The Vine Witch

by Smith, Luanne G.

  “I want you to still yourself, close your eyes, and concentrate on the shape of the star,” she said to Yvette. “The top point is straight in front of you.” While the young woman closed her eyes, Elena picked up the sack of salt and judged the weight of it in her hand. It ought to be enough if she was careful. Trickling the salt out in a thin stream, she traced a faint line around them on the floor, encircling the points of the invisible pentagram contained inside. She closed the circle at the top of the star and still had a spoonful of salt left. She returned it to the makeshift altar and raised her hands to thank the All Knowing.

  She was working too quickly, but there was no time for a proper spell. If Gerda’s patience were stretched too thin, there was no telling what she might do to Jean-Paul. Elena’s instinct would have to carry her over the gaps in preparation.

  Standing before the altar, she raised the tin of frankincense and let the smoke trail over her head. “Blessed be,” she said and placed the incense on the floor at the head of the invisible star. With the lavender and bay, she first trailed the herbs under her nose, inhaling their calming scent, and then placed them at the left point of the star. “I’m going to anoint us both,” she warned Yvette before smearing the young woman’s forehead with the olive oil. She repeated the gesture on herself, said a quick “blessed be,” and then positioned the vial at the right point of the star.

  Yvette appeared to be in a near reverent trance as she observed in awe a ritual that should have been a normal part of her childhood. A flicker of worry for the young woman’s safety tried to invade Elena’s thoughts, but she cast it out. She had to be a tyrant against doubt now. She handed one candle to the young woman and kept the other for herself. Eyes wide with uncertainty, Yvette seemed to ask what she was supposed to do with hers. Elena snapped her fingers against the wick, lighting it with a quick spark. A sign her power was back under her control.

  “Hold the candle in front of you and envision the energy of the universe converging around you. Draw it in like breath. Like sustenance. Let the energy build inside you. Fill yourself with light.”

  The young woman took in several deep breaths, and Elena eased her into a sitting position, coaching her to keep breathing, to keep focusing on the light as she crossed her legs. The circle’s energy began to coalesce around them, shimmering in growing intensity. Yvette had finally entered the meditative state of semiconsciousness. The preparation was nearly complete. It was a sloppy job, but the All Knowing seemed to accept and approve her intent. Buoyed, she tipped her candle into the flame of the other, letting the wick catch. She dripped a pool of wax on the floor at the star’s left foot, then secured the candle upright within it.

  For the final placement, she picked up the remaining salt from the altar and set it on the right foot of the pentagram. The young woman’s head drooped forward and Elena exhaled. Five points, five elements: spirit, air, water, fire, earth. And a hotheaded naïf sat square in the middle of it all.

  With her offerings set in place, Elena recited a silent spell, directing her thoughts outward and upward.

  Smoke, candle, oil, salt. Cone of energy form a vault. Safe within, safe without. Protect the one who sits devout.

  Satisfied she’d done all she could, she slit open a doorway at the back of the circle with her athame and slipped out, closing it up behind her. The veil of energy appeared to hold. Yvette should remain protected inside the cone. With that burden off her shoulders, she tucked the athame at her waist and walked out the door.

  The witch seething in the cellar could no longer wait.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Jean-Paul could taste fear coiled in his mouth like a length of old rope, a dry knot he couldn’t swallow down. The winepress had inched another notch closer. The wooden boards pressed against his rib cage, bending but not yet breaking him. He eyed the mechanical wheel that controlled the pressure. He wasn’t sure he could survive another three clicks.

  Gerda stirred the lees inside the barrels, doing the cellar work as if it were just another day at Domaine du Monde. But she’d seen him turn his head. The witch set down her stir stick and approached. He refused to look at her.

  “Do you hate me?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “You know, if you’d come to the valley just a year or two earlier, I might have fancied you instead of Bastien.” Her fingers combed through his sweat-dampened hair, chilling his body. “We might have made a beautiful wine, you and I.”

