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It was important to make one thing perfectly clear: the current predicament was not his fault.
It couldn’t possibly be. His only real business with this family had been concluded years ago and with that business his interests had been secured. Anything that happened after that could not be laid at his feet.
The would-be damning evidence in the case against him was this: he stood now before the door of the witch-house with the orphaned children in his arms, still slick with their mother’s rapidly-cooling blood. But he was not one of the culpable parties. No warm touch had put the children in his embrace, nor had his touch in any warm thing put them in the mother in the first place. And yet it is he that carries the children to back to the home of their family.
So yes, perhaps the situation had his fingerprints on it, but in this part of the Wood, what didn’t? Such a basic environmental coincidence could not, must not, be imagined significant. He forced no one and nothing. The children were a strange by-product of a different process, and ones that he had never anticipated when he’d concluded his business some years ago. This had never been his end game.
He has at least learned from the whole experience, and when one is as old as he is, it becomes something of a startling pleasure to learn something new, however inconvenient its subject may be. What he learned was simply that witches were not to be relied upon any more than mortals. He had occasionally wondered, and yes, even suspected that this was the case, but he’d never anticipated he’d have his suspicions so clearly and completely confirmed.
The reason for the doubt, such as it had been, was that witches were not mortal, and to the untrained eye that makes them seem comprehensible.
It is very easy to be mortal. One needs only two things: a birth and a death. Witches have births, yes, because they have sisters--but without violence and bloodshed, they have no deaths. All witches do is grow old and strange.
But darkness ate everything with a birth.
He looks down at the children. Yes, even a pudgy, naked, blood-slicked lumpling, bursting with juice like this, would eventually return to him a desiccated hag.
In the meanwhile, he might as well see if he could get her to replenish his stock a bit, now that he’d culled the herd to a manageable size.
***
His business had been this:
“Oh, Adelaide...”
About two days’ travel within Winter, from the river side, a solid stone house with a tight roof stood surrounded on every side by tall, dark trees. The yellow grass grew up in tufts, holding the sweet lake mud in place against the fog and rain that seems so relentlessly to trouble the area. Of an evening, the chimney would send a long column of smoke, scented with turtle-meat, into the sky, while through the windows dressed in lattice lines, candles gleamed into the gloaming. An old fence, still serviceable in spite of a little rough-wear, circumscribed the property.
“My dear Miss Adelaide.”
It’s long past nightfall now. He stands beneath the ledge of one of the second story windows. No light comes from within the house, no noise beyond the sounds of a night forest and the stillness of an ancient house come midnight.
“Are you there, Adelaide?” he murmurs.
To an outsider, it would look like a waste of time. He could be out minding his lantern-bearer, or putting children down in that sweetest, most final sleep. He could be menacing the tavern, or singing to his Edelwoods, or even going for a long, solitary ramble for the pleasure of the thing.
Instead, he stands beneath a window ledge, and calls to a witch.
“I know you are, Adelaide,” he purrs. “I know you hear me, O crone, however much you may not wish to. But when have I done you any harm, Adelaide? I’ve come for a chat.”
The garret of the house no longer sleeps, but takes on the peculiar silence of listening.
“Yes, that’s right. How came you to be a crone, Adelaide?” he wonders. “Surely you are not much older than you sisters. What made you the one for weather-wracked old age while they are so young, yet? What makes a crone?”
Witches are always trouble. It takes only three to make a coven, and when they are coven-bound they become a blight on the landscape. It’s always so, with child-eaters, whether they are ogres or witches or cannibal step-mothers. They start small and before one knows it there isn’t a child for miles whose bones haven’t been picked clean.
Every orchard in the world has its pest problems. He’s here to take care of his. And everyone knows that the fastest way to destroy a hive isn’t to take out the frisky little workers or the slow stalwart drones, but the tender and vulnerable queen.
