Terms, places and magic from the trilogy. Anything that spoils a book is hidden until you choose to reveal it, and entries for unreleased books do not appear here at all.
26 entries
What is left when the rot takes a great many people at once and does not leave them separate. An abomination is a towering, shifting bulk of fused limbs and partial torsos plated in dark purple bone, still walking the loop of the work that consumed it. It is not something a village can answer.
The institutional noun for the blight, held by the school, by trained healers, and by working witches who commit it to their private records but rarely say it aloud in a public square. Three things about it are set down plainly: it is progressive, it can be slowed by careful management, and nothing on record has ever cured it.
The school’s former headmistress, and the author of the herbals every village healer in the country works from — copied out by hand onto shed walls, kept on kitchen shelves beside the flour tin. She compiled them by walking the country and asking village healers what worked, so that none of it would be lost. A marble statue of her stands in the school’s Founders’ Courtyard with one hand half-extended, and an old country ballad has had her name fitted to it since the day she set out east and did not come back.
Witches who belong to no school and no village, walking the long roads alone with a staff across the back and a cloak in their color. They tend the wayshrines, dispatch what they find in the hedgerows, and trade the state of the road with the drivers they pass in a flat working shorthand: two hares yesterday, one bird this morning, nothing big.
A person the rot has finished with. A shambler keeps the shape and the clothes of whoever it was — a merchant’s red coat, a miner’s canvas overalls — and moves with a broken, twitching mechanism, one dragged step after another. It does not flee, and it does not recognize anyone. There is no cure to offer it; the only permanent mercy is a quick end.
What farmers and working witches call the rot when they can see it in a body — the purple thread at the corner of a hare’s eye, the sheep that will not eat, the skin crawling under a fox-cub’s fur. It is the country’s plain word for a thing most villages have no other name for, and it travels from one kitchen table to the next the way the trouble itself does.
The country’s main road, running east from the witch school through a string of farming villages to the city of Selenmar. The villages along it sit roughly a day’s walk apart, and the road is the only reliable thread between them — carts, post, and travelers all move in its ruts. Wayshrines stand at intervals on its verges.
The ceremony at which the school records a first-year’s name and her color. Seven objects are set out in a line on a low table — a candle stub, a cup of water, an iron coin, a wilted herb, a paper lantern, a river stone, a caged field mouse — and each girl holds her hands over them until one of them answers. Nobody chooses; the teachers have been watching for weeks, and the ceremony only says aloud what they already know.
The chartered company that keeps the country’s trade moving: guild halls in the market towns, weigh stations and transit tariffs, freight wagons on the long roads, and standing contracts with the iron villages. Its emblem is a crescent moon over a pair of silver scales, worn by riders in dark grey wool trimmed with bright silver piping.
The country’s magical message network. A terminal is a heavy brass box fitted with glass dials, exposed copper coils and a glowing crystalline center; smaller nodes are bolted into the walls of schools and post offices, wired together by copper cable and humming at a pitch a passer-by can feel in her teeth. Messages relay from station to station along the chain toward Selenmar.
A waist-high pillar of pale grey stone standing on the verge of the Pilgrim’s Road, carved with the wide brim and pointed peak of a witch’s hat and worn shallow by centuries of rain; also called a waystone. Travelers and road witches tend them, leaving wildflowers and bundled herbs at the base. A stone left untended — bare earth, creeping lichen — says as much about a stretch of road as a tended one does.
The Pilgrim’s Road
A market town of three or four streets filling a wide valley bowl — heavy stone houses and steeply pitched slate roofs running down toward a square bell tower of dark stone and tarnished bronze. The Pilgrim’s Road feeds straight into an open wagon-gate in a low stone wall. There are no guards on it.
Its market is the biggest thing for days in any direction: late root vegetables, crates of salted river fish, bolts of woven cloth, iced tea sold out of season because the city sells it. City things keep surfacing here — a stable boy in a second-hand Selenmar waistcoat, a fountain glittering with tossed copper, a bard by the inn fire playing an old ballad for a room that goes quiet at the chorus.
The square is loud, and the loudness runs slightly too hard — the breathless rhythm of people working to sound normal. The Silver League’s guild hall stands shut with a thick layer of dust on the iron handles, and the Lost & Found Board by the fountain is layered two and three notices deep, beginning to rot at the edges from the autumn rain.
