The Witch Queen

by Jan Siegel

  “It’s been a lousy summer.”

  “So everyone keeps telling me.”

  “Have you been over here long?”

  An hour later, she glanced guiltily at the clock. “I must get back. We’ve got the dog-biscuit people coming—they’re sponsoring the magazine and paying for the party, so we have to keep them sweet.” She had told him about Woof! “I—I’ve enjoyed this.” She sounded slightly nonplussed by her own response. “I—thanks. I wish you luck with the site and everything.”

  He stood up with her.

  “No chance your telepathic skills could find me a human skeleton lying around there? That always gets things moving.”

  “Sorry.” Her smile flickered again. “I don’t do bones. You need a dog.”

  “Well, thanks for your help, however you did it. I’ll always believe in witches now.”

  Outside, they shook hands by way of good-bye, and he held hers a moment too long. Just a moment.

  “How about dinner sometime?”

  She went out with him on Saturday, starting with drinks in a pub and moving on to a Vietnamese meal in a restaurant of his choice. It was far less sophisticated, and less expensive, than her evenings with Luc, but she didn’t care. At the liqueur and coffee stage, Dane asked her: “Are you going to tell me what caused all this stress you’ve been having recently—or am I being too nosy?”

  “I was seeing someone,” Fern said. “It didn’t work out.” She concluded, after a pause: “All fairly commonplace.”

  He heard the quiver in her voice. “Was he playing around?”

  “Playing? No—nothing like that. It just . . . wasn’t working.”

  “Rich guy?”

  “How did you know?”

  “You look like the kind of girl who pulls rich guys. I don’t mean—hell, that came out all wrong. You look—high maintenance. And you must meet plenty of rich people through your job.”

  “I don’t usually check,” said Fern. “And for the record, I maintain myself. Anyway, what about you? Some archaeologists are rich. Heinrich Schliemann and co.”

  “He’s dead,” Dane pointed out. “For men like that, archaeology is a hobby, not a career. I get by. I lecture in term-time, dig in the vacation, sometimes both.”

  “Like Indiana Jones?”

  “You got it. Picture me with a whip and a leather hat, stealing the green eye of the little yellow god from a gang of crooks. Beautiful girl on one arm—”

  “Dead rat on the other?”

  They both laughed.

  “Whoever your guy was,” Dane resumed presently, “he must have hurt you pretty bad. You look like you haven’t laughed much in a while. Was he a fool or a knave?”

  “Knave,” said Fern, “I suppose. We—we had a disagreement . . . an argument. You could say it was a question of ethics.”

  “So it was you who ended it?” said Dane.

  “Yes,” said Fern. She produced a pale smile. “I ended it.”

  Back at the flat, feeling comfortably wined and dined despite the conversational hurdles, she drifted easily into slumber for the first time in weeks.

  It was dark when she awoke, and a glance at the bedside clock showed the time was twenty past two. She lay for a few minutes feeling restful, even though sleep was ebbing from her brain. Gradually, she became aware of a presence nearby, or the imminence of one, an elusive pressure on the atmosphere that did not quite take shape and solidity. She detected a muted heartbeat, a sense of menace, yet she was not afraid. “It’s all right,” she said. “You’re invited.” He developed slowly, a thing of air and darkness hardening into flesh. He was clean now, his coarse mane softened into an aureole from recent washing, his hot, animal smell more unobtrusive than usual. Her witchsight could just make out the terrible pitting on his brow, but beneath the ridge of bone his eyes were almost calm, their red gleam deep and soft as burgundy. “It is good to see you,” she said, and meant it. “If you go and wait in the living room—that way—I’ll put something on and we can have a drink together.”

  “Is that what friends do these days?” Kal asked.

  “Yes,” she said. “That’s what friends do.”

