The Vine Witch

by Smith, Luanne G.

  Elena shrugged free of Nettles’s grip. “You’re making a mistake. Someone else murdered Bastien, and they’re still out there.”

  “You should be grateful, you know,” Nettles said, brushing his hands free of her. “You’re being granted a speedy trial. Seems the higher-ups want to make sure word gets out that we’ve caught the witch who’s been killing cats and conjuring blood magic for who knows what purpose. Though if it were up to me, I’d probably hang you on the spot.” Nettles cleared his throat. “Never mind I said that, Eugenie.”

  “I’m the soul of discretion, Aubrey.” The matron locked her lips with a pantomimed key.

  Shards of panic needled into Elena’s skin. The world had tipped on its axis so that up was down and down was up. To be held captive, cut off from magic, unable to clear her name—she’d go mad if she had to go through that again. Her icy blood retracted from her heart. Damn the consequences. She had to get free. Uttering words she’d vowed never to use as a vine witch, words of shadowy, summoning magic, she bent her wrists to hold her hands in an upside-down sacred pose, ready to unleash hell to escape.

  She called on the sun, the moon, and the east wind, hoping to create a tornado of energy out of the torment building inside her. Her hair lifted slightly, as if a gentle breeze had wafted over her shoulders . . .

  . . . and then nothing. No destruction, no magic, no escape—only the desperate silence of a failed spell. She stood trembling.

  “The magic is stronger with this one than most,” Matron said to Nettles. “She got the energy to stir around her. Most can’t even finish an incantation.” Matron yanked at the handcuffs on Elena’s wrists as the runes glowed in neon blue. “But now that you’ve tried your little trick, you can be satisfied your spells and hexes are of no use in here.”

  Elena stared dumbfounded at the vibrancy of the magic running through the shackles. The binding spell inscribed in the metal forced the cuffs to grip another inch tighter, zapping her arcane energy completely. She tried another spell, but the more she struggled, the weaker she grew. Defeated, she lowered her head to hide her tears. If the All Knowing had ever favored her, it was in another life.

  Nettles doffed his hat and made a quick bow before the matron. “I’ll leave you to it, seeing as you have everything under control.” And with that he departed, abandoning Elena into the night bucket of the criminal justice system for witches.

  She was led down a corridor ripe with the scent of mold and damp straw. A wall of empty cells lined the passage, the cages where the condemned from another era had once been housed. Curiously she could still hear the moans of the tortured and tormented reverberating within the bricks and mortar of the prison despite the shackles. But as her feet passed over the same ground where theirs had trod hundreds of years earlier, a chill snaked its way through her core to the space where she hid her deepest fear, and there it coiled, waiting to strike.

  The matron stopped marching when they reached a set of iron bars at the end of the corridor. Inside the cell a chain rattled and feet shuffled in dry straw, as if a stall full of cows had suddenly awakened to the scent of an intruder. The smell that hovered in the cave-like space, however, was worse than a cattle pen. It was the scent of neglect and the absence of hope.

  Elena looked up to see an impish face emerge from the shadows and press against the bars. Alert eyes stared out beneath greasy strands of unkempt hair. A crooked smile split a plane of pale skin.

  The matron shooed the young woman away. “We have a new prisoner, Yvette. Stand back.”

  The nymphlike young woman pirouetted out of the way of the barred door. Matron removed her wand from her sleeve and opened the lock with a manipulation spell. Elena knew it. She’d recited the words before when the wine cellar door had jammed, but now the words to the spell swam in her head, slippery as an eel, so that she couldn’t wrap her mind around the phrase. After a shove in her back, she entered the cell. The depraved space assaulted her senses with its pungency of unwashed bodies, the hard chill of stone underfoot, and the finality of metal clanging against metal as the door thudded closed behind her.

  The runes on the iron bars glowed faintly as the matron poised her wand a second time from the other side. “Hands up,” she said, and Elena’s shackles slipped off her wrists. The wan young woman with the glittering eyes sprang to the ground to pick them up and then handed them, polite as can be, to the matron. “Shoes too.”

  “What?”

