way, this familiarity mitigated that restlessness Yancey knew stirred in the breast of most young folks—she felt too close to the Cold Mountain and the Hoard, too much a part of them, to ever feel easy at the thought of leaving. Oh, she dreamed of seeing the world; who didn’t? And that yearning’d grown only more acute after Mala’s passing, two years previous . . . along with another class of future vision entirely, the kind you didn’t tend to talk about, except with those who shared the same facility.
On the cold April night after her first courses—a cause for quiet celebration, seeing her schoolhouse friends had all passed that milestone some time hence—she’d gone to sleep happy, only to wake shuddering with cannon-fire images ringing through her head. Thunder, broken walls above a moonlit ocean, a falling flag. When she’d asked Mala what it meant, Mala had said only,
Wait and see
. Three days on, papers began to ship in with the answer as their headlines: FORT SUMTER ATTACKED, varying tales of predawn bombardment, the Carolina outpost’s capture. The War Between the States, begun at last.
It
wasn’t
hexation, Mala had hastened to assure her; something less powerful but also far less dangerous, in the main. Still, these sudden flashes of insight (nighttime and otherwise) did come with a perilous knack for attracting the strange, as well as knowing it upon sight.
We are nothing so grand as they,
Mala had said,
yet these . . . hexes . . . may be drawn to us, nevertheless. And though they can’t batten on us as they do their own, the younger may kill you by trying before figuring that out, while their elders may decide that to brook no competition is always the better policy. It behooves us to know how to spot them, therefore—so we can run the other way.
Remembering, also,
she’d added, after a pause,
that to most without even a touch of the strange, such difference in degree means nothing. What they’ll do to hexes they’ll do to us as well, if we give them reason.
An image had flashed between them, then—shared memory made visible, something Yancey’d never thought unusual, until that day. Didn’t
all
mothers and daughters occasionally know what the other was thinking, after all? But here it came, spilling out palpable as if Yancey’d lived it herself, with no prompt but Mala’s cool hand on hers:
A rake-thin girl, half-naked and bruised, fleeing her hovel while the rest of the village celebrated, unaware / a smaller child turning to see, alerted by some unstruck bell—Mala, as was / fire, flaring from the girl’s blood-stained palms as a drunken man emerged after her, setting both him and his home ablaze / screams rising as light leapt from roof to roof, hungry-searing, eating
everything—
And then, what was left of the village smoking black, the witch-girl bound fast amidst a pile of kindling, too tired even to weep. As the headman declaimed hoarsely, black coat flapping in a frosty wind:
We burn
her
, or they burn
us.
No other way. You
all
know it!
Were those tears frozen to his face?
The torchbearer, approaching. Mala’s parents stood elbow-to-shoulder with the rest, mouths resolutely shut, her mother trying to angle her away. But the witch-girl’s eyes sought her out, needle-through-cloth deft, to stitch their minds together just as the torchbearer’s hand dipped down—telling her, without a sound—
Watch them burn me now, sister, like the
gadje
will burn them anyhow, half a year on. Like they’d burn you too,
if only they knew what you are. . . .
Yancey’d wrenched herself free, then, knowing—as Mala already knew she knew—that this was the one possible future they could never flee; that even poor, adoring Lionel, only half-aware of his wife’s true talents, could never be allowed complete comprehension, lest he admit his doubts to the wrong person.
At Mala Colder’s funeral, everyone had praised Lionel for raising such a self-possessed daughter, so strong and
On the cold April night after her first courses—a cause for quiet celebration, seeing her schoolhouse friends had all passed that milestone some time hence—she’d gone to sleep happy, only to wake shuddering with cannon-fire images ringing through her head. Thunder, broken walls above a moonlit ocean, a falling flag. When she’d asked Mala what it meant, Mala had said only,
Wait and see
. Three days on, papers began to ship in with the answer as their headlines: FORT SUMTER ATTACKED, varying tales of predawn bombardment, the Carolina outpost’s capture. The War Between the States, begun at last.
It
wasn’t
hexation, Mala had hastened to assure her; something less powerful but also far less dangerous, in the main. Still, these sudden flashes of insight (nighttime and otherwise) did come with a perilous knack for attracting the strange, as well as knowing it upon sight.
We are nothing so grand as they,
Mala had said,
yet these . . . hexes . . . may be drawn to us, nevertheless. And though they can’t batten on us as they do their own, the younger may kill you by trying before figuring that out, while their elders may decide that to brook no competition is always the better policy. It behooves us to know how to spot them, therefore—so we can run the other way.
Remembering, also,
she’d added, after a pause,
that to most without even a touch of the strange, such difference in degree means nothing. What they’ll do to hexes they’ll do to us as well, if we give them reason.
An image had flashed between them, then—shared memory made visible, something Yancey’d never thought unusual, until that day. Didn’t
all
mothers and daughters occasionally know what the other was thinking, after all? But here it came, spilling out palpable as if Yancey’d lived it herself, with no prompt but Mala’s cool hand on hers:
A rake-thin girl, half-naked and bruised, fleeing her hovel while the rest of the village celebrated, unaware / a smaller child turning to see, alerted by some unstruck bell—Mala, as was / fire, flaring from the girl’s blood-stained palms as a drunken man emerged after her, setting both him and his home ablaze / screams rising as light leapt from roof to roof, hungry-searing, eating
everything—
And then, what was left of the village smoking black, the witch-girl bound fast amidst a pile of kindling, too tired even to weep. As the headman declaimed hoarsely, black coat flapping in a frosty wind:
We burn
her
, or they burn
us.
No other way. You
all
know it!
Were those tears frozen to his face?
The torchbearer, approaching. Mala’s parents stood elbow-to-shoulder with the rest, mouths resolutely shut, her mother trying to angle her away. But the witch-girl’s eyes sought her out, needle-through-cloth deft, to stitch their minds together just as the torchbearer’s hand dipped down—telling her, without a sound—
Watch them burn me now, sister, like the
gadje
will burn them anyhow, half a year on. Like they’d burn you too,
if only they knew what you are. . . .
Yancey’d wrenched herself free, then, knowing—as Mala already knew she knew—that this was the one possible future they could never flee; that even poor, adoring Lionel, only half-aware of his wife’s true talents, could never be allowed complete comprehension, lest he admit his doubts to the wrong person.
At Mala Colder’s funeral, everyone had praised Lionel for raising such a self-possessed daughter, so strong and
Similar Books
