Come Hell or High Water: The Complete Trilogy

by Stephen Morris

  “There is nothing I can do to counteract the effect of Susanna’s cake,” she repeated to herself. Then a new idea occurred to her, the first since hearing of the betrothal. “If I cannot undo the effect of Susanna’s cake on David, perhaps there is something I can do to Susanna that will open his eyes and make him realize that their betrothal is a mistake.” But what? What could she do to help David see the truth about Susanna?

  After supper, she stayed behind to help Michael after David and Susanna had left the kitchen. She cleared her throat and nervously asked, “Michael, I need advice and I don’t know who to ask.”

  Michael stirred the stew in the great kettle that hung over the fire. Without looking at her, he replied gruffly, “What advice do you need?” He tasted a drop of the stew and stirred again.

  “A friend is about to make a terrible mistake. I need him to see the truth about someone. Before it is too late,” Ivana explained.

  Michael glanced at her as she stood by the table, nervously playing with the ties of her apron.

  “See the truth before it is too late?” the cook repeated. “Does this have anything to do with the news I heard this morning about someone’s betrothal?”

  Ivana did not answer but felt her cheeks blush.

  Michael nodded and wiped his hands on his apron. “They say that there are women to be found at the bathhouse at midnight who know about that sort of thing.”

  Ivana wandered out of the kitchen. Go to the bathhouse at midnight? Would these women be witches, like the one that German priest had burned at the stake last September?

  “I hope not!” she muttered, climbing the stairs to her room. “But who else would gather at the bathhouse in the middle of the night?” Susanna had not used witchcraft, only exploited the natural properties of menstrual blood. Her sin lay in stealing David from Ivana. “She used no witchcraft and neither will I!” Ivana promised herself. She just needed to know which things to exploit. There would be no sin in that.

  Ivana heard the gentle breathing of Susanna in the bed across the small room. The singing and laughter from the common room downstairs had faded some time ago and only the occasional creak of floorboards or groan from the joists could be heard. She had gone to bed as usual, not wanting to give Susanna any reason for suspicion that her deceit of David was about to be exposed.

  Ivana slipped from under the coverlet and out the door, hoping against hope that neither the hinges would squeal nor the floor groan overloudly and betray her. She moved cautiously down the stairs, pausing as her eyes adjusted to the dark and wanting to make as little noise as possible.

  Finally, she stood before the inn’s door, which she knew would be locked. “But Jan always keeps one key with him and hides another one here,” Ivana muttered, reaching behind a shelf and into the small niche hidden behind a statue of St. Raphael the Archangel, one of the patrons of travelers. Her fingers searched in the dark. The statue moved slightly and Ivana caught her breath, afraid that it might topple over and smash on the floor. It stayed still and her fingers closed around the key. She pulled her hand out of the niche and, with her other hand, searched for the keyhole in the dark.

  The door, its hinges well oiled, opened quietly and Ivana stepped out. She had thrown a cloak over her nightshift and the inn had not been warm, but the sudden cold of the outdoors pierced her joints. Shivering, she locked the door behind her so as to not leave the inn vulnerable to thieves and slipped the key into a pocket of her night clothes.

  “Ouch!” she hissed. She had taken the precaution earlier of slipping not only a coin from her purse but also a small knife from the kitchen into her pocket and then moving it from her apron to her nightshift, but in her efforts to be quiet, she had forgotten to put on her shoes. The flagstones beneath her were bitter cold, ice having formed where the snow had been trampled earlier. “Do I go back for shoes?” she debated. “That would only delay the business longer and make more opportunities for discovery,” she decided. Bracing herself, she stepped into the dark.

