The First Chapter
of The Sapling Cage
The Kickstarter for The Sapling Cage has done better than any of us expected. We hit our goal in the first hour. We tripled our goal in the first day. We hit and soared past our stretch goal right off. This last milestone means that I will have more funding for a tour this fall, which isn’t scheduled yet but I’ll be updating you here as I get to it.
Don’t worry, I’ll get back to posting my usual mix of essays and memoir here soon enough, but as a thank you to everyone, I thought I’d offer you all the first chapter the book. This is the text from the uncorrected proof, so there might be a few commas or whatever moved around by publication.
The Sapling Cage comes out from Feminist Pree on September 24, 2024. All copies purchased from the Kickstarter come signed. US shipping only at the moment but there are details on that page about UK and Canadian pre-orders, with other countries hopefully in the works.
The Sapling Cage
Chapter One
The alder tree was ancient, and its leaves and branches left sunlight dappled on the forest floor. It was also dead, and it shouldn’t have been. Everywhere around us, the forest was waking from winter. Everything was bluebells and white trilliums and new buds on branches and bright green leaves. Everything was spring. Except the alder. Its bark was sharp with cold, like ice or like stone. Its leaves were gray.
“I don’t think trees are supposed to be like that,” Lane said.
We’d finished our morning work on the communal fields. Not a hundred yards away through the trees, horses ran in the pasture, excited to be outside after so many months of snow. I could smell rain in the air. It should have been a perfect day. But the alder was dead, and it shouldn’t have been.
“Witchcraft,” Lane said. That was her explanation for everything strange.
“It couldn’t be the witches,” I said. That was my defense of everything blamed on witchcraft.
She paced around the tree. It took her several paces for every lap. She was half a year younger than me—she’d just turned sixteen—but she was the one always trying to burn off extra energy. I peered at the frost gathered on the alder’s bark.
“I see another one,” Lane said. She took off running further into the forest and I caught up with her a ways away. A young pine was dead and cold, its needles gone gray. One shattered at the touch of my finger.
“Who else but witches?” Lane asked. “Trees don’t turn cold.”
“Only a witch could save it,” I said. “You’ll be able to save it.”
“Oh, hurray,” Lane said sarcastically.
“It’s not that bad.”
“I didn’t make that deal. I don’t think my dead mom’s promise should mean anything.” Lane and I started back toward the village.
“Witches get to wear those black skirts, though,” I said. “And curse people. And heal people.”
“I’d rather be a knight. You know I’d rather be a knight. Why are you arguing with me about this?”
That was a fair question. I thought it over as we walked.
“If I was a girl, I’d pretend to be you and go in your place.” I’d always wanted to be a witch.
“It’s a shame you aren’t a girl,” Lane said.
I agreed. Not just because of the witch thing. One of my earliest memories was being glad that my name, Lorel, was as common for girls as it was for boys. Five years back, my mother had given up trying to keep me out of her face powder and paint. Lane had always been game to trade clothes with me.
Those were the only two people in town who I talked to about how I should have been a girl. I had enough social problems already. When I was little, maybe seven, I’d told my friend River to call me a girl instead of a boy, and he’d just punched me, right then and there, without thinking about it. My mom thought my nose was broke and a traveling witch had to set it for me. River apologized, and maybe he even meant it that he was sorry, but he’d made it seem like the whole thing was my fault—like I’d scared him or something.
So, yeah, only my mom and Lane knew about the dresses and the paint.
If I were a witch, though, I could turn the next person like River into a goat. Or figure out things like why those trees were cold.
“I’ll do it anyway,” I said as we walked through the fields of flax and barley.
“What?”
I started talking faster so I wouldn’t lose my nerve. “When the coven comes through to take you, I’ll tell them I’m you, and I’ll go off and learn to be a witch.”
“You’re a boy,” Lane said.
“Girls are allowed to be knights now, why can’t boys be witches? And besides, it’s not my fault I’m a boy.”
“It’s still true.”
“I can pretend.”
Lane walked up next to me and threw her arms around my shoulders. “What if you get caught?”
“I won’t get caught,” I said. “Strangers always think I’m a girl anyway.”
My mother and I ran the stables. There were more popular roads than South Ede, and there were more prosperous towns than Ledston on South Ede, but we still saw our share of wayfarers. Most were on their way to Port Cek to our east or Deadman Castle to our west, and most of them had horses, and most of them stabled with us overnight. We served knights and mercenaries and merchants and brigands, and I was just reaching an age where grown men took not a small amount of interest in trying to figure out my gender. I didn’t have even a hint of a beard, my shoulders were narrow, and I had my mother’s sharp features.
“These are witches, though,” Lane reminded me. “They can see more than other people can.”
“Are you trying to talk me out of it?” I asked.
