The Hex Witch of Seldom

by Nancy Springer

  Bobbi came trudging up at the best speed she could manage. “Is that true?” she demanded of Shane. “Is this really it?” A sweep of pasture, a rounded hill with a rock on top—

  Shane turned his intense gaze on her, but a smoky-thin voice from the vicinity of her right hand answered, startling her. Kabilde.

  “This is the Hub,” the walking stick said in its dispassionate way. “No one else has eyes to notice, but we of the Circle know. The mound was shaped by ancient people, the yellow-skinned people who came even before the red men. They raised the earthwork over their honored dead; the dust of their bones lies underneath. Millennia have passed, and the mound has weathered away to the shape of a breast, but we of the circle remember. The rock is even older than the bones, older than the shape of this continent. The people who made the mound have carved their runes on it. No muck-minded farmer would ever know, but we know. Under moonlight, they still show.”

  Come here who will, Shane’s stance atop the hill seemed to say. This is the Hub, the ancient, sacred place, and I will defend it.

  Bobbi said to her mother, “Would you get up, please? I want to look.”

  With a flounce and a swirl of polyester, Chantilly flitted away, and Bobbi looked at the stone. She could see no runes, no carving of any sort, but through her planted feet she began to sense a feeling, an understanding, wordless and bone deep. This was an old place. The Hidden Circle haunted the old places. The stone topped the mound like the nipple on a pap, breast of earth; and earth was the oldest thing of all.

  Shane stood deeply breathing through widened nostrils. Bobbi stood beside him and looked around at farmland, distant wooded mountains, sky. White clouds were beginning to glow saffron, lavender, rose. Bobbi stood by the black horse and watched the sunset. There would be time enough to eat, afterward.… The sun blazed in chariot spokes through shifting clouds, then sank lower, spun free, the solo dancer in a kaleidoscope sky, turning into a circle of scarlet.

  Chantilly Lou Yandro walked lightly up the hill, out of the dance in the west.

  The madwoman had been playing around the base of the mound, sometimes sitting like a lark in the tall grass, sometimes busy with her hands, sometimes jumping up to swirl off to another place. Because she wanted something from her mother that she was not getting and never would, Bobbi had not paid much attention until Chantilly came up the hill wearing the sun like a broad-brimmed hat. Chantilly had made herself a garland of violets to wear against the whiteness of her neck. In the wild curls of her dark hair she had placed the white blossoms of phlox, and she carried sprays and clusters of it in her arms, white and purple and wine red, and for the first time Bobbi noticed how weirdly beautiful she was in her long dress, her waist small, her breasts half-bared above the flowers. Chantilly’s face, rapt in madness, was as soft and unlined as that of a child. She had washed it in the dew on the lush pasture grass, and it rose white and innocent above the flowers, her lips lustrous red, her eyes dark and shining. She swayed as she walked, and Bobbi saw hoops swaying, silk flounces edged in velvet, green morocco slippers.

  Scarlett O’Hara came, red lips pouting and slightly parted as if waiting for a kiss, long eyelashes wisping down and then up again so that glowing, liquid eyes could gaze. Straight at the black horse she gazed. Straight into eyes of wild-larkspur blue.

  Scarlett said, “Rhett.”

  Like black silk Shane’s hide lustered. Sweat of fear made it shine.

  Bobbi saw the fear-sweat slick his neck and chest and shoulders all in a moment, saw him stiffen and start to tremble as she had seen him tremble once before, when he was trapped in a dark stall, terrified of castration—terrified. Shane was as deeply afraid of this woman as he had been of the scalpel. The dark rider, panicked by a slender girl-woman … “No,” Bobbi whispered, seeing the form behind the form, seeing too late what she had done. This was the one who had so often betrayed him. This was the woman who had tamed and befooled and betrayed him, all his lives. It was she who had sent him away to the wastelands, a wild horse. It was she who could coax and cajole a wild horse to her and lay her hands on its forelock.

  One hand outstretched, Kabilde in the other, Bobbi started toward Shane to lend him her strength. She would place her hand on his neck to comfort him. She would drive her mother away with the staff—

  Kabilde writhed and twisted in her grip. The snake’s head darted up at her face, its small eyes hard and glittering. Bobbi jumped back, nearly dropping the pow-wow staff. The snake faced her steadily, its small tongue flickering, wordlessly warning her away from Shane. What was to be, was to be. The cards had told it on Witchie’s table. Witchie had battled Bissel so that it could happen.

