Chapter 7
Elsebeth
I am dog-tired, yet I dream.
I am at the execution of those three witches who were burned to death all those years ago.
All the people from my village are there, but they look awful, killed by plague, hunger, and soldiers in their homes or on the roads when they fled.
It’s well possible that, of all of them, I am the only one still living.
Margarethe is there, too. She’s sitting in the dirt. Her legs are all twisted, and her dress is sodden at the lap and chest with blood. Her hair, fine and beautiful as spun gold, has been cut away in great hanks, exposing her scalp, which is porridge pale.
I am afraid of her and ashamed of my fear, for she is my sister, and it is because of me that she looks thus, so I force myself to take her hand. It’s the hand of a corpse, stiff and cold. I fret at it to warm it as the condemned say their final words, but it remains a dead thing.
In my dream, when the third witch escapes her bonds and jumps, she doesn’t fall to the ground to be trampled to pieces by the crowd. Instead, she rises slowly in the air, her hare eyes fixed on me, grinning like a demon.
I watch her, feeling fear swim up and down my back like a minnow in a stream, so cool that it makes me shiver.
Next to me, Margarethe squeezes my hand as best as she is able with her death-hardened fingers. When she opens her mouth, a glistening centipede crawls out and falls into her lap. It’s the same color as her clotting blood.
I begin to whimper. I can’t help it. I am so afraid, so desperately afraid…
“Run!” Margarethe croaks, and this time, she doesn’t need to clobber me with her clog to get me to move.
I am not one to grow dazed and still when afeared, like Ursula.
No, no, I am like the rooster protecting his flock, ready to fight, maim, and kill, and when that does not work, I am like the rabbit: I bolt.
I run, but the witch floats after me, filling the air with the smell of burned meat, making my stomach cramp and saliva flood my mouth, because my body is too stupid to know that this meat is forbidden.
I run till I taste something foul at the back of my throat, till I am too out of breath to take another step, and still she’s after me.
I curl up in a ball, my hands over my head.
The fear is no longer a minnow then, for those creatures are swift, small, and slippery.
This feeling of terror is an ox, faster and stronger than I am.
If I am not careful, it shall trample me.
It’ll kill me.
How can I be so afraid and yet live?
The witch drifts to me, so close I can smell her breath, this foul stench of singed hair and charred flesh. “Elsebeth,” she whispers, and for all that my hands cover my ears, I can hear her very well.
I begin to shiver like one struck down with the palsy.
“Be not afraid,” she whispers.
“Leave me be, you witch,” I moan. My teeth chatter so fiercely, I fear they might dance out of my jaw.
“Open thine eyes, sweet child.”
I shake my head.
“Open thine eyes,” she repeats, her voice threaded through with annoyance.
“No, no! Begone,” I groan.
“Open thine eyes, thou vile little wretch!” she screams, startling me so much, I instinctively obey.
It’s not the burned witch whispering in my ear, but the saint’s skull.
She is still wearing the crown of daisies I knotted for her, and that seems to me so silly, I forget to be afraid. “What are you doing here?” I ask.
“I’ve come to warn thee, for thou and the nun are in grave danger,” she says, her voice all soft once more.
As she talks, she bobs like an apple in a barrel, her hair floating slowly in the way of water weeds.
“A necromancer pursues you. He has with him a hireling who has been wetting his sword even before thou were budding inside thy mother’s womb. Both delight in cruelty.”
I know then this is no dream, for I don’t know some of the words she speaks to me. “What is a necromancer?” I ask.
“A witch who makes the dead walk.”
“What does he want with Ursula and me? What does the hireling, for that matter?”
She tosses her hair back. “They care not a whit for the pair of thee, only for what thou carriest: me. Whatever may happen, thou must not let me fall into his hands.”
Her daisy crown has fallen in front of her eyes. I hesitate, then reach up and brush the crown up so it rests on her white brow instead. She flinches at the contact. “Why do you tell me this? Why not Ursula, who is a nun?”
“Why would I, after she licked me in the manner of a dog? Also, I cannot talk to one awake.”
“I don’t understand,” I say.
She has no throat, and yet I swear she clears it. When she speaks, it is once more in that lofty way. “Thou hast been here a while. ’Twere better if thou wakest now. The nun has a need of thee. I am afeared that she is close to death.”