The Pilgrim’s Road
The first village east of the school. A whitewashed windmill at the northern edge, sturdy fieldstone cottages with slate roofs loosely clustered round a central green, and dense trimmed hedgerows dividing the fields into precise interlocking squares. It smells of baked earth, dry hay, woodsmoke, and the sweet rot of fallen apples.
It is too small for a Witchgraph terminal. The Post & Telegraph cottage keeps its shutters closed, and anything Hawthorn wants to say to the world goes out on a cart and waits for the road to carry it. A vine-covered wagon parked under the willow at the edge of the green is where the village Brown Witch sits and sorts roots with children cross-legged at her feet.
The Pilgrim’s Road
A mining village on the floor of a steep valley, built along a single straight street of hard-packed cinder. Tall narrow stone houses with a century of forge-soot worked deep into the masonry, iron bars across every ground-floor window, no flowerboxes and no greenery, and a sky pressed down grey by smoke that cannot climb out of the valley.
A brick steam forge with three chimneys dominates the south end, venting steam through copper pipes and ringing with hammer-strokes paced like clockwork. The village runs on its bell: three slow strikes to open a shift, three to close it, and fast ringing for an emergency.
Its living and its danger are the same rock. The deep shaft runs down into the iron the village exists to pull out, and when the shaft is sealed and the Witchgraph goes silent, there is nobody left in the valley with the training to go down and find out why.
The East
The city at the eastern end of the Pilgrim’s Road, and the thing every other place in the country is measured against. From the last rise the land falls away into a wide bowl, with Selenmar at the center of it.
An outer wall of pale smooth stone, ringed with squat round towers. Inside it the city is built in concentric rings, each one set a step higher than the ring outside it, each roofed in its own color of slate or fired clay tile and divided from the next by an inner wall. At the center the palace rises under a great pale dome, with temple spires scattered through the inner tiers. A river enters from the east, threads beneath arched stone bridges, and leaves on the west.
At dusk the lamplighters begin in the outer ring and work inward with long poles, and the temple bells ring on whatever schedule each temple keeps, so evening arrives as a spreading of small warm lights and a handful of unsynchronized notes carrying up out of the valley.
The Northern Coast
A fishing village on the cold northern coast, three days’ drive from the school. Docks, salt-eaten wood, tide-markers instead of wayshrines, a harbor light just visible from the breakwater. The sea air eats everything eventually, so nothing in Sennewick looks permanent.
It is a place that hoards warmth and rations words. Kindness there is a transaction; you do not promise what you cannot afford to make true, and you do not say a thing aloud unless it will still be true at low tide.
On the first freezing night of the year the bay closes over between one breath and the next — the surface goes glassy, the air drops until nothing moves in the water, and then a solid sheet of ice sets clean across the water while you stand on the dock and watch it happen.
The Pilgrim’s Road
The freight road running east out of Brassford toward the iron valley. It is wider than the stretch of the Pilgrim’s Road behind it and built for heavy goods — deep parallel cart-ruts down the center, baked rigid by a dry autumn.
It is a worked road with nobody working it. No farmers, no riders, no walking merchants; hedgerows giving way to open tracts of pale wheat-stubble under a high flat ceiling of cloud. The wayshrines along it stand on bare earth with lichen creeping up over the carved hat. The road witches have not been through this stretch in a while.
Brassford’s caravans went east on this road. The town describes what became of them in absences rather than symptoms — not heard from since the crossing, should have arrived last Tuesday, not seen on this road since — because whatever is out here is out here, and not at anybody’s field edge.
The East
The far eastern edge of the country: farming villages and lake country, names that nobody in the west has had much cause to say aloud. Greenoak. Stonebridge. Old Ines, up by the lake.
It survives in the west as correspondence. Healers out there wrote to healers in here for years — practical, diagnostic letters, sorted by year and by sender and tied in bundles with coarse linen string — about a dog that turned on its family in their own kitchen, about lambs going wrong, about a child taken by something in the woods.
Then the letters stop.
