5. A Witch in the Woods
A Witch in the Woods
I didn’t sleep much anymore.
As all things that lived in shadow, I embraced the night, burrowing into my cloak and walking through the cold, visiting the various taverns in the village, my legs lifting, falling one after the other mechanically. Breathing without thought. Living without life.
The taverns could be counted upon to deliver diversion. They buzzed with revelry late into the night, especially in the winter. In the cold months, more than ever, the villagers sought the company of each other over pints of ale near a crackling fire.
I found myself in a corner, sitting on a forgotten stool with one wobbly leg, trying not to feel so very alone and apart from everything in the crowded room.
I never thought that possible. To be alone in a space full of people, to feel achingly alone when surrounded.
It was still a new sensation, a fresh skin I’d donned that would never feel right or comfortable over my bones.
I watched sullenly as they caroused and drank and laughed, telling their stories, singing their bawdy songs. I sat, listening, hoping someone would mention me so that I would not feel so forgotten.
It was not an unreasonable expectation. My name still came up, my disappearance still a raw, pulsing wound in the village. Mothers clung fast to their children. No one went into the woods alone, the fear rampant that whatever had befallen me could happen again to any one of them.
It didn’t take long until I was mentioned tonight, conjecture given, speculation spouted over my fate.
I leaned forward, listening avidly, raptly to it all, thinking that perhaps one person would land on the truth.
One person could offer the explanation I desperately sought.
If I knew why or how this had happened to me then maybe I could fix it. I could at least try. No way could this stand. No way could the remainder of my life be . . . this. I could not survive it.
I listened intently to the chatter around me, about me.
She was such a headstrong girl.
Wild and impulsive.
Weird eyes.
A little strange, that one.
There was always a sliver of blame buried in their words. As though I was somehow responsible, as though I had offered myself up as a victim to whatever force, whatever thing, had taken me.
And then there were the predictions.
She froze to death.
We’ll find her remains in the spring thaw.
Wolves or battle boars got her.
All manner of rumors were tossed about. None rang true. None were right. They couldn’t be. I would remember. I would know. I’d walked out of those woods alive, not torn to pieces, not reduced to a corpse.
Maretta entered the tavern, the door thudding solidly behind her, cutting out the whistle of wind that trailed her.
The healer had to be the oldest person in the village, pushing a hundred, but she still walked upright and without need of a cane.
She took a seat and tugged off her fur-lined gloves, ordering mulled wine with a wave of gray, skeletal fingers.
The table of men loudly offering their theories on my presumed demise occupied the space beside her, but she showed no sign that she heard them—until she spoke.
“I’ll tell you what happened to the girl,” she declared in her raspy voice.
The men fell silent. The entire tavern seemed to collectively pause, waiting for the old woman’s explanation.
My fingers drifted to my lips, tapping them with anxious energy.
She had yet to offer her theories publicly, and I was eager for anything different from the useless conjecture offered thus far.
I knew with an innate surety that whatever she said would be different from everyone else simply because she was so different from everyone else.
“There be witches in the woods.”
Her words dropped like stones in the thick air.
No one reacted.
She went on: “A witch claimed her.”
A witch?
I looked from her to the other slack-jawed faces in the room, expecting to hear their rejections of such a notion, to see them scoff and shake their heads.
Witches were a thing of the past. They’d been run to ground years ago—burned in pyres or simply . . . vanished. They’d fled.
After dragons had been successfully exterminated in the centuries-long Threshing, the focus had turned to witchkind, that other magical creature deemed too powerful, too wicked, too much of a threat to humanity.
And yet no one in the tavern reacted with denials or objections. Their blood-rimmed eyes did not even blink as they considered Maretta thoughtfully.
I bit my lip, testing out this theory, batting it around inside my mind. It seemed outlandish . . . and yet here I was in this most inexplicable state.
Witches had possessed far too much power, and while that power had been essential in aiding humankind’s war against the pestilent dragons, even helping win the Threshing, it was not something to go unchecked once dragons had been vanquished.
We all knew the story.
