Dragonswood

by Janet Lee Carey

  On the other end of the square I spied Tidas Leech with his plump, sow-eyed sister, Joan Midwife, who’d lost every child my mother birthed. A sour taste came to my mouth.

  Poppy pointed to the bridge. “Look.”

  A shout went up: “Lady Adela!” People cleared a path for the horses, waving and calling her name. At the end of the procession, a pimply boy drove a cart with the lady’s trunks and three stately deerhounds with red velvet collars.

  I’d been in bed with fever the last time Lady Adela came to town, so I’d not seen her myself: never seen her royal escort or the Gray Knight sent by her uncle, the king’s regent, Lord Sackmoore, to guard the lady. The red plume atop the Gray Knight’s helm bounced in time with his horse, and the black swan of the Sackmoore family crest was painted on his shield. But among the riders, it was Lady Adela who caught my eye and kept it.

  Sitting tall in the saddle, she straddled the horse like a man even though ladies both highborn and low- were all taught to ride sidesaddle so as not to split their skirts. Astonished at her gall, I watched her as she steered her horse toward the stage that served as a speech platform, players’ stage, and hanging gallows.

  The youthful lady was all opposition in her dress, both plain and fancy. A short gauzy veil covered the top half of her face. She wore a proper black armband about the sleeve of her gray gown just like the woodward had. Yet for all this, her belt was jeweled, her sword ruby-studded.

  Here’s a woman who has mastered the world of men, I thought. Unfettered by marriage, in command of her own life. How had she risen to a man’s post, commanding eight knights?

  I had to admit I’d expected to see a more downcast woman, knowing her sad tale. As the story went, witches kidnapped Lady Adela four years back, when she was just eighteen. On the night of the Black Sabbath they tortured her in Dragonswood, slit her ankle tendon so she could not run, burned her with hot pokers, and worst of all, put out her left eye.

  The lady knew violence from witches; we knew violence from our fathers and husbands. Still, she was more than conqueror now. Draw her, I thought. I did not render people well, yet my fingers tingled, thinking how I’d ink the straight line of her back.

  I tossed her my buttercups. Three thin stems caught in her horse’s mane. She took two in her free hand. A smile bloomed below her veil. I was glad I’d thrown them. As she rode past, one blossom fell from the white mane and was crushed under her horse’s hoof.

  Anon she dismounted and took the stage walking with a slight limp from her witch-wound. Above us all, she raised her hand. “Good citizens.” She paused for silence.

  Had they found the treasure? Was Prince Arden home to be crowned?

  The town was still, waiting. “We have all been in mourning for our noble Pendragon king. God rest King Kadmi’s soul,” she said.

  “God rest his soul,” we all said, crossing ourselves.

  “And we are an isle without its royal treasure until young Prince Bion and his army find the thieves who stole it.”

  She let the words sink in. The treasure was still lost.

  “But I have not come here to speak of sadness or missing treasure. I have come to ask you, people of Harrowton, to stand with me and make ready for Prince Arden, our future king!”

  “Make ready for King Arden,” we cried.

  She drew her sword and held it up. A ray of sunlight glinted from the blade. “Prince Arden has risked life and limb these past four years fighting in the crusades. Should our God-fearing prince come home now to find his beloved island crawling with Satan’s spawn?”

  “No!”

  “Never!”

  “Then,” she cried, “let us scour our island clean of all wickedness before our new king returns!”

  People raised their hands shouting. I felt a fervor growing in me. Even old Blind Cropper hollered, holding up his walking stick. Townsfolk gazed up at her in that spreading light as if she were an Angel of the Lord come to purify us.

  When the shouting abated, the lady sheathed her sword and pulled back her veil, revealing the black eye patch covering her glass eye. The sight sent a soft, uneasy moan through the crowd. We’d all heard how King Kadmi asked the fey folk to create a glass eye especially for the lady after she’d been attacked. Some said the eye was magical, that it empowered her to winnow out a witch.

  The lady stepped forward. “How do we know a witch?”

  Quavering, I drew my hood up. Was this what she was after? Another witch hunt? She’d come to Harrowton four years back, right after her abduction. I did not know she was still on the hunt.