“No.” She squeezed me tighter against her side as we walked. “I’m just worried. What will you tell your dads? Or your mother?”
“I won’t tell Grell or Jorge anything.” My dads had a home all the way in Port Cek. I lived with them every autumn for a month or so when the storms kept them on land. Most of the year I didn’t hear from them and their only contribution to my upbringing was the silver they sent my mother when they could. “Mom, though, she’ll understand.”
“I love it like I love the Baron,” my mother said when I told her. That was about as close as she came to cursing—she sure didn’t love Baron Ede. No one did.
She sat in her rocking chair, a clay mug of wine in her hand. I’d waited until after supper to tell her, because she never took news well on an empty stomach. I didn’t either, come to think of it.
She took a long draw off the mug. “You’re old enough to make your own mistakes.”
After that, she didn’t say anything at all. Which was kind of worse than her yelling at me, really. It left me with nothing to do but stand around—there was only one good chair on the porch of the stable house—and come to my own conclusions about why it was a bad idea.
I didn’t want to do that. I’d made up my mind, so I tried not to linger on what the witches might do to me if they found out. Or what knights sometimes did to witches.
“I’ll get to learn magic,” I said. “Real magic. Cauldrons and curses and maybe I’ll even learn how to fly.”
“What is it that you think witches do?”
“They travel around doing good things,” I said. “They help some people and hurt some people, depending on what they deserve.”
“That’s what you want to do? Help some people, hurt other people? Since when have you liked hurting people?”
“I don’t know, Mom. Since never, I guess.”
It was my turn to grow quiet. I’d probably learned that trick from her. The cicadas were out, and early too, filling the air with their rising and falling song. The town drunk said it was going to be an irrational year, one of those years where the seasons don’t do what they’re supposed to and crops fail. No one paid him overmuch heed, but the cicadas really shouldn’t have been out just yet.
“There’s no way to disguise yourself,” my mom said, breaking the silence. “Not forever. You don’t look it now, but you’re going to grow into a man.”
“By then, I bet I’ll have magic enough to hide it,” I said.
“I won’t hear the end of it, never, not from Grell.”
When she invoked my birth father’s name, I knew that was basically the end of it. She’d given up. I was my mother’s child, through and through, and she knew I didn’t care what Grell thought. I hadn’t inherited anything from Grell but skin half a shade darker than my mother’s olive.
“This is it then,” she said. She poured the dregs of her wine off into the grass to honor the dead, as she did with every cup. “The coven is going to be by soon enough, and you’re going to lie to them, and you’ll learn to be a witch. Not a sailor, not a knight, not—Nethers forbid—a stablemaster, but a witch. My son the witch.”
I nodded, grinning. She hadn’t stopped me. I knew deep in my heart that if it was truly a terrible idea, my mother would have tried harder to stop me.
“What’s Lane going to do, while you’re off being her? She want to learn to run a stable?”
“She’s going to be a knight.”
“Of course she is.” My mom sighed. I knew she wasn’t happy about me leaving. I knew she wanted someone to care about the stables, about Ledston, the way she did. But that wasn’t me. It wouldn’t have done anyone any good for me to pretend otherwise.
Witches don’t really keep proper schedules, but most years they made their way down South Ede around Mother’s May, the spring holiday. I figured I had about a week to prepare myself.
The witches didn’t know Lane by name; they were just coming for the daughter of Leona of the Lead now that she’d seen sixteen years. I started sleeping over at the Lead manor in case they came at night. The house was a decrepit shell, really, the rock walls overgrown with vines and half the lumber taken to rot. Lane did what she could to maintain it, but she’d lived there alone for three years. She spent most of her days working the communal fields and hadn’t the skills or resources for serious repairs.
The manor was a shadow of its former glory. “Lead Manor, Dead Manor,” Lane called it, rhyming the name. A few hundred years ago, Lane’s ancestors had founded the town to mine lead, then sworn fealty to some baroness or baron. Serfs moved in, and those who weren’t mining took to farming on the communal fields. A hundred years back, collectivization had swept through the lowlands and the baron had allowed it rather than lose power completely. Lane’s family stayed richer than most of the rest of us, but only through trade and inheritance. They no longer ruled and they no longer took tax, only the baron did either of those things. By Lane’s mother’s time, the family barely had enough to maintain the ancient manor.
The first night I spent there, waiting for the witches, Lane led me up treacherous stairs to her parents’ old living quarters. We had to pick our way carefully across the sagging floor in the lamplight.
“I’m going to bring this place back to glory,” Lane said, tugging her shirtsleeve free from a protruding nail. “I’ll be the first knight protector Ledston’s had in fifty years.”
“You really think you’ll come back?” I asked.
“You won’t?”
“I mean, I’ll visit my mom,” I said. “Sometimes.”
“We could use a village witch,” Lane said. “Just think of this place with a knight protector and a village witch!”
