38. Then Witch
THEN: WITCH
Magda collected us after the next tenth-day service.
We met her at the public hitching post, where we saw her lean her white-haired head against the cheek of a massive plow horse.
The horse was the color of sand, with a white mane and tail and a pink nose, and was tied next to our old mare, Dusty.
We each had a small satchel with an extra set of clothing and other things we would need for our first stretch of seven days.
I had wrapped The Life of Una in my second shift and buried it at the bottom of my bag. Though it was a thinner volume, I felt its weight on my back like it was a collection of stones. The very idea of my parents finding it in our little bedroom made me break out in a cold sweat.
“This is Apple Dumpling,” Magda said, patting her big horse’s neck. Then, without further explanation, she mounted her ride and set off down the main dust road that led out of town on the Nyossa side.
I climbed up on Dusty and helped Rowena climb up behind me.
In my ear my twin whispered, as I clucked and urged our horse to follow Magda’s, “Do you think she is afraid to come into town? I mean I know Lord Torm and Father Starling have said she is exempt from church, but they say also that the priest would love to find her guilty of something. I heard our father tell Kent’s father that if Starling could, he would put her in the keep dungeons for life. ”
“Then why give her the lenience of not having to attend services?”
“Because I think the priest knows she could easily spread discord.”
“Discord?”
“Amongst the women. You know our mother is very devout. She worships at the altar of Rodwin’s scriptures, but she is the first one to say that women should be allowed tonics and anything that eases a pregnancy and a delivery. She just doesn’t say it openly.”
“You’re saying there are other women like our mother, outwardly devout and inwardly . . . more open-minded?”
I felt Rowena nod behind me. “They just don’t show it. They can’t.”
We rode in silence for a while and then turned at a fork in the road.
This stretch of it was untried, not as beaten down as the other dust roads.
Rowena and I were only familiar with it as it was a path we had taken to find Nyossa.
Soon, on the left side of the road, the Geist farm came into view.
It was an adequately sized farmhouse with a small stables behind it.
It had an orchard lining the side closest to town.
I could make out pear and peach trees. On the other side of the house was a stretch of gardens that seemed to yield a myriad of root vegetables, tomatoes, beans, peas, and what looked like a small field of herbs.
All of this was fenced in, from the road and also on the sides and back of the property.
And on the other side of the gardens was the edge of Nyossa, a solid tree line of knotted trunks and dark-green foliage.
I swore I could see the glowing moss glint in the shadows.
At the gate in the fence, which opened up to a pathway to the front door with a patch of grassy yard on either side, a fat calico sat on one of the fenceposts, screaming and whipping its fluffy tail to and fro.
“Quiet,” the midwife said to the cat.
The cat did not quiet at all.
Magda stopped in front of the gate and dismounted. She opened the gate, unsettling the cat, who screamed even more and leapt down to the ground.
Behind her, we were dismounting from Dusty.
Magda held out her own horse’s reins to me, nodding for Rowena to handle Dusty. “Take them down the pathway between my gardens and my house. There’s a patch of yard in the back for them to graze on.”
“Won’t they get into the gardens?” I asked, thinking of every time Dusty was allowed any rein, how she scarfed at the grass whenever she could.
The old woman called over her shoulder as she walked towards her house, “I’ve jimsonweed planted on the back of those plots. They don’t like the smell. So they never stray past it.”
“Jimsonweed?” exclaimed Rowena. “Isn’t that poison?”
Magda stopped and turned, nearly tripping over the calico circling her skirts.
“Well, I thought your mother might have told you a thing or two, and I was right. It’s poison for most, but for some old folks with tremors in their hands, a little bit steadies them.
Most poisons have other, happier uses, you’ll find. ”
We put the horses where she asked us, peeking into the stables to hang up their tack. Inside were two milk cows and three goats. Just behind the building was a small henhouse with a smaller fence around it. We could hear rustling and clucking coming from the inside.
The farmhouse was old. In the front room was a hearth and kitchen that took up most of the space.
A table that seemed like a small dining table sat towards the middle of the room, but there was a workspace table near the fire.
An open book was in the center of it, surrounded by clay bowls, a mortar and pestle, small tins, and several crates of what looked like jars in hay.
Drying vegetables and plants hung from the rafters alongside pots and pans and instruments I had never seen.
Shelves crowded any part of the walls where a window was not, full of more jars and pots and piles of books in no particular order.
A rocking chair covered in quilts sat in front of the fireplace.
“The back room is a bedroom,” Magda said, hands on her hips, watching us survey her home. “You two can have the bed while you’re here. I sleep most nights in the rocking chair anyway. My back cannot stand for me to lie for very long.” She paused to squint at us. “And now I’ll tell you the truth.”
We looked at her in surprise.
“The truth of it is, this is a two-person thing. I will train you both to midwife’s work.
I will show you both how to forage and make use of what we find.
But there is no way one woman could do all of that and run the apothecary.
So, one of you will be appointed the town midwife and live at the old apothecary, so that folk don’t have to run here anymore when their wives and mothers are in labor.
And one of you will live here with me and forage for supplies. And I will decide who does what.”
We remained silent.
“Do you understand me?” asked Magda.
Next to me, Rowena nodded but said, “You have a fine place, madam, but I do not wish to spend my life’s days away from town.”
I could not have disagreed more. The idea of living this close to the territory of Mother Earth thrilled me. I already felt more invited into this messy farmhouse than I had under any other roof.
The old woman nodded. “I thought so. And you must then prove to me that you are good with a babe’s delivery and handy with a tincture.”
Rowena turned to me. “I’m sorry if you wanted that role.”
“Wait,” I said to Magda. “If the only paid position is the midwife’s, then how will the forager earn a living?”
