Finally growing tired of the tug of war, the warrior holding onto the squash gave a twist of his hands with the full strength of his body behind it and the squash exploded into a spray of vegetable flesh and seeds. The distraught farmwife was left holding the stem and several inches of cracked and nearly smashed remnants, causing the farmer to wince.
“Now you’ve gone and done it,” he complained.
“Bah,” shrieked the farm wife, “what you can’t take, you destroy!”
“Calm yourself, good woman,” Falon warned the other woman sternly.
“Left the whole family—including babes in arms—they did,” the woman raged, starting to froth at the mouth.
The farmer shook his head and explained, “When she was a still a child, some lord marched his army through their village. Took the food from their farm and left them a chit. Her mother and two sisters died of hunger,” the Farmer said, looking decidedly unhappy.
“Control your wife or else I can’t be held responsible for what we’ll have to do to stop her,” Falon said, feeling a twinge of sympathy for the woman.
“I’m afraid she insulted a witch when she was a teen and she was cursed to have no sense of fear. At this point, you’ll have to beat her unconscious if you want to stop her,” advised the farmer as the woman scrambled backward and then ran into the barn like her skirt was on fire.
Falon glared at him, highly offended at his apparent attitude towards women.
“What kind of man advises strangers to beat his wife until she passes out?” she demanded furiously. “And can’t you see that she’s even now running away because she’s afraid of what we’ll do to her?!”
“Uh…one who wants to see her keep breathing,” the farmer said, looking at Falon like she had to be the stupidest creature that walked the gods-green earth, “and I’m pretty sure she’s not running away; she probably just went to get the axe, seeing as how there are so many of you. I wouldn’t care, really, except my brother asked me to take care of her right before he died, so I married his widow. Other men might try to take a mistress but, with the fearlessness curse, she’d likely kill any other woman who tried to take up with me. And, like I said, I promised my brother I’d look after her so—”
The farmer’s rambling diatribe about his marital woes and wife’s peculiarities was cut off by a feminine war cry as the irate farm wife came charging out of the barn with a wood-chopping axe held high over her head.
“You won’t take the food out of the mouths of my babies!” she screamed.
“Earth and Field; she’s got an axe!” shouted one of new recruits as the whole lot of them scattered away from the mad woman like a swarm of field mice before a cat.
“I warned ya! Don’t say I didn’t warn ya. She’s cursed, I say,” chortled the Farmer as he took a judicious pair of steps away from the rampaging woman, “you’ve got to beat her down unless you’re looking to kill her outright.”
“What kind of man do you call yourself?” Falon cried, and then had to duck as the mad woman started swinging wildly in her direction.
“I’ll kill you! You child-murdering, food-robbing plague of locusts,” shrieked the farm wife.
“Talk her down before I have to do something we’ll both regret,” Falon shouted, diving away from the mad woman and unsheathing her weapon.
“I told you what to do already but you didn’t listen to me—just like she won’t listen to a thing I tell her. She’s cursed, plain and simple,” retorted the Farmer, “in the beginning I thought I could reason with her, and that lasted until she took a hunk of wood and started hitting me with it until she knocked me out. Broke three bones and was laid up for three weeks, I was. The kids nearly had a conniption. After that, I learned there’s only one way to stop her. But since you lot seem to know better than her own husband…”
Clearly, the husband of this match made in the underworld wasn’t going to be of any help. Silently cursing all redneck, wife-beating lowlifes for the scum they self-evidently were, Falon leveled her sword at the mad woman. Probably driven mad by a hard childhood and an abusive husband, Falon felt a lot of sympathy for her even now—which is why she decided to end this quickly and without bloodshed, if possible.
“For a Swan!” Falon cried, raising her sword and jumping forward. Sword met axe and the two went into a bind. “Calm down, goodwife!” she shouted, pushing the other woman back.
