The Witch in the Woods: The Transmigration of Hazel-Anne Davis

Yan Luo walked forward until the banner brushed his shoulder. He took the pole, lifted, broke it across his knee. The monk's smile didn't split, but his eyes did.

"Set it down," Yan Luo told the bearers.

They looked to the monk. The monk looked at Yan Luo. Yan Luo tilted his head and lifted his right hand a finger's width. The men set the bier down as if the road had seized their knees.

Gaoyu and two others slid to the back, hands ready. "Lid," Gaoyu said.

The monk tried a last sanctimonious breath. "Defile a body, and the gods—"

"It would be best if you didn't believe in the gods," Yan Luo said. "Instead, you should believe in me and what I will do to you if you don't obey."

The lid pried up with a groan. Inside lay a small body wrapped in plain linen, face shrouded.

Gaoyu's mouth went a hard line. "If they killed him—"

"Quiet," Yan Luo said.

He reached in, felt the weight. Too light. He slipped fingers under the shroud, found the jawline of a doll's carved head, smooth and wrong under cloth. He pulled the shroud back.

A painted boy-face stared up at him, mouth open in a neat oval, eyes done in cheap ink. Sewn-in hair glistened with bathhouse glue.

He laughed then, a sound with no humor in it at all. "Almost," he said softly. "You almost had me cross the road."

The monk ran.

Gaoyu's knife took him low at the calf. He fell, hands out, then rolled like a man who'd been taught once and hadn't forgotten. He got to his feet again with one leg dragging and went for the ditch.

Yan Luo didn't hurry. He walked. Men ran when a thing chased them. They did strange contortions when a thing simply arrived at their throat.

The monk slipped on the frost-caked bank, went down to his elbows in cold mud. He still had the presence of mind to pull a razor from his sleeve and swipe at the thin cord holding the disguise brow to his skin. It peeled back like a scab. Underneath: a Baiguang soldier's brand burned faint on his temple, clumsy from wine and a friend's knife. Loyalty in uglier handwriting.

Yan Luo crouched beside him. "Where."

The man spat mud. "To the gods," he gasped. He went for the razor again. Yan Luo caught his wrist, turned it, and set the razor neatly into the man's palm. "Try it," he said. "I like the sound."

The man hissed and tried to slice his own tongue. He wasn't as fast as he thought. Yan Luo broke two fingers with the same economy he used to fold paper.

"Where," he said again.

The man trembled. "Gray Bridge," he whispered. "Potter's field—then the bier turns east, crosses the creek at Gray Bridge, and up to the bell hut. There's a mule path to the north watch post. They'll change again there. I was just—supposed to get the road open."

"How many," Gaoyu asked behind him, voice flat.

"Six," the man choked. "Two with the cart, two on foot, one at the bridge, one at the hut."

Yan Luo held the man's gaze another breath, long enough for the man to understand he had been given mercy by being allowed to speak. Then he cracked his neck for him and let him slump into the ditch.

"Carry the bier," he said. "We'll need it back."

Gaoyu frowned. "Back?"

"For the one that breathes," Yan Luo said.

They moved again. The poplars gave way to scrub and the smell of old clay. The potter's field lay to their left, hummocked under frost, the little markers leaning like tired men. Someone had left three apples with bites taken and put back.

Grief had its own strange rituals. He had respect for grief. He did not have respect for those who stole children from their beds.

The Gray Bridge was a footbridge, stone and narrow, the kind that forgets it has to carry weight until someone asks.

A man stood there with a prayer strip pinned to his hat. He had the expression of someone who had been told he was invisible and had believed it too long.

"Blessings," the man said as they approached.

"Take them," Yan Luo said, waving his hand at the men behind him. "I'm done playing nice."

The man shifted his weight back, prepared to run.

Gaoyu didn't give him the chance. He put a hook through the man's belt and lifted so his toes had to dance for the ground. A second man rose from behind the bridge parapet with a crossbow; three of Yan Luo's people stood up from the ditch and made the argument for him not to shoot.

He set the bow down like it was hot.

"Bells," Yan Luo said.

The second man swallowed. "Two—to warn. One to welcome."

"Which did you ring?"

"None," the man said. "Not yet."

"Ring it now," Yan Luo told him. "The welcome one."

The man fumbled the rope, the bell tolled once, low, rolling over the frost. Somewhere up the path a crow argued with the sound and lost. The bell hut sat squatting on the ridge. Between the bridge and the hut, a mule path ran in a shallow S, carefully raked to look like no one had raked it.

"Take the right side," Yan Luo told Gaoyu. "I'll be right behind you."

He did. He did not hurry. The morning had grown teeth. Breath came in plumes. A mouse made the mistake of crossing in front of him and rethought its life.

Halfway up, the smell hit him—dye and paste and the faint sweet note that did not belong outside a kitchen.

He stopped.

The path had been swept, but men never remember the air. He tilted his head. Voices. Soft. The sound of leather creaking under a sudden change of weight.

A child's breath when a gag loosens enough to let a little air through a raw mouth.