  “Remove your shoes and pass them through.” She tapped impatiently on the bars with the end of her wand. “Prisoners do not wear shoes.”

  The waif greedily picked up the kicked-off shoes, turning them over to casually note the maker’s mark imprinted on the bottom. She raised her brow at Elena before forwarding the soft leather lace-ups to Matron.

  “Thank you, Yvette. Take care of our newest guest.”

  “With pleasure,” said the young woman, whose placid smile lingered as long as the matron remained within the corridor. Once the guard was gone and the door at the end of the corridor slammed shut, her eyes flashed bright as sapphires in the dim light as they practically devoured Elena.

  “Well, well, what have we here?” The young woman circled her just out of arm’s reach. “I’d say you’ve got the look of one of Dubois’s light-fingered girls, but they don’t throw people in this pit for a little thievery. A Maison de Miel worker maybe? Hmm, no. Your clothes are well made, but they’re too plain for fantasy work. And you can’t be a carnival kink. I just come from there.”

  Elena wasn’t sure how to respond to the interrogation. She was reasonably certain a “carnival kink” was akin to being a gentleman’s illusionniste, someone who used magic to carry out sexual fantasies for paying customers. The young woman’s black silk stockings with the embroidered fleur-de-lis running up the sides, though badly torn, were a dead giveaway. As was the trace of kohl liner smudged under her eyes and the lingering scent of male musk on her clothes. But the jagged scar along the young woman’s cheek suggested there might be a more violent side of the tale. A casualty of her trade? Life in the cell? What kind of hell had Nettles left her in?

  “I’m not . . . that is, I don’t do that sort of work.”

  “Oh, too tawdry for the likes of you, is it?” The waif turned puckish, leaning in close enough that her sour breath blew in Elena’s face. “Some of us are good enough to make a decent side living at it. Want to know how good I am?” she asked, stroking her finger along Elena’s jaw.

  “Sit down, Yvette. Not everyone practices their magic while on their back.”

  A second body, this one seated cross-legged on the floor opposite the only window, leaned forward in the single beam of sunlight. Long black hair framed a brown face and world-weary eyes offering little comfort. The woman wore a faded silk robe of red and gold over a linen tunic and small gold hoop earrings that pierced the lobes of each ear in three places. The scent of charred citrus and incense rose off her skin. Foreign. Old World. Like the spice emporium Elena had once visited in the city as a child with Grand-Mère.

  “Oh là là, Sidra, I’m just trying to find out what kind of criminal they dumped in here with us. You’d think you’d be grateful I care about our safety.”

  “She’s a murderer, same as us. End of story.”

  Elena said nothing in reply as a small wren landed on the windowsill between the bars. It preened and bowed and then flew inside the cell to perch on Sidra’s outstretched hand. The sorceress whispered to the bird, and the bird sang back. After a brief exchange she petted the bird’s head, then plucked a daddy longlegs out of the straw and dangled it in front of the wren’s open mouth.

  “How can you talk to the bird? Don’t the runes prevent magic?”

  “They block spells,” Sidra explained, “but not even a place like this can strip away a person’s essence. I need no spell to talk to birds.”

  Was it possible? It must be. Hadn’t she heard the lamenting of the dead surface through the liminal space as she p
assed through the corridor?

  Yvette picked up a handful of damp straw and threw it at Elena’s feet. “This new one smells like alcohol. Can’t stand a drunk for a cellmate.”

  “It’s wine and oak.” Sidra pinched a silverfish between her fingernails and offered it to the bird. “It’s the scent of someone who works in a cellar.”

  Yvette scrunched up her face. “You mean she’s a vine witch? In here? Never heard of nothing like that before. What reason does a fancy witch like her got to kill someone?”

  “Good question.” Sidra’s eye lingered on Elena a moment before she whispered a last message to the bird. It flapped its wings and slipped out the window. The sorceress tracked the wren’s flight through the open sky, unable to hide the yearning to follow.

  Elena sat against the free wall and drew her legs up defensively, hugging them to her chest. “I didn’t kill anyone.”