He has slowly noticed that unless violence or disease take them untimely, the first part of a mortal to die is the brain. They tend to lose their minds when time drags them too thin. It can happen very soon, and if a mortal survives a thousand moons it is more than fairly likely that the only living part of the creature is its body, because its mind has long-since flown. It wasn’t hard to be patient, when things happened in only a few years.
Now, it did take a little longer for witches to lose their minds.
But this one is going, oh yes.
And the other witches know it.
The mother darts such cautious looks at the crone, her vast mouth twisting in grotesque concern as she looks out at the scorched symbols in the lawn and the scratches on the stairs. And the maiden counts and recounts their stores, calculating the missing turtles and candles and vials of blood, finding tiny bones and skulls in the corners of the house, where there ought to be nothing but dust.
Only a few things can be put to his involvement. The scorched marks are his, sure enough, and perhaps it’s possible to claim that the claws are his fault, too. But he only whispers to her at night, while all the actual gouging is her own work. Miss Adelaide does make such a spectacle of herself, scratching her way headfirst down the stairs on all fours and creeping along the walls all night and gasping those tiny little breaths. Embarrassing, is what it is, as her fearful eyes roll in her head and she whimpers and whispers to herself. It’s almost easier to watch her trying to catch birds in nets and suck out their blood.
“Adelaide, I recall a parson,” he says gently now, listening within for that rustling sound of witchy skirts dragged across a floor. “Long dead, of course, but while alive a good, sweet-hearted kind of man, with a long straight nose and room full of books. He said that witches sold their souls for their powers. Isn’t that right, Adelaide?”
He paces slowly around the house, listening for any movements. He arrives at the window again and looks up.
“Where do your powers come from, Adelaide?” he purrs.
“From the Devil,” comes a soft, reedy whisper from within. It trembles with fear.
He sips at the fragrant stream of fright as it pours from the window ledge above.
“And do you know who I am, Adelaide?” he asks.
This parson of his--and there certainly had been a parson once, but then there had been scores and scores of them--had sworn that witches were the consorts of that terrible Devil the little man had so feared. Witches, the parson had said, were the wedded brides and mothers of demons.
He doubted it then, and he doubts it now. After all, the house has a maidenly fiancée and a tender mother, but he’s certainly never heard of an old hermitical spinster being part of the deal.
“Yes,” the voice within whimpers. “You...you’re him.”
“Yes.”
No. Well, not really. Maybe. It is always a little tricky keeping track of just what mortals were saying about him from moment to moment. They had all sorts of stories about him and he drifts so much he never quite knew who thought he was what, from one mortal settlement to the next.
So maybe he was the Devil. Why not? It was worth a shot.
“I am come to collect, Adelaide,” he says. “It’s time you came with me.”
“No,” the voice whines, “no, no, please…”
“Yes.”
“No, please,” the voice mewls, “what can I do? Please, tell me what I can do! I’m not ready to go, not ready at all!”
Ah, yes. He hisses in her wracking desperation and swallows it down.
“Well, then, my Adelaide. Perhaps we need to make a deal,” he says gently.
A whimper, and then a face full of bright, fearful eyes appears in the window.
“Give me your blood,” he says. “You’ll hardly miss it.” After all, she won’t really be giving it to him. But he must make a deal. “Obey my every command...and I will spare you.”
The eyes stare at him, unblinking. Lips tremble.
“Come, my black widow,” he says. He beckons with one finger. “Away from your sisters. I will not have them. Only you.”
“But--”
“Bring nothing, Adelaide,” he orders. “We must refresh your vows. Come.”
She disappears from the window and he hears her scraping softly down the stairs.
He ‘takes’ her blood in a ritual that she devises and he installs her in a small house not far from the river.
Things are good, for a while.
Mortals believe in an obstinate fashion. They conceive one idea and hold fast to it for ever, no matter how the circumstances of the world change.
Witches, on the other hand, change the world. He should’ve thought of it before, but one has to learn these kinds of things eventually. He gets a few good years of service out of the old witch, captured and bespelled children and the like, before Adelaide’s blood sacrifice starts to catch up with them.