Her wrinkled mouth pursed and she said, “Because, and this is not to be made public, girls, the lord will give the midwife a surplus to her wage and that is to pay the forager for her supplies. Torm doesn’t want to admit openly to what this town needs.
So he does it in secret and with coin. But these are skills you should both know as one informs the other. ”
“I will be the forager,” I said. “I hate town.”
The old woman’s eyes flitted between us. “I think we should begin with magic. What say you?”
Her question was met with silence.
“It exists, you know. Or do you not know?”
“It is a heathen thing,” answered Rowena uncertainly.
Magda rolled her eyes. “It is a natural thing. And the four gods of Tintar exist too, in case you didn’t know that either.”
“Isn’t that just bedtime stories for Tintarian children?” My twin was trying to be respectful to the woman, but she was clearly unimpressed.
“I know you both loved Nyossa when you were younger. And perhaps, even more so recently,” said Magda. “You think I couldn’t see you?”
I was blushing, and I knew Rowena was too.
“You were drawn to the forest for the same reason any sane soul is. The essence of your spirit can be felt most in its borders.”
“Father Starling says what lures us, what attracts the mortal soul, is temptation. He says that anything that draws us is to be mistrusted.”
“Rowena,” I warned her, but when I looked at her I saw conflict on her features. She seemed to want to agree with our new mistress but could not bring herself to do so. She had spent too much time in a pew.
As had I, for I said, “I don’t believe that magic is heathen or that the Tintarian gods are evil, but I do not know that either exist.”
Then who did you pray to all those nights in the box? asked a voice in my head. Who told Tibolt to warm your body with blankets?
I gave a shudder.
Neither of them noticed, for Rowena was saying, “We were just raised that those things are evil, madam. Surely you must see why we would hesitate to believe in them. Can you not just teach us of midwifery?”
The woman fished in the pocket of an apron hanging from one of the chairs at the dining table, extracting a small pipe.
She placed it in her mouth, unlit, and chewed for a moment.
“Either they don’t exist or they are evil,” Magda challenged her.
“You cannot claim both. You cannot say something is not real and that it is also a vile thing. Either magic is not real or it is and it is evil in your mind. Pick one.”
Before Rowena could respond, I said, “But what do Tintarian gods have to do with midwifery? Or magic, for that matter.”
My twin nodded next to me.
“Because you were either made by Mother Earth or by the fates,” said Magda. “The fates copied her handiwork when they made people. All folk are her children.”
I knew both of us were thinking of the skeletal men in The Life of Una.
The midwife continued. “And the best way to understand a thing, is to know the maker of it, to know its origins. A woman’s womb was crafted by the goddess of earth. To know her craft, you must know something of her.”
“If we speak of these things, madam,” my sister interrupted, “we will be boxed. My twin has already suffered for even thinking she could challenge the scriptures of our church. I would not see her suffer further because of this apprenticeship.”
I was touched. I turned to Rowena. “It is my own fault I speak without thinking. It is mine and no one else’s.”
Rowena was shaking her head. “But you are easily influenced by—”
“Do you want even a bit of freedom?” the old woman snapped. “Either of you? Do you not want the chance to earn a wage all your own and not a husband’s? Do you want anything to call yours in this life?”
“What’s wrong with a husband?” asked Rowena.
Magda’s upper lip curled. “Nothing. I had a lovely one. He never used his being a man against me though.”
“Is that why you left Tintar?” I asked.
The old woman eyed me. “Yes and no. Torm’s father was a bitter old bastard, his prick half bent by anger, but he knew he had no answers to his problems. The land, forty or so winters past, was dying.
His sharecroppers could yield nothing from the earth.
And so, behind the back of Father Kenneth, a nasty man cut from the same cloth as your Starling, the old lord wrote to the city of Pikestully, had a letter carried right up to the grand bluff keep and my Mother’s temple, delivered to the archpriestess of earth magic, begging for help from someone from the temple.
And the archpriestess sent me, because she sensed I was regretting my being an acolyte. ”
“You were never ordained as a priestess?” I asked.
Magda shook her head. “I trained as a midwife in a fishing village south of Pikestully. But I wanted to see more of the world, so I traveled to my country’s capital and explained at the earth temple I had a knack for tonics.
They said I had some soil magic in me, my penchant.
But it was not four seasons before I realized my mistake.
I did not want to live in a city, no matter how grand it was or how close to the sea. So I came here to heal the land.”
“What did you do to it?” Rowena asked.
“I read it like a book.”
“What do you mean?
“I mean I bled a little into the fields and gave my Mother my blood. A little cost required by the jealous fates that wanted to separate god and child. When she tasted my blood, a drop or two, she was able to speak to me in my mind, and she showed me what the fields needed.”
“What was that?” I asked.
“Crystals. Sulfur crystals. I had Torm’s father send away to the mines of Eccleston. His fields had become acidic, like a poisonous hand choking any growth. And simply adding sulfur crystals to the topsoil reduced that poison. Magic likely saved this place from famine.”
“She spoke to you?” I asked.
Magda shook her head. “She gave me a vision in my mind. And I had studied soils, so I knew. It was half magic, half knowledge.”
“Is that how you met your husband?” I asked.
She nodded. “Yes. But he wasn’t a sharecropper.
This was his little farm. He was a bachelor and established and much sought after in those days.
Every widow was after him, every girl with a pretty face.
They did not care for his loving the Tintarian pagan woman who was nearing her thirtieth winter and rather homely. ”
“And you stayed, and he married you?”
“Yes. And this place needed a midwife badly. I felt compelled to be here. And I had the advantage of his land being next to the sanctuary of my goddess.”