And she didn’t sleep, until at last . . . she did, because that’s what you do, even when you’re alone again.
The knock on the shop door was so soft that Hanna thought it was a squirrel breaking a nut on a nearby branch. She ignored it at first, intent on weaving a charm shaped to drape around a door handle, and then she heard it again: rap, rap-rap-rap.
Getting up, she answered it.
“Mistress Hedgewitch?” It was a child, a girl about six or seven, with brown and orange hair in braids and a smock that was streaked with paints.
“Can I help you?” The shop wasn’t open today until afternoon—she’d planned to spend the morning on charmwork and cleaning, and then open when the woodsmen and woodswomen came in from the forest for lunch.
“You’re the hedgewitch? But you’re . . .”
Hanna didn’t know which word the little girl was going to pick. Young maybe? She was younger than the prior hedgewitch, but not as young as the boy who made baskets in the market every day. She was also plain-looking, with a narrow face, too-sharp nose, and hair that she kept pinned back so it didn’t fall into her mixtures. “Ordinary?” she supplied.
“Not scary,” the child said, her eyes as wide as an owl’s. “My mommy just had a baby.”
Those seemed like two unrelated statements, but Hanna smiled anyway. “That’s nice. You must be happy to have a baby brother or sister.”
“Sister,” the child clarified. “She screams a lot. I don’t really like her very much.”
“Okay.” Hanna hadn’t talked directly to many children. She felt a bit as though they weren’t speaking the same language.
“But I don’t want her to die. If she keeps screaming so much, the spirits will come. Mommy said she doesn’t know any better. She doesn’t know anything. She doesn’t even know how to hold her own head up. It flops back if you aren’t careful. Mommy says I’m not allowed to hold her because I’m not careful and I dropped the cat once, but the cat didn’t mind. So can I have a charm, please, for my sister?” Shoving her hand into her pocket, the child pulled out a glob of dried resin. “This is all I have. It’s a little sticky, and I got some crumbs on it. But I like it. There’s a bug stuck inside.”
So Hanna traded a charm shaped like a little cat for the resin and told the child to tie the charm beneath her sister’s crib.
It was like that the rest of the day, though not precisely the same. Villagers would come, wanting her help, trusting her to sell them what they needed to keep their loved ones safe. And the next day, others came. And on.
She’d tended to customers before, for Rowell, but this was different. They were coming to her, and slowly she got to know them, by face and by name, and they came to know her.
And that would have been her life, as the new hedgewitch of Fawnbrook, deep in the forests of Aratay. Except that the world did want to kill her. It wanted to kill everyone.
She heard the screaming at the same time as she felt the spirits.
Air spirits—her best affinity, the only kind of spirit she reliably sensed.
Their hatred and anger rolled over her, driving her to her knees. She wrapped her arms around herself as she moaned, trying to push their feelings out of her mind, feeling them like knives jabbing into her brain.
Six of them, wild with rage.
In Fawnbrook.
Climbing to her feet, she pulled back the curtain on the window. In the marketplace, people—her people—were running and screaming, scooping their children into their arms, as the spirits swept through the village. Hanna saw a spirit pin a man—Jerl, who liked honey bread and was courting a woodsman’s daughter—against a stall and tear with its claws into his chest, ripping at him like a cat with yarn. She saw his face as he died.
Dropping down below the windowsill, she shook. Please don’t find me. Please don’t—
More screams. From children. She pictured the little girl with her baby sister, as well as the others who had come through her shop door. Those weren’t strangers out there, not anymore. This was her town, and she was their hedgewitch.
No, she thought. This can’t happen. Not here. Not while I am here.
Hanna stood and crossed, shakily, to the baskets that held the air charms. Grabbing them, she shoved them in her pockets until her pockets were straining at the seams. Then she took as many in each hand as she could hold.
For a moment, Hanna stared at the door to the outside.
And then, hands full, she kicked at the latch with her foot, then knocked the door open with her hip. She flung her thoughts outward: Go! Leave, and never come back!
