The Near Witch

by Victoria Schwab

With so many obstacles between the first flutter of an aspiring author’s imagination and the final product, few stories get to live even a single life on shelves.

Everything seems different at night. Defined. Beyond the window, the world

When I was small, the wind sang me lullabies. Lilting, humming, high-pitched things, filling the space around me so that even when all seemed quiet, it wasn’t. This is a wind I have lived with. But tonight it’s different.

The room is suddenly quiet. I pry the window open, the wood protesting as it drags against itself, and throw the shutters back. The stranger is gone. I feel like there should be a mark in the air where he was wiped away. But there is no trace. No matter how much I stare, there is nothing but trees, and rocks, and rolling hills. I stare out at this empty landscape, and it seems impossible that I saw him, saw anyone.

News spreads like weeds in a place so small.

“No, if he was a crow-thing, then that’s a good omen. Crows are good omens.”

But to me they are like gravity, with their own strange pull, and whenever I have nowhere to go, my feet take me toward their house. It’s the same gravity I felt at the window last night, pulling me to the stranger on the moor, a kind of weight I’ve never fully understood.

The trees creep up around me as I enter the grove. I stop, knowing at once I’m not alone. Something is breathing, moving, just beyond my sight. I hold my breath, letting the breeze and the hush and the sighing moor slip away into ambient noise. I scan with my ears, waiting for a sound to emerge from the sea of whispers, scan with my eyes, waiting for something to move.

My father taught me how to track, how to read the ground and the trees. He taught me that everything has a language, that if you knew the language, you could make the world talk.

Growing up in Near, I’ve heard a dozen stories about witches. My father hated those tales, told me they were made up by the Council to frighten people.

“Fear is a strange thing,” he used to say. “It has the power to make people close their eyes, turn away. Nothing good grows out of fear.”

This house is as old as Near itself, sagging over the centuries. It sits on the eastern edge of the village, bordered on one side by a low stone wall, and on the other by a dilapidated shed.

“Does the moor really speak?” I ask, watching the tea in the cup grow dark. “Not in the way we do, you and I. Not with words. But it has its secrets, yes.” Secrets. That’s how my father used to put it, too. “What does it sound like? What does it feel like?” I ask, half to myself. “I imagine it must feel like more, rather than less. I wish I could—” “Lexi Harris, you could eat dirt every day and wear only weeds, and you’d be no closer to any of it than you already are.”

He told me witches were like people, that they came in all shapes and sizes, and they could be good or bad or foolish or clever.

If the moor wind ever sings, you mustn’t listen, not with all of your ears. Use only the edges. Listen the way you’d look out the corners of your eyes. The wind is lonely, love, and always looking for company.

Flowers are freethinking things. They grow where they please. I’d like to see you try and tell a moor flower where to grow.

My father used to say that the night could tell secrets just as well as the day,

The morning is a stealthy hunter, my father used to say. It sneaks up quiet and quick on the night and overtakes it.

Nothing good grows out of fear, my father said. It’s a poisonous thing.

It is a strange thing, the way the world goes quiet when we hear our own name, as though the walls grow thin to make way.

A memory ripples, as thin as a dream, of being half carried, half guided home, a low voice whispering as my boots slid over the tangled grass.

Magda looks at me as if I’ve gone mad. Or I’ve grown up. It’s kind of the same thing.

Funny how when we start to tell a secret, we can’t stop. Something falls open in us, and the sheer momentum of letting go pushes us on.

“It’s amazing how much can change in one day, let alone three. In those three days, I watched my uncle stiffen. I watched my mother become a ghost. I watched my father die. I tried to take in every word he said, tried to commit them to memory, tried not to break inside.

The words have scraped my throat raw. Maybe one day the words will pour out like so many others, easy and smooth and on their own. Right now they take pieces of me with them.

The woods are alight like an ember, bluish white and cradled by the rolling hills. It’s like a beacon, I think with a chill. So this is what happens when the world goes black. The forest steals the light from the sky.

The thing about bad news is this: All bad news might spread like fire, but when it takes you by surprise it’s sharp and hot, gobbling everything up so fast you never have a chance. When you’re waiting for it, it’s even worse. It’s the smoke, filling the room so slow you can watch it steal the air from you.

My father used to say that change is like a garden. It doesn’t come up overnight, unless you are a witch. Things have to be planted and tended, and most of all, the ground has to be right.

“My brother told me that the moor and witches are like everything else, that they can be good or bad, weak or strong. That they come in as many shapes and sizes as we do.