Winter Witch

by Elaine Cunningham

  Without pausing, the berserker swung his hammer in a great underhanded arc, lifting a charging goblin off its feet and crushing its ribcage with an audible crunch. A swarm of the little monsters followed, but Declan did not think for a moment that the big man needed his help.

  More Ulfen warriors overran the camp, wading into the fray with their hammers, axes, and swords sweeping through goblins like scythes through barley. Soon their battle shouts were drowned in high-pitched screams of terror as the goblins realized they were no longer attacking a simple trade caravan.

  Declan had expended his only proper fire spell, but he ripped the sleeve from his shirt and wound it around his sword. Once it was tied off, he grabbed a few pieces of wood from the shattered wagon and ran to the fallen troll. There he ignited his makeshift torch with a cantrip and lit a fire upon the monster’s corpse.

  He looked up to see a tall Ulfen woman with dark red hair standing before the troll he had briefly frightened off. The beast opened its maw to roar into her face, the force of the blast lifting the braids from her shoulders. The troll’s tusks were as long and thick as an ox’s horns, and the monster must have weighed half a ton, but the woman stood fast, her greatsword held high.

  The troll smashed a fist the size of a rain barrel down at her, but the woman stepped nimbly aside and slashed the brute’s arm. She was not quick enough to avoid the second fist, which knocked the breath from her lungs and sent her sword spinning away behind her. She scrambled to retrieve it as two of her kin rushed to her aid.

  Behind him, Declan heard a clash of steel and Ellasif shouting curses. Impossibly, she was beating back the Ulfen who had slain the first troll. The man was twice her size, and he’d already slain a troll and a small mob of goblins, but she was driving him away.

  “Stop!” shouted Declan. “He’s helping us!”

  “Lower than a dog!” screamed Ellasif, hacking at the man’s head.

  “Wait,” the man shouted. He raised his hammer in a two-handed grip just in time to save himself from a mortal blow.

  “Ellasif!” said Declan, but he knew he couldn’t stop her with words. She had lost her mind, perhaps falling into one of her people’s berserker rages. He reached out through the intervening space and let the now-familiar spell flow through him. Suddenly Ellasif’s hands and blade were covered with slippery grease. Her grip was strong, but her surprised clutching worked against her, and the blade slid from her grasp.

  She half-turned to follow the path of her weapon, and when she saw Declan concluding the gesture that had stolen it from her, she understood what he had done.

  “You idiot!” she shouted. She said no more, because just then the big Ulfen man clouted her on the head and knocked her unconscious to the ground.

  As he watched the shield maiden crumple, Declan realized he might have misjudged the situation.

  The big man touched Ellasif’s throat and nodded as if relieved she were still alive. As he lifted her limp form in his arms, he saw Declan preparing to cast another spell.

  “Don’t be a fool, boy,” he said.

  The insult struck Declan as absurd, since he was sure the man was little or no older than he. Sure, the beard made him appear older, but the point was that he was kidnapping Ellasif. “Just put her down,” he said, not entirely certain how he would enforce his demand.

  “Listen,” said the big man. He took one step forward and his eyes rolled up into their sockets. He sighed and fell to the ground. Mercifully, Ellasif fell atop him rather than being crushed under his bulk.

  All around them, trolls were fleeing into the woods. Declan saw one run off holding Camillor’s limp form. He moved toward Ellasif, but a knife flew down and hovered a few inches from his face. He heard a mad giggle, and the caped wild man floated down from the heights.

  “Have a care, boy, unless you want to go into the pot tonight!”

  Declan gritted his teeth. He had already expended his strongest magics, and he doubted he was a match for this weird stranger with the sharp teeth. He darted to the right, but the floating knife followed him. He stopped less than five feet from the wild man. The smell of the thing’s unwashed body was sickening, but worse was the stench of rotten flesh from his warm breath.