She becomes sick. Her blood, what’s left of it, runs so hot and dry that she sits like a burning coal ready to burst into a conflagration. Fresh air burns on the surface of her skin, her body steaming and even smoking in the night breeze.
And to be honest it’s nothing less than appropriate. She sold her blood to the one she thought was the Devil and now she is burning. It’s pleasantly apt, he thinks.
He shuts her away in her house and has rumors spread that the Good Woman of the Woods can solve any mortal’s problem. She gets little servants running her errands, woodland things and birds, and she slowly begins weaving a great big cocoon of a web.
He should’ve known she’d believed him too much, and that the magic in her veins would twist the skin around it and turn her body against the very elements.
But oh well. Nothing to be done. It was enough.
***
As far as he was concerned, that was the end.
Everything else that happened was completely out of his hands.
***
The maiden runs away just before Adelaide develops her skin condition. Two is an unsteady number, after all, when one is used to three, and it’s only right that the remaining witches should turn on one another. It’s enough to drive anyone from their home.
Even now he’s pretty certain the girl had only intended to be gone for a week, perhaps a little more, but not forever. But a witch should know better than to trifle and tarry in the woods, and lo and behold she is soon lost.
And he has nothing to do with it.
By the time he comes across them, the witch is very definitely no longer a maiden, as could be attested by the young man pinning her up against a tree with her legs around his waist. The delirious noise of their coupling is mortifying, and he hastily moves on when it becomes clear they are doing their dirty little dance against a non-Edelwood tree.
In a few days’ time, he passes a small cabin in the Woods and smells the witch’s fragrance mingling with the scent of stew and woodsmoke. (It turns out that witches are not in the habit biting off the heads of their partners. Until then he’d been convinced that that was how they satisfied themselves. There was always something new to discover.)
He leaves them alone. They can wait, and if this young man would like to take a witch to bed and keep her out of her coven, so much the better.
He wanders in the woods for three moons. He checks on all the territories of his Woods, including the witch-house. The witch-mother keeps her empty house with a broken heart and he sings for a job well-done.
The fourth moon rises, and he is without a lantern bearer. It’s a tricky time, to be sure, but he finally managed to bump off that lumberjack with little enough trouble, and though he’ll have to find something new soon there’s a certain pleasure in having his lantern back within his grasp.
When he passes a glade one fine evening, he startles a pack of wolves. They know him by his scent and they retreat, growling but cowed. He walks over to investigate what they’ve found.
The witch-maid’s young man lies before him in a pile of his own still-steaming guts, his eyes open and staring sightlessly at the sky. The Beast smiles and gets down on hand and knee, sniffing over the body to see if he can make it into an Edelwood, despite its still heart.
The young man died basted in terror, with a piquant edge of despair around his mouth and heart. Not bad, not bad. Perhaps he can claim this one.
The Beast reaches into the open chest and wraps his hand around the heart, pumping what blood is left. With his other hand, he calls up the roots beneath the earth and starts them wrapping around the young man.
“Come, wayward souls, who wander in the darkness,” he intones, helping to raise the stump. “There is a light for the lost and the meek…”
The Beast squeezes the heart and helps the Edelwood roots coil. When he thinks they can go on their own, he stands aside.
“Sorrow and fear are easily forgotten when you submit to the soil of the--”
A shrill shriek slices through the last word of his song.
“Mikhail!” the witch-maid screeches, running towards her deceased companion and the Beast of Eternal Darkness with very little concern for the latter. “Mikhail, Mikhail! No!”
She shoves him out of the way with surprising strength and drops to her knees beside the twisting tree.
“Oh! Monster!” the witch cries, grasping her lover’s face with her hands. “What have you done to him? What unnatural--”
“He died in my forest, witch,” the Beast says. “His fate is as natural as the snowfall.”
“No, no, Mikhail,” the witch whimpers, petting his slack face and kissing him. “Let him go! Please let him go. I can heal him!”
