Chapter 21 #2
“We heard there was an altar to the old gods,” Dacia explained. “We are on our way to lay our offerings and ask for protection. Girls have continued to go missing. Two …” Dacia glanced at the others. “Three more since you disappeared. Lorraine disappeared two days ago.”
“Lorraine?” I echoed, regretting how stingy I’d been with my pink silk—a rag compared to what I wore in Death’s home.
“I know she didn’t run away,” Dacia said.
“No one is finding their bodies. No one hears from them again. The old women in the village insist this is the work of Lord Death, but the priests and the Baron’s men think it’s the Bandits of Molsheim.
We’re not going anywhere alone. Only together or in pairs. To keep from being taken.”
It had been profoundly silly, but for a time I had felt as if my own suffering were so profound that once I’d succumbed to it, all other suffering would somehow end.
It surprised me to hear these tragedies beyond the confines of the wood continued the same.
That any sacrifice I made meant nothing when poured down the throat of the all-consuming appetite of destruction.
With another pang, I realized I could no longer ask Death about these women—that I had never thought to ask him about them in the first place—if he saw them in their final moments.
A sick feeling moved through my stomach. Dacia picked another leaf out of my hair, and I felt like I was breaking in half.
“We can take you as far as the altar at least,” Dacia said. But I saw the looks the other girls gave each other.
I had enough sense to know I was in trouble, but in that moment, I would have been led through the gates of hell for Dacia, such profound, bone-deep relief it was to be in her company again.
She tenderly tied the strings of her cloak and tucked her arm in mine, and I could not have left her for anything.
Ignoring Christine’s suspicious glances and the way the soldier eyed me and crossed himself, they resumed their journey, and I limped with them to be with Dacia.
It wasn’t far before the adrenaline began to ebb.
The pain in the backs of my legs and the bruises from my flight, as well as the general sickness of magic, all began to catch me.
The chatter around me faded away. I focused on the push-pull of air in my lungs.
On the steadiness of Dacia’s arm. And moving my legs forward. That was all.
“Are you sure you are well?” Dacia asked quietly, feeling through my body what I would not say.
“I’m just a little ill,” I said faintly. Despite the cool rain, a pale, sickly kind of sweat erupted on my brow.
“Louis,” Dacia called immediately.
The stern soldier turned immediately.
“Will you please let her ride? She’s been injured and is falling ill from being out in the weather. I can feel her trembling.”
“No!” I said to Dacia, for I wanted only to walk beside her. But she shrugged me off, handing me over to Louis.
“Hush, Salomé, you cannot walk in this state.”
I heard a few murmurs of complaint from the girls, but Louis set me sideways on the horse behind him as if I were Dacia’s luggage, then trotted back to the front of the group. I had to bury my scream in my arm as the jostling of the horse hit my thighs.
“Are you at least getting better rates?” Christine asked me at one point.
I blinked, trying to make sense of the question in my pain-addled brain.
“Josef had to raise the room rates because of the taxes,” one of the other girls explained. “It’s really the Baron’s …” But she trailed off, her gaze flicking to the soldiers.
Christine gave her a look like she’d just stepped in cow shit. “Josef isn’t here to hear you butter him up, but we are.”
“It’s about the same as it was,” I managed.
They accepted my answer, turning to a debate about expenses and taxes. It sounded as if they all owed more than before I’d left.
“What has happened in the village?” I asked. “Besides the taxes?”
“The Baron is restoring his estate. He’s pressed many of the men into work and they are coming to the Blue Moon less and less. It’s not money. I think they are all just exhausted, between the fields and the walls and the dangers of the labor.”
“Lamont lost his fingers. Crushed by a stone,” another girl informed me. I had no recollection of who Lamont was.
“Lisette got the pox from one of the Baron’s soldiers,” another said.
“Is it better in your town? Colmar?”
“She’s a long way from Colmar.”
“Is Colmar still in the Baron’s territory?” someone whispered.
“He is an active lord,” Christine said with a lofty detachment she performed for men; the soldiers escorting them were the Baron’s men, after all. “We are so grateful for his wisdom and care.”
The others murmured agreement.
But they had said more than enough—between the Baron and Josef, their misery was acute.
I gripped the back of the saddle and tried to hold back my tears.