  The wild man clucked and waggled a finger at Declan, who felt a sickening knot of pain form in his stomach. “Not so quickly, my tender morsel. I will return for you another night, when my boys are hungry. But I see I have one less belly to fill, so you can live another day or two.” He roughly shoved aside the unconscious form of the big barbarian—whose strange fainting was now clearly the result of magic—and lifted Ellasif in his arms.

  “No,” said Declan, raising his sword. The floating dagger darted toward him, and he had to take a step back to parry it.

  The wild man cackled, and the pain in Declan’s belly grew stronger.

  “Patience,” said the wild man. He rose up into the air, clutching Ellasif’s limp form. “We will sup soon enough, you and I. Soon enough.”

  And with that he flew away through the pines.

  Chapter Eleven

  The Footprints in the Frost

  Ellasif awoke to the peculiar scent of pine sap and rotting corpses. Even before opening her eyes, she recognized the sweet stench of Hell.

  Her head felt worse than it had the night she had celebrated her first raid with enough mead to drown all of the goblins she had slain. She licked her cracked lips, but her tongue was dry and swollen. Nausea wracked her hollow belly, and she felt as though she had not eaten or drunk for days.

  Tough wooden manacles gripped her wrists and ankles, pinning her to a wall of trees grown so close together that they formed the circular wall of a huge house. Through the gaps between the trunks, the wind whistled a sinister tune.

  Above her, the trees bowed toward a central chimney gap, their bristling branches trailing like the beards of ancient elders who leaned their heads together for a whispered conference. Through the opening Ellasif saw stars in a clear sky, and from the silver-limned boughs, she knew the moon had risen.

  The cool wind stirred long ropes hanging from the upper boughs. Each length was woven of human hair, most of it the red, blond, and brown of Ulfen warriors. Bones and whole scalps were entwined in the ropes every five or six inches, and at the base of each strand hung a skull filled with coins. The gold glimmered in the eye sockets and rattled in the breeze.

  Beneath the chimney, a fire crackled in a pit bordered by blackened rune stones. The flames tickled a chain of lumpy sausages, each link the size of Ellasif’s forearm. Beyond the pit stood a table carved out of a single massive pine trunk. Light from a dozen red candle stubs cast gruesome shadows against the wall. Ellasif recognized the fragments of severed human limbs. Over the edge of the table jutted a human foot.

  Ellasif turned her face away lest she recognize some sign confirming what she feared: that the dead man was one she knew, perhaps Camillor or Declan. If the caravan had been overwhelmed after she had fallen, it could have been almost any of the men. The foot was too small to have belonged to Gisanto. If there were any justice, it was Jadrek’s.

  Ellasif would have thought the idea of Jadrek’s demise would be a relief compared to the loss of one of the others, but she felt a pang of despair just the same to imagine him suffering such an ignoble fate. Even after what had happened between them, Jadrek deserved better. In the heat of her vengeance, sometimes Ellasif had imagined that she would be the one to kill him, but even in her most violent fantasies, she granted him a warrior’s death.

  Ellasif knew she was in the house of Szigo the Man-Eater. She had seen it before, over a year ago, but then she had approached only close enough to glimpse the interior through an opening she could not perceive from her present vantage. Perhaps there was no opening until the warlock desired it. Ellasif looked for some other way to escape.

  Along the wall of pine trunks hung
the helms, shields, armor, and weapons of the heroes who had come before, each hoping to claim the title of witch-slayer. Gnarled fingers of wood grew out of the pines to clutch each prize. She recognized the sword of Laughing Erik, a man whose reckless courage she had admired when she was a girl. His flying blade had sung the dirges for an entire cohort of goblins and dozens of trolls and human thralls sent by the witches of Irrisen to cross the border and pillage their own kin in the Lands of the Linnorm Kings. Erik had left White Rook one day boasting he would return with the head of Szigo, the warlock of the Grugnir Forest. Now his enchanted weapon was one of the warlock’s trophies.

  As was Ellasif.

