The Bone-Witch
Title: I-1, first third; the bone-witch
’Verse/characters: Wild Roses; various individuals from the Trickwood
Prompt: coastal_physics and klgaffney both requesting a proper telling of black of night and white of bones.
Word Count: eleven thousand, three hundred and ten
Rating: all ages, presuming a pre-Victorian attitude to 'children's stories'.
Notes: This will likely wind up as part of a chapter in one of the novels; there are things not explained in-text because of that. Questions as always are welcome. I do not yet have names for the principal players, so there are bracketed pronouns as placeholders.
Many thanks to dormouse_in_tea for her heroic efforts to protect the common comma from abuse.
[She] found [him] among a group just after sunset by tracking the sound of barely-suppressed laughter. She eventually recognised him from behind, by the way his hands flicked when he was illustrating a point.
She circled, eventually came out of the twilight at an angle he could see her, if not directly, and flicked her own hand at him in a come-here gesture. He shook his head, echoing the gesture, and she stepped within the circle of light, fire already burning bright enough to leave stains on the insides of her eyes when she blinked.
Half-scowling, one hand propped on her hip, she told him "Bet's yours to hold. What will you have of me?"
"A story." He grinned up at her, flash of white teeth in the near dark, when she blinked again at the quickness of his answer.
"Spent the afternoon thinking about this, did you?"
Another grin, and a gesture at an empty space close by the fire. "Maybe."
She sat, propping her back against someone's saddle, her feet tucked up onto her thighs and palms displayed openly atop them. It was no runner's pose, and it made the others around the fire sit up a little, two of them half-turning to watch beyond the fire's light.
"What story will you have of me?" she asked them, voice modulated low, smooth as she could make it. More heads turned, and the other conversations around the fire died, everyone focusing on her.
"Something of the dark," one of the riders said softly, rubbing his hand over a scored leather strap. Not his own gear, from the look, the colouring slightly different and the width out of place among his things. "Someone not coming home."
"Power," said someone else, carefully not looking toward where the newcomers slept. The man closest to her shifted slightly away even so, hand falling so his thumb brushed against the sun carved into the handle of his saddle-blade. She curled the corner of her lip at him, then let it drop, smoothing her face and staring at the fire fixedly. [He] glanced over, barely a flick of his head, then, looking at the fire himself, his tone easy, passionless, "The Bone-Witch?"
Two people nodded, one crooking her fingers up above the natural curve of her hands, the other rumbling "The Bone-Witch."
[She] nodded, closing her eyes briefly and taking a deep breath, then blew it out, opened her eyes, and spoke.
"It was a long time ago," she told them, just a little wry. "Before the Trickwood was a forest. --yes, there's a time before then," she told a dark-hidden disbelieving snort, "there's very old maps in some of the cities that show farms where the Dragonspine Mountains are now, and a city on a plain between here and [Autumn], that men called Summer.
"This was after Summer died, after the new mountains appeared, but before the forest really took hold. People still thought they might be able to farm where their ancestors had. Some of them even managed it, digging out the first roots of vines and mulching the seedlings of trees to feed their fields, setting snares to protect their harvests and sometimes burning the things that died in the snares. Almost all of the successful farmers were linked to a mage of some kind, true, but choose the right mage to feed and they'd tell you what charms to carve on your border-posts, or weave you a safe path to another holding.
"Colours helped with that--a mage that wore the gold of the harvest, the gold of the sun, or the bright colours of a fire burning in the dark was generally a better mage to deal with than any mage who wore the dark against their skin. Even a mage who built a tower but wore gold and brown was a bet worth taking--" a quick face made at [him], met with another white flash of laughter "--and it's here the story starts.
"Her hair was red-gold, the kind that pales in daylight to a fuzzy halo, and she wore gold powder against her skin to show her eyelashes, to mark her alignments for anyone who cared to look. She'd raised a tower up from mountains' bones to touch the sky as a girl, and tied up her hair like a harvest wreath when people came to cut firewood from her claimed forest, then stayed to plant fields.
"She'd carve magery into a border-stake for a pair of rabbits, chase away stormclouds when the time came for haying whether or not they gave her bread as well as grain--but they always did. She was sun-gold, not harvest-gold, and the sun will turn her face away if you don't pay heed to her."
Reflected light made several listeners' nods flicker oddly, some heads dipping far deeper than others, and not those with the slightly alarming utter stillness of wolves listening. She'd spotted two, one flopped two-legged half on top of a saddle that obviously wasn't theirs, another, four-legged, mostly hidden in the shadows cast by gear and listeners. After a moment of silence, the fire's keeper rummaged at the edge of his stockpile, banging sticks together to warn anything trying to take up residence in it before he touched it barehanded. Not looking at her, he tossed another heavy branch into the center of the blaze, and she closed her eyes against the flare.
"He might have come quietly," she said, voice barely audible over the crackle of crisping leaves, "he was more than strong enough to have slipped her border-stakes, walked up into her tower and none aware of him until he spoke. But he was old, and angry. Resented the poor power the short-lived farmers held over the long-lived mages, the bargains his colleagues made to survive in a world much changed from the one that taught him strength. He wore black, and he broke her woven borders like you or I could break spiderwebs."
Everyone took a small breath, and on her own exhale she continued, "She told those within her borders to run. If she'd fought, first, or never took her attention from him, she might have won. He was coming to her tower, after all, trying to take another's stronghold. If she'd been more like him to start, she might have driven him off."
Another small breath, curling her hands over to lay her palms on her thighs, "But as she was, she lost. Couldn't even move when he finally stood next to her at the height of her tower, his spells wrapped around her, against her skin and tangled in her hair.
"She thought the worst was when he told her, oh so calm, the same I've told you. That she might have won, if she hadn't cared about those at the base of her tower enough to cry them a warning. She thought she'd die there, her tower lost, knowing if she'd been closer to the dark she might have won.
"Then he broke the first of her fingers," [she] snapped a thick twig she'd picked up when the latest branch had been added to the fire and no-one had been looking directly at her. Four people jumped.
"She'd never so much as tripped on her stairs before, never cracked her leg laying a horse down or pulled her shoulder out of place clinging to a branch on a cliff. She screamed. Struggled to get away from him, not even thinking anymore of power or trickery, just escape from pain. No luck, and he reached out to her other hand. Broke another finger, in a different direction.
"She fainted at the third finger's breaking, not even fighting anymore because breathing hurt her hands, and fighting hurt much, much more."
[She] nodded to the keeper, who shook himself briefly--wolf-influenced if not blooded--before taking another piece of wood and adding it to the fire. It flared up high, pressed warmth against her face and her knees, her hands as she flipped them palm's up again, and it was as the initial flare died down that she spoke again.
"She woke, eventually, and wished as soon as she did that he'd killed her. He'd stripped the spells from her hair, her clothes and her skin, left her barefoot and tatter-skirted in the room that had once held her winter grains. Left her, too, the thumb and first finger of both her hands, and nothing besides. The broken fingers were swollen black, bent visibly out of true even so, and they burned with every beat of her heart.
"She couldn't have fed herself, even if she'd wanted to take her own food from him. But she wasn't strong enough to fight him when he fed her, though he kept her hands pressed tight to her legs whenever he shared a room with her." [She] crooked her own fingers, mimed fighting to pull her hands up, and failing.
"He fed her enough to keep her alive. Not enough for her to heal as fast or as cleanly as she would have, given all she'd have eaten if she'd been allowed. The swelling faded, and left her fingers looking worse than before--like apple branches, old grape vines, with as much free movement as the wind will give a vine grown into its supports. She'd never weave again, or braid her hair in more than three strands, and that only by using a broken finger as a guide for one of the three.
"She tried, though." [She] pulled a hair from her own head, pondered it for a second, then tossed it into the fire, started flicking the tips of her fingers together in a loose, invisible braid. "Chewed off a length of matted hair and wove a threshold trap with the unbroken fingers, to take his ankles and smash his head on the stones of the room he still kept her in.
"He laughed when he came to her next, walking through the trap like it wasn't even there--which was worse than breaking it--and said that she must be feeling better. She'd feed herself, and in the meantime . . ." [She] made snipping motions with the first two fingers of her hand, across the space she'd been weaving in. "He cut her hair with the shears her farmers had once used on their goats and sheep. Took the matted mess away with him, though he still ignored the thin braided cord across the edge of the door. The cooking pot he brought her to use for her waste was soot-brushed inside, the next time it was changed out. It had been her favourite stew-pot, once, but she used it as he meant her to.
"Things became a slow pattern after that. He'd bring a plate or a bowl of food, always the dishes she'd had before he took her tower from her, but never anything she'd used often enough to have any sort of power attached to it. She ate with the fingers he'd left her, licked them clean or wiped them on a tatter of her skirts. The dishes and the waste-pot disappeared while she slept, and if it meant she watched them for more than a day and he brought more food before they went away, so be it. Faking sleep never worked, though she tried. No control, no sense of time passing beyond that food appeared on a schedule.
"He gave her soap and the run of her own bathing-room when he deemed her dirty. She couldn't force him, there, even by refusing to eat or by dragging her ragged hems through the remains of the dishes. He gave no rhyme or reason to his timing--she went weeks at times, less than a day others--and if she asked, he only looked at her with knowing eyes. She'd shiver, even neck-deep in hot water, and learned not to ask. The clothes he let her have after she'd scrubbed her hair and her skin with a rag of once-pattern were never the same as the ones she'd had before. Her longest skirts he gave her, the clothes she'd been proud of. But their decorating colours and contrasting fabrics he tore or cut away before she saw them, made them useless for magic unless she ripped the base cloth up for thread. He dressed her in her golds, and it felt like silent mockery.
"Her hair he trimmed too short to chew a length from again, cut in deliberate patternlessness so far as she could feel, and much, much shorter than she'd ever worn her hair when it had been her own."
The two-legged wolf jerked, and one of the two keeping watch beyond the light snapped her head around to look at [her], one eye closed to block the glare but the other unhappily wide. [She] nodded, deeply enough to acknowledge the attention but not so deep to hide her face. "It took a long time, but it happened." Lifting her head again, as the watcher turned back to self-appointed task, "She stopped thinking of him as the invader, the one who'd taken her life from her, and started thinking of him as the one who let her bathe, who fed her. It might have gone so far as the one who controlled her, owned her, if the aching of her broken hands hadn't kept her awake, and if she hadn't spotted a mouse near her dirty dishes one night."
A shadow lying along a fallen log near the fire sprouted teeth, long light-reddened tongue lolling as the wolf smacked its lips, and she laughed, ignoring the tiny clench in her stomach at the unknown dark grinning at her. "She didn't eat it--couldn't have caught it if she pounced, too long on too little food to keep all her proper speed--but it was the first living thing she'd seen since she lost her fight, that wasn't him, or she herself. Seeing it jarred her a little out of the thinking he'd encouraged, reminded her that her world wasn't the room she slept in, him, and the room he let her bathe in." A grin of her own, "Well, her first thought on seeing it was that when the tower had been hers, no mouse would have ever found enough to eat for it to be worth staying, not that it was alive, and not him.
"That didn't keep her from saving crumbs from her food, or from scattering them where a hungry mouse would be willing to venture. After all," the lingering smile in [her] voice turned briefly vicious, "her tower wasn't truly hers anymore. What should she care if there were mice to get into the grain storage?
"So she and the mouse grew closer over time--it grew braver, willing to eat within snatching distance as she never pounced, and she could sometimes stretch out one of her unbroken fingers and feel soft living fur brush against her jagged fingernail. She'd fall asleep to the sound of it scuffling around in the remains of her dishes, tiny claws clicking against glazed clay.
"She might have done better to keep it a little distant. She'd watched it climbing onto her skirts, one day, claws gripping tight at the torn edges of the fabric, touched it gently with the hand not resting in her lap. In perceived safety it nosed around for fallen crumbs, and found one resting in the crook between one of her broken fingers and the back of her hand. It bit her, clawing at her broken finger to push it out of the way like a discarded bone to get at the crumb. She hissed, flung it off her hand with no thought behind the action, and she heard its body break as it hit, small juicy crunch of impact."
A sap pocket in the fire blew with a pop, loudly enough that everyone jumped. After a moment of waiting for her heart to stop racing, [she] said, "She'd seen death before. Even killed before, laid spells that kept scavengers from hen-houses, broke the necks of rabbits for her meals. But she'd never killed accidentally, and never something she attached emotion to.
"She wasn't child enough--or broken enough--to poke it to see if it was really dead. She let it lie, and went to sleep feeling sick, wishing it hadn't bit, wishing that she hadn't reacted as she had.