“No. You are too late. I have claimed him,” the Beast replies. “And as for you…”
“A trade!” the witch cries, turning to him on her knees. “I will trade anything for his life! Oh, you must, please, you must trade!”
Trade? A living girl for a new tree? Never.
“There is nothing that I ‘must’ do, witch,” the Beast says. Her grovelling is embarrassing, so mortal and desperate, and he turns to go.
“Please,” the witch says, catching the hem of his great fur cloak. “You are...you are the one who took Adelaide! You make deals, do you not? I will die without a deal!”
A deal? Well. Perhaps he can at least hear her terms. She might be a good lantern-bearer, after all, if he can get her on a tight leash. Witches can be tricky.
“And what deal could you offer me, witch?” he asks, tilting his head.
“Anything,” the witch says. “Anything you want. I...he can’t be eaten by the tree. He can’t die like this, without telling me…”
She drops her head and sobs.
The Beast strides close and holds her by the chin, tilting her head up to look at him. Her skin is hot and wet with tears against his hand. A repulsive point of contact, but unfortunately necessary, when one is working with touch-sensitive mortals.
“And just what did he not tell you?” the Beast asks quietly. It could be valuable information.
Fresh tears roll down the witch’s cheeks.
“I gave him my heart,” she chokes. “And I don’t know where he put it.”
“Ah.”
Witches don’t really understand metaphors. He’s positive that the witch-house had contained an actual arm-chair, for one thing.
Hardly surprising, that a witch’s love would manifest itself in the literal gift of a body part.
“Please,” she mewls. “He hid it away from the animals! I don’t know where it is, and if I don’t have it--”
Well, things would get terribly predictable, at that point, wouldn’t they? Mortals and semi-mortals really didn’t quite get their vulnerabilities, it often seemed to him. They seemed so very eager to throw away their lives and limbs at the merest provocation; make a chance comment about that thing they called “honor” and they’d practically fall over themselves trying to die.
And now it was going to be love that killed this witch-maid. How tragic.
“But you can find it!” the witch-maid cries. “You know where everything is in your Woods! And if you find it for me…”
He tilts his head, bored. The Edelwood is wrapping up the young man’s body and he might as well be on his way. “Yes? If I find it for you?”
“If you found it,” the witch maid says, lower lip trembling. “Then...I’d be your slave.”
That does seem fair enough to him. His lantern weighs heavy on his left antler.
“Lead me to your house,” he says. He may or may not be able to find this heart, but if he can, it’s hardly a useless thing to have in reserve. And if he can’t, he’ll just trick her.
The witch-maid rises to her feet and he sees that she’s barefoot in the snow. Her white dress is long and tattered and completely fails to hide the bulge in her belly.
This is quite a desperate situation, then. She needs her heart beating for two.
She leads him back through the Woods to the small cabin she’d shared with the young man. The fire within has begun to go to smoke and he sniffs the air, trying to get through to the scent of witch heart.
He leaves the witch-maid outside, trying to get away from her living aroma. It takes him a few minutes but he finds the heart in the East-most corner of the house, tucked between the rafter and the roof and wrapped in a scrap of cloth.
It sits there hidden safely away, red and beating. They’re just lucky they never had a cat.
He contemplates the heart for a moment. Witches--sane ones, at least--are good at twisting their promises. Not like him, but good enough. This one is going to try and weasel a way out of their informal little deal.
If the witch-maid is going to honor her bargain, he’s going to need to get some insurance.
He reaches out and takes the heart. He squeezes it hard and watches as it withers from a plump red to a brown, shrivelled scrap. It still beats, though it rasps like breathless old dog.
He holds it in his hand as he emerges from the cabin and finds the witch-maid standing nearby.
“Here it is,” he says, opening his hand to show her.
She stares at her heart and lets out a little moan, falling to her knees. She covers her face with one hand and her belly with the other, crying once more.
“No,” she whimpers, “oh, no, no...if I die…”
She lets out a sound of wracking grief, a mother’s cry of loss.
