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

is full of shadows, all pressed together in harsh relief, somehow sharper than they ever were in daylight. Sounds seem sharper, too, at night. A whistle. A crack. A child’s whisper.

“She was very old and very young, depending on which way she turned her head, for no one knows the age of witches. The moor streams were her blood and the moor grass was her skin, and her smile was kind and sharp at once, like the moon in the black, black night…”

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.

I must be feeling bold today, because my fingers close around the knife, and the weight of it feels good. I slip it around my waist like a belt, the guarded blade against my lower back, and feel safe again. Clothed.

Only hunters and witches live out this way, they say.

Witches can call down rain or summon stones. They can make fire leap and dance. They can move the earth. They can control an element. The way Magda and Dreska Thorne can. I asked them once what they were, and they said old. Old as rocks. But that’s not the whole of it. The Thorne sisters are witches, through and through. And witches are not so welcome here.

Everyone else in the village turns their back on the sisters, pretends they are not here, and seems to do a decent job of forgetting. 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.

He taught me that everything has a language, that if you knew the language, you could make the world talk.

“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.”

“Born is born. You were born the way you 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.

“This is their home, Lexi. They won’t turn their backs on it, even though it turned its back on them.”

The trees all whisper, leaves gossiping. The stones are heavy thinkers, the sullen silent types. He used to make up stories for everything

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.

In my sister’s world, secrets are almost as much fun as games.

And I do not like the way my chest tightens when my eyes snag on him, as it does for wild things.

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

He believed that witches were blessings. They are closer to nature than any human, because it is a part of them.

“Witches are connected to the moor. I think my father wanted to have that connection, too. And he got closer than most, but the fact that he couldn’t made him respect witches even more.”

The moor streams were her blood and the moor grass was her skin, and her smile was kind and sharp at once like the moon on the moors in the black, black night. The Near Witch knew how to speak to the world in its language, and sometimes you didn’t know if the sound you heard beneath your door was the howling of the wind or the Near Witch singing the hills to sleep.

“The Near Witch was a moor witch. They say it’s the strongest kind, that you have to be born of two witches, rather than a witch and a human, and even then, you never know. She could manipulate any of the elements instead of just one.

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

“No, silly girl, sticks and stones. For building birds.” She half sings in her raspy way as she hobbles along. “Gathered from the village floor, nailed to every village door, watchful eyes turned out at night, keep the evils out of sight.”

Stories are always born from something.”

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.

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

“Dead things are bound to their beds until dark,”

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.

Watchful eyes turned out at night, keep the evils out of sight.

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 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.

“If by ‘fine’ you mean ‘bleeding,’ then yes, you are,”

“Lexi, I left you alone for one night, and you got yourself abducted and nearly killed by the Near Witch. There’s no way I’m letting you walk home alone.”

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.

“Energy’s like a knot,” he’d say. “The more you force it, the worse it gets. You have to untangle it. Close your eyes, and breathe. Picture the knot untangling a little with every breath.”