Western Region
The school of witches. Villages and towns send their hopefuls here to learn and discover about their power. Witches travel to and from the various towns using the Pilgrim’s road. The current headmistress is Leah Thistle, with past headmistresses recognized with statues in the founder’s courtyard. It is here that Wren starts her journey and meets Ana.
The Pilgrim’s Road
Ana’s village: cottages under thinning willows in a shallow, tree-lined basin, reached by a dirt lane that climbs north off the Pilgrim’s Road. A creek winds through the green. Orchards line the approach, and the country around it is old smallholdings behind thick lichen-covered walls.
This is Yarrow country. Ana can name the arched stone bridge she learned to swim under and the stand of yellow birch where she cut firewood with her father; every wall and orchard on the way in is a coordinate on a map she has known since she was born.
What has happened to it is legible before anyone says a word. The russets hang unpicked and the ground beneath them is bare. A walled field lies unturned in last year’s stubble. Six chimneys are smoking out of fifteen. And the Witchgraph terminal has been unbolted from its post, its wiring drawn cleanly out of the casing, and laid down on its side in the long grass.
Blue witchery is the quietest of the seven colors. It does not burn, or heal, or call anything out of the trees. It lowers the temperature of a thing and holds it there — a net frosted against the rot on a winter dock, a pan pulled back off the boil, a creature stopped where it stands.
Wren has two working shapes: the Knife, driven down into a single point, and the Wave, swept wide from an open palm. The first breaks things. The second holds them. Most of what a Blue does in the field is holding.
Its teachers are firm that the cold is not a place to hide in. The cold answers what a witch brings it; bring it heat, and it gives the heat back sharper than she wanted. A Blue Witch is not the witch who feels nothing — she is the witch who knows what she is feeling when she casts.
Every witch in the country wears the same shape: a wide brim and a pointed peak. A teacher’s sits low and square and keeps its crease. A first-year’s is usually too big, slides down over her eyebrows, and collects leaves in the band.
The shape has escaped the witches entirely. It is chiseled into the wayshrines along the road and carved over the school doors. Children draw it on barn doors and schoolhouse gates in thick white and yellow chalk, on stick figures holding hands with stick farmers.
Farmers stitch a crude one out of stiff scrap canvas and set it on a scarecrow’s burlap head — a witch protector, propped on an ash pole to watch over the fields.
Brown witchery is the magic of healing and growing things, and it is the color most people ever actually meet. A Brown Witch keeps a village’s herb beds, sets its bones, sits with it through its bad nights, and knows which of the hedgerow weeds is worth stopping for.
It is taught hands first. Apprentices spend their earliest weeks making tinctures they will never use — three feverfew leaves, a sprig of meadowsweet, a pinch of dried sage, held at a slow simmer for five breaths — because making them teaches the hands what binding feels like. The magic comes later, when the hands already know what they are doing.
Its instinct is always to coax. A Brown Witch’s first assumption about anything broken is that it can be brought back toward health. It is the best thing about the color, and occasionally the most dangerous.
Magic in this country is a trade, not a title, and it comes in seven colors. A witch does not choose hers. Her hands settle into one over her first weeks of training, and the school reads the answer off her.
Brown is the most common by far — healing and growing things. Every village has one, and the world cannot move without it.
Red keeps the forges and the bakehouses.
Yellow are the messengers and the storm-callers, one in every post office in the country.
Blue are the cold-keepers, fewer than anyone expects, mostly stationed on the coasts and in the high mountains; they hold things still.
White are the lamp-witches and the night-watchers.
Black is stone and earth — the diggers and the foundation-layers, a useful color to be in a city.
Green are the wild-callers, and the fewest of all. They speak to the beasts and the beasts speak back, and a Green often goes her whole life without meeting another.
What the school knows about the corruption fits into three sentences, and they are handed over whole, without softening: the cases on record were progressive; some were slowed by careful management, a few of them for a very long time; and none were cured by anything anyone still has written down.
Everything after that is arithmetic. Cold slows it. A Brown Witch’s slowness herbs slow it. A ring charged at first light and again at sunset slows it. No combination of these stops it, and the wound gains more ground in the gap between charges than it does under the cold.
What the school has wrong is not the rules. It is the frame around them. Inside the gates, corruption is spoken of as rare, isolated, and fifteen years dead. The country outside the gates keeps a different count.
