The Third Witch

by Rebecca Reisert

  Stand up! Stand up!

  I roll over to my stomach. I cough, choke, and finally pull up to all fours. My head whirls from the effort and my breath comes out in little pants. Finally I manage to stumble to my feet, half-crazy from the pain in my throat and chest. My body feels like it’s been beaten.

  The castle is silent. I see a few twists of smoke rising above the walls.

  With one hand on the wall to steady me, I limp my way toward the gates. My clothes are wet, heavy, and cold. When I come to the corner, I peep around it, but there are no signs of the attackers. I feel my way to the gates and enter the castle.

  The courtyard is littered with heaps of bodies, their limbssplayed out in all directions. Some piles are as high as my shoulder. These dead have surrendered even their dignity. They lie with their clothes disordered, their arms and legs all tangled with everyone else’s. I do not see the lady or her children, but I do not search through the piles of corpses. It is clear that nothing has been left alive. Even the bodies of dogs, geese, pigs, and hounds lie silent about me.

  I stumble my way to the keep. The door to the hall is closed. I put both my hands against the door to push it open. But the door is hot and burns my hands. I smell smoke and back away. I start toward the rear courtyard, but the smoke grows thicker.

  It is clear that there is nothing for me here.

  I stagger back to the front gates. I see no sign of Lord Banquo’s horse. Poor beastie. To have gone through so much and to have traveled so far. . . .

  I trudge out of the castle, cold and heavy. My mind is muddled—scenes pop into my head, but I cannot tell whether they are memories from the castle today or the one many years ago. As soon as I see a wood, I stumble my way over to it and hide among the trees. I pile leaves and branches around to make myself a nest and snuggle down into them, falling immediately asleep.

  Until I am torn wide open by my dreams.

  “No!” I scream.

  Make me a witch indeed so I can have the power to change things. Let time turn backward. Let this day’s misadventures unravel and then knit up again in a new tapestry, something pleasing and beautiful.

  I am so sick of this world in which children are beaten and torn and damaged beyond all saving.

  “No!” I scream again.

  IT TAKES ME THIRTEEN DAYS to reach Nettle’s hut.

  When I am almost at the door, my legs give out and I fall to the ground. The frozen grass is stiff and scratchy against my back.

  I hear quick footsteps, and then my head is resting in Nettle’slap. Her apron smells of wood smoke and dried herbs. Her rough hand is smoothing my forehead as if I am still a child.

  “Hush,” she says.

  When I open my mouth to speak for the first time in thirteen days, I am surprised by my voice. It is cracked and dry, and there is a fierce soreness in my throat. “I have nowhere to go.” My words sound like they were croaked by a toad.

  “Hush, Gilly,” Nettle says. “You’re home.”

  I fumble my hand up and close my fingers around her stick-thin wrist. “Nettle, I’m done with revenge. I will have no more to do with Him.”

  Then all is darkness and silence.

  UNTIL I SCREAM myself awake.

  “Mama!” I am screaming. “Mama!”

  I look around. I am safe inside the warm hut, wrapped in a soft, new, white woolen gown. My hands are bandaged, and my skin is clean. I am lying on a pallet filled with fresh-smelling pine boughs. I do not know how Nettle and Mad Helga managed to carry me into the hut.

  Mad Helga is crouched on the far side of the fire, her cloak wrapped around her, the hood so low over her face that I see only her pointed chin with the few hairs growing out of it. She does not even lift her head.

  Nettle stands over a small cauldron, ladling dark green liquid into a mug. She moves to me and kneels down, handing me the warm cup. She does not say a word. I sip it. Her potion is bitter but soothing. It smells like fresh grass and the husks of walnuts. When I have finished drinking, I set the mug down next to my pallet. After a while my eyelids grow as heavy as stones.

  I sleep.

  THROUGH THE WINTER, through the spring, I throw myself into work around the hut. Work that is hard enough can wash my memory clean, at least for a little while.

