Aaron Perry - [BCS287 S03] - The Witch of the Will (html) Read online

  The Witch of the Will

  By Aaron Perry

  When the Hedgewitch of Feckless Lovers’ Lane turned one hundred and five, she decided she did not fancy brewing potions for the rest of her life. As her grandmother had told her, there was not much fame in potions—people would do whatever foolish, brave, or malicious thing they had intended, with or without the brew. So the witch packed up her laboratory and set her sights on a grander legacy: she stole the free will of the king.

  The witch had seen the king’s father’s and grandfather’s rule, had watched the generational corruption of good intentions, and she had grown tired of divine mandate, so she took it away. She wrote out every significant deed the king would do until the day of his death, on a sheet of parchment as long as she was tall, in writing cramped as a column of marching ants. On a bleak winter’s day she folded it, sealed it, and nailed it to the front doors of the mortuary. There it would remain, not to be read until the king’s death—a reminder to all who entered those doors that kings, too, went to their graves.

  When asked why none may read it, she replied, “I know everything the king will do in reaction to everything in his life—the exception being that piece of parchment. If he knew what was written, his will would be his to command once more, and then it wouldn’t be much of a foretelling now would it?”

  For this she was widely declared a fraud, but some believed, and there grew up a secret society called the King’s Chroniclers. They recorded everything the king did, from insignificant events such as executing his half-brother to momentous occasions such as scratching himself in public. No one knew what sort of details the witch had written down, and if she was to be vindicated, it would be best to record everything for posterity.

  The king inevitably got wind of this. He tried to make the witch recant what she had done, but when he sent his soldiers to take her, the witch was perpetually out. When he later thought to burn her house down, his soldiers spent the afternoon wandering up and down Feckless Lovers’ Lane like goldfish in a bowl, unable to remember what exactly they had come for. When he sought a wizard to outfox her, he discovered the wizards of the realm were all her nephews and quite fond of their aunt.

  At last, the king tried to have the parchment pried off the mortuary doors, but it would not budge. Taking a chisel to it—or even an axe—merely resulted in shattered iron. Eventually he resorted to burning the mortuary to the ground, but when the smoke and cinders cleared, the parchment alone survived. It hung in the air at the exact height it had been nailed to the doors, immutable as lead. Finally, the king went back to what was most familiar to him: he pretended the parchment did not exist. He went so far as to build a monument around it, encasing it in the marble base of a statue of himself.

  But this did not erase the parchment from the minds of the people. On the day of the king’s death, nearly ten years later, the streets were empty of mourners. Everyone, even the doubters, had gathered to tear down the statue and finally read what the witch had written.

  The mood was tense, and tenser still when a carriage arrived in the Square of the King’s Will and the queen herself stepped out. She stood in silent appraisal, dressed head to toe in mourner’s black, stonier than the edifice of her deceased husband. Her veiled gaze swept slowly across the crowd until finally it came to rest on the witch, who bowed ever so slightly. The queen reached into the carriage and withdrew a sheaf of notes thicker than scripture and went to join the ranks of the King’s Chroniclers. They no longer committed themselves to secrecy.

  After the clamor had died down, the workmen glanced at the witch, who stood with her arms crossed in the shadow of the king’s memorial. She nodded, and they took up their hammers to dismantle their liege. The parchment emerged by painstaking degrees. When the statue was but dust and rubble, the witch strode across the stony ground and plucked the parchment from the air. She breathed on the seal, whereupon it cracked open with a faint pop.

  She scanned its contents briefly, smiling to herself as though she had forgotten how wonderful her work had been. She handed it to the queen.

  “If you will, Your Highness.” She leaned a little closer. “It cannot mention you by name, for it was his and his alone, but you may want to censor some of the bawdy bits.”

  The queen took the parchment, which trembled like an autumn leaf in her hand. “I will not omit so much as a pen stroke from this.”

  She checked it against her notes, her expression tightening into a mask of painful, cold fury. Hours later, she relinquished the parchment and handed it to the next member of the King’s Chroniclers. One by one they checked the document. The afternoon wore on, the sun slipped below the horizon, and night fell. Still they worked by lamplight. At the witching hour, the final chronicler raised her head—she had been the king’s taster—and they had their awful, wondrous answer.

  The king’s will had not been his own.

  Every deed of significance had been foreseen and recorded on that parchment, and that night the Hedgewitch of Feckless Lovers’ Lane became the Witch of the Will. She rose meteorically in fame that night, ascendant in name and power. The queen appointed the witch to the newly created position of High Court Magus and Alchemist. No one impugned her craft any longer, neither to her face nor behind her back. People feared her—nearly as much as they respected her. She constantly had appointments, and not always with the nobility.

  One afternoon nearly a year after the death of the king, she found one of the kitchen knaves in her chambers. He looked perhaps fourteen and stood gazing at the living portrait of her grandmother.

  “You know,” she said, “I have a waiting room for a reason.”

  He whirled about. He was at the awkward stage between boy and man—tall for his age, strong from tearing apart deer and pig carcasses for the king’s table, but such timidity lurked behind those grey eyes. Even though he towered over her, he would not meet her gaze.

