Half-Witch

by John Schoffstall

  The man poured the mug full, and took a long drink. He wiped his mouth with his hand. His fingernails were cracked and had arcs of black grime under them.

  Lizbet realized she hadn’t introduced herself yet. She stuck her hand out of the blanket. “My name is Lizbet Lenz,” she said. “I’m very pleased to meet you. I’d like to thank you for the food, and for letting me stay in your house.”

  “Uh,” the man said. He took her hand in his and roughly shook it.

  “May I ask your name?” Lizbet said.

  “Uh-uh,” the man said. “You can ask, but I ain’t tellin’. It’s dangerous.”

  Lizbet had not expected this response. “Oh. I see. Actually, I don’t see. Why is it dangerous?”

  “None of your business!”

  The man’s shout hung in the air. Lizbet hugged herself, not sure what was safe to say. After a minute, the man spoke again. “So why is a young girlie like you coming all the way up here where no one but—no one but folks like me live?”

  Lizbet told him the story of her father’s magical misadventure, his imprisonment, the Margrave, the witches, and her quest to get the Margrave’s book of magic. The man nodded through the story. He finally said, when she was done, “What happened to the witch girl who came with you?”

  “I don’t know,” Lizbet said. “She disappeared.”

  Perhaps her story made the man more willing to talk. Or perhaps it was the whiskey. “Your father’s got it bad,” he said, draining his mug in noisy slurps. “Being in the Houses of Correction. I been down in the Houses. Glad I ain’t there now. Though being out here ain’t good either.”

  This wasn’t what Lizbet wanted to hear, that this man had been in trouble with the law. She told herself that perhaps he was still a nice man. If her father had been imprisoned undeservedly, perhaps this man had been too. She wondered whether she should ask him, but decided against it. She had never been taught the manners of asking new acquaintances about their criminal past, but suspected it was something one didn’t do. Also, she was afraid of what she might learn.

  She was going to leave first thing in the morning, anyway.

  The man didn’t offer to talk about why he had been in the Houses of Correction, but he wasn’t shy about condemning those he said were responsible for putting him there. The rich. The poor. The priests. Judges, lawyers, gypsies, foreigners, Hebrews. Pretty much everyone, it seemed, was responsible for the man’s troubles. But most of all, Hengest Wolftrow. Wolftrow this, Wolftrow that, Wolftrow had hated him and plotted his downfall since the day he was born to his mother, the goodest woman what ever breathed, despite her habit of smothering her houseguests and selling their bodies to doctors at the university. Hengest Wolftrow was a blackguard, a villain, a bounder, a knave. A devil in human form. He should be deposed from his position and hung in irons at the Plaza of Fear.

  Lizbet, feeling the effects of a wearying climb, the late hour, and a pleasantly full stomach, had been fighting off sleep. The horror of the man’s words brought fully her awake. “That’s high treason!” she exclaimed. “Surely you can’t mean that.”

  The man glared down at the table sullenly.

  “Surely . . . ,” Lizbet pleaded. No crime was worse than high treason. To revolt against a ruler was to war against God’s law. It was an offense against the Great Chain of Being, that gave structure and order to all creation.

  The man took a deep gulp from his pot of whiskey. Instead of retracting his words, he changed the subject. He complained about the rigors of living up here at the timberline. The harshness of the weather, the scarcity of game, the unceasing labor of keeping up the house, digging the garden, working his traplines. He needed someone to help him. It wouldn’t be so bad if there were two to do the work. It wouldn’t be bad at all. He stared at Lizbet. She thought there was a hopeful look in his eye.

  “It must be so hard living here alone,” Lizbet said, as cheerfully as she was able. “I do hope you find someone to help you. When I get back to Abalia, I promise I’ll make inquiries.”

  The man grumbled, and stared at the table again.

  “I’m most grateful for your hospitality,” Lizbet said. She drew the greasy blanket more tightly about her, and yawned. “But I’m very tired. I need to sleep.” She looked around. Perhaps she could just curl up in a corner? “I won’t be any more bother. I’ll be leaving first thing in the morning.”

  She rose from the table—and gasped in pain, and almost fell.

  “What’s that?” the man said.

