Summer came brittle and thin, like parchment singed at the edges.
The crops grew crooked; the air carried the scent of smoke though no fires burned.
Each dawn, the villagers found small things left upon their doorsteps—
a single feather,
a sprig of rue,
a smooth black stone, warm to the touch.
Children whispered that it was Prudence returning gifts to those who once scorned her.
Their parents whispered louder, calling them curses.
But not all feared them.
The baker's boy—now older, pale, and watchful—kept one of the feathers hidden beneath his pillow. He said it helped him sleep, that it carried warmth where dreams once froze.
---
The first to see the crow was Goody Larkin.
She awoke to find it perched upon her windowsill, staring in with one obsidian eye.
It carried something in its beak—a shred of parchment, brittle with age.
When she reached for it, the bird croaked once, sharp as laughter, and dropped the paper on her bed.
Written in a hand she did not know were four words:
> "The hollow remembers all."
The crow took flight, its wings shedding sparks of soot as it vanished toward the woods.
That night, Goody Larkin's hearth went cold, no matter how fiercely she stoked it.
By morning, she had gone to the meetinghouse, trembling. "The witch walks again," she swore. "Her shadow flies upon black wings."
---
Each day thereafter, the crow returned—never to the same home twice.
It left tokens: a silver button, a child's ribbon, a shard of broken glass.
And sometimes, at the edge of the forest, villagers swore they saw the faint glow of a lantern swinging in the dark, though no one dared follow.
Only the baker's boy did.
He waited one twilight when the crow came to roost upon the old gallows beam.
Its eyes caught the fading light—gray, not black—and for the first time, he felt no fear.
"Where do you come from?" he asked.
The bird tilted its head. Then, with a sound like the sigh of wind through leaves, it dropped a small object at his feet:
a rusted key, marked with the symbol of a flame.
He looked up. The crow was gone.
But beyond the fields, a dim light flickered—
a lantern, swaying gently between the trees.
---
That night, he dreamed of Prudence.
She stood by the same lantern, its light golden as memory.
In her hand she held the key.
> "The lock lies not in the cell," she told him softly, "but in the heart that feared me."
He tried to speak, but his voice failed.
She smiled, fading into smoke.
When he awoke, the rusted key lay in his palm—clean, gleaming as though newly forged.
And from the woods, faint but sure, came the call of a crow—three times, like a summons.
---
The villagers soon noticed the boy's eyes changing—paler, like ash stirred to light.
He began walking the forest paths without fear, leaving offerings of bread and milk at the hollow.
And though they whispered he'd been "touched" by the witch's spirit, none dared stop him.
Because when he passed, the air grew warmer.
The wells ran clear.
And for the first time in months, no one dreamed of the gallows.
Still, at night, the crow circled above the meetinghouse, its shadow vast upon the snow, and the faint glow of a lantern moved among the trees—
never nearer,
never gone.