Half-Witch

by John Schoffstall

  Lizbet reluctantly admitted it must have taken courage, or something like it, to live up here, alone, depending only on oneself to survive day to day and year to year in the wilderness. “I thought you said that the affections disappear when you die?” she said.

  “These aren’t affections,” Strix said. “They’re virtues. Or vices, depending on how you look at them. They’re woven into your heart. They go with you to your grave. Unless a witch harvests them first.”

  Next came a bright red mass that quivered and bounced. “‘Rebellion,’” Strix said. “Or ‘Independence.’” Whatever it was called, the Outlaw had a lot of it.

  Again and again, Strix delved into the Outlaw’s body, drawing out masses of material that that she named ‘Kindness’ (a tiny amount), ‘Cruelty’ (quite a lot of that), ‘Treachery’ (slithery, bile colored), and others.

  When she was finished, Strix said to Lizbet, “What do you think? Do any of these suit your fancy?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What came out of one, can go into another,” Strix said. “With these, I can patch up your character any way you like. Need more Courage? No, you’ve almost got too much of that already. Any more and you’d start picking fights with bears.” She eyed Lizbet like a dressmaker sizing up a bolt of cloth. “How about taking some of his Rebellion though? I think you must have had your hands in your pockets on the day they handed out Rebellion.”

  “I don’t want to be more rebellious,” Lizbet said, thinking of all the things she’d done in the past week. “I’m plenty rebellious already.”

  “Oh, goblin poop,” Strix said. “If you were rebellious, you would have asked Mrs. Woodcot to overthrow the Margrave, or call down an army of devils to break open the prison and free your father. That’s being rebellious.”

  Lizbet was speechless.

  Strix went on, “Not that she would have done it. But the idea didn’t even enter your head. Instead, you’re off on this loopy journey over the Montagnes—”

  Lizbet broke in, “You can just stop, because I don’t want any of that stuff. I wouldn’t want to be like that man, at all. Even a little.”

  Strix shook her head. “Mortals are so vain. No one ever really wants more virtues or vices than they already have, even if they need them badly. Still, I’m hanging on to this stuff. In case you change your mind.”

  Strix rummaged through the Outlaw’s possessions until she found a bandoleer and some spent shotgun shells. She stuffed the squirmy vices and virtues into the empty shells, and the shells into the bandoleer. Slinging the bandoleer around her chest, she strutted about the cabin like a Barbary pirate, waving the Outlaw’s shotgun at Lizbet and threatening to pepper her with Sloth or Whimsy.

  Together they dragged the Outlaw outside and dug a grave for him in the stony, unforgiving earth. It was exhausting work. Strix helped, but most of the labor fell to Lizbet. For all of Strix’s restless energy, she turned out not to be very strong, perhaps because she was only made of paper and string and pocket fluff. Lizbet’s new wood and iron legs were still unsteady for walking, but they were powerful and able for digging.

  “Do we really have to dig down six feet?” Strix complained, leaning on her shovel and panting.

  “That’s how deep a grave is,” Lizbet said.

  “Who makes this stuff up?” Strix said. “Would anyone care if we stopped at five feet and six inches? Or four feet? Or three? Why don’t we just leave the Outlaw’s body on a crag, for the vultures to eat? That’s what the Zoroastrians would do.”

  “Because we’re not Zoro-whatever-you-said,” Lizbet said. Hip-deep in the grave, she shoved her spade into the earth and heaved out another shower of earth and pebbles. Her breath came in pants. Her shoulders and back burned with fatigue.

  She needed to dig the Outlaw a proper grave, every inch of six feet down. A proper grave and a proper burial were the least she owed him. Because of guilt. Guilt for having killed him.

  It didn’t matter that he had almost killed her. It didn’t matter that he was a murderer himself. He was an adult, who had given Lizbet shelter and food. For Lizbet to disobey him—let alone kill him—was called “petty treason.” It was a crime, and a sin. Adults were the natural masters of children. For a child to turn her hand against an adult, even an evil adult, was an offense against the natural order of things, against God, against the Great Chain of Being itself.

