The Near Witch (5 page)

“You.” That’s all I manage to say. There is something startlingly familiar about him. I have never seen anyone so fair-skinned and dark-haired, with such cool, colorless eyes. And yet, the light that dances in them, and that strange pull, like gravity tipped over.…

“Who are you?” I ask.

He cocks his head, and I realize for the first time how young he is. He cannot be much older than I am, a few inches taller, and too thin. But flesh and blood, not the phantom on the moor beyond my window who seemed to bleed right into the night.

“Where did you come from?” I ask, examining his features, his clothes, painted in shades of gray. He looks out over my shoulder and says nothing. “Why are you here?”

Still nothing.

“A boy’s gone missing today. Did you know?” I ask, searching for some recognition in his eyes, some sign of guilt.

He sets his jaw and strides past me, back toward the shed and the sisters’ house. I follow him, but as we reach the shack he still shows no sign of stopping to speak to me. I grab his arm and pull him back. He winces at my touch, withdraws so fast that he stumbles back against the wooden slats. And now he will not even look at me, turning his eyes away and onto the moor.

“Say something!” I cross my arms. He lets his weight sag against the shed. “Did you take Edgar?”

His brow furrows, and his eyes finally return to mine.

“Why would I do that?”

So he
can
speak. Not only that, but his voice is smooth and strangely hollow, echoing. He seems to wish he hadn’t spoken, because he closes his eyes and swallows as if he could take the words back.

“Why did you hide from me yesterday?”

“Why were you trying to find me?” he replies.

“I told you. There’s a boy missing.”

“Today there is. But you tried to find me yesterday.” The challenge flickers in his eyes, but it dies away just as fast. And he’s right, I wanted to see him yesterday, when Edgar was safe and sound. I wanted to see if he was real.

“There are no strangers in the town of Near,” I say, as if that explains everything.

“Nor am I in it.” He gestures to the ground at his feet, and I understand. We are officially out of town, on the open moors. He pushes himself off the wall and stands to his full height, looking down at me.

He is not a phantom or a ghost, not a crow-thing or an old man. He’s just a boy, as solid and real as I am. My hand did not go through his skin, and his back made a sound as it met the shed. And yet, he is not like me. He is not like anyone I have ever seen. Not just his ghostly skin and dark features, but his voice, his manner.

“I’m Lexi. What’s your name?” I ask.

He seems to be mute again.

“Well, if you won’t tell me, I’m going to give you one.”

He looks up, and I swear I can see a sad smile tease the edges of his lips. But he says nothing, and the smile—if it was one—slides back beneath the pale surface.

“Maybe I’ll call you Robert or Nathan,” I say, watching his face. His eyes. His hair. “Ah, maybe Cole.”

“Cole?” he says quietly. His forehead wrinkles up. “Why?”

“Your hair and your eyes—you look like coal. Like ashes.”

He frowns and turns his eyes back to the ground.

“You don’t like it?”

“No,” he says. “I don’t.”

“Well, too bad,” I say lightly. “Unless you give me your name, I’m going to have to call you Cole.”

“I don’t have a name,” he says, and sighs, as if talking so much is tiresome.

“Everyone has a name.”

Silence falls between us. The boy watches the grass, and I watch him. He fidgets, as if being here with me is uncomfortable, as if my gaze is painful.

“What’s a waste?” he says suddenly.

“Excuse me?”

“You said that to the shed door, that it was a waste. What did you mean?”

I cross my arms. The wind is picking up.

“Coming all this way to find you, and having you not be here. That would have been a waste.”

“Do they have any idea what might have happened to him?” he says after a moment. “The missing boy?”

“No.” I turn back toward the sisters’ house, hoping
they
have some answers. “No one knows.” Myself included. I am no closer to finding Edgar than I was this morning. I don’t know why I felt the need to come here instead, to question a boy who hardly has a word to say. I look back one last time. “You should have come into the village and introduced yourself. Now they will suspect you.”

“Do you suspect me?”

My feet stop. “I do not know you.”