"The body was still there when she woke, though her dishes were gone. She was left to wonder if he hadn't seen it, or had, knew what had happened and wanted to let her dwell on it. It took her a long time to decide to cross the room and touch the body--to reach down, pick it up and look at it.
"It hadn't started rotting yet--only a day or so dead--but there was no mistaking it for something alive. The fur was matted with blood, small prickly broken bones catching at the skin near her fingernail as she touched it, the feel a mockery of life. Blood had smeared where it struck the wall, near-shape outlined on the stone."
[She] took a long, slow breath, nodded to the keeper, who nearly reached into the pile without looking at it, then stopped, hand outreached. The woman sitting next to him stopped, too, her hand arrested in an abortive snatching motion aimed at his wrist. They exchanged a glance before she dropped her hand, and he picked up a stick, tapping at the pile before he pulled from it, began casting wood to the flames. Watching the exchange, [she] wondered who'd been bitten, and when, then closed her eyes against the flare of firelight.
From self-made darkness, "She had been too long alone. Tired and angry--angry again, instead of still--and alone. She reached out, smeared the blood on the wall into a true shape, wetting her fingertip with spit when the shape flaked instead of smeared. She sketched a line of rodents, the shapes fading out almost as soon as she finished, adding the long spirals of mountains' bones that had given her tower form, long ago. Pattern grew from pattern, and she drew faster, reaching out into the stone, the spaces between stones, trying to take her tower back.
"She knew she didn't have much time before he noticed, before he came to bring her down again, and she drew as fast as her fingers would allow, scraping at the edges of the building stones to give her blood to draw with, not even taking the time to pierce it from her fingers with the bones of the mouse she'd killed and still held in her hand.
"When he came through the door, darkness came with him, boiling past the threshold like soot-ink in clear water, drowning the room in black. If she'd needed to see the patterns she was drawing, it would have stopped her, but she'd lost sight of the spark already, and all that was left to her spell was blood calling out to blood, and to stone. In the blackness, living claws glanced off her bare feet as mice swept past her towards the place he had last been. Heavier bodies fell on her shoulders and tangled in her hair as the larger scavengers were shaken from within the walls, rats and beaded-lizards hissing in terror and fury.
"Other hands found her in the dark, yanking at her hair and trying to capture her moving hands, to break her spell and take her tower from her again. He shuddered when she pushed back, jabbing with her elbow before she struck at the height of his face with the heels of her broken hands, wishing the scavengers to leap from her shoulders to his, for them to claw at his eyes, his throat. Her mouse was smashed into his nose, small bones crunching again, and she spat curses into the blackness at him, her long-unused voice as harsh as the sounds of stone scraping against stone. She wished him aloud to the mercy of the rats, the tainted bite of the lizards, to the black and the darkness, then stumbled, her toes desperately grasping for traction, as the stones of the floor shifted abruptly.
"He screamed. Just once, as his hands slipped free of her, tearing at her hair and her clothes, and he fell. The scavengers poured after him, still driven by her spells, desperately following the corpse of the mouse, and tearing at the body of the only support they could find.
"She took a breath, mouth filled with dust and fear and hate, and spoke aloud the words to close the hole in her floor."
A log was crumbling to glowing coals, light flaring gently, whe she opened her eyes and looked around at the audience. The wolves had frozen, sometime in the telling, and many of the others had stilled, shoulders curling in to guard bellies and hands dropping to touch something iron. [She] looked down at her hands, before she spoke again. "She'd won, after a fashion. Her tower was hers again, though she couldn't shake the feeling that she could hear the scrabble of claws on stone, on flesh, as the darkness lifted and she could see the space around her again, her lights flaring palest gold, almost white in the lingering twilight of a powerful mage's spell."
Cupping her hands together, holding invisible water, "She stood on a threshold, though she couldn't see it. In that moment, her tower hers, she could have left it, pulled it apart as a grave-marker to a man better with a weight holding him there. She could have walked away, gone to find those living of her farmers, gone to find a sister or a teacher, some trusted mage with enough power to hold rebroken bones steady as they healed again. But she didn't even think of it--no letters had come to her, no paper-birds or worried whispers from the stones, no reminder that she was anything but alone."
Hands let go, casting the air she'd held towards the fire, "So she stayed. Stood for a long time looking at the blank space where her tormenter had fallen, given to the black he'd worn, then, very slowly, she stepped outside the threshold of the room she'd been confined to, toes brushing the remains of the braided hair she'd first tried to kill him with. It gave beneath her, smearing dust and oil against the bottom of her foot, and she left prints in the hallway as she walked away."
[Her] next breath caught in her throat as the smoke of the fire shifted with the wind, filling her lungs with the tang of cedar and dry-rotten maple, before it shifted abruptly, swirling briefly in its own tiny storm of airy tendrils, then rose straight up, drifting again in the wind at a height above that of a tall man standing. She blinked, a little surprised at the strength of the wish that had moved the smoke away from her, then took another breath, trying not to cough.
Her nearest neighbour handed her a heavy mug of something warm, as the keeper stirred the fire, shifting the coals around before adding new, thicker branches, the smoke still rising straight up as he did.
The wolf lying in the space between log and fire's boundary was some dark colour, she noted silently as she sipped at the cider--last harvest's apples, if she was any judge--nodding thanks to the woman who'd handed her the mug as she returned it. The wolf was big, even for a shapechanger, and red-eyed in the light of the fire. She wondered who it was, and if her story would be told again later in the night, to a listening circle of four-legged shapes.
She waited until the first bright light and crackle of new wood died away, and for cider to circle the fire twice, before she continued. "The tower was half-ruined, though she could not have sorted out what was caused by his neglect, and what was the doing of her fury. She soothed what edges she could as she passed, trying to catalog the damage as she did. Shifting floor-stones groaned under her feet, sometimes dropping a finger's breadth as edges no longer caught at one another. Archways and corners she touched with still-bloody fingers, stone's ragged edges smoothed with tacky blood and whispered wishes for mortar.
"Everywhere she walked, she found bodies. Fall-fat brown squirrels half-underneath shattered stones, tiny shrews dead in passageways without a mark on them, her spell stronger than their need for food, until their hearts stopped them cold. More mice than she cared to think about, mixed in with heavy-limbed rats and belly-up lizards, some still writhing in death throes. She touched them all with her unbroken fingers, wished them up off the floor and into the air. They floated behind her, trailing her path through the tower like some mockery of magelight-fireflies, their fur clotted with blood and fallen dust. There were more animals than a neglected tower should have naturally attracted, and that not counting those that had died with the mage in black.
"She only realised what she'd done when she found the corpses of two coyotes and a raccoon in the remains of her kitchen, the smaller animals swirling in her wake like startled fish as she stopped short. The coyotes lay near the heavy door dividing the room from the outside, their forelimbs broken and their jaws filled with bloody stubs instead of fangs, but the door was broken, too, gnawed and shoved until the hinges gave."
The wolves shivered, violently enough to be visible in falling firelight, and more than a few of the other listeners had unconsciously dropped their hands to the nearest weapon. The idea of something so determined to get inside a building that it would break its own limbs was a little too close for comfort, with the stories flying in from the borders. And the should-not-have been borders. The loss of the elder Kintarls still stung, even months removed from the news.
"The guard-spells on her outside doors," [she] painted in the air with her thumb, sketching a threshold and hex-signs, "even long neglected, had still been stronger than the blood that pulled the bigger beasts into the tower. The coyotes fell as soon as they crossed the threshold, coming to the call. The raccoon had lived a little longer, had dragged itself into the center of the room. When she touched it with a hesitant finger, a bubble broke in the bloody foam around its mouth, but it still rose to her wish, and she pushed it with the others back outside."
Making seeding gestures with her hands, "She scattered the bodies of the predators around the approaches to her tower, without stepping off the tower's paving stones. She was mage enough, still, to direct the path and fall of corpses without needing to see all of them, and she laid them down in a half-remembered warding pattern. The other animals, including a rabbit unlucky enough to run directly past a fallen border-stake when a dead coyote drifted by, she sent back inside the tower, floating at table level to wait for focused attention.
"The coyotes were laid down at the foot of the broken gateposts, one on either side of the ironwood gate the mage in black had shattered when he came to take the tower, and that he had never repaired. The raccoon formed a node in a second pattern intersecting the path leading from the gate to the door, one she knew was meant to warn the mage inside the web. Dead lizards guarded the walkways most obvious, their open, still poisonous mouths aimed to catch at feet, while the claws of rats were seeded in nooks and crannies, sharp rodent teeth at knee height, or at hamstring.
"When she ran out of predators--before she ran out of hiding places for them--she went back inside, bare feet tracking dirt into the dusty kitchen, and looked at the remaining bodies. Skinning the newly-dead rabbit, first, with a small knife she'd once reserved for vegetables, she skewered the flesh onto its rib-bones and cooked it over a woodless fire, ate it to keep herself on her feet as she sorted the once-healthy from the once-sick. The bodies of the sick she used to fill the remaining spaces in the patterns outside, while the healthy she reduced to scraps of fur, bones, and meat. She ate what she could force herself to, then laid the remainder at the edge of the grated hearth, to dry."
The two legged wolf slapped a hand reaching for the saddle she was lying on, without looking away from [her], then paused, stuck her own hand into the pack, and passed a strip of dried meat to the man she'd hit. The man lifted the strip in a slightly sheepish salute to the group, now staring at him, and [she] shook her head, amused, before she took a breath and continued. "The bones she piled together, stripped of flesh but not yet cracked or boiled for their marrow. Then, fed as well as she could handle, and the food sitting heavily within her even so, she took stock of her kitchen.
"It had never been meant to feed more than one mage, and the state of the stores showed it. The things she'd used most often, the things she'd liked and spent energy on, were almost entirely gone. She had no idea if the mage in black had liked the same things she had, or if he'd used them up to break her remaining hold on the tower that little bit more. Staples she still had, though not enough to last a season, dried grains and withered plums, onions and yeast and salt, a lidded tub of not yet spoiled fermented bean paste. She found droppings at the edges of her grain storage bins, and she thought at first that the hole in the pot that used to hold her tea leaves was mouse-gnawed, not human made. But the pot contained nothing but a smudge of soot, and a faint scent of burning.
"She wept, then, helplessly, and cursed the mage in black when she had breath between sobs. Wished his remaining spirit to be caught in the space between two worlds, crushed and torn apart by every breeze that blew between them, wished his names--which she never knew--and his memory to the books Winter once kept, wished him lost, as Winter was."
Softly, a little sad, "Until then, she could have told herself she could have gone back to what had been before. Fingers could be reset, she was already repairing the tower, she could sing a sweet song to an early summer wind and call her farmers back. But her tea was gone, and she had no way to get more, and it all came crashing down.
"She slept, eventually, slid down onto the stones of her kitchen floor and curled up near the fire and the remains of her accidental victims."
Taking a moment to stretch her back out, [she] watched the fire be tended, then accepted another few sips of cider. Her legs had long since gone to sleep, and if she made it back to her bedroll without falling on her face at least once she'd be stunned. But switching her legs' position wouldn't help much in the long run, and she held her listeners in her cupped palms. Delaying much longer would lessen the effect.
So she took a breath, tasting the spices in the cider she'd drunk, and began the witch's long fall.
"She woke abruptly, yanked from sleep by the harsh screams of carrion birds, and a tearing feeling in her head as they pulled the bodies of her patterns out of place. She lashed out with gestures, unthinking, her other hand pressed to her temple, and the noise grew greater. Bones flew from the pile in the kitchen like arrows, and outside the calls of the birds shifted from argument to panic. By the time she got outside, the screaming had crested, then stopped, leaving only silence behind.
"The birds were dead, some tacked to trees by three or four bones, others staked to the animals they'd been eating, heads thrown back in agony, black beaks wide as the jaws of the lizards she'd scattered the day before. She sat down without looking, collapsing into the tatters of her skirts onto stone, and pressed her palms against her head, trying not to cry. She couldn't force herself to eat carrion birds--especially knowing that they'd been tearing at the meat she'd thrown away. Left where they'd died, they'd poison the water, and attract what birds hadn't already come calling.
"She thought all the while she was dragging the scavengers back into the patterns she'd made, holding them down with broken pieces of her tower. Her feet bled, before she wrapped them in the tattered remains of patterns that had once adorned her skirts, and her broken fingers ached with every small movement. Glancing her hand off the edge of a rock as she set it over a lizard's half-buried body brought her to her knees, tears standing in her eyes, and it was there she found a compromise, though only with herself and her remaining sense of duty.