  Lizbet lowered herself back into the chair, biting back a sob. When she put weight on her feet, it was like standing on burning coals. Painstakingly, she undid the laces on her boots and peeled off her socks.

  Her feet were raw, red, and so swollen she could barely get her boots off. The blisters had broken, and the raw flesh oozed sticky yellow fluid. There were even open sores at her ankles where her boot tops had rubbed off the skin. Walking even a few steps was unbearably painful.

  “You ain’t going nowheres on those feet,” the man said with satisfaction. “You’ll be staying awhile. A good long while. I’ll make a bed for you in the loft.”

  The loft was at the other end of the cabin. It was open on the side away from the wall. Barrels, skeins of rope, firewood, and other odds and ends mostly filled it. A rickety ladder gave access from below. Lizbet scaled it with difficulty and pain. The man shoved some of the clutter aside and put blankets on the loft floor.

  “Sweet dreams, girlie,” he said. “I’m thinking that the pair of us can work out some arrangement to our mutual benefit while you’ll be stayin’ here.”

  He backed down the ladder. When he reached the floor, he took the ladder away.

  Lizbet lay her head as low as she could and still see over the edge of the loft floor. The man had returned to the table and was continuing to drink.

  Movement, deep in the shadows in a corner of the room, caught her eye. Did the man keep a dog she hadn’t noticed? Or maybe it was a mouse. But when fire crackled and flared up for a moment, the object was revealed to be just a ball of crumpled brown paper, and a wad of twine.

  How long would it take her feet to heal? Days? A week or more? Lizbet was willing to wait, although she feared what might happen to her father if she delayed.

  Once healed, she could start up the Montagnes du Mondes again. Maybe this man would even give her a little food to travel with? But he was rough spoken, and his thoughts of treason against his lawful lord were shocking.

  Before she went to sleep, Lizbet fished a host out of her pocket and put it on her tongue. She sneezed. She wasn’t looking forward to an earful of recriminations about her recent behavior, but surely God could at least advise her on how to deal with this odd man. She hoped he wasn’t still too busy to talk.

  “God?”

  She heard nothing but a soft hissing and popping. A faint whistling noise rolled slowly up and down the musical scale.

  “God? It’s me, Elizabeth.”

  The sounds were oddly soothing, or perhaps Lizbet was simply exhausted beyond reckoning. If God were present, He never said a word, and Lizbet fell asleep with the host still dissolving on her tongue, and her unspoken questions still unanswered.

  Chapter 8

  Lizbet woke to the man’s hand roughly shaking her shoulder. He had put the ladder back against the edge of the loft. Lizbet rubbed her eyes. The cabin was still dark. “Time to rise, girlie!” the man’s voice yelled in her ear. “There’s no sleeping late here, like fine folks do in town. Go throw the dinner scraps to the chickens and pigs, and gather up any eggs you find. Don’t step on none, or there’ll be trouble.”

  “What sort of trouble?” Lizbet asked, imagining being pecked by an angry hen.

  “Trouble like a strap on your backside, for wasting food,” the man barked. “Quit your stalling! Get out of that bed and earn your keep.”
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  Lizbet knew some parents beat their children, but Gerhard had never beaten her. The man’s words made her mind go numb.

  Lizbet’s feet were so swollen that she could barely get them into her boots. Even though she left the laces loose, her feet throbbed. When she tried to descend from the loft, every step down the ladder caused such agony that she nearly cried.

  “Hurry up!” the man yelled at her. He was at the table, and had already started on his jug of whiskey.

  Lizbet limped around the table, gathering up the plates and combining the scraps of food. “Quicker!” the man snapped at her. “I want my breakfast.” Lizbet tried to hurry, but bearing weight on either foot made it feel like it was being squeezed in a red-hot vise. Carrying the table scraps, she hobbled to the door.

  The sky above the Montagnes was just beginning to lighten. Numbing cold air bit Lizbet’s cheeks and fingers. A cock crowed in the near darkness, and a couple of runty pigs, scenting the scraps, butted her legs with their wet noses. Lizbet scattered the scraps around. While chickens and pigs clucked and oinked and fought over them, Lizbet strained her eyes to look for eggs in the predawn light. She discovered four eggs in nests the hens had made in the fallen fir needles.

