“I went to Ivo’s apartment,” he whispered. “I was going to—to pay him back the rest of the money I’d borrowed.” Ylfing swallowed hard and scrubbed the tears off his face. “I was going to say good-bye. I didn’t think he’d care that I was going, but I wanted to say it for me. He, um . . .” He took a huge breath, let it out in a long, slow stream. “There was, um.” He couldn’t get the words out. “There was someone else there with him. A, um. A gentleman caller. He was just leaving when I got there. It was . . . really early this morning.” Another long, shaky breath. “I was just across the street when Ivo was showing him out, and they were holding hands and . . . they . . . um. They looked cozy.” He bit his lip. “Then Ivo saw me across the street and he was . . . Well, you could tell he hadn’t thought I’d see that. I went over, and he introduced me to the man, but I forgot his name. He left. Ivo and I had a fight right there on his doorstep, and I gave him his money, and I left. And that’s all.” A desperately sad little laugh. “That’s it. It’s all over.”
Poor little mite, he’s terribly young. Hasn’t had his heart broken too often, you know. Hasn’t learned how to love someone at arm’s length, like a Chant has to. Regular folk, they’d wonder if you can really ever love someone like that. There’s plenty who do—monks, nuns, mothers. It’s not about keeping them out of your heart. It’s knowing that you can’t keep them, and they can’t keep you. You love them like their heart is a bird in your hand. You hold it so gently, and you cherish it while you have it, you are filled with the wonder of it—and then they flutter their wings, and you open your hands and let them fly. And you don’t begrudge them their flight, because you held them for a few warm moments, and how often is it that that happens?
Anyway, he sobbed for a while, and I drooled, and he fed me dinner, and I let most of it dribble out of my mouth, and he never lost his patience with me once. Ylfing has a heart as big as the world, you know. And I have walked back and forth all my life, from one end of this world to the other, so I know exactly how big it is, better than most anyone else.
We were to head southwest over land; the late-winter storms were coming up by then and the harbor was locked in ice. We had a small caravan of carriages, with their wheels locked and mounted onto sleds so they could skim over the snow and frozen ground, and we had horses to pull them, a motley set of the most mismatched beasts you’ve ever seen. Well, I suppose you have seen them, actually, come to think of it. You know horses better than I do—they’re not very good, are they? No, I didn’t think so. They’re built for a purpose, though, which is pulling things over snow and through drifts. Heavy, ugly things, I thought. Nothing like yours. Those horses couldn’t dance down an avalanche like yours did.
The ride down was so boring that there were several times I almost forgot myself and spoke. And I think I wasn’t dribbling enough, because Ylfing started talking to me less like I was a complete imbecile. It was just so cold, the drool on my face froze into my beard every time someone opened a door. So I gave up on that right quick, as you can imagine.
There were two carriages for Consanza and her family, and two more for the retinue and staff that were naturally required by the ambassador’s office, and a fifth carriage, which was exclusively for hauling the paperwork they’d need along the way. Damn Nuryevens can’t take a piss without filing a form in triplicate.
It was a dead quiet journey, as I just said, for the first three days. Utterly nothing happened.
And then one afternoon, we came upon three blackwitches.
The whole caravan came to a halt, and the Nuryevens clustered all the wagons as close as they could and then wandered around between them, muttering or peeking out to look at those three still figures standing off in the middle of the field. People came to tell Consanza everything, of course, since she was the most important person present. We were all frozen in fear, unwilling to move any closer to the blackwitches in order to pass them.
But we stood there in the snow for an hour, then two, with the Nuryevens muttering more and more darkly, and Consanza and Helena holding each other ever more tightly. Velizar ran up from the other carriage to check on us; Consanza snarled at him to go back and take more of the guards with him to protect the carriage that held the children. I sat there and tried to look neutral, tried not to shake myself right out of my boots. I couldn’t do anything or say anything. I just had to sit there and drool.