"The compromise used the cauldron she'd once dyed cloth in, the sharpest ax that answered a call, and every plant-carried warning she could think of--the leaves of poison-lilies, the roots of the first strangler-weeds, the liquid-filled stalks of manticore's-sting, many others. She took off the heads of the birds, dried them with words, and scattered them across her roof with clatters like hailstones striking. The white skulls and black beaks were stark against the dark woody brown of the roof and the moss that had invaded while the mage in black ruled her tower, but the contrast seemed more right than not." A quiet hiss of breath from somewhere in the listeners made her smile inwardly. First step to the witch's Colours taken, and heard by at least one.
"The long flight feathers she plucked to use as paintbrushes for the spell she meant to make, but the rest she left attached to the headless bodies. Carrion birds make poor pillows," she quirked her mouth, and half-chuckles answered her, "and there were so many she'd have carpeted her tower with feathers and still been able to pile her bed high with down.
"Instead she boiled the birds, in batches, until they were nothing but sodden feathers and hollow bones, mixed into a thick liquid that smelled of death. The flight feathers she dipped into the mess, wishing them aloft into the trees, to paint warnings on the branches, to trace patterns of poison, not food, for the remaining birds. The cooked feathers were splashed out in heaps the size of a living bird, anchored beneath arched roots, where the liquid could leach through the tangle before it hit a water source and made her downstream neighbours sick, or dead.
"She'd caught rabbits as she worked--flung a bone with a gesture out after a flash of movement with the barest of wishes to not harm something she wouldn't eat--and the thought occurred to her that it might be wise to make that permanent. She washed herself, cooked, cleaned, all by force of will and the knowledge that there was no other choice. There was no-one to help her feed food-animals, or to hunt for her.
"So she took boiled, splintered-sharp bones, and made snares, carved symbols into the surface with the knives she could still use, spelled the bones to take only the healthy, the big. She linked the traps together, to take only enough to feed her and her stores, not to decimate the population. And she sent them out, aloft, rushing through the air to find a place where rabbits ran, and there to settle down like white roots, points retracted until the time came to snap.
"When her stores ran too low for her to dip a full bowl from the bin, she sent the bones of mice to harvest for her, each tiny bone enough to touch a grain and pull it back, up away aloft and into the tower's bins. Even as bones, mice remembered grain, and the thieving of it.
"It wasn't until she found bits of baked bread in among the seeds that she knew what was really happening, knew her tiny thieves weren't harvesting wild grains, but stealing from the stores of others." [She] closed her eyes, then opened them again, spoke over the crackle of the flames, "the next night she sent a bigger bone, to steal her a loaf complete. She missed the taste of bread."
The black wolf chuckled, as she'd expected it--him, apparently, by the depth of tone--to, and she suppressed a smile of her own as she went on, winding the fall tighter. "She didn't steal many loaves--unlike seeds, bread is missed near as soon as it goes--but her hands kept her from kneading her own dough," she made motions with her hands to show the word she meant, "and bread, once had, is hard to let go of.
"The first truly cold morning since she'd reclaimed her tower made her miss her tea all over again, and she had a clever thought. She sent bones to steal her grains, to trap her meat. Why not to bring her tea leaves, too?
"The thought was there, but the refinement wasn't. The first leaves her bones brought her were fallen maple, mixed with flowers, and she sent them back out again, with a better picture of what she was looking for. This went around more times, until she had a handful of tight-wound leaves that smelled right, that if she broke off a little piece tasted right, to what her memory said was tea. So she heated water, and cast in the leaves, and drank the whole of the first cup in a cloud of success."
Several of the listeners winced, and she nodded, lifting one hand to her head and touching her temple briefly with a knuckle. "It wasn't tea she drank, but something that looked like it, and the brew threw her out of her head, drowned her in heat and light, delirious pictures skidding across her eyes, the visions of spring storm clouds, of autumn winds, the breezes of summer and the ice-kissed snaps of winter mixing with the sounds of fingers breaking, and screaming."
Closing her eyes again, her tone slipping towards matter-of-fact, "She lived because she'd been desha, once, and the blood still ran through her, only a little less strongly than it had when she'd chased away stormclouds for her farmers. Her flying bones, her traps, were enough to keep her strong, and she woke aching everywhere but hungry, and alive. She ate, before she went outside to see what damage her lack of control had caused, and she nearly lost the meal when she did.
"There was a dragon wrapped around the base of her tower, pieces of the roof atop the body, one of the great wings broken in four places by falling stone. The other wing was stretched out straight, nearly a ramp from the ground to just below her first windows. By the colouring, all light sand and peat salt, the remaining wing nearly translucent gold, the dragon had been one of those that ride storms, the ones that laugh in the midst of thunder and sail the edges of the great winds. And she, who'd loved air, once, who'd raised up a tower to be closer to the sky, had killed it, in arrogance and foolish triumph.
"She wept a long time, huddled in the space between the dragon's neck and the first break in the wing, then rose, wiping her eyes with the tatters of her skirt, and sent out bones."
[She] stretched again, just a little, and took a sip of offered cider. "The bones brought her cloth, fresh-woven, gold and brown as the makers could dye it. They brought her stolen salt, made in the heat of summer and kept for the wet of winter. They brought her green walnuts, taken from the trees and never to make a squirrel's meal or a horde's addition. Wood-ashes she made herself, and drained water through them, then soaked the cloth in the lye, stirring it with bones and wishes so it didn't burn her hands.
"The gold she rinsed as pale as it would go, then spread salt thickly across it, left it in the sun to bleach, to go as white as the bones that fed her, protected her.
"The brown she washed, then soaked in a liquid made by boiling crushed walnuts and their casings in water. The bones she stirred it with darkened, both bone and cloth as black as the clothes of the mage who'd made her what she was." [She] closed her eyes. "She took his Colour, and all the warnings that came with it."
Hisses of air came from around the fire, and she opened her eyes again to see shivers passing through the listeners, despite the heat of the flames on their faces, on their sides. The wolves were still, unmoving even as others touched reds, touched iron or carved suns, and the big black one in the shadows nodded, slowly, acknowledging the fall.
"The spells she'd laid on her bone-snares were the beginning of her warnings, of her traps. Bones that rattled together to frighten deer and foxes came next, then patterns made of bones to misdirect animals of weight too great for her to eat easily, to shoo away the predators. Within the nets of those, she laid spells to call up bones, to strike down a manticore before it came to the clearing and the tower, with other spells that would tremble in the bone-spells' wake, would tell her something was happening like a spider feels the tremble of its web." [She] shut her eyes, and the fire's keeper took his cue.
Within the crackle, eyes still closed and seeing not the story, but not too distant past, "She found a dying man in one of her traps, one day, in the middle of winter. The bones that would have hit a beast in the eyes, the throat, had gone over his head, but the ones meant to break legs struck.
"He cried out when he saw her, which was how she knew he was alive, and she nearly screamed back, he startled her so. Both their hearts raced, his with pain and sudden terror, hers with surprise and guilt, but his stopped. Already nearly bled dry from the sharpened bones in his legs, in his side, the terror pressed the remaining blood out faster. His pulse throbbed one last sluggish beat against the finger she laid on his throat, and he slumped. She'd learned to hate the smell of death, and a human death was no different.
"He wasn't one of her farmers, from before. It would have been worse if he had been, if he'd seen his sun-mage standing with dry white bones in her tangled hair, seen skirts of black with white mixed in, seen her feet wrapped up in dragon wing-leather. Seen her hands, that had once braided bread and hair and sky alike the broken twisted ruin the mage in black had made of them.
"He wasn't one of her farmers," [She] repeated, opening her eyes, "And that meant he had no right to be in her territories. Not even an ancestor's right. He'd come to scout, to steal, to poach on her rabbits or to spy out her traps, and her traps had killed him. Let him lie, then, as a warning to his fellows. And she whispered a spell, that when he was bones, he would join the traps on her borders."
[She] shook her head, a little sorrowfully. "The man was a farmer, gone to see where his stores were stealing off to. Cloth had been going missing, grain, bread, stewing bones--never the best, true, but always a trickle he couldn't control.
"He was the first, but he wasn't the last," the words cold, the loss of bread and food no longer a half-joke. "Other men--most of the women stayed near to home in those days, knives close at hand to defend it--followed him, come to see what stole their stores, what happened to the men who went into that wood. They came first one by one, because no manticores stalked out of the wood to hunt on their farms, but as the singles stopped returning, they came in pairs, then in groups.
"Eventually one got away, spoke in horrified tones of the bones, the skulls of men and monsters lined up side by side in macabre patterns, splintered thighbones the stakes of deadfalls, the chittering of rats with no life behind the noise. A group--without him, he never went back, which should have been the warning they needed--took fire and steel to the wood, to try to claim the bodies of the lost for burial or burning.
"Two of that group lagged behind the others, trying to act as a rearguard but not well trained for it. When the traps started springing, they ran." She gave no censure in the words. When the end came, carrying a message back became more important than trying to save the already dying. Otherwise others followed, to look for the lost. Something everyone knew, but it was hard, so very hard, to be among the running, leaving those loved behind to die, and she saw the rider who'd asked for someone not coming home clench his hand on the strap that wasn't his, face twisting in pain.
"One of the runners saw her," she continued, politely turning her face away, "saw the black, saw the white, saw the way bones flew at her command, and told that story to all who'd hear him. People stayed awake at night, talking of what they'd lost to the wood, and some fell silent as bones slid out of the darkness, touching bags, touching bins, and sliding back to black.
"They stopped burying their dead after that--the ones they could recover, never the ones lost to the wood--and laid marking stones over ashes. They burned their dead, so that the Bone-Witch could not steal them from beneath the ground. They burned their dead to keep them safe," she said, pressing gently at the alien concept, "not to let them fly. She tasted ashes in the air, and she chose not to think about what caused it, never sent back a breeze to spy out cause, or to give farewell salute."
Spreading her hands in a time-passes gesture wolves used, "Things settled. Children were born, taught the signs of manticore and strangling-vine and the white-marked edges of the Witch's territory with the same careful words. They grew up--excepting those who fell to bad luck or to heedless ways, who were burned and given to the ground if they could be recovered. Most had children of their own, that were taught the ways of caution as they'd been taught. Some were encouraged to stay up at night, usually with the person who kept the braid-tallies of the stores, to watch the bones steal. Warnings seen were more powerful than those only spoken, and watching the one responsible for sharing out what remained in the end of winter stand by as white bones stole salt and grain made a child think.
"The stories about the Witch spread--stories do," she grinned briefly, and got chuckles in reply, "and eventually they spread far enough that someone came to see the place the stories came from. Not a farmer, stopping for a night on the way to somewhere else, who looked at the edge of the forest that had never been cut for fires' wood with fear. Manticores came out of uncut woods, near other farms, their bulk hidden by brush, but the Witch was worse than beasts. They feared cutting her trees, feared what an axe would bring down on them. And it would have brought bones down on them--bones and the Bone-Witch behind them, to smother fires and dull axes with words, because what was hers was hers alone, her farmers long gone and the days she'd worn gold a distant memory that haunted her on sleepless nights.
"No, the one who came was a woman, and young, her bright hair braided along her head like a range of mountains and trailing down her back. She wore autumn reds, anchored in brown and embellished in gold, and she lit forges and spelled smokehouses to buy her food and a place to sleep. She walked, and the older smudges of dirt on her boots were the same gray as her eyes, a rusty red that echoed her hair, not the brown or the black of the best soil.
"The farmers asked her why she'd come, the first night and all the rest after, taking it in turns, and her answer shifted subtly depending on her questioner. To the ones who worked in steel, who gave up their tools for her use with a glad heart, she said that steel went where it was needed. To the ones who pulled stones from the soil and coaxed plants up in their place, she said as she passed water that she loved stories, and wished to see how much was truth and how much decoration. To the mother who'd just lost a second son to the Witch she said, where no one else could hear, that a mage's offense called for a mage's response, and that she was sorry it had taken so long for someone to hear the stories, and sort truth from still-fueled dreams.
"The mother told her that foolish children went into the woods, the ones who had never watched the bones, and that only the lucky returned. So why did she, a child among mages or she was very much mistaken, why did a child among mages think that she could walk into the Bone-Witch's wood and stop the Witch? The mother had just lost a second son to what was still at heart a mage, and she didn't care if the younger one took offense and killed her.
