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

  And then one day Canute arrived. He wore a short sword at his hip and bore the compass of the royal cartographers on his lapel; a boy no longer, but it was him. He came to find the borders between kingdoms, something so neat on a map and so nebulous in the real world—or so he told the villagers. The witch saw through him. He was a spy for the crown, sent over the top of the world to a place where borders were enforced by mountains rather than armies.

  She retreated to her forest cottage, watching Canute as he performed his cartography, a second shadow unseen at his side as he traveled through forest and field and mountain surveying which paths might best accommodate a trade route. For the better part of a year he stayed, growing friendly with all the village folk—and a young woman named Vera in particular. On the last day of summer, Canute proposed, vowed to take her back to the citadel with him to a wedding of the sort she could not imagine.

  To the witch’s delight, Vera demurred.

  That evening, the witch went to her. “Will you marry him?” she asked, knowing full well the conflict in her heart.

  “I do not know. He is kind, and so sure of himself, but marriage...” She trailed off.

  “Marriage will mean children, and you have a great interest in many other things,” the witch finished.

  Vera looked troubled. “But do I have what is required? Can I sit the academy exam, with what I have learned here? Sometimes it feels like we knew nothing before you came. How much more is there yet to learn? I... I cannot imagine.”

  The witch withdrew a letter from her pocket, the latest in a long exchange with her nephew asking after her and wondering when she would return. Most importantly, it was sealed with the signet of the High Court Magus and Alchemist.

  “I was not always a hedgewitch,” she said. “Once I had the ear of the queen. I might still, if I chose. Become apprentice to the current court alchemist, and you will not need the academy’s permission to pursue knowledge.”

  Vera’s eyes were wide, alight with inquisitive delight and perhaps something less innocent. Curiosity rarely survived into adulthood untarnished by vain ambition, and the witch knew exactly what she was leveraging. Vera took the letter, running her finger over the seal in reverence.

  The next morning she rejected Canute, and that evening a knock came at the witch’s cottage door. When she opened it, Canute looked down at her, mouth open to speak but silent.

  “Hello, Canute. Have you come to see who stole your love away?”

  His whisper carried a shade of heartache. “You?”

  They watched one another from opposite sides of the threshold. “Do you still trust me? Trust me more than chance, or providence, or fate? If you wish, I can return your will to you now.”

  His eyes grew hard, and he turned away without a word. The witch watched him leave, her heart leaping with alarm that he would harm his would-be love, yet her mind at peace with the knowledge that he would not, for he was not a monster. Not yet.

  The next day he was gone before sunrise.

  The witch wrote a letter to her nephew, which she sent along with Vera and a gaggle of other village youths who had decided it was time to see the world. After they had disappeared into the horizon down the southbound road, she packed up her cottage and left, leaving only a note behind which read: It has been a joy, but I must go now, to a foreign land where gods still roam. Blessings upon you.

  Traveling by ancient forest roads and through secret mountain passes that Canute himself had discovered, the witch made her way through snow-capped heights and down into foreign lands. Old religions were practiced there, worshipping the sun and sea and stars: things that could be touched and seen and feared.

  In Ichor she had watched loss harden Canute and shear away what remained of his childish heart. Here he would lose something else and cross the gap between man and monster. When the time came, the witch would place herself at the center of that rage.

  But first she needed a guide.

  The witch spent her days close to the earth, covered in mud and bramble, stalking through grasslands and aspen groves. She followed the stag-elk herds taller than any man and preternaturally sensitive to the scent of magic. She learned to be silent, the voice of the wind more familiar than her own; to move quietly in step with the ponderous turning of the world itself. A part of her began to fade—not lost but locked away bit by bit, buried in quiet bends of her mind.

  On the morning of her one hundred and twenty-first year, a doe elk gave birth to a birch-coat fawn. Its fur shone purest white, speckled with black, like flakes of windborne ash across the face of the moon. The witch drew near, her scent of nothing but sky and earth; her steps slow and careful.

  While the fawn found its feet, she slew the mother with a knife of bone. She rode it to the ground where it kicked fiercely before growing still. The fawn looked at her in bewilderment, and she reached out to lay a hand along its muzzle. Its eyes grew wide, and it snorted in alarm as she drew the fawn down into sleep, its blood slow as ice floes in its veins, and with tears in her eyes she brought the knife to bear on it as well. She cut through delicate bone and tender sinew, until its lower jaw came away in her hand. She stared at it for a moment before whispering an apology and casting it aside.

  The fawn healed by turns of magic and time, and the witch was no longer alone. She raised it on goat’s milk and mashed fern leaves, bringing it into an unnatural dependence on her. She had raised familiars before but never in such a manner as this. When its speckling faded and it shone like a ghost in the moonlight, she took to riding. By instinct it brought her to austral valleys and lonely peaks, holy places that no human eye had seen in generations.

  Among the people of those wind-scoured hinterlands she became a specter of fearful mystery—a woman astride a jawless white hart, its tongue lolling in grotesque abandon. She carried with her the remnants of elder things: tusks slung over her shoulder, desiccated faerie wings strung along a cord about her neck, the shimmering skin of abyssal leviathans fanned across her thighs. The people knew marks of power when presented to them, and whether such a person called themselves witch or shaman or magus mattered little. They sought her out, following at respectful distances until she had their attention wherever her hart appeared.

