White as ice, she turned to Encanzo. “Algorquprqin,” said Queen Sychorax uncertainly. “I think… I may have made a mistake.”
Miracle of miracles! Stiff Queen Sychorax, proud Queen Sychorax, unbending Queen Sychorax who always thought she was right about absolutely everything, admitting that even she might not be perfect!
“We all make mistakes,” said Encanzo grimly. “Even you and I, Queen Sychorax.”
“Oh, by hemlock and nightshade and all things mean and bad,” whispered the Witchsmeller. “What is that?”
“That is a Witch,” said Sychorax. “You see the difference, pest controller? Giants and fairies and Magic people, they’re not really Witches at all, are they? A Witch is kind of unmistakable.”
“And that isn’t just a normal Witch either,” said Encanzo grimly. “That is a Kingwitch.
“What do you want, Witch?”
Now the Kingwitch began to speak, and it was a dreadful sound indeed, a harsh, grating, guttural noise that seemed to pain him to make, and every now and again, a word was reversed, as was the fashion with Witches.
“I want the children,” crooned the Kingwitch. “Give me the children.”
There was a horrible silence.
“What children?” said Encanzo.
The Kingwitch pointed at Xar and at Wish.
“The boy iss mine already,” said the Kingwitch. “And the girl is special…”
“There’s absolutely nothing special about Wish—look at her!” said Sychorax briskly, but there may have been a little anxiety in her voice. “She’s totally ordinary, and if anything, for a Warrior, just a little substandard…”
They all looked at Wish, standing uncomfortably on one leg. She didn’t look remotely special, a small, skinny little child with an eyepatch and hair sticking out in all directions.
“She has something I need,” continued the Kingwitch. “I already have some of it, but only as much as was in the very tip of her very little finger… Now I want ALL of it… to share with my fellow Witches… Give her to me now.”
“And what,” said the queen with considerable asperity, “are you intending to do with her?”
“I will eat her,” said the Kingwitch.
Which was not very nice, but what did you expect a Witch to be like?
There was another horrified silence.
“That is ridiculous!” snapped Queen Sychorax, magnificently scornful and every inch a monarch. “Of course you can’t EAT my child, you disgusting creature. I never heard of anything more barbaric!”
“Give me the child,” repeated the Kingwitch. “I will swallow her whole… Give me the child…”
“I am the queen of these territories,” said Sychorax imperiously. “We have a Warrior army, fully armed with iron. Take your Witches out of here, before we kill you all. Go!”
The Kingwitch gave a ghastly shriek and spread wide his great dark wings and leaped into the air, and as he flew up, up, up into the airy heights, it looked for one moment as if he was flying away, trying to escape.
Spare a thought for the poor Witchsmeller.
This was meant to be his moment.
He had been enjoying the battle with the Wizards, but this was even better!
As the Kingwitch soared upward, the Witchsmeller was rubbing his hands together.
OH, THIS WAS TOO GOOD.
All his wishes had come true at once.
A WITCH! At last he had found a real live Witch, after a lifetime of looking! And not just one Witch, a whole host of the creatures…
They weren’t extinct after all!
“Get out the Witch-destroying weapon!” yelled the Witchsmeller joyfully. “Prepare to face the full force of IRON, Thing of Evil!!!”
He put down his iron visor, almost chuckling to himself.
The Witchsmeller imagined, encased in iron as he was—iron breastplates, iron helmet—that he would be quite safe against the Witch. It might look scary, this creature, but no Magic could work against iron. He would first get rid of the big one and then turn the might of the weapon on all of the others. And then he would go back to the capital in triumph and in glory, with lots of Witch beaks to show the emperor.
The Witchsmeller was just enjoying this happy little thought…
When the Kingwitch turned on him.
High up in the air the Kingwitch turned in a great beautiful glorious swoop, if you had been in the mood to admire the swooping of Witches, which the Witchsmeller most certainly wasn’t, and with a grand gesture of his feathered wing the Kingwitch pointed all five of his taloned fingers at the Witchsmeller and his two imperial giant-killers, who were struggling to launch the Witch-destroying weapon.