  He nearly choked on the thought. Why didn’t she just kill him and be done with it? Elena wasn’t coming. She’d disappeared before, and she would again. He tugged at his restraints, desperate to strangle the witch. “Get your filthy hands off me, you goddamned hag.”

  “Hate it is,” she said with a sigh.

  The wheel turned another click.

  He shut his eyes against the pressure as the heavy timbers shifted lower, like an elephant squatting atop his lungs. But when he opened his eyes and gasped for a breath, something had changed. A shaft of natural light cut a swath through the cellar’s darkness. He had to twist his head around to find the source, straining to see through the stinging sweat that dripped into his eyes and fogged his glasses. After so long in the dark he doubted his sight, but then he saw her descend the stone steps.

  Elena glowed in his vision, encircled by a veil of energy, as if she attracted all the light in the cellar, from the finger of daylight seeping through the crevice under the door to the unnatural flame flickering above the witch’s candle. Even her odd outfit sparkled as though it had been beaded with precious stones.

  God, she was beautiful.

  He didn’t want to die. He wanted to hold her, to tell her love had no real weight or value until he’d met her.

  But he had to warn her. He had to tell her about the witch. If only he could keep his eyes open. If only his mouth would form the words. Instead, he seemed to drift away on a gentle wave. Sunlight warmed his face, and the pain that had racked his chest, head, and teeth slipped loose from his body, floating away on tiny filaments of radiant energy.

  He no longer had a care in the world, only a trancelike memory of an exciting and alluring love that made life worth living.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  She had conjured a temporary hypnosis spell to alleviate his suffering. To see him in pain would reveal her weakness. She had to eliminate the distraction of wanting to run to him and cool his fevered body. All her energy, all her focus, had to be reserved for what waited in the dark.

  Elena took the final step into the cellar. Cool air infused with the scent of oak and fruit drew her in like a familiar hand, leading her into the darkness, though the tinge of sulfur still hung in the space, as if the empty barrels had recently been cleaned with the stuff.

  Only the two sconces above the press and the three-pronged candelabra flickering inside a ritual circle on the flagstones provided any light. She peered into the dimness, watching for movement. This one, she knew, liked to hide in the dark and damp. Though she couldn’t yet see her, she sensed the witch’s eyes watching from the shadows.

  “Now, now, a sleeping spell like that might be interpreted as interfering with a mortal,” Gerda said. She stepped to the light’s edge, letting the sweep of her long skirt brush against a cat skull positioned on the eastern point of the pentagram. Her face remained half in shadow. “Wouldn’t want the covenant police locking you up for your little infraction, would you?”

  “Release him and I’d be happy to reverse the spell.” Elena took a cautious step toward the candle, hoping to lure her adversary farther into the light. “He’s no danger to you.”

  “Oh, even a lovesick mortal can be dangerous when provoked. And I rather thought I’d save him for later.”

  “He came to see you in good faith.”

  “To help you.”

  “Let him go. I’m the one you want to hurt, not him.”

  Gerda scoffed. “Spare me the martyrdom. You were merely a convenient scapegoat for my little indiscretions. T
hough I admit I underestimated your training. It’s been years since I’ve encountered another witch with shadow vision as developed as yours.”

  Gerda lifted the hem of her skirt and turned from the circle’s edge to ascend the steps to the winepress. Elena, fearful of what she might do to an unconscious Jean-Paul, clasped her hand tighter around the crystal in her pocket and ventured nearer. The energy from the protection spell still radiated warmth against her skin, calming her.

  “You can’t hope to get away with this,” she said.

  “Oh, but I already have.” The witch kept her back turned as she stroked Jean-Paul’s exposed arm with her finger. “And I will again.”

  Elena’s skin rippled with gooseflesh at the sight. “You enjoy this, don’t you? Hiding in the shadows. Uttering your blood magic spells. And now you’ve strapped an innocent man to a machine that looks more like it was invented for torture than winemaking.”

