by Sam Austin
The witch looks up, her mismatched eyes widening. The blood covered sword raises threateningly over her head as she steps away from the wall. “You stay away from him. Don’t you touch him!”
A figure drops from the roof, barrelling into the witch’s legs and knocking her to the ground. The sword flies from her grip and smacks against the large stones of the wall. A heartbeat later the figure - Ness - is on his feet. Grabbing Neven around the middle, he somehow manages to limp his way backward into the shadows of the barracks. Neven fights all the way, legs pinwheeling in the air. The machine slips onto the grass, its whirring fading to silence.
Timon stands near Alice, pudgy toddler hands clenched together, obviously fighting the urge to cling to the girl. Alice looks about her, eyes rolling in fear. Then she moves, hopping over the prone witch to grab the sword.
Boone moves. Jumping over the witch, she tackles the girl.
A sharp elbow connects with Boone’s stomach, surprising her into loosening her grip. Alice scrambles out from underneath her, breath coming in quick gasps. The princess grasps the fallen sword, her attention fixed on the hole Neven made in the wall.
The girl’s determined, but Boone has more than enough history of her own of being stubborn. She lunges forward before the girl can get too far, reaching under the hem of the dress to grasp an ankle.
Alice yelps and falls back to the grass. The princess leans around, sword held tight like she’s thinking of using it. Then the arm wilts, her shoulders slump. She may be determined, but she doesn’t want a fight.
Boone doesn’t want one either.
Fire erupts in her left leg. It hurts as bad as when the lost one put his sword through her shoulder. Only that was spine chilling cold. This is searing heat that stabs all the way down to the bone, scraping against it in a way that makes every bone in her body quiver in horror.
Alice moves backward, the ankle slipping from Boone’s grip. The princess’s rosy cheeks stand out against her pale face, clear enough to be seen even in the soft light that reaches behind the armoury. Her green eyes take on the dark tone her father’s do when he talks of serious matters. She’s saying something - yelling it. Boone can’t make out the words.
She glances back in what feels like slow motion. Taking in the witch’s furious face. Her withered hand gripping the hilt of the knife sticking out from her leg, just below the knee. It’s Boone’s knife. The one she wears on her belt.
Julius was right, she thinks disjointedly. Her awareness of her surroundings is terrible. She needs to work on that.
She turns her eyes back to Alice, only to see the girl grasping the sword again, her attention on the wall. The girl’s bottom lip quivers.
The velvet dress strokes against her hand as the princess moves away. No!
Boone grabs the hem blindly. Her good hand falters, its grip too weak. But the dead hand, that closes around the thick velvet, like a vice.
“Let go, boy!” That she hears. The wavering voice is punctuated by a tearing feeling and a new wave of agony blazing up her leg.
She grits her teeth, and tells the numb hand not to let go.
Alice uses her sleeve to tug at her fingers, trying to dislodge them. Fat tears gather at the girl’s chin, dripping onto Boone’s face. Alice’s lips move rapidly, but Boone’s ears only make out the odd word here and there. ‘Crystals’ and ‘right thing.’
Timon nervously kneels by Alice’s side, trying to take the sword. His fingers drift through the metal, no matter how much his brow furrows in concentration. He’s not the same boy they met in that shed. Somehow she knew that. He’s changed.
The pressure leaves her leg, and while the pain stays, the relief is enough to take a much needed breath. The air tastes horrible - of panic and fear. She gulps it down greedily. The alley lightens as her head clears. Dawn is on its way.
The barbarians will lose stealth as the light grows, but the battle will be just as bloody. How could it not? Men of the circle will fight until their last breaths, more to spare their honour than their women, though they’ll fight for them too. Her father said men of the north were fierce warriors. The circle call them cowardly savages. Whatever the truth, once they’re inside they’ll fight to their last breaths too. Trapped, it’s their only chance of survival. The circle doesn’t take prisoners.
There’s no choice. She can’t let them in.