“No—you have to do it quick,” the Farmer said with alarm, “one quick right hook to the jaw will knock her out—do it now or she’ll just be harder to deal with. She’s weak in the jaw, I tell you, but has thews like iron if you get her blood up.”
“Someone shut up that wife-beater before I silence him…permanently,” Falon grunted as the mad woman came at her again.
“Ye think I fear ya?” screamed the farmwife. “I fear no man. No man, ya hear? I’ll chop you all if I have to!”
Putting words to action, she came back with an overhand chop which Falon barely deflected.
“Ye want we should help, Lieutenant?” asked Jake the Sergeant with the recruits.
“I’ve got this,” Falon said, dodging another axe blow while she started channeling power before coming in close to end it. Amazingly, the mad woman got her axe around to block—and then even more amazingly, despite the fact that Falon was powered up, the other woman actually pushed her back and sent her feet skidding a good two feet.
“I told ya she’s cursed—I toldja! She gets stronger the more she has the chance to get her dander up,” cried the abusive farmer. “You gotta end it with a good swift hit to the jaw. She’s weak there I, tell ye.”
Grunting and heaving with all her might, Falon started to push the mad farm wife backward. Utilizing her witch’s sight, she could see the farm wife drawing power from the earth as she fought.
“Rob the food from my babies mouths?!” the other woman snarled, shoving Falon back and raising her axe high.
Realizing the problem, Falon didn’t try to scramble away or block but propped her left foot on the ground to form a firm connection and kicked out with a magically-enhanced sweep of her right leg which knocked the farm wife off her feet.
Grateful to see that she’d temporarily severed the other woman’s connection to the earth, Falon scrambled over and—hating herself for every moment of it—balled up her magically-imbued fist and struck the woman smack in the jaw. She knew it was either that or kill her and, much as she hated to admit it, this seemed to be the lesser of two evils.
The farm wife’s eyes rolled back into her head and the life seemed to go out of her.
“Ye got her a good one! Ye got her a good one,” chortled the Farmer, “din’t I told ya? Gots to get her in the jaw early else she’ll not stop until it’s time fer the doctor—”
Falon’s silent approach, followed by a sudden uppercut, caused the Farmer to finally fall blessedly silent.
He truly is a useless husband, she thought angrily, but just after thinking that she was forced to ask herself if she was just as useless an officer. Honestly, here she was with a man who outright warned her about his crazy wife and how to deal with her if she didn’t want to see someone killed. What had she done? She had flat out ignored him until the mad woman started trying to chop her to pieces. One of her boys could have been killed because she was too busy castigating her man for his failures as a husband.
“Tie her up,” Falon said grimly.
“You want us to string her up on the hanging tree at the crossroad?” Sergeant Jake asked with an ugly look on his face. Apparently he didn’t take too kindly to rebellious farmwives with axes.
“No,” Falon said shortly.
“Both of them then?” asked the Sergeant, his brow furrowing. “It’d be on account of a man has a duty to control his wife and it’s clear as clear that he plum failed. We can do that.”
Falon closed her eyes and bit back a dozen furious retorts, starting from the fact that the man had been restrained by two of their warriors while the wife had
gone crazy, and continuing on to the fact that a woman is responsible for her own actions. Being married has nothing to do with her decision-making agency.
Instead of screaming at the Sergeant, who was rightfully upset at this one-woman rebellion, Falon forced a smile and said as gently as she could, “We’re not hanging either of them. The woman was clearly out of her mind and the husband was in our hands during the episode—he even advised us she was a danger.”
“If you say so,” Jake said, regret over her decision clear as day in his voice.
“I do say. Also,” Falon bestowed upon him a tight smile, “make sure we take all the winter squash and half the chickens before we go.”
“Will do. Also, I’m pretty sure they’ve got the seed corn hidden in a hole under the barn…” he trailed off suggestively.
For a moment, purely out of a desire for revenge on a person that nearly killed her, Falon was tempted. Then she shook the dark emotion off.