He stands above her with her heart in his hand, drinking in her despair. He would never understand birthed things. There was something about that sudden burst into existence that made these creatures discontent with themselves, even to the point of suicide.
He had always been what he was, nothing more nor less. But these half-mortal things have this terrible urge to attempt a becoming--from maiden to mother, from lost soul to preserved. And for some reason they so often relied upon him to make help them change.
“Perhaps we’d better make a deal,” he says.
He puts the power of her heart in the lantern. As long as the flame is lit, her heart will beat on inside and keep her, and her unborn spawn, alive. But it must be fed by the oil of the Edelwood trees.
“That tree,” she says, quivering. “That’s the tree you turned Mikhail into.”
“Yes,” he replies.
“They’re all...they were once all--”
“Does that matter? They’re already gone. You have a life inside you that must be fed, and I know you have drawn blood to feed yourself and your sisters…”
She covers her mouth with her hand, tears rolling down her cheeks, but she nods. “Yes. Yes, then...I obey.”
The witch-maid fetches her young man’s axe and a shawl to wrap around her shoulders. She refuses any shoes and takes the lantern with her to go find an Edelwood.
The Beast watches her go and tucks her little scrap of a heart into his fur. Who knows what a world of good a dried witch heart could do? It might come in handy later.
***
A witch’s gestation takes more time than a human’s.
The witch is a good servant for twelve moons, maybe more. She grows rounder and rounder but she knows she can’t possibly stop her work, if she means to keep her heart beating. The lantern burns in her hands with an unfailing brightness and the Beast feels good. He hardly has to watch her, tucked away as she is, a very strange Vestal virgin focused on keeping her heart lit.
He adds to his orchard, free from the burden of his lantern. The entire Western Wild grows strong under his careful cultivation and he wipes out whole towns while his witch-maid tends the fire.
He comes along to visit her one day and stops at the threshold of the cabin. Within, she lies on the bed, bleeding between her legs, her face white with pain and fear. The time has come for her to burst, and burst she certainly shall. He smells Death waiting in the room for her.
She will not survive the night.
“Beast,” she gasps, “I must...it’s the baby...please, the lantern, I must feed it…”
He pours a bottle of oil into his lantern and hangs it on his antler again. He tucks her store of oil away beneath his fur.
“I will take you to your sister,” he says, and picks her up. She screams in agony and he carries her out the door.
She won’t return.
He takes a circuitous route, further and further into the wilds and away from the witch-house. She’s delirious enough with pain that she doesn’t notice the route.
They’ve been moving for almost half the night when she screams and claws at him.
“Oh, God, no!” she cries. “It’s coming! It’s coming, we don’t have any more time!”
He sets her down in the snow, in a lovely glade.
“Please,” she sobs. “My sister--I need my sister--”
“I will fetch her,” he says, and stands hidden away in the forest to watch.
It’s a hideous kind of violence, he thinks. As a rule he has almost no use for bloodshed, but this is beyond any kind of cruel demise. Her own body has turned against her, ripping itself inside out.
It takes a long time, but soon the blood and filth gives way to gore and muscle, and out of the abyss of death beyond death comes a tiny birthed creature, and then another, unbirthed thing that clings to it. The birthed thing gasps and shrieks in the cold, and the mother sobs with relief at the abeyance of her terrible, mortal pain.
Buoyed by the roots he’s been quietly coiling around her body, the new witch-mother slips into a darkness and then a deeper darkness, and is gone.
He severs the infant from the afterbirth and tucks the latter beneath his fur. Another useful part. Perhaps it will grow into a shrub.
After a moment’s consideration, he picks up the infant from its place in the bloody snow and, holding the children in his arms, begins to sing.
“Come, wayward souls, who wander in the darkness,” he hums, as the child stops squalling and begins to whine. This is as good a response as any to its first lullaby, he thinks. He pets its hot, wet head, leaving the growing tomb of its mother and heading towards the witch-house. “There is a light for the lost and the meek…”
***
He declines to knock on the door.