  And then, like a specter himself, Canute appeared as well. He was older, his features hidden by a beard, his skin wind-burned and creased with the passage of time, but there he was all the same. He came from the mountains he had mapped years ago, bearing gifts wrought with alchemy that carried the scent of magic unknown to the witch. It smelled faintly of her nephew: coriander, cut with winter sunshine, yet touched with something else. Vanity.

  Canute entranced the people of the moors, wooed them not with promises of power but of love and peace. The queen wished to arrange a marriage, to unite their two great civilizations in harmony. She wished, the witch suspected, for gold and spices from the southern archipelagos, carried like sleight of hand over the top of the world.

  The people ultimately knew they must consult the gods, and they set off in seeking, following roads and crossing lakes out of their season, Canute in their company. If they noticed that the witch followed astride her maimed hart, they did not tell him. She was of them, of this land, and things of the hinterlands did not concern the foreign queen’s messenger. Not yet.

  They struck into northern climes as winter fell, trudging through cold that shattered bone and against wind that cut like a wet knife. They crept through caves that ran along the roots of the mountains like a tracery of cobwebs, past unspeakable slumbering things. Always in their party was one more shadow, one more sighing breath, the weight of one more gaze that Canute might have noticed had he been looking for it, but after the sorrow of times gone by, he had begun to forget the witch once more.

  At the crown of the world, deep beneath the earth in fungal caves where mushrooms grew like trees and faeries pinwheeled within phosphorescent auras, they came at last to the labyrinth of the Aged Dreamer—a craggy willow that re
quired neither sun nor riverbank. It slept in the center of a wending maze, where its eternal night visions caught the essence of the world like light within a crystal, bending it into the spectrum of all that was.

  Here the people barred Canute’s way, forbidding him entrance into the final labyrinth, but to the witch they paid no mind, and before she disappeared into the twisting pitch-black depths she sent them to Canute with a question.

  The eldest member of the hinterland peoples approached Canute and asked, with unhidden curiosity in his voice, “The avatar of the maimed hart asks if you trust her—more than chance, more than providence, more than fate?”

  Canute screamed in horrified rage. He surged past them, shattering all ambassadorial goodwill as he set foot into the labyrinth. At the heart of the mountain he found the Aged Dreamer ablaze, the witch standing in its light. He choked on his fury, unable to speak as the chosen walkers of the labyrinth appeared behind him and wept at the sight of the burning Dreamer, its boughs dripping cinder and ash.

  “Rage, Canute. You will not complete your task for the queen.” The witch picked up a smoldering chunk of the Aged Dreamer and crushed it in her hand, a tongue of smoke trailing up from her fist. “I will crush you again, and again, and again.”

  Righteous anger overcame the elders’ sorrow and strangled their fear, intent on justice no matter the signs of power she wore. They bound her hands with braided birch bark and painted her tongue with ashes of the Dreamer, and as they led her away she met Canute’s eye.

  “And you will help me do it, Canute.”

  He watched as she allowed herself to be led away, bound in body and spirit, her strength dampened by the rituals of epochs past, from times when humankind had the barest understanding of the powers that surrounded them, when cause and effect were like the mist of a dream.

  Canute was still free, and even without the Aged Dreamer’s omens perhaps he could sway the people of the hinterlands into an alliance, but not if he wanted to preserve his will, etched upon the mind of the witch.

  That night the witch was stripped naked and bound from head to toe in chains of bronze. She was flame-strider and wind-talker, with eyes of ice and hands that knew the earth as a friend, but the sea knew no master, and in the morning they would feed her to the salty depths. There she would either perish or remain until the passing of all ages.

  From where she lay in the cold center of the camp she could see Canute’s tent, sense the conflict from within. With his paper will burned and the witch dead, his will would rebound to him, his once more. At Ichor, the witch had shown him a love he might have had; what he had lost to maintain his fettered will. Now she was showing him what he might still have; what he had not yet lost, if only he could let her go to the grave.

  At midnight he doused his lantern, his silhouette eaten by the darkness. As silence fell over them, with only the witch and her guards awake in the night, Canute left his tent and struck the sentries dead. Wielding a sword forged from a fire iron called Providence, he hacked through the witch’s bronze shackles. She whistled, fluting tones high and clear in the frozen air, and her maimed hart bounded through the encampment. They fled amidst the chaos, allies by circumstance alone—but all the people saw was the witch and the ambassador leaving together, the Aged Dreamer nothing but piles of ash. Canute howled as they leapt along moonlit snowfields, his cry like a banshee’s in the still night.

  His voice hissed, his breath hot in the witch’s ear. “What do you want?”

  “I want you to take back your will and become a man, not a cog for which I am responsible. I offered you a choice today, a new choice, one outside your will, and I will offer it again. There is no escape from this fork in the road.”