  Lizbet tried to explain the Great Chain of Being to Strix. “At the top is God,” she said. Her breath came in huffs as she forced her spade into the stony soil. “The angels answer to God. The Pope answers to God. The bishops and priests obey the Pope. Nobles obey the Pixie Queen. Commoners obey the nobles. Children obey adults. Horses and dogs obey people. Everyone has their proper station.” In her imagination, Lizbet could almost see the Great Chain of Being, like an immense glittering cathedral as high as the sky, a precise mathematic of privilege, obligation, order, and law. “If you defy the Great Chain of Being, you’re rebelling against all the world and the heavens.”

  “Your queen is a pixie?” Strix said, leaning on her shovel.

  Lizbet made a noise of exasperation. “You haven’t heard a word I said, have you?”

  “Children obey adults or they get beaten,” Strix said with a shrug. “Commoners obey nobles or they’re hanged. The Great Chain of Being is obviously just an excuse for the strong to exploit the weak, dressed up in fancy language. It’s funny that humans would be ruled by a pixie though.”

  “Empress Juliana isn’t really a pixie,” Lizbet said. “She’s called the Pixie Queen because she’s delicate and beautiful, and all men fall madly in love with her the moment they lay eyes on her.”

  “Sounds like a pixie to me,” Strix said. Exerting all her strength, she dug her shovel an inch into the earth and heaved a spoonful of dirt onto the pile beside the grave. “This would be easier if we were Zoroastrians,” she said.

  Evening gloom was creeping fast beneath the firs and hemlocks by the time they had the grave deep enough to suit Lizbet. With a dull thump the girls rolled the Outlaw’s body in. In far less time than it had taken to dig it out, they shoveled the dirt back in and made a tidy mound across the top.

  Lizbet felt she should say something over the grave. “Sleep tight,” she said. “Get some rest. On Judgment Day, God will sort things out between us, okay?”

  “What’s Judgment Day?” Strix asked.

  “That’s when God brings the dead back to life,” Lizbet said.

  Strix nodded. “Oh, I get it. Like zombies.”

  “No, not like zombies! For heaven’s sake.”

  Lizbet explained to Strix about the Second Coming, and the Beast, and the Seven Seals. Strix’s Bible knowledge was spotty at best. “It’s dangerous to read the Bible,” Strix said. “You can burst into flames. I once heard of a witch who read the Bible by wearing gloves made of asbestos and isinglass. Even so, she scorched her eyes and had to put wet rags on them for a week.”

  Dinner was hens’ eggs collected from beneath the trees, and ham, with biscuits fried in a pan over the fire. Exhausted by the day’s grim labors, Lizbet had barely crawled into her loft and covered herself with blankets before she fell asleep.

  She woke from troubled dreams of crashing thunder and a bolt of lightning that set the Outlaw’s house on fire. Still only half-awake, she found that the house was not on fire after all. But she still smelled smoke. Cigar smoke.

  Terror gripped her. Cigar smoke? The Outlaw’s alive, she thought. He must not have been dead after all, but only stunned. He’s crawled out of his grave. He’s come back to kill us.

  Pausing, first, to relax with a cigar?

  That didn’t seem likely. As Lizbet shook off sleep, the hammering thunder of her dream resolved into just plain hammering. She pushed herself to the edge of the loft and risked a peek over the edge.

  It was morning again.
On the opposite side of the cabin, the oiled paper window glowed yellow with daylight. Strix stood on the floor of the cabin, a hammer in her brown fist, pounding away at wooden sawhorse taller than she was. The sawhorse had a head, neck, and tail. As she worked, she puffed at a cigar clamped between her teeth.

  “Strix? What are you doing?”

  Strix turned, and blew a smoke ring directly at Lizbet. The smoke rolled through the air, like a serpent with its tail in its mouth.

  Lizbet coughed as the smoke ring hit her. “That’s disgusting.”

  “It certainly is,” Strix said. She removed the cigar from her mouth and examined the cigar band. “Poor tobacco stock, grown too quickly, cured indifferently. Still, even a bad cigar is better than no cigar.” She took another mouthful of smoke and blew a smoke ring shaped like a figure-of-eight on its side.

