Thalgor's Witch

by Nancy Holland

  Mafern let her stand there and absorb the healing power of the joyful sounds and sweet smells.

  Erwyn had wondered why anyone with all the power the Wise Witches had would live in the drab, cold tower she’d walked through. Now she saw that they lived not there but here, in the perpetual warm time created by an invisible magic tent that sheltered this roof from fog, wind, and rain, letting only the sun and its warmth shine through.

  “Welcome to the garden of the Wise Witches,” Mafern said.

  Chapter Six

  They walked through the lush foliage to a small stone table. Seated around it were three very old women. Each glowed slightly with colored light–one red, one blue, one green.

  The likeness to a council in Thalgor’s camp brought the unwelcome sting of tears to Erwyn’s eyes.

  The three Wise Witches stood and smiled kindly at her.

  “A visitor, how lovely,” said the one who would be Fire.

  “Did you have a hard journey?” asked Air with a small frown.

  “You must be hungry,” commented Earth, one hand on her own round belly.

  Erwyn’s knees wobbled. She could barely manage a smile in the presence of so much power and wisdom.

  “I’m fine, thank you.” Her voice came out thin and shaky.

  “Then we will start,” Fire declared and all three sat down.

  “Why have you come here?” Air began with a look that was sharp and deep, but not unkind.

  “I came to know if my mother spoke the truth.”

  “You doubt your mother’s word?” Earth asked in obvious surprise, her kind smile fading.

  “She had reason to lie.”

  “Tell us what she said,” Fire suggested.

  So Erwyn repeated the story of Felyn’s birth.

  “You wish to know if witches do have the power to keep a man’s seed alive in their bodies until they choose to conceive?” Air asked.

  Erwyn nodded.

  “Some do, some don’t.” Earth told her with a shrug.

  “The answer to your true question,” Fire added gently, “is written in your heart.”

  Erwyn stood silently for a moment, stunned that they would deny her the truth she has come all this way to hear. But to protest or plead would clearly be useless.

  “Why have you come here?” Air asked again.

  “To learn the nature of the child’s curse and how it might be lifted.” The words were pulled from her more than said.

  “What are the signs of her curse?” Earth asked with a frown.

  “Her eyes. The black is a slit in the green, not round.”

  “Nothing else?” Fire peered more closely at Erwyn.

  “She is only a child.”

  “The answer to your question is written in the child’s heart,” Air told her kindly.

  Again disappointment settled on Erwyn like a dark weight.

  Before she had fully absorbed the impact, Earth asked again, “Why have you come here?”

  This time Erwyn spoke the words she meant to say all along. “To become a Sea Witch.”

  Fire smiled and shook her head. “It is not your fate.” She made a swirling motion in the air and the face of the Witch King appeared above the table.

  “Is…is he my fate?” Erwyn’s voice shook with dread.

  Air waved her hand to make the vision disappear. “Your fate is written in the heart of another.”

  Erwyn’s ears rang with the need to deny their words. Her eyes stung.

  But the Wise Witches stood and Earth made a kind, but definite gesture of dismissal. Erwyn had no choice but to go.

  Mafern led her in silence back down the citadel and to the door they had entered through, then finally to the road. She handed Erwyn a bag of food, then raised her hand above her head.

  “Blessings, sister witch,” she said solemnly before she left Erwyn alone.

  Unable to hold the pain inside any longer, Erwyn ran down the road toward the sea. Her rage swirled the air around her into tiny cyclones of dust.

  How could they treat her so, like a child? She’d came so far, suffered so much, lost so much…

  “Lost what?” a voice asked her. The Witch King’s voice.

  The question only made her run all the faster. Blinded by tears, she felt her feet leave the road for the soft sand of the beach, but she ran on.

  “Mother!” she was surprised to hear herself cry. “Mother!”

  When the first wave hit her feet with a shock of icy cold, she opened her eyes. She stepped back on the hard, damp sand at the water’s edge. Ahead of her was one of the rocky points that jutted into the ocean.