  She rued the hour she had departed this house without taking the head of its master. Szigo had given her the opportunity. His trolls had been too far away to save him if she had simply drawn her sword and cut his throat, and Ellasif would have gambled that his mistress would have only cackled as she watched him die. Yet Ellasif had not come to Szigo's grove that day to slay the warlock. She had gone there to find her sister’s body.

  No matter how often she tried to bury the memory of that futile quest, thinking of it always evoked the sensation of Jadrek’s strong hands on her naked skin, his breath warm upon her shoulder. She had never been able to separate the ill memories from the good, and every time she thought of Liv’s fate, Ellasif also remembered that day, over three years ago, when she and Jadrek had finally made love.

  They had stolen away from the village on the first day of spring. No one would follow them, for everyone in White Rook knew they had been making the long, slow dance of a courtship once thought impossible, each afraid to be the first to make a wrong step. And no one saw where they went, except for a pair of foxes still half-snowy in their hoary winter coats.

  Jadrek led her to a shallow cave from which the village warriors had driven one of the monstrous bear-owl creatures the previous autumn. The beast had returned, daring even to approach the village, unaware that the perpetual incursions by the forces of Irrisen had honed the warriors of White Rook into the deadliest of defenders. The monster’s carcass had provided nights of feasting, and the candles from its tallow still lit the houses at night.

  When Ellasif saw that Jadrek had covered the floor of the cave with fresh straw, she understood his intentions. It had taken him years to come to his senses and give up on Olenka, who despite her long legs and red hair was hardly the right match for the strongest man in the village. Jadrek needed a woman whose fighting heart was equal to his own. Or even stronger.

  Most of her romantic rivalry with Olenka had sparked to flame in the practice circle, where Ellasif was rarely defeated. When the two most skilled shield maidens of the village faced off, Ellasif always remarked, “I am shorter than you. Thus, I am meaner than you.” More often than not, she followed up her jest by knocking the tall redhead on her ass and touching her chin with the point of her sword. Olenka took her defeats in stride, realizing only near the end that she was also losing the battle for Jadrek’s heart. She was the last to notice that when Jadrek offered his arm to lift her from the ground, his eyes strayed toward the victor.

  Eventually Jadrek broke off his dalliance with Olenka, and after a few days had passed, he began to appear as if by coincidence whenever Ellasif was on watch. Sometimes she would find him rambling through the woods where she was known to take her solitary strolls. They walked together, talking of their dreams of glory, their plans for carving their names into the legend of their village.

  He broke her name over his lips as lovers do, and she did not object. “Sif,” he murmured into the hollow of her neck. When she did not protest, he took her hand in his, holding it until they returned to the village. This continued until Ellasif began to feel the impatience of uncertainty. She was not averse to making the first move. She had done so often enough with other men and boys. This time, however, she wanted to feel what it was to be the prey, not the hunter.

  At last, she thought as they approached the cave. At last Jadrek had finally gathered the courage to do more than hold her hand or nuzzle her neck outside the light of the village fires. Today he would chase her to ground.

  Jadrek lifted her chin to kiss her mouth. She almost smiled as she tasted the spearmint he had chewed to sweeten his breath, but then she surrendered to the pleasure of his embrace. His straw-blond beard was still soft as a rabbit’s pelt, and not yet so long that he could braid it as the older men did. She ran her fingers through his beard and clutched it tight as she took control of the kiss. As big as he had grown, as brave as he had proven himself in battle, Jadrek still shivered at her touch. His boyish reaction released a thrill deep inside her.

  It was the first time for neither of them, and both knew it. None of the jokes about the ironic title of “shield maiden” mattered, not among the tight-knit band of White Rook warriors. Yet for Ellasif, it was the first time the physical union had felt inevitable. Fated, as the skalds would sing as they sat beside the hearth and unfolded tales of great loves. All of them were fated.

  Looking back on that day, Ellasif realized she should have remembered the other thing those fabled loves had in common: they were all doomed.

  Afterward, when they lay panting on the damp straw, Ellasif heard the distant cry of a bird she could not identify. It was not a crow, but the shrill tenor of its voice spread a cold unease through her belly.