Again my eyes snag on him. There is something in him, distant and sad, this thin boy, his hollow eyes and his singed travel cloak. I cannot stand to blink while looking at him, in case he is not there when I open my eyes. He lifts his chin, as if trying to hear a far-off voice. For a moment he looks unbearably lost, and then he turns and walks away, out into the hills, seeming to put as many weeds and wildflowers between us as possible.

I trudge back toward the sisters’ house, checking the angle of the sun in the sky. I’m losing time. How long do I have until Otto returns home? I should have just followed the search party. But I can’t fault myself for wanting to talk to the stranger. I needed to see him for myself, to know if he did this, if he’s involved.

I kick a stone. Now I have only more questions.

I pass the sisters’ house, heading for the path home.

“Lexi,” says Magda, calling me back. I spot her kneeling in the plot of dirt just beside the cottage. The patch that Magda calls her garden.

“You lied to me,” I say, when I’m close enough, “about the stranger. He’s here.”

Magda cocks her head at me. “We told you we knew nothing about him. And we don’t.” She looks past me and out onto the moors. I follow her gaze. Far beyond the house, a thin shape wanders over the hills that dip away from the sisters’ house in slow waves. On one of these rises, the boy in gray pauses, looking north, away from Near.

I frown and turn back to Magda, who is hunched over in the small patch of dirt again.

“Why did you call me back?” I ask, scuffing my boot along the patch of barren earth.

Magda doesn’t answer, just goes on whispering something to no one at all, and brushing her gnarled fingers back and forth over the empty plot. I squat beside her.

“What are you doing, Magda?”

“Growing flowers, of course.” She gestures to the dirt, where not so much as a weedy stem is poking through the soil. “Little rusty, is all.”

Normally I’d be intrigued and would want to linger, on the off chance that I could catch a glimpse of Magda’s craft. Hoping that she’d forget I was there beside her, and show it. But I don’t have time today.

“Did you plant seeds?” I ask.

At this, she gives a dry laugh and whispers a few more things in the direction of the soil.

“No, dearie. I don’t need any seeds. And besides, I’m growing moor flowers. Wildflowers.”

“I didn’t know you could, in this soil.”

“You can’t, of course. That’s the point. Flowers are freethinking things. They grow where they please. I’d like to see you try and tell a moor flower where to grow.” Magda sits back and rubs her hands together.

I look down at the empty plot. I’m more than an hour behind Otto’s men, with nothing to show for it. And for all I know, my uncle could be making his way home this minute. Maybe Magda knows something. Anything. Whether she’ll
tell
me is another story.

“Magda, there’s a boy missing. Edgar. He’s five—”

“Little blond thing, yes? What happened?” she asks, turning her good eye up at me.

“No one knows. He vanished from his bed last night. They haven’t found any trace yet.”

Magda’s face changes a fraction, the lines deepening, her bad eye growing darker and her good eye focused on nothing. She looks about to say something, but she changes her mind.

“Do you think someone took him?” I ask. Magda frowns and nods.

“The ground’s like skin, it grows in layers,” she says, pinching some soil in her crooked fingers. “What’s on top peels back. What’s underneath can work its way up, eventually.”

I sigh, frustrated. Every now and then Magda does this, talking nonsense. In her mind it might very well be a logical train of thought, but pity the rest of the world can’t follow. I should have known she couldn’t, or wouldn’t, help me.

“The wind is lonely…” Magda adds in a voice so soft I almost miss it. The words snag on something, a memory.

“What did you—” I begin.

“Lexi Harris,” says Dreska, appearing in the doorway. She motions at me with her cane, and I push myself to my feet and go to her. Taking my hand, she sets a small bundle in my palm. It’s a pouch on a string, and it smells like the moor grass and the rain and wet stones.

“Give this to your sister,” she says. “Tell her to wear it. For safety.”

“So you
did
hear about Edgar.”

Dreska gives a grim nod and folds my fingers over the charm. “We’ve made them for all the children.”

“I’ll give it to her.” I slide the pouch into my pocket and turn to go.