  Luckily, there was a moon to light her way and she skipped along as quickly as she could, wanting to minimize the contact between her feet and the ground. Were any thieves lurking in the shadows? She stopped once or twice, startled by noises that seemed loud and threatening but which she quickly realized were only the scuffling of rats, mice or the occasional dog or cat. There seemed to be no other humans out that night. She held onto the knife with one hand, nevertheless, and clutched her cloak about her. The gentle breeze that sighed along the streets brought odors with it, some of which she recognized as either the stench from the latrines behind the houses or the gently burning fires on the hearths. An occasional wisp of smoke curled up from a chimney or two and light from a candle stole from under one set of closed shutters.

  The streets, so familiar to her in the daylight or dusk, seemed foreign at midnight. Buildings loomed and corners looked confusingly similar. She retraced her steps once, realizing that she was headed down the wrong street. Her feet began to ache from the cold. Finally, she stood before the bathhouse.

  “Are the doors locked?” she wondered. “Should I knock? Or will the women Michael spoke of be hiding around the corner or behind the bathhouse?” She stood altogether still, waiting for some small noise to give her a clue as to what to do next. The street she stood on seemed eerily quiet. It was quieter here than on any other street she had walked on to get here. “Will there even be anyone here?” she wondered. “Did Michael make it all up about the old women? Or is it too cold and they’ve all gone home already?” Was this midnight adventure all for naught? She wiped her nose with the back of her hand and then rapped her knuckles against the bathhouse door as loudly as she dared. No answer. She flattened her palms against the rough-hewn door and pushed gently.

  Unexpectedly, it yielded slightly to her touch. She pushed harder and the door swung open, revealing nothing but darkness within. She stepped into the door frame and peered into the cavernous shadows, her body in the door blocking whatever light could have pierced the interior.

  Then she saw a pinpoint of light across the bathhouse. She knew that the three pools lay between her and the flickering point of light from what must have been a single candle across the bathhouse. Her heart fluttered. Someone was here! Her escapade was not in vain!

  She tried to speak, but the words caught in her throat. She swallowed and tried again, croaking out a hoarse and tentative hello.

  “Come in, dear child, come in,” an equally hoarse voice whispered in response. “Come in and speak with us.” A rustle of movement caught Ivana’s attention and other voices seemed to murmur in agreement.

  “How— how many are you?” she stammered.

  One of the women laughed, the cackle sounding thunderous in the night. “She’s scared of us, she is,” one said. “Thinks we might boil her alive.”

  “Or take her heart out, she does,” another chuckled.

  It did seem dangerous, Ivana realized. To enter the bathhouse at night, talking to strangers who, even if they were—admittedly, old—women, could be thieves. Or worse.

  “I have a knife,” she warned.

  “Oh, she has a knife, she does,” cackled the more sarcastic voice. Ivana did not move.

  The first voice spoke again. “There’s only three of us, child. Three old women here in the dark, and you with a knife. We have more reason to fear a young thing like you than you have to fear old crones like us.” There was a chuckle but there was no mockery in this laughter. Ivana stepped into the bathhouse and the door slowly swung shut behind her.

  “Look at the candle,” the voice urged her. “Look at the candle and be careful of the pools. Walk along the edge of the bathhouse and come see us, dear child.”

  She could only see the single point of light in the otherwise total darkness. Reaching out, she could not even see her hand in front of her but she found the wall and slid her hand along it to reach the other side. Guided by her hand and the flickering candle, Ivana slowly made her way t
owards the voices. After what seemed an eternity, she arrived.

  Her eyes having finally adjusted to the dim light, she saw them. Three old women huddled around a single candle on the floor. Only their faces were clearly illuminated, the rest of them swallowed by inky blackness. They were indeed old, older than any women Ivana could remember ever seeing. Gap-toothed, one of them looked as if she were blind in one eye, a milky white cataract covering it. The skin hung in deep folds and wrinkles around their throats and under their eyes. One wore a kerchief over her fly-away white hair while another let her gray-white hair stream around her face, the candlelight illuminating it creating the effect of a halo. The knotted locks of the third tumbled around her shoulders, which seemed covered by a ragged shawl. Anything else about them was impossible to discern. Ivana knelt to speak with them more easily, bringing her face into the candlelight and level with theirs.