  Nettle lets me keep the fine new wool gown. I boil it with onion skins and nut shells, and it turns a fine golden brown. One day I build a big bonfire in a corner of the clearing so I can make soap. It is dreadful work, but I offer to do it. I stand for hours over the hot kettle, stirring the stinking mixture of fat and ashes till my arms ache. When I take it off the fire, Nettle sprinkles the gluey mixture with dried chamomile and lavender and other sweet-smelling herbs, and we pour it into a wooden trough to cool. After she has gone inside, I throw my short tunic and other boy’s clothes into the hot fire, poking them around with a stick until they burn to ashes. I do not want any reminders of my other life.

  I haunt the wood, gathering the fresh shoots of lion’s tooth and burdock for spring tonics. My hair begins to grow long again, tickling the nape of my neck until it is long enough to catch back with a bit of cord. When I go to take some dried herbs to the nunnery at Cree in exchange for a bit of dried fish, I wear a kerchief over my head.

  “ ’Tis a fair age since we have seen you, Gilly,” says Sister Grisel. She gives me a hunk of fresh wheaten bread and a sliver of pale sheep’s cheese. The nunnery kitchen is clean and painted white.

  I do not let it remind me of the kitchens in the castles.

  Mad Helga sleeps most of the time. From time to time she still brings broken wild creatures home—toads with torn-off legs, birds with snapped wings, one time a tiny fox kit that cannot eat or drink. She rocks them in her arms and jabbers to them in a strange language, warming them in her ragged blankets. None of them survive, though, no matter how fiercely she nurses them. I notice she no longer bothers to boil their bones. She lets Nettle take the poor little corpses away, and she does not ask what Nettle has done with the bodies. On bright days, she chooses a sunny spot in the clearing. She brings out her little stool and naps sitting up, our two scarred cats curled on her lap or about her ankles.

  My hands heal so that I no longer need to keep them bandaged,although the new skin is red and puckered. I weed the garden and gather fresh cress from the brook. Some days I go sit by the waterfall, but I no longer bathe in its waters.

  I want there to be no trace of the old mad Gilly.

  I scatter corn for our chickens and collect the eggs from their hiding places. I help Nettle make the goat cheeses, carefully turning them each day. I comb burrs out of the hair of our goats, and in the evenings I sit around the fire with the women, carding bits of wool.

  Yet many nights I awake screaming from my dreams.

  “In time,” Nettle says, “the horrors will go away.”

  But when she tells me this, she does not look me in the eye.

  From time to time, I wonder how Pod is doing, and Lisette. I miss them sorely, but I never speak of them.

  Sometimes Nettle and Mad Helga play a game I used to love as a child. I suspect they do this to cheer me up. We call this game, Revenge.

  One night Nettle begins it. She looks up from the wool she is spinning on a spindle in her lap. “When I took the elderbark tonic to the miller’s wife today, her son called me a witch.”

  Mad Helga, who is awake for once, asks, “What will you do?”

  “I’ll make myself as small as a worm and crawl into his ear,” Nettle says. “There I’ll whisper such scary tales as will rid him of sleep forever.”

  We laugh. We have little power for revenge, but it is fun to fancy what we would do were we real witches.

  Mad Helga takes the next one. “I went for a walk today.”

  I ask, “Who did you see?”

  “Old Sven’s second daughter, the one who wed the sailor. She was munching on a lapful of chestnuts. I asked for one, but she only said, ‘Get away from me, you mangy old mare.’ ”<
br />
  “What will you do?” Nettle asks.

  Mad Helga answers us in rhyme.

  I’ll become a rat without a tail,

  And in a sieve I’ll sail and sail

  To her husband’s ship—

  “I’ll conjure you up a wind,” I offer. Mad Helga nods. “I myself have all the other winds,” she says. And on her husband I’ll cast a spell

  On which he’ll sail to the ends of hell.

  For your insult, he will pay.

  Sleep shall neither night or day

  Hang upon his deep eyelids.

  He shall live a man forbid.

  Weary seven-nights, nine times nine

  Will he dwindle, peak, and pine.

  Though his ship cannot be lost,

  Yet it will be tempest tossed!

  Nettle grabs a dried bean pod and waves it in the air. “Here I have that sailor’s thumb—”

  I rack my brains trying to think of a rhyme. Then I call out, “Wrecked as homeward he did come!”

