The Vine Witch

by Smith, Luanne G.

  Yvette snatched them away with one swipe. “Shhhh!” she said and twisted around to see her cellmate’s reaction.

  Every muscle in Sidra’s body tensed. Her mouth drew into a hard line. Her eyes, dark and hooded now, checked the corridor for signs of Matron with a predator’s gaze.

  “Matches,” Yvette said to Sidra. The word had a bite to it Elena didn’t understand. Then the young woman rattled the allumettes inside the box, teasing. “Come and get them.”

  The sorceress leaped, but Yvette was quick-footed and scurried back to her side of the cell. Sidra’s leg iron had stopped her just short of reaching the woman. She lunged and swiped with her long nails, but Yvette merely grinned, taunting her by shaking the box again. Confident she was untouchable, Yvette took out a cigarette and slid a match from the box. Her lips pressed into a hard smile as she dragged the tip of the match against the strike pad with a hard swipe. The phosphorous ignited in a flash of orange, and Sidra’s eyes flared in sync. Then she curled her lip at the young woman while she watched her draw the flame through the tobacco with a long inhale.

  Elena thought Sidra might cut off her own foot to be free of her chain as she watched the smoke swirl from the end of Yvette’s cigarette. She knew tobacco was a powerful herb. She even knew a potion or two that called for adding the stuff, but she’d never seen anyone so ravenous for the taste.

  Sidra thrust her hand out. “Give them to me, sharmoota!”

  “They’re Egyptienne Luxury brand too,” Yvette said, reading the label. “Isn’t that made to measure?”

  “Give her the cigarettes,” Elena said. “They’re for everyone.”

  A trail of smoke snaked out of Yvette’s mouth as she tilted her head. “Want to know why ciggies aren’t allowed in our cell?” The young woman bared a fiendish smile. “Watch this,” she said and tossed the lit cigarette toward Sidra.

  The sorceress sprawled on her stomach on the filthy floor, her hand open, fingers spread wide to catch the half-smoked cigarette as it rolled toward her. Once it was in her hand, she no longer prostrated herself. She raised herself up as if in a trance and walked back to the spot where her chain was bolted to the wall.

  Her desperation evaporated. And yet she hadn’t inhaled. Hadn’t even held the tobacco to her mouth. Instead, she closed her eyes and thanked her god, as though she were eternally thankful for the cast-off stub.

  “Just remember who gave that to you,” warned Yvette, lighting a fresh cigarette for herself.

  “Why can’t we have cigarettes?”

  Elena waited for an answer, but the young woman merely blew smoke and pointed at Sidra. The desert witch held her arm out to let her silk robe drape to the floor. Her eyes widened in fanatic-like anticipation as she pressed the smoldering tip of the cigarette against the fabric. A black hole rimmed with orange bloomed alive, burning through the silk until it ignited into flame.

  “What is she doing? Sidra, no!”

  “They can block magic and spells,” Sidra said as the fire climbed up her arm, glowing with an unnatural intensity, “but they cannot strip the essence of who we are.” Sidra’s gold and ivory teeth gleamed in a triumphant smile, then she raised her arms as if welcoming the fire, begging the heat to burn her clothes, her skin, her hair.

  Elena reached for her blanket to smother the flames, but it was too late. The fire had spread too fast, as if Sidra had been drenched in oil. Fully engulfed, the desert witch glowed within the flames before bursting into a fiery tornado.

  The heat grew so unbearable that Elena had to back away and shield her eyes with her hand. Helpless, she watched the flames consume Sidra’s body until it crumbled to the ground, disintegrating into a pile of waxy ash. The fire fizzled, and a column of smoke rose from the metal leg iron, coiling upward as if directed by an unseen force. Yvette stood, her eyes lit in amazement. A ghost of a laugh echoed off the walls, followed by a whiff of frankincense, and then the smoke trailed out the window and was free.

  “Wow! She did it. She got out.” Yvette spun in a pirouette. “I’d heard about it, but I never thought I’d ever see one combust in front of my very own eyes.”

  Elena hugged the blanket to her chest. She’d thought she knew every kind of magic there was, but clearly she was wrong. “How could she survive burning without a protection spell?”