  The one with a blind eye jabbed her elbow at her neighbor, the one with the seeming halo. “Wants something from us, does she, you think?” the hag giggled.

  Ivana swallowed hard. “I need your advice,” she whispered. “I was told that the women at the bathhouse at midnight would know what to do.”

  “Ah,” the one in the center with the halo, the apparent leader of the three, nodded. “Not many would remember how and when or where to find us.” She sighed.

  “Especially not since September!” snapped the one beside her with the cascading hair and the shawl. “Not since what they did to Fen’ka!”

  “No,” agreed the first. “Especially not since what they did to Fen’ka.”

  “We are only lucky that they haven’t come for us!”

  “Lucky? Luck has nothing to do with it!” chimed in the one with a cataract, spitting at the candle. She turned to Ivana. “But someone was brave enough to tell you how to find us. What advice do you come searching for?”

  “I need your assistance,” she answered, growing more confident that the old women would be willing to assist her. “The apprentice I had hoped to marry has been tricked by another into asking her father to betroth them. How can I make him realize that he has been duped, that this girl has lied to him and tricked him and that marriage to her—rather than me—is a mistake?”

  The three women looked at each other, smiles blooming across their ancient faces, and then they burst into whoops of laughter.

  “Tricked him, the other girl has?”

  “Lied to him, she did!”

  “All to marry her rather than you?”

  “Needs to see his mistake he does, and soon!”

  Ivana was mortified at being the butt of the old ladies’ joke. Their hilarity cut almost as deeply as the news of Susanna’s betrothal. “I thought you would help me!” she exclaimed. “Not laugh at me!” Tears sprang again to her eyes.

  “Ach, look at what you’ve done!” the leader reprimanded the half-blind one with the kerchief. “Made her cry, you did.”

  “Me?” demanded the half-blind crone, leaning forward into the light. “You laughed as well as me!”

  “Nevertheless, the dear child came to us for help, she did,” insisted the crone in the center, turning from one to the other of her companions.

  “Well, does she have a coin?” asked the third, twisting around to leer at Ivana. “No advice comes free, child.”

  Ivana removed the coin from her pocket and offered it to the woman, who seized it so quickly that Ivana was startled. The hag peered at the coin in the candlelight, bit it to determine its authenticity, and then peered at it again. She passed it to the woman in the center, who held it flat in her palm. The one-eyed hag leaned over, too, squinting her good eye and putting her face so far down into the other’s palm that Ivana was afraid the coin would stick to her eye when she finally sat back.

  “Not enough!” the one-eyed woman snapped.

  “Not enough?” the one who had seized the coin hissed. “It is more than we have seen in these many days!”

  “Not enough!” insisted the one-eyed one.

  “It is enough,” decreed the one who still held the coin. She reached somewhere under her garments and deposited the coin, withdrawing her now empty claw of a hand.

  “Now, child, what advice did you come asking for?” she repeated.

  “She wants to know how to make her young gentleman see the truth of someone!” barked the furious harpy to her right.

  The central granddam nodded in agreement. “Ah, yes. To see the truth of another.”

  “You could whistle through the keyhole of a church door,” suggested the hag on the left, nodding her head vigorously and smacking her lips.

  “No!” exclaimed Ivana in shock. “That is witchcraft! It calls the devil! That is a sin. I do not wish to conjure a devil or work black magic with demons! I simply want to know how best to show Da— ah, show him the error of trusting this person.”

  “Now, child,” soothed the middle one, reaching across the pool of light to stroke Ivana’s hand. “Calm yourself. No one is suggesting you work witchcraft on your young gentleman or call a devil to aid you.” She glared sharply at the one who had spoken, whose face was now turned toward the ceiling and seemed to study a beam intently.

  “I know,” said the shrew on the right. “I know the thing you need.” She squirmed about on her haunches, reaching into folds and pockets of whatever she was wearing. At last she pulled out a thin glass bottle, stopped with a cork. “These will show the truth to anyone who looks to see.” She held her treasure up in the light. The other two looked at the jar and then nodded slowly.