But Ylfing had never seen the blackwitches like I had. I think he still thought they were half fairy tale. His curiosity was piqued, so he bundled his scarf around his head and neck, and pulled his cloak around him, and went out.
“Wait,” Consanza said, and looked him up and down. She made him open his cloak, and then she pursed her lips. “Keep it closed tight. Tight, you hear?” And then she snatched away his mittens and gave him a pair of her own.
“Um?” said Ylfing. “Yes, I was planning to. The snow and everything.”
Consanza grabbed his chin in her hands and looked fiercely into his eyes. “Do not open your cloak. And stay well back from them. Well back.”
Ylfing nodded solemnly and hopped out of the carriage, wading through the thigh-deep snow to the front of the caravan. I tried not to fidget, but he returned soon enough. He climbed back in, shaking off the snow, and settled himself again beside me. He was trembling and pale.
“Did you see them?” Consanza demanded.
“What? I . . . I saw something,” Ylfing said. “I don’t know what a blackwitch looks like, but . . . they were certainly people, and they were certainly wearing black. I think I—” He cut himself off, shook his head.
“Mmmm,” Consanza said, brows knotted, and pulled out her pipe. She packed the bowl with a tiny amount of leaf, just enough for a puff or two, and lit it.
“The guards seem very concerned,” Ylfing said.
“Good,” said Helena, who was riding with us.
After a long pause, Ylfing said, “Why’d you take my mittens?”
Consanza sucked her pipe at him and breathed out a slow, thin stream of smoke. “They were green.”
Ylfing looked down at the ones she’d given him in return. They were made of undyed yarn, naturally charcoal gray. “Is that bad, if you see a blackwitch?”
“Only sometimes,” said Consanza. “They don’t like color, or so it’s said. Dark hues, or dull, muddy ones—those just irritate them. Make them itchy, like someone who gets sick on shellfish. Bright ones . . . Depends on the blackwitch. A lot depends on the blackwitch.”
“Some people become blackwitches when they die,” said Helena. “They creep around, curse people, steal things, frighten livestock. As time goes on, it’s like they lose their minds. Growing up, I had a friend whose father was a farmer, and one day he went into the barn to milk the cow and there was a blackwitch just standing there. Just standing there in the middle of the barn with its hands at its sides. And he froze, because it wasn’t looking at him, and of course he didn’t want it to. And it didn’t move at all, except it opened its mouth and sort of . . . made this soft noise in its throat, like a creaking door or a yowling cat. Made the hair stand up on the back of his neck, and he ran back to the house and got a shovel out of the garden shed and came back to kill it, but it was gone by then, and the cow never gave milk again.”
Started thinking again about what got me into this whole mess—it’s been so long, I hardly remember the details. Let’s just say there was a sick goat that I saw somewhere, and I happened to have some herbs, and there might have been a woman who was a little startled to see me.
And, come to think of it, I believe I remember I was wearing clothes that were likely pretty grimy and grayish by then. It had been quite a while between towns, and there’s not much point in paying for a launderer when you can just do it yourself in a river. But all the rivers we’d passed were slow and silty.
Helena went on, heedless: “I guess the one my friend’s father saw must not have been one that was quite so bad. Or maybe it just wasn’t as far gone�
�they get worse the more magic they use, that’s what everyone says, but no one knows for sure. Some of them are like animals—they tear open rabbits and mice with their teeth and eat them raw, and they’d tear you open too if you angered them, or if your clothes were too bright. And some of them—some of them look just like real people. They can even talk. Those are the ones that come up in stories.”
“No one ever bothered to tell us any stories about blackwitches,” Ylfing said.
“Well, no,” Helena said, uncomfortably. “You wouldn’t want to talk about them, would you?”
Like drawing Shuggwa’s Eye, I thought at Ylfing, as hard as I could.
“They might come for you if you did?” Ylfing said.
Helena shrugged and tilted just a little bit closer to Consanza, who blew out her second stream of smoke and laced her fingers with Helena’s. “They might,” Helena said tightly. “Best not to risk it.”
