The Witch Queen

by Jan Siegel

  “Neither. Weather can be controlled, but it’s very difficult to conjure. There are other powers in the world far stronger than mine—or hers. There’s even supposed to be someone called Luck, though I’m told you shouldn’t rely on him.” The premature gloom lightened a little as the water-cannon rainfall slowed to a monsoon.

  “Does Morgus really hope to defeat us with those birds?” Luc pursued, frowning. “Or is she just an obsessive Hitchcock fan?”

  Fern accorded the remark a smile that was merely polite. “She may be aiming to exhaust my Gift,” she said.

  “If I have the Gift, too, can I use it?”

  “I . . . I don’t know. If you have, you haven’t learned to discipline it—or channel it. And it won’t work the way mine does: different people always have different talents. Stick with the broom: it’s safer.”

  There was a quality in the somber, almost-handsome face that she could not read. Possibly it was withdrawal. She had forgotten to look for Rafarl in him: in these moments he was only Luc. “Presumably, when the birds run out, she’ll come herself,” he was saying.

  “I hope so,” said Fern.

  The flock, dispersed by the storm, did not regroup in the same numbers: Most of the birds had fled back to the place from whence they came. In the shelter of the Eternal Tree there were no extremes of weather, and the birds dwelt there in relative safety, menaced only by each other. A few ravens remained behind, circling the house, perching briefly on gable and chimney, calling to their mistress in harsh voices. She waits for dark, thought Fern; but the evening was long and light. The cloud cover split, and an unexpected sunset overflowed the gap, spilling its yellow fires across the underbelly of cumulus, irradiating the landscape. Lean shadows stretched out behind hump and hummock, hill and tree. Fern and Luc relaxed their vigil enough to begin tidying up and cleaning off the droppings. In Will’s old studio, they covered the broken pane with a black garbage bag, since all the plastic wrap had been used in the kitchen. Fern even leafed through the Yellow Pages and telephoned a repairman, booking him for the following Monday, hearing her own words spoken with a sense of dislocation in time. There was no Monday, she would not be there, the universe must turn around before Monday came again . . . She told herself sternly not to be a fool. There was always Monday: in a world of working weeks it was the one thing you could depend on.

  “What’s the matter?” Luc must have been watching her more closely than she realized.

  “Nothing. Nerves.”

  She knew Will would be waiting for another call, but she did not phone, not yet. She felt less and less able to talk normally.

  The sunset faded slowly, leaving a wide green pool of empty sky beyond the departing cloud. Some kindly god switched on the evening star, its tiny, friendly glimmer winking at her down the light-years. Gradually, one photon at a time, the day died. Night fell like a black velvet curtain.

  Morgus came.

  She came to the front door, not the kitchen. They heard the heavy hand of the driver pounding the knocker, heard him call some-thing that might have been: We know you’re there. Then another voice, whisper soft but so resoundingly clear it seemed Morgus could have been in the room with them already: “Let me in, Morcadis. You know you cannot keep me out. Don’t waste your strength. Let me in, and I may spare you, at the end.”

  As you spared Kal? thought Fern. Break the taboo. I dare you.

  But she made no audible answer.

  There came the thudding of an ax or machete hacking at the door, splitting the weathered oak. Then footsteps entering, pausing. Hodgekiss. “Come in, mistress.” She thinks to cheat the Ultimate Laws, Fern realized. She instructs an ordinary mortal to break in and issue the invitation . . .

  “Shouldn’t we do something?” Luc hissed, scowling.

  Fern shook her head slowly. They drew away from the kitchen door, positioning themselves by instinct, without any prearranged plan, Fern in front of the patched window and half leaning on the trash can, Luc to her left, Lougarry to her right, Bradachin lurking unobtrusively in the lee of the cupboard. Luc found he had picked up the broom automatically, and propped it in a corner, reaching instead for one of the larger carving knives. Morgus’s voice sounded again, from the hallway just outside.

  “Let me in, Morcadis.”