  “Rhett,” Scarlett O’Hara breathed, “you have come back to me.”

  Shane stood quivering, his eyes wild with terror. Why did he not run, if he was so terribly afraid? But he was the dark rider. Honor held him where he stood. He would not run.

  Aglow in the scarlet sunset light, with white flowers caught like souls in the tangle of her hair, Bobbi’s mother faced Shane on the hilltop. Blossoms drifted down from her breast, her arms. She lifted her hands to either side of Shane’s black head, pressed them there, gazed into his staring eyes and kissed him.

  There was a harsh, clanging sound, like the clash of some brutal gong. The sky darkened, for all in a moment the sun had sunk. And the dark rider changed under the madwoman’s hands. No horse stood there. Shane stood there, Shane the man, or the man Bobbi called Shane, shaken and trembling. In black silk shirt and black breeches he stood there—the clothes were as much a part of him, of what he was, as a black stallion’s black hide was of it. But four moon-crescents of iron had fallen clanging to the ground. On his neck, at the open collar of the shirt, showed odd white markings, a brand or scar. His face—the look on his face tugged at Bobbi’s heart. A man doomed to love … He stepped back from the full-skirted woman standing before him, but swept off his broad-brimmed black hat in the presence of a lady.

  “You are mistaken, ma’am,” he said. His deep voice shook only slightly.

  Scarlett O’Hara did not step toward him, for in her way she was as proud as a Yandro. White blossoms stirred around her head as she lifted it. “Why, Rhett Butler,” she declared, “don’t be a fool. I know you.”

  Seeing him standing there, bareheaded, with his blue eyes shadowed, his face pale and his dark hair lifting like a mustang’s mane in the evening breeze, with his proud chest heaving beneath the black silk and the new moon rising over his left shoulder, Bobbi felt a sudden hot, dark surge. She wanted him. He was so wild, so beautiful; she wanted to possess him, to own him, to keep him always. He was hers; she had known him first! The weird wooden snake swaying in front of her face could no longer stop her. She cast Kabilde aside, hearing the sharp hiss as the staff struck the ground, ignoring the sound—let the staff do what it wanted. She doubted it would hurt her. In three quick strides she was at the dark rider’s side.

  “His name is Shane!” she challenged her mother, challenged Chantilly who was prettier than Bobbi would ever be, who looked younger than her own daughter, Chantilly standing there so willowy with white blossoms in her hair while Bobbi clumped about in mud-caked boots and jeans. Chantilly who would never give her daughter what a mother should, what Bobbi needed and craved.

  “Shane!” Bobbi repeated. Her mother had flowers in her hair, but she could not have him.

  “Melly,” Chantilly snapped, “you keep out of it!”

  A white form flitted near her in the dusk, frantic, shouting her name. Her father wanted to speak with her. She ignored him. She heard nothing he said. He might have been hammering at the doors of her mind and she would not have heard, for a low, intense voice, the voice which had always thrilled her, was speaking to her.

  Shane said, “Bobbi, she’s right. You’d best stay clear of it.”

  Bobbi turned and looked at the dark rider in the dusk, and for all his toughness she knew. Something in her knew his soul. And though his gaz
e on her did not waver, she saw the shadow that moved near his mouth, and she knew he was wishing himself dead. The woman who had brought him back from mustang form was worse, more fearsome, more devastating than the castrating scalpel to him. The knife would have taken his manhood, but she would take his soul, and his life, and his mind.

  “I’m not going to let it happen,” Bobbi said to him, knowing that he knew what she meant. With all his lifetimes he knew.

  “There’s no help for it.”

  Bobbi’s mother stood by silently, smiling to herself, dimpling like a courting girl with a secret.

  But there was help; it was so simple! Bobbi said, “But I can offer you loyalty. I would keep faith with you until I die. I would never toy with you and tame you and betray you. I would love you.”

  She felt an odd stillness for a moment, as if the entire world had stopped in its circling. And she saw the sudden flickering of something heartbroken in his eyes, and saw that maybe she had not done good after all. The hope hurt him worse than the despair.

