Speaker 1: Prolog. The night they came, she stood in a meadow
circled by tall pine trees, their dark silhouettes swaying in
the wind that swept down from the mountains beyond. Her
thin white shift clung to her rain soaked body as
water slid down her arms and dripped from her fingertips,
disappearing into the deep indigo violets at her feet. She
was perfectly still, silent as carved stone, listening. The only
sound was her ragged, uneven breath. She did not know
how long she had been running. Her lungs burned, her
legs trembled with exhaustion, but she believed, hoped that she
had outrun them, the angry mob that had come under
cover of night with rope and scripture, intent on binding
her hands and feet and casting her into the pond
at the village edge to see whether a witch would
sink or float. Their mistake was believing she would be unprepared.
She had seen this moment coming in the lingering stairs
at the market place, in the sideways glances, in the
whispered warnings that fell silent. The moment she drew near,
they suspected she was a witch. Secretly painfully. She suspected
it too, though she had never been certain. There were
things she could do that defied explanation. A snap of
her fingers could coax the hearth fire awake. A gentle
breath from across the room could extinguish a candle. Her
garden thrived when others withered, her harvest lasted far beyond reason.
Children Sarah and William, would knock on her door, laid
in the autumn, needing vegetables their mothers lacked. Somehow, she
never ran out. No one questioned her gifts when they
benefited the village. But everything changed the day Reverend Sampson
arrived and set a church at the center of their world.
Under his sermons, her thriving garden became a blight, her
remedies a sign of the devil's mark. Yet even then
the villagers knew only a fraction of the truth. There
were the dreams, vivid, impossible, unsettling, that carried her somewhere
else entirely. She would fall asleep in her small feather bed,
only to awaken in another place, an empty green surrounded
by unfamiliar buildings, a baker, a yarn shop, a general
store stocked with food sealed in clear containers she later
learned from a book were called plastic. There was a
shop named the Witch's Brew, filled with crystals, herbs, candles,
and objects that stirred something warm and ancient inside her light.
There required no flame. Glass bulbs glowed with captured brilliance.
Metal machines hummed with dials and numbers she could not decipher.
Each night she wandered that strange, silent village, half in awe,
half in longing. Once she tried to carry knitting needles
back with her, but she awoke empty handed. Her favorite
place was the yarn shop, with its endless skeins and
soft colors, enough to keep a whole coven of nosy
grandmother's knitting for decades. Knitting steadied her thoughts there, grounding
her amid the impossible questions. Was this a dream or
the future? She never saw another soul. At times it
felt as though the entire village had vanished mid breath.
She convinced herself it was imagination. Until the night she
sat I saw him. A man on a black horse
watched her from the edge of the trees. His presence
sent cold dread curling up her spine. Instinct commanded her
to run. She fled blindly through the green until she
crashed into an iron staircase. A jagged piece of metal
tore into her arm. When she awoke in her own
bed the next morning, dried blood stiffened the fabric of
her shift, and her arm still bore the wound. That
was the moment she knew her gardens, her herbs, her
night walking to the other side. It was all part
of the same truth. She was a witch, and the
knowledge weighed upon her like a curse. On the night
it finally happened, September twenty ninth, sixteen ninety four, she
slipped into sleep and found herself on the other side
as usual, But moments later she was torn violently awake.
A heavy pounding rattled her cottage door. She snapped her fingers,
the candle flared to life. She reached for the small
knife beside her bed she had prepared for this. Dropping
to the floor, she shoved aside the rug and lifted
the hidden hatch. The opening was nearly invisible, smooth wood,
no handle, no seam. She slipped into the darkness below
and closed it behind her. At the bottom of the
narrow pine branch ladder waited a small satchel. She tied
it around her waist and ran. She had dug this
tunnel over two long years, from the moment the reverend
arrived and the whispers began. She had prepared, she had
heard the stories from Salem. She would not be caught unaware.
The tunnel led her to the river bank. The water
was low. She crossed quickly, vanishing into the forest just
as the moon broke free of the clouds. The trees
were dense, turning the world into shadow and silence. She
walked all night, bare feet, whispering over pine needles. The
scent of wood smoke faded behind her. By dawn, the
sky shifted from star dusted black to a muted gray.
She needed shelter. Rain swept in, suddenly cold, heavy, relentless.
She did not know that the storm saved her, sending
the two men tracking her back to the village. Unwilling
to risk sickness. By mid morning, she found a rocky
overhang at the base of a cliff, dry hidden enough
to conceal her. She crawled beneath it, used her cloak
as a blanket, her satchel as a pillow, and sleep
claimed her instantly. When she awoke, she was no longer
beneath the cliff. She was in the woods of the
other side. Her shift was damp. Pine needles clung to
her feet, Her fiery hair hung in tangled curls around
her pale face. Her stomach growled. She tried to stand,
but her legs failed her. She was exhausted, hungry, alone,
but alive. The air smelled of rain and early autumn.
A stream trickled nearby. She gathered herself and washed the
cold water, shocking her awake. She dressed boots stockings, a
fresh dry dress, and, for the first time since fleeing,
allowed herself a trembling breath of relief. She would live
another day. Back in the village, Reverend Sampson announced that
God's righteous hand had struck down the wicked Fernwood girl.
He preached that she had hurled herself from a cliff
into the jaws of hell. The congregation cheered their bellies,
and his purse would be full that winter. And though
a few mourned the mothers whose children she had healed,
the elders whose aching bones she soothed, their sorrow was
swallowed by fear. Silver Fernwood would never know, she would
never see them again.