  Canute struck her savagely and leapt from the back of the stag, disappearing into the night. She cast a glance over her shoulder, and she knew it would not be long before Canute found her again. He had suffered too greatly to allow her to roam free as keeper of his will, and he would not take it back as his own. He needed a middle road.

  Thankfully she had left him one.

  The witch could have spent her days fleeing from Canute’s wrath, dancing around him, forever teasing him out until the thread of his life snapped. But she did not wish for such a long and dreary existence, so she left the hinterlands and returned to the lands she had called home as a child. It was a place by the sea, where salt drifted through the air and across the tongue; where mangroves with gnarled roots clotted the still, marshy waters and birds flocked in every season.

  Her maimed hart died young, a price she had always known it must pay for the trauma of its birth. She laid it to rest alongside the familiars of her childhood, when such things had fascinated her. She stood over their graves in the shade of a mangrove tree, long-buried memories resurfacing, recalling foolish decisions of her youth and pain inflicted on undeserving creatures. How much she had changed since then, and how little.

  For a season she came to its grave every day in remembrance, and then every week, and then every month. As one year turned over into the next, she laid a wreath of citrus leaves on its cairn, and something within her broke. Flames of anguish licked at her soul, and she fell to her knees amidst bitter sobs. She clenched sandy soil in her fists, watching the grains slip from between her fingers, and her grandmother’s words came back to her:

  There will be no ultimate price to pay for whatever you do in life, child. No justice. You are the steward of your own soul.

  Those words had come from a grandmother who was still wise, still a master of her own mortality, and it was no coincidence that the witch recalled them now. There might be no final reckoning for her, but this life held enough agony of its own. The longer she lived and the more she learned, the more she realized how little she knew.

  For the first time since accepting the burden of responsibility for Canute, she felt fear. She could be sure of nothing, not even a man whom she had weighed and measured and put to a sheet of parchment so long ago. There was no telling how she played into his fate, for she was an outside observer; a meddler. She had the power of a god and the failings of a human, with the experience to know how dangerous that could be. If she was going to truly bend his fate to her will, balance the scale she had tipped, there could be no half-measures.

  She stood and cast her gaze out across the estuary, where flocks of cranes stood like sentinels in white. This place had been her beginning, in a time beyond memory. It would not make such a bad end, either.

  Canute appeared one morning with a litany on his lips. His voice preceded him, sending egrets and clouds of swallows into the air.

  “I name you Marisol,” he called, “born here, born on a summer solstice, born alone bearing a caul meant for two.”

  Marisol smiled and did not move from where she sat, staring out across the estuary as a fragment of herself came back to her. That had been her name, and that had been her birth—the necessary fate of all practitioners of magic. To feel the touch of magic was to be intertwined with the soul of another, the first step in losing one’s personhood and becoming simply another part of the world; a conduit for the cosmos. Now Canute would return that individuality to her; ground her so solidly in herself that she could not reach out to become anything else. He was fettering Marisol in her own essence.

  “Did you end her?” she asked. There was only one person he could have learned this from.

  Silence returned to her, and then he said, “I burned her portrait. She is no more.”

  Marisol closed her eyes, and another line of Canute’s will came back to her:

  And he will seek power from one whose fear of death outweighs love of life.

  “And now you have come to do what I did to her,” she said. “To keep me from my death, to make me the lockbox of your soul.”

  Canute emerged from the brush wearing a mask blank as slate. He held Providence in one hand and a mirrored shield in the other, reflecting Marisol’s tired eyes back at her.

  “Name me,” she s
aid, and stood to face him. “Define my origins and my borders. Take my magic from me. Do you think then it will be easy? Do you think we who are touched by magic don’t all fear this day, like an eagle fears losing the skies? I am your god, Canute. If you’ve come this far, it’s only because I let you.”

  The threads of her identity wrapped around her, binding her magic tightly, but her limbs thrummed with memories—the experiences of more than two lifetimes, the movements of fear and anger and survival.

  She hurled a fistful of sand against his mask and lunged, her fingers seeking the hollow of his sternum. He balked, shield raised, then swept low, striking at her ankles. With disdainful fury she stomped on his blade, pinning it beneath her foot, and drove rigid fingers toward his throat.

  He dipped, and his mask cracked beneath her strike, the porcelain around his right eye falling away to reveal one wild, grey eye. With a snarl he threw his sword and shield away and wrapped his arms around her. She went for his neck, her teeth snapping shut on his collar bone, and he roared as he lifted her high then drove his knee into her back. She bit down on her scream and shunted the pain into a strike to the jaw, which he shook off with bearish resilience.

  They rolled away from one another, coated in sweat and blood and sand.

  He spread his arms wide, overshadowing her, drawing her attention in with slow, decisive movements. In a flash a crossbow quarrel flew from the trees and buried itself in her thigh. She cried out and pitched forward onto the sand, her leg rigid with pain.

  From the undergrowth stepped the woman from the village of Ichor—a woman whose name Marisol was curiously unable to remember. She wore her own signs of power, yet she had crouched in the humid shadows with an iron bolt and fear in her eyes. Marisol laughed through her pain, for even gods can be fools. She had robbed Canute of his love, but she had not robbed him of an ally, and there were more people than just her grandmother who feared death.