"But the mage with a red braid only smiled, slowly, and it was the sort of smile hunters wear when they have a perfect shot, and reminded the mother softly that bone burns."
[She] gestured to the fire, and raised her voice to be heard above the sound of it being stirred again. "The new mage didn't enter the Bone-Witch's wood in pursuit of a foolish child; she even laid small spells on the farmers' children at the request of their mothers, to pull them towards home if they wandered too far. For all her smiles, all her steel-working and the fires she rolled across her knuckles, she was walking into a much older mage's claimed territory. She'd go in with her eyes open, or not at all.
"She'd laid spells on herself, on her heartbeat and her breathing, to send word to someone else if she should die," there were a few nods, the black wolf's head among them, "and one morning, she told the farmers farewell, and walked away down the path out of sight before she turned, took a breath, and stepped off the path towards the white-marked edges of the forest.
"She shivered, as she stepped over the small bones that were the white of the boundaries. The forest was more alive than she'd expected, wilder, for all that there'd been no fires in years and the underbrush was choked and dying for lack of light. Birds sang, out of sight, and she could hear the rustles of small animals in the brush. She jumped, when bones first rattled, fire blooming in her hands, but it was only a warning pattern, not a striking. She moved on, feet placed carefully, watching above, below and to the sides for traces of white, looking for shapes in the forest that were not wind-made.
"For all her care, she wasn't a third of the way to the tower before the first striking spell snapped, moss-covered buried bones erupting from the deer-path and driving up at her, falling down as burning bits as she struck back. Smoke rose, clung to her clothes and to her hair, but she walked on, her feet as carefully placed.
"More traps sprang, the closer she came to her unknown goal, and she started keeping a fire alight, trailing from her shoulder to her hand, flickering back and forth as the wind direction shifted, and bones flew at her with high whistles of movement. The traps stopped waiting for her to step near them, eventually, the trembling-spells tangled in with them pulling them free and flinging them at her, the great fanged jaw of a manticore dropping from overhead to try to crush her, the chattering of rat-skulls joined by human skulls, teeth snapping hard enough to shatter the enamel and throw tiny shards at her eyes while she was paying attention to bigger bones, heavy femurs and ribs that struck like clubs or spears.
"They all burned, and the sound of heat-snapped bone almost sounded like screaming. The smoke hung tightly around her, tangling with the fires she called, swirling around her ankles and shrouding her bright hair in ashy fragments.
"Far away, instead of standing staring at the smoke rising from the forest, the mother told her companions to run for shovels, for plows, to build a barren area between their fields and the edges of the Witch's territory, to brake the fire she knew was coming. If the mage-child lived, she might stop it. She might not, though, or she might die in battle with the Witch, and a farmer could not trust a mage to think of them, even one who'd eaten their bread and mended their steel.
"When the younger mage came out of the tangle of brush into open space, she didn't see the tower at first, just the dragon. The bones were still tangled around the base of the tower, wings long since destroyed to make wrappings for the Witch's feet, to patch holes in her roof or to cover a pit. It took a moment to see the tower, and the patches made of dragon's hide, and the new mage stared, open mouthed, burning what bones came near her without paying attention. Dragons die--" a small ripple went through the listeners, and [she] caught a flash of snarl on someone's lips before she continued "Dragons die, and are buried, burned, given back to the rocks they came from, blocked up within their caverns with the best of their treasures. The new mage had never seen a dragon before, alive or dead, and the bleached pale skull and great fangs were a thing very different from the stories of dragons, flying. She nearly cried, looking at the ruin.
"She saw the Bone-Witch then, standing beside the head of the dragon she'd killed, mouth open in a silent snarl, saw the tiny bones holding back the Witch's hair, saw the heavy leather wrapped around the Witch's feet, saw the black skirts with hems glued, not stitched, saw the long white sleeves, and saw, finally, the Witch's broken hands.
"She did cry, then, the salt water streaking the soot on her cheeks, and called out to the Witch, asked her why. Why the bones, why the deaths, why the dragon--why she hadn't gone for help, or sent a paper-bird.
"The Bone-Witch looked back at her for a long time, unspeaking, moving her broken hands as she eyed the new mage, seeing the gold the younger mage wore, the brown and the red. She'd been like that, once, though it had been air playing around her, swirling through her skirts, not the smudges of fires that sparked brightly at the knees of the trousers, and flickered along the long, perfect fingers. She gave her reply first by holding out a hand, flexing the palm, and smiled coldly as the younger mage flinched from the sight. Her face was a blank mask when she spoke at last, said that a mage had done this to her, and why should she trust mages?
"Then she flicked her hand, and sent bones flying to fight for her."
Leaning forward, stretching out her hand to nearly touch the coals of the fire, "Bone burns, and so the Witch's weapons burned, even the ones she pulled from long-laid traps to strike." Pulling back her hand, turning it over to gesture to the side in as graceful an arc as she could muster, "Even the dragon, she pulled aloft one last time and threw to her fight, and the burning hollow bones of the wings marked the path the new mage walked, from the edge of the clearing to the Witch's tower, a small glowing desha surrounded by the fires of her calling, the trees above and the ground below beginning to catch, too, as she focused her attention not on control, on defense, but attack.
"The Witch was screaming, soundless in the fire's storm, when the invader stepped onto the edge of her paving stones, the mortar beginning to melt from the heat of the fire surrounding her. The Witch was screaming, hate and fear and fury, that her tower would be taken from her again, and she could not stop it this time either.
"Then she couldn't scream anymore, her voice taken, with the very last of the bones she could call on. All that was left to her was tied to the faint tremor of the tower, and the stones. Given time, she might be able to bring a part of the roof down on the head of her last attacker, but she knew she wouldn't be allowed that time.
"No more," [She] whispered, in a lighter tone, a younger woman's voice. "No more," the words soft, a blessing, not a curse, as she reached out and laid her hand on an invisible chest. "--and the Witch fell, still afraid, into the blackness.
"The mage with a red braid caught her going down, her fires out and her body exhausted, starving from the power she'd called up, but she'd not eat from the Witch's stores if she could help it. She was crying, as she laid the Witch's body on the Witch's bed, set the broken hands atop the black cloth, smoothed her own fingers along the broken ones. Thought about what she used her own hands for, tried to think of what might have happened if it had been her, in the Witch's place.
"'Know rest, lady. Know ease,' she said to the Witch's body before she left the room, still crying.
"She shattered the bonds of the tower from outside it, tore apart the blood-spell keeping it aloft, and walked away, into a smouldering forest, listening to the stones fall. She smothered the fires she found as she went, and emerged from the edge of the forest to find the farmers waiting, shovels and picks and what bladed steel they had paused in the task of turning earth, to see her, and to find out what she'd found, in the Witch's domain.
"She told them only that the Witch was dead, and that they'd lose no more children to bones, before she collapsed from exhaustion. She woke to find a platter of steaming food, which she fell on like a starving wolf, and the mother who'd lost two sons waiting, hands folded neatly in her lap. To the mother she told the barest of stories, leaving out the bones of men that flew side by side with the bones of animals to bar her way, spoke of fire, and of burning, and the way the Witch had screamed before she died. The mother nodded, once, when she finished speaking, then rose and left the room.
"The desha who stopped the Witch's heart never stopped thinking of her, even after leaving the farmers and the forest, walking her way to another story, another forge. Never stopped thinking of breaking, in the dark, alone, and of the need for endings." [She] smiled, one sided, "But the story of the next time the mage with a red braid walked into the dark, to face it and walk out again, is a story for another night, and another lost bet." She stuck out her tongue at [him], under cover of the listeners breathing out, and beginning to go back to the activities they'd worked on, before the story started. He laughed, near-silently, and inclined his head to her as he rose, heading for the horse-line. Mouthed a 'thank you,' as he passed, and she nodded back.
Many of the listeners began to stand, stretching, and the two who'd kept watch both nodded deeply to her before disappearing into the darkness beyond the fire's light. Another group, led by the cider-maker and the fire's keeper headed out into the night to fetch more wood, two of them with rifles ready to hand, just in case, and at least one of the others with a shotgun.
She stumbled as she rose, as she'd expected to, but her hand came down on a solid furry shoulder, not a log or saddle, which was entirely unexpected and almost made her snatch her hand back and fall into the coals. Fortunately the wolf was big enough that her startled squeeze caused no distress.
The black shadow who'd been lying along the log had ghosted over to her side of the fire soundlessly, under cover of the others moving. She wondered--beneath the self-disgust that he kept doing that to her--if it was because he'd expected her to fall when she rose, or because he wanted to thank her for the story-telling. Wolves took that sort of thing seriously--so much of their history wasn't written down, instead commited to memory, song and story.
"Thank you," she said politely, trying not to lean heavily on him as she shook out the beginnings of the pins and needles in her legs. Oh, she was going to ache.
The wolf seemed to consider the phrase gravely, watching her from the corner of one eye, then told her "My pleasure," in a dreadfully familiar baritone. She froze, and the big black head turned to look up at her, and this close, even with only firelight to see by, she could see the eyes were gold.
Her stomach clenched all over again, the pins in her legs forgotten. "Oh Winter-- I didn't know--" she began, knowing she was babbling but unable to help herself, transfixed by the knowledge of who was behind the calm lupine stare.
"I know," he told her gently, interrupting, and she closed her mouth with a snap of teeth. "You told the story better for it, and given the words you were, you laid sparks to rest, not fanned them higher. No storyteller I know could have done better."
'High praise,' she thought faintly, 'He must have heard many storytellers, on both sides of the line. I'm going to kill [him], he must have known when he suggested the Witch--'
"You--"
"Let you think that I was Dennei, or attached to the riders? Yes, I did." Calm, flat yellow stare that seemed to be looking at her from a like height, not below. "Not many people have the guts to speak the Witch in front of desh-blood, let alone in front of someone who might carry word back to the man who pulled the whole of the 'Wood to his heel like a stray pup. You would have chosen another story, would you not?"
'I wish I had,' she thought numbly, nodding, not thinking of who else he might carry stories to, in that moment as afraid of disembodied attention as the woman who'd asked for power.
"You knew what they were asking," he said, softer, the timbre of his voice rumbling through his chest and up her hand, still touching his shoulder. "What they were really asking. The Witch doesn't always have red hair. Nor does the one who lays her down."
She had to turn her face away, submission as plain as that between two wolves. She couldn't meet his eyes, and some part of her mind, no longer gibbering with realisation, filed away the stare of a sure wolf as a powerful, powerful thing. "I--" she hesitated, then, very softly, "Yes, I knew."
"Thank you," he said, as softly. "Those above can't know their own effect. My father, for one," here a guileless wolf-grin, all long red laughing tongue and barely any teeth, "would have far fewer need for horses, and for hands to speak in his absence."
"Your father," she told him, the storyteller self shoving aside the woman briefly, "is terrifying and would do better if he would stop staring at people like he's sorting out where they keep their last shells."
He chuckled, louder, nearly a human laugh, when she flushed slightly, and rippled his shoulder under her hand. "Best we get you to your bedroll, lady, before you start singing other truths."
"I can't--I've a duty to the horse-line at the darkest."
"Ahh." He nodded, and moved forward a step, her hand sliding down from his shoulder to his back. She pulled it away, flexing the fingers a little to clear the sense-memory of fur, embarrassed all over again that she'd frozen, not reacted. Not a good precedent, for one in the Trickwood.
"I'll see you in the morning," he told her, a smile in his voice, and faded into the night.
She had to dodge aside as the wood-gatherers returned, nodding thanks as some gave her a storyteller's salute, and took her leave of their fire. She was limping, just slightly, but it would fade by the morning if she was careful how she sat her watch.
Heading toward her bedroll to pick up the knives she meant to rebind while on duty, wishing she could just fall into it, she turned over the conversation again in her head.
She stopped short as she arrived; a rider she knew very slightly was waiting for her. Obviously waiting for her, because he near-saluted when he saw her.
"I thought I'd take duty," he said, cheerfully young, holding up a bag of something that jingled at the movement. "I've shells that need filling, and my next watch isn't for another two nights."
She blinked, polite words coming out of her mouth with no thought behind them, "I just have knives, and they can wait. Take and be welcome--"
Another almost-grin and salute, and he turned away, heading for the horse-line they were both aligned to.
" . . . That wolf is sharper than he looks," she mumbled to herself as she laid out her bedding and crawled gratefully into it, shotgun in its usual place and load checked before she pulled off her boots. 'Much sharper than his reputation would have him,' she thought, as sleep tried to claim her, 'I wonder how much of that is people meeting him, and those who just assume.'