  One man joked, “Witches be the toothless hags what stink up the room!”

  Lady Adela said, “How easy that would be, sir. But witches are more cunning than that. Any woman standing in this crowd with us today could be a witch. They are not always old crones. Some are young and lissome.” She paused and lifted her eye patch.

  Now her fey eye was on the crowd. We all of us gasped. The sound came in a wave. I sucked a breath in and could not let it out.

  “Could she be your neighbor, the baker’s daughter? Is she the girl at the well? A friend who has herb skills? Does she look innocent and yet she harbors secret powers?”

  Sweat slicked my back. Only Grandfather knew I had the fire-sight, and he’d warned me to keep the power secret. The visions came when I was alone, so I’d managed to keep it to myself—until the day we buried Adam. In the sexton’s burning leaf pile by the grave I saw a flaming man all green and shining in the fire, swinging his bright sword. Later that same day I ran to Joan Midwife’s house to demand our money back. I found her cutting eel for her stewpot.

  “Pay me back for the sticklewort we bought to cure Adam, or I’ll spread the word, Joan Midwife.”

  “What word?”

  “Adam died because of you, filthy hag. You’re not fit to handle infants. I’ll spread the word about you. No one will ask you to be their midwife now!”

  “Was it me made Adam die? I saw you staring at the fire, didn’t I? In a trance, you were in the graveyard.” She poked her gray tongue through her gapped teeth. “What witch spells were you casting, girl?”

  “Who is the witch?” Lady Adela asked again. “Look to any girl seen entering Dragonswood. She goes there after Satan. In secret places she joins her coven to torture her victims; she even sacrifices children, stewing their bones for the power it gives her. She’s a woman with a devil’s heart!”

  Poppy took my hand and Meg my arm. Both were frightened, though they’d only come in once with me for berries.

  “No one saw us,” I whispered to Poppy. But her wild-eyed look asked, Did your father maybe on that day, or the leech?

  “We’re exposed so high up here,” I said. “Let’s get down.”

  Meg managed to squeeze in next to Tom, but he could not make room for Poppy or me with the mob backed all the way up to the edge of the well. I tried to force my way down onto the cobbles and felt a crushing weight as my foot was pinned against the bench. I grunted with pain, tugging my leg, and barely managed to pull my foot back.

  Up on stage Lady Adela turned her head slowly left to right. “A witch brings pestilence to your town, and death. Are your elderly safe from her, are your children? A witch need only give a babe the evil eye for it to sicken and die.” Oh, that went to my heart, thinking of my brother newly in the sod. I was not the only one, for next I heard Father’s booming voice.

  “She’s a witch!” He pointed through the crowd. “Joan Midwife! She poisoned our newborn son and made him die!”

  The midwife shrieked, and I screamed, “No!” I tried again to clamber down and reach my father, whose arm was out, finger pointing. I knew he was still crazed over losing Adam.

  I’d cursed Joan Midwife to her face a week ago when she wouldn’t pay me back for her useless herbs. I might have called the midwife a witch when I fought with my father later in the backyard, but I hadn’t meant it. Surely he knew that?

  I had one foot on the ground and w
as still pinned up against the well when I saw my father moving like a great muscled bull forcing his way through the throng, shouting, “Witch!”

  “Stop him, Mother!” She couldn’t hear me above the din.

  One man called, “Midwife’s a witch?”

  Then another, “A witch surely. I lost my child after she tended the birth!”

  “She gave my girl the evil eye!”

  “Makes a man pay whether they live or not.”

  “Get her!”

  My shouts of “Stop. She’s not a witch!” were swallowed up with all the rest. The excited crowd churned like a tide pool. Some coming closer to the stage, some trying to back away from it as Midwife Joan and her brother, Tidas Leech, fought their way toward a side lane trying to escape.

  Father was still bounding for Joan with his fists up when two of Lady Adela’s knights caught the woman from behind and dragged her toward the sheriff’s house.

  “Let me go!” she howled. “The man’s a liar!”