  “Yes, these will strip away all the lies and pretense of a man,” the central crone agreed. “Or a woman,” she hastily added. “Only the most fundamental truth of a person can then be seen.”

  Ivana leaned closer to the jar, and the crone who held it brought it closer to Ivana’s face. The small bottle was full of small seeds.

  “What are these?” asked Ivana. “They are so tiny and delicate.”

  “They come from a plant that grows near the river,” the crone told her.

  “Where the gypsies camp each summer,” continued the crone across from her. “The gypsies collect the seeds and dry them, giving some to us and keeping the rest.”

  “As you can see, child,” added the leading crone, “it is no easy task to collect seeds as small and easily blown away as these. We are too old to collect seeds such as these anymore and the gypsies are kind enough to do us that favor. It seems only right to share the fruits of their labor with them.”

  The one-eyed hag spat into the darkness beside her.

  “What do I do with these?” asked Ivana, slowly extending her palm toward the bottle. “How do they work?’

  The bottle remained in the crone’s hand. “It only takes a few of the seeds,” she instructed Ivana. “Only a few. Slip them into food to be eaten or wine or ale to be drunk. Whoever eats or drinks these seeds will find it impossible to conceal the truth about themselves.”

  “They will be unable to lie,” explained the crone on the left, seeing Ivana’s confused expression.

  “They can ever lie again,” reiterated the crone in the middle, nodding at Ivana. “Is that what you want, yes? Are you certain, child?”

  Ivana saw the seeds in the bottle in the candlelight. The hag turned the bottle up and around, this way and that. The seeds slid and fell against each other. Did she want Susanna to tell the truth? Of course! Did she want Susanna to be unable to ever lie again? Certainly!

  “Yes.” Ivana said the single word, quietly and definitively. She had never wanted anything else more. She reached for the bottle.

  The crone snatched it away. “These are more than you could ever need,” she hissed. “Greedy, greedy child. Wanting more than she needs and taking from others who might need such advice.” She hunched and contorted her torso, hiding the seeds from Ivana’s sight.

  “Oh, please!” Ivana cried with disappointment. “Just a few, then. Let me take just a few of them, please!”

 
The central crone across from Ivana bent her head towards the one concealing the seeds. “Give them to the child,” she commanded. The crone on her other side found another small bottle somewhere in the dark and handed it to the central hag, who opened it and held it in the light of the now much-shorter candle. The harpy clutching the seeds in her claw-like hands grimaced, refusing to move. Then she whipped out the bottle of seeds and poured a third of them into the new bottle. Ivana was startled that not a single seed seemed to miss the opening of the new bottle. The original bottle was returned to wherever the crone had first retrieved it from. The third crone ran her palms along the floor on either side of her. Ivana could hear bottles and boxes clinking against each other.

  “Ah!” the crone exclaimed in triumph, holding a cork aloft. She handed it to the crone holding the bottle of seeds for Ivana, who took it and inserted it into the bottle’s opening.

  “Use these with care, child.” The hag handed the bottle to Ivana, who snatched it and hid it in her pocket before they could change their minds. She attempted to stand and discovered that her legs had gone numb as she had squatted with the women.

  “Go, child,” urged the one who had found the bottle and cork. “Go to your friends and give them the seeds that will stop their lies. Let the world see the truth of them. But once the truth is shown, it can never be undone. Remember that, child. It can never be retracted.”

  Ivana nodded and pushed herself up from the floor. “Thank you,” she said with a sigh. “Thank you very much. I am forever grateful to you.” She reached out to find the wall behind her and moved quickly back across the bathhouse toward the door.

  “Forever grateful?” The one-eyed crone chuckled from across the dark bathhouse. “That I wonder.” All three burst into a cacophony of whoops and howls. Ivana found the handle to the door and slipped into the night air.