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

  Canute flipped her onto her stomach, face pressed to the sand. Boots appeared in the edge of her vision, and then the woman was squatting in the sand, staring at her like a specimen in a jar.

  “You, too, child?” Marisol asked. “Did I not give you enough the first time?”

  The woman reached out and with a savage tug removed a hank of hair by the roots. She coiled it into a glass vial, then stepped on Marisol’s wrist. Marisol knew what was coming, and she closed her eyes to it, but still the image of the woman burned bright in her mind’s eye. A woman she had cared for as a girl, raised into a woman, sponsored into a witch.

  Marisol opened her eyes. A silver chain around the woman’s neck disappeared into her collar, and Marisol knew what lay there against her breast—a diamond of exquisite perfection, yet harboring the tiniest inclusion, a necessary flaw. The tool of a witch too young to be forgotten by the world.

  “Child, have you been walking the halls of my mind without my knowledge? Have you stolen your name from my memory?”

  The woman wedged a sliver of wood beneath Marisol’s thumb nail and removed a mallet from her belt, but Marisol held her gaze.

  “Is that a memory lattice around your neck?”

  Mallet hit wood and wood parted flesh, and a strangled groan escaped Marisol’s clenched teeth. The woman tore the thumbnail from its bed and dropped it into another glass vial. Marisol’s feet drummed against the sand, her blood drooling out onto the beach, bright in the sunshine, and she choked on her cries.

  “You have what you need?” Canute asked.

  “For now,” the woman said.

  As she walked away, Canute bent to whisper in Marisol’s ear. “You may have taken her love from me, but you didn’t take her. You are a weak god.”

  Marisol closed her eyes, felt the sun on her cheek, the sand growing wet beneath her fingers. The flow of fate could never be controlled, merely nudged here and there, to waver briefly before settling back into its path. She had been a fool to try, and yet she did not regret it.

  Marisol awoke at twilight, tied to a chair in her empty bedroom. Remnants of daylight illuminated the woman from Ichor. She sat at an easel.

  Her brush traced unseen arcs across the canvas, careful dabs and negative space. After a moment she looked up and met Marisol’s eyes. She set her brush aside and walked over to Marisol, holding her gaze.

  “The eyes were what I noticed,” she said, “about your grandmother’s portrait. The detail that had been put into every facet—pale blue, just like yours.”

  “They’re called witch eyes for a reason, child. When was the last time you looked in a mirror?”

  The woman blinked.

  “You wear your power too openly. The eyes, almost no one notices; the scent, almost no one understands; but that lattice around your neck, filled with stolen recollections? People feel too many gaps in their memories—especially if they all center on you. I hope you haven’t been lying to him. This could all get quite nasty.”

  The woman took a step back, studying Marisol a moment longer before returning to her easel. She mixed her paints, cut with blood and hair and fingernail, and continued her work. At some point Canute walked by the open doorway, but he glanced in without a word. Marisol was a mere thing to him now—perhaps she had always been.

  She sat in that bare room for days, allowed water and nothing else as the woman continued her work. Marisol’s stomach became an echoing hollow inside her, a place she retreated to touch the walls of pain that throbbed there, serving as a shield rather than a prison. On the fourth day, she awoke from the restless half-sleep that sometimes came over her and found Canute and the woman examining the painting in the late afternoon light.

  Canute’s eyes flicked from the painting to Marisol to the woman, who nodded. “This will do.”

  Canute untied her and dragged her out to the cemetery of familiars. He looked at the cairns, each marked with a placard in a language he couldn’t read, and said, as though it were a measure of good faith, “I will lay your body to rest with your ancestors.”

  Marisol laughed. “You’re no less ignorant now than when I first met you.”

  He threw a rope over a bough of the ancient mangrove that grew close to the house, far from the waterline. “Do witches not bury their dead? Do you wish to be immolated?”

  He fastened a noose around her ankles and hauled her up, so the world spun madly as the blood rushed to her head. The woman placed the painting flat on a stool beneath her.

  “Not doing this elegantly,” Marisol gasped.