  “Well, you don’t get locked up in here for making bad wine.” The young woman, who couldn’t have been out of her teens, transformed again from ingénue to cunning street urchin, the soft angles of her face hardening as she stiffened her jaw. She inched closer and flashed a four-inch piece of sharpened metal she’d pulled from her hair. “And you don’t get to sleep with both eyes closed unless we can come to an arrangement.”

  The shiv, once an ornate silver hairpin, had been filed down to a deadly point, one Elena did not doubt could draw blood. It was the sort of thing that ought to have been confiscated, but savvy Yvette had somehow managed to smuggle in a little nonmagical protection. Clever.

  Elena stared at the point aimed at her throat. “What sort of arrangement?”

  Seeing she was going to get her way, Yvette’s eyes brightened. “You’re going to pay for your side of the cell.”

  “With what?”

  Sidra made a clicking noise with her tongue. “Do we have to go through this every time?”

  “It’s all right for you in here,” Yvette snapped back. “You got that bird to pass the time. What have I got?” Sidra dismissed her with a shake of her head. The young woman turned her venom back on Elena. “A witch like you ought to have plenty of rich friends. Whatever they bring you when they visit they got to bring me too. I want a clean blanket, food, and a change of clothes. And new silk stockings. I can’t wear these worn-out rags another day.”

  “No one’s going to bring you those things in here,” Sidra said.

  “Why aren’t they?”

  “Because no one’s going to waste money on a carnival tramp like you.”

  “Better me than a dried-up old hag whose neck is about to feel the kiss of la demi-lune. Your birds can’t save you from fate’s hand on the guillotine.”

  The young woman’s waspish tongue had found its mark. The sorceress got to her feet. The rattle of metal followed. Beneath her robe a heavily linked chain attached to her ankle trailed back to a solid metal ring affixed to the wall. Elena worried she meant to attack the young woman as she loomed over the dour pixie. If the chains and bars had not held her back, the sorceress might have annihilated the young woman with a single spell, so threatening was her look. Instead, Yvette scuttled away to the other side of the cell, safe in knowing, for the moment at least, she was the more dangerous of the two. Sidra kicked at the straw, then pulled her scarf over her head. She returned to the wall and faced her back to them to gain the only privacy available in such tight quarters.

  “Is that true?” Elena asked the young woman. She risked drawing the wrath of both inmates, but she couldn’t help wondering about her own fate. “About . . .” She subtly gestured with her fingers drawn against her neck.

  An inkling of regret crept into Yvette’s voice as she leaned her head back to stare up at the small square of sky framed by the window. “Her execution is in three days. That’s why she’s chained.”

  The chill in Elena’s body sank from her skin to the inside of her veins, where it swam in a circle around her heart and lungs so she couldn’t get a proper breath. Yes, she had wanted Bastien dead. Yes, she had distilled the poison to do the deed. She had even written a spell to bind it to his stomach so he couldn’t cough it back up. She did it all, accepting the consequences to her soul if she followed through. But building doubt had created a wall in her mind that she couldn’t get over. His denial, spoken only moments after he’d nearly run her down, had been given time to ferment in her thoughts. He’d always been proud of the control he exerted over others, bragging about having neighbors hexed or competitors’ fields jinxed. If he’d been responsible for her curse, he wouldn’t have backed away from the triumphant moment when he could finally take credit for it. The realization was enough to give her second thoughts, and so she’d stored the poison in the cupboard above her worktable and focused instead on making a wine so superb it would erase the name of Du Monde in the valley. Only now she was trapped behind bars and accused of killing him, possibly facing the same deadly fate as the women beside her.

  After a long silence Sidra leaned her head against the bars and stared into the corridor, where the lamps had long been doused. “Do you hear them? They are crying again.”

  Elena glanced over her shoulder. She’d tuned out the low wails and pitiful calls for mercy imprinted in the stone, too consumed with her own worries, but Sidra had called the voices up again so that they echoed in the dark as if rising out of a tunnel.

  The sorceress gathered her chain to her and then looped it into a neat coil at her side. “That one,” she said with a tip of her head, “does not believe me when I say there are voices that echo in the hall. They used to keep me up at night. But now I listen for them. I am sorry for them, though I do not know who they are or why they cry.”