  Yvette picked up the cigarettes and matches and stashed them behind a loose stone in the wall. “Thought you vine witches were all educated. You didn’t know she was a jinni? They’re made of fire. Of course she survived.”

  “A jinni?” Grand-Mère had always made them out to be more myth than real. Wisps of smoke carried on the wind. The scent of premonition. A streak of madness in an otherwise calm mind.

  “One joined the carnival after the last World’s Fair,” Yvette said, taking a last, deep inhale of her cigarette. “He’d traveled across two continents to see the wonders of the new age and then ended up fascinated and in love with our fire juggler. Craziest thing you ever saw, the two of them. Sparks flying every time they held hands.”

  A door slammed in the corridor, followed by the sound of running feet. Yvette scuttled into her corner, waving a hand to clear the smoke. Elena stood frozen over the burn mark on the floor, still clutching the blanket.

  The prison guard bolted for the cell bars. “Oh, no, no, no!” He reached for his whistle and sounded the alarm. Matron waddled in two minutes later, her robe flowing out behind her.

  “What happened? Where is our third prisoner?” The matron cast a spell to illuminate the cell and saw the black char pile in the center of the floor. “She escaped by fire? How did she get access to a flame?” She nearly rattled the teeth out of the poor young guard as she shook him by his lapel, demanding an answer.

  “That one,” he said, pointing at Elena. “She had a visitor.” Matron shook him again, so he added in his defense, “It must have been her attorney. They don’t get searched.”

  Matron narrowed her eyes at Elena. “You’ll regret this,” she said and snapped her fingers at the guard. “Sound the tower alarm. Notify the mayor. We have a killer on the loose.”

  Elena sat up and counted the stars through the bars on the window. More than a thousand of them flickered in the black space within the narrow frame. She wrapped her blanket around her shoulders, inhaled the trace of incense left behind by its previous owner. To be made of fire in a world full of fuel—a whirling dervish of controlled rage, spinning beneath the eye of the All Knowing—the notion sent a chill rippling over her skin.

  To burn until even your bones turned to ash, yet survive the transformation without aid of a spell . . . Sidra had been right. For a person’s essence to survive, it had to be so entwined with the core being that chains and counterspells couldn’t impair it, which was why she’d been able to hold on to just enough of herself to stay yoked to her intellect and escape the curse. Her second sight had opened a pathway that allowed her to survive because it was intrinsic to who she was. Just as a jinni was made of fire. And a murderer was drawn to blood.

  Yes, that too was something that resided within. She’d once thought herself capable of committing murder, dipping her hands in the blood of revenge to be free of the pain of her curse, but it was a stain her hands would not wear. When faced with the deed she proved no murderer. Yet whoever killed Bastien must bear that brutal streak in their skin, in their hair, and on their breath. They would be imbued with the stench of it, because blood and death were a part of their essence. But what would make a person turn to such depravity? She understood the mind exploring the thrill of the risk, but to leap to the act?

  A warning crawled up her back one joint at a time to perch on her collarbone. The archaic rules of blood magic tumbled over in her mind. What value was there in spilling the blood of a fox or cat? Or Bastien’s for that matter? And what spell would allow for either one? For all her powers of second sight, she was blind to its meaning. And without her freedom she was as helpless as any stumbling mortal to figure it out.
r />   She knocked the back of her head against the wall in frustration. “I shouldn’t be here.”

  “What, you should be at the cabaret drinking champagne?” Even after Matron’s threat, Yvette smoked a defiant last cigarette after lights out, blowing the smoke high into the air, daring the guards to catch her.

  That one was trouble. Too young to foresee the consequences of her rebellion, yet too savvy to claim ignorance in how she might also take others down with her actions. The stars said as much. Emboldened by the dark phase of the moon, the constellations twisted round in their infinite sky, slowly corkscrewing into the future, divining immutable futures for those still awake and gazing up.

  “You’ll get us both shackled to the floor if you don’t get rid of that thing.”

  “Oh là là, aren’t we feisty tonight.” The young woman stubbed out the butt of the cigarette on the floor near the place where Sidra had incinerated herself. “Happy now?”