  Overwhelmed by a sudden, soul-deep need to be as close as possible to the source of power, to the place where the Mother Sea crashed and swirled, she dropped the bag of food and her cloak in the sand, closed the distance to the rocks, and began to climb them.

  Once on the flat, pitted top, slick with sea plants and water, she made her way to the farthest point. Hurt and anger melted like the fog in morning. Every wave that broke below her drew her onward, until their roar filled her mind completely.

  She went to the very end of the rocks. The waves crashed on three sides of her now and wrapped her in a fine, salty mist.

  The mist parted and her mother walked toward her across the water, her face smiling and serene.

  “Mother!” Erwyn opened her arms to the vision.

  But her mother shook her head as she rose slowly into the air and disappeared into the clouds.

  Erwyn raised her arms after the vanishing illusion, then lowered them in submission.

  To be a Sea Witch was not her fate. So be it.

  The weight of disappointment lifted. In its place came a lightness in her heart, as if she were freed from a burden she never knew she carried. Flooded with joy, she lifted her hands to the sky in praise.

  The waves crashed higher around her, as if to welcome her. Their rhythm quickened to match the rush of her heart. The world shrunk to this one moment of dizzying exhilaration.

  And power. She felt as if she made the water rise and fall.

  Here, she was free. Here, in the thundering tides, was her fate. She leaned forward to fly into the crashing surf below her, to become fully one with the Mother Sea forever.

  “Erwyn.” The Witch King’s voice?

  “Erwyn!” Closer. From the land, not the sea. Thalgor’s voice.

  She turned to see him clamber across the rocks toward her on all fours like the crabs that scurried away from him.

  She looked back at the sea and suddenly saw the lure of oblivion for what it was–cowardice. An escape from the Wise Witches’ judgment.

  She started back across the slippery rocks toward Thalgor, toward the future.

  A great wave crashed over her and knocked her to her knees. If she still stood at the very edge, it would have washed her into the sea.

  Thalgor reached her as the water rushed away. He pulled her to her feet and held her at arms’ length to look at her.

  She’d never seen fear in his eyes before.

  She let him guide her, drenched and shivering, back to the sand. Her cloak lay where she’d dropped it. He wrapped her in it, cursing under his breath.

  She pushed him away. “Leave me, if I caused you too much trouble again.”

  “After I came so far to find you? You cause me nothing but trouble, witch, but you’ll not get rid of me so easily.”

  He cursed again and leaned his forehead against hers.

  “I thought the sea would take you.” He shuddered. “I never saw anything like it. As wide as the sky, but alive. Alive and dangerous. Yet you danced with it! Are you mad, witch?”

  The fear was back in his eyes. His hands trembled and for a moment she saw the frightened child inside the great warrior.

  “The sea is our mother.” Her teeth chattered as she spoke.

  “A mother who can take life as well as give it.” His voice was tight with unaccustomed fear. “A witch mother.”

  Sh
e put one icy hand on his face to comfort him, but he shook the gesture off. The frightened child disappeared again.

  “Come.” He took her hand. “I made a camp by the pool. There’s a fire laid and a lean-to out of the wind.”

  She nodded, too cold to refuse his offer of shelter.

  “How did you get a lean-to here?” Then she saw the ox that grazed on the grass by the river and waved the question away.

  Once they reached the makeshift camp he hunkered down with his back to her to start the fire while she pulled off her sodden clothes.

  “There’s another gown in one of the baskets,” he told her without turning around. “Gee thought you might need it. But I didn’t bring another cloak. We’ll have to hang everything on some bushes to dry.”

  She found the gown and quickly slipped it on, then hung her clothes on the bushes. She took both of their cloaks to the edge of the beach and spread them on the rocks.

  “The rocks are hot from the sun. They’ll dry faster,” she explained in answer to Thalgor’s frown when she got back.