  “Only four?” the man snarled when she came inside. “You must have missed some. No, don’t look again! Cook the ones you got for me. I’m starving while you’re loafing around.”

  Lizbet’s stomach rumbled. “Any . . . ?” She hesitated.

  “‘Any’ what?”

  “Any for me?”

  “No! Not until you’re done with cooking and cleaning and chores.”

  Cooking and cleaning and chores? How long would that take? Lizbet’s stomach rumbled harder.

  She stoked the cast-iron stove with firewood. She found a skillet caked with grease and burned food, and cleaned it as best she could. Soon the eggs and slices from a dried ham were sizzling away, releasing a delicious scent. Hunger overwhelmed Lizbet. Perhaps if she sliced off just a tiny bit of the ham . . .

  “Greedy, lazy thing!” the man yelled at her. “I fed you last night for nothin’, and now you better feed me!” So Lizbet piled the food on a plate and watched while the man wolfed it down. When he noticed her watching, he sent her out back of the cabin to chop firewood, her stomach still rumbling and cramping.

  It was afternoon before Lizbet was allowed to eat, and then only a mouthful. Her feet were hurting enough to bring tears to her eyes, but the man made her spend the rest of the afternoon scrubbing the cabin floor, hauling water from the spring, and washing his filthy clothes and dishes encrusted with grease and dried food.

  Throughout the day, the pain in Lizbet’s feet worsened rapidly. By evening her feet were so swollen that she could not fit them into her boots at all. Yellow fluid seeped from the blisters. The skin was an angry red all the way up her calves and shins. She struggled back into her bed in the loft, almost lifting herself up the ladder with the strength of her arms, barely able to touch her feet to the rungs.

  Before she slept, she said her prayers, for herself, her father, for all the people in Abalia. She prayed for every person in the Holy Roman Empire, Empress Juliana, and for heathens and pagans in foreign lands. Last, and hardest, she prayed for the man below who tormented her, because Christians pray for their enemies.

  Sleep came quickly, but it was shallow and fitful. Lizbet woke in the dark, clammy all over with sweat. Even her single blanket was too warm, and she threw it off. She touched her hand to her brow. She was burning up with fever. Her legs were swollen to the thighs, and so exquisitely tender she couldn’t bear even to touch the skin or roll over on her pallet.

  She was terribly thirsty. Could she struggle down the ladder and find the water pitcher? But when she tried to sit up, everything spun around, and she had to lie down or she would faint.

  In the morning, the man would expect her to do his chores again. What would he do to her when he found she couldn’t?

  Beset by pain, fear, and fever, Lizbet lay in the near dark, breathing heavily. She could not see a way out. Despair broke over her like a black wave. When she had fled from Carl, Lizbet had found an even more dangerous person to help her, a witch. But who could help her now? She wished Mrs. Woodcot were here. Or even the awful Strix.

  Lizbet wished she hadn’t sent Strix away.

  Hours passed. Lizbet drifted in and out of a troubled sleep. Her fever waxed and waned. At last, groaning sounds below as the man rolled from his bed. His boots thumped onto the floor. “Girlie!” his hoarse voice called. “What are you doing still in bed? You know better than that by now. Get down here, and get to work.”

  “I can’t,” Lizbet called back. “I’m sick. My legs . . . I can’t even move them. It hurts too much. I have fever. Please, can I stay in bed just one day? Maybe I’ll get better.”

  A roar of inarticulate rage came from below. Lizbet flinched. The sound of boots stamping. The man swarmed up the ladder. His face was flushed with rage. He brandished a leather belt in his hand. “Malingering still!”

  “No . . . ,” Lizbet cried.

  He raised the belt. “Sick, are you? Well, I’ve got the cure for that.” The belt came down, like a whip of fire.

  All thought dissolved in a haze of agony. All Lizbet wanted was for the pain to stop. “Please,” she begged of the man, of God, of the empty air. “Stop. Don’t. Help me. Please help me. Please. I beg you. Help me!”

  A new voice, beside her: “You heard her! Stop hurting her now!”

