Shannon Delany - Weather Witch

Holgate

Caleb’s voice surprised Jordan. “You do not feel her there? With you?”

Jordan shook her head, confused. “I truly do not know what you mean … There is no one here with me.”

“Sybil is,” Caleb insisted. “You may not see her, but she remains. In the walls and in the water. She is a part of this place. She is rooted here.”

Jordan shivered. “A ghost?”

“The spirit of a little girl,” he corrected. “I might become a ghost someday, but she? She is Rusalka.”

Jordan tested the word on her tongue, rolling its foreign sound in her mouth. “Rusalka? What is that?”

“It is the spirit of a murdered girl bound forever to water.”

“How could that be?” Jordan’s finger traced the chink of mortar running between the weeping stones. “If she was a murdered Witch … would she not be tied to a soul stone? Not water?”

Caleb grew quiet a moment. “Why not both? I still feel her. Part of her remains there. I am certain. She was sweet. Just a scrap of humanity. Taken too soon from this world. Not I. For me the end comes not soon enough.”

The Warden slammed Jordan’s door open and grabbed the chain hanging between her leather shackles. At the top of the Eastern Tower, Jordan next saw the child who had called her an abomination as the Maker prepared to do the less than gentle parts of his job. The child carried a floppy-eared toy that seemed somehow less substantial than previous. The little girl looked at her with wide eyes and handed the Maker a bowl of some food and piece of bread so fresh and warm Jordan could smell it from where she stood with the Warden, eyeing the boards, the straps running across them, and the table that held a roll of dark-colored cloth.

Her mouth watered the tiniest bit but her stomach grumbled so loudly in response to the scent and sight of freshly baked bread that the Maker even turned to look at her.

“The pretty lady is hungry,” Meg said, tugging gently at her father’s shirt. “Do you have any to spare her?”

He looked at her as if it was the oddest thing anyone had ever suggested to him. “What a very sweet girl you are, Meggie. But you must remember what she is. Yes, she looks like a pretty lady, but … she is a powerful monster under that smooth skin of hers. An abomination,” he reminded. “Now run along.”

“Yes, Papá,” she agreed. “I think I will visit Maude first for a drink. I am parched.”

“Go then, little dove,” Bran said. “Have a care on the stairs—I will meet you in the library in less than an hour.”

She nodded and he helped her through the door and watched as she started her descent before he closed the door once more.

“She is an interesting child, do you not agree?” he asked Jordan as he approached her with the bread and bowl. “If I follow her suggestion, give you this piece of bread, could we dispense with the unpleasantness and shoot straight to you calling up a storm?” He picked up the bread and held it before her face. “It is fresh. And warm…”

“I cannot. I am no Witch,” Jordan protested. Her wounded finger flinched, curling toward her palm in response to his nearness.

“Not even for a nice piece of bread? Can you smell it over the stink of the Tanks and your magick?”

Her nostrils flared involuntarily. “Yes, I smell it,” she whispered, her eyes reflecting back the frantic hunger that threatened to crawl up from her stomach and out of her throat. “But I cannot call a storm. I have no magick.”

The Warden strapped her to the boards.

Bran shook his head. “I wish you would stop repeating such nonsense.” He set the bowl down on his table and unrolled the cloth that held all the instruments of his particular trade. He picked up a scalpel and bit into the bread. “Oh. It is delicious,” he said around a bite of the stuff. “And so, so very soft…” He crossed to her side and looked her straight in the eyes as he said, “Just like a lady’s flesh.”

And then he made her scream.

Philadelphia

All the way up the Hill Marion left signs of his passing. Small patches of wilting grass marked his every footstep and the air became unseasonably cool wherever he passed. His breath came out in frosty puffs as he pushed on to the Council’s chambers and then, standing before the doors, he hesitated.

Yes, he could clear Chloe’s name. Yes, he could prove her innocence, make an ass of the Council Court and … and name himself as witness. Put himself at the scene of the supposed crime, thereby admitting his true identity.

Showing that he was the son that was taken for witchery, the one Witch that had escaped Holgate.

