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head back and stared up at a sky carpeted with stars. A metallic taste filled her mouth. This story—Hen’s story—was taking her somewhere she didn’t want to go. It had a witch, and Isabelle had always loved stories with witches in them, would check out any book from the library that had the barest hint of a witch in it. But the story also held a baby close to its heart, and Isabelle couldn’t bear that baby. She couldn’t bear it! Because she could see it as it had been, its little chest rising and falling as its sling swung in the night breeze, the moonlit air warm on its skin. And then—awful, awful—she could see what it became when it was no longer a baby but had become a small, lifeless body, bruises likeblack flowers across its arms and legs and forehead.
    Hen had been right: Out of the leaves, they had made a bed fit for queens. But that night, Isabelle tossed and turned and didn’t sleep until the singing of the birds lifted up the sun.



13
    Let me pause here for a moment. There’s a boy there in the third row, halfway back, who’s had his hand in the air for the last ten minutes. I guess some of you have never heard about keeping your hands down until the person telling the story is done. Not that it’s distracting to have someone waving wildly at you while you’re trying to remember exact details, the order of events, what this person said to that person. Oh, no, not distracting
at all.
    You want to know what the lamps are? Oh, the
camps.
You want to know what the camps are. Haven’t I explained the camps yet? I thought I had.
    Here’s what I know. Back in the time of the witch, in the County of the Five Villages, eachvillage had its season, and the children of that village had to leave until the witch had moved on. (The order of the villages went Greenan, Aghadoc, Corrin, Stoneybatter, and Drumanoo.) If you lived in Corrin, you ran to the woods north of Greenan. Aghadoc—the woods south of Stoneybatter. And so on.
    I don’t know much about the camps, to tell you the truth. I guess if it was spring or summer the children foraged for berries, fished in the creek, threw rocks at squirrels (
not
nice, I know, but they were hungry, and it’s not as if there was a grocery store half a mile down the road). Did they tell one another stories at night? Weave potholders out of long grasses? Make boats out of twigs? I don’t know. Somebody else will have to tell that story. Maybe you could do it. Some of those children are still around. Oh, they’re grown up now, but believe me, they haven’t forgotten. Go ask them yourselves. All you have to do is find the door.

14
    In the morning the two girls continued south, and Hen made no complaint.
She must know we’re getting closer to the witch, not farther away,
Isabelle thought,
so why doesn’t she turn around?
Maybe Isabelle should offer to turn around herself, take Hen to the camps. It would be almost a day’s walk, but what was that to Isabelle? When they reached the camps, she could get more bread, maybe a jar of peanut butter—no, no, they wouldn’t have that—a handful of dried apples, then, enough to survive on as she made her way back south after making sure Hen was safe in the camps.
    Isabelle’s eyes felt hot and scratchy, her legs as though they’d been cast in lead. She didn’t have halfa day’s walk in her, that was the problem with her plan. Besides, there was that look on Hen’s face, serious and slightly grim, as if she’d been setting her own plans in concrete all morning.
    “Is this the path you walked on yesterday?” Isabelle asked, trying to make conversation. Hen’s silence was beginning to worry her. “I mean, as you headed north from Corrin.”
    “No, miss,” Hen replied. “We went through the woods. Didn’t want to be out in the open, ripe for the picking, especially with a shadow moon overhead. Even a half-masked moon sheds light if it’s full.”
    It was the sort of morning that made Isabelle happy not to be in