A young fellow stepped forward. Lizbet recognized him as the kissy guard of the Palace gate. He sank to one knee in front of the pink lady. “Your name?”
“Francis Schnitzerzook, Your Highness,” the fellow stammered.
“Francis, from this day forward you will be Margrave of Abalia, and of the Abalian Pale, from the Falls of the Nur and the Piedmont to the peaks of the Montagnes du Monde. Take this as your domestic policy: treat the people as a farmer treats his prize cow. Let them wax neither too fat nor too lean, and if you must use a switch, use it only to guide them from harm. This will be your foreign policy: keep the witches on both sides of the Montagnes occupied and distracted, but do not carry things to the point of war. Hengest went too far, and you can see the result.”
“Your Highness!” Francis cried. “I adore you with all my heart! I pour out my soul to you. All that I am is yours! My life, my being, I pledge to you. Your eyes are like jewels. Your smile is like the sun—”
He went on like this, fevered oaths of romantic devotion mixed with extravagant but banal compliments. Lizbet blushed. The pink lady listened impassively for a minute or so before cutting Francis off.
“Yes, yes, of course,” she said. “Francis Schnitzerzook, Margrave of Abalia, serve me well and faithfully. If you do so, in a score of years and ten, this will be your reward: you may place your lips here”—she indicated her cheek—“for the merest moment.”
Francis trembled, and seemed about to explode. Instead, the blood disappeared from his face and he fainted to the grass. The pink lady pointed to his unconscious body and addressed the surrounding crowd. “This will be your new margrave,” she announced. “Obey him as you would me, when he wakes up.”
“Your Highness?” Lizbet said. “You are . . . Empress Juliana? You really are a pixie, then?”
Juliana’s pale eyebrows rose. She indicated her followers. “My guards. Describe the men you see.”
“I don’t see any men,” Lizbet said. “I see badgers and bears, Your Highness.”
“Hm,” Juliana said. She lowered her voice. “You are the only one. All others here see men-at-arms, and horses and coaches instead of flying scallop shells. When they look at me, they see a handsome mortal woman of middle years, as tall as you, dressed as befits a queen. ‘Pixie’ is thought to be no more than a fanciful compliment.” Her gaze probed Lizbet up and down. “Who are you, to pierce my glamour? Who are you, to put down devils? Are you an angel, turned freelance?”
“I’m Lizbet Lenz,” Lizbet said. “I used to be a girl. Then I became partly a witch. Then I was a little bit of Christ.”
“What are you now?”
“Honestly, I’m not exactly sure,” Lizbet said.
“I understand that’s a common puzzlement among mortals,” Juliana said. “My sympathies. You have my thanks for banishing the devils, which have been a problem since God was deposed from His throne. He and I have had our differences, but taken altogether, I still think He was a positive influence on the mortal world, while the devils have proven to be nothing but a nuisance.”
“Your Highness, I have a project in mind,” Lizbet said. “I want to release God from prison, drive the devils out of Heaven, and restore God to His throne. Will you aid me?”
For the barest second, Juliana was at a loss for words. When she regained her voice, she said, “I am in favor restoring the status quo ante in Heaven. However, I can’t imagine how you could possibly accomplish such a thing.”
“Ask Hengest Wolftrow what I can accomplish,” Lizbet said.
“He and I have much to catch up on,” Juliana said. She tilted her head and peered at Lizbet. “You are a child of unusual talents. We may talk again.” She turned, clapped her hands smartly together. She raised her voice to her badgers-and-bears-at-arms. “We’re finished here. Homeward!”
As Juliana and her entourage boarded their shells, the ground began to shake and fissure beneath Francis Schnitzerzook’s unconscious body. As Lizbet watched, the grass and sod collapsed, and Francis fell into a dark hole.
But before anyone could move, Francis flew up out of the hole again, as if launched by a catapult. He landed on the grass with a thump. This brought him to his senses. He jumped to his feet, rubbing his bottom and yelling in pain. From the hole, the spidery, rooty form of an earth witch popped up. She craned her head around. “Rats!” she said. “He wasn’t dead after all.”
“He had just fainted,” Lizbet said. “From love.”
“A spurious hoax! Perfidious mortals!”
“You still owe me nine-hundred-ninety-nine gold pieces,” Lizbet reminded her.
The earth witch cackled and spun something shining toward her. Lizbet caught it: a gold coin. “Patience, sweetie!” the earth witch said. She dived down into the ground, and the hole crashed shut over her.