As she strode outside, she hurled charms at the spirits. Powder exploded as it hit their bodies, the trunk, and the market stalls.
Go and never come back!
Some of the spirits veered away, hacking as they breathed in her powders, screaming their rage as they flew. But one . . . one aimed straight for her.
She recognized it both from the green and blue feathers and from the feel of its mind: it was the air spirit that the old hedgewitch had trapped. It had incited the other spirits, and it had led them here. All its hate was focused on Hanna—a wild, suicidal hate, fueled by the knowledge that the queen would punish the spirit for this defiance . . . but not, it believed, before it killed Hanna.
Hanna stood her ground.
She battered it with her mind, and when it drew closer, she threw charm after charm at it, until it was coated in herbs. Closer still, and she thrust her mind into the swirling chaos of its thoughts. This is my town, these are my people, and you will not harm them! Go! NOW!
And never return!
Shrieking, it soared up, away. She felt its mind retreating as it fled, and she sank onto her knees. Slowly, the villagers emerged from where they’d hidden in houses, shops, and behind stalls. They gathered around their dead, and they gathered around her.
A little girl—the same one or a different one? she didn’t know—touched her shoulder lightly and asked, “Are you all right, Mistress Hanna?”
Hanna looked at her, at the people around her, at the damage in the town, at the blood and the bodies, and then back at the child. The child was staring at her with wide, luminous eyes, and clutching a bird-shaped charm that Hanna herself had made, while her mother cleaned a gash on the child’s arm. The blood was already beginning to dry.
“Yes,” Hanna said. “I am.”
After the dead were buried, Hanna planted flowers by their graves—far fewer than would have died without her, the villagers kept telling her, though it still felt like far too many—and then helped with the cleanup of the marketplace. Side by side with her neighbors, she hammered stalls back together, swept up shattered window glass, and patched holes in the platform. At night, when it was too dark to work outside anymore, everyone shared food, coming together as if they were all one family, and then everyone returned to their homes to hold their children close until they fell asleep.
Hanna returned to her shop, but she didn’t sleep. She went to her workroom and made charms until her fingers felt numb.
At dawn, she opened her shop and sold every single charm she’d made.
So she made more.
And when those sold, she thought, It’s not enough. Even if she made enough charms for every villager to wrap around their entire house, it wouldn’t be enough. She saw it in the eyes of the children: they were still afraid.
She watched them as they tiptoed around her shop, stroking the charms and staring in wide-eyed wonder at her, as if she wasn’t real, wasn’t ordinary, wasn’t just like them.
And she had an idea, one of those thoughts that blossoms inside you, like a flower that has finally found fertile soil and enough sunlight.
She started small, talking to the mothers and fathers who came into her shop. At first, they were confused: hedgewitches only ever took on apprentices, one magically gifted child per witch. That was how it was done. No one ever taught the unmagical, and certainly no one ever did what she proposed: a class fo
r any child who wanted it.
But then she asked the children themselves.
Her first student was the little girl who had wanted a charm for her baby sister. She brought three of her friends, two boys and a girl, who all crowded into Hanna’s workroom. By the end of the first month, she had twenty children, all of them bent over little tables that she’d set up outside in front of her shop, because they couldn’t all fit inside, all of them weaving herbs into charms.
A few of them could feel spirits—those she singled out for extra lessons.
Eventually, she’d choose one to be her apprentice. But she wouldn’t stop teaching the others. After two years, she had children coming from several of the surrounding towns, and the villagers had built her a schoolroom beside the shop.
And every day, after the shop closed and after the children were finished with their regular school, they’d come to her and look at her with their wide eyes. And she’d stand in front of them and say, “The world may want to kill you. But you can learn to fight back.”
Scott Sigler
* * *
Most of the fantasy I’ve read echoes European feudalism, even when the world is completely made up. The stories are steeped in kings and queens, their kingdoms, the knights that roam the land, the serfs that till the soil, and the quests of the chosen ones.
