Half-Witch

by John Schoffstall

  But her legs weren’t mortal. What about her legs?

  Her skirt came to just above her knees, her thick wool socks to just below. The chamber was poorly lit. Maybe Lizbet’s birch-white witchy legs would escape notice. She hoped.

  Lizbet tried to direct their attention elsewhere. She took another woman’s hand and pressed it to her other cheek. “See?”

  Kate gently squeezed Lizbet’s arm up and down. Her fingers caressed Lizbet’s cheek, and with an impulsive, motherly gesture brushed an errant lock of dark hair behind Lizbet’s ear. “Why are you in the company of a witch, then?” she asked in a gentler tone. “Are you ensorcelled?”

  “I’m not ensorcelled,” Lizbet said. “Strix is my friend.”

  “Witches are no one’s friend,” another woman said. She was a head taller than Kate, skinny except for her tummy, with a nose like a bunion and anxious eyes. She wrung her hands together and rocked right and left on the balls of her feet. “Maybe she’s a spy for the Pope of Storms.”

  “She’s not a spy,” Lizbet said urgently. “She’s just a girl. I don’t know anything about any Pope.”

  “If she were the Pope’s spy, he wouldn’t have set the goblins after her, Maglet,” Kate said.

  “I dunno, I dunno, witches are tricky ones,” the woman called Maglet muttered. “I dunno about that. It might be a ruse. It might be a plot.”

  Kate seemed a little assuaged, but the other women and girls still murmured to each other in tones of suspicion and discontent. Casting anxious glimpses back, they drifted away. The room emptied, until only Kate, Lizbet, and Strix were left.

  “How did you come to be in such a fix, dear?” Kate asked.

  Lizbet told her story, from her father’s being arrested, her trip to Mrs. Woodcot’s, the journey over the Montagnes, until Lizbet and Strix got to the goblin town and accidentally woke up the goblins. She left out her injured legs and how Strix made her new ones.

  Kate shook her head again and again through the story. “Such an awful burden for such a young girl to bear,” she said when Lizbet was done. “Such terrible hardships.” Her voice flattened, and the words came like a penitent making a reluctant confession to his priest. “I see it was all General Wolftrow’s doing. He was the one who put the idea in your head.”

  “He didn’t ask me to do this,” Lizbet said.

  “No, he didn’t. And yet, somehow, you are doing all this for him, putting yourself in danger of losing your life and your soul, consorting with witches, nearly captured by goblins. And it started with things Wolftrow said or did.” She smiled, barely. “He plays skittles with men, and the pin that goes flying may be three pins away from the one his ball hit.”

  Lizbet walked to Strix’s bed, sat on the edge, and laid Strix’s severed arm on the bed beside her, where it would have lain if it were still attached. “Strix,” she said. “There’s no one here who can help you.” Strix nodded silently. “I don’t know what to do,” Lizbet said. “Can we keep your arm, and when we get back over the Montagnes, maybe Mrs. Woodcot can put it back on for you? Since she made you to begin with?”

  Strix stared at the ceiling. A new look played across her features. It looked like fear. It was the first time Lizbet had ever seen Strix look fearful. “I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Strix said.

  “Strix, what’s wrong?” Lizbet said. “You’re too quiet. It’s not like you. I know, your arm, but—does it hurt?”

  Strix shook her head. “It doesn’t hurt.”

  “It must be a shock . . .”

  “It diminishes me.”

  Lizbet thought about this. “I suppose that’s what losing part of your body would do.”

  “It diminishes me. The me that’s talking to you.”

  Lizbet’s skin went goosebumps.

  “It’s like missing part of your soul. Witches don’t have souls, but the part of us that’s us is spread throughout our bodies. Our bodies are our souls.”

  “Oh, Strix . . .” The horror of it gripped her. And Strix had covered Lizbet with her own body to save Lizbet’s soul from being blown away in the Montagnes. “What can we do?”

  Strix shook her head. “Only a witch could help. Only a witch can put me together again.”

  Only a witch. Only a witch could build things that lived and moved from inanimate materials. “Only a witch can do this,” Strix had said when she was building Violette.