  The kitchen door shook. The fork-wedge was back in place, but it flew out with such force that it shot across the room and stuck, quivering, in the opposite wall. The latch lifted of its own volition. The door opened. Morgus entered, not on a gust of rage as she had done in Moonspittle’s basement, but slowly, deliberately. Her gaze locked on to Fern’s. Nehemet slid into the room behind her in a single fluid motion, like a worm through a crack. Her muzzle swayed, catching the scent of goblin; but the sight of Lougarry deterred her. Hodgekiss waited in the rear, faithful as an automaton.

  Morgus said: “At last,” but there was no exultation in her tone. She seemed taller than Fern remembered, perhaps because she was so slender. The serpentine tangles of her hair made an irregular black halo around her face; contemporary makeup emphasized the fixity of her expression, staining the set mouth, outlining the deadly eyes. The room appeared to rearrange itself around her, becoming mere background for her personality. Yet Luc, glancing at Fern, thought there was something forceful in Fern’s face, too. For all its delicate angles and fine-drawn features, something indefinably, elusively similar was matching Morgus look for look, meeting power with challenge. A hint—a phantom—the shadow of a resemblance.

  “You have stolen something that belongs to me,” said Morgus. “You crept into my house by night and took the one ripe apple from my Tree. Like Eve, you will pay dear for your theft. Give it to me. Give it to me now.”

  “No,” said Fern. The monosyllable seemed to escape her with difficulty. She was clenching her power. Braced. Armed. In the can behind her, the head hammered against the sides with a muffled boom . . . boom . . .

  “So!” cried Morgus. “It is there!” The familiar lightning flashed from her hand. Fern made a quick gesture of defense, but she was just too late, and the jolt knocked her off balance. Luc and Lougarry leaped from either side, but Morgus’s movements were thought-fast: she singed the she-wolf’s fur and sent Luc reeling, burned even through his leather jacket. The lid flew off the can and the head sprang out in a volley of potatoes, bandage and blindfold unraveling. The lips were bitten raw from the savagery of its struggles; the eyes rolled. Morgus caught it by the hair, her Medusa stare meeting its true reflection. “Morgun?”

  “Morgus,” said the head.

  And in that moment of comprehension, they were one.

  “It’s . . . me,” Morgus shrieked at Fern. “You stole—me. You stuck my guardian like an insect on a collector’s card—you slew my Tree with my own poison—and then you rob me of my Self, a part of me—!” A hissing stream of Atlantean issued from her mouth, and Fern’s bare forearms bubbled into blisters that burst immediately, evacuating tiny maggotlike creatures that wriggled into her clothes. She fought to stay calm, muttering a counterspell, suppressing a scream when the maggots began to burrow under her skin. A frustrated Bradachin hurled his rolling pin, but Morgus batted it aside with barely an effort. The larvae were crisping into coiled cinders, dropping off Fern’s body, but she was bleeding from a hundred minute wounds. She tried to shield, knowing she should have done it before, cursing herself for her stupidity. Morgus’s incantation continued relentlessly. “Sangué luava, duum luavé invar . . .” The trickle of blood became a gush. Fern fell forward, seeing spots, too weak to fight back . . .

  On the floor, straining to push herself up, she saw Nehemet squirm between her mistress’s legs as if in affection—and nip her ankle. There was an unexpected touch of malice to the action. Morgus broke off her chant, crying out more in shock than pain, and stumbled backward over the cat, losing her grip on the fruit. The spell failed. The head, teeth bared, bounced toward Fern. But she was drawing on her Gift, reviving swiftly, using the respite to flo
od her limbs with pure power. She snatched at the hair, scrambling to her feet—“Luc! The knife!”—seizing the weapon when Luc kicked it over to her.

  Morgus appeared briefly paralyzed, staring at the cat.

  “You betrayed me,” she said. “You . . .” She heard again the words of the seeress speaking of her sister: She found a way to put her spirit elsewhere. But not in the Tree, nor any of its later fruit . . .

  “This is you,” Fern said to her, holding the prize that writhed and snarled in her grasp. “Your Tree, your head. You’ve seen it, touched it, acknowledged it. The magic is complete. And it’s never been dipped in the Styx.”