Without the hope of becoming a sorceress, I had no ability to help Dacia, or any of them.
I would not be able to find Rochelle. Perchta’s hut would shelter me for a moment, but it would not give me what I wanted, what I needed.
My fire, my bath, my bed. Power. Freedom. Why had I run? I could not remember.
The women began debating the directions for finding the altar, and eventually Louis set me down and trotted off into the woods, looking for the turnoff. Gratefully, I leaned onto Dacia, and we began to slowly shuffle forward.
“I am afraid for you, Salomé,” she said in low tones. “I missed you, but I wish we had not come across you like this.”
I pressed her arm, trying to comfort her without betraying a word.
“There were terrible rumors about you.” She glanced around us, as if to see if anyone was listening. “They think you killed Maxime. That you are a witch. That you crawled out of your own grave.”
I shook my head, which made it spin. “They are just stories,” I managed through the nausea.
“Of course, for here you are in the flesh.” She sighed. “But still …”
“What about Odette? Could she have run away?”
Dacia shook her head. “No, and you cannot convince me otherwise. Maybe Josef sold her too?” She said it as if she did not believe it, but hoped.
“Maybe.”
“Since you left, fear has taken hold in the village. They thought it was Kaufman, for he was last seen with one of the girls. They hung him right in the street—it was terrible, and then of course another girl was missing the next day. One of the washerwomen—you remember Jehenne?—she swears she saw the man who did it, that it was Lord Death in the dead of night, with his dark robes on a great black stallion. But they’ve tried to make you their villain too.
They say you stalk behind him, looking for little girls to feed on.
It feels like every day grows more dangerous. ”
I did not know what to say, or even how to think about her words. I was not a villain—or at least, I didn’t think I was. I was so bewildered by the pain I couldn’t feel sure. As she spoke, I felt the slow pulse of blood dripping down my legs. The rain lightly pattered on the leaves, a quiet song.
That’s when I felt the magic.
It was just a thread, like a spider’s web spun through just the right catch of sunlight and morning dew.
But I could see it. I could feel it and separate it from my own magic, even while it was part of it somehow.
I touched it with my finger, and even though there was nothing there, I felt the ripple all along its thread.
“What is it?” Dacia asked.
“I found it,” I said.
Dacia called for the other women. The others called for Louis. But none of us waited. Holding tight to Dacia, I led them into the woods, following the golden thread.
The shrine was not far off the road. It was made of white stone, standing about as tall as the withers on a horse and carved with the Latin letters and older, stranger runic symbols.
I recognized the shape of them from Renaud’s manuscripts, though I could not read them.
Someone had placed a stone sculpture of Jesus carrying the cross, his brow beaded with sweat and blood, on top of the stone, but even with its weathered and faded paint, it was a recent addition, and the foundation was much older.
The Latin said this was the altar to stop at and consider the death and sacrifice of Christ. Below the sculpture the stones had been built with a lip that acted like a shelf.
Dead flowers, old coins, and weathered odds and ends littered it, and it was there that each of the girls silently knelt and offered something. A coin. A lock of hair. A sweet.
“I ask the new gods and the old, protect me from dangers missed and told,” they each whispered, crossing themselves. The air around the shrine felt tight and heavy.
I was the last. I had nothing to offer. But I knelt and pressed a kiss from my lips to my fingers to the stone. The memory of Hecate, facing the woods and the grove and Perchta all at the same time, leapt to my mind. I silently sent a prayer for her guidance.
A crash through the quiet woods startled us all. I leapt away, not with surprise, but with hope—with a wild vision of a black stallion and cloaked rider coming to take me back.
“Louis,” Christine reminded us.
The girls sighed with relief. One of them even chuckled.
But I kept watching, that hope thrumming in my chest. How much easier this would be if he simply found me and dragged me home.
It was because of that wild hope that I saw the brown flash of a rider in the brush.
That was not Louis’s red livery. It took only a moment for me to realize.
“Bandits! Run!” I screamed and wrenched the two closest girls by their cloaks, shoving them away from the oncoming riders.
Christine saw the way of it immediately and sprinted off.
The young ones followed, wide-eyed and looking back.
Dacia hesitated, but I pushed her. “Go!” I ordered.