  The woman glanced up at her. “Yes, well, your nephew said you never instructed him in the artful dark. Which bead of blood will be the fatal drop to seal your fate? I don’t know how to sift through such paradoxes. Clumsy divination cannot say—I do not know how you painted your grandmother so elegantly. Would you like to tell me? It will make this easier.”

  “I think not.”

  The woman went back to securing the painting, so it would not tumble to the earth beneath the deluge of Marisol’s blood as they waited for the drop that carried her soul. It was the first time Marisol had seen the painting, and as she spun in lazy circles it stared up at her like a sorrowful mirror. A bitter smile turned up the corner of the mouth, a smile she wore even now.

  Canute stood by, his stony gaze wavering neither left nor right. “You could have avoided this, had you just let me be.”

  “A stone in a river or a rising tide are things we let be. You wanted to pretend you, too, were a force of nature, but you only become that by handing your agency to someone else. If a thunderhead gave me its volition, I would not let it scour the earth, either.”

  Canute drew his belt knife, folded steel glinting ember-like in the setting sun. “When a squall gathers on the horizon, you run, Marisol. You do not fight.”

  He laid the knife edge against her neck and pulled. Blood drizzled like tree sap from her neck—slowly, so slowly—and Canute frowned. He glanced at the woman from Ichor, who shook her head, studying Marisol like a locked puzzle box. Canute laid the knife against the other side of her neck and pulled again, and again a lazy drizzle of blood stretched out to the painting in drips and drops.

  Marisol shrieked, half-mad with panic that her body still felt, regardless of what she knew in her mind. “Cut again, Canute. Give me gills, turn me into a mermaid. You will not catch my soul with that blood sieve, no matter how well she painted it.”

  Canute’s fingers wrapped around her jaw, digging into her cheeks as he turned her to face him. “What did you do?”

  “Only what every witch does,” she replied, “and what I promised myself I never would.”

  The woman stood, understanding leaping into her eyes. She crossed the distance between them and tore open the collar of Marisol’s shirt, revealing a livid scar down the length of her sternum. She pressed two fingers against Marisol’s neck, her eyes growing wide as the sensation that rebounded to her was nothing, nothing, nothing.

  “She has cut out her heart and enspelled it with a synecdoche. She’s a blood-shade.”

  Canute turned away, the pent fury in his voice flaring even as his tone dropped. “What does that mean? She doesn’t look like a shade.”

  “She cannot be bled to death. Her heart is...” The woman looked around, at the house, the mangroves, the estuary. “Somewhere else. We cannot complete the painting without it.”

  “Can you find it?”

  The woman fell into a conflicted silence. “No. Not unless she has hidden it someplace very stupid.”

  “Or I tell you.”

  They both turned to Marisol, who continued to spin slowly by her ankles.

  “What is a musician who does not fear his critics? A sailor who does not fear the storm?” She looked out across the still, sunset waters. “A witch who does not fear death... yet allows herself with wither into a shade anyway.”

  From behind her came the woman’s answer, small and filled with dreadful anticipation. “Free.”

/>   “Free to do anything. I did not hide my heart away in a vault of stone, or sink it to the bottom of the sea. I fed it to a crane, and when the bird dies, so will I.”

  The wind gusted, and Marisol swung around to face them. Canute was staring out across the waters, as though he could wade into that multitude of birds and kill them one by one. The woman, too, stared, with the face of one defeated. “We will never find it.”

  Marisol tilted her head, the gashes on her neck tugging strangely. “I am neither a wind-shade nor a time-shade. I can still be strangled, still be burned.”

  The woman’s expression tightened, and she shook her head before Canute could ask the question. “No,” she said to him. “She—she’s taunting me. I learned the making of a blood sieve from her grandmother. I could not guess how her soul might ride the last breath from her lungs or which flake of ash might carry her to the sky. Such sieves are beyond me.”

  “Can you experiment?” Canute glanced at Marisol, panic rising behind the anger. “Can you learn?”

  The woman recoiled at his pleading touch. “Only on people.”

  “And?”

  A fragile stillness came over them, on the precipice of desperation. Slowly she said, “And I would never do that.”

  “Why not?” Canute loomed over her.