  They did what friends do. She opened a bottle of Corton that she had bought to share with Luc, and they drank their way through it. He looked bizarre sitting in an ordinary armchair, dressed in oddments of fur and hide, one leg outstretched, the other crooked, his lion’s tail looped over the armrest. The man-made light shone on his giant muscles, his disfigured face, the twisted coil of his horns. He glanced around from time to time, when he thought she wouldn’t notice, half-nervous, half-wondering, as if he had difficulty believing he was really there. Fern found herself filled with a deep warmth toward this mongrel creature with whom she had once traded friendship as part of a bargain, an offer made in cold blood to save her own life, and who had since become a friend indeed. It seemed to her that, more than anyone, he was the person she could talk to about everything that had happened, the one who would truly understand. She told him about the final battle with Morgus, and the courage Luc had shown, and that hiatus after when they came together at last. And the dream, and the wakening, and what followed. “I killed him,” she said. “He hesitated—I know he did—but I didn’t. I killed him.”

  “It’s natural,” he said. “I have killed often and often. To feed—to win—in vengeance—in hate. I have killed the howling dog that disturbed my sleep and the fox that slunk from my path and the beggar who would not share a crust. Your little killing is nothing, Fernanda. It is your conscience that magnifies it, born of your soul. I have no conscience, no soul. I cannot comprehend such feelings.”

  “Then why did you never kill your mother?” said Fern. “Why did you love her, in spite of all she did to you? Oh, yes, you did—you loved her and loathed her, and when her death released you, in a corner of your heart you mourned, because now there was no chance she would ever turn to you.”

  “You are seeing phantoms,” said Kal. “I never loved my mother, nor mourned for her.”

  “Liar,” said Fern. “I can sense your emotions, even the ones you deny. They are prisoners as you were, trapped in your subconscious. Let them free.”

  “Give me the wine, and let my emotions be. We were talking of yours, little witch. Your lover betrayed you, and threatened you, and you killed him to save yourself. That is the right of any living thing.”

  “Is it?” said Fern. “Or did I kill for the sake of killing, because I could? Because he made love to me, and without killing him I knew I would never be rid of the taint?”

  “You are not a killer by nature, I know that. Hence these torments.”

  “I am not tormented,” Fern responded. “I am . . . diminished. I have always believed that your soul grows when you do something that is good and brave, a right thing, a true thing, and when you do evil—no matter what the motive—your soul is eroded. Well, my soul is less. I feel an emptiness inside. As if there was a little bright flame in the nucleus of my being, and now it has gone out, or withered to an ember. I don’t . . . I don’t quite know how to go on living.”

  “Yet you manage,” Kal said. “That emptiness is familiar to me. I have always had it.”

  “You have a soul,” Fern asserted. “At least, a soul in potentia. I can see it.”

  “My father was an immortal who had no seed. My spirit was plucked from the ether and forced to inhabit a fetus botched together by magic from an unholy union. My heredity does not include a soul.”

  “We are more than our heredity,” Fern declared. “Someone said to me recently, nothing is written till we write it ourselves. I owe you, Kal: you are always reminding me of it. So I will give you something. I will give you a soul.”

  Kal’s eyes gleamed red as flame. “You have a spare?”

  “Wait.” She left the room, returning some ten minutes later with Mabb’s apple wrapped in tissue paper. “Take this. It is a goblin apple; the fruit is not good but at its core is a soulseed. Plant it, nurture
it, and as it grows, so will your soul.” She had put a spell on it to encourage rapid growth. “One day it will become a tree, and when the tree blossoms, your soul, too, will flower. But remember, magic is not enough. You must nourish it with deeds, you must try to—”

  “To do the right thing, the true thing?” He cupped the apple in one swarthy hand. His tone was suspicious. “Goblins have little magic, only petty charms, slumbersongs, will-o’-the-wisp lanterns. I have never heard of a soulseed.”

  But Fern was ready for that one. “Mabb is a picker-up of discarded enchantments,” she improvised, “a hoarder of secrets who will forget in a moment what they are or where she has hidden them. She gave me this, no doubt, because she did not know or could not recall what it really was.”

  “Why should the light-fingered queen of a race of malmorffs be sending you gifts?”

  Fern explained about their allegiance, telling him of Skuldunder—Kal had barely noticed him at Wrokeby—and Mabb’s recent visit.

  “Truly you have mighty allies,” he commented, with amused sarcasm.

  “I hate that word,” she said, suddenly cold. “Mighty. Mabb called me mighty. But I don’t want to be.”

  “I think you need this apple more than I.”

  “It wouldn’t work for me,” she said. “I’m supposed to have a soul already. If it is damaged, no magic will make it grow.”

