the barren north, Hebron in the midlands, Sine in the mountains, Judah at the cusp of the desert, Shoan south where the raging sea licked the land, and the black stain of Valta—the Dark Mother’s domain—in the far east.

All around the room, stacked in piles as tall as Immanuelle, were books. They were shoved into shelves, perched atop the hearth’s mantel, even crammed beneath the bed. But it was only when Immanuelle drew near enough to read their titles that she realized almost all of them related to the history, study, and practice of witchcraft.

Her heart seized in her chest, as if some hand had closed around it and squeezed tight. She could think of only one reason Ezra would have developed a sudden taste for books of witchcraft, and it began with her and ended with what happened in the Darkwood. “What is this, Ezra? You’re scaring me.”

“Something dragged you under,” said Ezra, and the weight of his gaze made her skin crawl.

“What?”

“Back in the woods, at the pond, something dragged you under, and it kept you there for a long time.”

In spite of the blazing fire, a deep chill racked her. “What do you mean by a long time?”

“Twenty minutes. Maybe more.”

“That’s impossible,” Immanuelle whispered, shaking her head. “You must be mistaken, I was barely under for more than a minute. I warned you, the Darkwood has a way of twisting the minds of men—”

“Don’t patronize me,” he snapped. “I know what I saw. You went into the water, something dragged you under, and it kept you there.” His voice broke on the last word, and he hung his head. “I tried to dive in after you, but the forest caught hold of me, and I couldn’t. I just had to stand there helpless, watching you drown with that damn rope in my hand. Toward the end, I was just hoping to reel your corpse ashore so your kin would have something to bury.”

“Ezra... I’m sorry.”

Immanuelle wasn’t even sure he’d heard her. He kept his eyes locked on the fire as he spoke. “When I was young, my grandmother used to tell me stories of girls who floated inches above their beds while they slept at night. Girls who could talk a man into taking his own life or the life of someone else. Girls who were executed—tossed into a lake with millstones chained to their ankles—only to be reeled from the water alive an hour later. Girls who laughed when they burned on the pyre. I never used to give those stories credence, but you...” He lost his train of thought. Took a moment to collect himself. “What was your obsession with the blood plague? You said you just wanted to end it, but it was more than that, wasn’t it? You know something the rest of us don’t. What is it?”

So Ezra did know the truth, or at least enough of it to send herto the pyre. It was futile to lie, in light of that. “I went into the Darkwood, just before the blood plague began, and while I was there I had... an encounter.”

“An encounter with what?”

“The witches of the woods. They’re real. I was with them the night before the blood plague struck. I think that my presence in the woods unleashed something terrible. When I went back I was trying to undo it. And I would have told you sooner, I wanted to, but—”

“You couldn’t trust me.”

“You’re the Prophet’s son and heir. A word from you could’ve sent me to the pyre. I didn’t know if I could trust you with my secrets. I still don’t.”

Ezra sidestepped past her, crossed the room to his desk, unlocked its top drawer with the blade of his holy dagger, withdrew a sheaf of papers, and extended them to her.

Immanuelle took them. “What is this?”

“Your entry in the census. I was supposed to surrender it to my father days ago.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“Read it yourself and find out.” When she hesitated, Ezra nodded toward the chairs that stood by the hearth. Between them was a table that housed a glass decanter and goblet. “Go on.”

Immanuelle took a seat on one of the chairs and Ezra settled himself opposite her. He poured himself some wine, watching her over the rim as he drank. The first page recounted the particulars of Immanuelle’s personal history—her full name and the names of her parents, her date of birth. At the end of the account, a strange, muddled mark that Immanuelle initially mistook for an ink spot. But upon closer examination, she saw that it was some sort of strange symbol: a bride’s seal, only the points of the star were longer, and there were seven of them instead of eight. Thelonger she studied that strange mark, the more certain she was that she’d seen it before.

Then the realization struck her.

That mark was the same one carved into the foreheads of Delilah and the Lovers.

Immanuelle’s hand began to shake. She leaned out of her seat, pointed to the mark at the end of her census, and extended the page to Ezra for clarification. “Is this—”

He merely nodded, his gaze on the fire. “The Mother’s mark. It’s the symbol the cutting seal was derived from, years ago. David Ford sought a way to reclaim it, so he altered the mark and called it his.”

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