Long ago, a witch very nearly seduced the king of Penterra into giving up his throne. She exerted her magic and wiles on him, but he valiantly wrested himself free and escaped her clutches, putting her to the torch—the first of many witches.
There was a book I had been drawn to in the schoolhouse. I’d studied it over and over until the brittle pages became worn and loose within their spine. It contained an illustration titled The Shadow Witch, Vala Put to the Pyre.
I’d fixated on that picture, examining the artful black-and-white rendering of the witch shackled to a tower of wood and kindling, flames licking up her slender body, meeting and tangling with the long tendrils of her hair, reaching her face—upturned to the sky in a dramatic vision of agony.
The memory of that illustration pricked me still, sharp as a scythe.
As a young girl, I would lie in bed thinking about it only to return to it the next day to study it even longer, mesmerized by the image, imagining I could feel her pain, taste her fear .
. . hear the crackle of flames devouring her.
Now I wondered about my connection to that book and its illustration. Had I felt some sort of prescience? Had I sensed a witch lurking close to Isstad, living in the woods I prowled?
“Witches are gone,” one of the men at the table finally called, capturing my attention again. And yet there was uncertainty in his dark eyes that I felt run through me like a tremor.
Maretta cackled. “Are they indeed?”
More doubtful looks were exchanged.
“She lives in the woods,” Maretta proclaimed. “She is there. I have felt her magic.”
At this assertion, I sat up a little straighter, as though this information connected to some cord that ran directly through the center of me and tugged me to alertness.
“How?” someone challenged. “Are you a witch, too?”
Now it was her turn to scoff. “I’ve lived a hundred and nine years among you all and never once harmed a soul.” Because witches only ever harmed. That was the understanding—the truth.
I took thorough measure of the old woman. A hundred and nine? Was she exaggerating? It was unheard of for someone to reach such an advanced age—someone human.
She continued, “In fact, I’ve nursed many of you back to health from the brink of death, including you, lad.
” She pointed a gnarled finger at the one who had dared to offend her with his accusation.
“Remember that time you got your bum stuck in a bucket. I was the only one to get it unstuck and then I treated your blistered and chafed arse afterward.”
The man’s face burned red as everyone at his table broke into explosive laughter.
“If I was an evil witch who wished you ill, would I not have left you in that bucket?” She sniffed. “I did not.” She nodded with alacrity. “Because I heal and save lives. I do not take them.”
Grumbles of agreement met her words along with several nods.
There was no doubt she was a skilled healer.
She’d tended to members of my own family on more than one occasion.
Her skills were valuable in a community that was frequently beset with illness and disease and injuries.
No one wanted to lose her, and if anyone truly, seriously thought her to be a member of witchkind, I suspected they would keep that opinion to themselves.
“Just because you don’t see them doesn’t mean they are gone. They’re cunning chameleons. Know just when to appear and disappear,” the old woman added with a sly smile that revealed the dark holes of several missing teeth. “Aye, they’ve become very good at hiding.”
Another man spoke up tentatively, and I recognized him as Gert, father to one of the children fond of pelting me with snowballs.
“I’ve seen a woman in the woods. Hair like ice.
Her black eyes bore a hole right through me.
Ran a chill down my spine, she did. Must confess I nearly soiled myself in my haste to get away. ”
I shivered at his admission.
A somber silence fell. No one laughed at the mention of his near mishap.
Another man volunteered, “I’ve seen her, too, walking my back pasture by the light of the moon. Haven’t been able to grow or harvest anything in that field since, and when I set my sheep to graze on it, they never live out the season.”
A grave murmur broke over the room at this, and others started calling out their own similar experiences and encounters with a lone, mysterious woman who stirred fear and unease in their hearts.
Maretta nodded. “Aye, witches are out there still, hungry to avenge the wounds done to them and their kind.”
The campaign to exterminate witchkind was still something recounted among our elderly, those old enough to remember—like Maretta.
Witches had been systematically rounded up and put to the torch.
Pyres had burned across the land, the smoking bones and skin of witchkind mingling with the perpetual fog that cloaked so much of Penterra.