  “Then take your own advice. Nourish it with deeds. Live again, love again, whatever love may be—“ his manner was mainly flippant, but not all “—and your soul will revive.”

  “Love again?” Fern shrugged. “I met someone lately, someone I could have—might have . . . but it’s no good. If I loved him, I couldn’t lie to him—I couldn’t tell him the truth—it will always be there, the thing I did, like a great red wound that no one else can see. I won’t be able to forget it, or ignore it, or set it aside. It will always be part of me—a part I can’t share. I fear I am damaged for good.”

  “It is not for good,” said Kal. He picked up the bottle and drained the last of the wine. “Thank you for my gift. I will grow myself a soul. Now I owe you, little witch—for many things.”

  “There are no debts between friends,” she said.

  “For that also I owe you. I will find a means to repay . . .”

  She was growing tired now and she thought he had begun to fade, blurring from her sight. Then, as in a dream, there were strong arms lifting her, carrying her to her bed, and even as sleep supervened she felt the pillow beneath her head, and someone drawing the quilt up to her chin.

  About three weeks later, she returned home from work to find a phial on her dressing table that had not been there before. Beside it was a note written in an ill-formed hand on a scrap of her own paper. You know what this is. A single draft, and your Gift, and all you have accomplished with it, good or bad, will be forgotten. You can start again, no longer my little witch, just Fernanda. Good luck to you, however you choose.

  The phial was very small, the size of a perfume bottle, and seemed to be made of rock crystal. As far as she could tell, it contained about a mouthful of clear water. When she held it up it took the light and broke it into rainbow drops that danced and flickered around the walls.

  She sat for a while, remembering the caverns of the Underworld where Kal had been her guide, and the silver notes of a fountain now little more than a trickle, all that remained of a spring that had once fed a great river. Its name lived on in legend, though the healing water had all but gone. The well of Lethe.

  She closed her hand tight around the phial, but did not touch the stopper.

  Summer declined into autumn with little appreciable change in the weather, except that it got wetter. Will’s production company won its first significant commission, involving about six weeks’ filming in the more inaccessible parts of India, as a result of which he decided he needed to cement his relationship with Gaynor by moving into her flat. “With such an unstable job,” he announced, “I need a stable home life. Besides, when some unhappily married creep comes around trying to sob his way into your sympathy, I want him to see my socks in the bathroom. And I want photos of us all over the place. Soppy ones.”

  “Next you’ll be saying you want me to get pregnant,” said Gaynor.

  “We’ll see about that in due course.”

  They gave a party to celebrate and Fern brought Dane, who, perhaps under her influence, had cut his hair short and wore something that might have been a suit if the jacket and trousers had matched. “He’s lovely,” Gaynor told her friend in an aside, hoping desperately that with someone like that Fern might learn to forgive herself, and let go of a past she could not forget.

  “Isn’t he?” said Fern, and her expression went cold. “I don’t really know what to do about it. I don’t deserve him.”

  As Will was going to be away until the second week in December, they made long-term plans for Christmas. “Family, friends, all together,” said Will, offhandedly including Dane. Fern said nothing either to confirm or deny.

  “We could go to Yorkshire,” suggested Abby, Robin Capel’s permanent girlfriend. “The house is big enough.”

  “Not Yorkshire,” said Fern, so flatly that no one attempted to disagree with her.

  Ragginbone paid Will a visit, a few days later, on one of his occasional trips to London. Hearing about Dane Hunter, he remarked: “I knew something about that excavation was important to Fern. I didn’t pretend to know what.”

  “Will she ever be able to put all that business with Lucas Walgrim behind her?” Will inquired.

  “Who knows? She is who she is. That is something that cannot change.”

  “As long as Dane doesn’t turn out to be the reincarnation of some psychotic Viking or a mad Celtic druid.”

  “He may well be,” said Ragginbone. “So may you. Since you can’t remember, what does it matter?”