“Too much world to see,” I said. Since I’d made up my mind to join the witches, I’d spent half my time, waking and asleep, imagining all the things I was off to see and do.
We stopped before a heavy cherrywood wardrobe set in the corner of the master bedroom. Its hinges were faded brass, but gold filigree still gleamed eternally bright along the door panels. Before Lane’s mother died, she had always kept us out of this room. After Lane’s mother died, Lane herself had solemnly told me that this wardrobe was off limits.
Lane selected an iron key hung on a chain from her belt and held it aloft so we might appreciate the seriousness of the moment.
“You ready?” she asked.
I nodded. I could scarcely wait.
She opened the wardrobe. Black skirts and dresses hung from hooks. Stockings woven in intricate patterns lay in a pile. Jewelry, finely crafted from plain materials, glittered beneath the glass lid of an ebony box. I’d studied at the loom enough to know the long days it took to weave a few yards of flax or wool. This was the accumulated wealth of a life.
“My mother left pretty clear instructions for when I left to join the witches,” Lane said. “I was to bring a short dress, a long dress, a warm cloak, a winter skirt, and three pairs of stockings. So pick out whatever you’d like.”
My own dress. I would have my own dress. Two of them, even.
I spent most of an hour making my decision, modeling each garment in front of the mirror on the inside door of the wardrobe. Not even Leona of the Lead had ever owned a smooth glass mirror, so my image was distorted. That suited me fine. It let me imagine how I ought to look.
I let my hair down out of its topknot. Long and straight and black, it framed my face well. I’d have worn it down all the time if I could.
Though I was much taller than Lane, I was nearly the same size as Leona had been. Most of the dresses sat funny across my chest since I had nothing to fill them out, and even fewer of them were loose enough across the hips to hide the bulge between my legs, but in the end I found two that fit me just right. Both were high-waisted, which made my legs look longer and my torso shorter. One linen, one wool.
When I wore those dresses, I couldn’t stop smiling.
“You’re beautiful,” Lane said. She was smiling too. She thought for a minute, then dug through the wardrobe. She pulled out a necklace. A black stone pendant hung from a delicate steel chain. She held it out to me. No one in town had anything so nice.
“Your mother didn’t say anything about taking any jewelry,” I said.
“She’s dead. Take it. As a thank you.”
I took it and put it on. It hung just above the low neckline of the long dress, the stone cool and comforting against my chest. Despite how I was born, I was going to get to be a witch. Despite how I was born, I was going to get to live as a woman.
Lane squeezed me. She was crying into my neck. “Thank you,” she whispered.
“Of course.” I started crying too.
I slept in my long dress that night. I wanted to get used to wearing it, and also I just didn’t want to take it off. I slept in one of the empty rooms in the manor. A windstorm howled outside and branches cracked in the distance.
I dreamt about a witch with translucent skin. I saw her skull and her veins and her teeth like I was looking through foggy glass. She was a real woman, a real witch, who’d wandered through town when I was an infant. I’d dreamt about her ever since.
That night, though, I was a witch, and the glass-faced witch was with me, next to me, tied to me with thick hemp rope. We were in a boat. Hands lifted us out of the boat and threw us overboard, and we sank, and I was drowning, tied to the glass-faced witch.
Mother’s May came and went with no sign of the coven. No word from anyone passing through, either, though of course I had to be careful with my inquiries. Witches weren’t beloved everywhere across Cekon. None of the baronies outlawed witchcraft outright, but not everyone knew and appreciated the social utility of witchcraft, and very few of the knightly Brotherhoods would raise a hand or a sword to protect witches. Some knights saw witches as a threat to their power and hunted them. If I told the wrong knights we were expecting witches, I might even get them killed.
Most of the news was talk of strife far to the north. Duchess Helte had pressed some ancient and dubious claim and annexed some baron’s holdings. The news felt impossibly distant.
I tried to make myself useful at the stables, but as the days wore on, I got more and more anxious and distracted. One day I forgot to fasten a buckle and a passing merchant fell from her horse and injured her back. After that, my mother told me it was about time she got used to running the place alone anyway, which left me with too much time to worry.
What would witches do to an impostor? Would they kick me out, turn me into a sow, or kill me? They’d probably just kick me out. Maybe.
My mother took to eating dinner with us at Lane’s house, particularly after she fired me and I spent more of my time baking and cooking.
Five days after Mother’s May, I was reaching my breaking point. We ate on the back porch, where the overgrown garden kept away prying eyes, and I wore my short dress. The sun was just below the horizon. We were mopping up the last of a turnip and barley soup with fresh-baked bread, and I just couldn’t keep my feelings cooped up anymore.