A shuffling sound behind her. A groan. It takes her too long to piece together what it means. The witch - Claudia - is getting up. She’s changed too. She’s weaker. But she thinks the woman will have strength enough for this.
Boone pulls at the dress, trying to put Alice off balance. The girl wavers, half crouching.
She swings for the sword with her good arm. The movement sets off fireworks behind her eyes. She misses.
The witch stumbles to her feet, takes the sword from Alice’s hand. The girl sinks to the ground, continuing to weep.
The witch walks to the wall on slow arthritic limbs Boone would be able to outrun on any other day. If she had her sword the woman wouldn’t have gotten far. Boone might baulk at hurting Alice, but she’d chop the legs off the witch without hesitation. But she’d dropped the sword before tackling Alice, and it’s somewhere to the right, out of reach.
There’s nothing to do - except…
Every twitch sends those fireworks exploding inside her skull. And if this is going to work, it’s going to need a lot more than a few twitches. Gritting her teeth, she pushes herself to her hands and knees. Pain flares. Blackness threatens to crush her.
She can do this. She has to do this.
Inch by inch, she drags her leg forward along the grass. A sickly spinning connects her head and stomach, making it seem as if the two are doing some kind of dance inside her, swapping places and twirling each-other around like some enthusiastic pair of newlyweds. Reaching back, she grasps the hilt of the knife with her dead hand. That hand won’t hesitate. It will do as she tells it to, without giving her time to change her mind.
The witch reaches the wall.
Boone pulls. The knife comes out with a slick ripping sound. Bright white blinds her, turning her whole body as numb as her arm. The pain is visceral, cutting through every part of her. She gags.
Her body keeps moving.
The dead hand transfers the knife to the feeling hand. It must be quicker than she thinks, because Alice has no time to react before she levers her weight on her dead arm, leans back and lets the knife fly.
It sticks right between the old woman’s shoulder blades.
An eternity passes in a second. The witch stops, looks back at her surprised, then collapses to her knees. Timon starts screaming ‘Mama’ ‘Mama’ over and over again in his wailing baby voice. Alice’s face turns shocked, then angry.
“What did you do?!” She screams, not hiding any of the fire in her words. Slamming a hand down on the ground next to Boone’s face, the princess gets to her feet.
This time there’s no energy left to stop her.
Boone collapses onto her forearms, head barely staying upright. Her head swims as she tries to think of a solution. Think. She has to think. No knives to throw, not even a stone. Timon’s frantic pleas drill into her brain like Neven drilled into the wall.
Her leg hurts. She wants her father.
The old woman gets to her feet. Alice rushes to steady her. The knife juts out. The material below it is stained dark with blood.
She did that. And she has to do more if she wants to stop the barbarians. Ness is gone. There’s no one else.
Except there is - and she bets he’s listening.
“Gelert.” Her voice is weak. Dropping the rest of the way to the ground, she concentrates on summoning more air into her lungs. “Gelert. Gelert!”
“Stop it!” Alice snaps. “He can’t get in here. He can’t stop this.”
A horn blares. The sound of an attack.
“No he can’t,” comes a voice from above. “But he does have friends who can. Step away
from the wall before I put an arrow in your head.”
Julius stands tall on the roof of the barracks. Above his head a deep red flare lights up the pale sky. It gives his lithe figure an eerie look. With his long hair and the large bow in his hands, he looks more barbarian than the barbarians themselves.
The witch hisses, lifts the sword to the hole.
“I think not Claudia.” The sword shoots from her hands, burying deep in the soil several feet away.
Boone can’t find the energy to lift her head from the cool grass, but she knows that voice. The King.
“Did you really think I won’t notice when my own daughter disappears from her chambers?” King Robin says in a scornful tone. “You should know better than that dear Claudia.”
The witch turns around to face him, leaning heavily on the frozen Alice. “That’s your view of women in a nutshell, isn’t it Robin? You think you care for them, but you don’t trust them.”