  But Lizbet had helped build Violette, hadn’t she?

  “I’m going to do it,” she said.

  “What?”

  “I’m going to fix you.”

  Lizbet begged a candle from Kate and inspected the stump of Strix’s arm. The stuff Strix was made of poked out: rolled and folded papers, leaves, twine, pocket fluff, brown duck feathers, rattlesnake skin, cattails. Her arm bone was a bundle of twigs lashed together with string. “I’ll need kindling,” Lizbet said to Kate, “and if you have old letters, bits of leather, maybe an old pillow leaking feathers, that would help. And flour and water. And ink.”

  In a way, it was easier than building Violette, because Lizbet didn’t need to create anything new. She just had to reattach everything, stuff fluff and feathers in the holes, and patch it all together. But in way, it was harder too. Because it was Strix. It had to be right. It had to be perfect.

  But it also had to be done. Even if it wasn’t perfect.

  Thus, Lizbet was torn between what her beginner’s skills allowed, what she wanted to do, and the need to do something, even something flawed, when there was no one else there to do it.

  Her palms were sweaty as she worked, and her fingers shook.

  Strix could offer little help. She did not remember her own creation, any more than Lizbet remembered hers.

  As Lizbet worked, she learned. How to shape paper and feathers together into firm flesh. How to string it all together with strips of leather and lengths of twine, so that Strix could move her fingers. How to tension the twine properly by twisting it around twigs. As Lizbet worked, she grew more confident. Her hands no longer shook. She finished up by patching Strix’s skin with papers and flour-water paste, like papier-mâché. She stained it with oak-gall ink to make it brown, to match the rest of Strix.

  Hours went by. When Lizbet was finally done, Strix twisted her arm back and forth, and drummed the fingers on the bed. She lifted her hand in front of her face and swiveled her wrist around.

  “How is it?” Lizbet asked anxiously. “Does it feel okay?”

  “It feels good,” Strix said. Her voice was surprised, but pleased. “It all works.”

  “Oh! I’m so glad. But how do you feel? Is it really you again? Do you feel . . . whole?”

  Strix nodded. “I’m me again.” She shivered. “That was awful. I’m glad it’s over.”

  “Are you sure you’re okay?” Lizbet’s voice was still worried.

  Strix frowned. “Yes, I’m sure. What do you mean?”

  “Strix,” Lizbet said, “I think you’re sweetest, gentlest girl I’ve ever known. And to prove it, I’m going to give you a big hug and a kiss.” She leaned down, threw her arms around Strix, and planted a noisy, sloppy kiss on her right cheek.

  Strix exploded. “I am not sweet! I am not gentle!” She wiped her cheek with her hand. “My cheek is wet! I’m utterly disgusted. There’s wet human spit on my cheek. Ick!”

  “That’s better,” Lizbet said. “Kate, can we borrow a washrag for Strix? Kate?”

  “What’s better? What are you talking about!”

  “You’re back to your old nasty self. And do you know, Strix, I really wouldn’t want you any other way.” Lizbet looked around. “Kate must have left when I was busy with you.”

  “She can bring me supper when she returns,” Strix said. “I’m starved.”

  “Me too,” Lizbet said. “We’ve had a day, haven’t we. Oh, that reminds me. Be
fore Kate gets back . . .” She undid her bootlaces, removed her boots, and put them back on, but on the opposite feet, the way boots go on a normal mortal. They pinched her feet. It would do for now, but Lizbet hoped she didn’t have to conceal her witchy feet too long. She checked her knees. The skin was paler than the rest of her, but as long as she kept her socks pulled high, none of the brown birchbark seams showed on her exposed skin. Maybe her legs would pass muster long enough.

  But how long was “long enough”? They had escaped the goblins, but where were they to go now?

  She had barely got her shoes on opposite when she heard Kate’s decisive footsteps approaching. She appeared from the mouth of a tunnel. “It’s become late,” she said. “You’ve been busy with your . . . friend all afternoon. Corporal Tiermann has commanded your presence at supper. He wants all your news from over the Montagnes. Is something wrong? You look disappointed.”

