The Third Witch Read online

  Nettle kneels quickly, wrapping her skinny hand around the top of a wild onion and tugging it from the ground.

  “There’s little flavor in them,” she tells me for the hundredth time, “but boiled with cloth they make a golden brown dye that’s second to none.”

  “Old woman,” I shout, “I have asked you three times, and you have not answered me. I will not take another step until you tell me when shall we kill Him?”

  Nettle stands and dusts off her skirt. “Then stand there until you turn into stone for I shall not answer such a foolish question.” And she takes off through the forest.

  I stay behind, hating her.

  I will not move. I will stay here forever rather than give her the satisfaction of seeing me trail behind, like a broken-willed hound.

  I stand there for a long while, hating her, hating Him, savoring the strong, pungent, onion-sharp taste of hate. I like hating. I feel strong and safe and alive when I hate. If I knew hate songs, I would sing them. Instead I indulge in the pleasure of making up curses and call them out.

  “Nettle,” I cry. “You are a pockmarked, rickety, toad-bellied, snot-snatching, addle-hag!”

  Then I picture myself facing Him.

  “You craven snake licker! You son of a ditch drab! Do not dare to stare at me with your eyes of a newt! Do not speak to me with your tongue of a frog! Your hair is the hair of dogs who lie in dung. Your private places are as shriveled as hemlock root. Your soul is more shriveled than a forked mandrake that has lain a sevenday under the eye of the August sun! You eater of babes, may all who follow you in your line learn to hate their father and mother and curse the day they were ever born!”

  My maledictions ring out through the wood, sharp as a snapped branch. I love this wood. I love it for itself, but I love it also because the villagers fear it. They believe the wood full of magical creatures who mean them harm.

  If they hear me cursing, they will think me an evil spirit of the woods, perhaps a weird woman casting her spells. I chuckle with delight. Then I get an even better idea. I begin to make noises—a low moan, then a shriek to curdle the thickest blood, then a mad cackle, like a queen being turned into a hen.

  Perhaps Nettle can hear me. Perhaps she will think, as I stand here so faithfully, an errant wizard has come upon me and is subjecting me to terrible spells. Nettle will blanch with fear and guilt for making me stand stock-still in the middle of this mad wood.

  I realize that I am tired of standing here waiting for Nettle to come back. This is how I can tell that she does not care for me, that she raised me only out of pity. Otherwise she would have come back to check on me. The wood is no longer so pleasant. A wind has arisen, dancing in tiny circles about the leaves that bob and twist.Then I hear the pitter-pat of raindrops. At first they just tap against the leaves, but then one plops down on my neck. I feel another on the top of my head.

  Saint Colum’s bones, it is enough to drive me mad, this slow, irregular drip-drip-drip of the water. Mad Helga has said this was how some of the Old Ones used to torture their captives, an unsteady drip-drip-drip until they went out of their heads. Water seems so soft, but I have seen the hollows in the hardest stones worn deep by the soft, patient water.

  My head jerks up.

  I have my answer.

  Perhaps I will not wear Nettle down today, but I can ask-ask-ask until she gives in. I am not water, but I can learn the lessons of water.

  I hunch my ragged wolfskin about my shoulders and hurry back to the hut.

  F O U R

  WHEN SHALL WE kill Him?”

  My words fall like a stone into the pool of quiet darkness inside the hut.

  Nettle and Mad Helga pause for a moment, then resume their work. All the treasures of the battlefield, except the book, are spread out on the hearth. With the hem of her gown, Nettle cleans and polishes them. Her two wild cats are hunched down at her side—Graymalkin, with his one eye and his three sound legs, and Hecate, with her broken tail. In summer they mostly live in the wood, but as the season of binding approaches, they creep inside to huddle next to the woman who saved them. Every turn of the moon, Mad Helga brings home one or two broken creatures, rocking them in her arms and gibbering at them in a strange language that no one else seems to speak. Despite her attention, most of her wild creatures die. Then as if in some lunatic tribute, she boils their bones until they are clean as Saint John’s soul. She piles the boiled bones ’round her bed pallet to use as playthings or prayer beads or conjuring twigs or some such nonsense. This evening Mad Helga kneels at the far side of the hearth, rocking the skeleton of a toad inher cupped hands, her lips moving in the rhythm of a soundless chant.