  We all laugh at my rhyme.

  I begin the next story. “When I walked by the church today, the parson spat at me and called out, ‘Aroint thee, witch, I charge thee by all the saints in heaven.’ ”

  Nettle asks, “So what did you do, Gilly?”

  I love playing the Revenge game. It is a treat to see Nettle so lighthearted. In truth, I am glad to be lighthearted again myself. Even when Mad Helga’s wits wander, it only adds spice to the game.

  How splendid it would be if we could indeed do these things we imagine to make one another laugh.

  Yet all the time I feel like an impostor, a monster dressed in the clothes of a peasant girl. Life in the hut no longer feels real to me. Intruth, for seven years and more, no life has felt like my real life. I feel like an enchanted creature who lives caught between worlds with no real place of her own. I am a girl who passes as a boy, a mortal who is seen as a witch, a lord’s daughter, a warrior who longs to right the wrongs done to those she loves but who seems only to make things worse.

  One afternoon I offer to tell Nettle what happened back at Lady Macduff ’s castle. We are snapping sticks into kindling. I look sidewise at her and ask, “Would you like to know what came to pass, Nettle?”

  Nettle looks down. She continues to break the sticks into smaller pieces. “There’s no need to talk about what’s done. What’s done is done. The less said, the sooner rewoven.”

  I do not know whether she does not want to know, or if she is telling me that, thanks to her double sight, she knows already and there’s no need to speak of it.

  Yet I wonder all the time. I wonder if wise little Fleance and beautiful Prince Malcolm reached safety. I wonder if Pod is safe.

  I do not wonder if He is still alive.

  Although I am done with Him, I will nonetheless know in my very bones on the day He stops walking the earth. Although I do not have the double sight, I know that I will feel in all my being when His wife—she who was once my mother—begins her flight to the bowels of hell.

  But I will have no more to do with them in my lifetime. It is a great relief to be free, finally free.

  One afternoon, just before Midsummer’s Eve, when I am milking the goats, Nettle comes back from her rambles in the wood. She has a basket filled with dark green leaves.

  “Gilly, I found a whole patch of early adder’s tongue. The good sisters will pay well for this. They use it to flavor their mead. Gilly, at the first rising of the sun, take this to the sisters. Remember to ask to see Sister Grisel. Do not accept less than a basketful of dried fish in return.”

  I reach the convent by mid-morning of the next day. I knockboldly on the wooden gate. A very small, very young sister comes to answer my knock. She has pale golden freckles and the downy look of a newhatched duckling.

  “I come to see Sister Grisel,” I command.

  The small sister inclines her head and glides away. In a very short time, the door is opened wide. Sister Grisel, plump and jolly as ever, stands there. She looks like a barrel with arms, legs, and head. Across one cheek is a large birthmark the color of berry juice. It sprawls out like a splayed flower.

  Her face lights up at the sight of me. “Gillyflower, my child. Now what magic does my good Nettle send me from the wood?” She lifts the cloth from the top of my basket, and her face shines with delight. “Ahh, bring it into the kitchen, my girl. I have some fresh milk, still warm from the cow, and Sister Inge will have her bannocks cooling by the time we get there.”

  I perch on a stool in the kitchen, nibbling a warm bannock. I find the kitchen’s tidiness restful. It is so unlike our hut in which things are all over the place. Sister Inge leans over the griddle frying bannocks. She is long and thin, rather like a heron or a broomstick in a wimple. Sister Grisel snatches up a second hot bannock and plops down beside me. “And how does the good Helga?” She bites off a bit of her bannock.

  “Her wits wander more each day,” I say through a mouthful of crumbs.

  Sister Grisel sighs. “The poor thing has a heavy cross to bear.”

  Sister Inge adds, “The way the world goes, perhaps ’tis a mercy she no longer has to bear witness.”

  Sister Grisel sets her bannock down as if she is no longer hungry. “ ’Tis true. Scotland aches under the harsh hand of—”

  “Hush!” Sister Inge raises a floury hand in warning. “He has spies in every household.”