  “I’m sorry.” He gestured to the portrait. “I heard her talking to herself, and I thought it was you.”

  “Truly?” The witch raised an eyebrow. “Most people can’t hear her. What’s your name?”

  “Canute.” He looked back at the portrait again. “Is she really alive?”

  “Are you? Am I?” The witch cocked her head as if to say the matter was debatable. She drew up alongside him to look at the portrait of the old woman. “My Gran is alive in a sense.”

  “It doesn’t seem like a nice way to live.”

  “It’s better than nothingness. At least, until she’s ready to accept the prospect.”

  Canute’s brow creased. “Nothingness?”

  The witch watched him with cautious curiosity. Most people wanted to take what she offered without letting her rub off on them. A discussion such as this would have certainly been unwelcome with nobles or even most of the commoners who came to her.

  “I’m sure you know that witches, along with all practitioners of magic, can’t go to paradise once they die?”

  Canute nodded.

  “Well, that’s only half true. We can’t go to paradise, but neither can we go to damnation. We go nowhere; our essence becomes nothing. Magic touches the soul in a way that unknits it from within, makes us incompatible with nature. That includes what naturally comes after this life. We are, in the end, the stewards of our own souls.”

  “Doesn’t that make you uncomfortable?”

  “More uncomfortable than the idea of damnation? No. And I cannot help what I am.”

  He hesitated before saying, “I see.”

  The witch smiled. “My Gran didn’t like it, eith
er, which is why I painted her into that portrait. Now she has time to come to grips with the concept. That’s probably what you heard her muttering about.”

  They stood side by side for a time in quiet contemplation before the witch asked, “Now why did you come up here? Certainly not to discuss philosophy.”

  Canute stiffened. “I was hoping you would do something for me. I heard you helped the scullery maid so I thought, maybe...”

  “Yes?”

  Now he met her eyes. “Would you do for me what you did for the king?”

  Canute looked at her with such hope that it took a moment to realize what he meant.

  “You mean the old king?” she asked.

  “Yes. I’m sorry. I—I imagine it’s a lot of work.”

  It was a lot of work, but that wasn’t what astonished the witch and made her skin crawl with unease.

  “I didn’t do that for him, Canute. I did that to him. Do you understand what it means to take a person’s free will? I made him meaningless as a cog in a mechanism. If anyone had taken and read that parchment, they would have seen the whole of his life etched in ink and would have held his fate in their hands. They would have owned him. Devoured him. He may have feigned apathy, but it plunged him into existential despair during his final years. He nearly killed himself several times. The only thing that stayed his hand was the thought that it didn’t matter; that whatever he did, he would not be the agent of his own actions.”

  “I don’t care. I want it.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s simpler. It seems better...”

  He trailed off, and only then did the witch truly see the boy. Not all his burns were from pans, not all his scars were from the slip of a blood-slick knife, and the way he cradled his left arm was not merely shyness.

  “Oh, child.” She drew near, and he flinched as she laid a hand on his shoulder. “You’ll learn nothing if I inscribe your will only to give it back to you. It’s impossible to know what your own future holds, for if you did, your actions would inevitably change it. It would no longer be your future. Unknown sorrows await us all, and knowing what might once have been will make no difference in facing what will be.”

  “I think it will,” he said. “You would take my will from me, and then I would take it from myself.”

  The witch lapsed into silence, for she could see the boy would not be swayed. Like most people, he did not understand that knowing his future would return his will to him. Every time a besotted youth sat down with a diviner, it was not their future being revealed but their future being returned to the ether of mere possibility now that they were aware of it. Knowledge did not like to be known before its time.

  But she also saw that in this moment she could give him a measure of happiness, however fleeting. She placed a finger beneath his chin, forcing him to again look her in the eye.

  “Tell me your wish once more.”

  “I wish for you to take my will. As you did for the old king.”

  “Very well. Come back in a week, and it will be finished.”

  The relief on his face sickened her, but she kept her word. As she had done over a decade ago, she took a sheet of parchment as long as her outstretched arms and covered it in writing as dense as swarming locusts. What she discovered in the boy’s life surprised her, and for the first time she doubted her own skill. She did not see how a broken boy such as Canute could become the fated man of his written will.

  When Canute returned the following week, he thanked her and tucked the sealed parchment into his filthy tunic. Never did his hand stray toward opening it. His eye did not so much as glance at it. This surprised the witch.

  She watched him carefully in the coming months and kept an ear to castle gossip which she normally disdained. She could not remember all of Canute’s will, but certain events remained lodged in her brain like arrowheads. Four months later, the first of them occurred—Canute killed one of the kitchen cooks with a fire-iron. When the witch heard of it, a line of her own stark writing hovered in her mind’s eye: And he will slay his tormentors with a fire-iron named Providence.

  Immediately she went to the dungeons, where Canute was being kept. In the dead of night, with the guards drawn down into an unnatural slumber, she stood outside his cell. He sat in the far corner, half-hidden in shadow. He did not seem the least bit disturbed.