  The woman met Marisol’s gaze. Marisol smiled.

  “Canute,” the woman said. “We don’t need to do this now; we have time, have her bloody name. Can’t you see what she’s doing?”

  “She? The crone I’ve stripped of all power and hung from a tree branch? Yes, I can see what she’s doing. What I can’t see is what you’re doing. I did not bring you here to fail at the final hour.”

  He turned on the spot, his feet kicking up sand as he looked about with an animal panic. “Maybe we’ll even find the one she—”

  “Canute. No. She’s beaten us.”

  The wind sighed. The noose around Marisol’s ankles creaked. The crack of Canute’s fist across the woman’s nose was like the snap of falling timber. She gasped and reeled but did not lose her feet.

  Her expression darkened. “I see.”

  With a snarl she spoke a word of power and ensnared him. She crooked a finger, and through the cloth of her shirt the memory lattice flared like starlight—but she had only a novice’s training, only a novice’s focus. Marisol watched as the woman stared into Canute’s furious eyes, remembered he knew who she was, and the cosmos faded from her grasp.

  Canute drew his sword. “I’ll cut you down to a bloody stump, nothing but a head to speak sorceries as I need them. You don’t think I know your name still? You don’t think I took precautions against forgetting? I will twine you around my fingers, break you down like I’ve broken—like I’ve broken...”

  He twitched, his blink erratic and forced. He looked to Marisol, and she snorted. “Forgotten my name, Canute? Maybe she has it.”

  Canute rounded on the woman, and terror filled her eyes, surging up from the depths of her soul. She brought a hand to her temple, eyes squeezed shut, arcane words at her lips. The memory lattice shone once more, and then she fell to the sand, convulsing like a patient in a stroke. Canute hesitated, watching as the woman grew still. Her breath sent grains of sand skittering across the beach, but her eyes were empty.

  “First she took my name from you,” Marisol said, and closed her eyes. “Then she took from herself—removed it from her own mind. But ensorcelling one’s own memory, taking what one knows and casting it aside—that requires a defter hand than hers.” The witch opened her eyes. “A hand such as mine.”

  Canute had barely turned before the rope untied itself from the witch’s ankles and the winds howled, carrying her emaciated body to the ground gentle as any autumn leaf, and then they did not touch her at all. She was stillness in the eye of a storm—her lank hair, her filthy shirt, her exhausted body untouched by the winds.

  Canute dropped to his knees, sword anchored in the sand, head bowed against the gale. When it softened to a breeze, he looked up, and the witch stood over him, hands clasped behind her back. She spoke to him in a language he did not understand yet felt familiar to his soul, like the voice of a mother to a babe in the womb.

  The witch reached down and took the sword from his grip, once a fire iron called Providence, and the final line of Canute’s will came to her lips, bittersweet as a balm, but she did not speak it aloud. Instead she placed the blade against his neck and said, “I told you there would come a day I felt I must kill you.”

  With his final breath he looked into her eyes and said, “I’m sorry.”

  “I know.”

  The witch struck his head from his shoulders, and then for a time she did nothing. She looked down at Canute’s still form, made small in death. Now, at the end of the decision she made long ago to step into his life and drink that bitter brew of responsibility for another’s sins, she could not say she had done right, could not know. She could only hope and fear in equal measure.

  The woman from Ichor lay beside him, her expression a blank mask. The witch reached down and let her hand cover those staring eyes.

  “Canute was so sure of himself.” She did not know if the woman heard, or if the words were even meant for her. “A curse I gave him, which he would not allow me to lift. I suppose that surety was appealing to you, even after you’d found something greater to chase, and I wish I had foreseen that. I’m sorry.”

  The witch wiped a trickle of blood from her collar and flicked it to the wind, then took the necklace from the woman and crushed the diamond between her fingers. “But your choices were your own, Vera. Farewell.”

  The Witch of the Will disappeared thereafter. None could say for certain where she went, but it was rumored she returned to an old forgotten house on an old forgotten lane, and that a person who has the right motivations might stumble upon her brewing potions, waiting for a crane to die.

  © Copyright 2019 Aaron Perry