  “Not at all.”

  She ignored Yvette’s rude flick of the fingers under her chin and stretched out on her side to rest her head on her folded arm. The guards had scraped the surface ash from the floor earlier to gather evidence, but a sooty stain remained. Elena stared at it with a stab of jealousy before closing her eyes.

  Not even three breaths later she smelled smoke again and propped herself up on her elbow, ready for an all-out fight. “I said put it out.”

  “I did!”

  Elena sniffed the air again, and her nose filled with the scent of frankincense too strong and immediate to be coming from the blanket. She sat up, eyes searching the darkness. As she traced the cell for the source, she spotted a seam of smoke snaking between the cracks in the overhead beams. More sweet smoke sank between the joists, and then the first of the flames begin to lick the underside of the beams.

  “Get up, Yvette.”

  “Why are you such an uptight bitch?”

  The young woman rolled over, brandishing her sharpened hairpin like a dagger as a booming series of footfalls rattled the roof. Her eyes shot to the ceiling. A ribbon of smoke wafted down, deliberately wrapping around her neck like a noose. Properly panicked, she covered her mouth with her thin blouse and escaped to Elena’s corner of the cell.

  “Guard! Fire!” Yvette shook the bars as the smoke drifted toward her again. “Fire! Open the door, you bastard!” She stepped back and desperately tried a spell on the lock. It fizzled the moment the words fell off her tongue.

  “It’s no use,” Elena said, looking for something—anything—that might help them escape. Finally she picked up the blanket, started a tear at one end, and then ripped it into three pieces.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Thinking like a mortal,” she said and tied the pieces of blanket together so that she had one long piece. “Give me that hairpin.” The young woman handed it over, and Elena knotted it to the end of the blanket and gave it a hard tug. Hefting the blanket in her right hand, she slipped her arm through the bars and swung the blanket at the alarm bell on the wall. The knot in the blanket glanced off the metal, making a pitiful muffled noise.

  “Harder!”

  “I’m trying!” She took a breath and aimed again. This time the silver pin struck the bell, clanging out a note loud and clear. She did it again and again and again until the guard entered the corridor ready to curse them both for waking him.

  Two trails of smoke snaked down the hall, twining around the guard’s head and neck.

  Yvette banged on the bars to get the guard’s attention back on them. “Open the door, you fool! Let us out before we die in here.”

  The guard hesitated, blinking as much, it seemed, against the blinding smoke as he did against the strict rules. At the last moment he relented and put the key in the lock. The door swung open, and they ran through the sweet cloud of burnt incense.

  “That way,” the guard said, pointing to the stairs. Their feet skipped down the steps, hurrying toward the exit. They reached the ground level, eager to run for the door, when the guard ordered them to halt. Matron stood at the other end of the corridor shouting out dousing spells, but the flames licking the beamed ceiling only grew, her words hitting like water thrown on a grease fire. Even the stone foundation appeared to catch fire as the flames clung to the walls of the old fortress.

  “It’s no use,” she called. “Evacuate the witches. I’ll see to the mortal prisoners in the east wing.”

  The guard fumbled for his keys in a mad panic. “You two, in here.” He gestured toward a small room where metal restraints hung in rows along the wall.

  Yvette balked. “You heard her—get us out of here.”

  “Not until you’re shackled.”

  “The whole place is going to burn down and you want to restrain us?”

  “I’m not risking any more escapes,” he said and shoved them both face-first against the wall.

  Vibrations from the rune spell buzzed along Elena’s skin as the guard snapped a shackle around her left wrist. Hope sank as the other cuff went around Yvette’s right wrist, binding them together. If she’d had a notion to run, it had just been pruned to the nub.

  The giant oak door of Maison de Chêne opened. The guard escorted the witches down the steps and under the brickwork arch at the bottom of the hill. Free from the clouds of smoke, they sucked in deep gulps of fresh night air as they clung to the stone pillars holding up the arch. Fear dissolved into awe as Elena turned to stare at the massive flames crowning the roof of the ancient castle. Below, at the main entrance, Matron herded a dozen panicked women through the doorway, ordering them to stay calm as she waved her wand. But before she could spit the incantation out, the beams over the main entrance caved in and the shackled prisoners scattered down the stone steps like a stampeding herd of gazelles, tripping and tumbling over each other. The guards, including the one watching over Elena and Yvette, ran to contain the chaos and corral the mortal prisoners.