“Tempting as that idea is, doing so would only turn us into the very tyrants she feared we were when she raised that axe,” Falon said.
“A body raises a hand against you and yours, ye got to stomp them into the ground,” Jake said his accent thickening as he advised her. “The rest of it is the realm o’ things I don’t understand. But that much I know. It’s like dealing with a dog that’s started eating livestock; got to put it down or beat it to within an inch of its life else it’ll just keep doing it.”
Hearing such a dark and dreary outlook, Falon suppressed a shudder. Now that the battle was over and her blood was no longer up, she started to feel surprisingly uncomfortable with such talk.
“If I have to defend myself, I will. If I have to kill in battle, I will. But I don’t take pleasure in it, nor am I the sort of tyrant who steals a farmer’s livelihood out of revenge,” she said firmly. “The farmers owe a duty to their lords and their king to support the armies that those nobles—or king or, in our case, Prince—raise to defend them and that duty is food. If they don’t want to pay the tax then they need to do like the people back at my home did and volunteer for the militia. They can either fight or they can farm food for the armies but they can’t not fight and then not feed those who fight for them.”
“You’re the officer, but you’re also young. I pray that you never lose that idealism,” Sergeant Jake said and then turned to the men. “All right, you heard the Lieutenant: get all that squash and half the chickens in the wagon. It’s time to roll out of here. There are two more farms in the area we need to hit if we’re going to feed everyone through tomorrow.”
Falon winced but didn’t say anything. The food situation wasn’t as dire as the Sergeant made out, but it wasn’t all sugar and honey in the cornmeal either. They weren’t about to starve just yet, but they would if the farmers didn’t do their duty and provide food for the army.
The Prince and his quartermaster were being as tight-fisted as usual with the supplies, which meant that she and her men had to take the side roads and scrounge all the harder to make up for the difference.
Personally, she hoped that the army marched past a large town or small city on the way to the target in midlands then they could sell some of the extra loot they’d taken up north. For some reason though, the Prince—or his captains—had taking them on a path that studiously avoided such places. Still, a few of the smaller towns might be able to exchange something…
She’d just have to see.
Chapter 21: Witch Hunters
They were on the winding dirt paths that meandered from village to village en route to the lands of Baron Froggor, and Falon Rankin—Lieutenant in charge of the Battalion while their official Captain enjoyed himself living large with the Prince and his small traveling court and all around general knight extra-ordinary—walked to spare her horse.
Meanwhile, her friend and general all-around-pain-in-her-posterior, Ernest Farmer, lounged around on the back of Bucket the Magnificent keeping her ‘company.’
“I think I’m going to need new pair of shoes soon,” Falon said, looking critically at the sole of her left boot and complaining before dropping her foot and doing a quick double step to keep up with the donkey. She was going to have to stop by the next cobbler they passed and see if she could get a quick repair done.
After all, she was a knight now and needed more than just one pair of boots. At least two—or maybe even three—were required, and she imagined the exact set of boots she needed. Firstly she’d need a pair for marching like this obviously, then a cavalry boot for when she rode, and then maybe something for formal occasions…
“Must be nice,” Ernest said, bouncing up and down with every step Bucket took.
“Just sit up there and be grateful, funny man,” Falon said with an eye-roll, having little sympathy for anyone whose feet weren’t killing them like hers were.
“Not that I’m not grateful, but this donkey doesn’t exactly give the smoothest ride you know. I swear, sometime’s he gets it in his head that I ought to be in the wagon and goes into the most jarring gate,” Ernest said with heat.
“Yeah, well at least you won’t have to see the wench if you want to keep riding tomorrow,” Falon retorted, “my feet, on the other hand, very well might so stuff it.”
“I’d much rather walk, thank you,” Ernest grunted. “Well, since that’s not an option…” Falon sniffed.
“Curse this bum leg, anyway,” Ernest said, giving a wild kick off the side as if in protest but midway through the motion he winced and grabbed it. “Ouch!”