  The witch queen raised her hand, began to speak—but this time, it was she who was too slow. Fern plunged the knife into one eye; it felt soft, like butter, like all the clichés, and then there was denser matter, muscle or sinew, an instant of resistance before the point penetrated the brain. Two voices gave vent to a single scream, less a cry than a choke, cut off in seconds. Scarlet juice burst over Fern’s breast and splattered the floor. Scarlet blood streamed down Morgus’ cheek, clogging in her hair. But the wounds did not close. There was a splinter of time when she seemed to be still alive, when the scream still gurgled in her throat and a hand groped toward the hideous injury and her good eye gaped and stared in final malevolence. Then her body jerked and folded, slowly, slowly, and her face emptied of all but the terminal impress of pain. And there she was on the floor, a disorderly heap of flesh and bone, suddenly shrunken to mortal proportions, smaller with the smallness of death. Deprived of health and heartbeat, the power of the Tree could no longer sustain her or her fruit: the head rotted in Fern’s grip, the juice stains fading to brown, while the corpse was already beginning to decay, a thousand years of aging compressed into less than a minute. The flesh greened and shriveled, wafting a foulness through the kitchen, withering to a tumble of white bones that brittled visibly and subsided into dust. Even her clothes were gone, caught in the magic, perishing with their wearer. The goblin-cat approached the little dust pile that had been her mistress, sniffed it, and then, inexplicably, slashed it with her paw. The last atoms of Morgus were scattered across the stone flags, blown on a sudden draft and lost, not on a battlefield as she might have wished but in a scullery. Nehemet lifted her head, looking at Fern for a long moment in a way she did not understand; then she slunk out.

  She was never seen again.

  Luc got up, wincing from the burns on his chest. He came to Fern and put his arms around her, not speaking; her blood soaked into his shirt. Presently, he said: “Did you know that would happen?”

  “No,” she admitted shakily. “I just hoped.”

  “You’re hurt.”

  “So are you.”

  Lougarry was licking her scorched fur, Bradachin ground his foot in the dust that had once been Morgus. “Guid riddance,” he said. “Howsomedever, lassie, next time ye couldna be mair siccar? That wa’ a wee bit close for my liking.” He picked up the knife that Fern had let fall and put it on the table; the fruit had rotted away to an evil-smelling smear. Hodgekiss walked in, looking like a sleepwalker suddenly and rudely awakened.

  “Mrs. Mordaunt . . .” he mumbled. “Where’s Mrs. Mordaunt?”

  “She’s gone,” said Luc, “and she won’t be coming back. If I were you, I should take yourself home. Leaving now. It’s a long drive.” And, as an afterthought: “Tell your company to send the bill to Kaspar Walgrim.”

  “They always do.”

  “What we need,” said Bradachin when the man had gone, “is usquebaugh. Usquebaugh tae fight the devil, usquebaugh tae heal the hert . . .”

  “Robbie Burns?” said Fern.

  “Boggan,” said the goblin.

  He fetched the whiskey. He knew where it was kept.

  In the study of his Knightsbridge home, Kaspar Walgrim was sitting in front of his PC when he had the sudden impression that Time jarred. He found he had upset his sherry, and looked around the familiar room as if unsure where he was. His recollection of recent weeks—months—was inexplicably blurred. And then he blinked at the computer screen, and saw the details of the company he had invented, and the vast sums of the bank’s and clients’ money he had poured into it. In a frenzy he flicked through account after account, watching the money dodge here and there, acquiring a will of its own, ducking and diving, switching identities, bleeding away into the ether. He had never done anything criminal in his life, and now, seeing the evidence of his madness unfolding before him, his brain spiraled into panic. It was a dream, a nightmare—but no, the nightmare was over, and this was the awakening. He saw the name of Melissa Mordaunt and wondered fleetingly who she was. And then the memory returned of a woman with a bird’s face, a spike-haired harpy who melted into a raven goddess caressing him with fingers of silk, transporting him into a dark Paradise . . .