  “Witch! Witch!” people called. I couldn’t believe how quickly they’d let my father’s single outburst poison their minds against her.

  “You want a witch?” the midwife screeched. “Look to yer daughter, John Blacksmith!” Joan was dragged inside the sheriff’s house. The heavy door slammed shut.

  Struggling, I tried to push through the throng.

  “Tess,” Poppy called from somewhere behind me. I could not stop for her. The alley was hidden by the pressing bodies, but I knew it was there. Get to it and I could run. Hood on, head down, I forced my way through, rammed into the fishmonger, stumbled. The crowd swirled around me. More shouts. Witch? Where? I know Tess. She was here.

  There she is.

  I ran, was knocked to the cobbles. On all fours I tried to crawl. Scratch my way to the alley. Where was it? Which way? Gowns, pant legs, stench. I stood, pushed past the man I’d seen earlier at the river.

  More shouts. Tess! There she is! Heart in my throat, I reeled for the alley, ran past the baker’s, cobbler’s. Large hands grabbed me. Tidas Leech. “Call my sister a witch, Tess, Blacksmith’s daughter, and I’ll call you one!” His face was red as raw beef. Spittle foamed in the corner of his mouth.

  I struggled against him. “Father doesn’t mean it. He’ll take it back. Let me go!”

  He was thickly built, stronger than I. I screamed and fought as he dragged me back through the crowd toward the stage.

  “I’ve got her now! Tess the witch! She’s the witch! Not my sister!”

  I stomped his foot, elbowed him, threw back my head to pull away.

  On stage Lady Adela looked down. Her fey eye on me.

  Chapter Three

  I WAS NOT allowed to speak at my trial the next day. Fishmonger said I hexed his pregnant wife so his boy was born with a harelip—Gave my wife the evil eye day before she birthed our boy. Tidas Leech said he’d seen me dancing naked with the devil in Dragonswood, and kissing Satan’s arse. His sister, Joan Midwife, was brought up from her cell. Her lies were the most foul. She said I’d hexed our cradle to lull all Mother’s infants to deathly sleep, used witchcraft to kill all my baby sisters and my brother so that I could stew their bones to suck in powers.

  I threw myself at her. The guards dragged me kicking from the room, and dumped me back into my cell. I prayed to Saint Thecla, who escaped death by fire when a storm put out the flames. I still remembered Jane Fine’s ear-splitting screams.

  I had clung to Grandfather’s rough neck as he ran through the mob. I was seven. He still lived in the tipped cottage by the harbor then. Among his maps and papers, I’d sobbed until I was sick, the smell of burning flesh still in my nose.

  “Remember this,” Grandfather said. “She was seen in Dragonswood. Remember it, Tess.”

  “I don’t want t-to remember,” I howled.

  Taking me up again in his strong arms, he did something then he’d never done before. Holding me close, he hummed and danced around the room. A soft fire burned in the hearth, a kind one, not a killing one. Great shadows were thrown up on the wall as he danced me about the tables and chairs. When he set me down at last, I was quiet. The man knew I had the fire-sight, but I’d never spoken my fear aloud. “Am I a witch?”

  He came down on one knee. “No, child, you’re no witch. You have a power, but there’s no darkness in it.”

  I believed him then. I still believed him. The fire-sight wasn’t evil, though why I had the gift was a mystery. He’d been right to tell me to keep my power secret, right to warn me not to be seen going into Dragonswood. I should have listened, but after Grandfather moved north, I’d had nowhere else to run for refuge nights after Father beat me. Against all reason, I’d gone to Dragonswood.

  THE NEXT DAY I was taken to a larger cell with shackles on the walls. The place stank of sweat and vomit. Hooks and winches hung from the ceiling. Hammers lay neatly beside vises on a rough-hewn table. In the corner a long poker leaned against the burning brazier; the iron chair to its left sported thick leather bands to bind the prisoner down.

  The room had the look of my father’s blacksmith shop. But I was the metal here. I was the one to be burned and bent and pressed. I nearly wet myself seeing all the torture implements.

  Lady Adela ordered the guard to tie my hands behind my back and hang me from the ceiling hook.

