Antain stood outside of his uncle’s study for nearly an hour before working up the courage to knock. He took several deep breaths, mouthed paragraphs in front of his reflection in the pane of glass, attempted an argument with a spoon. He paced, he sweated, he swore under his breath. He mopped his brow with the cloth that Ethyne had embroidered—his name surrounded by a series of skillful knots. His wife was a magician with a needle and thread. He loved her so much, he thought he’d die of it.
“Hope,” she had told him, tracing the many scars on his face tenderly with her small, clever fingers, “is those first tiny buds that form at the very end of winter. How dry they look! How dead! And how cold they are in our fingers! But not for long. They grow big, then sticky, then swollen, and then the whole world is green.”
And it was with the image of his dear wife in his mind—her rosy cheeks, her hair as red as poppies, her belly swollen to bursting under the dress she had made herself—that he finally knocked on the door.
“Ah!” his uncle’s voice boomed from inside. “The shuffler has decided to cease his shuffling and announce his presence.”
“I’m sorry, Uncle—” Antain stammered.
“ENOUGH WITH YOUR APOLOGIES, BOY,” roared Grand Elder Gherland. “Open the door and be done with it!”
The boy stung a bit. Antain had not been a boy for several years now. He was a successful artisan, a keen businessman, and a married man, devoted to his wife. Boy was a word that no longer fit.
He stumbled into the study and bowed low before his uncle, as he always did. When he stood, he could see his uncle look upon his face and flinch. This was nothing new. Antain’s scars continued to shock people. He was used to it.
“Thank you for seeing me, Uncle,” he said.
“I don’t believe I have a choice, Nephew,” Grand Elder Gherland said, rolling his eyes to avoid looking at the young man’s face. “Family is family, after all.”
Antain suspected that this wasn’t entirely true, but he didn’t mention it.
“In any case—”
The Grand Elder stood. “In any case nothing, Nephew. I have waited at this desk for close to an eternity, anticipating your arrival, but now the time has come for me to meet with the Council. You do remember the Council, don’t you?”
“Oh, yes, Uncle,” Antain said, his face suddenly bright. “That is the reason I am here. I wish to address the Council. As a former member. Right now, if I may.”
Grand Elder Gherland was taken quite aback. “You . . .” he stammered. “You wish to what?” Ordinary citizens did not address the Council. It wasn’t done.
“If that’s all right, Uncle.”
“I—” the Grand Elder began.
“I know it is a bit unorthodox, Uncle, and I do understand if it puts you in an uncomfortable position. It has been . . . ever so many years since I wore the robes. I would like, at long last, to address the Council and both explain myself and thank them for giving me a place at their table. I never did, and I feel that it is a thing I owe.”
This was a lie. Antain swallowed. And smiled.
His uncle seemed to soften. The Grand Elder steepled his fingers together and pressed them to his bulbous lips. He looked Antain square in the eye. “Tradition be damned,” he said. “The Council will be ever so pleased to see you.”
The Grand Elder rose and embraced his wayward nephew and, beaming, led him into the hall. As they approached the grand foyer of the house, a silent servant opened the door, and both uncle and nephew walked into the waning light.
And Antain felt that tiny, sticky bud of hope bloom suddenly in his chest.
The Council, as Gherland had predicted, seemed more than happy to see Antain, and used his presence to raise their glasses to his celebrated craftsmanship and fine business sense, as well as his prodigious luck to have wedded the kindest and cleverest girl in the Protectorate. They hadn’t been invited to the wedding—and wouldn’t have come if they had been—but the way they patted his back and rubbed his shoulders, they seemed like a chortling chaw of benevolent uncles. They couldn’t be more proud, and they told him so.
“Good lad, good lad.” The Councilmen gurgled and grunted and guffawed. They passed around sweets, almost unheard-of in the Protectorate. They poured wine and ale and feasted on cured meats and aged cheeses and crumbly cakes, heavy with butter and cream. Antain pocketed much of what he was given to present later to his beloved wife.
As servants began clearing away the platters and jugs and goblets, Antain cleared his throat. “Gentlemen,” he said, as the Council took their seats, “I have come here with an ulterior motive. Forgive me, please. Particularly you, Uncle. I have been, I admit, less than forthcoming in regard to my intentions.”
The room went colder and colder. The Council started giving Antain’s scars, which until then they had pretended to ignore, a hard, almost disgusted, look. Antain steeled his courage and persevered. He thought of the baby growing and moving in his wife’s swollen belly. He thought of the madwoman in the Tower. Who was to say that he, too, would not go mad, if forced to relinquish his baby—his baby—to the Robes? Who was to say that his beloved Ethyne would not? He could scarcely bear to be parted from her for an hour, but the madwoman had been locked in the Tower for years. Years. He would surely die.
“Pray,” the Grand Elder said, slitting his eyes like a snake, “continue, boy.”
Once again, attempting not to allow the boy to have its intended sting, Antain went on.
“As you know,” he said, trying his best to turn his guts and spine into the hardest and densest of wood. He had no need to destroy. He was here to build. “As you know, my beloved Ethyne is expecting a child—”
“Splendid,” the Elders said, brightening as one. “How very, very splendid.”
“And,” Antain continued, willing his voice not to shake, “our child is to arrive just after the turning of the year. There are no others expected between then and the Day of Sacrifice. Our child—our dear child—will be the youngest in the Protectorate.”
And the happy guffaws stopped suddenly, like a smothered flame. Two elders cleared their throats.
“Hard luck,” Elder Guinnot said in his thin, reedy voice.
“Indeed,” Antain agreed. “But it does not have to be. I believe I have found a way to stop this horror. I believe I know the way to end the tyranny of the Witch forever.”
Grand Elder Gherland’s face darkened. “Do not trouble yourself with fantasies, boy,” he growled. “Surely you do not think—”
“I saw the Witch,” Antain said. He had been holding on to this information for ever so long. And now it was bursting inside of him.
“Impossible!” Gherland sputtered. The other Elders stared at the young man with unhinged jaws, like a council of snakes.
“Not at all. I saw her. I followed the procession. I know it wasn’t allowed, and I am sorry for it. But I did it anyway. I followed and I waited with the sacrificial child, and I saw the Witch.”
“You saw nothing of the kind!” Gherland shouted, standing up. There was not a witch. There had never been a witch. The Elders all knew it. They all rose to their feet, accusation in their faces.
“I saw her waiting in the shadows. I saw her hover over the babe, clucking hungrily. I saw the glittering of her wicked eyes. She saw me and transformed herself into a bird. She cried out in pain as she did so. She cried out in pain, gentlemen.”
“Lunacy,” one of the Elders said. “This is lunacy.”
“It is not. The Witch exists. Of course she does. We’ve all known that. But what we did not know is that she is aged. She feels pain. And not only that, we know where she is.”
Antain pulled the madwoman’s map from the mouth of his satchel. He laid it on the table, tracing a trail with his fingers.
“The forest, of course, is dangerous.” The Elders stared at the map, the color draining from their faces. Antain caught his uncle’s eye and held it.