  A familiar laugh echoed off the walls of the prison, prickling Elena’s supernatural instincts.

  “It’s Sidra,” she whispered to Yvette. “She’s doing this.”

  Yvette’s face lit up. “I knew she wouldn’t forget who gave her that ciggie. Come on, now’s our chance.”

  “What, you mean run?”

  “Yes!”

  “And how far do you think we’ll get, bound together and unable to do magic?”

  Yvette wrinkled her nose at the logic and yanked her arm, forcing Elena off balance. She tugged back, and a column of smoke rose up beside them. An overpowering cloud of incense prompted them to wave their free hands in front of their faces, while the shape of a human emerged from the smoke.

  “Thought you’d be halfway to your desert by now,” Yvette said.

  “And maybe I was. But a debt is a debt.” Sidra, now fully reanimated, grinned and flashed her gold-inlaid teeth at them, then shook her head at their shackled wrists. “This complicates things, does it not?”

  Yvette raised her arm, hauling Elena’s up with it by the chain. “Can you get these things off us?”

  Sidra shrugged. “It is a thing I can do. I owe you each for my escape, and therefore a favor is due to both. And yet I did not expect you would be chained together.”

  “What difference does it make?” Yvette squealed before stealing a look over her shoulder. “Just do it before that damn guard comes back.”

  Sidra trailed her fingers through the air, and a screen of smoke cut them off from view of the guards.

  The jinni met Elena’s eye. “Your fates have been bound.”

  “What’s that mean?” Yvette asked.

  “It means you both must want freedom for me to grant such a thing.”

  “Of course we do!”

  Sidra thumped a knuckle against Yvette’s forehead and then pointed her finger at Elena. “Did you ever stop to think this one might actually be innocent? If I grant your desire and set you free, I make her a fugitive too. I cannot decide another’s fate for them. She must choose her p
ath.”

  Yvette dropped her arm and glared at Sidra.

  Elena felt the pinch of the shackles against her wrists. Running meant guilt, but she feared staying would end in a sure date with la demi-lune, innocent or not. She was trapped again by the same wicked hand of fate that had stripped her of her freedom once before while the real murderer still wandered the lanes and hills of home. As did the witch who’d cursed her seven years earlier.

  Her desire for justice reignited. She raised her wrist before the jinni. “Set us free.”

  Sidra raised an eyebrow and nodded. “As you wish.” A second later a flash of sparks encircled the magical shackles binding the witches together. The cuffs glowed as if they’d been thrust in a blacksmith’s fire before disintegrating into a pile of ash at their feet. The witches rubbed their unburned wrists, kissed the jinni’s cheek, and ran.

  The crescent moon slipped loose from the clouds as the baying of hounds and the shrill of the alarm bellowed over the embankment. A layer of smoke, meant to conceal movement and confuse the bloodhounds, thinned to reveal distant torchlight moving in their direction. Elena crouched lower in the ravine beside the impish girl. She was a fool to have fled, escaping into the night like a common criminal. But her desperation to find the truth and exonerate herself had outweighed her better judgment. She’d followed an impulse, a witch’s natural instinct, and one that had rarely let her down before.

  The dogs were near enough that she heard the snuffling of their breath against the earth.

  Yvette stretched her neck to listen. “Why are they getting closer?”

  “The guards must be using counterspells to disperse Sidra’s smokescreen.”

  “What do we do?”

  “Give them what they want.” Elena scanned the ground and plucked up a fuzzy dandelion by its stem. She swiped the delicate puffball over her exposed forearm, then held it to her lips. “Scatter these seeds upon the ground, and with them shall my scent be bound.” She blew on the seed head to scatter its hundreds of pappi on the prevailing breeze. The tufted seeds shimmered briefly in the dark as they carried her magic over the ravine and into the woods to create a separate scent trail.