She fell asleep to the memory of laughter.
’Verse/characters: Wild Roses; various individuals from the Trickwood
Prompt: coastal_physics and klgaffney both requesting a proper telling of black of night and white of bones.
Word Count: eleven thousand, three hundred and ten
Rating: all ages, presuming a pre-Victorian attitude to 'children's stories'.
Notes: This will likely wind up as part of a chapter in one of the novels; there are things not explained in-text because of that. Questions as always are welcome. I do not yet have names for the principal players, so there are bracketed pronouns as placeholders.
Many thanks to dormouse_in_tea for her heroic efforts to protect the common comma from abuse.
[She] found [him] among a group just after sunset by tracking the sound of barely-suppressed laughter. She eventually recognised him from behind, by the way his hands flicked when he was illustrating a point.
She circled, eventually came out of the twilight at an angle he could see her, if not directly, and flicked her own hand at him in a come-here gesture. He shook his head, echoing the gesture, and she stepped within the circle of light, fire already burning bright enough to leave stains on the insides of her eyes when she blinked.
Half-scowling, one hand propped on her hip, she told him "Bet's yours to hold. What will you have of me?"
"A story." He grinned up at her, flash of white teeth in the near dark, when she blinked again at the quickness of his answer.
"Spent the afternoon thinking about this, did you?"
Another grin, and a gesture at an empty space close by the fire. "Maybe."
She sat, propping her back against someone's saddle, her feet tucked up onto her thighs and palms displayed openly atop them. It was no runner's pose, and it made the others around the fire sit up a little, two of them half-turning to watch beyond the fire's light.
"What story will you have of me?" she asked them, voice modulated low, smooth as she could make it. More heads turned, and the other conversations around the fire died, everyone focusing on her.
"Something of the dark," one of the riders said softly, rubbing his hand over a scored leather strap. Not his own gear, from the look, the colouring slightly different and the width out of place among his things. "Someone not coming home."
"Power," said someone else, carefully not looking toward where the newcomers slept. The man closest to her shifted slightly away even so, hand falling so his thumb brushed against the sun carved into the handle of his saddle-blade. She curled the corner of her lip at him, then let it drop, smoothing her face and staring at the fire fixedly. [He] glanced over, barely a flick of his head, then, looking at the fire himself, his tone easy, passionless, "The Bone-Witch?"
Two people nodded, one crooking her fingers up above the natural curve of her hands, the other rumbling "The Bone-Witch."
[She] nodded, closing her eyes briefly and taking a deep breath, then blew it out, opened her eyes, and spoke.
"It was a long time ago," she told them, just a little wry. "Before the Trickwood was a forest. --yes, there's a time before then," she told a dark-hidden disbelieving snort, "there's very old maps in some of the cities that show farms where the Dragonspine Mountains are now, and a city on a plain between here and [Autumn], that men called Summer.
"This was after Summer died, after the new mountains appeared, but before the forest really took hold. People still thought they might be able to farm where their ancestors had. Some of them even managed it, digging out the first roots of vines and mulching the seedlings of trees to feed their fields, setting snares to protect their harvests and sometimes burning the things that died in the snares. Almost all of the successful farmers were linked to a mage of some kind, true, but choose the right mage to feed and they'd tell you what charms to carve on your border-posts, or weave you a safe path to another holding.
"Colours helped with that--a mage that wore the gold of the harvest, the gold of the sun, or the bright colours of a fire burning in the dark was generally a better mage to deal with than any mage who wore the dark against their skin. Even a mage who built a tower but wore gold and brown was a bet worth taking--" a quick face made at [him], met with another white flash of laughter "--and it's here the story starts.
"Her hair was red-gold, the kind that pales in daylight to a fuzzy halo, and she wore gold powder against her skin to show her eyelashes, to mark her alignments for anyone who cared to look. She'd raised a tower up from mountains' bones to touch the sky as a girl, and tied up her hair like a harvest wreath when people came to cut firewood from her claimed forest, then stayed to plant fields.
"She'd carve magery into a border-stake for a pair of rabbits, chase away stormclouds when the time came for haying whether or not they gave her bread as well as grain--but they always did. She was sun-gold, not harvest-gold, and the sun will turn her face away if you don't pay heed to her."
Reflected light made several listeners' nods flicker oddly, some heads dipping far deeper than others, and not those with the slightly alarming utter stillness of wolves listening. She'd spotted two, one flopped two-legged half on top of a saddle that obviously wasn't theirs, another, four-legged, mostly hidden in the shadows cast by gear and listeners. After a moment of silence, the fire's keeper rummaged at the edge of his stockpile, banging sticks together to warn anything trying to take up residence in it before he touched it barehanded. Not looking at her, he tossed another heavy branch into the center of the blaze, and she closed her eyes against the flare.
"He might have come quietly," she said, voice barely audible over the crackle of crisping leaves, "he was more than strong enough to have slipped her border-stakes, walked up into her tower and none aware of him until he spoke. But he was old, and angry. Resented the poor power the short-lived farmers held over the long-lived mages, the bargains his colleagues made to survive in a world much changed from the one that taught him strength. He wore black, and he broke her woven borders like you or I could break spiderwebs."
Everyone took a small breath, and on her own exhale she continued, "She told those within her borders to run. If she'd fought, first, or never took her attention from him, she might have won. He was coming to her tower, after all, trying to take another's stronghold. If she'd been more like him to start, she might have driven him off."
Another small breath, curling her hands over to lay her palms on her thighs, "But as she was, she lost. Couldn't even move when he finally stood next to her at the height of her tower, his spells wrapped around her, against her skin and tangled in her hair.
"She thought the worst was when he told her, oh so calm, the same I've told you. That she might have won, if she hadn't cared about those at the base of her tower enough to cry them a warning. She thought she'd die there, her tower lost, knowing if she'd been closer to the dark she might have won.
"Then he broke the first of her fingers," [she] snapped a thick twig she'd picked up when the latest branch had been added to the fire and no-one had been looking directly at her. Four people jumped.
"She'd never so much as tripped on her stairs before, never cracked her leg laying a horse down or pulled her shoulder out of place clinging to a branch on a cliff. She screamed. Struggled to get away from him, not even thinking anymore of power or trickery, just escape from pain. No luck, and he reached out to her other hand. Broke another finger, in a different direction.
"She fainted at the third finger's breaking, not even fighting anymore because breathing hurt her hands, and fighting hurt much, much more."
[She] nodded to the keeper, who shook himself briefly--wolf-influenced if not blooded--before taking another piece of wood and adding it to the fire. It flared up high, pressed warmth against her face and her knees, her hands as she flipped them palm's up again, and it was as the initial flare died down that she spoke again.
"She woke, eventually, and wished as soon as she did that he'd killed her. He'd stripped the spells from her hair, her clothes and her skin, left her barefoot and tatter-skirted in the room that had once held her winter grains. Left her, too, the thumb and first finger of both her hands, and nothing besides. The broken fingers were swollen black, bent visibly out of true even so, and they burned with every beat of her heart.
"She couldn't have fed herself, even if she'd wanted to take her own food from him. But she wasn't strong enough to fight him when he fed her, though he kept her hands pressed tight to her legs whenever he shared a room with her." [She] crooked her own fingers, mimed fighting to pull her hands up, and failing.
"He fed her enough to keep her alive. Not enough for her to heal as fast or as cleanly as she would have, given all she'd have eaten if she'd been allowed. The swelling faded, and left her fingers looking worse than before--like apple branches, old grape vines, with as much free movement as the wind will give a vine grown into its supports. She'd never weave again, or braid her hair in more than three strands, and that only by using a broken finger as a guide for one of the three.
"She tried, though." [She] pulled a hair from her own head, pondered it for a second, then tossed it into the fire, started flicking the tips of her fingers together in a loose, invisible braid. "Chewed off a length of matted hair and wove a threshold trap with the unbroken fingers, to take his ankles and smash his head on the stones of the room he still kept her in.
"He laughed when he came to her next, walking through the trap like it wasn't even there--which was worse than breaking it--and said that she must be feeling better. She'd feed herself, and in the meantime . . ." [She] made snipping motions with the first two fingers of her hand, across the space she'd been weaving in. "He cut her hair with the shears her farmers had once used on their goats and sheep. Took the matted mess away with him, though he still ignored the thin braided cord across the edge of the door. The cooking pot he brought her to use for her waste was soot-brushed inside, the next time it was changed out. It had been her favourite stew-pot, once, but she used it as he meant her to.
"Things became a slow pattern after that. He'd bring a plate or a bowl of food, always the dishes she'd had before he took her tower from her, but never anything she'd used often enough to have any sort of power attached to it. She ate with the fingers he'd left her, licked them clean or wiped them on a tatter of her skirts. The dishes and the waste-pot disappeared while she slept, and if it meant she watched them for more than a day and he brought more food before they went away, so be it. Faking sleep never worked, though she tried. No control, no sense of time passing beyond that food appeared on a schedule.
"He gave her soap and the run of her own bathing-room when he deemed her dirty. She couldn't force him, there, even by refusing to eat or by dragging her ragged hems through the remains of the dishes. He gave no rhyme or reason to his timing--she went weeks at times, less than a day others--and if she asked, he only looked at her with knowing eyes. She'd shiver, even neck-deep in hot water, and learned not to ask. The clothes he let her have after she'd scrubbed her hair and her skin with a rag of once-pattern were never the same as the ones she'd had before. Her longest skirts he gave her, the clothes she'd been proud of. But their decorating colours and contrasting fabrics he tore or cut away before she saw them, made them useless for magic unless she ripped the base cloth up for thread. He dressed her in her golds, and it felt like silent mockery.
"Her hair he trimmed too short to chew a length from again, cut in deliberate patternlessness so far as she could feel, and much, much shorter than she'd ever worn her hair when it had been her own."
The two-legged wolf jerked, and one of the two keeping watch beyond the light snapped her head around to look at [her], one eye closed to block the glare but the other unhappily wide. [She] nodded, deeply enough to acknowledge the attention but not so deep to hide her face. "It took a long time, but it happened." Lifting her head again, as the watcher turned back to self-appointed task, "She stopped thinking of him as the invader, the one who'd taken her life from her, and started thinking of him as the one who let her bathe, who fed her. It might have gone so far as the one who controlled her, owned her, if the aching of her broken hands hadn't kept her awake, and if she hadn't spotted a mouse near her dirty dishes one night."
A shadow lying along a fallen log near the fire sprouted teeth, long light-reddened tongue lolling as the wolf smacked its lips, and she laughed, ignoring the tiny clench in her stomach at the unknown dark grinning at her. "She didn't eat it--couldn't have caught it if she pounced, too long on too little food to keep all her proper speed--but it was the first living thing she'd seen since she lost her fight, that wasn't him, or she herself. Seeing it jarred her a little out of the thinking he'd encouraged, reminded her that her world wasn't the room she slept in, him, and the room he let her bathe in." A grin of her own, "Well, her first thought on seeing it was that when the tower had been hers, no mouse would have ever found enough to eat for it to be worth staying, not that it was alive, and not him.
"That didn't keep her from saving crumbs from her food, or from scattering them where a hungry mouse would be willing to venture. After all," the lingering smile in [her] voice turned briefly vicious, "her tower wasn't truly hers anymore. What should she care if there were mice to get into the grain storage?
"So she and the mouse grew closer over time--it grew braver, willing to eat within snatching distance as she never pounced, and she could sometimes stretch out one of her unbroken fingers and feel soft living fur brush against her jagged fingernail. She'd fall asleep to the sound of it scuffling around in the remains of her dishes, tiny claws clicking against glazed clay.
"She might have done better to keep it a little distant. She'd watched it climbing onto her skirts, one day, claws gripping tight at the torn edges of the fabric, touched it gently with the hand not resting in her lap. In perceived safety it nosed around for fallen crumbs, and found one resting in the crook between one of her broken fingers and the back of her hand. It bit her, clawing at her broken finger to push it out of the way like a discarded bone to get at the crumb. She hissed, flung it off her hand with no thought behind the action, and she heard its body break as it hit, small juicy crunch of impact."
A sap pocket in the fire blew with a pop, loudly enough that everyone jumped. After a moment of waiting for her heart to stop racing, [she] said, "She'd seen death before. Even killed before, laid spells that kept scavengers from hen-houses, broke the necks of rabbits for her meals. But she'd never killed accidentally, and never something she attached emotion to.
"She wasn't child enough--or broken enough--to poke it to see if it was really dead. She let it lie, and went to sleep feeling sick, wishing it hadn't bit, wishing that she hadn't reacted as she had.