  “Do you never do what you’re told, witch?” He sighed. “Come here, closer to the fire. You’re still shivering.”

  “Why did you follow me?” she asked when her teeth stopped chattering.

  “I wasn’t going to. You were always going to go to the Sea Witches. We found a place to camp for the warm time.”

  He sat across the fire from her, but through the pale daytime flames she could see a look of pain cross his face.

  “Then I dreamed of my father. He told me to come after you. He said it was not your fate to be a Sea Witch.”

  Witch blood, father and son.

  “How is the child?” she asked.

  “Content. But she clings to Gee. I think she feels safer when you are there. Perhaps because you are a witch.”

  Thalgor got up and searched through the baskets.

  “I have food.” She pointed to the bag Mafern had given her.

  “You see too much,” Thalgor grumbled as he brought the damp bag to the fire.

  The bread inside was too wet to eat, but he rinsed the salt water from the fruit in the pool.

  “Why does it annoy you if I know what you want?” she asked.

  “If you knew what I truly wanted, you would not sit there so calmly, witch.”

  A flash of what he wanted blazed through her mind and skittered down her spine. Witch blood to witch blood.

  She made the image go away.

  “The Sea Witches gave you enough for two,” he commented quietly as he handed her the larger portion of food.

  “Did you think no one from the citadel saw you come down the road? Even I saw you, though I did not know it was you.”

  He laughed. “And who else would come alone and unarmed to the stronghold of the Sea Witches with a laden ox?”

  They ate in silence as the small fire burned low.

  She started to stand. “I’ll get more wood.”

  Thalgor shook his head. “I’ll go. You rest.”

  She was still surprised how willingly he and Rygar did the women’s work her uncle, even her father, would never have touched.

  She must have fallen asleep as she stared into the flames because the next thing she knew she lay on the bed in the lean-to, where Thalgor had carried her.

  That he had made only one bed should have frightened her, but the shiver that ran through her body was hot.

  Thalgor had banked the fire and was swimming in the pool of clear river water.

  Suddenly the salt and sand that still clung to her skin under the clean gown became unbearable. She pulled the gown over her head and walked into the water.

  It was cold. Colder even than the sea. But sweet and clean.

  She drove under the surface, unbraided her hair, and ran her hands through it, reveling in the feel of it as it floated free.

  When she came up for air, waist deep in the shallows, she saw Thalgor in the center of the pool treading water. The wonder on his face as he looked at her body melted something deep inside her.

  She wanted to see his body with a yearning so sharp it made her gasp.

  She plunged into the water and swam toward him, but he swam away to the rocks at the upstream end of the pool. He climbed up to sit on one of them, his beautiful, scarred body on glorious display. She wanted to hear the story behind every scar, to kiss and smooth away all the pain they’d ever caused him.

  She wanted to touch the unfamiliar maleness of him. She wanted him to touch her, wanted with a terrible urgency for him to caress all the soft, aching parts of her she’d never known existed before.

  She walked as close as she could with her feet still on the sand and stared.

  “Stay away, witch.” He covered himself too late with his hands. “Don’t look at me.”

  Confused by the rebuff when she thought he invited her stare, she swam back to the camp and waded ashore.

  A loud splash behind her was all the warning she had.

  Thalgor grabbed her from behind by the shoulders and spun her around to face him. “Do you want me, witch?”

  She looked into his face. Joy filled her the way light fills the sky at dawn. “Yes.”

  “Man to woman, woman to man?”

  Woman and man, not witch and warrior, not anything but what they simply were, now, together. “Yes.”

  “To keep my tent and bear my children.”

  A new thrill of joy flowed through her at the thought.

  “Yes.”

  “Me,” he pulled her against the hardening of his body. “Only me.”

  “Only you, Thalgor.”

  Then the sweetest words of all. “Only you, Erwyn.”

