AllFreeNovel
Share Us
A magical way.
Aforbiddenway.
I gaze thoughtfully at the old woman, and years and years of strange tales about her swirl in my head. I ask carefully, “Is there a way for us to find out where my family is right at this moment?”
“Of course not, girl.”
“Are you sure?”
A nasty grin spreads over Biddy’s face and she points her pipe at me. “You’ve been listening to stories in the firelight.”
“I’ve heard all the tales, and they’ve had an alarming habit of coming true lately. There are a great many told about you, Mistress Hawthorne. Old Mister Groat said you once told him where to find a whole herd of his sheep that were lost in a snow drift.”
The old woman nods sharply. “Aye. I fancied some spring lamb, and when he paid me in a leg, I dressed it with mint out of my garden.”
“How were you able to do that?”
“I was hungry.”
Does she really expect me to believe she was able to save a whole herd merely because she was hungry? “My family is also lost, in a manner of speaking, and I thought that if you could try and look—”
“Why would I see them? They’re your family, and it’s your heart that’s hankering after them.”
“But couldn’t you ask your heart to—”
“It doesn’t work like that.”
“But the sheep—”
“We would have all starved without those sheep. I saw what the village needed me to see, whatIneeded me to see, not what one silly girl wants to get herself killed over.”
Biddy Hawthorne is watching me as beadily as the raven that sat on the well and watched me enter the village. I have the feeling that she’s not saying no. She’s waiting for me to figure something out.
“How did you know I was here? This cottage is on the other side of the village from where I walked in.”
She points her pipe at me. “Ahh, now you’re asking the right questions.”
Silence stretches until I blurt out, “Well, are you going to answer me, please?”
Biddy Hawthorne puffs on her pipe, examining me with her cloudy blue eyes. “You were the chit who would walk off whenever your mother’s back was turned, and when you were carried home again, you would cry and say you could hear something in the mountains.”
The old witch remembers something about me that I don’t remember myself, though I was told about it often enough over the years. Apparently I liked the old folktales so much as a child, I thought they were true.
But they are true. What did I know then that I’ve since forgotten? Could I really hear something in the mountains?
The old woman reaches out and seizes my wrist, her jagged yellow nails digging into my flesh. I gasp and try to wrench myself away, but suddenly I’m not in the smoky little room anymore.
I’m not anywhere.
It’s a terrifying feeling, like suddenly I don’t exist.
The world has turned black.
Blacker than black.
Is this death?
Several shapes form in the darkness. A soft glow that becomes pinpoints of light from candelabras. Dozens of candelabras. I’m standing in a room, and there’s not much to see except for lines and shapes carved into the floor.