"The body was still there when she woke, though her dishes were gone. She was left to wonder if he hadn't seen it, or had, knew what had happened and wanted to let her dwell on it. It took her a long time to decide to cross the room and touch the body--to reach down, pick it up and look at it.
"It hadn't started rotting yet--only a day or so dead--but there was no mistaking it for something alive. The fur was matted with blood, small prickly broken bones catching at the skin near her fingernail as she touched it, the feel a mockery of life. Blood had smeared where it struck the wall, near-shape outlined on the stone."
[She] took a long, slow breath, nodded to the keeper, who nearly reached into the pile without looking at it, then stopped, hand outreached. The woman sitting next to him stopped, too, her hand arrested in an abortive snatching motion aimed at his wrist. They exchanged a glance before she dropped her hand, and he picked up a stick, tapping at the pile before he pulled from it, began casting wood to the flames. Watching the exchange, [she] wondered who'd been bitten, and when, then closed her eyes against the flare of firelight.
From self-made darkness, "She had been too long alone. Tired and angry--angry again, instead of still--and alone. She reached out, smeared the blood on the wall into a true shape, wetting her fingertip with spit when the shape flaked instead of smeared. She sketched a line of rodents, the shapes fading out almost as soon as she finished, adding the long spirals of mountains' bones that had given her tower form, long ago. Pattern grew from pattern, and she drew faster, reaching out into the stone, the spaces between stones, trying to take her tower back.
"She knew she didn't have much time before he noticed, before he came to bring her down again, and she drew as fast as her fingers would allow, scraping at the edges of the building stones to give her blood to draw with, not even taking the time to pierce it from her fingers with the bones of the mouse she'd killed and still held in her hand.
"When he came through the door, darkness came with him, boiling past the threshold like soot-ink in clear water, drowning the room in black. If she'd needed to see the patterns she was drawing, it would have stopped her, but she'd lost sight of the spark already, and all that was left to her spell was blood calling out to blood, and to stone. In the blackness, living claws glanced off her bare feet as mice swept past her towards the place he had last been. Heavier bodies fell on her shoulders and tangled in her hair as the larger scavengers were shaken from within the walls, rats and beaded-lizards hissing in terror and fury.
"Other hands found her in the dark, yanking at her hair and trying to capture her moving hands, to break her spell and take her tower from her again. He shuddered when she pushed back, jabbing with her elbow before she struck at the height of his face with the heels of her broken hands, wishing the scavengers to leap from her shoulders to his, for them to claw at his eyes, his throat. Her mouse was smashed into his nose, small bones crunching again, and she spat curses into the blackness at him, her long-unused voice as harsh as the sounds of stone scraping against stone. She wished him aloud to the mercy of the rats, the tainted bite of the lizards, to the black and the darkness, then stumbled, her toes desperately grasping for traction, as the stones of the floor shifted abruptly.
"He screamed. Just once, as his hands slipped free of her, tearing at her hair and her clothes, and he fell. The scavengers poured after him, still driven by her spells, desperately following the corpse of the mouse, and tearing at the body of the only support they could find.
"She took a breath, mouth filled with dust and fear and hate, and spoke aloud the words to close the hole in her floor."
A log was crumbling to glowing coals, light flaring gently, whe she opened her eyes and looked around at the audience. The wolves had frozen, sometime in the telling, and many of the others had stilled, shoulders curling in to guard bellies and hands dropping to touch something iron. [She] looked down at her hands, before she spoke again. "She'd won, after a fashion. Her tower was hers again, though she couldn't shake the feeling that she could hear the scrabble of claws on stone, on flesh, as the darkness lifted and she could see the space around her again, her lights flaring palest gold, almost white in the lingering twilight of a powerful mage's spell."
Cupping her hands together, holding invisible water, "She stood on a threshold, though she couldn't see it. In that moment, her tower hers, she could have left it, pulled it apart as a grave-marker to a man better with a weight holding him there. She could have walked away, gone to find those living of her farmers, gone to find a sister or a teacher, some trusted mage with enough power to hold rebroken bones steady as they healed again. But she didn't even think of it--no letters had come to her, no paper-birds or worried whispers from the stones, no reminder that she was anything but alone."
Hands let go, casting the air she'd held towards the fire, "So she stayed. Stood for a long time looking at the blank space where her tormenter had fallen, given to the black he'd worn, then, very slowly, she stepped outside the threshold of the room she'd been confined to, toes brushing the remains of the braided hair she'd first tried to kill him with. It gave beneath her, smearing dust and oil against the bottom of her foot, and she left prints in the hallway as she walked away."
[Her] next breath caught in her throat as the smoke of the fire shifted with the wind, filling her lungs with the tang of cedar and dry-rotten maple, before it shifted abruptly, swirling briefly in its own tiny storm of airy tendrils, then rose straight up, drifting again in the wind at a height above that of a tall man standing. She blinked, a little surprised at the strength of the wish that had moved the smoke away from her, then took another breath, trying not to cough.
Her nearest neighbour handed her a heavy mug of something warm, as the keeper stirred the fire, shifting the coals around before adding new, thicker branches, the smoke still rising straight up as he did.
The wolf lying in the space between log and fire's boundary was some dark colour, she noted silently as she sipped at the cider--last harvest's apples, if she was any judge--nodding thanks to the woman who'd handed her the mug as she returned it. The wolf was big, even for a shapechanger, and red-eyed in the light of the fire. She wondered who it was, and if her story would be told again later in the night, to a listening circle of four-legged shapes.
She waited until the first bright light and crackle of new wood died away, and for cider to circle the fire twice, before she continued. "The tower was half-ruined, though she could not have sorted out what was caused by his neglect, and what was the doing of her fury. She soothed what edges she could as she passed, trying to catalog the damage as she did. Shifting floor-stones groaned under her feet, sometimes dropping a finger's breadth as edges no longer caught at one another. Archways and corners she touched with still-bloody fingers, stone's ragged edges smoothed with tacky blood and whispered wishes for mortar.
"Everywhere she walked, she found bodies. Fall-fat brown squirrels half-underneath shattered stones, tiny shrews dead in passageways without a mark on them, her spell stronger than their need for food, until their hearts stopped them cold. More mice than she cared to think about, mixed in with heavy-limbed rats and belly-up lizards, some still writhing in death throes. She touched them all with her unbroken fingers, wished them up off the floor and into the air. They floated behind her, trailing her path through the tower like some mockery of magelight-fireflies, their fur clotted with blood and fallen dust. There were more animals than a neglected tower should have naturally attracted, and that not counting those that had died with the mage in black.
"She only realised what she'd done when she found the corpses of two coyotes and a raccoon in the remains of her kitchen, the smaller animals swirling in her wake like startled fish as she stopped short. The coyotes lay near the heavy door dividing the room from the outside, their forelimbs broken and their jaws filled with bloody stubs instead of fangs, but the door was broken, too, gnawed and shoved until the hinges gave."
The wolves shivered, violently enough to be visible in falling firelight, and more than a few of the other listeners had unconsciously dropped their hands to the nearest weapon. The idea of something so determined to get inside a building that it would break its own limbs was a little too close for comfort, with the stories flying in from the borders. And the should-not-have been borders. The loss of the elder Kintarls still stung, even months removed from the news.
"The guard-spells on her outside doors," [she] painted in the air with her thumb, sketching a threshold and hex-signs, "even long neglected, had still been stronger than the blood that pulled the bigger beasts into the tower. The coyotes fell as soon as they crossed the threshold, coming to the call. The raccoon had lived a little longer, had dragged itself into the center of the room. When she touched it with a hesitant finger, a bubble broke in the bloody foam around its mouth, but it still rose to her wish, and she pushed it with the others back outside."
Making seeding gestures with her hands, "She scattered the bodies of the predators around the approaches to her tower, without stepping off the tower's paving stones. She was mage enough, still, to direct the path and fall of corpses without needing to see all of them, and she laid them down in a half-remembered warding pattern. The other animals, including a rabbit unlucky enough to run directly past a fallen border-stake when a dead coyote drifted by, she sent back inside the tower, floating at table level to wait for focused attention.
"The coyotes were laid down at the foot of the broken gateposts, one on either side of the ironwood gate the mage in black had shattered when he came to take the tower, and that he had never repaired. The raccoon formed a node in a second pattern intersecting the path leading from the gate to the door, one she knew was meant to warn the mage inside the web. Dead lizards guarded the walkways most obvious, their open, still poisonous mouths aimed to catch at feet, while the claws of rats were seeded in nooks and crannies, sharp rodent teeth at knee height, or at hamstring.
"When she ran out of predators--before she ran out of hiding places for them--she went back inside, bare feet tracking dirt into the dusty kitchen, and looked at the remaining bodies. Skinning the newly-dead rabbit, first, with a small knife she'd once reserved for vegetables, she skewered the flesh onto its rib-bones and cooked it over a woodless fire, ate it to keep herself on her feet as she sorted the once-healthy from the once-sick. The bodies of the sick she used to fill the remaining spaces in the patterns outside, while the healthy she reduced to scraps of fur, bones, and meat. She ate what she could force herself to, then laid the remainder at the edge of the grated hearth, to dry."
The two legged wolf slapped a hand reaching for the saddle she was lying on, without looking away from [her], then paused, stuck her own hand into the pack, and passed a strip of dried meat to the man she'd hit. The man lifted the strip in a slightly sheepish salute to the group, now staring at him, and [she] shook her head, amused, before she took a breath and continued. "The bones she piled together, stripped of flesh but not yet cracked or boiled for their marrow. Then, fed as well as she could handle, and the food sitting heavily within her even so, she took stock of her kitchen.
"It had never been meant to feed more than one mage, and the state of the stores showed it. The things she'd used most often, the things she'd liked and spent energy on, were almost entirely gone. She had no idea if the mage in black had liked the same things she had, or if he'd used them up to break her remaining hold on the tower that little bit more. Staples she still had, though not enough to last a season, dried grains and withered plums, onions and yeast and salt, a lidded tub of not yet spoiled fermented bean paste. She found droppings at the edges of her grain storage bins, and she thought at first that the hole in the pot that used to hold her tea leaves was mouse-gnawed, not human made. But the pot contained nothing but a smudge of soot, and a faint scent of burning.
"She wept, then, helplessly, and cursed the mage in black when she had breath between sobs. Wished his remaining spirit to be caught in the space between two worlds, crushed and torn apart by every breeze that blew between them, wished his names--which she never knew--and his memory to the books Winter once kept, wished him lost, as Winter was."
Softly, a little sad, "Until then, she could have told herself she could have gone back to what had been before. Fingers could be reset, she was already repairing the tower, she could sing a sweet song to an early summer wind and call her farmers back. But her tea was gone, and she had no way to get more, and it all came crashing down.
"She slept, eventually, slid down onto the stones of her kitchen floor and curled up near the fire and the remains of her accidental victims."
Taking a moment to stretch her back out, [she] watched the fire be tended, then accepted another few sips of cider. Her legs had long since gone to sleep, and if she made it back to her bedroll without falling on her face at least once she'd be stunned. But switching her legs' position wouldn't help much in the long run, and she held her listeners in her cupped palms. Delaying much longer would lessen the effect.
So she took a breath, tasting the spices in the cider she'd drunk, and began the witch's long fall.
"She woke abruptly, yanked from sleep by the harsh screams of carrion birds, and a tearing feeling in her head as they pulled the bodies of her patterns out of place. She lashed out with gestures, unthinking, her other hand pressed to her temple, and the noise grew greater. Bones flew from the pile in the kitchen like arrows, and outside the calls of the birds shifted from argument to panic. By the time she got outside, the screaming had crested, then stopped, leaving only silence behind.
"The birds were dead, some tacked to trees by three or four bones, others staked to the animals they'd been eating, heads thrown back in agony, black beaks wide as the jaws of the lizards she'd scattered the day before. She sat down without looking, collapsing into the tatters of her skirts onto stone, and pressed her palms against her head, trying not to cry. She couldn't force herself to eat carrion birds--especially knowing that they'd been tearing at the meat she'd thrown away. Left where they'd died, they'd poison the water, and attract what birds hadn't already come calling.
"She thought all the while she was dragging the scavengers back into the patterns she'd made, holding them down with broken pieces of her tower. Her feet bled, before she wrapped them in the tattered remains of patterns that had once adorned her skirts, and her broken fingers ached with every small movement. Glancing her hand off the edge of a rock as she set it over a lizard's half-buried body brought her to her knees, tears standing in her eyes, and it was there she found a compromise, though only with herself and her remaining sense of duty.
