The Year of the Witching by Alexis Henderson

Author:Alexis Henderson [Henderson, Alexis]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2020-07-21T00:00:00+00:00

IN THE DAYS that followed, more than two hundred fell ill, succumbing first to the fever, then to the madness after it. Immanuelle heard stories of grown men clawing their eyes from their sockets, chaste women of the faith who stripped off their clothes and fled, naked, into the Darkwood, screaming as they went. Others, mostly little children like Honor, suffered from a different, but perhaps more sinister, affliction and succumbed to the clutches of a sleep as deep as death. As far as Immanuelle knew, none of the healers in Bethel were able to wake them.

Of those who fell ill in the early days of the contagion, sixty died before the Sabbath. To keep the plague from spreading, the dead were burned on purging pyres. But those who fled to the Darkwood in fits of madness were never seen or heard from again.

By all accounts, it was the worst contagion in Bethel’s thousand-year history, and people called it many things—the affliction, the fever, the manic flu—but Immanuelle only ever referred to it by one name, the one written dozens of times in the final pages of her mother’s journal: Blight.

“More water,” Martha demanded, mopping a sheen of sweat from her forehead. Though all the windows were open, each breath of wind brought the hot smoke of the pyres that burned throughout the Glades. “And bring the yarrow.” Under normal circumstances, burning the bodies of the blameless was a grave breach of Holy Protocol. But in a desperate attempt to stop the spread of the disease, the Church made a rare amendment to its sacred law.

Immanuelle obeyed, skirts sweeping around her ankles as she ducked into the kitchen, grabbing a basin of water and a bundle of dried yarrow flower from the herb box beneath the sink. She raced upstairs as fast as she could without tripping on the hem of her skirts and entered the children’s room.

There, she found Anna tightening the knots around Glory’s wrists, tethering her to the headboard to keep her from escaping, as she had tried to do six times since the night she first took ill. Anna tied the cloth cuffs so tight there were bruises around her daughter’s wrists, but it couldn’t be helped. Nearly half of those afflicted with the blight had maimed or even killed themselves in the throes of their madness, jumping out of windows or bashing their own heads in, as Honor had nearly done the night Immanuelle found her.

At her mother’s touch, Glory thrashed and shrieked, legs tangling in her sheets, her cheeks bright with fever.

Immanuelle set the basin beside the bed, took the yarrow from her mouth, and grabbed the bowl on the nightstand. She crushed the blooms as best she could, mashing them into a paste. Then she added a little water—still faintly tinged by the last traces of the blood plague—and mixed the pulp with her fingers.

It was Martha who administered the draught, seizing Glory firmly by the base of her neck and thrusting her upright, the way one holds a squalling newborn.

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