“And tell me what you’ve ever done to change that view?”
The witch scowls. There’s something not right about the illusion of the head druid’s face over hers. A shine travels down the fake cheek, disappearing and reappearing. It hesitates in mid-air somewhere below the fake head, then falls to the grass. Another follows it. Tears. “Tell me what you’ve done to let me?”
“You tried to kill my daughter.”
“You killed my son!”
Timon looks back and forth between them, wide eyes staring out of a toddler’s face. He huddles as close to his mother as he can without touching her.
“If I’d known you were going to bring him back, I’d have overseen the execution myself instead of ordering it.”
Claudia half slumps against the wall, unable to hold herself up even with Alice’s help. “He did nothing wrong. All he did was help. The girl was dying.”
“He broke the rules.” The King steps forward, until Boone can feel his presence beside her. “By doing so he condemned her baby to live with the mark of magic. Something that infected their line for generations.”
“And they lived for generations because of him.” She juts out her chin defiantly. “I’m proud of my boy.”
“Good.” The air takes on a tang, like the taste you get in your mouth before a lightning storm. “Maybe that’ll make it easier to say goodbye.”
The witch screams out ‘no’ at the same time as the princess. Behind them the dead boy shakes as his skin - or what passes as skin - lights up with symbols. Blue, white, gold, red. Every layer is etched in careful patterns, like the lines of the witch’s carvings. They remind her of butterfly wings, delicate flowers, the dress her mother had worked on for three straight nights and days, that she’d ripped tripping over a rock.
A few of the layers of symbols are smeared and cracked, like pottery left to dry too long. But the rest are perfect, glowing with love.
Then they’re gone. And with them, Timon is too.
A small patch of mist stands where he was, before it drifts through the wall, fading as it goes.
The witch - Claudia - falls to her knees and weeps. The head druid’s illusion shatters, leaving a broken old woman. She doesn’t seem to notice the knife still in her back. The pain inside her looks like it hurts a lot more.
“How could you!” Alice screams at her father. Her face is red and tear streaked, but her eyes are steel. “He was just a boy! Couldn’t you have shown some mercy?”
The King’s voice is calm. “Mercy is a weakness I can’t afford. Not if I’m to keep you safe.”
Chapter 30
They lead the witch out to the courtyard where they’d tried to burn her and Neven.
The head druid - the real one - heals her leg as she watches. It’s quick, but it uses up most of the rest of the red crystal Neven had used to drill into the wall. By the time he’s finished it gleams a pale pink.
They’d found the druid down in the cellars, wrapped in vines. He’s a little fuzzy on when he went down there, or who did it, but he thinks it was shortly after the battle. That would make sense. A lot of wounded had been brought in, as well as women and children. It would’ve been simple work to slip in amongst them.
Harder to explain is what he was doing down in the cellars in the first place. Or where the plants came from. The plants that exist nowhere else but Alice’s chambers.
Alice stands stiffly next to Julius, who from his watchful eye seems to be on some kind of guard duty. Neven joins not long after, standing the other side of her.
With the barbarians dispersed, the soldiers make up a big crowd. They form a circle a respectful distance from the King and few others in the inner circle. They jeer insults as the witch is secured to the prepared fire, but fall quickly into silence as the King walks forward and speaks softly with the woman.
Boone can’t make out the words, but from the way Claudia spits in the man’s face, they aren’t well received.
Cries of outrage start up as the King walks away, wiping his cheek. So it’s only with luck that she makes out his words as he passes her. “She wishes to speak with you.”
“Me?” Boone spins around, the leg supporting her with ease. But he’s gone, walking to the palace with the pig farmer trotting beside him.
“Last words are important,” the head druid says, not looking in her eyes. A bandage covers half his head. It’s curious that he heals her with such ease, and doesn’t tend to himself. With difficulty he lowers himself to the bench. “Be kind to her.”