  “I mean, it’s disgusting because girls shouldn’t smoke.” Because it wasn’t ladylike, but Strix wouldn’t understand that. What else did people say? “It will stunt your growth,” Lizbet said primly. She eyed Strix’s boy-like figure. “And if you will forgive my saying so, a little growth wouldn’t hurt you in the least.”

  “I don’t grow.”

  Every time Lizbet thought she had Strix figured out, Strix came up with some new eccentricity. “What do you mean? How can you not grow? Everyone grows.”

  “I told you, Mrs. Woodcot made me. When she wants me bigger, she makes me bigger. She adds new gallows rope, weasel’s ears, mechanic’s waste, whatever she likes. Smoking doesn’t enter into it.” She filled her cheeks with smoke and blew another smoke ring, a complicated knot this time. It unwound itself as it traveled through the air, dissolving into twisting smoky strands.

  “Oh. I see. I guess that explains why you don’t have . . . why you aren’t more . . . you know. Filled out.” Lizbet was beginning to feel sorry she’d started. “If witches don’t have babies in the usual way, of course, then you wouldn’t need . . .”

  “Breasts.”

  “It’s more delicate to say, ‘a bosom.’”

  “When I’m big enough, Mrs. Woodcot will create breasts for me,” Strix said. “They will fill with gall and wormwood. At Satanic Masses on the blasted heath, I will give suck to fallen cherubs and the fierce spawn of demons.”

  “Strix, quite frankly, that’s far more than I really wanted to know.” Lizbet searched for a way out of this line of conversation. “Whatever are you hammering at? It looks like a horse.”

  “It is a horse. It’s a witch horse. To carry us over the Montagnes.”

  Its skeleton was wood. The joints were articulated with leather. Its tail was a spray of broomstraw.

  Midway through the day, they maneuvered the witch horse through the door, into the clearing in front of the cabin. “Soon it will be too big to get out,” Strix said. “It would have to kick down a wall.”

  Lizbet watched while Strix worked. Strix sent Lizbet to fetch things she needed: dried lima beans for teeth, chestnut hulls for eyes, papers for stuffing. Lizbet was gradually getting used to her new legs. By evening, she had taught herself to walk about without holding her arms out for balance, although she wobbled a bit. Running or jumping were still out of the question.

  Strix had her do little tasks, like unraveling rope to make the horse’s mane, or cutting up the Outlaw’s clothing and stitching the pieces together to make a patchwork hide. It fascinated Lizbet to watch Strix make the witch horse’s muscles out of straw. It was like watching a master seamstress: Strix’s fingers danced, tucking, twisting, knotting, folding, pinching. Lizbet tried to follow, but Strix’s nimble fingers moved too fast. Strix noticed Lizbet’s look of concentration. She said, “What is it?”

  “It’s you,” said Lizbet. “That’s clever. What you’re doing.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  Lizbet’s fingers were already moving in imitation of Strix’s. “Can you teach me how to do it?”

  “No.”

  “Please?”

  “You’re a mortal. Only a witch can do this.”

  Lizbet already had an answer. “It’s pretend, again. Pretend I’m not a mortal.”

  Strix rolled her eyes.

  “Thank you,” Lizbet said. “You’re really nice to do this.”

  “I am not ‘nice’!”

  You twisted the straw here, Strix said, and then you held the twist tight with two fingers while you tied here. Then you doubled it, and bent here, to keep it all snug. There was a special secret turn, and a mysterious inside-out knot, then several twirly loops that went in directions that Lizbet had never seen before. The first time Lizbet did it, the tightly twisted knot of straw flew out of her hands and shot across the clearing. Strix barked out her contemptuous laugh for just a moment. Then she stopped. Lizbet’s cheeks blushed hotly. “Try again,” Strix said in a half-strangled voice.

  The next time didn’t work either. “Again,” said Strix.

  The next one at least held together, but—

  “It won’t work,” Strix said. “You made Mme. Minglefinger’s Loop go widdershins twice. It’s supposed to go widdershins once and sunwise once. Do it again.”

  “Who is Mme. Minglefinger?”