  Gerda hissed between her teeth. “And what would you know of torture?”

  “I see the pleasure you take in hurting others.”

  “You know nothing.” Gerda twisted her neck to look up at the monstrosity of wood and wheel and rope overhead and raised her hand. The wheel on the press groaned. The rope squealed against the windlass, and the wooden pallet shuddered lower as if it had been magicked. A gush of air left Jean-Paul’s lungs with a sound like a pillow being punched. “If I’d desired it, you would have found his body split open like the skin of a grape under that weight. I do admit a certain curiosity about what sort of juice comes sluicing out of a man subjected to that much weight and pressure.” Gerda lifted her arm again.

  “Wait!” Elena’s hands involuntarily reached out as if she had some power to hold up the weight of the press. She didn’t yet understand the game they were playing, only that she must keep moving on the board long enough to keep Jean-Paul alive. “Just tell me what you want.”

  Gerda pivoted away from the press. She finally showed her face to Elena, but the shadowy light from the oil lamps seemed to play tricks on her skin, as if she wore the wrinkles of a woman twice her age. And her lustrous hair, normally held in a tight chignon at the back of her neck, had dulled to gray, frizzling in long strands that stood on end. There was little left of the elegant young bierhexe who had come to Elena’s aid in the village street. The witch before her was in the process of some transformation. But what kind of spell could strip a woman’s youth from her face as if it were a coat of varnish?

  “Whatever is the matter? You look as if you’ve seen an unfortunate future.” Gerda bared a grin, revealing a row of teeth brown with rot.

  Elena gripped the crystal for strength. “What’s happening? Why are you doing this?”

  “It’s nothing personal. But I’m quite set on having my way.” A cool draft swept through the cellar as the rafters creaked overhead. “This ‘hiding in the shadows,’ as you call it, has kept me alive for a very long time, and I intend for it to continue.”

  Gerda stepped off the platform and strode past Elena, and the curve of her spine bowed against the lace of her mourning dress. She seemed to be shrinking, yet the aura of her power only intensified. Then Elena noticed the witch’s legs. They’d seemingly warped beneath her skirt, forcing her to walk crab-like to her magic circle. Once inside her cone of power, her metamorphosis accelerated, doubling the age of her appearance yet again.

  Professor Rackham had said the lure of influence, money, and immortality created a pitfall for magical folk. Power craved power, leading some into dangerous alliances. The sickly sweet scent of lilac water churned in Gerda’s wake, barely masking the underlying whiff of decay. But why change into this hideous creature? What ability did she gain from decrepit disfigurement?

  And then it struck her. The bierhexe wasn’t transforming into something new. She was reverting into herself. Hidden beneath the veneer of a powerful illusion lay her true form, one possibly testing the limits of immortality, a body rotting at the fringes from the unnatural extension of life.

  “How long?” Just asking the question made her stomach queasy.

  The witch stood hunched and balding as a shriveled foot protruded from under her skirt. “Oh, I’ve seen kings and conquerors come and go. Dauphins, emperors, prime ministers, presidents.” Gerda retrieved her black-and-silver walking stick from atop a barrel. “Mark my words—fashions change, causes change, but men’s ambitions never do,” she said and leaned heavily on the cane.

  Elena found herself horror-struck at the rate of the transformation yet also drawn in by a curiosity shaped by years of studying magic. “What spell allows a person to endlessly cheat time and fate?”

  Gerda stared back through eyes now veiled with cataracts. “When I learned you had escaped from prison, it confirmed an earlier suspicion. You see, I’d already begun to think we had more in common than most,” she said. “It’s why I decided to bring you here. To show you a glimpse of what life can be for those brave enough to grip it by the throat. If you want to hear.”

  Elena wanted to scream they had nothing in common, aside from this unfortunate crossroads in time and place. But she’d do anything to keep the murderess talking and distracted from lowering the press against Jean-Paul another breath-stealing inch.