  A corporal? “It’s just . . . ,” Lizbet began uncertainly, “Corporal Tiermann is good to want to dine with me. But maybe I can also meet with someone older, who knew Margrave Hengest Wolftrow, and might know something about his lost book?”

  Kate smiled slightly. “Dear, Corporal Tiermann is High Lord of the Sewers. His rank is the greatest of any in the sewer city, and his age is nearly the oldest. He was in General Wolftrow’s army that the crossed the Montagnes thirty years ago. If anyone can help you, Corporal Tiermann can.”

  Chapter 14

  Corporal Henrik Tiermann was a scrawny middle-aged man with a straggly gray beard that went everywhere. Dinner with the corporal proved to be dinner with the whole colony of sewer-dwellers. They placed Lizbet at the opposite end of the dining table from Tiermann. Between them on both sides of the table, six old men slurped and smacked their lips as they ate. They wore army uniforms so tattered that they were little more than rags. Boys brandishing knives and forks ran up and down behind them, cutting each man’s food into bites. Younger men and women dined at a score of other tables set up on the floor of a great stone sewer plenum. Rows of pipes on both walls poured forth steaming gray sewage that splashed in noisy cataracts to the floor and drained away into stone and brick channels.

  The noise and stink were almost unbearable to Lizbet. The others didn’t seem to notice, and put away their food with vigor and enthusiasm.

  The main course—the only course, it turned out—was chunks of meat and vegetable matter in an oily gray sauce. It smelled like a badger caught in a trap, if you’d thrown away the badger and cooked the trap. Lizbet wondered whether it was polite to ask what it was she was eating. Instead, she asked one of the serving boys, “Can the cook give me the recipe for this?”

  The boy shrugged. “There’s nothing to it,” he said. “It’s just rat. It’s always rat. And fungus.” He pointed with his knife at a pale globe on Lizbet’s plate. “That’s a blind cave fish eye. You must have done something to deserve that.”

  “I can’t think of what. It’s an honor, then?” Lizbet said.

  “Not much. They give fish eyes to people who are under suspicion, to let ’em know that they’re being watched.”

  “Suspicion of what?”

  “Polyandry or barratry, mostly. Or sometimes Gnosticism or flirtatiousness.”

  “I don’t believe I’ve done any of those,” Lizbet said.

  “Maybe the eye’s because you’re a stranger, then.”

  “Do they usually give them to strangers?”

  The boy shrugged. “Who knows? I’ve never seen a stranger here before.”

  “Not ever? Really?”

  “Uh-uh. Where would a stranger come from?”

  “Well, I came from over the Montagnes,” Lizbet said.

  “Are you sure?” The boy’s voice was skeptical.

  “Of course I’m sure!”

  “The old folks say they came from over the Montagnes,” the boy said, “but there’s younger people who don’t believe it.” He lowered his voice. “They say we’ve always lived right here. They say we’re all lost parts of the Universal Sewer, and with the Universal Sewer our souls long to rejoin.”

  The old man seated at the table to Lizbet’s left interrupted. “Enough, boy.” He fixed the boy with a rheumy gaze. “Hold your tongue before you get an eye on your own plate.” His gaze darted between the boy and Lizbet. “And maybe a second one as well.” He returned to his food.

  The boy blushed. Lizbet blushed. The boy made himself busy elsewhere at the table.

  What must it be like, Lizbet thought, to have always lived with the same people you’d known all your life, and never meet anyone new? After spending her childhood being dragged from town to town by her father, she had longed for a settled life. But if this were an example, it didn’t seem like it would be very much fun. And it seemed to give rise to peculiar ideas about a world that the people here had never seen. Of course, things might be different if you didn’t have to live in a sewer and eat rat every day too.

  “How come there are people living in this sewer?” Lizbet asked the old man at her left.

  The old man looked at her suspiciously. “Are you flirting with me?”

  “Certainly not!”

  The old man slurped up a spoonful of rat stew and gummed it noisily. “We’re down here ’cause of the goblins,” he said. “Can’t go up top long. Goblins are hostile. You saw.”

  “But there must be another way out?” Lizbet’s heart sank. Were she and Strix trapped?