  “A famous witch. She invented that loop. She said it came to her in a dream, of a snake revolving with its tail in its mouth. Or so she claimed.”

  “She didn’t really?”

  “Gossip is that Minglefinger actually learned it from a fallen angel in exchange for a sexual tryst so violent that it tore her into two halves, straight up the middle. Her apprentice had to sew Minglefinger together again with carpet thread and a darning needle. Do you want to try this or not? We don’t have all day.”

  And so it went, Lizbet’s inexperienced fingers failing again and again to make the subtle knots correctly, until Strix gave up on her and went back to making the witch horse herself.

  Lizbet kept on trying though. She failed repeatedly, until she was ready to yell in frustration. However, she did not give up. Somewhere around mid-afternoon, after uncounted failures, she finally made a bundle of straw with every knot and twist correct.

  “Strix. Look.” With shy pride and trepidation, Lizbet held it up: a sloppy fascicle of twisted and knotted straw, the thickness of a pencil.

  Strix glared at it. She took it from Lizbet and poked it with a fingertip. The bundle of straw twitched, just a little.

  “It’s not well done,” Strix said.

  “But it moves!”

  Strix nodded. She frowned and glared at Lizbet suspiciously. “A mortal shouldn’t have been able to do this.”

  Lizbet thought about that.

  “Now make me twenty more like it,” Strix said.

  “Twenty?”

  “If it’s much for you, I’ll do it.”

  “It’s not too much for me,” Lizbet said quickly. The hint of a smile crossed Strix’s lips.

  Lizbet’s next three attempts failed, before she made another straw bundle so that it twitched when she poked it. She worked through the afternoon and into the evening. Her stomach growled. She ignored it.

  By early evening, she had a pile of of twenty straw bundles by her side. The first were clumsy, but the last ones she made looked almost as good as Strix’s. Her fingers ached and were covered with little cuts from the straws. Strix, meanwhile, had twisted and knotted dozens of times as many, and had already bound them together into muscles and attached them to one of the forelegs. When she stroked the horse’s neck, it raised its leg and stamped its hoof on the ground. The hoof made a ringing sound, because Strix had made it of spoons and forks, braided together. The hoof glittered red and gold in the last rays of the setting sun.

  “Now give me yours,” Strix said.

  Lizbet handed over her little pile of straw bundles. “What’s it going to be?” she asked eagerly.

  “The coccygeus,” Strix said
.

  “The cox-what-y-us?”

  “A tail muscle.”

  “Oh.”

  Strix laughed. “What’s wrong?”

  “I don’t know. I guess I was hoping that it would be more important. Than just a tail muscle.”

  “If you were a horse, you’d think the tail’s important. Chases the flies away.”

  “But this isn’t a flesh and blood horse,” Lizbet said. “It won’t have flies . . . will it?”

  “Maybe it’ll have clockwork flies,” Strix said. She was whipping Lizbet’s bundles of straw together with string. Next, she nailed the joined bundle to the horse’s wooden frame with tacks.

  Strix scratched the horse’s flank with a fingernail. The tail slapped back and forth. Lizbet gave a little gasp. Her bundle of straw was moving the tail!

  They broke off work to eat supper. Afterwards, Lizbet and Strix sat together on the cabin’s doorstep in the chilly darkness. Crickets and spring peepers made the darkness noisy. Strix was smoking one of the Outlaw’s cigars. The ember glowed in the dark.

  “How much longer?” Lizbet asked. “Until the horse is done?”

  “Days,” Strix said. “Maybe a week or more.”

  That long! With her father still languishing in the Margrave’s prison. And no telling what they’d run into on the other side of the Montagnes, or how long it would take to find the Margrave’s book.

  “I’ll help,” Lizbet said. “It’ll go faster with both of us.”

  Strix took the cigar out of her mouth and examined the glowing tip. “Are you sure you wouldn’t like a puff or two of this? It’s not so bad, once you get going.”

  The change of subject made Lizbet pause. She said, “I told you, it’s not healthy—”

  “I think it would be okay for you.”

  Lizbet couldn’t decipher Strix’s tone of voice. “No, Strix,” she said. “No.”