All around, the dolphin teams flopped into the air, the whips of their drivers snapping above their gray snouts. The shells gently lifted into the sky. From the pink and gold shell, Juliana turned, waved, and blew a kiss.
Night was coming on. The sun sank below the housetops, and long, chilly shadows crept across the green lawns in front of the Houses of Correction. Francis Schnitzerzook, Margrave of Abalia, was taken off by Bellows to be installed in the Palace that was now his. He was already giving orders and trying to sound imperious and official, and less like an adolescent whose voice tended to crack at inconvenient moments.
All Lizbet wanted was to go home. She wanted to be with her father, and talk, and laugh, like old times, and she wanted Strix there. Strix, who had held Lizbet’s heart in her hands.
But the town of Abalia had other ideas. As they walked through the streets, the crowd that had followed them to the prison grew rather than shrank. Hundreds of townsfolk milled around, talking, laughing, cheering, pestering Lizbet for her story. How she had gone over the Montagnes, how she had fought the Pope of Storms and the Witch of the Grove of Frenzy, how she had banished the devils and deposed the Margrave. Lizbet was in little mood to talk, but Gerhard, once he saw which the way the wind was blowing, was happy to tell the tale, aided by whispered hints from Lizbet and Strix. Hints were all he needed, or wanted. By the time Gerhard was on the third retelling, a dragon and an ogre had somehow crept into the story, and Lizbet was fleeing across a rope bridge hundreds of feet above a torrent of boiling lava, bearing a book of magic with which to save Abalia from the tyrant Hengest Wolftrow.
Lizbet was astonished to see how much better Gerhard looked. His voice no longer croaked. His eyes twinkled. Even his stooped posture had improved. For some people, human regard is an essential humour, as necessary for life as blood in the veins or air in the lungs. Gerhard was like that. Alone in a tiny prison cell, he had withered into a stooped old man. But in the middle of a crowd, every eye on him, he blossomed like a rose in sunlight.
The mob found its way down the staircase in the Wall of Virtue and into Abalia-Under-the-Hill. It was in the mood for ale, which Abalia’s churchmen and magistrates frowned upon. Lizbet now understood why the staircase in the Wall was so well-worn. Abalia-Under-the-Hill had no shortage of pothouses, and the mob found a drinking spot soon enough, filled it, and overflowed the tavern yard ten deep. Gerhard climbed atop an outside table. In a booming and dramatic voice and with many expressive gestures, he recounted Lizbet’s story yet again, with new variations.
Lizbet found her way to the outskirts of the crowd. Strix shortly appeared, slipping in and out of the shadows as she made her way through the revelers. She carried a flagon of ale in each hand. She sat beside Lizbet, handed her one flagon, and slurped deeply and noisily from other. “Try it,” she urged.
“It’s sinful,” Lizbet said.
“The sin’s the best part,” Strix said, drinking again.
Lizbet delicately sipped at the ale. The bubbles made her nose burn. Her ideas of what was a sin and what wasn’t had turned upside dow
n and spun around, and still hadn’t come to rest. She sipped again. “Is the bitter taste the sinful part?”
“No, that’s the hops,” Strix said. She put her hand over the top of Lizbet’s flagon. “That’s fine for now. Slow down, or you’ll be upchucking all night again.”
Lizbet smiled. “My, a witch advocating temperance! Is there no end of wonders in the world?”
Strix stuck out her tongue. She had pulled her layers of dresses around herself to cover up her morel lungs, which still blew out the front of her chest with every breath. Lizbet reached to touch them, but drew her hand back. Strix said, “I hope you’ll fix me, before . . .”
“Before?”
Strix stared into the darkness. “Before you leave.”
Standing on the table, gesturing with a wine bottle someone had given him, Gerhard had his audience enraptured. He had finished with Lizbet’s heroic tale and was now expounding on some dubious financial scheme that was going to make all of Abalia rich beyond the dreams of princes.
Lizbet knew what would happen next. In a few months Gerhard’s schemes would come to nothing, everyone who gave him money would be ruined and angry, and Gerhard would have to flee yet again.
But not with Lizbet.
“Of course I’ll fix you,” she said to Strix. “Right now. Tonight. But I’m not leaving. Or at least, I’m not following after my father. I’ve had too many adventures. I’m too different from the person I was. Too different from what anyone is.” She rapped a knuckle on her steel chest, to hear it ring. “I don’t even know what I am, anymore.”
“Like every other teenager,” Strix said. “But I wasn’t talking about your leaving with your father. What madness were you saying to the Pixie Queen, about storming Heaven and springing God from prison?”