"The compromise used the cauldron she'd once dyed cloth in, the sharpest ax that answered a call, and every plant-carried warning she could think of--the leaves of poison-lilies, the roots of the first strangler-weeds, the liquid-filled stalks of manticore's-sting, many others. She took off the heads of the birds, dried them with words, and scattered them across her roof with clatters like hailstones striking. The white skulls and black beaks were stark against the dark woody brown of the roof and the moss that had invaded while the mage in black ruled her tower, but the contrast seemed more right than not." A quiet hiss of breath from somewhere in the listeners made her smile inwardly. First step to the witch's Colours taken, and heard by at least one.
"The long flight feathers she plucked to use as paintbrushes for the spell she meant to make, but the rest she left attached to the headless bodies. Carrion birds make poor pillows," she quirked her mouth, and half-chuckles answered her, "and there were so many she'd have carpeted her tower with feathers and still been able to pile her bed high with down.
"Instead she boiled the birds, in batches, until they were nothing but sodden feathers and hollow bones, mixed into a thick liquid that smelled of death. The flight feathers she dipped into the mess, wishing them aloft into the trees, to paint warnings on the branches, to trace patterns of poison, not food, for the remaining birds. The cooked feathers were splashed out in heaps the size of a living bird, anchored beneath arched roots, where the liquid could leach through the tangle before it hit a water source and made her downstream neighbours sick, or dead.
"She'd caught rabbits as she worked--flung a bone with a gesture out after a flash of movement with the barest of wishes to not harm something she wouldn't eat--and the thought occurred to her that it might be wise to make that permanent. She washed herself, cooked, cleaned, all by force of will and the knowledge that there was no other choice. There was no-one to help her feed food-animals, or to hunt for her.
"So she took boiled, splintered-sharp bones, and made snares, carved symbols into the surface with the knives she could still use, spelled the bones to take only the healthy, the big. She linked the traps together, to take only enough to feed her and her stores, not to decimate the population. And she sent them out, aloft, rushing through the air to find a place where rabbits ran, and there to settle down like white roots, points retracted until the time came to snap.
"When her stores ran too low for her to dip a full bowl from the bin, she sent the bones of mice to harvest for her, each tiny bone enough to touch a grain and pull it back, up away aloft and into the tower's bins. Even as bones, mice remembered grain, and the thieving of it.
"It wasn't until she found bits of baked bread in among the seeds that she knew what was really happening, knew her tiny thieves weren't harvesting wild grains, but stealing from the stores of others." [She] closed her eyes, then opened them again, spoke over the crackle of the flames, "the next night she sent a bigger bone, to steal her a loaf complete. She missed the taste of bread."
The black wolf chuckled, as she'd expected it--him, apparently, by the depth of tone--to, and she suppressed a smile of her own as she went on, winding the fall tighter. "She didn't steal many loaves--unlike seeds, bread is missed near as soon as it goes--but her hands kept her from kneading her own dough," she made motions with her hands to show the word she meant, "and bread, once had, is hard to let go of.
"The first truly cold morning since she'd reclaimed her tower made her miss her tea all over again, and she had a clever thought. She sent bones to steal her grains, to trap her meat. Why not to bring her tea leaves, too?
"The thought was there, but the refinement wasn't. The first leaves her bones brought her were fallen maple, mixed with flowers, and she sent them back out again, with a better picture of what she was looking for. This went around more times, until she had a handful of tight-wound leaves that smelled right, that if she broke off a little piece tasted right, to what her memory said was tea. So she heated water, and cast in the leaves, and drank the whole of the first cup in a cloud of success."
Several of the listeners winced, and she nodded, lifting one hand to her head and touching her temple briefly with a knuckle. "It wasn't tea she drank, but something that looked like it, and the brew threw her out of her head, drowned her in heat and light, delirious pictures skidding across her eyes, the visions of spring storm clouds, of autumn winds, the breezes of summer and the ice-kissed snaps of winter mixing with the sounds of fingers breaking, and screaming."
Closing her eyes again, her tone slipping towards matter-of-fact, "She lived because she'd been desha, once, and the blood still ran through her, only a little less strongly than it had when she'd chased away stormclouds for her farmers. Her flying bones, her traps, were enough to keep her strong, and she woke aching everywhere but hungry, and alive. She ate, before she went outside to see what damage her lack of control had caused, and she nearly lost the meal when she did.
"There was a dragon wrapped around the base of her tower, pieces of the roof atop the body, one of the great wings broken in four places by falling stone. The other wing was stretched out straight, nearly a ramp from the ground to just below her first windows. By the colouring, all light sand and peat salt, the remaining wing nearly translucent gold, the dragon had been one of those that ride storms, the ones that laugh in the midst of thunder and sail the edges of the great winds. And she, who'd loved air, once, who'd raised up a tower to be closer to the sky, had killed it, in arrogance and foolish triumph.
"She wept a long time, huddled in the space between the dragon's neck and the first break in the wing, then rose, wiping her eyes with the tatters of her skirt, and sent out bones."
[She] stretched again, just a little, and took a sip of offered cider. "The bones brought her cloth, fresh-woven, gold and brown as the makers could dye it. They brought her stolen salt, made in the heat of summer and kept for the wet of winter. They brought her green walnuts, taken from the trees and never to make a squirrel's meal or a horde's addition. Wood-ashes she made herself, and drained water through them, then soaked the cloth in the lye, stirring it with bones and wishes so it didn't burn her hands.
"The gold she rinsed as pale as it would go, then spread salt thickly across it, left it in the sun to bleach, to go as white as the bones that fed her, protected her.
"The brown she washed, then soaked in a liquid made by boiling crushed walnuts and their casings in water. The bones she stirred it with darkened, both bone and cloth as black as the clothes of the mage who'd made her what she was." [She] closed her eyes. "She took his Colour, and all the warnings that came with it."
Hisses of air came from around the fire, and she opened her eyes again to see shivers passing through the listeners, despite the heat of the flames on their faces, on their sides. The wolves were still, unmoving even as others touched reds, touched iron or carved suns, and the big black one in the shadows nodded, slowly, acknowledging the fall.
"The spells she'd laid on her bone-snares were the beginning of her warnings, of her traps. Bones that rattled together to frighten deer and foxes came next, then patterns made of bones to misdirect animals of weight too great for her to eat easily, to shoo away the predators. Within the nets of those, she laid spells to call up bones, to strike down a manticore before it came to the clearing and the tower, with other spells that would tremble in the bone-spells' wake, would tell her something was happening like a spider feels the tremble of its web." [She] shut her eyes, and the fire's keeper took his cue.
Within the crackle, eyes still closed and seeing not the story, but not too distant past, "She found a dying man in one of her traps, one day, in the middle of winter. The bones that would have hit a beast in the eyes, the throat, had gone over his head, but the ones meant to break legs struck.
"He cried out when he saw her, which was how she knew he was alive, and she nearly screamed back, he startled her so. Both their hearts raced, his with pain and sudden terror, hers with surprise and guilt, but his stopped. Already nearly bled dry from the sharpened bones in his legs, in his side, the terror pressed the remaining blood out faster. His pulse throbbed one last sluggish beat against the finger she laid on his throat, and he slumped. She'd learned to hate the smell of death, and a human death was no different.
"He wasn't one of her farmers, from before. It would have been worse if he had been, if he'd seen his sun-mage standing with dry white bones in her tangled hair, seen skirts of black with white mixed in, seen her feet wrapped up in dragon wing-leather. Seen her hands, that had once braided bread and hair and sky alike the broken twisted ruin the mage in black had made of them.
"He wasn't one of her farmers," [She] repeated, opening her eyes, "And that meant he had no right to be in her territories. Not even an ancestor's right. He'd come to scout, to steal, to poach on her rabbits or to spy out her traps, and her traps had killed him. Let him lie, then, as a warning to his fellows. And she whispered a spell, that when he was bones, he would join the traps on her borders."
[She] shook her head, a little sorrowfully. "The man was a farmer, gone to see where his stores were stealing off to. Cloth had been going missing, grain, bread, stewing bones--never the best, true, but always a trickle he couldn't control.
"He was the first, but he wasn't the last," the words cold, the loss of bread and food no longer a half-joke. "Other men--most of the women stayed near to home in those days, knives close at hand to defend it--followed him, come to see what stole their stores, what happened to the men who went into that wood. They came first one by one, because no manticores stalked out of the wood to hunt on their farms, but as the singles stopped returning, they came in pairs, then in groups.
"Eventually one got away, spoke in horrified tones of the bones, the skulls of men and monsters lined up side by side in macabre patterns, splintered thighbones the stakes of deadfalls, the chittering of rats with no life behind the noise. A group--without him, he never went back, which should have been the warning they needed--took fire and steel to the wood, to try to claim the bodies of the lost for burial or burning.
"Two of that group lagged behind the others, trying to act as a rearguard but not well trained for it. When the traps started springing, they ran." She gave no censure in the words. When the end came, carrying a message back became more important than trying to save the already dying. Otherwise others followed, to look for the lost. Something everyone knew, but it was hard, so very hard, to be among the running, leaving those loved behind to die, and she saw the rider who'd asked for someone not coming home clench his hand on the strap that wasn't his, face twisting in pain.
"One of the runners saw her," she continued, politely turning her face away, "saw the black, saw the white, saw the way bones flew at her command, and told that story to all who'd hear him. People stayed awake at night, talking of what they'd lost to the wood, and some fell silent as bones slid out of the darkness, touching bags, touching bins, and sliding back to black.
"They stopped burying their dead after that--the ones they could recover, never the ones lost to the wood--and laid marking stones over ashes. They burned their dead, so that the Bone-Witch could not steal them from beneath the ground. They burned their dead to keep them safe," she said, pressing gently at the alien concept, "not to let them fly. She tasted ashes in the air, and she chose not to think about what caused it, never sent back a breeze to spy out cause, or to give farewell salute."
Spreading her hands in a time-passes gesture wolves used, "Things settled. Children were born, taught the signs of manticore and strangling-vine and the white-marked edges of the Witch's territory with the same careful words. They grew up--excepting those who fell to bad luck or to heedless ways, who were burned and given to the ground if they could be recovered. Most had children of their own, that were taught the ways of caution as they'd been taught. Some were encouraged to stay up at night, usually with the person who kept the braid-tallies of the stores, to watch the bones steal. Warnings seen were more powerful than those only spoken, and watching the one responsible for sharing out what remained in the end of winter stand by as white bones stole salt and grain made a child think.
"The stories about the Witch spread--stories do," she grinned briefly, and got chuckles in reply, "and eventually they spread far enough that someone came to see the place the stories came from. Not a farmer, stopping for a night on the way to somewhere else, who looked at the edge of the forest that had never been cut for fires' wood with fear. Manticores came out of uncut woods, near other farms, their bulk hidden by brush, but the Witch was worse than beasts. They feared cutting her trees, feared what an axe would bring down on them. And it would have brought bones down on them--bones and the Bone-Witch behind them, to smother fires and dull axes with words, because what was hers was hers alone, her farmers long gone and the days she'd worn gold a distant memory that haunted her on sleepless nights.
"No, the one who came was a woman, and young, her bright hair braided along her head like a range of mountains and trailing down her back. She wore autumn reds, anchored in brown and embellished in gold, and she lit forges and spelled smokehouses to buy her food and a place to sleep. She walked, and the older smudges of dirt on her boots were the same gray as her eyes, a rusty red that echoed her hair, not the brown or the black of the best soil.
"The farmers asked her why she'd come, the first night and all the rest after, taking it in turns, and her answer shifted subtly depending on her questioner. To the ones who worked in steel, who gave up their tools for her use with a glad heart, she said that steel went where it was needed. To the ones who pulled stones from the soil and coaxed plants up in their place, she said as she passed water that she loved stories, and wished to see how much was truth and how much decoration. To the mother who'd just lost a second son to the Witch she said, where no one else could hear, that a mage's offense called for a mage's response, and that she was sorry it had taken so long for someone to hear the stories, and sort truth from still-fueled dreams.
"The mother told her that foolish children went into the woods, the ones who had never watched the bones, and that only the lucky returned. So why did she, a child among mages or she was very much mistaken, why did a child among mages think that she could walk into the Bone-Witch's wood and stop the Witch? The mother had just lost a second son to what was still at heart a mage, and she didn't care if the younger one took offense and killed her.
"But the mage with a red braid only smiled, slowly, and it was the sort of smile hunters wear when they have a perfect shot, and reminded the mother softly that bone burns."