  He said, “You deserve better.”

  Would love him? What had she meant, saying she would love him? She loved him then, there, at that moment. Her heart turned to water, just looking at him. And whatever he had said about deserving made no sense. She drew a breath to tell him—

  He took one quick step and touched her mouth to stop her. It was the first time she had ever felt his touch, Shane, the man. Fingers on her lips like a kiss, then gone.

  “Bobbi. No. Please. If I let myself love you—” His voice trembled so badly that he stopped and sucked breath, trying to steady himself. His chest sobbed as if he were weeping.

  Standing by, watching, listening, the madwoman softly laughed.

  Bobbi felt the sound chill her, then shut it out of her mind, left it on the air somewhere along with the voice of her father’s importuning ghost. She did not look at her mother. Nor did Shane. But his voice, when he spoke again, was calm. Worse than calm. Dull, dead, like the voice of a doomed man.

  “If I let myself love you, it would destroy—what you are. It would make you—just like the others.”

  How could that be? He was the one who would give her what her mother could not, what no one else would, what she had always wanted, what would still her yearnings and make her always happy: love forever, love immortal and eternal. And what she could give him in return … She looked at him, seeing his shadowed face strong-lined and pale in the light of a horseshoe moon. Knowing with all her heart that she was the one who could put the blue fire back in his eyes.

  He said, “Go away from me, Bobbi. Please.”

  Instead, she tilted her head toward him, lifting her chin, parting her lips to kiss him. “Shane,” she whispered, her eyes half lidded, and he did not pull away from her. He was tame. He was hers. His strength was gone.

  “Rhett Butler,” called Chantilly Lou Yandro sharply out of the nightfall, “don’t you dare kiss that tart.” And by her side a white form bobbed in air, frantic. Faintly within her mind she heard its voice shouting at her, “Bobbi, no!”

  And then she felt the touch of those immortal lips on hers, and she heard nothing but the pounding of her own heart. And she was hot, and full, and strong, strong with a woman’s witchery, strong as any twelve virgins, strong as Chantilly because Shane was hers. She felt the hot rush in her breasts move down. She felt her lips move, her body move, felt Shane’s mouth and body answer, and she knew that soon, as soon as she could lead him away to a private place, he would be all hers, heart and body and soul.

  “Rhett!” Chantilly shrilled, aghast, and Bobbi broke the kiss and turned on her.

  “He is Shane,” she averred to her mother, “and he is mine.”

  “Call him what you like,” said another voice harshly out of the darkness, “he will not be yours.” A deep, iron-hard voice. A black form, soot-black, shadow-black, standing in the night. Sweep of black robes. “He is Shane,” the necromancer said, Samuel Bissel said, “and he is Rhett Butler, and Paladin, the wandering black knight, and he is the tavern prince, and the Scarlet Pimpernel, and many others. And he is mine.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  As if he had flown down out of the dark heart of the moon, the trickster stood tall on the stone atop the hill. In his primal form he stood, robed in darkness, tall and looming on that high, holy place.

  Frightened, Bobbi looked to the beautiful man standing at her side. But he seemed somehow weakened, shaken, unable to move, as if some invincible power held him prisoner. Feeling her glance, he said to her in an unsteady whisper, “The trickster holds the rock.”

  Bobbi looked at Bissel. Power even greater than his own flowed into the smith like suckle from the pap of earth, faintly haloing his head, his beard, his glinting eyes with a milky white glow. Bobbi could sense it more than see it, but she never doubted power was there. Under Bissel’s feet the spirals and circles and meandering lines of ancient petroglyphs showed on the rock, glowing the same milky star-faint white in the moonlight, their meaning as inscrutable as that of the cuneiform scar on Shane’s neck.

  Shane whispered, “He—he has put his grip on me. Steel, plus—stone.…”

  Kabilde lay at a small distance. Bobbi ran, three hasty strides, crouched and grasped it. But the staff lay inert, nothing but wood, in her hand.

  “You’ve broken it, youngster!” And Bissel laughed loudly, laughter that pealed steel-hard, like hammer on anvil.

  “Kabilde,” Bobbi whispered urgently to the staff, “wake up!”

