Where the Witches Wait
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“Even the purest of souls falter under the touch of man.”
Cora's brother is missing.
Riots rage through the cog-choked streets of Anatine. Witches wait in the woods. Death knocks on every door. And the city guards refuse to help.
Her only clues are a mechanical mouse, a cryptic note signed “AH,” and a promise Kit made the night he vanished: I'll be back by morning.
The trail leads into the forest—into the territory of the witches she was raised to fear. When they save her from a monster in the dark, she begins to wonder if everything she was told was a lie.
The witches are kind. They offer her tea. They promise to find her brother.
But Cora was too young to know: kindness always comes at a cost.
A standalone Crooked Atlas story.
Read a taste below…
‘Tell us, Cora, what is it you seek in these woods?’ The witch’s eyes were a magical purple as they watched the girl closely.
‘My brother. He’s missing,’ she replied, holding the warm mug of herbal tea in her freezing hands. Camomile and rose wafted from it to her nose, calming the fear in her heart. The witch had poured it for her as she arrived, introducing herself as Aria, but neglecting to explain her purple eyes. She was older than Cora, still young, but in her early twenties—if witches aged the same, that is.
‘And why do you think he came out this way?’ the second witch asked. She’d said her name was Erin earlier and dressed much the same as her friend, though she appeared older. She, too, spoke softly as she waved a stick of burning wood in the hut, drawing beautiful figures in the air with the smoke.
‘There was a note,’ Cora said, reaching into the leather satchel at her waist, the brass buckle clinking as her hand shuffled around the bottom of the bag. ‘I found it after he left. It said something about meeting at the old market, but the signature was just two letters. AH.’
Mousey, Cora’s small brass mechanical mouse, dashed from her shoulder into the satchel, quickly pulling the note out in a crumpled ball between its tiny metal teeth. Cora took it, stroking the mouse’s nose before unrolling the paper and handing it to the outstretched fingers of the witch. Not long, crooked fingers, as Cora had expected, but ones with soft skin and rose-red polish coating the nails.
Aria examined the note, reading it more than once before briefly showing it to the other. They exchanged a curious look, one that Cora couldn’t read, before turning back to her. ‘We don’t know this AH, but we will look into it whilst you stay here.’
‘Stay? No, I can’t stay.’ Cora cradled Mousey in the palm of her hand and rose from her chair. ‘I have to keep looking.’
Arira, with her alluring violet eyes, held out her hand to Cora, one finger extended farther than the other. ‘Sit, Cora. Sit.’
Cora did, the old wood creaking beneath her. Not because she wanted to, nor because the witch told her to. A strange feeling in her heart told her to stay, one that hadn’t been there moments before.
The witch’s outstretched finger curled back into her palm. ‘Please, tell us more of your brother. How did he leave?’
‘I...’ Cora searched for an excuse, a reason not to speak to them any more. They were witches. Witches were evil. It was as simple as that. All her life, she’d been told never to go near the woods where they hid, yet there she was, sipping tea, chatting with them as if they were old friends. But they had saved her at the market, and they had offered their help. These witches didn’t seem so bad.
Both watched and waited eagerly as Cora took a shaken breath and began to tell them about the night her brother never came back.
#
‘I won’t be long, Cora, I promise. Just seeing a friend.’ That’s what her brother said when he tucked her into bed that night.
The thudding of steam-powered factory pistons called at Cora's window every night, in a rhythm she learned to let soothe her to sleep. She’d needed it since the night their parents disappeared.
‘Don’t leave,’ Cora pleaded. On any other night, she would’ve said that she wasn’t much of a little sister anymore, and at nearly fourteen didn’t need tucking in, but riots had started in the streets, anger boiled to steam, threatening to burst through the pipes. She didn’t want to be left alone in the darkness of the house they could barely afford to heat.
‘If it wasn’t important, I wouldn’t go, but this is my only chance,’ Kit explained.
‘Your only chance to see your friend is at one in the morning?’
Kit scratched the rough beard that grew in patches around his cheeks. Cora told him to shave it, saying it looked as though he’d glued cat hair to his face, but he kept it anyway. He thought it made him look like a man and that the girls at the bar would jump at him for it, but with the grease and oil stains he never washed off, Cora figured they’d just slide off him anyway.
Reaching into a worn leather bag behind him, Kit pulled out a mouse. Not a live one, of course, but one made from scraps of discarded metal, with what looked like hundreds of tiny cogs and mechanisms inside, trying to burst free from its mouse-shaped shell. ‘I made this for you, to look after you.’
The cold metal felt like ice against Cora’s palms as she took it. ‘This is going to look after me? It’s so small—’
‘But smart,’ Kit interrupted sharply. He took a tiny key from his pocket and inserted it into the mouse’s side, winding round and round, a thousand tiny clicks and metal twangs calling from inside as it prepared to spin to life.
‘What will you call it?’ Kit asked as he finished turning the key.
Cora shrugged. ‘Mousey?’
‘Seriously? The weeks of effort I put into making this, taking scraps while my master wasn’t looking, and building this instead of studying, and all you can be bothered to come up with is Mousey?’
Cora paused for a second, staring into the cold black eyes of the little brass mouse, warmed by the heat of her skin. ‘Yes. Mousey.’
Kit huffed as he removed the key, and with a gentle, clean whir, the cogs began to hum as they spun, at first all out of sync, like an orchestra playing different songs at the same time, until they finally fell into rhythm, humming together in a perfect symphony.
The mouse’s eyes flicked left and right, and its whiskers bounced in the breeze of Cora’s cold breath. Unsure, the mouse wound its way up her palm, its rubber wheels gripping her skin as Cora brought it up to her face, their noses almost touching.
‘Hello, Mousey,’ she said. ‘It’s very nice to meet you.’
It squeaked in response, a sharp little squeak, not like an ordinary mouse, but one in which tiny pieces of brass were scraping against each other.
Excitement overtook the mouse as it whizzed off Cora’s palm and onto the bed, where it quickly found warmth under the covers. There, it sped around Cora’s legs, its fine whiskers tickling her feet as it passed. ‘Stop!’ Cora called out to the mouse as it tickled her again.
Kit smiled, pleased with his tidy work. ‘Should keep you occupied at least.’
He’d been studying under one of the city’s best engineers for years, ever since he was Cora’s age, honing his craft so that one day he could take over the workshop.
A sound outside made Cora turn to the window. Shouts of anger bellowed from the streets below. The now-nightly riots had begun.
‘Please don’t leave,’ she said again. The mouse was a softening gift, but it couldn’t protect her, couldn’t come to her room in the night to sing to her when the nightmares came, couldn’t make those blueberry pancakes that somehow made everything feel okay.
Kit knelt beside her, tucking her back in as she rested on the pillow. ‘I’ll be back before you even wake up,’ he said as the mouse wound its way onto Cora’s shoulder, snuggling its pinhead nose under her chin. ‘And you look after her, okay?’ he told the mouse, who squeaked back reassuringly.
He brushed back Cora’s brown fringe as he stood, smiling kindly, yet with the unmistakable emptiness of fear behind his eyes. Cora wanted to cry, to tell him she loved him and to beg him not to go. Before she got the chance, her eyes began to close, and Kit’s face disappeared behind the door for the final time.