* * *
I sit up with a great gasp. My legs feel like wet cloth, all weak and just as damp; I’m covered with sweat. I turn to Ursula, I know not why—you do know why it’s for comfort you want her to comfort you with those cool white hands of hers—and my heart trips.
Ursula is gone.
I begin to tremble. The fear from my dream is still upon me, and all sorts of dark things form in my mind. Didn’t the skull tell me she’s close to death?
Don’t be daft, I tell myself sternly. A dream’s a dream, no more. There’s no such thing as talking skulls. Ursula must have a good reason for being up. Mayhap she got hungry or thirsty; mayhap she had to relieve herself.
I light a candle. “Ursula?” I whisper, but she is not anywhere in the room.
Her clothes and shoes are gone, too, and for a moment, I am certain she has abandoned me, and I fear I shall run mad again, as I did after Margarethe.
But no, the box with the skull is still here, and she would not leave without it, she loves it so.
It’s not as if she can get far with her bad knee, besides.
Then where is she?
I dress hastily, then search the house, the candle sputtering not because the house is drafty, but because my hands aren’t steady, no matter how often I tell myself I had a nightmare, no more.
Wax runs down the slender stem, pooling in the little pocket of skin between my thumb and index finger.
It burns, but I hardly feel it, I’m that anxious.
I need not search long.
The front door, which I had fastened carefully to keep us safe when we slept, gapes open.
I go outside. Almost immediately, the wind snuffs out my candle. In the dark, I walk from one edge of the village to the next, looking for Ursula.
As I walk, I try to think of the Latin names for flowers that Ursula taught me yesterday in an effort to calm my thundering heart and still my palsied hands.
I never learned how to read, but I’ve a good memory and a good ear.
“Taraxacum officinale: the common dandelion. Bellis perennis: daisy,” I whisper.
Yet these strange words, so like a spell, hold no power here. With every step, I grow more afraid, until my breath comes out in shallow pants, my mouth is bone-dry, and the fear is like a minnow again, flicking up and down my spine.
When something crunches under my shoe, I jump as if someone has shot at me, then dash toward the nearest house.
I crouch against the wall and cower there until I realize I am still hale, hearty, and unharmed.
It takes a few minutes to convince my body of this, too.
Then, I creep back to see what it was that startled me so.
It’s Ursula’s rosary.
I pick it up. The cord has snapped, which might explain how she came to lose it, for she would not have left it behind willingly.
It doesn’t explain why some of the beads are sticky with blood.
For a moment, I go quite mad.
I run around screaming Ursula’s name, pulling on my hair with my free hand, because the burning pain as I rip it from my scalp is easier to bear than the horror of being alone again.
I only stop running once I reach the graveyard, for what waits for me there is so vile, it manages to pierce through my panic and shock me into sanity.
The coffins have been dug up and broken into, and the dead are scattered everywhere. Here lies a skeleton draped over a tombstone like a forgotten coat; there a woman sits propped up against the fence, so much rotted I only know she is a woman from her clothes.
I crouch down next to a little girl whose corpse lies close to the gate.
She’s lying on her belly, one arm trapped underneath her, the other flung out, as if someone has tossed her aside.
She stinks, though not as much as the man in the woods did, but then it’s much colder now, and she may have been dead for longer.
Her lips and gums have rotted away, revealing four rows of teeth.
It’s a monstruous sight. I never knew before that the marriage teeth sleep inside the gums and jaw like that, waiting for the day the milk teeth fall out and they can push their way up like daisies.
I grab a hank of her hair and make to drape it over her cheek, so she won’t be grinning at me so. In lifting it, I reveal her throat.
It has been torn open to the bone.
Scavengers, I think desperately, dogs, crows, and mayhap even pigs, for everyone knows pigs will eat anything, even each other.
But I’ve seen enough dog and pig bites to know that the tooth marks visible on what is left of her throat weren’t made by an animal.
To be sure, I bring my hand to my mouth and bite at the pad of my thumb, not hard enough to break the skin but hard enough to leave a mark. The seamed line left by my teeth is almost the same as the one on her neck.
I know then why everyone here has fled, and why the farmer thought us demons and would not let us enter his home, and why the skull told me Ursula is close to death.
This is no longer a village.
It’s a Nachzehrer’s hunting ground.