  I stamp my bare foot against the hard-packed earthen floor. “Listen to me! I say we kill Him tomorrow.”

  The two older women look at each other silently. I hate it when they exchange these silent looks.

  “We will leave at dawn,” I shout. Instead of the gentle dripping of water, I have become a flood. “Get sleep now, for we must get an early start.”

  “Women weep and children scream,” Mad Helga croons to the tiny skeleton in her gnarled hands. “Paddock sleep and paddock dream. Rockabye, be not shy, we shall all sleep bye and bye.”

  “Listen to me!” I long to shake the old woman until her jaw rattles.

  Suddenly Nettle begins to laugh, a harsh, broken cackle that hurts my ears.

  “Stop it!” I shout. I want to shake her, too.

  But Nettle cackles on and on.

  “Don’t laugh at me!”

  Nettle shakes her head. “When you are daft, child, then I must laugh. Now we have had enough of your jests. There’s barley porridge in the kettle. Fetch your bowl and eat your dinner.”

  “No!” I hit the frame of the door with my fist. “When I came here, seven years ago, you promised to help me. ‘Give us seven years of service,’ you said, ‘and we shall aid you in fetching your heart’s desire.’ Seven years of service have I given to you, seven years of faithful service, and now I claim my rights.” I take a deep breath. “Three days ago I saw Him, the man that I must kill. For seven years I have made my life an arrow, and He is its target. For seven years I have made my heart a dagger, and He is its sheath. I call to you both. Fulfill your promise. Help me kill Him.”

  Nettle looks down. Her bony fingers pick up a broken shard of bronze and begin to polish it. “I did not promise—”

  “You did! You did! You promised. ’Twas the only reason I stayedwith you. Why else would I stay for seven years with two mad old women in this tumbledown hut? The very night I came, you gave me a promise.”

  Nettle’s face darkens. “ ’Twas only some words, Gilly, said to soothe a frightened child.”

  “But what you said was a promise.”

  We continue to quarrel until I slam out of the room and stomp down to the pool in the stream. In the spilled light of the fat moon, I study my face in the water. My hacked hair, outlined by the moonlight, looks like stubble in a barley field after the final winnowing.

  “Water,” I beg, “teach me your ways. Teach me the way to wear Nettle down.”

  I sit for a long time and listen to the water.

  Then hunger nudges me back to the hut.

  AUTUMN BLEEDS into winter.

  Past All Hallows, through Advent, all through the dark days, I wear away at Nettle with my words, my sulks, my anger. It is not a pleasant winter, the three of us either huddling in our hut that reeks of smoke and sour, unwashed linen or shivering in the outside air that is as sharp as an iced blade. No, it is not a happy winter for any of us. I hate the way I sound when I open my mouth, but I cannot stop my bleating.

  There is little for us to do in winter. I often see Nettle studying our food store and then counting on her fingers the days until the middle of spring. Mad Helga seldom stirs from her trash heap of rags and bones by the fire, except to totter out to relieve herself. I go for long solitary walks, my wolfskin tight around my bony shoulders. I often wish Nettle woul
d join me, but I am too proud to ask her. From time to time, one of the villagers appears at our door, begging for a potion to cure a cough, a plaster for a phlegmy chest, or a poultice for chapped fingers and shins. Villagers shun us in health and fortune, but when they are weakened by disease or heartbreak, they come creeping to Nettle and her herbs.

  Many days I sit in front of the hut wrapped tightly in my wolfskin in the thin light of the afternoon trying to decipher words in my book. I do not ask Mad Helga to teach me Latin. I will request nothing from her except her help with the murder.

  Some days I sit in the pale dribbles of winter sunlight and let myself dream of revenge. I do not picture His dying, but I picture Him dead. I see myself towering over His lifeless body, a knife or torch or flask of poison in my hand and my face as serene and saintly as Judith’s when she hammered a spike into the head of her foe. Other times I amuse myself by picturing His face just before I kill Him, and in my mind I practice the words I will say. Perhaps Now the score is evened or Thus my promise is fulfilled. Sometimes I compose a long, lofty speech in which I make clear how He has wronged me, but at other times I imagine myself merely giving Him a long, cold, scornful look. A handful of times I imagine Him lying in a silent castle with all His servants dead around Him, and once I let myself envison the slut that He loved kneeling at His side, but this frightens me so much that I vow to imagine for Him a solitary death.