“Well don’t go trying to damage it all over again, dirt clod,” Falon scolded. “I swear the two of you brothers would cut off your own noses just to spite your faces if you got the notion into your head that your face was working against you. Just calm down and let it heal. It’ll get better as time goes by, at least that’s what the wench said anyway.”
“Bah,” sneered Ernest his face the very picture of young man unresolved to his fate, “it’ll never be what it used to be. Right now I’d be happy if I could just march with the rest of the battalion.”
“Well you can’t,” Falon snapped, “at least not now—and maybe not ever if you keep abusing it.”
“Thanks for the advice, Mr. Know-it-all,” retorted Ernest.
Walking and squabbling it took Falon’s nose a while before it informed the rest of her that there was something odd going on.
“Hey,” Falon said abruptly and immediately after turning up her nose and sniffing the air, “do you smell smoke?”
Ernest cocked his head and frowned. “Now that you mention it, yeah, I do,” he said after mimicking her action of smelling the air. Then he shrugged, “What of it? I mean it doesn’t smell large enough to be a forest fire. Probably just someone clearing a field or having a barbeque after one of the oxen died.”
“I’m not sure…” Falon said, starting to relax. Then in the far distance the faint sound of screams and shouting could be heard. “A barbeque, really?? Ernest you’re an idiot!” Falon declared, turning back down the column and running, “Somebody bring me my horse!”
Moments later a New Blood man came running up with her gelding and Falon jumped onto its back.
“Yah!” she said putting her boots to it. “Let’s go, Thunder!”
“I’ll bring the war band,” Uilliam called after her and, since his men were currently on rotation at the head of the column, that sounded fine with her.
“Good! Pass the word back that there may be trouble up ahead,” Falon shouted, not bothering to slow down.
Breaking into a canter, Falon quickly passed Bucket who seemed to have gone into a really jolting trot in protest of the sudden attempt to increase his speed sending Ernest every which way as he bounced down the road.
Of course, as soon as Falon and her gelding went thundering by, Bucket’s fighting spirit seemed to have been activated.
“Whoa!” Ernest yelled in a half-strangled voice as Bucket tried and failed to accelerate to the same speed and keep up
with Thunder.
Unable to suppress the barest hint of a smug smile, she looked over her shoulder as Ernest and Bucket the Magnificent fell back and were forced to eat her dust.
‘Take that!” she laughed, silently urging Thunder into a full blown gallop. The feeling of riding again, the speed and the wind in her face, caused Falon to throw back her head and laugh.
However, the sight that greeted her around the bend in the rode immediately killed the good mood entirely.
In the common area just outside the village were half a dozen white-robed figures in formation surrounding a wooden pole with a great heap of now-smoking wood piled around it. Attached to the pole was a screaming, middle-aged woman.
From her garb, she looked like the local healing wench—and from the smoking wood and the robed figures surrounding her it looked like she was about to be burned at the stake.
Pulling Thunder to an abrupt stop before she reached the village, Falon’s eyes bulged and her face turned pale. There was only one kind of person who wore white robes and burned women at the stake:
Witch Hunters.
They were Tower-sanctioned Inquisitors that went around rooting out hidden practitioners and enforcing the kingdom’s laws on practicing Healing Wenches or the official Witches.
This was bad. This was very bad.
Chapter 22: Burning at the Stake
As Falon watched with horror, the woman on the stake cursed and screamed at the wizards, demanding that they cut her down and turn her loose.
“I’m just a simple healing wench doing her duty by her village and people!” she shrieked.
“For practicing unsanctioned magic under the certificate of a bonded healing wench, the punishment is death!” shouted what looked like the leader of the white robed hunters before turning to the other wizards. “Brothers! Prepare the anti-ambient wards; there is no way any witch can utilize her powers within an anti-magic field designed to counteract her powers!”
The Channeling (Rise of the Witch Guard Book 3) Page 11