And the Magic came blinding out of the five fingers, with the fierceness with which it might blast out of five Wizards’ staffs.
Fifty years the Witchsmeller had studied Witch-hunting and the Pursuit of Magic, and now he was looking up through his little iron visor at the thunderous sky and realizing, oh my goodness, that the Kingwitch was spelling at him, and that was exactly the same moment that he had a tiny flicker of concern as he realized, horror of horrors, how small he was, how insignificant, how unprepared for the spells coming down at him in brilliant stars of light.
The Witchsmeller didn’t even have time to get the imperial giant-killers to launch his Witch-destroying weapon. It had taken years for the Witchsmeller’s father and for the Witchsmeller’s father’s father to design that weapon, and they reckoned they had gotten it pretty much perfect, but this is an excellent example of how things that work magnificently in theory don’t necessarily work in practice.
The Witchsmeller got as far as shouting, “LAUNCH THE WEAP—!” before the spells hit him.
The stars of light hit the Witchsmeller full on the chest and bounced neatly off onto the other Magic-hunters standing around him, one after the other.
One second the Witchsmeller was standing, in full body armor, erect and splendid, if a little uneasy, with his axe raised high above his head, shouting impressive instructions.
The next second, the armor had stiffened around him and solidified, and he was caught within it, as if it were the trunk of a tree.
CLANG!
His visor came down.
“Hello?” said the Witchsmeller in a bewildered sort of way, and the echo of his own voice came back to him from within his metal prison. “Hello?”
And all around him, his fellow Magic-hunters were similarly caught, stuck in their armor, frozen in various poses of attack, one of them bending down to light the fuse that might set off the Witch-destroying weapon (also frozen), another with an arm above the head about to launch a spear, others in the act of taking their swords from their scabbards.
IRON. Their armor was made of IRON. How could the Witch’s Magic be working on iron? With a terrible sinking of the heart, Xar realized how…
Back in their last adventure, when they first met the Kingwitch in Queen Sychorax’s dungeon, the Kingwitch had drunk up some of Wish’s Magic, and NOW…
For the very first time…
He had a little Magic that could work on IRON.
The Kingwitch had not taken enough of Wish’s Magic to do more than make the armor freeze. He couldn’t make it move or dance. But freezing was quite enough to paralyze the Witchsmeller and his band of Magic-hunters.
“Are you all right in there, pest controller?” snapped Queen Sychorax, peering through the Witchsmeller’s visor. “Enjoying your first encounter with a real Witch?”
“Help!” said the Witchsmeller in reply. And the soldiers all around him echoed, “Help!” “Help!” “Help!” as they tried and failed to move the armor that had solidified all around them.
Queen Sychorax sniffed. “So much for your famous Witch-destroying weapon.”
“The Kingwitch shouldn’t have been able to do that,” said Encanzo grimly.
But they didn’t have time to absorb any of the implications of this.
For the Kingwitch whirled arou
nd and screamed, “Let me show you why you should do as I say.
“WITCHES! ATTACK!”
16. The Witches Attack
With a terrible smell of burning feathers, the Witches swooped.
When Witches attack, they assault all your senses at the same time. Their stink is unbearable, the worst smell you can possibly imagine. Their scream is like the shriek of five hundred angry foxes, and it buries itself in your brain and reverberates around your head till you feel like you might go crazy.
“WARRIORS! WIZARDS! GIANTS! LYNXES!” cried Sychorax. “Stop fighting each other! Fight THE WITCHES!”
And Encanzo held up his staff and yelled out the same orders.
Sychorax and Encanzo didn’t really need to shout those instructions.
The noise and the smell were so horrid that the Wizards and the Warriors were instinctively banding together to fight these new, terrifying assailants.
Warriors and Wizards and giants were in one instant fighting back to back, on the same side. But there was an astonishing number of the Witches, a cloud of them, like a swarm of gigantic malevolent crows.