  At Wrokeby, the spell wall in the attic shimmered into view, a woven net of strange and sinister beauty—and vanished. Kal reached through the bars, probing the air, feeling nothing. He withdrew his hand, his expression undiscernible beneath the mask of grime, the lice-ridden hair. (He had eaten the lice when he was hungry.) He knew what it meant. Morgus had been his mother, had rejected and tormented him, punishing him for his birth, his being, for the monster she had made him. And now she was dead . . . There was something in his eyes that might have been pain, or perhaps simply a longing for the pain that was suddenly no longer there. Then he thought of Fern thrusting her hand through the barrier. He seized the chains that fettered him, the muscles in his arms stiffening into rigidity. He was part werefolk: captivity had not weakened him. The chains creaked, link grinding on link, straining at the ring that held them to the wall—then snapped like breadsticks. His legs were free; a few more minutes and his arms followed. The manacles still clasped wrist and ankle, loose ends of chain clattering as he moved, but he could deal with those later. He grasped the bars, trying to force them apart, wrenching, bending. It took a long time, but he had time. His strength was more than human though his soul was less, and gradually the gap widened, and the bars twisted, tearing up the floor where they were embedded, sending great cracks zigzagging across the ceiling. After nearly two hours, there was enough space for him to insinuate his body between them. On the other side he straightened up, stretching; the muscle web across shoulders and torso flexed, tensed, and relaxed into suppleness. Then he moved through the attics, chains rattling faintly, his stench following him like a darkness. In the ghostless house there were no eyes to watch him go.

  Downstairs he met Grodda, who at Morgus’s whim had brought him food: Nehemet’s leavings, mice she had trapped, worms from the garden. On the rare occasions when she had arrived with a proper meal, she always spat in the dish. Seeing him, she turned to run, but she was not fast enough.

  He broke her neck.

  Then he went out, leaving the door ajar, letting the country night flow in to fill the emptiness.

  In Dale House, Fern and Luc were patching up their injuries. A search of the bathroom cabinet had yielded a selection of antiseptic creams, one or two suitable for minor burns, and such antiquated remedies as iodine and hydrogen peroxide. There were also Band-Aids of assorted sizes, lengths of bandages, pads of gauze. Luc had stripped off his damaged jacket and unstuck the bloodstained shirt from his burns; Fern spread cream gingerly on the blistered area and insisted that he wash every spider scratch even though, as he pointed out, those lacerations were old and dry. “I’ll deal with them later,” he said. “Your turn. Take your top off. And your bra. And your jeans.”

  “I’d rather—”

  “And don’t fuss.”

  She complied. The maggot bites on her upper torso were tiny, but there were very many of them, and Morgus’s magic had seen to it that she bled freely. Her top was already stiffening from the drying blood, and she squirmed out of it with difficulty; underneath, her white bra was blotched crimson. Bradachin dematerialized tactfully, muttering something about a robe, while she peeled
off her jeans. Her body was very slender, twiglet boned, curving slightly outward at the stomach, like a child’s. When she removed her bra Luc saw her breasts were small and conical, tapering to nipples like hard pink shoots. She did not work out, and her thighs were slim and soft, her thin arms lacking the reinforcement of visible biceps. Her fragility and the number of her wounds roused him to an unfamiliar gentleness: he wiped away the blood with cotton balls dipped in a bowl of boiled water and peroxide, feeling her every wince, every instance of teeth-clenching pain deep in his own loins. “How come these don’t self-heal like your hand?” he asked her.

  She explained, trying not to react to the proximity of his naked chest, the hurts that made him vulnerable, her own nakedness and vulnerability. Despite the stinging of the peroxide, the touch of the cotton ball was cool and pleasant.

  “They’re not deep,” he was saying. “I could bandage half your body like an Egyptian mummy—”

  “Don’t bother. Let them breathe. But you ought to cover those burns.”

  “Perhaps we should let them breathe as well.” The cotton ball moved along the crease beneath her breast, daubed her nipple. She felt suddenly warm inside, very warm, though her customary pallor did not alter. And then Bradachin reappeared with a bathrobe, and she put it on, fumbling clumsily with the tie, and turned away to see to Lougarry, and Luc resorted to the whiskey bottle.

  Later, unexpectedly ravenous, they raided the fridge and opened cans of soup from the larder. Fern telephoned Will, telling him at length what had happened, absentmindedly sipping her way through a large glass of scotch on the side before she hung up. Lougarry lay in her preferred spot by the stove; Bradachin, seeing the two humans did not need him, faded unobtrusively from the scene.