  Sister Grisel nods. “True. And I am too old and too fat to be one of his sacrifices.” She picks up her bannock again and takes a mournful bite.

  Sister Inge frowns at her. “ ’Tis especial folly to speak this way today with him and his men just over the hill at the abbey.”

  I let my bannock drop to the table and sit bolt upright. “What? The king is at the abbey?”

  Sister Inge sighs. “They say he comes to hold holy vigil at the bones of Saint Brendan, but there are those who claim he wishes merely to gauge the wealth of the good brothers.”

  In my chest excitement rises like a bubble of blood. “He is there now?”

  Sister Grisel says, “The little lad who takes our cows to pasture said he had heard from the baker that the king was coming to these parts today. Why else would he come, if not to visit the abbey?”

  I stand up abruptly. God has obviously given me one more chance—God or the devil and I don’t care which. All I care about is that there is still time to avenge my father’s murder.

  Sister Grisel stares at me. “Why, what’s wrong, child? You’ve gone all pale. Are you ill?”

  “I must go.”

  Sister Grisel heaves herself up. “I have some old linens I would send to the ladies of your—”

  “I cannot take them.”

  As I run out the door, Sister Grisel calls after me, “Gilly, I have not yet paid you for—”

  I cannot believe it. He is coming to the abbey—not half a day’s journey. The man who killed my father, who stole my mother and made her His wife, who burned my home to the ground, and who sent me forth as an orphan. Forgive me. I lost faith. But He has been sent to this corner of the earth for a purpose, and it is clear that the purpose of His coming is so I can finish my revenge.

  He would not expect to find His wife’s abandoned daughter in this part of the world.

  My life is an arrow, and at last it is headed home.

  • • •

  BY EARLY AFTERNOON, I reach the abbey. I have still not thought of a believable reason to request admittance. To buy time, I duck down to the pond that stands by the gate to splash water on my hands and face. I pull off my kerchief and try to smooth my hair. Finally I go right up to the gate and knock.

  The window in the gate is opened by a young snub-nosed novice, not above twelve years old. I wonder if he is standing on tiptoe to see through the opening.

  “May I help you?” he asks.

  “The king—the good sisters at Cree said that the king would be here today.”

  “What business is that of yours?” The contras
t between the fierce words and the tiny voice almost make me laugh.

  “I—have a touch of Jupiter’s rash. I need the king’s touch to cure me.” After all, a rightful king should be able to cure this rash with just a touch of his hands. Perhaps it is not the best lie, but it will have to do.

  As the boy slides the window shut, he says, “You are too late. He has come and gone.”

  My heart sinks. My disappointment is as bitter as poison in my mouth. I turn away and begin to trudge home.

  Behind me I hear the window slide open again.

  “Girl!”

  I do not bother to turn around.

  “Girl!” he cries out again. “With luck, you may catch him yet. He stopped here but to enquire the way to the heart of Birnam Wood. He said he seeks three women there—three women who are witches. He said they have enchanted him. He is on his way to kill them.”

  F O R T Y - T H R E E

  I DO NOT REACH HOME until sunset.

  Or at least what was once my home.

  All the way, my brain chants, Faster, faster, faster.

  Sunset comes late in midsummer in our high lands. This evening the sky is ablaze with a hot fire orange light. The trees are black scratchings against the violent light.

  Where the hut once stood, there is only a black pile of charred fire stubs and ashes. Nothing moves in the clearing. The clearing and the nearby wood are silent. I put a hand against a tree to steady me.

  I have seen too much of burned homes.

  The clearing is silent. My feet drag the last few steps. I gingerly touch one of the burned wooden beams in the pile of rubble to see how long it has been since it was ablaze. The beam is warm, but not hot. I reckon it was set on fire near midday, just as I started off on my will-o’-the-wisp chase to the abbey.

  It was good fortune that the woods themselves did not catch fire. That is thanks to Nettle. She has always been scrupulous about keeping the grasses and undergrowth pulled around our hut as a firebreak. Still and all, the nearby trees are smudged with smoke. Their branches dangle broken, snapped and twisted by the large party of armed men who must have tramped back here to destroy the witches.