The Witches were happy to attack the Magic things. But they were still afraid of the Warriors, and they couldn’t attack them like the Kingwitch could.
“HOLD FAST! DEFEND YOUR POSITIONS!” cried Sychorax, that great war leader. “FIGHT THE WITCHES TOGETHER!”
The Kingwitch sharpened his talons against each other like a blacksmith sharpening a gigantic sword.
And then, quick as a weasel he stretched up his claw and screamed an unintelligible gargle of command.
“We need to defend the children,” said Encanzo, jumping up aboard his lynx, and Sychorax glided up behind him, sidesaddle, arms crossed, for she would have rather DIED than put her arms around Encanzo’s waist. It was remarkable, the way that she did not lose her balance as the lynx leaped forward, but then Queen Sychorax was really rather a remarkable woman.
“Go away!” shouted Xar as Encanzo pulled the lynx to a halt beside him. “I don’t need your help!”
“You have to let us defend you, Xar!” said Encanzo. “I had no idea that creature was after you…”
In the heat of the moment, and in his anxiety, Xar admitted something that he had not yet really wanted to admit, even to himself.
“The Kingwitch isn’t after me; he’s after Wish,” said Xar. “Wish is the girl of destiny… We need to help Wish.”
Above Xar’s head, the whirr of soft wings. Five Witches soared, and they did not pause for Xar.
Xar was right: They were after Wish, while her Magic was still untrained, and uncontrolled.
Wish was in the center of the courtyard.
She had been about to take off her eyepatch, but the Witches had attacked with such suddenness that she had only just nudged it up a smidgeon.
And as they attacked, Encanzo leaped from the back of his snowcat and pointed his fingers toward Wish, making a defensive Magic force field the size of a very large, round, invisible boulder spring up around Wish to protect her.
The force field burned bright, as the Witches struck again and again, like great black ravens attacking a tasty morsel. Such was the force of their onslaughts that Wish was rolled drunkenly around the courtyard, thrown about inside the force field with such violence that she was unable to take off her eyepatch. Every time she put up her arms to do it, she was thrown off her balance once more.
The Kingwitch landed in a blur of wings and crouched down, long black drips of saliva pouring from both sides of his jaws.
“It’s weakening!” screeched the Kingwitch, three eyes glowing red as the great slugging force of the Witches’ spell-attacks began to crush the force field protecting Wish, punching great dents in it as it rolled pathetically this way and that.
Xar ran toward them, the Enchanted Sword slippy in his trembling hand.
“GET OFF HER!” cried Xar, waving the sword at the Kingwitch.
The Kingwitch crouched lower.
“You fool,” he whispered. “Do you not know, boy, that you are mine?”
“I am not yours!” screamed Xar.
“You have to be careful what you wish for,” crooned the Kingwitch, “and you wished for Witchblood… willingly took it… put out your hand and made the cut yourself. X marks the spot…”
How could Xar deny it? His whole hand beneath the glove was burning a bright, terrible green of such vividness that it turned the glove itself transparent.
“And now I control you,” said the Kingwitch. “It was I who urged you to escape from the prison of Gormincrag, and I who helped you to do it. You brought her to me.”
“No…” said Xar, very white, “it’s not true…”
But it is only sometimes when you reach the end of the quest that you realize what it has been about all along.
They had fallen into a trap set by a Kingwitch. All along the way, they had thought they were making free choices, but silent, frozen, unmoving, the Kingwitch had been controlling them, like the spider in the middle of a great gray web.
The Kingwitch turned his dead face to Xar.
“You can’t fight me,” he said.
Xar’s bright green hand burned hot with such fire that it made poor Xar cry out, and it was as if his arm had a mind of its own. His own hand, holding on to the Enchanted Sword, dragged him forward with his body desperately trying to pull the other way. But the hand was inexorable… It pulled him with dreadful force…
He tried to resist, holding on to his right elbow with his other hand, but like it or not, for good or for evil, the rest of his body was attached to that hand so what could he do? Heels dragging, he was hauled toward Wish, who was still being thrown about in Encanzo’s force field.