It’s a strange thing to say about someone who had conspired to drug you for days. Shaking off her unease, she walks across the cobbled courtyard, past the stacks where practice swords are placed. It’s odd standing below the mound of wood, looking up at the witch. It makes her feel small.
Claudia leans forward, straining against her bonds. “You hate me, don’t you?”
“I don’t know you enough to hate you.” She keeps her voice low, just loud enough for the woman to hear. The crowd is a distance away and talking amongst themselves, but Alice, Neven, and Julius aren’t as far. She’s not sure why it’s important no one else hear, except she feels she owes this woman some kind of privacy in her last moments.
If these are her last moments. She is a witch. Boone wouldn’t put it past her to escape.
“That’s never stopped anyone before,” Claudia says. “It didn’t stop me trying to hurt Alice. And it didn’t stop me hurting you.”
Her shoulder. The arm is already starting to lose some of its function. The energy from the plant is almost gone. “My arm. How do I fix it?”
She looks down at her sadly, like a mother to a child. “You don’t child. Or if you do, I don’t know how. It was an action of hate. One I’m sorry for now. Hate is such a horrible thing. It damages so easily. Just like any other part of life, the consequences of a hateful action are easier made than reversed. Magic has limits. No, I’m afraid that arm is a part of you now.”
Boone shakes her head. “I don’t want it. It’s evil - nothing but a weapon.”
“I thought boys such as yourself liked weapons?”
“Not this kind.” Boone turns her thoughts over in her head. Gelert may be useful, but after this war he’d be considered monstrous. Sooner if the spell on him breaks. It’s the same with her arm. “A sword can be used to kill or protect. This arm does nothing but take. There’s nothing good in it.”
“I don’t know.” Claudia turns her weathered face to one side. “There’s a little good in most things. Very rarely do you come across something that’s all good or all bad.”
“Is that what this is?” Boone frowns up at the woman. “You trying to convince me you aren’t all bad?”
“I’m saying maybe you should look closer at this King you’re protecting.”
The idea is a strange one. King Robin had protected the circle for hundreds of years before she’d been born. Everyone says he’s kind and fair. To even think otherwise feels like going against the Gods, or saying the ancestors don’t provide luck and protecti
on. But he had sent those soldiers to her house. Soldiers who attacked her father.
Boone makes her voice go cold. “Are those your last words?”
“My last words are these: I’m sorry I blamed that girl for the sins of her father. If I hadn’t been so blinded by revenge, Timon wouldn’t have gotten hurt. I wouldn’t have used up so much magic. And maybe he wouldn’t have…” She bows her head, wispy white hair blows over her face. Pain makes her look older than all her thousand years.
Boone steps back, meaning to walk away. Something stops her. One last question. “When will the spell on Gelert break?”
“Gelert?”
“My dragon.” Boone tries not to let her tension show. This is the thing that will determine everything. If the spell breaks soon then she might have no other choice than to kill him. Even if the thought of putting a sword through his throat makes her feel as if someone has put a sword through her own.
Claudia shakes her head not comprehending. “I placed no spells on any dragons. Look to the barbarians for that.”
Boone covers up her disappointment with a curt nod. She doesn’t sense that the woman is lying. So it’s likely she had nothing to do with the golden dragon either. She turns to walk away.
“But if you want to know about spells to do with dragons, ask the King,” the woman calls after her. “Or rather, ask the King about his dear mother.”
Boone halts, about to walk back and ask what she meant. Before she can, Angus steps in front of her with a torch. He lights the bottom of the pile of wood to the crowd’s cheers. His face stays grim.
Boone returns to her bench to find the head druid gone. She chooses to stand, waiting grimly as the flames lick their way up the wood pile, growing bigger with each gathered inch. She’s seen what magic this woman can do. There’s no way she won’t think of a way to escape. She has another eye to trade if need be. Something as simple as fire and a few ropes won’t best her.
A hand on the hilt of her sword, Boone waits for Claudia to escape.
And waits. And waits. And waits…
***