Chapter 37
In Which Glenda Is Happy to Be Making Progress, and Happy to Be Spending Time in a Cushioned Carriage, but In Which All Attempts at Conversation Have Left Her with the Curious and Unpleasant Suspicion that She Is Being Judged and Found Wanting.
They followed the glow of the sword like a compass.
Glenda brought up portals again, delicately, but the mongrel witch waved her into silence. “I am not the sorcerer. Cutting through space is an act either of arrogance or desperation, and we have the luxury of time. We fly, or we ride.”
As it turned out, they didn’t need to ride for long.
The blade pulsed brighter as the carriage hurtled down an ancient tar road, bouncing with every pothole.
Glenda swung the sword back and forth, struggling to discern which direction generated the stronger glow as they circled the outskirts of what had once been the sorcerer’s territory.
Houses soon dotted the roadside in greater frequency, until they rolled into a small town.
“I know this place.” Glenda leaned from the carriage, Passionweed allowing for a full heart-pounding excitement. “The sorcerer used this village to replenish his supplies. We found it after Cameron started a . . . conflict with our knights. Surely even he wouldn’t be stupid enough to return.”
The glow led them through the town, past hastily reined in unicorns and gawking children, then out the other end. Its luminescence peaked, drenching the carriage interior in white light, as a military outpost came into sight.
“He can’t have been captured again.” Glenda cloaked her unease with a laugh. This was her prey, and her hunt.
The carriage rolled to a gentle stop. Its doors opened of their own accord, accompanied by the fall of wooden stairs.
Gathering her flower-embroidered dress in one hand, and the sword in the other, the mongrel witch descended with a grace that made her bulky form look weightless.
In contrast, Glenda hunched down the wooden steps with caution, fearing they might demonstrate animalistic life by twitching or rolling beneath her.
Nothing of the sort happened, but she maintained her distrust of the vehicle.
Hurrying to catch up with the witch, Glenda discovered a new discomfort; with Domitia’s blue skin and braided silver hair, the knights would think she was an elf. And elves shouldn’t look like that, all round of face and belly. Certainly, an elf woman would never grow to such a height.
It occupied her, how best to slip into their introductions that she, not this corpulent witch, best represented her kind—and so Glenda was as stunned as the knights sitting inside when the outpost door tore off its hinges, flung by a terrible power.
The mongrel witch held the blade outstretched, its burning light impossible to look at directly.
She pointed it at the slack-jawed men, one by one.
When she reached the last man, a bearded fellow who Glenda found faintly familiar, the sword erupted like a sun in miniature—then just as quickly went out.
The man had enough time to spit a curse before a spell propelled him upward, slamming him into the outpost ceiling.
With his outspread limbs, he looked like an oversized fly in a web.
The other men cried out, grabbing for their swords, but the witch fixed them with a deadly look.
“Get out,” Domitia said, and they did, giving the woman a wide berth as they fled through the ruined door. With Glenda at her side, the mongrel witch stood beneath the suspended man. “Sir Cameron, I presume?”
The elf peered upward. “No. But I remember him. The conflict I mentioned before—this is one of the knights who reported it.”
“That’s right!” said the knight, saliva escaping from his mouth. “I am a victim of Sir Cameron!”
Domitia broke her spell with a word, and the man tumbled to the floorboards between them.
“How so?” the witch asked calmly as the man scrambled to his hands and knees. She took one of the knight’s abandoned chairs, lowering herself with a regality that Glenda had to admire.
“Sir Cameron transformed himself into a woman.” The burly man’s posture was pleading, dog-like on all fours. “And—and—it was him that came on to me, not the other way around! He deceived me.”
The witch rubbed her chin. “If that was her true self, then no deception took place. I perform that procedure often, for those who seek it. This is your sword?”
The knight nodded, still not daring to rise. “He took it from me, him and the sorcerer.”
“She took it,” the witch said sternly—then, ignoring the knight’s rushed apologies, swept to her feet and exited the small outpost, stepping carefully over the ruined door. Glenda hurried after her.
“You failed to mention that Cameron is a woman now,” Domitia said as they walked, annoyance clear in her voice. The carriage lowered itself like a loyal pet. Glenda imagined that if it had a tail, it would be wagging.
“He was a man again the last time I saw him.” Glenda climbed in after the witch. “It wasn’t his ‘true self,’ just some Cameron stupidity. He was a vulture, the time before that.”
They settled into the cushions, and the witch resumed her snacking on the biscuits. Glenda eyed them with hunger, remembering that the witch had offered some earlier, but gritted her teeth in determination. Better to maintain her figure.
“You help people to lie, then?” She might as well enrich herself with some gossip. Glenda treated the witch to a smile, but froze at a snapping sound; the biscuit in the witch’s hand, destroyed by a tensed fist.
“There is no lie.” Domitia spoke with a hostility that made Glenda recoil. The witch visibly worked to calm herself, before speaking again. “You’re quite invested in religious norms.”
“As we all should be!”
“Even when they cause people to deny themselves?”
“Deny what, objective reality?” Glenda giggled nervously. Seeking to recover the situation, she said, “Listen, we need to find an object of significance to Cameron. Why not try his family home? There should be records with the Church as to where Vaillancourt manor is located.”
The witch nodded absently, and Glenda felt the carriage pick up speed. When the woman spoke again, it was in a gentler voice. “Is it Passionweed that you take?”
Glenda flushed violet, and fixed her attention on the scenery passing by the carriage windows. “I can’t imagine what you mean.”
“I help people, Glenda.” As much as she wanted to tune Domitia out, Glenda found herself pricking her ears to the woman’s musical voice.
“It’s a hard journey to reach my cottage, with the mud and the stinging insects, and I make it worse by wandering.
There is no set place my home may be found.
Those who do succeed are typically desperate.
Their friends and family have failed them, and so they pin everything on rumours of my mercy. ”
Glenda nodded, happy to have the witch on a different tangent. The carriage passed a pair of gawking farmers on unicorn-back, and she felt brief pleasure at being inside the transport that inspired their awe.
“I’ve tended folk like you,” the witch continued.
“Sometimes, it’s a terrible event that renders them numb.
Sometimes, it comes from nowhere, ebbing and flowing.
Whatever the cause, if they want their emotions restored or enhanced, I help them.
If they simply need to make peace with who they are, I help them. But I never prescribe Passionweed.”
Glenda waited in annoyance for the woman to get to her point. Feeling like a child forced into a lesson, she said, “So tell me, great witch. Why would that be?”
“It leads you to seek peaks, surges of feeling. What I recommend is the redhood flower. You can forage it yourself in the right locations, and it restores emotive abilities without the ecstasy. It’s less flashy, certainly; the highs are lower, the lows are higher.
But you won’t lead yourself to destruction under its influence.
It’s also cheaper,” the witch added. “Not that I imagine money’s a problem for you. ”
Glenda contemplated jumping from the moving carriage. “Thanks, but I’m perfectly fine.”
“You feel a great deal of antipathy toward this knight, Sir Cameron,” Domitia persisted, her voice careful. “Passionweed may be exacerbating this. It could give you some relief, to let go of old hatred.”
“I should hate him.” Glenda folded her arms, in what she knew to be a juvenile manner.
She blinked rapidly, fighting the prickle of tears.
“There is not a speck of honour in that man’s body, and not a sin under the sun he wouldn’t commit for his own self-preservation.
If my hatred needs an end, it can have one with his second death. ”
“No one is beyond redemption,” the witch said, looking at her with an emphasis that Glenda failed to grasp. Unable to formulate a response, the elf leaned stormily against the opposite side of the carriage and, sighing, Domitia ceased to press.