Ylfing nodded and glanced at the carriage door. “You know,” he said softly. “There already are blackwitches outside. And we know they’re the . . . the kind to stand in one place and make that noise. So they’re not as bad as they could be, and they’re just off in the snow by themselves, off to one side of the road.” He paused. “So . . . would now be an all right time to tell me one of the stories? They don’t seem . . . feral.”
Helena and Consanza shared a look, and Consanza squeezed her hand. Helena took a deep breath.
THE SIXTEENTH TALE:
The Blackwitch and the Farmer
You will know the blackwitch by the drabness of its garb (because it cannot stand to touch color or see it), and by its black cat-skin boots (because it has no heart, and so it lusts to kill soft things), and by its broad-brimmed hat (because it will not abide the touch of sun or moonlight).
Once, a blackwitch came to a farm on a cold, crisp autumn night with no moons. When it knocked, the farmer opened the door, and the blackwitch raised its eyes and said, “I am a traveler all alone, and I beg leave to sleep in your hayloft tonight, and in return I will give you a magic token that you can bury in your field, and all your crops will grow as huge as your wife’s belly is now.”
(Here Helena paused and bit her lip and looked as if she wanted to unsay it, to twist the metaphor. She rubbed her own huge belly; Consanza’s knotted brows tightened still further and she squeezed Helena’s hand.)
The farmer was frightened out of his wits, and he wondered how the blackwitch knew about his wife, for her pregnancy had been difficult and the midwife had prescribed her strict bed-rest for several weeks now; she had not stepped foot outside the house. But the farmer thought that the only thing worse than allowing the blackwitch to stay in the hayloft would be to refuse.
The blackwitch bowed, and the next morning the hayloft had nothing in it but hay, and there was a little wooden disk lying on the front step, with strange markings burned into it. The farmer picked it up, and put it with the seeds for spring, and poured a little milk into the cup before the icon of Brevo in their kitchen, and prayed that no blackwitch would ever darken their doorstep again.
A week later the blackwitch came back, and it was pale, and it had grave dirt beneath its fingernails, and its breath rattled in its throat like someone dying of sickness, and it begged leave to sleep in the stable with the horses, and it promised a token that, hung with the cows, would make them give rivers of milk, and the farmer thought that the only thing worse than allowing this would be to refuse. And in the morning, there was a little wooden disk with strange markings on the doorstep. He hung it in his barn, as he’d been instructed, and the cows’ udders did indeed give rivers and rivers of milk.
A week later the blackwitch came back, and its eyes were glassy and reflected the firelight oddly, and its black clothes looked wet and sticky, and its teeth were yellowed. And it asked to sleep by the fireside in the kitchen, and in return it would give the farmer a token that his wife could wear around her neck, which would protect her in childbirth, and each baby could wear when it was born and be protected from illness until it could walk—and if the blackwitch had offered this two weeks before, the farmer might have allowed it. But his wife was cheerful and energetic lately, not sickly at all, and she had already borne three children safely. . . .
So the farmer said that the blackwitch was welcome to sleep with the animals again, no payment needed.
And in the morning the midwife came to visit, and the farm was silent, and there were rivers of blood running out of the barn door, and blood running out from under the threshold of the house, and when she ran inside, she found the whole family torn to pieces, and the blackwitch crouched over the farmer’s wife’s belly, and—
Helena stopped quite abruptly, as pale as death herself, and I don’t think anyone really wanted her to continue.
Well.
Well!
If I hadn’t been pretending to be catatonic, I would have caught her up in my arms and kissed both her cheeks. Every last rock in this godforsaken country can go straight to hell—but Helena, though! A garland of blessings for Helena. What a story! What a delight, to hear such a story told so well, and a story I’ve never heard before, to boot!
I’ll stop myself now, otherwise I’ll sit here crowing about the wonder of Helena until the sun falls from the sky and the moons crack in half.
