The Witch of Thornvale Chapter 9: Cinderglen
The Witch of Thornvale is a literary portal fantasy featuring two distinct characters. It allegorizes Ludwig von Mises’ Six Lessons.
If you haven’t yet read The Witch of Thornvale, now is an outstanding time to get on board. Check out Act I (Chapters 1 to 6) of the serialized fiction work, and below you can access Chapters 7 and 8.
Chapter 9: Cinderglen
Eirwyn’s jaw tensed. “He’s with me. He’s been with me.”
The woman narrowed her eyes. “That may protect him…for now.”
The last elder—the quiet one, silver-bald and hunched—tapped the bottom of his staff once against the ground. He watched Drake like he was watching the edge of a storm that hadn’t made landfall yet.
Around them, more villagers emerged, their eyes flickering between Drake, Eirwyn, and the elders.
The path wound behind the elders—stone-lined and narrow, carved into the curve of the ravine. The buildings grew closer together here, folded into the earth with purpose. Bark walls curved around small clearings, ivy hung from roofbeams, and lanterns swayed on hooks, their light soft as breath.
A round building stood apart from the village. Its walls stacked from slate and river stone, fitted without mortar, rising into a domed roof thatched with dark reed and bound by what looked like animal sinew. Faint smoke curled from a vent in the center.
A woman stepped from the entrance. Her hands were stained with dye, wrists wrapped in frayed cloth, and a line of crow feathers wove through her braids. Her eyes tracked Eirwyn first, swept to Drake, then back again without blinking.
“She’ll deal with you,” the shortest elder said. Then he turned away, as if that ended the debate.
The woman stepped aside and waved Drake and Eirwyn into the strange building.
Inside, the air smelled like a mixture of cedar, ink, leather, and dried roots. Baskets lined the walls. They were neatly arranged and labeled with chalk marks. Like the woman used them for record-keeping.
Tanned hides hung from the rafters. Hooks held bundles of dried herbs, string-tied roots, and fat-stemmed fungi hardened to bone. A round table dominated the center of the room. It was worn smooth from generations of elbows, knife tips, and ink spills. On the wall behind it, twenty slates were mounted in a perfect spiral, each marked with rows of scratches, glyphs, and notations in faded red and white chalk.
The woman moved toward the largest basket. She lifted the lid and drew out a bundle of blue-stemmed stalks bound in black thread.
“We deal in anything that has value,” she said. Her voice had texture. “Not strictly coin.”
She tapped one of the slates with the back of her hand. “No overseers, no tithe, nothing that resembles the war machine Malcor now leads.”
Drake stepped forward. “And if someone steps out of line?”
She looked over her shoulder, brow furrowed. “Then they would face a few ramifications. I, for one, would bar them access from my trade hall. My family has owned it for generations.”
Drake smirked when the woman turned away from them. It was exactly what he hoped to hear.
Eirwyn pulled a pouch from inside her cloak, one Drake had yet to see. She unwrapped a cloth bundle inside—small sprigs of blackmint and powdered shrikeleaf sealed in waxed paper. The woman’s eyebrows twitched, but she nodded and pointed to an empty line on the nearest slate.
“That will give you enough for three meals, one bed, and one bath upstairs. For one night.”
Eirwyn reached for the chalk and recorded her payment.
The woman turned to Drake. “And you?”
He glanced around and pulled out his dead phone. “That’s all I got.”
The woman gaped at it. “I see no value in that—whatever it is.”
Eirwyn turned and took out another few sprigs of blackmint and sealed shrikeleaf and pushed it across the counter. “I’ll pay for him.”
“Record it.”
Then, a voice echoed from the corner.
A sharp-eyed boy, maybe twelve, leaned against a post with a sprig of dry grass between his teeth. “Can you teach me how to lie to a regime?”
Drake blinked. “Lie to a regime? What regime?”
The boy eased forward, eyes locked on Drake’s. “Malcor’s.”
“Why would you need to lie to them? This doesn’t seem like a place he visits often.” If he did, Drake thought to himself, this village would look like the rundown one they passed.
“Not to cheat or steal. Just to make them think I’m smaller than I am so they look away when I leave the village. I’m almost of age.”
Drake turned to the woman. “What’s he saying?”
“Malcor’s soldiers may not come into Cinderglen, but they have conscripted some of our own when they would leave the village on hunting parties.”
“Then he’ll have every reason to lie.”
Eirwyn’s head turned slightly.
The woman raised her chin, and threw Drake an expectant look.
Drake nodded, catching a strange vibe that this boy, somehow, knew how he felt about regimes like Malcor’s. Well, the American Empire was bad enough.
The boy grinned. Just a flash. Then it vanished as he looked toward the woman. “I see that as value, too.”
“How much?”
“A lot, especially if it keeps us from losing hunters and trappers.”
The woman turned back to Drake and marked a second slate. “You and Starweaver might have a place for a while. But my boy will be the judge of that.”
***
Outside, a fire crackled low along the river’s edge, hemmed in by a ring of dark stone polished smooth by years of flood and sun.
A group of villagers gathered in a loose half-circle. Some sat on flat stones, others on carved logs. One boy dangled his feet over the water, kicking idly as the glow caught his face in flickers of gold. Voices moved like the current—soft, layered, and constant.
Eirwyn crouched near the edge, arms folded across her knees, her gaze locked on the dancing firelight.
Drake stood between two stones, palms open near the glow. The warmth bled into his skin. His breath rose in the cool air, trailing off toward the branches above.