  “Do you hear that?” she asked Jadrek.

  He cocked his head to one side. “What is it?”

  Ellasif did not know. “Probably just a goose fallen behind its—” A nameless fear filled her stomach with ice. She felt something was wrong back at the village, and she wished now that she had told Liv where she had been going. She pulled her clothes back on, ignoring Jadrek’s questions until he also dressed and followed her as she ran back to the village.

  White Rook was empty. Not even a lone sentinel remained.

  “Where is everyone?” asked Jadrek.

  Ellasif ran the perimeter of the village. When he saw what she was doing, Jadrek did the same, running the opposite direction. Ellasif found the footprints and called out to him, still believing he was as mystified as she, a ruse for which she would later hate him all the more.

  The footprints led directly to the river. The path was so wide that Ellasif knew every adult and child from White Rook had gone together. In a rush of certainty, she knew why they had gone.

  “Liv,” she groaned, her voice dying in her throat.

  She ran along the path of footprints. Jadrek followed, calling for her to wait and tell him what she was doing. With his long gait, he soon overtook her, but he did not try to stop her. He knew better.

  They met the villagers on the way.

  They shuffled back toward White Rook, most of them with their gazes fixed on the ground a few feet ahead. Only the elders held their heads high, but their eyes were fixed on the horizon behind Ellasif. Even they could not look in her eyes.

  Standing tall among the crones and crookbacks was Red Ochme, her posture unbowed by the years. Her hair was more gray than red these days, but in her blue eyes shone the strength that in her younger days had made her the hero of White Rook. Her clothes were drenched from the chest down, as were those of two of the stronger old men.

  Ochme’s gaze wavered at the sight of Ellasif. Her frown deepened, but she did not look away as the others did.

  “What have you done?” cried Ellasif.

  “It was a needed thing,” said Ochme. Her voice, so strong in the fray, cracked as she added, “Daughter of my heart, you knew this day would come. We could not allow a witch to live among us.”

  “She did nothing wrong!”

  “One day, she would have.”

  “You could have sent her away,” said Ellasif.

  “And you would have gone with her,” said Ochme. “You are too valuable to the village. We cannot lose you. One day you must take my place.�
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  Ellasif ran past the villagers. She followed the wake of their footprints. Most of them stopped far from the water’s edge, but four pairs went all the way to the bank and into the water. Only three returned.

  Ellasif ran along the bank, calling for Liv. The river ran fast in the spring thaw. Her eyes sought any sign of her sister, but she saw nothing but the water.

  What had Liv been wearing that morning? Was it the gray woolen robe? That would be difficult to spy under the iron-colored water. Why hadn’t she worn the yellow or the white?

  Ellasif knew the answer to the absurd question: It was because Liv had woken that day with the expectation that the people of her village—her neighbors, her kin—would drown her. And she’d gone with them rather than fight against the inevitable.

  Tears blurred Ellasif’s vision, but she kept running along the bank. She heard Olenka call her name, but refused to turn back. Olenka’s shouts grew closer and closer, drowning out her own cries for Liv. The red-haired warrior grasped Ellasif’s shoulder and spun her around.

  Ellasif hesitated when she saw the anguish in Olenka’s face. They had been fast friends since childhood, and their rivalry for Jadrek’s affections could not have changed that. Then a horrible realization struck Ellasif deep inside, a staggering blow on a day when she thought she could endure no further pain.

  She understood that Jadrek had never broken off with Olenka. It had all been a ruse to distract her while the rest of the village murdered her sister. In all her years of keeping Liv’s secret, Ellasif had confided in only one person, allowing Olenka to help shoulder the weight of that terrible knowledge. And now her friend had clearly betrayed her to the village elders, telling them about the tiren’kii.

  “Come back,” said Olenka. She held out her hand.

  Ellasif kicked the woman’s knee hard enough to crack the joint. Olenka hissed in pain and fell as she tried to step back. Ellasif drew her sword and raised it high.