  Strix’s voice.

  The blows stopped. Lizbet focused her eyes. Strix crouched in the loft beside her, forcing the man’s arm back with all her might.

  But Strix was made of paper and sticks and twine. The man was bone and muscle. With a roar, he shook Strix off, and shoved her away. Strix teetered, yelled, and fell from the edge of the loft. From below, a muffled thud.

  For an instant, Lizbet almost forgot her own pain and danger. She even forgot she hated Strix. Strix had tried to help her, and instead, Strix had been hurt too. It wasn’t right.

  The man’s hand rose again to strike her, but this time, instead of flinching away, Lizbet raised her arm and grabbed his wrist. Her fingers barely fit around it. “You hurt Strix!” she yelled in his face.

  Pat-pat-pat coming up the rungs of the ladder. A bare brown arm circled the man’s neck, and Strix’s face appeared over his shoulder. Strix grabbed the man’s hair and yanked his head back.

  The man’s bangs parted. For the first time, Lizbet saw his bare forehead. A pink scar puckered his skin, in the shape of an ‘M.’

  M meant ‘murder.’ Outlaws were branded like that. This man had been outlawed for murder.

  “Strix . . .”

  “Help me!” Strix yelled. “I can’t do this alone!”

  The man was already reaching behind him to grab Strix and throw her off. Gritting her teeth, and bracing herself against the pain she knew was coming, Lizbet swiveled her hips, put both of her red, swollen feet against the man’s chest, and pushed as hard as she could. She cried out as agony hit her. Strix yanked back on the man’s head.

  The ladder rocked, and tilted back. Ladder, Strix, and Outlaw all toppled to the floor with a crash.

  Wiping away tears from the awful pain in her legs and feet, Lizbet peered over the edge of the loft. Strix was standing nonchalantly, dusting off her hands. The Outlaw lay, unmoving, on the floor beneath the ladder.

  “Strix,” Lizbet said urgently, “we have to leave. We have to escape now. That man’s an outlaw. And a murderer. Did you see how he was branded? We’ve got to get away, or I don’t know what he’ll do to us when he wakes up.”

  Grunting with the effort, Strix rolled the ladder off the Outlaw. She examined him with narrowed eyebrows. “He’s not doing much of anything right now,” she said.

  “Really?” Now that the ladder was out of the way, Liz
bet saw that the Outlaw’s head was twisted on his neck at an angle she wouldn’t have thought possible. Looking at it made her feel queasy.

  “In fact, he’s not even breathing,” Strix said.

  “Oh. He’s not, is he?”

  “I don’t think he’ll be a danger to us anytime soon.” Strix put her hands on her hips. “Lizbet,” she announced, “the trail of bodies in your wake has grown longer by one.”

  “What?” Lizbet said, shocked. “I didn’t kill him! You killed him!”

  “Me?!”

  “You pulled his head!”

  “You kicked his chest!”

  They both stared at each other.

  Silence, broken at last by a cockerel crowing outside.

  “On the other hand,” Lizbet said after a while, “in a way, I guess, I’m relieved that somebody killed him. If you know what I’m saying.”

  Strix nodded. “You wouldn’t have lasted very long, being beaten like that.” She cocked her head and examined Lizbet. “In fact, you still don’t look too good.”

  Lizbet shivered and wrapped her arms around herself. A chill shook her. Her forehead was still sweaty from fever. “It was lucky you showed up,” she said. She had no doubt she would have been dead at the Outlaw’s hands, save for the timely appearance of Strix.

  Save for the timely appearance of the hateful, arrogant, irritating Strix.

  How could she still hate Strix, after Strix had saved her? How could Lizbet be that awful? Something broke into pieces inside her.

  “Strix,” Lizbet said. “There’s something I need to tell you.” Strix stared at her with those mismatched brown eyes. “I want to . . .” Lizbet swallowed hard. “I want to thank you. For coming back. For ignoring me when I told you to go away. For saving me from that awful man.”

  “Thank me?” Strix was incredulous.

  “Yes. For saving my life. For being . . .” She hesitated, then plunged on: “For being a friend. The best possible friend I could have, right when I needed one the most.”