“Lexi,” says Magda. “I called you back for the same reason I invited you in yesterday. Because of him. I wondered whether you had heard talk of a stranger in Near.” She points a dirt-caked fingernail at the stranger on the moor. I cast a last glance at the boy, his back still to us. He slides to the ground, and suddenly he doesn’t look like a person, just a rock or a fallen tree jutting up from the tangled grass.

“Others will be looking for him, too,” says Dreska.

I understand her meaning. “I won’t tell. I am my father’s daughter.”

“We do hope you are.”

I head back down the path, but turn and add, “You really don’t know anything about him? Where he’s from?”

“He is safer here,” murmurs Magda, cupping dirt.

“He is keeping secrets,” I say.

“Aren’t we all,” says Dreska with a dry laugh. “You do not believe he took Edgar.” It is not a question. But she is right.

“No, I don’t think he did it,” I call, heading home. “But I mean to find out who did.”

I
MAKE IT HOME BEFORE
O
TTO
, and for that I am thankful. The high sun slides across the afternoon sky, and it’s too late now to risk going into town, too great a chance of running into the search party. There’s no sign of Wren or my mother, but the house is warm and smells of heated stones and bread. I realize how hungry I am. Half a loaf sits on the counter, along with some cold chicken, left out from lunch. I cut a couple pieces of each and devour them, relishing the freedom of solitude and being able to simply eat, rather than be delicate about it.

Feeling much better, I duck into my room, kicking off my boots and smoothing my hair. I pace the space at the foot of the bed and try to make sense of the day. My father taught me to listen to my gut, and my gut says that this strange, hollow boy did not take Edgar. But that doesn’t mean I trust him yet. I do not
understand
him yet. And I do not like the way my chest tightens when my eyes snag on him, as it does for wild things.

Something else tugs at me, and I remember Magda’s whispered words:
The wind is lonely.

I know that line.

I cross to the small table by the window, the one with the leaning candles and the cluster of books, my fingers going straight to the one in the middle. The cover is green and pocked with indents, like the ones my father’s fingers made on the knife and the ax. But these are from my fingers, my marks of use as much as his.

The frayed pages of the book smell earthy and rich, as though there is a part of the moor between the covers instead of paper. Whenever my father told a story, I asked him to put it down in here. The book is strangely heavy, like a stone, and I slip onto the bed with it, tracing my fingers over the soft cover before cracking it open and skimming the pages with my thumb. Three years ago, my father’s handwriting vanished from this book, and mine took over.

There were so many blank pages left in his wake. I tried, now and then, to remember a snippet he might have forgotten to write down. Out walking, or delivering bread, or chopping wood, a sentence would sneak up on me in his rich voice, and I’d race to my room to write it down.

The wind is lonely.

I know that phrase.

I turn to an entry dated a few months after my hand replaced his:

The entry stops. Here and there the page ripples, dotted with small wet circles.

I flip back through the book, searching for an earlier entry, one he would have written himself. My thumb catches the corner of a page near the beginning, pinning it back.

Of course. It’s from the story I thought of last night.

I run my fingers over the page. Why would Magda quote my father’s words?

And then I see it. At the bottom of the page in my father’s small script, the letters
M. T.
Magda Thorne. This story doesn’t belong to my father—he only copied it. But what does it mean now, coming from Magda’s lips in the garden?

The front door opens with a soft groan, and I blink and close the book. How long have I been sitting here, wondering on bedtime poems? Wren’s patter of feet reaches me from the hall, her light bouncing steps on the floorboards. I can’t hear my mother’s, but I know she must be with her. Pushing myself up from the bed, I clutch the book to my chest and head into the kitchen.

Wren is sitting on the table, swinging her legs and playing with one of her baked toys.

I lean against the door frame, holding the book close as my mother wanders like a ghost, setting an empty basket down, picking up an apron, all without a sound. Wren smiles at me and curls her fingers, beckoning me to the table, and when I’m there she reaches up with cupped hands to whisper, “Did you go to the sisters?”

I come close enough to kiss her hair and whisper back, “I did. I’ll tell you all about it later.”