  She reached her arms up around his neck and rubbed her body against his in an enticement as old as time. He claimed her mouth with a moan, swept her up into his arms and carried her back to the lean-to.

  “Only one bed,” she said with a smile as he laid her on it.

  He gave a lazy shrug and lay beside her. “I could have slept outside.”

  Then he gently kissed her. His touch was gentle, too, as his hands explored her damp, cool flesh.

  She wasn’t cold. His touch lit a fire in her skin that swirled through her to pool at her core.

  As of their own will, her fingers played along the muscles and scars of his body, lingered where her touch made him moan. Brazenly she eased lower, toward the maleness pressed against her softening belly.

  His hands on her breasts made her cry out. His thumbs on her nipples made her hands fly away from him to grasp the blanket at her side. He slid his body down hers and took her nipple in his mouth. The swirl of fire became an inferno of need. She grasped his head to her breast and let the desire carry her on its roaring, searing flight.

  His hand found the heat at her center. Gentle here, too, but the more tantalizing for it, he opened and explored the secrets hidden there.

  Suddenly she was consumed entirely. She called his name as she soared to a place she’d never imagined.

  With a cry he entered her, the pain no more than she could erase with the tiny part of her mind not drowned by desire.

  He lay still upon her as they both savored the shudders of delight that flowed now from her to him, buried inside her.

  He brushed his lips against her cheek. “So precious.”

  His arms trembled with restrained need as he held himself over her. She answered his unasked question by lifting her hips to claim him more fully. He moved against her, slowly at first, then faster, until she arced again beneath him. He caught her cry with his mouth and gave one more great thrust before the raging flames consumed them both.

  She lingered in the bliss, her only reality the strength and heat of his body over hers. Their hearts beat to the same rhythm as the cloud of pleasure slowly ebbed.

  She dozed until she felt Thalgor leave her. Through half-closed eyes she watched as he brought a bowl of fresh water. He turned her gently, then dabbed a bit of cloth in the water and wiped her leg
s clean of the blood she had shed.

  Then he poured the water reverently back into the pool, lay down beside her and wrapped his arms around her.

  She slept again, afloat on the sea of his tenderness.

  *

  Thalgor awoke to find Erwyn sitting on the bed beside him, fully dressed. Before he could act on the need to have her naked beneath him again, she proffered the clothes she must have collected from the side of the pool where he left them. She didn’t look at him.

  Reluctantly he sat up and dressed. Then he put his hand on her chin to turn her face toward him. She didn’t resist but kept her eyes downcast.

  “You will not look at me. Do you regret what you said, what we did?” For the second time that day his heart froze in his chest as it hadn’t since he was a boy.

  “No. But it grows dark and cold. If I look at you, we will freeze and starve and lose our ox.”

  Delight sprang him to his feet. He pulled her up, wrapped his arms around her, and spun her in a circle.

  “You are truly my woman now.” He set her down. “You have begun to nag me.”

  “I nagged you before.” She pulled her dry clothes from the bushes, shook off the salt and sand, and folded them into one of the baskets.

  “Then you nagged me as a witch used to having her own way. Now you nag me as a woman who cares if I am warm and fed.”

  She opened her mouth to argue but he kissed her soundly. She laughed. The sound sang in his heart as he went to find their ox and tether it.

  In the night, between sweet dreams, he taught her the joy of long, slow pleasure. As he plunged into her one last time, he thought, My woman.

  And heard her voice in his mind, half-mocking, “Your witch.”

  *

  The next morning Erwyn woke at sunrise and went to the edge of the sea. She watched as the fog lifted and day colored the water. Icy little waves washed over her toes.

  When Thalgor came to stand close behind her, she felt him tremble.

  “The sea is truly the mother of all witches,” he whispered as if the water could hear. “It is so vast, so powerful, so unpredictable. Like any woman. But even more like a witch. I know now why no men live near the sea.” He put one arm protectively around her. “How do you fight something so huge? How do you protect what is yours from its power?”