  “You can get out,” the old man said, “only there’s nowhere to go.”

  Nowhere to go? “But there’s mountains, and rivers, and plains,” Lizbet said. “I’ve seen them. I’ve never been over the Montagnes before, but it looks to me like there’s a whole world over here. Why do you have to live in a sewer?”

  The old man shook his head. “The world on this side is filled up with goblins and witches and worse. There’s no place for us.”

  A whole world of goblins and witches?

  “We wait for Wolftrow to return for us,” the old man said. “He said he’d return.”

  Between noisy gobbles of his bowl of rat stew, the old man told Lizbet his story.

  Thirty years ago, fresh from his victories over the Catalans and Berbers, and looking for new worlds to conquer, General Hengest Wolftrow (not yet Margrave) had crossed the Montagnes du Monde with an army of a hundred thousand men. Trailing behind came thousands of others, the sort who follow after armies: tinkers, brewers, musicians, and women. (“You mean the soldiers’ wives?” Lizbet asked. “Not exactly,” the old man said.)

  The crossing had been nightmarish. There was no road over the Montagnes, so Wolftrow built one. Cutting through the living rock, moving vast boulders, the Grande Armee labored two months to build the road that had taken Lizbet and Strix over the top of the Montagnes in a single day.

  The army was unprepared for the high reaches and perilous cold of the Montagnes. Many froze to death. Those who survived lost fingers, toes, whole limbs to the cold. The horses all died. Still Wolftrow drove his army on. “Wolftrow was mad with dreams,” the old man said. He had a patent from Empress Juliana to subdue the lands over the Montagnes du Monde and add them to the Holy Roman Empire. But many suspected Wolftrow lusted after a kingdom of his own. Some said he was seeking magic with which to depose the Pixie Queen and set himself on the ancient throne of Charlemagne.

  Whatever Wolftrow secretly desired, he was ruthless in his pursuit of it. As his army perished around him, he drove the survivors onward up the mountain with undiminished fervor. When they reached heights where the etheric winds began to rip men’s souls from their bodies, Wolftrow marched in front, blocking the wind with his own body. Wolftrow’s own soul seemed indissolubly knit to his flesh, a heroic soul in a heroic body that no wind, however fierce, could tear asunder.

  Many were desperate to quit this journey of horrors. Under another commander, they might have
mutinied. Wolftrow persuaded them to march on. He was a man of messianic personality. A few words from General Wolftrow to a despairing soldier made the man believe that it was he, and he alone, whom Wolftrow counted on to save them all through strength and steadfastness. At night, he was everywhere among the troops, striding from campfire to campfire, coaxing, encouraging, giving hope to the despairing. The soldiers loved him as a father is loved. His frown was more feared than death.

  The army’s numbers dwindled each day. At the last, a half-frozen, horror-stricken handful of survivors stumbled over the Montagnes’ crest and down the eastern slopes into the unknown lands beyond. Out of a hundred thousand men and women who left Abalia, Wolftrow’s great army was reduced to a few score by the time they found the goblin town.

  Like Lizbet and Strix, they had accidentally woken the goblins, and a battle ensued. But Wolftrow’s tattered ranks, exhausted and half starved, had no fight in them. The goblins chased Wolftrow’s soldiers down into the sewers.

  There they had refuge. They ate rats and offal, and eked out a precarious existence by raiding the goblins above.

  Wolftrow quickly became restless. He still had grander dreams than ruling over a sewer. One day he set out alone, vowing to cross back over the Montagnes. He swore he would bring a new army to rescue the sewer-dwellers. He swore he would return.

  But he never did.

  “He’s Margrave of Abalia now,” Lizbet said. “He’s been margrave for years.” She remembered how Margrave Hengest Wolftrow seemed to her: hollow, filled with shadows. She could not imagine him having the strength of body, or will, to cross the Montagnes again. “I don’t think he’s coming back,” she said.

  The old man shook his head and sighed.

  At the table’s opposite end, Corporal Tiermann turned his tin plate over and banged his spoon loudly on the bottom. The diners became quiet. Tiermann rose, slowly, assisted by two boys.