The Near Witch

by Victoria Schwab

“Of every aspect of the moor, the earth and stone and rain and fire, the wind is the strongest one in Near. Here on the outskirts of the village, the wind is always pressing close, making windows groan. It whispers and it howls and it sings. It can bend its voice and cast it into any shape, long and thin enough to slide beneath the door, stout enough to seem a thing of weight and breath and bone.

beyond the weathered glass the moor rolls away like a spool of fabric:

“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.”

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

So he can speak. Not only that, but his voice is smooth and strangely hollow, echoing.

“It’s not safe out here. Not at night,” he says at last. His voice is clear and smooth at once, cutting through the wind in an odd way, more parallel than perpendicular.

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.” She looks to me, still tottering like a knocked glass before it resettles.

The forest is a different thing in the dappled light of day, but not a better thing, not a less frightening thing. It does not glow blue-white from within, but dull gray-white from without, diffused by the dead branches of the trees. The trees themselves make jagged lines, thin poles jutting up from the ground. There is something violent about the way they’ve been stuck in the soil like pins. Careless and sharp. And everything feels deadened by a stifling quiet.

No Wren. Voices spill out of the kitchen, my mother’s and Otto’s, low and strained and lined with something worse, the kind of thing that catches in your throat and bends your words out of key.