The madwoman in the Tower saw the Witch hobbling through the trees. She was far away—ever so far, but the madwoman’s eyes could see around the world if she let them.
Had she known how to do this before she went mad? Perhaps she had. Perhaps she simply did not notice. She had been a devoted daughter once. And then a girl in love. And then an expectant mother, counting the days until her baby came. And then everything had gone wrong.
The madwoman discovered that it was possible for her to know things. Impossible things. The world, she knew in her madness, was littered with shiny bits and precious pieces. A man might drop a coin on the ground and never find it again, but a crow will find it in a flash. Knowledge, in its essence, was a glittering jewel—and the madwoman was a crow. She pressed, reached, picked, and gathered. She knew so many things. She knew where the Witch lived, for example. She could walk there blindfolded if she could just get out of the Tower for long enough. She knew where the Witch took the children. She knew what those towns were like.
“How is our patient doing this morning?” the Head Sister said to her at the dawning of each day. “How much sorrow presses on her poor, poor soul?” She was hungry. The madwoman could feel it.
None, the madwoman could have said if she felt like speaking. But she didn’t.
For years, the madwoman’s sorrows had fed the Head Sister. For years she felt the predatory pounce. (Sorrow Eater, the madwoman discovered herself knowing. It was not a term that she had ever learned. She found it the way she found anything that was useful—she reached through the gaps of the world and worried it out.) For years she lay silently in her cell while the Head Sister gorged herself on sorrow.
And then one day, there was no sorrow to be had. The madwoman learned to lock it away, seal it off with something else. Hope. And more and more, Sister Ignatia went away hungry.
“Clever,” the Sister said, her mouth a thin, grim line. “You have locked me out. For now.”
You have locked me in, the madwoman thought, a tiny spark of hope igniting in her soul. For now.
The madwoman pressed her face to the thick bars in her thin window. The Witch had left the outcropping and was, right now, limping toward the town walls, just as the Council was carrying the latest baby to the gates.
No mother wailed. No father screamed. They did not fight for their doomed child. They watched numbly as the infant was carried into the horrors of the forest, believing it would keep those horrors away. They set their faces and stared at fear.
Fools, the madwoman wanted to tell them. You are looking the wrong way.
The madwoman folded a map into the shape of a falcon. There were things that she could make happen—things that she could not explain. This was true before they came for her baby, before the Tower—one measure of wheat would become two; fabric worn thin as paper would become thick and luxurious in her hands. But slowly, during her long years in the Tower, her gifts had become sharp and clear. She found bits and pieces of magic in the gaps of the world and squirreled them away.
The madwoman took aim. The Witch was heading for the clearing. The Elders were headed for the clearing. And the falcon would fly directly to where the baby was. She knew it in her bones.
Grand Elder Gherland was, it was true, getting on in years. The potions he received every week from the Sisters of the Star helped, but these days they seemed to help less than usual. And it annoyed him.
And the business with the babies annoyed him, too—not the concept of it, really, nor the results. He simply did not enjoy touching babies. They were loud, boorish, and, frankly, selfish.
Plus, they stank. The one he held now certainly did.
Gravitas was all fine and good, and it was important to maintain appearances, but—Gherland shifted the baby from one arm to the other—he was getting too old for this sort of thing.
He missed Antain. He knew he was being silly. It was better this way, with the boy gone. Executions are a messy business, after all. Especially when family is involved. Still. As much as Antain’s irrational resistance to the Day of Sacrifice had irritated Gherland to no end, he felt they had lost something when Antain resigned, though he couldn’t say exactly what. The Council felt empty with Antain gone. He told himself that he just wanted someone else to hold the wriggling brat, but Gherland knew there was more to the feeling than that.
The people along the walkway bowed their heads as the Council walked by, which was all fine and good. The baby wriggled and squirmed. It spat up on Gherland’s robes. Gherland sighed deeply. He would not make a scene. He owed it to his people to take these discomforts in stride.
It was difficult—no one would ever know how difficult—to be this beloved and honorable and selfless. And as the Council swept through the final causeway, Gherland made sure to congratulate himself for his kind, humanitarian nature.
The baby’s wails devolved into self-indulgent hiccups.
“Ingrate,” muttered Gherland.
Antain made sure he was seen on the road as the Council walked by. He made brief eye contact with his uncle Gherland—Awful man, he thought with a shudder—and then slipped out behind the crowd and hooked through the gate when no one was looking. Once under the cover of the trees, he headed toward the clearing at a run.
Ethyne was still standing on the side of the road. She had a basket ready for the grieving family. She was an angel, a treasure, and was now, incredibly, Antain’s wife—and had been since a month after she left the Tower. And they loved one another desperately. And they wanted a family. But.
The woman in the rafters.
The cry of the baby.
The cloud of sorrow hanging over the Protectorate like a fog.
Antain had watched that horror unfold and had done nothing. He had stood by as baby after baby was taken and left in the forest. We couldn’t stop it if we tried, he had told himself. It’s what everyone told themselves. It’s what Antain had always believed.
But Antain had also believed that he would spend his life alone, and lonely. And then love proved him wrong. And now the world was brighter than it was before. If that belief could be proved wrong, could not others be as well?
What if we are wrong about the Witch? What if we are wrong about the sacrifice? Antain wondered. The question itself was revolutionary. And astonishing. What would happen if we tried?
Why had the thought never occurred to him before? Wouldn’t it be better, he thought, to bring a child into a world that was good and fair and kind?
Had anyone ever tried to talk to the Witch? How did they know she could not be reasoned with? Anyone that old, after all, had to have a little bit of wisdom. It only made sense.
Love made him giddy. Love made him brave. Love made foggy questions clearer. And Antain needed answers.
He rushed past the ancient sycamore trees and hid himself in the bushes, waiting for the old men to leave.
It was there he found the paper falcon, hanging like an ornament in the yew bush. He grabbed it and held it close to his heart.
By the time Xan reached the clearing, she was already late. She could hear that baby fussing from half a league away.
“Auntie Xan is coming, dearest!” she called out. “Please don’t fret!”
She couldn’t believe it. After all these years, she had never been late. Never. The poor little thing. She closed her eyes tight and tried to send a flood of magic into her legs to give them a little more speed. Alas, it was more like a puddle than a flood, but it did help a bit. Using her cane to spring her forward, Xan sprinted through the green.
“Oh, thank goodness!” she breathed when she saw the baby—red-faced and enraged, but alive and unharmed. “I was so worried about you, I—”
And then a man stepped between her and the child.