If they tortured Witches to Make them, what might they do to a Witch who had escaped and wreaked wintry havoc? His fingers flexed at his sides. They had stolen him from the family their laws had ruined. He should have died that night beside his parents and his little brother but instead the Council and their Weather Workers had taken and tortured him. Made a monster of him. What more could they do to him that they hadn’t done already?

What could they still do to hurt him? What was left for them to take that they hadn’t already ruined? He should have died that night five years ago. Why had destiny spared him then? If the Council discovered him now, killed him now, at least he’d die knowing he saved one person who was important to him. And, if God was just (if there was a God), perhaps he’d be reunited in Heaven with his family. He decided he had nothing left to lose and the rescue of Chloe—even if it meant a much sooner heavenly reunion with his parents and little brother—was quite the gain.

He squared his shoulders, set his jaw, and climbed the last set of stairs into the Council’s main hall. Automatons shifted along the walls, watching him as he moved toward a central desk and a reassuringly human watchman. “I am here to speak to the Council Court and present them with new evidence.”

The watchman looked up at him. “The Council is adjourned for the day to oversee the administration of justice.”

Marion’s brow creased. “But I have new evidence that can clear the accused named in the case of Chloe Erendell.”

“Oh.” The watchman’s mouth dropped open and he looked over his shoulder to the broad expanse of doors and large windows overseeing the Council’s broad courtyard.

And that was when Marion saw them—a crush of bodies all turned to watch something ahead of them. “No,” he whispered, realizing. “No. The paper says Wednesday hence…”

“Yes,” the watchman yelled at his back as he sprinted across the room’s length, “they confused the dates—the paper was very apologetic—we usually have more spectators for a noon hanging—quite the event…”

Marion was at the doors and shoving through them, pushing past people when he could not slide between them and shouting—always shouting, “Stop! Stop!”

But the crowd was cheering and laughing and there was no more place for him to run and so he made his way to the one tree in the courtyard and shimmied up its trunk just high enough to see the gallows and the hooded figure in a simple shift who stood there, noose about her neck, dark hands and feet bare, her head bowed as she gave her final confession. There stood his nanny, his last connection to a more innocent time, and he knew then just what he still had to lose.

He screamed her name, cried out her innocence again and again, and snow billowed out from his mouth but was whisked away with his words by the breeze and evaporated in the day’s heat and the crowd’s fierce haze of human musk.

The floor beneath Chloe’s feet dropped away and she fell toward the ground—only stopped by the sudden tightening of the rope round her neck. Her feet kicked out a moment and Marion gasped, ramming his knuckles into his mouth to keep from crying out to her—or anyone again.

Then she was still.

And he was all alone in the world.

This time for certain and for good.

The cold seeped out of him, cruel and deadly, burrowing into the tree that held him in the same insidious way the cold clutched his heart, so that, after the crowd drifted apart and Marion finally climbed down from its branches, only then did the tree’s leaves begin to curl and blacken along the edges. Only then did the cold begin to kill it from the inside out—the same way the cold was killing its young master.

Holgate

That night Meggie again awoke to soaked sheets, a wet gown, and a perplexed Maude. Maude had decided to sleep on the floor at her side, as cramped and uncomfortable as it was, although Meggie had innocently suggested Maude share her papá’s bed as it was so big and he was quite alone in it every night. “And a spot of warmth and kindness never hurt a soul, my mother used to say,” Meggie said loudly enough that Bran couldn’t help but hear it.

“A spot of kindness, yes?” Maude said with a smile. “Such things do quite frequently help situations one might think beyond help…” She sighed. “Quite alone in it every night, is he?” Maude had asked.

“Most certainly so,” Meggie quipped. “And I think I know why,” she said with a solemn nod.

“Oh you do, do you?” Maude asked, tucking her in after one last story. It was harder than ever to get her to go to sleep now that every night she had a friend staying over.

“Yes. It is the snoring,” Meggie said sagely. “It is a dreadful racket,” she disdained. “It sounds like an elephant trying to blow its nose!”