I’ve been dwelling on the idea of a fantasy world based instead on American sensibilities, a feudal state that arises originally from people who have never lived under royalty, people who have always been free. And a place without that ubiquitous staple of fantasy fiction: the steel sword.
What would happen in the Americas if all metal quickly and unexpectedly broke down, perhaps in only a month or two—not enough time for people to reinvent tech before civilization as we know it collapses. What would happen if the 565 million people living there found themselves almost instantly reduced to the preindustrial age?
And for the purposes of this setting, what would North America be like two thousand years after that fall?
The concept of a fantasy setting with no iron, no ringing steel . . . it seems damn near blasphemous, doesn’t it? Welcome to a San Francisco of a possible far future, one where Old West sensibilities rule far more than those of medieval Europe.
Scott Sigler
Victim with a Capital V
Scott Sigler
“Miss, did you just wet yourself?”
Lisa heard the man’s voice, and didn’t hear it.
She felt the instantly cooling warmth spreading through her jeans, and she didn’t feel it.
That laugh.
That laugh, the day everything changed.
“Miss? Are you all right?”
Lisa fought to come back to the moment.
The laugh, somewhere behind her.
The man speaking, in front of her. Bartender. Probably owned the place. She hadn’t had time to order a beer. So many people, three deep at the bar, it had taken her fifteen minutes of waiting just to get a stool. The bartender was leaning toward her, one hand palm-flat on the worn, warped wood of the ancient bar top that was rumored to be seven centuries old, the other palm resting on the handle of a wood club laid flat. The end of the club was rough, barely ground down from the oak branch it had once been. The handle, though, was worn smooth—Lisa wondered if the bartender spent a minute without this weapon in his hand.
“I’m fine,” she said.
“Mmm-hmm.”
She couldn’t see his lips through his thick beard. Shaggy mop of black hair. A little bit of hay in it. Eyebrows with a few hairs growing crazy in every direction. Nose hairs just as hectic. A big man—the kind Lisa usually didn’t let come this close to her.
Not that she let any man get close.
He spoke quietly. A rare act of kindness, perhaps, in a room packed full of screaming, laughing, reveling people who looked like they were not very kind at all.
“Well, you pissed yourself,” he said. “I can smell it already. In here, that’s saying something. I’ll get a mop. You clean up, come back. Or don’t come back, but right now you need to go. Okay?”
That laugh, that day, when everything changed . . .
She noticed the bartender’s fingers curl close to a full grip on the worn-smooth club handle. A big man—big beard, big head, big hand, big arms, big gut. She had no doubt that club had connected with many a head. Blood splatters dotted his whitish apron. From making lunch, not from enforcing calm. Pork chop special: 5 Bowens, said the message written in chalk on the rough piece of black slate mounted on the wall. Not that most of the people in here could read, probably.
People around her, starting to sniff the air. To her left, a redheaded woman in a skimpy yellow dress looked up from a book, her nose wrinkling.
“Disgusting,” she said, then went back to her book.
Lisa couldn’t think. The memories of the past, clouded and mixed with the overwhelming sensations of the bar: the crackling fire, the heat of burning wood and packed bodies, the out-of-tune harp and the more out-of-tune harpist singing the one about the naked man in the convent, drunken voices screaming along with lyrics that were more wrong than right. A cavalcade of sight and sound and scent all muddled by a rapidly growing feeling of shame and humiliation.
Then, for the second time, she heard that laugh.
A cutting, horrid noise.
The sound of fear.
The sound of pain.
If she’d had any piss left in her, she might have let that go as well.
“Your name,” she said to the bartender, her voice even quieter than his, the little voice of a little girl and not a twenty-year-old woman.
“You’re in Ziggy’s Place,” the bartender said. “I’m Ziggy. Now go—last time I ask nice.”