“If the sword kills Witches, it can kill her too… And I can eat her dead just as well as alive,” whispered the Kingwitch. “You can kill her for me, boy. Humans are weak. She won’t want to hurt you…
“Remember who you are. You’re a Wizard, and she’s a Warrior… Wizards hate Warriors…”
“I’m sorry, Wish! I can’t stop it!” shouted Xar as his bright green hand brought the sword down on the red force field and broke through it,
BAM!
It shattered into thousands of pieces that exploded around the courtyard like tiny splinters of bright red glass, before melting into the air.
“Good, good,” crooned the Kingwitch. “Now go for the girl…”
Wish stood there, her fingers crooked now underneath the eyepatch.
She couldn’t lift it to fight Xar…
Poor Xar was still trying to control his own hand. But the combination of his arm with the Witch-stain and the Enchanted Sword was too strong for him, and he was being dragged nearer and nearer to Wish, with the sword raised above his head to attack her, even though he was pulling in the other direction with all his might.
I can’t fight this… It’s too strong for me… thought Xar wretchedly.
“Don’t think about your weaknesses, think about your strengths,” shouted Caliburn. “Work with what you DO have, not with what you DON’T!”
“Use your disobedience, Xar!” ordered Queen Sychorax, shouting from behind him. “You have PLENTY OF THAT!”
Xar turned, and raised the sword toward the Kingwitch. He couldn’t fight the Kingwitch completely, he wasn’t strong enough for that, but he could work with the Kingwitch’s own desires.
(Xar had learned that lesson from the Kingwitch, because that was exactly what the Kingwitch had been doing to him.)
“You want the sword, Witch?” shouted Xar. “You can have it!”
With every single ounce of disobedience in his disobedient body, Xar shouted, “NO! Take that, you stinking great feather-armed FREAK of a nightmare Witch!”
And he threw the sword with all of his might toward the Kingwitch.
There was a moment when it seemed as if the sword wasn’t going to leave the green grip of Xar’s hand.
But Xar had guessed right.
&nb
sp; The Kingwitch DID want that sword, for it was a very powerful Magic object.
The Kingwitch’s own wanting loosened Xar’s grip… the sword sailed through the air and landed a couple of feet in front of him with a loud clatter.
“I WILL NOT do it,” said Xar, chest heaving with the struggle of it. “Because I LIKE Wish.”
The Kingwitch was astonished at this defiance. The boy should be his entirely! How was it possible that Xar would not do his bidding?
But it did not change the ending…
The Kingwitch would finish this himself.
He reached out his taloned hand and grasped the Enchanted Sword.
He said some very powerful words of a spell to bind the sword to his hand, so that the girl could not take it from him.
With one, two beats of his great wings he leaped in the air, wings spread wide, up up up.
And then he swooped, terrible mouth agape, to swallow the child whole.
17. Taking Off the Eyepatch
And Wish took off her eyepatch. Taking off the eyepatch was like opening the door into another world.
Looking through her left eye, it was as if she was standing on the top of a snowy mountain, where the snow was so glitteringly bluey-white that it dazed you. The colors were so forceful, the reds so red, the greens so purely green that it overwhelmed her, and she cried out now, as they hit her almost like a physical blow.
She’d forgotten just how sickening this feeling was, how terrifying.
Very few Wizards before or since have ever had the rare power of a Magic eye.
A power that misted up Wish’s brain with such furious energy that her hair leaped up around her like an electrical ruff and the ground beneath her swayed like a sea, and the broken walls shook further, and all around lost their balance as the Magic came screaming out of her eye and met the blast of the swooping Kingwitch’s Magic.
Closer… closer the Kingwitch dived, so close that Wish could see right down the ghastly maw of his open throat, the Enchanted Sword pointed right toward her.
The Wizards of Once--Twice Magic Page 14