A Tangled Magic #2
They stepped aside for him as they would step aside for Goodman Trew, the village drunk, but with none of the laughter and ribald comments. There was just a sense that he should be left to go his way, with no interference.
The sorceress kept her hand outstretched and her finger crooked for all the time he took to wobble up, with nary a tremor in her well-shaped arm. When he reached her, he stood, swaying on his feet, staring into her perfect face. We all stared with him.
She smiled, and all our hearts leaped like Dav’s dying fish.
Then she opened the door to her carriage and stepped up and inside.
He followed, stumbling up the steps, looking like the bumpkin he was.
We saw an elegant hand reach from the darkness inside and close the door, and we heard the small snick of a lock.
None of us went about our business. None of us spoke. We all waited. Not much time passed—four minutes, maybe five? It was hard to tell. And then the carriage started to rumble, the wheels sucked themselves out of the dirt, and the whole mess of it started to drive back the way it had come.
When it was out of sight, the chatter started. Low-voiced at first, and then louder. Speculation. Lewd suggestions as to what Dav was doing in there with the sorceress. Calls for the guardsmen—she can’t just take him! Who knows what she’s going to do with him? It must be against some law, surely?
And the men looked yearningly after, all wishing it had been them.
Maybe they imagined that one day a carriage would stop, and a lady would hold out a hand and take them into the city with her, to be used as she saw fit, and maybe they wouldn’t care if she wizened them out like an old fruit.
Maybe they imagined the sorceresses were magic all up in their quaints, too.
That they had cunnies that glowed, maybe, or shot sparks, or opened up like flowers.
No one called the guardsmen. After all, Dav might have been taken, but he went willingly.
We had all seen it. Besides, the guardsmen were as ineffective as the holy men when it came to sorceresses.
Why did we need the law, or even gods, when we lived under the sorceresses’ all-powerful protection? Their authority trumped all.
Dav’s mother cried. There were half-hearted attempts to contact the city, send letters, but no one knew exactly where to send them.
When Dav came back—must have been a week, maybe ten days later?—he came back alone. They found him lying in his fish stall in the early hours of the morning, when the first market-keepers were trundling in their barrows of produce and flowers.
He was snoring, head on the ground and feet dangling over and into his tin tub of stale, briny water, which no one had bothered to empty. And he was naked with, some said, a great bruise on his chest. I never saw him without a shirt after this, so I can’t confirm the truth of it.
They shook him awake, splashed the souring water on his face, slapped him about a bit, and draped him with enough cloth to make him decent.
They asked him what had happened. He seemed dazed, looking over their shoulders as if searching for someone else.
He looked like a child hunting for his mother in a crowd, on the verge of tears. His great, rough, dry lip wobbled.
Dav’s mother kept him out of sight for a while. She kept her curtains closed, too, so none of the village nosy-parkers could peek in.
When he finally emerged, he looked like a man recovering from a long illness. He even walked with a cane, for shite’s sake, which I thought was probably for show. After all, his legs weren’t what the sorceress had been interested in, presumably.
“Poor fellow,” Da said once, shaking his head, as we watched Dav pass by.
“Weak fellow, to be so easily dazzled,” I said, blowing a strand of damp hair out of my face. It had been an unusually warm and busy day in the shop, and I was more irritable than usual, and perhaps less generous of spirit. Da shot me a look.
“Don’t be so quick to judgment, Foss,” he said, but gently. “We don’t know what manner of magicks she used on him, nor how we would have behaved in his place.”
“I wouldn’t have fallen for it, I can tell you that,” I said. “No matter how pretty she was.”
Da smiled—the same smile he got when he talked about my mam, sad and happy all at once. “We’ll see,” he said. “You’re young yet. There’s more than magic that can make a person foolish—or weak, as you call it. Stronger men than Dav have succumbed to it.”
I snorted, but I was laughing. He had a way of making me soften up, did Da.
There had been much speculation about Dav’s adventures with the sorceress, naturally. Most of it was shouted in the pub or muttered between men on the street and kept away from the womenfolk, but no one really considered me womenfolk, and so I got to hear a lot of it.
It was what you would expect. Talk of dungeons with all kinds of instruments for inducing dark pleasures.
Enslavement, Dav in a collar, forced to feed his lady grapes—or, in the gorier versions, little pieces of his own heart, wrapped as elegantly as hors d’oeuvres, perhaps stuffed with pitless olives and silky cream cheeses.
Everyone was eager to hear the musk and moisture of Dav’s stories—or, failing that, the blood and horrors. Perhaps a mixture of both.
But Dav said nothing. Whenever he was asked—and he was, subtly at first and then more insistently when he vouchsafed no details—he started to cry like a child, his face open and loose and wet, so that the other men looked away in embarrassment.
He would cry for hours into his ale, himself as free of shame as a baby, but it made everyone else sit at the edges of the room and eye him sideways. After a while, they stopped asking.
Dav never spoke about his time with the sorceress. Nor did he ever marry, nor have a sweetheart. I heard the rumors and saw him often as he passed before the shop window, looking lost and bereft, searching the crowd as if looking for someone.
I didn’t think to talk to him myself about the sorceress or ask him about his time under her spell. Back then, I thought I would have nothing to do with the magic ladies besides watching them pass through—more fool me, as it turned out.