  No rousing of the carved serpent answered her, no blaze of white light. Bobbi felt remorse squeeze her heart, aching worse than fear. Kabilde had spent itself and spent itself to aid her, feeding her, defending her, giving her a horse of air to ride—and she had flung it aside. She had hurt Kabilde, maybe even—maybe even killed it.… Crouching on the damp ground with the staff in her hands, she let her stare flicker away from Bissel a moment; she looked down at Kabilde, checking with eyes and hands—no, the carved snake was intact, the wood not split anywhere, the small head not broken away.

  “Kabilde,” she begged the staff, “I know you don’t think much of me right now, but I’m not asking you to help me. Shane’s in danger!”

  Kabilde did not stir. Bissel laughed again.

  “The dark rider is mine!” His triumphant voice echoed like clanging metal in the night. “You can do nothing to prevent it, young sorceress.”

  The words brought Bobbi to her feet. “No,” she said fiercely, “He is mine! Go away, sooty old man.” And to the world at large and in particular to the inert staff on the ground she declared, “Very well, I’ll fight him myself.”

  She saw the glint of the necromancer’s grin; it enraged her. But before he could laugh at her again, Shane’s quiet, vibrant voice took hold of the night. “You are both wrong,” said the dark rider. “I do not belong to you or anyone. I am my own. I am—a free thing, a roaming thing.…”

  Bissel shifted his glance to Shane, and Shane’s voice started to struggle, and then words came out of him as if against his own will.

  “I was—I was a free thing, running, wandering. Then they trapped me, and roped me, and threw me down, and burned the brand on my neck …” His voice faltered and faded away.

  “I claim you by that brand,” said Bissel.

  Only Grandpap could truly claim him by that brand, Bobbi thought hazily, and he would geld him. But no, Shane was a man now, and they didn’t castrate men … or did they? What did Bissel want to do with Shane?

  “Why?” she demanded of the Amishman, aloud and strongly. “What do you want him for?” But even as she spoke the words, she knew the answer.

  “Power,” said the smith simply. “The dark rider will give me power as of wild horses. He will add his magic to mine.”

  Even though they came from the trickster, the words were true, stone true, and to the marrow of her bones Bobbi knew it. And the truth, the truth she knew in her heart, enraged her more than any lie would have. “In a pi
g’s eye!” she shouted, with more force than eloquence, and she charged.

  His gaze, still on Shane, jerked around to her. He stood, looming and still—for a moment she thought that her sudden attack had startled him so badly she would reach him. Then she saw his naked upper lip twitch over his glinting teeth, and she knew that, contemptuously, he was waiting for her.

  Her hands clawed toward him, darting at his hateful face—and he twitched his hand a little, one finger, and as if she had hit a giant fist of air Bobbi fell back onto the ground.

  Her own anger pulled her back to her feet—her fury, rather, and she focused all the force of it on Bissel through her mind, her glare, as she had focused her stare on an unlocked door and on a powwow staff—doorknob and staff had knuckled under, but Bissel seemed not to care. Perhaps only good-hearted things cared. The black-hearted trickster grinned, lifted his finger, and knocked her down again, harder.

  And again, and again, each time she struggled up, and she was no longer a fury, but a dogged fighter, punch-drunk, reeling, and a small voice inside her mind, perhaps her own, certainly a Yandro voice, said to her, “Even a mule don’t need to be run over by a truck before it takes a think, Bobbi.” And Bissel, growing bored and annoyed, knocked her down with the whole force of his sorcerous hand, so hard that Bobbi lay on her back with the breath knocked out of her and her hands clawing at the air in front of her face.

  A red glow of his own fury had started around Samuel Bissel’s head. “Begone, girl-child!” he commanded.

  Bobbi scarcely heard him, for her entire groggy-minded attention was taken up by the sight of her own hands in front of her. They were bent, and crooked, the hands of an old woman, and against the trickster’s dull red nimbus they were the same sooty-dark color as his robes. A trick of the nighttime light, perhaps … But no, it was the cloth of her gloves, the fleece and fine calfskin of her cuffs, charcoal black.…

  Bobbi had seen such moon-curved hands and fur cuffs before. White, she thought hazily, they are supposed to be white. And too beaten to fear the utter strangeness of what was happening, she knew she was seeing herself, the form behind her own form, and it was that of the sorceress. But how had she gone dark?