“Is this true? I ask in a whisper that skitters across the silence. “Do you really feel my pain so acutely?”
He does not answer out loud. Instead, I feel an invitation—no… a dare?—drop into my head like a coin into a well. He dares me to find the lie I suspect him of. But though I probe and search, I can find no trace of it. He does not lie to me. He seeks to help—for his own benefit, perhaps, and yet the result will ease both his pain and my own.
Too many graves. We have already had to dig too many graves.
“Very well,” I say. “What is the price?”
I know this is no man, and therefore I know his magic is not human. I am bargaining with something I don’t fully understand. This is dangerous, but the fever is also dangerous. I choose the danger which stands before me, because at least its consequences will fall to me alone. The fever takes indiscriminately.
“I do not ask a price,” the man says.
“There is always a price.”
“Not today.”
I search again in his eyes, in his voice, for the lie. I cannot find it. More sweat trickles down my back. The yarrow wilts in my hand. Precious time slithers past us as I wrestle with my indecision.
“Yes. If you truly ask no price, I accept your help,” I say at last.
The man says nothing. He only nods, one corner of his mouth curving into the ghost of a smile that I can pretend I have not seen. Then he sinks to his knees in the clearing, rolls up his sleeves, and presses his long-fingered hands to the earth.
He bends his head and closes his fathomless eyes. His mouth moves over words I cannot hear, but I know instinctively that I would not understand them even if I could hear them. He sinks his fingers into the earth, the fingertips disappearing as the deep brown soil envelops them. All at once, I can feel a humming in the earth beneath me, a current of power that courses through the ground and buzzes like a hive of beesagainst the bare soles of my feet. I can feel it is magic even as I recognize that it is no magic I have ever encountered before. Like the figure kneeling before me, it isother.
What begins as a thrill of dread becomes a thrill of excitement. It surprises me, but I cannot suppress it. I can feel it tingling in the roots of my hair.
His hands close on two great fistfuls of earth and he stands, the soil trickling in tiny eddies from between his fingers. He does not approach any closer—perhaps he can feel my skittishness—and instead extends his hands out toward me.
“You must take it,” he says. “Take it and sprinkle it on the doorstep of every dwelling in your village. The fever will be gone with the dawn.”
I hesitate. Even for magic, it seems too good to possibly be true.
“And the fever will spare them?” I ask. “All of them?”
“All of them.”
All at once the soil slipping between his fingers seems too precious to waste, a priceless treasure about to be borne away on the breeze. I hurry forward and extend my basket out so that it waits beneath his outstretched hands. He opens his fists and releases the soil into two heaps on the waiting bed of cheesecloth.
“Do not waste time,” he tells me in his melting voice. I raise my eyes from the soil in the basket, and find his face again. I mean to thank him, but I cannot. I am lost in the black wells of his eyes.
A crow caws loudly in the air above us. It startles me, and I blink.
The man who is not a man is gone.
For the next hour, I creep from cottage to cottage, from makeshift shelter to tent, sprinkling the enchanted soil on each threshold from the spoils of my basket, but not before returning an armload of fresh yarrow to the waiting belly of our cauldron. I hope the soil will work, but I am not ready to gamble the survival of our covens upon its efficacy.
But the man who was not a man told the truth. As the sun rises, the fog of confusion and fear of hovering death clear, like the mist; and by midday, we have made our last weary rounds, and can confirm that everyfever has broken, every frail being has been released from its grasp. I tell no one of the soil, nor of the thing that had given it to me.
But that very night, and every night after, I dream of him.
The dreams deepen over time, like love. Or hatred.
At first, I dream as I have always done—my dreams peopled with those I know, and also those who have gone before me. Sometimes they speak to me. Sometimes they merely watch over me, guiding my actions by the gentle weight of their presence. But in the background of these dreams, there he is—a hovering figure in the distance, easy to ignore, if I choose.
But I never choose.
As the weeks go by, he grows nearer. I can make out more of him—the unshaven plane of his cheek, the dirt beneath his fingernails, his slightly parted lips, like he is always just on the cusp of saying something out loud. Still, I do not approach or speak to him. I am waiting, but he is waiting, too.
We are learning about each other.
