Bone of My Bone

Prologue Elsebeth

Prologue

Elsebeth

When I was a little girl, I saw three witches burned.

This was when the war was still young compared to what it is now, though we weren’t to know that then. A lucky thing that was, because who wants to know that a war will last so long that there are now men and women alive who have known nothing else in their entire lives?

Nothing but soldiers who go plundering and torturing and raping and murdering.

Nothing but plague and the Hungarian sickness.

Nothing but hunger.

But we didn’t know that yet the day my father and my grandmother took me to see the burnings.

My mother did not come, for she did not care for violence.

My big sister, Margarethe, would have liked to join us—she did always love any sort of excitement—but rheumatism had crippled her again, and so she had to stay home.

We followed the cart with the two women and the man in it as they were brought to the pyres to die.

People jeered at them and threw all manner of filth at them, rotten eggs and clods of earth and dung, for although Christ tells us that only he who is without sin may cast the first stone, to not cast out a sin when you know it is there is a kind of sin also.

After they were tied to the stakes but before the fire was lit, the three were allowed to say something.

The man said that he was no witch and that God knew.

The first woman claimed she was no witch either and would plead her case better if only her hands didn’t hurt so much. They had tortured her for her confession, and her thumb had come clean off under the screw.

The final woman didn’t speak of God and forgiveness. She didn’t plead, either. Instead, she tossed her head and laughed, and when she spoke, she did so with a loud and pleasant voice clear as a church bell.

She said that she was indeed a witch.

She had met the devil at the crossroads one January afternoon when she was still a girl and looking for food, for she and her mother were poor and starving. He came to her in the shape of a hare. He smiled and called her by her name. He told her he had come to ask her for her soul and maidenhead.

She should have fled then, and if Satan had made it so that her legs no longer worked, she should have closed her eyes, stoppered her ears with her fingers, and prayed to God to save her, for Satan’s might is great, but God’s might is greater still.

Instead, she proudly raised her head and asked him what he might offer her in return.

The devil told her he could teach her many of his dark arts, like how to make women barren and how to spread sickness that strikes both man and animal across the land so she might punish all who had ever mistreated her and her poor old crooked mother.

He would also teach her how to steal babes and kill them by driving a needle through their brains so she could boil them into a salve that would make her fly and thus let her join the witch’s Sabbath, where she would fornicate with demons and find a pleasure no mortal man could give her.

She said all of that sounded fine indeed, but she would be better served if he gave her a pot of soup that would never empty, and a pretty dress and a pair of good leather shoes as well, for she was hungry and cold, and her bare feet much bruised and cut.

The devil smiled and agreed to her terms, then transformed into a handsome man with bare, hairy feet dressed in an embroidered coat of green. He had her on the cold, dark ground, and afterward it was as he had promised.

Did she regret any of it?

She spat on the ground. Pah! Of course she did not, for this was a cruel world, and poor women such as herself should grab any crumb of power they could get their hands on.

For this reason she had thrown in her lot with the devil.

Seeing as she had given herself to him and he owned her body and soul, he was welcome to fetch her home now.

When the pyres were lit, the man tried to pray, but his words soon slurred into screams. The woman with the missing thumb only sobbed. Both soon choked to death; someone had added green branches to their pyres, that they might die from breathing the smoke before the flames reached them.

Not so the witch. She didn’t pray or scream or sob, just bit her lips with such force, blood slicked her chin as the flames raced up her skirt. Soon, the air smelled of cooking meat, and my stomach growled, for the harvest had been bad and my meals lean.

The witch burned so bright, my eyes ached to look at her, but I could not tear them away.

One of her arms fell off, yet still she lived.

She did not scream, but she writhed and somehow managed to wrench herself loose.

As soon as the ropes no longer bound her, she leapt out of the flames and into the air.

I caught her eye as she hung, for a moment, suspended. I thought mayhap she might fly away; mayhap she had managed to rub some of that salve she had made from all those poor little unbaptized babes on her body before she was brought out to die.

She had the strangest eyes, round and yellow, not the eyes of a woman but of a hare.

I knew then what it was like to be so afraid your heart stutters in your chest, the blood thrums in your ears, and you go cold all over as if someone has upended a bucket of water over your head.

Time stretched and stretched in the way a clump of wool stretches impossibly long as you spin it into yarn, and still she floated, still her flaming hare eyes bored into mine. It seemed to me she could see straight into my soul. She must have liked what she saw, for she began to grin.

I shuddered once, but with such violence, it was almost a convulsion.

Just when I thought I’d run mad, or I’d faint, or something else would happen to me, for standing there held by a witch’s spell was more than I could bear, she finally fell and was trampled to death by the crowd.

Not in my dreams, though.

In my dreams, she flies.