She bounces happily.

“Wren.” My mother doesn’t look up, but her voice wafts through the room. “Can you go fetch me some basil from your garden?”

Wren hops down from the table and bounds out. The front door groans shuts. I wait for my mother to speak to me, to ask me where I’ve been, but she says nothing.

“I went to see the sisters,” I offer. “They hadn’t heard about Edgar.”

Her gaze floats up. Why won’t she speak?

“I saw the stranger, too. I spoke to him, and he’s not to blame, I don’t think. He has the oddest—”

“You shouldn’t have gone, Lexi.”

“You didn’t stop me.”

“Your uncle—”

“Is not my father. Or my mother.”

She sets a towel down and circles the table. “Otto is only trying to protect you.”

“And you?” My fingers tighten on the book. “You could have stopped me.”

“You wouldn’t have listened,” she says.

“You could have tried…” I start, but my words fade as my mother’s fingers, ghostly white with flour, come to rest on my back. Her touch is light—not gentle, but thin, ethereal. For a moment I am reminded of the stranger. And then her fingers tighten and her eyes find mine, and something flickers in her, fierce and hot.

“I
am
trying, Lexi,” she whispers, “to help you.”

The glimpse of the woman my mother used to be catches me off guard. Just a moment, and then it’s fading, and her fingers are sliding weightlessly away. I want to speak, but when I open my mouth, another voice breaks through from somewhere outside. Then another joins. And another.

The moment is over. My mother is back at the counter, turning out dough from a proofing pan, looking a hundred miles away.

“I didn’t see him,” I offer quickly, the sounds of men drawing closer. “I never went.” I wait for her to look up and offer a knowing smile or a nod, but she doesn’t even seem to hear me.

I swallow, tuck the book under my arm, and slip down the hall. The voices are coming from the west, building on each other like thunder, from where the village sits, hidden by hills. I position myself in the doorway, shivering as the wind cuts through.

What did my mother mean?

I take several long deep breaths, trying to get air past the rocks in my throat.

The book falls open in my hands to Magda’s entry, as several members of the search party trudge into sight, looking like shadows cast by the sinking sun. Their faces are long and thin, their brows heavy, shoulders hunched. Their hopes of finding Edgar, at least of finding him alive, must be waning with the light. I watch them from my post, glancing up from the book and trying to give the look of a docile, patient girl. My thumb traces over the words,
The wind is lonely.

The men pause at Otto’s house and exchange a few low words. Then the group breaks apart, scattering like seeds on a gust of wind.

I step aside as Otto stomps past and into our house, avoiding my gaze. And there, a few strides behind him, a tall boy marches over, his shock of dirty-blond hair glowing in the dusky light. Tyler Ward. His pace slows to a stroll as he sees me, a smile teasing the corners of his mouth, even now. He’s trying and failing to look appropriately sober, considering the situation. He slips into the doorway with me, weaving his fingers through mine.

“Pretty sunset,” he says, and his imitation of the brooding and forlorn is almost funny.

“No luck?” I ask, pulling my hand away.

He shakes his head, and I can’t believe it, but it’s almost dismissive. I bite my tongue and force a calm smile.

“Where did you look?”

“Why?” He shoots a blue-eyed glance at me from behind his hair.

“Come on, Tyler,” I say. “You’re always complaining of not having enough adventure. Regale me. What did you do today? Where did you go?”

“Otto said you’d ask, said you’d try to go off on your own. That would be unsafe, Lexi,” he says with a frown. “I’m afraid I cannot risk you getting hurt.” His eyes wander down my hands to a small nick, a splinter from chopping wood. He runs his fingertips over it. “I would have done that for you.”

“I didn’t want to wait,” I say, pulling my hand away. “And I’m more than able.” Tyler falls into a strange quiet, and I step closer and brush his jaw with my fingers, guiding his chin up. “The town square? The Drake’s house? That field we used to play in, the one full of heather?”

He offers a slanted grin. “What will you give me for it?”

“This is serious,” I say. “It’s almost dark, and Edgar’s still missing.”

