Conversation gradually returned in the tavern, and Maretta contented herself with her mulled wine, sipping loudly at the steaming brew over the rim of her glass. I studied her, those sunken eyes beneath eyebrows that sprang wiry hair in every direction.
A witch claimed her.
She meant me.
There was a logic to it. I remembered the presence I had felt with me in the woods that night months ago. That sense of someone lurking close.
She lifted her face from her drink and stared directly ahead, directly at where I sat. The attention jarred me. I sat up a little straighter, hopeful, perhaps, that she could see me.
“Maretta?” I whispered her name again. “Can you see me?”
She remained as she was, her gaze fixed ahead—at me,onme. And yet not.
Not on me.
Not seeing me.
Not hearing me.
For several long moments, I held my breath, hoping for her to reply. For some recognition to flare in those wise old eyes. Some awareness. Something.
Nothing.
Nothing happened.
She blinked and looked away, went back to sipping her brew.
Deflated, I sighed and pushed up from the table, walking from the tavern and out into the cold night, the door thudding softly behind me, muffling the buzzing din of the living. I walked, a soundless specter, down the center of town, snow falling softly around me, landing gently as a moth on my lashes.
I walked headlong into the teeth of winter and did not feel it. Not nearly as much as the bitter bleakness churning inside me.
I strode across town to the schoolhouse on numb legs and let myself inside, jiggling the window with the loose latch that never fully sealed shut no matter how much Mr. Nyland struggled with it. I pried it open, sliding the window up enough for me to wedge myself through it.
Standing, I surveyed the space with its empty desks and benches. I’d never been inside the school when no one else was around. I suspected if a book fell to the floor the sound would echo forever.
Moonlight spilled inside through the large, mullioned window that faced the street. In the night it felt eerie, the shadows stretching, creeping long fingers over desks toward the front of the room where Mr. Nyland presented his lessons.
I had always enjoyed my hours within these walls, wishing for more time here. School was only a few hours a day but not at all during harvest. Even the youngest of children were required to work then.
I stepped across the plank flooring, knowing that the schoolmaster who slept on the second level of the schoolhouse would not hear the creak of the floorboards beneath my weight. I’d learned this already when testing out the boundaries of my invisibility.
Desperate to be heard, I’d thrown objects. A pitcher to the floor. A bowl against a wall. I’d grabbed each of my father’s boots and tried flinging them into the window, hoping to shatter the glass.
The moment these things released from my fingers, they never landed. I would glance to my hand to only find it empty, the object back where it originally had been, untouched, as though it had never been moved at all.
I’d done this so many times, flinging things, hoping one of them would make contact, would result in a crash. Only it never worked. Like my nonexistent footprints, nothing I did ever left a mark. Nothing I did mattered.
It was some sorcery at play, to be certain. It had to be...which brought my thoughts back to Maretta’s words.
A witch claimed her.
If that were true, then the wordcursedwould be more accurate.
I advanced on the shelf of books, finding the one I sought.
Hugging the thick, leather-bound volume to my chest, I moved to the front window that faced the street and the meetinghouse with its many torches casting light into the night. I sank before the panes of glass in a puddle of light and opened the book, quickly finding the page with the illustration of Vala, the shadow witch who had so transfixed me as a child.
She was exactly as I remembered her. Even in black-and-white strokes, inanimate on the page, the illustration was so vivid, so very raw, depicting the witch on the brink of death, caught up in an agony of flames.