“Witch!” he says, knowing his voice will cut through anything that might hold the old creature’s attention. “I must speak with you.”
The witch-mother is always a very different creature from the maiden and the crone. Crones and maidens are essentially the same; tied to their places in the gulf of time that separates them, the consequence of their very identities is self-absorption. Maidens will always be focused on their youth and beauty and vigor, while crones will always think of their age and frailty and wisdom. Mothers, tied not to time but to their relations to other creatures, focus more on what is beyond themselves. Mothers think of the things others need. This can sometimes make them difficult to catch, if you do not use their children as bait.
It’s also why they make good middle ground between maidens and crones.
This coven was no exception to that rule, and that middle ground now manifests thus: the witch-mother neither lurks at the window nor barrels out into the wild to accost him. Instead, she opens the door and frowns at him, a mere arm’s reach away.
“And what have you to say to me, monster?” she asks, darting him a suspicious glance with her huge, bulbous eyes.
“A message from your sister,” he says, watching the barb of her sister’s memory pierce her heart. Her eyes widen and she tries not to seem eager and fearful.
But he can always tell these things.
“A message, brought by the Death of Hope? Have my sister’s charms reduced you to a errand-boy?” the witch-mother asks with a sneer.
He smiles to himself. She doesn’t see it, of course, but he does it anyway.
“Oh, not me,” he says. “Her charms did not lay me low, though I cannot speak for herself and her lover.”
The witch-mother draws in a shaky breath. “Low? Then she is…?”
“She sends you this parcel,” he says, “and hopes you will keep it.”
He moves aside his fur and shows her the children. Her huge mouth gapes open and her eyes shine with tears.
“Oh!” she cries aloud, reaching for the children. “A baby!”
He lets her take the children and shakes out his arms, glad to be rid of the things. The witch-mother is already swaddling them in her shawl.
“But my sister was a maiden,” the witch-mother says, rocking the children.
“Not for long,” he replies.
“Oh, dear,” the witch-mother says. She tenderly strokes the babies’ head. “My little niece. My poor girl. She’s so small, not born an hour ago. Such a little baby.”
“Babies,” he corrects her.
The witch-mother closes her eyes and tears roll down. She holds the children close. “Then the other...it was still-born?”
“Indeed, no,” he says, bemused. “You hold them in your arms. Your sister bore pair of twins, although she had heart enough for only one body.”
The witch-mother stares at him and then at the children. “What? I don’t understand.”
“The second child passed into the first. The infant has a spirit with it,” he says. “Congratulations. I understand two births is cause for celebration.”
The witch-mother holds the infants close to her chest. “And where is my sister?”
“Dead. And mine,” he replies.
The witch-mother spits at his feet, her features twisted with hate. “How many of us must you have?”
“No more,” he says easily. “After all, I bring you a replacement for the one I took. The maiden left on her own.”
The witch-mother winces and rocks the children for a few minutes with her eyes closed. “What did my sister name her?”
“Nothing. She did not have the time.”
The witch-mother nods. “Was it a painful death?”
“Yes. She died in agony. But if it is a consolation to you,” he says, “she cried for you all the while.”
The witch-mother turns a look of blind fury on him and bellows, “Be gone, Beast!”
He laughs and turns away, glad to wash his hands of the matter at last. Let the witch-mother handle the new witch-babes. One spirit in that tiny body is surely wicked enough, born without a heart--but which one? Either way, she’ll have to find a means to bind it.
As he leaves, he heard Whispers murmur to the babies. ”Come, my dear…come in, my little…Lorna.”
Let them grow, now, and let the mother become a crone, if she too wishes to become something she is not, and let the little babies become the new maiden. Let those two circle around each other forever, appetites gnawing with no outlet, while Adelaide spins her web tighter and tighter within her little cottage.
These Woods secured and defended as he likes, several bottles of Edelwood oil clinking beneath his fur, he heads out for a little ramble, just to hear his Woods and his voice.
A good piece of work.