He looks away, leaning heavily back against the door frame with a frown. It looks wrong on his face, which is so used to smiling. “I know, Lexi. I’m sorry.”

“Have you been to see Helena? Is she all right?”

He interlaces his fingers behind his head and looks away.

I let out an exasperated sigh. The doorway is not big enough for both of us, and I step past him and out into the yard. Tyler trots after me.

“I’ll tell you if you answer a question for me.”

I stop walking away but don’t turn around. I wait for him to reach me, hugging the book to my chest. The wind picks up, the cold air prickling my skin. The world is turning a bruised shade as the light fades. Tyler stops just behind my back. I can almost feel his outstretched hand as he tries to decide whether to touch me or not.

“Why are you doing this to me?” comes his voice, just loud enough to cross the narrow space between us.

“I’m not doing anything, Tyler.” But I know it’s a lie. And so does he.

“Lexi,” he says, and the voice is strange, almost pleading, “you know what I want. Why won’t you even—”

“Why won’t I give you what you want, Tyler?” I ask, spinning on him. “Is that what you’re asking?”

“Lexi, be fair. Give me a chance.” He reaches out, brushes a coil of dark hair from my face. “Tell me what you’re afraid of. Tell me why I can be your friend your entire life, and yet you won’t entertain the thought of—”

“
Because
you’re my friend,” I interrupt. That’s not the whole truth.
Because I loved the little boy you were, and now you’re growing up to be something else.

“I’ve always been your friend, Lexi. That will never change. Why can’t we be more?”

I take a deep breath. The wild grass rolls away from me toward Near.

“Do you remember,” I say over the growing wind, “when we were little, and we used to play those games, the spinning games?”

“Of course I remember. I always won.”

“You always
let go
. You let go when you thought it would be funny, and the circle broke apart, and everyone fell down except you.”

“It was just a game.”

“But everything’s a game to you, Tyler.” I sigh. “All of it. And it’s not about skinned knees anymore. You just want to win.”

“I want to be with you.”

“Then be with me as a friend,” I say. “And help me find Edgar.”

Tyler looks back at the house, the silhouette of my uncle in the window as he washes his hands. When Tyler turns back to me, he’s smiling again, a thinner version of his usual grin.

“No one will ever be good enough for you, Lexi Harris.”

I smile back. “Maybe one day—”

“When the moon shines—” he says.

“In the grass green sky,” I finish. A line my father used to say. Tyler walked around for days repeating it. And for a moment we’re just two kids again in a spinning game or a field of heather, grinning until our faces hurt.

Then the wind bristles. The last bit of light is bleeding away, replaced by a rich blue darkness. I fight off a shiver, and Tyler slides out of his coat, but I shake my head. He seems caught between actions, so he just lets the coat hang there in his hand, both of us suffering.

“Now it’s your turn to talk,” I say, trying to keep my teeth from chattering.

“I do love talking,” he says, “but Otto’s going to have my head for telling you this, Lexi.”

“When has that ever stopped you?”

His smile fades as he slides his coat back on, squares his shoulders, and holds his head up in an almost perfect imitation of my uncle. “We went with Edgar’s father, Mr. Drake, to his house. Edgar’s bedroom was untouched. The window was open, but that was all. Like he just got up and left. Climbed through.” My mind flashes to Wren walking in her daze to the window, trying to slide it open.

“His mother said she tucked him in last night. She said she didn’t hear anything strange.”

“Edgar’s afraid of everything. He wouldn’t just leave.”

Tyler shrugs. “All we know is there was no struggle, and the window was open. We headed west, into those fields by their house, all the way to the edge of the village.”

So they took my advice, after all.

“We looked everywhere, Lexi.”

Everywhere in Near, I think.

Tyler sighs, and I can’t help but think he’s almost handsome without the egotistical smile.

“Everywhere. There’s not a single trace of him. How does that happen?” He frowns, kicking at a stray pebble. “I mean, everyone leaves marks, right?” He shakes his head, straightening. “Otto thinks it’s that stranger. Makes sense, if you think about it.”