[She] gestured to the fire, and raised her voice to be heard above the sound of it being stirred again. "The new mage didn't enter the Bone-Witch's wood in pursuit of a foolish child; she even laid small spells on the farmers' children at the request of their mothers, to pull them towards home if they wandered too far. For all her smiles, all her steel-working and the fires she rolled across her knuckles, she was walking into a much older mage's claimed territory. She'd go in with her eyes open, or not at all.
"She'd laid spells on herself, on her heartbeat and her breathing, to send word to someone else if she should die," there were a few nods, the black wolf's head among them, "and one morning, she told the farmers farewell, and walked away down the path out of sight before she turned, took a breath, and stepped off the path towards the white-marked edges of the forest.
"She shivered, as she stepped over the small bones that were the white of the boundaries. The forest was more alive than she'd expected, wilder, for all that there'd been no fires in years and the underbrush was choked and dying for lack of light. Birds sang, out of sight, and she could hear the rustles of small animals in the brush. She jumped, when bones first rattled, fire blooming in her hands, but it was only a warning pattern, not a striking. She moved on, feet placed carefully, watching above, below and to the sides for traces of white, looking for shapes in the forest that were not wind-made.
"For all her care, she wasn't a third of the way to the tower before the first striking spell snapped, moss-covered buried bones erupting from the deer-path and driving up at her, falling down as burning bits as she struck back. Smoke rose, clung to her clothes and to her hair, but she walked on, her feet as carefully placed.
"More traps sprang, the closer she came to her unknown goal, and she started keeping a fire alight, trailing from her shoulder to her hand, flickering back and forth as the wind direction shifted, and bones flew at her with high whistles of movement. The traps stopped waiting for her to step near them, eventually, the trembling-spells tangled in with them pulling them free and flinging them at her, the great fanged jaw of a manticore dropping from overhead to try to crush her, the chattering of rat-skulls joined by human skulls, teeth snapping hard enough to shatter the enamel and throw tiny shards at her eyes while she was paying attention to bigger bones, heavy femurs and ribs that struck like clubs or spears.
"They all burned, and the sound of heat-snapped bone almost sounded like screaming. The smoke hung tightly around her, tangling with the fires she called, swirling around her ankles and shrouding her bright hair in ashy fragments.
"Far away, instead of standing staring at the smoke rising from the forest, the mother told her companions to run for shovels, for plows, to build a barren area between their fields and the edges of the Witch's territory, to brake the fire she knew was coming. If the mage-child lived, she might stop it. She might not, though, or she might die in battle with the Witch, and a farmer could not trust a mage to think of them, even one who'd eaten their bread and mended their steel.
"When the younger mage came out of the tangle of brush into open space, she didn't see the tower at first, just the dragon. The bones were still tangled around the base of the tower, wings long since destroyed to make wrappings for the Witch's feet, to patch holes in her roof or to cover a pit. It took a moment to see the tower, and the patches made of dragon's hide, and the new mage stared, open mouthed, burning what bones came near her without paying attention. Dragons die--" a small ripple went through the listeners, and [she] caught a flash of snarl on someone's lips before she continued "Dragons die, and are buried, burned, given back to the rocks they came from, blocked up within their caverns with the best of their treasures. The new mage had never seen a dragon before, alive or dead, and the bleached pale skull and great fangs were a thing very different from the stories of dragons, flying. She nearly cried, looking at the ruin.
"She saw the Bone-Witch then, standing beside the head of the dragon she'd killed, mouth open in a silent snarl, saw the tiny bones holding back the Witch's hair, saw the heavy leather wrapped around the Witch's feet, saw the black skirts with hems glued, not stitched, saw the long white sleeves, and saw, finally, the Witch's broken hands.
"She did cry, then, the salt water streaking the soot on her cheeks, and called out to the Witch, asked her why. Why the bones, why the deaths, why the dragon--why she hadn't gone for help, or sent a paper-bird.
"The Bone-Witch looked back at her for a long time, unspeaking, moving her broken hands as she eyed the new mage, seeing the gold the younger mage wore, the brown and the red. She'd been like that, once, though it had been air playing around her, swirling through her skirts, not the smudges of fires that sparked brightly at the knees of the trousers, and flickered along the long, perfect fingers. She gave her reply first by holding out a hand, flexing the palm, and smiled coldly as the younger mage flinched from the sight. Her face was a blank mask when she spoke at last, said that a mage had done this to her, and why should she trust mages?
"Then she flicked her hand, and sent bones flying to fight for her."
Leaning forward, stretching out her hand to nearly touch the coals of the fire, "Bone burns, and so the Witch's weapons burned, even the ones she pulled from long-laid traps to strike." Pulling back her hand, turning it over to gesture to the side in as graceful an arc as she could muster, "Even the dragon, she pulled aloft one last time and threw to her fight, and the burning hollow bones of the wings marked the path the new mage walked, from the edge of the clearing to the Witch's tower, a small glowing desha surrounded by the fires of her calling, the trees above and the ground below beginning to catch, too, as she focused her attention not on control, on defense, but attack.
"The Witch was screaming, soundless in the fire's storm, when the invader stepped onto the edge of her paving stones, the mortar beginning to melt from the heat of the fire surrounding her. The Witch was screaming, hate and fear and fury, that her tower would be taken from her again, and she could not stop it this time either.
"Then she couldn't scream anymore, her voice taken, with the very last of the bones she could call on. All that was left to her was tied to the faint tremor of the tower, and the stones. Given time, she might be able to bring a part of the roof down on the head of her last attacker, but she knew she wouldn't be allowed that time.
"No more," [She] whispered, in a lighter tone, a younger woman's voice. "No more," the words soft, a blessing, not a curse, as she reached out and laid her hand on an invisible chest. "--and the Witch fell, still afraid, into the blackness.
"The mage with a red braid caught her going down, her fires out and her body exhausted, starving from the power she'd called up, but she'd not eat from the Witch's stores if she could help it. She was crying, as she laid the Witch's body on the Witch's bed, set the broken hands atop the black cloth, smoothed her own fingers along the broken ones. Thought about what she used her own hands for, tried to think of what might have happened if it had been her, in the Witch's place.
"'Know rest, lady. Know ease,' she said to the Witch's body before she left the room, still crying.
"She shattered the bonds of the tower from outside it, tore apart the blood-spell keeping it aloft, and walked away, into a smouldering forest, listening to the stones fall. She smothered the fires she found as she went, and emerged from the edge of the forest to find the farmers waiting, shovels and picks and what bladed steel they had paused in the task of turning earth, to see her, and to find out what she'd found, in the Witch's domain.
"She told them only that the Witch was dead, and that they'd lose no more children to bones, before she collapsed from exhaustion. She woke to find a platter of steaming food, which she fell on like a starving wolf, and the mother who'd lost two sons waiting, hands folded neatly in her lap. To the mother she told the barest of stories, leaving out the bones of men that flew side by side with the bones of animals to bar her way, spoke of fire, and of burning, and the way the Witch had screamed before she died. The mother nodded, once, when she finished speaking, then rose and left the room.
"The desha who stopped the Witch's heart never stopped thinking of her, even after leaving the farmers and the forest, walking her way to another story, another forge. Never stopped thinking of breaking, in the dark, alone, and of the need for endings." [She] smiled, one sided, "But the story of the next time the mage with a red braid walked into the dark, to face it and walk out again, is a story for another night, and another lost bet." She stuck out her tongue at [him], under cover of the listeners breathing out, and beginning to go back to the activities they'd worked on, before the story started. He laughed, near-silently, and inclined his head to her as he rose, heading for the horse-line. Mouthed a 'thank you,' as he passed, and she nodded back.
Many of the listeners began to stand, stretching, and the two who'd kept watch both nodded deeply to her before disappearing into the darkness beyond the fire's light. Another group, led by the cider-maker and the fire's keeper headed out into the night to fetch more wood, two of them with rifles ready to hand, just in case, and at least one of the others with a shotgun.
She stumbled as she rose, as she'd expected to, but her hand came down on a solid furry shoulder, not a log or saddle, which was entirely unexpected and almost made her snatch her hand back and fall into the coals. Fortunately the wolf was big enough that her startled squeeze caused no distress.
The black shadow who'd been lying along the log had ghosted over to her side of the fire soundlessly, under cover of the others moving. She wondered--beneath the self-disgust that he kept doing that to her--if it was because he'd expected her to fall when she rose, or because he wanted to thank her for the story-telling. Wolves took that sort of thing seriously--so much of their history wasn't written down, instead commited to memory, song and story.
"Thank you," she said politely, trying not to lean heavily on him as she shook out the beginnings of the pins and needles in her legs. Oh, she was going to ache.
The wolf seemed to consider the phrase gravely, watching her from the corner of one eye, then told her "My pleasure," in a dreadfully familiar baritone. She froze, and the big black head turned to look up at her, and this close, even with only firelight to see by, she could see the eyes were gold.
Her stomach clenched all over again, the pins in her legs forgotten. "Oh Winter-- I didn't know--" she began, knowing she was babbling but unable to help herself, transfixed by the knowledge of who was behind the calm lupine stare.
"I know," he told her gently, interrupting, and she closed her mouth with a snap of teeth. "You told the story better for it, and given the words you were, you laid sparks to rest, not fanned them higher. No storyteller I know could have done better."
'High praise,' she thought faintly, 'He must have heard many storytellers, on both sides of the line. I'm going to kill [him], he must have known when he suggested the Witch--'
"You--"
"Let you think that I was Dennei, or attached to the riders? Yes, I did." Calm, flat yellow stare that seemed to be looking at her from a like height, not below. "Not many people have the guts to speak the Witch in front of desh-blood, let alone in front of someone who might carry word back to the man who pulled the whole of the 'Wood to his heel like a stray pup. You would have chosen another story, would you not?"
'I wish I had,' she thought numbly, nodding, not thinking of who else he might carry stories to, in that moment as afraid of disembodied attention as the woman who'd asked for power.
"You knew what they were asking," he said, softer, the timbre of his voice rumbling through his chest and up her hand, still touching his shoulder. "What they were really asking. The Witch doesn't always have red hair. Nor does the one who lays her down."
She had to turn her face away, submission as plain as that between two wolves. She couldn't meet his eyes, and some part of her mind, no longer gibbering with realisation, filed away the stare of a sure wolf as a powerful, powerful thing. "I--" she hesitated, then, very softly, "Yes, I knew."
"Thank you," he said, as softly. "Those above can't know their own effect. My father, for one," here a guileless wolf-grin, all long red laughing tongue and barely any teeth, "would have far fewer need for horses, and for hands to speak in his absence."
"Your father," she told him, the storyteller self shoving aside the woman briefly, "is terrifying and would do better if he would stop staring at people like he's sorting out where they keep their last shells."
He chuckled, louder, nearly a human laugh, when she flushed slightly, and rippled his shoulder under her hand. "Best we get you to your bedroll, lady, before you start singing other truths."
"I can't--I've a duty to the horse-line at the darkest."
"Ahh." He nodded, and moved forward a step, her hand sliding down from his shoulder to his back. She pulled it away, flexing the fingers a little to clear the sense-memory of fur, embarrassed all over again that she'd frozen, not reacted. Not a good precedent, for one in the Trickwood.
"I'll see you in the morning," he told her, a smile in his voice, and faded into the night.
She had to dodge aside as the wood-gatherers returned, nodding thanks as some gave her a storyteller's salute, and took her leave of their fire. She was limping, just slightly, but it would fade by the morning if she was careful how she sat her watch.
Heading toward her bedroll to pick up the knives she meant to rebind while on duty, wishing she could just fall into it, she turned over the conversation again in her head.
She stopped short as she arrived; a rider she knew very slightly was waiting for her. Obviously waiting for her, because he near-saluted when he saw her.
"I thought I'd take duty," he said, cheerfully young, holding up a bag of something that jingled at the movement. "I've shells that need filling, and my next watch isn't for another two nights."
She blinked, polite words coming out of her mouth with no thought behind them, "I just have knives, and they can wait. Take and be welcome--"
Another almost-grin and salute, and he turned away, heading for the horse-line they were both aligned to.
" . . . That wolf is sharper than he looks," she mumbled to herself as she laid out her bedding and crawled gratefully into it, shotgun in its usual place and load checked before she pulled off her boots. 'Much sharper than his reputation would have him,' she thought, as sleep tried to claim her, 'I wonder how much of that is people meeting him, and those who just assume.'
She fell asleep to the memory of laughter.