Lisa didn’t bother turning around to look across the dark bar, through the light of the hanging oil lamps. She knew who had made that laugh, that glass-grinding-against-granite bit of harshness which contained only malice, not humor or joy. The kind of laugh drawn out at the expense of others, like when someone tripped and fell.
Ten years since she’d heard that laugh, yet she knew exactly who it was.
“I’m sorry,” she said to Ziggy. She slipped off the wooden stool.
Lisa walked to the door, focusing all her energy on just putting one foot in front of the other, slipping past the people packed into the place. Her wet jeans clung to her thighs. She hid her head in the hood of her gray-brown cloak, pulled the sides tight around her to hide the damp spot at her crotch, the streaks down her legs.
Why was she leaving? He was there. There, with her.
Her training was no training. She wasn’t twenty, she was ten, she was helpless.
She was a victim—the kind with a lower-case “v.”
Someone thumped her shoulder, spun her half around. No, she’d walked into the door’s thick wooden frame. Maybe others were laughing at her now. She slid the wooden bolt back and opened the door to blinding late-afternoon sun. Southern-facing doorway. A counselor had taught her that once, taught her that in an afternoon fight she needed to put her back to the south, position her attacker so the sun would be in his eyes.
But she wasn’t fighting—she was running. A man behind her, dangerous, and she couldn’t even turn to face him.
That laugh, that day, when everything changed . . .
Lisa stumbled outside. Eyes watering from the setting sun. Onslaught of city noise, a wave of people. Horns and shouts and laughter. The taste of dust.
How many times had she dreamed of a random encounter like this? All the years of training. The pain. The sacrifice. The cuts and bruises and scrapes and broken bones. The first hundred thousand throws. The second hundred thousand. She’d pushed herself, dreaming of a moment when she might track that man down, slice his cock and balls from his body, maybe stuff them in that mouth that had forced itself upon hers. She’d dreamed of meeting him again, of being ready, being armed, being a full-grown woman and not a helpless little girl.<
br />
And now, by random chance, it had finally happened. Had she put a sliver in his throat? Sliced his Achilles to watch him crawl? Lured him in close to spike his groin or armpits or wrists?
No. She’d pissed herself. Without ever laying eyes on him. From nothing more than the sound of his laugh.
“The fuck out of the way,” said a hunched old woman wearing moth-eaten black robes. Basket of bread. Did she sell to the patrons, or deliver to Ziggy?
Lisa realized she was still standing in the bar’s doorway.
“Sorry,” she said, and walked out onto Frisco’s brick streets, letting the woman into Ziggy’s Place. The woman slammed the door shut behind her, cutting off the sound of the horrible harpist and the drunken singing.
And the man’s laugh.
Lisa had come into Frisco hours earlier. She’d walked for weeks, but only a few hours outside of the city walls she’d hitched a ride on a wagon train full of wrestlers shouting at people to come watch the matches at Presidio Arena. Brightly colored canvas wagons, each bearing the painted image of one of the wrestlers: Don the Destroyer, Evil Linny, Kanyon Kid, and more.
Riding in on the back of El Tornado’s wagon, the city of Frisco had been a wonder. Buildings of wood and stone, some as high as four stories tall. More people than she’d ever seen in one place. Wobbly carts pulled by cows, oxen, and buffalo. People on horseback. Dray horses struggling against the weight of huge, rattling transport wagons.
Now, standing on the street—Lumbard, I think they called it—the city was all just too much, an attack on her ears and eyes. And her nose. Shit, everywhere: horse shit, buffalo shit, cow shit, pig shit, people shit. Noise, mooing and braying and shouting and bone trumpets and laughter and talking, so damn much talking.
The sun blazed down, but it wasn’t hot. The mist from the ocean, or the bay. Always foggy at night, she’d been told. Summers here colder than most winters everywhere else. At least that’s what she’d heard. But the people who said that hadn’t seen a real winter. Lisa had.
Unfettered II: New Tales By Masters of Fantasy Page 32