The guards eventually gathered enough of their courage to stop wringing their hands—or possibly they’d been worrying themselves ragged, finally ran out of patience for their own terror, and decided that the options were as follows: that they could die standing still when the blackwitches inevitably turned on them, that they could have a staring contest with the damn things and see who froze to death first, or that they could at least try to slink past them and hope that they didn’t take notice.
I got just a glimpse of them as we went by—I said before that the Kaskeen don’t have magic, and that’s true. But because we don’t have it, we can feel it when it’s about. You know how a cook can grab a hot pan without flinching, when anyone else would drop it, howling? It’s like that. Or like a tanner who stops smelling the filth a year or two into his apprenticeship. Nuryevens have lived with their land’s particular flavor of magic all their lives; their senses are dulled to it. But me, I can feel the heat when I grab the pan, and I can smell the filth—but magic usually doesn’t feel that vile.
The blackwitches did, though. They must have been thirty or forty feet off the road, but when I saw them, my teeth itched and my fingernails felt sore and it felt like there was just one single fly crawling around the inside of my eyelids. It was like what I’d sensed that night the blackwitch and the Weavers came to my cell to kidnap me, but so much worse. Ten times worse. Vile magic, and no good could possibly come of it.
I was glad to be past them. We all were.
The whole caravan was on edge the rest of that day, and the next, and we were just starting to unwind the day after that when, to everyone’s surprise, we were overtaken by that marauding party of your riders, led by Temay Batai. Your niece, isn’t she?
I’m surprised that there were only three deaths, to be honest. Fortunately, most of the Nuryevens fell into the snow and started begging for their lives, because a ferocious band of horse demons was just too much to bear after the ordeal of getting past the blackwitches. Consanza and her spouses all went ashen and tried to hide the children. Helena, though! Again, Helena! What a champion she was—she must have taken her own story to heart, because she was armed to the teeth! She was full ready to fling herself out a door and start hamstringing any horse or rider in reach, pregnant or no. If I were riding through hostile territory again, she’s the first person I’d want with me.
What a jewel. Another heart as big as the world, I think. I can cast aspersions on Consanza all day and well into the night, just as I have been doing, but by the stars and moons above us, I simply cannot find fault with her taste in women.
Of course, the second I saw that it was who it was, I flung myself out of the carriage a
nd started singing the “Song of the Two Firesides,” just as loud as I could. My voice croaked and creaked with disuse, and I nearly got skewered by a couple javelins before the riders near me heard and came to a blundering halt. It took a second or two for them to get their wits about them and collect their jaws from the ground where they’d dropped them, and then they cried out in loud voices and sang the descant back to me just like I was long-lost family, and it rang along the caravan and brought tears to my eyes, I’m not too proud to admit.
“Honored elder!” someone bawled at me, tumbling off her horse and catching me up in her arms. I hadn’t the foggiest idea who she was, but she kissed my hands, so I patted her beautiful brown cheeks and clucked at her for getting all wind-chapped, which made her beam with joy, and then there were others crowding around too, just as if I were their own grandfather back from a long journey.
I explained what had happened, then, and exactly who I was, and they explained they were a scouting party and they’d been nearly as startled to see us as we were to see them, and we all agreed that the thing to do would be to rejoin you as quick as we could, me and Ylfing and as many of the Nuryevens as would like to come along.
I grabbed Temay Batai’s hands when she came riding up—I could tell she didn’t recognize me, because she called me honored elder instead of oathsworn-uncle, but I wasn’t at all offended. I suppose the last time I saw her, she was about knee-high to a jerboa and still had to be strapped onto her horse. But I introduced myself again properly, and I scolded her for the scuffs on her stirrups, which pleased her deeply.
We yammered away for a while about this and that, and made plans for the journey back to the main camp, and I was so thrilled that it took me a while to get around to turning back to the carriage.
And then I did.
And there was Ylfing, sobbing his eyes out, crying so hard that the tears didn’t even have time to freeze on his cheeks. He’d shot out of the carriage after me and promptly tripped on his own feet. Don’t know what he thought his poor invalid master was doing, but as soon as I started singing . . .
A Conspiracy of Truths Page 42