The Night Gardener by Jonathan Auxier

the road because it reminded him of the last time they had all been together as a family, the four of them leaving the farm to board a boat that would carry them across the sea to a new life. Kip had been too sick to remember much of the voyage. He hadn’t even been able to give Ma and Da a proper good-bye. He had awakened in an orphanage, where Molly had explained how their parents and the rest of the grown-up folks had been carried off by pirates. Kip suspected it wasn’t actually pirates—that was just the sort of detail Molly would make up—but he did know his parents would come back soon. They had to.
    When Kip opened his eyes, he saw a figure approaching from the eastern road. It was not the postman but the old witch they had met their first day in the valley. He remembered her name was Hester Kettle, which had struck him as a little bit funny and a little bit frightening.
    The woman was walking straight toward Kip. There were no other homes for miles, and so it was pretty clear she meant to call upon the Windsors. Kip considered running off before she reached him butthen thought better of it—if she really was a witch, he didn’t want to provoke her.
    He watched her shuffle nearer, her pack of junk clattering with each step. She wasn’t playing her instrument, but she was humming something to herself. It took Kip a moment to realize that she was singing in the same key as the water flowing alongside the road. “Why, look who it is!” she called when she was near enough to speak. “The little brother, come to bid me welcome.”
    “I’m waitin’ for the postman,” Kip said.
    “You’ll be waitin’ a long time, I wager. Post comes but once a month, and rarer still in this direction. You don’t mind if I rest my bones, do you?” She untied a three-legged stool from her pack and set it on the ground. She sat upon it with an unsteady plop that left the stool groaning. She grinned at Kip. “Not so grand as your throne, but it’ll do.”
    His eyes drifted to a pair of long, rusted garden shears hanging from the side of her pack. “I thought you never came near these woods,” he said.
    “You thought correctly,” she said, gracefully tucking the shears out of view. “But when I spied Master Windsor racin’ toward the city on that carriage of his, I figured it was worth the risk to check on my investment.” She smiled in a way that let Kip know she was talking about him. “You may recall promising me a story.”
    “That was my sister who promised it, not me,” Kip said. “I dinna tell stories. Molly’s fixin’ supper in the house, if you care to call on her.”
    The woman glanced toward the house but quickly looked away again. “Here’s close enough for me, luv.” Kip could tell she was nervous—for all her jokes and stories, she was just as scared of the sourwoods as everyone else. “No need to interrupt your work. I only come to put a niggle in your ear. And to make sure you two lambs weren’t”—she hummed, as if searching for the right word—“indisposed.”
    Kip did not know that word, but he understood her meaning. “You thought we was dead,” he said.
    The woman laughed, which was no kind of answer. “You got a keen eye for what’s what. It’s not like me to be so dramatic, but when two whelps disappear into a place such as this”—she gestured to the wooded isle—“you can’t help but fear the worst.”
    Kip looked hard at the woman, trying to disentangle her teasing from her truth. What did she really know about this place? “Back when we was on the road, you said there was somethin’ tragic about these woods. You called it ‘the other thing.’”
    The woman gave a cryptic smile. “I’m not sure your sister would appreciate me frightening you.”
    “I ain’t afraid,” Kip said. “Well, I
am
afraid … but I’m not afraid of
being
afraid. If that makes sense. True is still true, even if it’s bad. That means I want to hear it.”
    “That’s a rare thing, in