  In winter we do not glean the dead. We hear that this year there are battles all through the winter, but Nettle doubts this. “Most warriors,” she tells me, “go home for the harvest and stay snug at home through the spring planting. Then, in the late spring after Beltane, when they have naught to do at home, they grow restless and fight wars until harvest calls them home again.”

  Lent comes, the emptiest days of the year. Now we take care to avoid the villagers. In Lent, all but the invalids and babes eat only one meal a day. Hunger makes everyone spiteful.

  One frosty afternoon when the light is as thin as a graybeard’s spittle, I carry a basket of herbs over to the holy sisters at Cree. Fat Sister Grisel slips me two fresh-baked oatcakes and a warning to take special care. “Between this war and the hard winter, our country grows more dangerous. They say that even some of our good Scottish lords have turned traitor and now swear fealty to the kingfrom the north. I wonder at Nettle’s letting you come here alone. ’Tis not safe for a girl to go about on her own.”

  “I am not a girl,” I say, but I cannot tell whether the feeling in my heart is pride or sadness or both. “I am neither lass nor lad. I am a thing of the wood, and things of the wood have no sex at all.”

  Her mouth frowns, but her eyes are kind. “Remind Nettle that ’tis not safe for any of you to go about much until after Easter Sunday. Remind her that more people are hanged as witches during this season when folk are hungry and holy than at any other time of the year.”

  So like three angry mice corked in a bottle, we stay close to the hut.

  Although even I have grown tired of my demands, I do not stop.

  “When Lent is over, will you help me kill Him?”

  Nettle is sharpening our knife on a whetstone. As usual, she ignores me, but Mad Helga joins our conversation. Her tone is unusually sensible, even though her cupped right hand cradles the skeleton of the mouse she strokes with her gnarled left fingers.

  “And just how will we kill him, girl?”

  F I V E

  EAGERLY I TURN to Mad Helga. I have been thinking about this for a long time. “We can use magic—yours and Nettle’s—to kill Him. We will lay an enchantment on Him.”

  For a moment there is silence. I hear the hiss of the fire. Then Nettle begins to cackle wildly, rocking back and forth with cruel laughter. I want to put my hands over my ears to shut out that ugly, broken sound, but I don’t want to give Nettle the satisfaction of seeing how much her laughter hurts me.

  Mad Helga’s calm voice, however, cuts through Nettle’s jagged laughing.

  “And how, child, do we employ this magic?”

  “All I ask you to do is to cast a spell to bring about His death. A painful, lingering death.” I warm to my subject, delighted at last to be able to give details. “A death so horrible that it will be talked about for generations. A death—”

  Nettle slams the whetstone against the table. “You are almost a woman now, Gilly. Do not speak like a silly child. Surely we have had our fill of your foolishness, so—”

  “Nettle, I claim my due.”

  “Gilly, I have told you and told you, there was no prom—”

  “ ’Tis not fair!”

  “ ’Tis a foul thing to wish a man’s death, Gilly. Even if I wished—”

  “You gave me your word. Is your word of so little account?”

  “A promise to a child, my lass, is not a prom—”

  “Hsst!” There is a surprising edge of steel in Mad Helga’s voice, but her face looks as vacant as ever. “Gilly, the man you speak of, did he not save your life on the battlefield one morning during harvest time?”

  My face hardens. “No,” I say loudly. “He did not.”

  Nettle shrieks like a stoat with a foot caught by a trap. “Who lies now?” she says with a trill of triumph in her voice. “Whose words are now false? You twist-tongued prevaricator, did I not see with these very eyes that man you speak of save you from those three peasants—”

  “I did not ask Him to save me. Given enough time, I should have saved myself.” My breath quickens. “Anyway, it makes no difference. I have made my life an arrow, and He is my home. I have made my heart a dagger, and His heart is my—”

  Mad Helga says, “ ’Tis a serious business, child, to kill a man who saved you. Whether he saved you asked or saved you unasked, it matters not.”