  In late October, Fern and Dane took a weekend break in the Peak District. He had asked her to come to America to meet his family, but she refused, insisting it would be inappropriate as theirs was only a casual affair. The peaks were mostly obscured by rain, but he dragged her out on bracing walks and warmed her up afterward by the log fire in their hotel, and she wished she had more to give him than just the outer layer of her self. She was driving down the motorway on the way home when it happened. That sudden jolting of reality—an image from the spellfire flashing into her mind—a blinding glimpse into the moment ahead. She was in the fast lane, doing perhaps sixty-five, the wipers swishing the rain this way and that across the windshield. On the other side of the central divide there was a lorry coming toward her—huge, dirty, anonymous—she saw it in great detail. And behind the sweep of a single wiper the driver’s face shrank into a skull, and his teeth jutted in a grin of triumph . . .

  Glancing around, hand on the horn, she swerved abruptly across the traffic flow, skidding to a halt on the hard shoulder. Dane cried: “What the hell—“ but his words were cut off by the scream of tires, a horrific thud, the crunch of metal on metal. Even as Fern moved to evade it the lorry had mounted the crash barrier, bucking like a giant bronco, carried forward by its own weight and slamming straight into the car that had been behind her, mashing it into the road. The two interlocked vehicles slid across the wet asphalt, adding other victims to a pileup that finally stopped about thirty yards back. Dane took one look and reached for his mobile, dialing emergency services with his left hand while his right arm held Fern very tight. She was still clutching the wheel, her teeth starting to chatter from shock. “How did you know?” he said. “How did you know to swing over like that?”

  “I’m a w-witch,” she said when she could speak. “I knew.”

  It had not been an accident—she realized that only too clearly. The death’s-head was no hallucination; she didn’t need to listen to the news the next day to learn that the driver of the lorry had mysteriously disappeared from the scene of the pileup in which two people in the car behind her had been killed and thr
ee others seriously injured. (My fault, whispered a still, small voice in the back of her mind.) She was at the top of Azmordis’s hit list: she always would be.

  Until they got her.

  That night, for the first time in a long while, she dreamed of Atlantis. She was back in the Past, living it, at one with it, and she was sixteen again, and the burden of her years was so light, so light, and the Fern she was now dwelt in the mind of Fernani, the girl of those far-off days, and danced for joy in the cleanness of her spirit, the freshness of her heart. And there were the lion-colored colonnades, and the slaves sweeping horse dung, and the smell of perfume and spices and dust, and the great disc of the sun beating down on the dome of the temple, and the sound of the drums throbbing like heat on stone, like blood in the brain. In her dream she experienced all the sweetest moments again, jumbled together in a moving mosaic, a wonderful kaleidoscope of images and feelings, taste, touch, scent. She was in the dungeon with Rafarl, and escaping over the rooftops, and supping in his mother’s villa in the sapphire-blue evening, and making love on a beach at sunset where the sand was made of gold and the sea of bronze, and the great arc of the sky hung over all. Rafarl’s face was clear in her vision, and the beauty that came to him when he stood in a fountain shaking the water drops from his hair, or rose from the waves like a sea god, and they walked in the deserted orchard of Tamiszandre plucking the peaches that grew there, silver and golden, and the Fern of today thought her heart would break with happiness to be revisiting her city, her love, her self.

  But the throb of the drums grew louder, until the mosaic shattered like glass, and she was in the temple with the priests chanting and Zohrâne opening the Door, and the shadow of the tsunami swept over them, blocking out the sun. The dome broke like an eggshell, and the columns cracked, and the nympheline Uuinarde was hurled into the maelstrom, and Fern fled with Rafarl down the tunnel to the harbor with Ixavo the High Priest in pursuit, clutching the wound in his head to stop his brains from oozing out. And they took ship, though it was too late, but at the last she threw herself overboard to delay Ixavo, and saw Rafarl sailing, sailing into the tempest, and thought he was saved. But the hurricane tore the ship apart, the mermaid took Rafarl, and the earthquake swallowed the golden city and everyone in it. The Ultimate Powers buried it deep and forbade even the vision of it to witch and sybil alike. But they cannot forbid my dreams, thought Fern, even as she slept, and in her dream she woke, and wept, wept a pool of tears, like Alice, then a lake, then her tears turned to starlight and she was sitting on the silver shores at the Margin of the World, waiting for the unicorn who would never come again. But because it was a dream he came, and bore her away, bounding through the star spray.