  “No, Lady Adela! Please. I am innocent!”

  She left the room as the guard did her bidding. I thought my arms would tear away from my shoulders. I screamed and screamed, but they left me there. I could not say how long I hung in agony. Afterward a jailor came and lowered me to the floor. I wept with relief. The man helped me up, not out of kindness, but to strap me to the iron chair he called the witch’s chair. He tightened the straps around my waist and upper arms, clamped my legs in metal vises, then set a tray before me and strapped my wrists against it.

  Lady Adela returned. She wore no eye patch. Her good eye seemed cool and deep as an evening pool, and there was life in the look, but her fey eye was cold even with the torchlight reflecting in the glass.

  My shoulders and wrists still throbbed with pain from hanging. Dry-mouthed, I begged, “Please, Lady. Some water.”

  She took out a metal vise. The jailor jammed my thumbs between the nine-inch-long metal bars. Wrists tied to the tray, thumbs wedged in the thumbscrews, I could not pull my hands back. “Mercy. Have mercy.”

  A man came in with a notebook to write my confession.

  “Why did you hex your mother’s children?” Lady Adela asked.

  “I didn’t!”

  “Yet they all died. Tell me why.” She turned the screws, crushing my thumbs.

  “Stop! The midwife—”

  “Go on,” she said, leaning in.

  The thumbscrews sent shooting pains through my thumbs, up my arms. Say she’s the witch. “My father blamed her for my brother Adam’s death. She blamed me. It’s… all a mistake.”

  “Tidas Leech saw you dancing with Satan in Dragons-wood.”

  “I didn’t.”

  She tightened the metal screws.

  “Ah!”

  “When was the last time?”

  I gulped air.

  The lady clicked her fingers. “Evidence.” The note taker put down his pad, brought her a stack of parchment. She held up one of my dragon sketches, produced a second drawing of a fey girl riding on a dragon’s back.

  “We found these hidden in your cupboard. Yours, Tess. Don’t deny it.”

  “I… sketch. It doesn’t mean—”

  “You could not have drawn these from your imagination, nor rendered the dragons and fey so well if you’d not seen them with your own eyes. And we found this.”

  She held up my drawing of the green-flamed man—the swordsman I’d seen in the fire-sight.

  “You say you’ve never been with Satan, yet you draw him burning with hellfire.”

  Lady Adela dropped my artwork to the stone floor, the green man half covering the dragon. She tightened the screws.
/>   “Stop!”

  “Admit you’re a witch.”

  The room tipped. My head fell. Blackness.

  I awoke to horrible pain. The jailor’s hands on my forehead. He stood behind the witch’s chair, holding my head up.

  “I will let you go when you confess,” Lady Adela said coolly.

  My body shook and shook.

  “I’m not a witch.”

  She tipped her head, considering. “You say you’re not a witch.” For the briefest of moments I thought she might be coming round to believing me, then she said, “There are two reasons a girl enters Dragonswood. Either she goes to join with Satan, or she’s drawn in by the fey.” She glared at me with her glass eye. “What are your powers?”

  “I… I don’t have powers.” The lie hung raw in the air between us.

  She tightened the screws again. Blood spurted from my thumbs.

  “Stop! Oh, God!”

  “Name the other girls who joined you in Dragonswood.”

  Other… girls? “No one came with me.”

  “So you have gone over the wall. You admit it! Name the others.”

  I shook my head. Vomit filled my mouth, dripped down my chin.

  She turned the screws again; blood pooled on the tray. “Tidas Leech said he saw you in Dragonswood with two other girls. He could not see the others well enough to name them. Tell me who they are.”

  “Loose the screws!”

  “Name them and the screws come off.”

  I fainted again.

  I awoke, already screaming.

  “Name them!”

  “Meg! Poppy! But they’re innocent!” I sobbed. “We only went to pick berries!”

  Too late to take it back.

  Lady Adela smiled as she loosened the screws. The man wrote the names down.

  Back in my cell, my bleeding thumbs swelled. I held them against the cold stone wall and cried myself sick. Would Meg and Poppy be arrested, tortured? God have mercy. What had I done?