  The witch gripped her cane with care and bent to pick up the tasting cup she’d placed at the west point of the pentagram. She sniffed its contents as she waited for an answer. If not for her grotesque appearance and taste for murder, she might have been mistaken for a wise elder, a teacher, a mage. But even the monsters of the world can prove a flashpoint of enlightenment to those stuck in the dark.

  Elena agreed with a nudge of her chin. “Tell me about this shadow magic of yours.”

  The witch’s teeth had disintegrated to nubs so that she spoke with a gummy, wet inflection, and her eyes had lost their midrange focus, suggesting she’d sunk into blindness. Even so, Elena suspected Gerda’s magic still carried the sharp swipe of a falcon’s claw. Though the crone appeared easy prey, only a fool would attack a bierhexe in her domain.

  “When the secret was first revealed to me I was still young enough that I blushed when a man looked at me with a mischievous smile. A complete innocent, aside from a strong curiosity about the world that didn’t conform with the nature of my sex. I wanted to know everything.”

  She stirred the liquid in the tasting cup with a rhythmic, almost hypnotic, gyration of her wrist. “I came from a good family. Direct descendants of the bierhexe who discovered the magic of adding hops to beer. Changed beer-making forever. The brewers benefited from more reliable batches, and the hexen stopped being blamed for every natural disaster that destroyed a field of grain or ruined an unstable vat of beer. Because of my lineage, I was apprenticed to the renowned braumeister Hans Steinacher. The secrets he knew about fermentation!

  “But I soon learned secrets too. I saw how he cheated his customers, slipping their change into his pocket when their eyes blurred from too much alcohol. And once I watched him conjure a hex to ruin a rival’s crops with mildew.” She shrugged, as if it wasn’t the worst offense. “But the day I learned about his ungodly appetites was when things changed.” The old witch whispered as if relating a whiff of gossip she’d heard at the fish market. “I’d spied on him, you see, with the barrel boy in the cold room. So many fingers and mouths where they shouldn’t be.”

  “He knew you’d seen them,” Elena said, drawing Gerda back in when she’d begun to spool off in distant thought.

  “Mmm, I would have looked the other way to keep learning his magic, but . . .” A shudder ran through her, a convulsion perhaps brought on by those thoughts she’d revisited. “I was too green to know what lengths a man with power would go to preserve what he’d attained. Oh, but the child doth learn.”

  The old witch paused and stuck a crooked finger in the red liquid of her tasting cup. She stirred it once, then licked her finger, smacking her lips before setting the cup back down on the pentagram and turning the handle to the north. />
  “To punish me and protect his secret he had me cursed,” she continued. “He’d offered me a sample of his latest brew under the guise of wanting to know my opinion.” She “hmphed,” as if ashamed of being taken in by such a notion. “The ‘brew’ turned out to be a barbed potion. It stitched up my voice with a thousand unseen hooks that worked their way into my throat, binding the vocal cords immobile. I couldn’t speak a word, let alone utter a spell, when he was through.”

  Elena had read about similar concoctions in old grimoires—dated, dusty books that reeked of mold and damp from sitting in cellars and crawl spaces for too long. Such sadistic spells were illegal in the Chanceaux Valley and most regions beyond, though things were possibly different in the northern forests.

  Gerda cupped a hand over her saggy neck as if reliving the pain. “We didn’t practice in the open the way they do now. It was a different time. The world was caught in a riptide of corruption and cruelty. Accusation was all it took to create a cloud of guilt. After the braumeister stole my voice, he publicly accused me of witchcraft, knowing I’d be swept up with the hapless mortals being rounded up like sheep. And then it was off to the drudenhaus for me.”

  Elena tilted her head as if she hadn’t heard right. She understood there were still places where witches had to practice with discretion. But the drudenhaus were northern prisons erected during the height of the witch hunts to house those unfortunate mortals accused of malefaction. They were older than the castle that had held Celestine. “But there hasn’t been a drudenhaus for—”

  “Two hundred and seventy-eight years.”