He looked at the boy standing across from him. The same one who asked about lying. He watched Drake with an eager look on his face.
“So,” Drake said. “Are you ready?”
The boy’s facial expression grew even more eager.
“I’m gonna tell these stories one at a time. The first one might not make so much sense at first, but you’ll see where I’m going eventually. Now, imagine a place packed with fifty thousand people. Think you can do that?”
A few people who overheard him tilted their heads and threw him halfway glances. The girl sitting nearest to them whispered something to her sister.
“It’s called a stadium. Built with brick, steel, and glass. Giant moving pictures the size of trees flash with color. Music shakes the bones. People scream so loud they drown themselves out and the stadium shakes.”
A woman cocked her head, the single braid holding her hair in swinging over one shoulder. One of the elders leaned forward, elbows on his knees, face aglow with interest.
“They call it sport. Millionaires—people with a lot of money—who are my age play them. Watched by people who work double shifts and go home broke. No lie.”
He let the silence hang. The boy near the river still watched, while the two sisters also locked their eyes on Drake.
“They argue and fight over it. Entire channels on smaller moving pictures built just to scream about which team is better. But outside the walls—those same cities rot. Families collapse, and politicians steal, smile, and tell us what else we should be angry at.”
Someone exhaled a sharp breath through their nose. Another man shook his head in disbelief.
Drake’s eyes caught the shimmer of embers near the fire.
“We call it distraction. But that’s too clean. It’s conditioning a society raised to react to noise, not act on principle.”
Eirwyn shifted. Her arms loosened, eyes never leaving his face.
An elder near the front lifted a hand. One with gnarled fingers that Drake hadn’t noticed until now. “So how do your people speak truth, then, if noise is all they know?”
Drake’s shoulders rolled. “Many don’t, and most won’t.”
He crouched by the fire. His reflection rippled in the water beside the stones.
“But some of us hide our voices inside machines. We scramble our names, wrap messages in something we call codes. We use VPNs—it’s a way to hide inside a machine. They look like nothing. But they’re like shields, or armor you wear without being seen.”
A low chuckle rumbled from the elder again. His voice cut across the quiet with dry weight. “You’ve hidden everything but your courage.”
The boy laughed next.
Drake looked at the fire before glancing at Eirwyn. Finally, he turned to the people who sat quiet but attentive. “I lost it for a while. But we had to do something, because those sports I was talking about—that’s how regimes keep people pacified. Bread and circuses, we call them. That enables their war machine back home. One hardly any different from Malcor’s.”
The fire crackled louder for a breath. Wind shifted, and the trees overhead leaned into the silence.
Eirwyn stood and crossed to the edge of the circle. Her cloak caught the light, blue silk catching embers like stars pressed into fabric, but she didn’t seem to mind. She kept up her stride until she stood beside Drake.
And in that stillness, the villagers down near the banks relaxed.
One woman leaned back against a tree and passed a dried root to the boy. An old man closed his eyes and murmured something beneath his breath.
Brewing moonlight spilled across the river and rising mist clung to the banks in low coils, dragging across stones and occasional tangled weeds. Water trickled steady through the valley, catching glints of light from the village fire.
Drake took a jug made of carved gourd from Eirwyn that the braided girl handed her, its rim chipped but still watertight. He crouched and dipped it slow, watching bubbles rise as the current pushed against his wrist and cold bit through his skin.
A twig snapped behind him.
Drake rose, water sloshing against his fingers. He set the jug down on a flat rock beside him.
She stepped into view, her cloak pulled tight, and brown hair cropped short. A scar ran across the bridge of her nose like an unfinished sentence. Her eyes were hard, blue-green, and unflinching—locked on his face.
One hand rested on the hilt of a blade no longer than her forearm. “We’ve survived,” she said, voice low, “because we trust slowly. It’s one reason Malcor won’t send his people in. Yet, anyway.”
Drake shifted, his feet shoulder-width. “You’re not wrong.”
She took two steps forward. Her boots barely cracked the gravel.
“The tradeswoman negotiating that deal with you wasn’t just voluntary exchange,” she said. “It was a test.”
Her gaze drifted to the jug, to the water, then back to his face. “You speak well. Too well.”
The blade stayed sheathed, but the weight of it shaped the air between them.
“I couldn’t speak openly before.”
She tilted her head. “You think that story bought you ground?”
Drake met her eyes. “It had enough value to buy me and Eirwyn time.”
Her gaze flicked toward the village, toward the lantern-lit circle where a few children chased shadows and another group of adults whispered too close to hear.
She pointed with her chin. “That boy, the one who asked about lying to regimes and you gave him a sports story.”
Drake followed the glance. The boy now stood near the edge of the clearing, playing with a carved stick like it was a sword.
“Don’t teach hope, unless you plan to fight for it.” She turned and walked away, boots crunching soft over gravel.
Drake stood alone at the river’s edge, moonlight cutting across his shoulders. The jug sat full beside his sneaker.
Eirwyn gave him the same kind of smile his mother gave him when they would make eye contact.
He picked up the jug, and waved her over and they stepped toward the edge of the grove—a break in the tree line where moss-covered stones formed a quiet arch. Leaves hung heavy above, dripping with dew as wind pushed past them.
Drake kept his head up. He knew they were being watched. Eirwyn—for now—was his only true friend here.
Catch Chapter 10 and find out if this village really takes well to Drake
This piece initially appeared on The Rogue Scribe.