“I’ve been thinking about it,” Lizbet said. “We need to rescue God. Despite His faults, the world gets by better when He’s around. And even you have to admit that the devils don’t know what they’re doing.”
“And you’re planning on getting into Heaven—how?”
“I’ve got this figured out.” Lizbet drew imaginary pictures in the air with a finger. “You see, there must be holes in all the Spheres since the dark planet crashed through them into the Earth. We’ll fly through the holes, one after another, until we get to Heaven. We’ll build flying chariots, like the Pixie Queen’s. We can make giant bats, like they have in the Torrid Zone, to pull our chariots through the sky. We’d make their wings out of India rubber. We’ll use patented steel springs for their muscles.”
“You have far too many ideas,” Strix said, shaking her head.
“Strix, look,” Lizbet said. She had been dreading this moment, but it was something she had to do. “I know you don’t like God. And you’re right, even if we get help from the Pixie Queen, rescuing Him is going to be dangerous. It’s still something I want to do. So . . .” She took a deep breath. “So if you don’t want to come along with me, you don’t have to.”
Strix said, “I always have to do what you want.” Lizbet couldn’t read her tone of voice.
“‘Have to’? No, you don’t. Why? Because of the egg? But I freed you from that, a long time ago.”
“It isn’t the egg,” Strix said. “Remember that Mrs. Woodcot thought I had to obey her command because she made me? But I didn’t, because I had been unmade. And remade. By you.”
The meaning of this went round and round in Lizbet’s head. Finally she said, “So because I made you, that means I own you? The way Mrs. Woodcot used to own you?” Strix nodded. A chill went through Lizbet. “Then I’ll just free you,” she said quickly. “I’ll do it again.”
Strix shook her head. “You can’t be freed from the one who made you. Not until you’re unmade.”
But . . . “Didn’t you make me too?” Lizbet said. “You made my legs. And even more than that.” She tapped a fingernail on her chest. The metal plates clinked. “So I belong to you, as well. We both own each other.”
Strix’s face was blank with surprise. “I guess we do,” she said at last. “But I’ve never heard of such a thing.”
“Since I’ve been with you,” Lizbet said, “it’s been one thing after another that I’d never heard of.” She took both Strix’s hands in hers. “We’re in each other’s power. We’re each other’s thrall. The only way it’s going to work is if we’re both good to each other. If each of us trusts the other. If we both treat each other as we’d want to be treated. Because if we fight, it’s all over. We’ll destroy each other.”
At last, Strix nodded. “Is this friendship? I’ve been trying to figure out what friendship is. Maybe this is it.”
Lizbet had always thought she wanted a friend. If this was friendship, it was more than she had bargained for.
But if it was Strix, it was okay. Whatever was to come, whatever Earth and Heaven and Hell had in store, Lizbet was ready, as long as Strix was there.
Acknowledgments
Endless thanks to the Nameless critique group: Judith Berman, Ann Tonsor Zeddies, Steve Berman, Vickie McManus, Ef Deal, Rikardou Sturgis, for their patient help with this novel, in many ways large and small. Special thanks to Steve, whose unflagging belief in this work inspired and sustained me during dark days and wrong ways. Without Steve industriously kicking my butt, Half-Witch might not have seen publication.
Thanks to my editors, Kelly Link and Gavin J. Grant, for their fine-tuning of the manuscript to make it run like a well-oiled mechanical bat with India rubber wings and patented steel springs; and to my agent, Sally Harding, for all her help, wisdom, and attention to detail in helping to make the publication of Half-Witch a reality.
Many thanks to my teachers at Clarion: Suzy McKee Charnas, Nina Kiriki Hoffman, Nancy Kress, Kelly Link, Gavin J. Grant, Jeffrey Ford, Andy Duncan, and Gordon Van Gelder, for their wise teaching and insights into the nature of fiction writing. Thanks to Tim Powers and K. D. Wentworth, teachers at Writers of the Future. Special thanks to Nina, who was there for both, and was an early supporter of my fiction. Encouraging words and deeds early in a career have positive effects well beyond what one might expect.
About the Author
John Schoffstall has published short fiction in Asimov’s, the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Interzone, Strange Horizons, and other venues, and was a Grand Prize winner of the Writers of the Future award. He is a physician, and once practiced Emergency Medicine. Now he follows Candide’s advice and tends his own garden. He lives in the Philadelphia area. He has a website at johnschoffstall.com.
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