Chapter 13 #2
Just when I was beginning to think I’d have no choice but to fight my way back to the yard, I pushed aside a curtain of pine boughs and found myself before the bramble thicket.
The rose blossoms glowed like little ghosts in the dark, and the way was open for me, a gap in the tangle of thorns beckoning me inside.
I followed it down gratefully, surrounded by the heady perfume of roses and overripe blackberries.
The thorns still dragged lightly at my skin, but they felt curious rather than hostile, as if they were teasing—or perhaps testing.
The farther I went, the darker it got, until even the silver sheen of the roses was reduced to a mere impression of gray.
By the time I found my way to the center of the thicket, the brambles had completely closed over my head and I was walking nearly bent in half, the basket of materials bumping awkwardly against my shins.
It might’ve made someone else claustrophobic, but it was exactly what I needed. No one could spy on me here.
I only guessed I’d come to the center when the thorns on either side of me gave way.
I settled onto my haunches and fished a candle out of the basket for light.
As the flame took hold of the wick, I saw there were no roses in this place, nor blackberries, nor even leaves.
Here in the heart of the thicket, there were only massive, gnarled vines and thorns as long as knives.
They curled and twisted over my head, and even when I lifted the candle above me I couldn’t see a hint of green.
With no light reaching this deeply, the ground was soft dirt, and it was littered with the bones of trees that were taken by the thicket. The limbs were dry and nearly petrified, and it didn’t take much to snap off a couple pieces and start a fire.
The first thing I did was unwrap the syringe and draw off as much physostigmine as was left in the bottle.
It was only half as much as I needed, but it was better than nothing—in theory, at least. I laid the syringe where it was easily at hand on the corner of the basket, then arranged the trencher and the bones in front of me. At last, I considered the belladonna.
The berries were black as pitch in the glow of the fire, eating the light in a way the surrounding darkness did not. I plucked three of the largest ones and dropped them into my mortar along with a single leaf, and the rest of the boughs I tossed on the fire, where they began to smoke.
I dipped my fingers into the mortar and coated them in the pulped flesh, drawing a single line down the center of my forehead and two others down my eyes.
The rest I strained into a cup of water, which I placed near the fire to warm while the pungent leaf smoke curled around the space in gossamer strands.
When the outside of the cup grew warm, I lifted it to my mouth.
Don’t.
I stopped, the black liquid resting against my lips. The voice sounded like my mother’s.
Don’t look unless you’re prepared to face what you see.
“You don’t even know me anymore,” I said. “You don’t know what I’m prepared to do.”
There was no answer. I tipped the cup and drank it all in three long swallows. It went down easy, faintly sweet, and it was only after that I felt how it had coated my throat, my tongue, my teeth, possessive and inescapable.
Now came the hardest part: waiting. Belladonna usually acted within an hour, and I should’ve used the time to focus my mind on what I needed to know: whether the hex bag would work, whether the pastor would leave, whether my sanctuary would be saved.
Instead, I found myself ruminating on the poison in my body or the too-empty syringe sitting on the edge of the basket.
I placed another log on the fire and watched the flames lick up the sides.
This is unwise, came my mother’s voice again. You can’t control it.
“I can’t control anything anymore,” I answered. “And you’re dead.”
My mother had forbidden me to use belladonna or any of the other shadow herbs.
For her, they cut too close to what people already believed about us, and they frightened her.
She did not wish to know the future or understand the secrets of the universe; she only did what magic she’d needed to survive.
My grandmother, according to her journals, had been an avid user, a seer, but over time my mother wore her down.
I only ever saw her bring out the trencher once, while my mother was gone and she and I were alone in the house.
She’d read stones rather than bones, pebbles and river glass and amber she’d collected over the years.
I remembered my fingers itching to rub their shining, smooth-worn surfaces, but my grandmother had slapped my hand away.
When I looked up at her, her eyes were blown so huge and black I thought they would swallow me.
“Go play outside,” she’d rasped, and her teeth and lips were stained like mine were now.
“Go,” she snapped more forcefully when I hadn’t moved.
I went—straight up to the attic, crawling on my belly to avoid the creaky boards until I found a hole through which I could watch her.
It wasn’t much to watch, at least not from my vantage point, but up until then my mother and grandmother had been wholly open with me, explaining everything they did and teaching me to do it alongside them.
The idea that something was not for my eyes and ears was new to me, and the allure of the forbidden was strong.
I was jolted out of the memory by pain in my fingers. I snatched my hand back from the fire—the same one the fawn bit, still in its bandage—and tried to assess the damage, but my vision swam as soon as I focused my eyes. I was in the belladonna’s hold.
I reached for the box of bones. The fire popped, loud enough that I felt it in my skin, and I jumped. My hand went astray, and my fingers dipped over the edge and met my mother’s.
Blade peeling through dead flesh, palm to nail split, blood congealed, blood oozing, I am a butcher I am a butcher I am a butcher—
I had just enough sense left to pull my hand back yet again. The memories faded from my mind’s eye, but when I reached for the box again, my own fingers were flayed neatly open, knuckle bones rising white from tendon-laced flesh. I tried to shut my eyes and failed.
“It’s not real, it’s not real, it’s not real—”
My voice didn’t even sound like me, a clotted, staccato series of gasps.
For a moment, my entire body was alien and everything teetered on the edge of hysteria, each new prick of awareness threatening to cascade into terror.
I clawed myself back from the edge, seized the box, and dumped the bones into the trencher with enough force that a distal phalanx broke off and leaped into the fire.
I stared into the trencher for a long time.
It was hard to focus, and the materials appeared to move of their own accord.
I kept losing my place, or perhaps I only thought I did, because every path ended in destruction.
I wasn’t sure how long I sat there, following the trails through the bones with rising panic, hoping that each new angle and turn would show me a way forward.
They did not; each one concluded with the razing of the sanctuary and my own death or imprisonment.
There was no escape, no opportunity to reinterpret, no end but earth scraped raw, trees slashed and burned, the creek dammed, pond drained, habitats and burrows crushed beneath caterpillar tread.
I saw it again and again—the meadow burned to ash, the forest uprooted, nothing remaining but acres of abraded land primed for building.
Whatever loss I felt at the killing of the rose wards was wholly subsumed by this, every bit of life and magic drained until the earth itself turned black.
I did not see the pastor and yet I did; something about the hard-edged furrows of the upturned dirt reminded me of his face, the lines around his mouth.
Whatever was to be built here was for his purpose.
I finally sat back. My eyes burned, and for a moment I was certain I’d scorched them in the heat of the fire, singeing off my eyelashes, the skin of my very eyelids.
When I reached up to touch them, the tickle of my unburnt eyelashes reminded me of spider legs, and I found myself shaking my hand frantically, pale spiders falling from my sleeves and out from underneath my fingernails.
A distant part of me realized this was a very bad trip, and my fear had colored the casting of the bones.
Perhaps this was why my mother did not read the future, not in stones or tea leaves or anything; she was always afraid, and it tainted everything.
I gathered up the bones in my bare hands, heedless of the images that welled up before my waking eyes, and tossed them again.
The clatter came to me long after they’d hit the bottom, long after I realized my ability to read had fled.
I could see hints of something, a future perhaps even darker than the first, but the materials were unwilling to give up their answers.
There were glimpses of a way forward, flashes of power and reclamation, but I saw them as impressions in my periphery, and the harder I stared the more the bones curled in on themselves, a disembodied fist refusing to open and reveal the knowledge inside.
I told you not to look.
“You have no right to deny me,” I snarled. “Now show me the answer!”