  She wondered where Sidra came from. Whatever distant land, it was far enough away she’d not heard the tragic history of the valley’s falsely accused. “They’re the voices of the condemned,” Elena said. Her eyes followed the path of a low moan, trailing the sound across the floor to a spot on the wall where a pair of eye-hook bolts would have secured someone by the wrists under heavy irons. “They were confined and tortured here for practicing witchcraft two hundred years ago. Men, women, and children.”

  “What, you can hear them too?” Yvette shook her head as she flexed her foot and pulled her stocking up. “Then you’re both loony, if you ask me, listening to a bunch of dead witches.”

  Elena recalled the time she and Grand-Mère had traveled to the city to shop for the few rare ingredients they couldn’t get in the village—root of turmeric, dried fish bladder, and fine henna powder, which they infused into their yarn with a binding spell. Unable to find the correct shop on the unfamiliar street, they’d stopped to ask directions of a woman sweeping her sidewalk. At their approach, the woman took out an evil-eye amulet from her pocket and spit on the ground before shooing them away with her broom. Elena hadn’t understood, so Grand-Mère took her to a café for ice cream while she explained their history and why there were still those who held witches in contempt.

  “Only most of those you hear weren’t witches.” Elena stood and gripped the bars with both hands as she closed her eyes. Instantly she knew what Sidra had said earlier about the place not being able to stifle a witch’s essence was true. The energy from the rune spell hummed under her fingers, vibrating through the metal like a pulse that blocked her connection to the All Knowing. She opened her eyes again and rubbed her hands together to rid them of the spell’s odd energy. “When the condemned were alive, this place was a regular mortal prison. It hadn’t been magicked yet. Any healthy witch would have had no trouble escaping these cells.”

  Yvette snorted. “Or getting caught in the first place.”

  Elena agreed and then pictured Grand-Mère. “Though any witch too old or weak to defend themselves would have been as helpless as a mortal.”

  Sidra shifted on her feet so that her ankle chain rattled against the flagstones. “Or someone who’d been cursed?”

  It was as if the sorceress had used a scrying g
lass to peer beneath Elena’s skin to inspect the vulnerability embedded on the underside. She rubbed at the gooseflesh on her arms and nodded as a ghost-thought fluttered in her head. Would she have had the strength to escape the witch hunts had it been her in her cursed state?

  “What terrible spell did these lost ones unleash to cause their cries to be etched into stone?”

  “They were accused of consorting with the Devil and committing evil acts against their neighbors. And it’s true, there were some witches—warlocks mostly—who conjured destructive spells that brutalized a handful of villages. But they weren’t the ones caught and put in prison. It was almost always some hapless mortal from the valley who they were able to coerce a confession out of.”

  “They cry for mercy and”—Sidra tilted her ear—“relief from the pain.”

  “Many were abused. Tortured. Back then the prosecutors might drag a woman to the river and dunk her head under the water, over and over again, until her lungs were near to bursting. Or they’d shave her head. Or use thumbscrews. Or maybe tear a fingernail loose from the bed and force the injury to throb for hours so that the accused would do or say anything to make the pain go away.”

  “Tell her about the stones,” Yvette said, no longer pretending to ignore the conversation.

  Elena nodded. “Some had stones stacked on top of them. With every denial, the load increased until the person either suffocated under the crushing load or they confessed convincingly enough to have the weight lifted off before their lungs ruptured from the pressure. Either way, the law got what it wanted.”

  “Pain has always been the prosecutor’s handmaiden,” Sidra said, agreeing. Then she closed her eyes and inhaled deeply as she listened. “The women also say they fear the lick of fire at the stake. Did they burn them too?”

  “Yes.”

  “Alive?”

  “Sometimes.”

  Sidra lifted her head from the bars. “But now in this country they take the head with a curved blade.” She stared at the empty corridor with the same yearning with which she’d watched the bird escape. “I would trade places with any one of them to have the fire,” she said, then bent to pick up a thin wool blanket she’d been using as a pillow. She offered it to Elena. “Here, you’ll need this tonight. And don’t let Yvette steal it from you, either.”