  “Mad Helga,” I say, “should He save the entire world, it makes not a whit of difference to me. Should He save God and Jesus and the whole stable of shining saints, I will kill Him. With your aid or without it.”

  Nettle shrugs. “I do not like such foolish prattle. We will do naught to aid your foolish plan.”

  “Then I will kill Him myself. I will find Him, and I will—”

  Nettle’s cackle cuts off my words. “Just dance up to him and say, ‘God save the mark, sire, and begging your pardon, but I have come to kill you, so if you will kindly take off your shirt of mail, I shall—’ ”

  “Do not laugh at me!” Oh, to be Samson and be able to pull thepoles of this hut down, burying Nettle and her mockery in the rubble.

  Mad Helga holds up her hands. The skeleton of the mouse, unheeded, tumbles to the hearth. The tiny bones scatter. “We cannot cast a spell, child, unless we have aught of our victim.”

  All at once, my heart jigs with joy. At last my revenge begins to take real shape. “What do we need? Things like bits of His hair and fingernail parings? Threads of His clothes and—”

  Mad Helga ignores my words. “If you desire his doom, lass, ’twill not be a free gift. Doom is costly, more costly than love.”

  “I have given you seven years of service.”

  Mad Helga snorts in seeming disgust. “Seven years of service is a mere trifle. Less than a trifle. Doom demands heart, hands, and blood. At most seven years of service buys your right to ask to buy the spell. It does not buy the spell itself.”

  Nettle shoots an angry look at Mad Helga. “Old woman,” she says, “shut your mouth. Your wits are as scattered as those silly bones on the hearth stones. We’ll have no more of this foolish talk.”

  “ ’Tis not foolish talk,” I say. “I do God’s work, Nettle.”

  She quickly makes the sign of the cross. “Hush! We’ll have no blaspheming here, girl. Do not try to hide your selfish desires under the cloak of our Lord. To cure your own flea bite, you want to burn down a hut. Can you not see your own madness?”

  “ ’Tis but justice I seek. With all your second sight, can you not see that? Did He not slaughter all my family, all those I loved?”

  “All save o
ne, Gilly.”

  “And that one is just as dead to me.” How dare Nettle try to stop me? “Nettle, I will kill you rather than let you stop me now.” I feel a quiver of fear because I may be speaking the truth. Out of the pouch at my side, I pull the broken dagger from the battlefield. “I will stab you in the heart with this dagger, Nettle, rather than abandon my plan.”

  Nettle studies me for a moment, her mouth tight and hard. I hear the sputter of the fire and Nettle’s angry breathing. Then abranch in the fire snaps. Nettle stands. “So you would use that bit of blade that butchered your hair to kill the woman who raised you?” Her voice shakes. “Please yourself, then. Both of you. Mad old woman and mad, mad child. I shall not be part of this dangerous folly.” She walks to the door. Her stride is unsteady. “I shall go out for a bit, and when I return, I will hear no more of this mad talk.” She fumbles her cloak off its peg and wraps it around her knobby shoulders.

  She turns back to glare at me. “But before I go, Gilly, I give you two warnings. Heed them well. First, know that ’tis easier than anything—easier than breathing, easier even than death—to find that you yourself have become the very thing you hate most. It happens quicker than a body can reckon.” She closes her eyes briefly, as if she feels a twinge of pain, and then opens them. Her eyes look sad. “And second, child, as you well know, against my will, I have the gift of second sight. So I warn you both now, no good will come of this plan. The doom in the plan is not for him alone. That doom will also find us out and bring death to our very door.”

  Then she stalks out of the hut, her skirts twitching like the fur on an angry cat.

  S I X

  NETTLE HATES THE WOOD at night. She must be angry indeed to seek out peace in the wild wood. Although I will not admit it, Nettle’s words frighten me. She does indeed have second sight. Am I willing to doom all of us just to pull Him down? I push that thought away as firmly as a mother would push away a babe with sticky hands. I cannot afford to think these things. If I soften, I am lost. A tree must not yearn to become a feather, nor can a stone afford to long to become a bubble. I am not a girl but a thing, a thing made only of revenge, hate, and a fierce, wild will. My hunger for blood will burn out any thread of softness in my soul. If doom were to walk, it would wear my face. Doom will not find me. I myself am doom.