  She knew he could not discern her face beneath the shade of her hood, yet he smiled at her. “Thank you.”

  “Canute,” she said, “I did not give you your will so you could follow it to the letter and somehow assume that absolves you of guilt. In reading it, you’ve regained your free will. Your decisions are entirely your own.”

  “I never read it. I burned it.”

  Too late did the witch understand what sort of comfort the boy had sought in having his free will removed. He had not wished to know his future but to become bound to it inexorably. In this way, he felt himself absolved. He stood helpless before the sorrow given to him and blameless in the wake of the sorrow he gave to others. Neither guilt nor grief had any power over him now. It left her speechless, and she departed the dungeons without another word.

  In her chamber she sat staring at her desk as the clock ticked through the early morning hours. A cloying unease had begun to molder in her belly—a feeling that she had unleashed something foul into the world. Unlike the old king, Canute had the opportunity to read his will and do with it what he would, but he had not. Revoking the king’s will had been a show of power but also a punishment. Canute’s was neither; it had been intended as a gesture of comfort for a boy drowning in a world implacable as the sea. She had not expected him to take refuge in his drowning. He had surprised her, and with a sinking certainty that she had never felt regarding the king, she knew Canute was now her responsibility.

  The following night she returned to the dungeons. Canute lay on the floor, staring at the ceiling with an expression of wide-eyed madness. He remained motionless, arms and legs splayed like a vivisected frog. She recognized this existential paralysis. The old king had often lain in bed, unable to move under the weight of his thoughts, contemplating one action after another, discarding each as a fate he did not want.

  “Canute.” He did not stir. “By refusing to read and reclaim your will, you have handed it over to me. I would reveal it to you if I thought it would make a difference, which I don’t, but I will tell you this: if you continue as you are, there will come a day when I feel obligated to kill you.”

  His whisper echoed in his cell. “That is fine. I trust you more than chance, or providence, or fate.”

  The witch left him then. She had not come to convince him, only to confirm her own suspicions.

  In the royal alchemy hall she brewed a pot of tea, then sat lost in thought as it grew cold. Had she possessed the stunted empathy that too frequently accompanied great sorcerers, she might have been able to kill Canute now or ignore him entirely, but this miserable child and the winding path of his fate lay upon her conscience like a cairn. Unable to take final action or sink into apathy, she embraced the one option left to her: not breaking the fate of another but bending it. She would have to use her knowledge as a lens, to focus his fate on her. As the writer of his will, not an actor within, it would be difficult to predict what her meddling might do. Almost impossible.

  And yet she would try.

  The next week she relinquished her position and arranged for her nephew to take over as High Court Magus and Alchemist. When the queen asked where she was going, the witch did not answer for a time, thinking of the many nebulous lines that comprised Canute’s will.

  At last she said, “To the village where a boy will fall in love, the snowfields where a man will meet a god, and to a place by the sea, where a monster will fear death for the first time.”

  The queen was used to cryptic responses from her, so this came as only a mild surprise. On a chill morning beneath budding cherry trees, the queen wished her farewell, and the witch bit back the urge to w
arn her away from the boy in the dungeons. She had taken the will of another twice now, and the more she learned about the old king or the boy, the more she realized how little she knew about anything else. Who could say how Canute would be freed from the dungeons, whether it be escape or pardon or coup? Best to let the knucklebones of chance lie where they may and pray that fortune smiled on the queen.

  She traveled far to the north, where the air was too cold for thunder, the ground too hard for burial. At the very edge of the kingdom she found the village of Ichor, a place where auroras danced through the skies and the people spoke the queen’s name as that of a mythical beast. When the witch arrived she set aside her great power, becoming a hedgewitch once more, content to watch and wait for a time. She was only one hundred and sixteen years old.

  The villagers regarded her with suspicion and curiosity at first, but a slow trust began to grow as she proved herself to be a rather boring witch. She brewed potions and tinctures, cured coughs and joint pain, and safely delivered children from womb to world—many, many children.

  One afternoon as she returned along the forest road from a morning’s foraging, she found the village carpenter standing outside his workshop. He stood with his back to the open door, tears streaming down his ruddy cheeks and into his beard.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked.

  The carpenter shook his head. “A silly thing to cry about. Truly.”

  She went to the door and peered inside. On his workbench lay a coffin-boat, coated with pine resin and ready to burn as it floated onto the misty lake.

  “Who?” she asked.

  “No one. Perhaps it’s morose, but I build them ahead of time, when I can still hope I’ll never have to use them. This morning I realized I—I have not built one for a child since my grandson died. Not since you came.”

  He smiled through his tears, and that’s when the witch knew she had the villagers’ love, for they trusted her with their children. She opened a school, teaching them about stars and herb lore, arithmetic and logic. The children grew thoughtful under her tutelage, if perhaps a bit too silver-tongued, and when they came of marrying age, many of them wished for nothing more than to travel to the capital and have nothing to do with weddings. When they expressed such desires, the witch merely smiled and told them they had time to do all that they wished.