“I give up,” I said. “This waiting, it’s going to kill me. Or the witches will kill me, or people will kill me for being a witch. Better I just give up. I’ll go be a sailor or something instead. Sailors see the world too.”
Lane looked up, her brown eyes just starting to go wide with fear. If I backed out, the coven would take her instead.
“You can do anything you want with your life, Lorel,” my mother said. I always knew a lecture was coming when she used my name. “And I don’t wish you were off to be a witch. But you made a promise to Lane.”
“I didn’t say I promise,” I said. As soon as the words came out of my mouth, I regretted them.
“Saying you promise isn’t the only way to promise.”
“It’s okay,” Lane said. “It was nice of you to offer, but if you back out, it’s okay.”
I didn’t like my mom being mean to me and I didn’t like Lane being nice to me. I didn’t like much of anything at all.
The Ledston bell tolled, twice.
The Ledston bell rang once for friendly knights and merchants come to town, twice for friendly brigands and witches and other people the baron didn’t approve of, three times for royalty, and cacophonously for any of the above who looked like they might stir up trouble.
“Never mind,” I said, standing up. “I’ll do it.”
“Upstairs with you,” my mother said to Lane. “Out of sight. You look too much like your mother.”
Lane darted over and hugged me. She pulled back to look at me, like she was trying to say something, then she gave up, shook her head, and ran into the house.
“Are you going through with this?” my mother asked.
I stood up straight, smoothed out my dress. “Of course,” I said. “I made a promise.”
My arms shook uncontrollably at my side as I walked to the center of town, and it was all I could do to concentrate on my breathing.
“We have come for the daughter of Leona of the Lead.”
Five witches stood shoulder to shoulder in the center of the town square.
My whole childhood, I’d wanted to know about witches. It was always hard to separate rumor from truth, but I knew a few things. I knew that every full-fledged witch was the other’s equal, for one thing.
Each of these five wore black from head to toe, despite the warm evening and the heat radiating from the cobbles beneath their boots. One was roughly my mother’s age, with the ivory-pale skin and narrow nose of someone from the far north. Two of them were as old as anyone I’d ever seen. Two of them could scarcely have been twenty.
One of the youngest had a fresh wound cut across her face and stood with the help of a crutch. Two of the others had bandaged arms. They must have had trouble on the way. Maybe that was why they were so late. Most of them were armed with spears or axes or swords. The uninjured young one carried what looked like a birdcage, covered with a cloth embroidered in the indecipherable runes of witchcraft.
Behind them, a girl my age stood shyly, like she didn’t know quite what to do. Another recruit, most likely. She wore the most beautiful black cloak, made of glistening sea-wool. Its hood had a long pointed tail. That was a good cloak for a witch.
“I’m Lorel,” I said. I lie the best when I sort of just avoid telling the truth, instead of lying outright, so I didn’t mention that I only had one name. I stepped forward.
One witch, one of the crones, broke from the line and circled me, looking me over. The rest of the witches carried baskets of wicker on their backs, but this woman bore a casket, child-sized, instead.
“Lorel of the Lead,” she said.
My name was just Lorel, as my family bore no titles, but who was I to correct a witch who’d likely been born before my long-dead great grandmother?
She stopped in front of me. “Do you come willing or merely accepting?” she asked. There was an old scar on her cheek, a crescent moon white against her dark olive skin.
“I come willing,” I said. My voice wavered as I spoke. What had I gotten myself into? With eyes as old and wise as hers, how could she not see right through me?
The witch smiled. Some of her teeth were yellow, some of her teeth were black. One of her teeth was capped in gold, another capped in pearl. The contrast between them all was unnerving. “Not many come willing, not these past years.”
“Why?” I asked.
She ignored my question and went back to stand in the line.
Only a handful of people had gathered to see the strange procession. The herbalist, a few farmers, the midwife—River’s mother. If any one of them said anything about me dressed up like a girl, the whole plan would fall apart.
My mother stood among the onlookers, balancing my wicker basket of clothes on her hip, holding it by one of the woven shoulder straps.
“Lorel of the Lead, I summon you into the Order of the Vine. Today and forever, you are Lorel of the Vine.”
I nodded. I knew no courtly manners for an event like this.
“Do you have anything to bring with you?”
“Just clothes,” I said.
My mother walked toward me then, setting the basket down by my feet. Tears welled in the corners of her eyes.
“You’ve been like a daughter to me,” my mother said. She winked, then hugged me for a moment. “Go off and be your best self.”
The crone looked between me and my mother for a brief moment, as if noticing the similarities in our features, but she said nothing.
With no more formality, the line of witches turned and walked out of town. I grabbed my basket of clothes and hurried after. They hadn’t seen through me. I was going to be a witch. I wasn’t shaking anymore. I was grinning.
I REALLY REALLY wish it can come to Europe at some point...
This has me so excited for the book! I can't wait to see what happens.