Wren the Fox Witch (Europa #3: A Dark Fantasy)

by Joseph Robert Lewis

  “Whatever you want. But whatever you do, you need to do something new, something different,” he said. “This soldier-of-fortune routine of yours is tearing you to pieces.”

  “I’m not the same person you knew back in Damascus,” she said.

  “Neither am I. You know, it’s funny, the nature of our immortality is that our bodies can’t change because our souls are inside these pendants, yet our souls seem to go on changing all the same.”

  “It’s not funny at all.”

  “Sorry.” Omar wiped his hand across his mouth. “Well, we’ll figure it out. Come on, let’s get back into the city and call it a night. All right?”

  She nodded and they started walking again. She paused by her dented armor lying in the snow.

  “Leave it,” he said. “That’s in the past now.”

  She nodded again and they continued along in the shadow of the wall. They eventually found another smaller gate and a quick flash of Omar’s seireiken convinced the guards to let them enter.

  As they walked through the empty streets of Constantia, a cold wind began to blow gently down the wide boulevards. Omar saw the tiny shiver in Nadira’s shoulder and the prickling gooseflesh around her bare throat. He shrugged off his coat and held it out to her, and she took it and slipped it on without a word.

  “So what’s the story with the walking corpses?” she asked.

  “I don’t know yet. Are you interested in that sort of thing?”

  “I’m interested if I need to be.”

  He shook his head. “I doubt it’s anything we’ll need to worry abo—”

  A moan echoed out of the alleyway beside them.

  Omar looked over and saw three figures staggering toward them. He drew his seireiken. “I’m starting to regret destroying that lovely sword of yours.”

  “A pity, but that life is behind me now,” Nadira said as she gestured to the alley. “Whenever you’re ready, old man.”

  He sighed. “This is turning into Ysland all over again.” The three corpses began shuffling along faster, their frozen eyes fixed on his bright sword.

  “What happened in Ysland?”

  “Very bad things.” He raised his weapon and saw Ito Daisuke standing to one side out of the corner of his eye. “At least this time it’s not my fault.”

  Chapter 17. Nightmare

  “It looks like the aether is starting to settle,” Wren said. “If the wind could move it, it would probably thin out pretty fast, I think. Oh well.” She lingered by the balcony a few more moments and watched the stars shine down on the palace and the water.

  The screams echoing across the city outside had died down shortly after she took the bracelets from Yaga, and once she had used her own ring to sweep the aether out of the tower, most of the nightmare sounds had faded away completely, leaving the city quiet, though still shrouded in darkness.

  Wren came back inside and sat down by Yaga’s head. “How are you feeling?”

  “I hate you.”

  Wren sighed. “I suppose I can keep you like this. Without a sun-steel resonator, you can’t move the aether, and as long as I’m nearby, I can keep the aether from carrying your nightmares out there.”

  “Idiot child,” Yaga muttered. “I am forever.”

  “I know, and that’s the problem. I can’t always be here, taking care of you, can I?” Wren played with the silver bracelets and ran her fingers over the veins of gold running around them. As she touched the warm sun-steel, dozens of strange faces flashed in the shadows around her, the ghosts of men and women wearing furs and leather cloaks covered in bones, almost like armor.

  Her ancestors? Her enemies? Her priests? What sorts of souls would a woman like this collect for her trinkets?

  Wren said, “So you can’t sleep, and you can’t stop having the nightmares. All right then. I can fix that.”

  “No, you can’t.” The answer was a mangled chorus of Yaga, the ancient valas of Denveller, and the souls inside the bracelet she was holding.

  Wren dropped the bracelet into her lap and frowned. “Thanks for the support.” She shuffled over closer to Yaga’s head. “So, you’re always having these nightmares, eh? All right then. Let’s take a look at your ghost.”

  She reached out and laid her right hand on the woman’s brow and pressed down tightly, squeezing her sun-steel ring between their skin. Wren closed her eyes.

  Gudrun had explained ghost-talking to her once, during one of the old crone’s more lucid moments, but the lesson had been less than helpful. Omar had found the story amusing and offered a few similar anecdotes, but no lessons of his own.

  I can do this. If Gudrun could do it, I can do it.

  For a brief moment she felt herself falling through the darkness, falling forward through a shadowy space where eight old women sat clustered around a tiny circle of moonlight. They glanced up at her as she passed, and Wren saw the cold eyes of Kara watching her fall.

  And then she was standing on solid ground in the middle of a dirt road that had been churned up by horses and wagons and then frosted with snow and ice. The houses on either side of the road were log cabins with stone chimneys gently exhaling their hearth smoke into the pale blue sky.

  This is the nightmare?

  There were goats, sheep, and chickens in small wooden pens. There were people all around, chopping wood and carrying buckets of water and trudging down the lane toward a small lake with their fishing poles. The men wore dark shabby suits and women wore dark shabby dresses with colorful scarves tied over their hair.

  It looks a little like Vlachia, or what Vlachia must have been like before the corpses. Is this Rus?

  She started walking down the middle of the road, and she nodded to the people as she passed them, but no one nodded back. They walked on by as though they didn’t see or hear her at all.

  It only took a few minutes to reach the end of the village, where she paused to gaze out over a frozen field that may have held rows of wheat just a few weeks ago, at harvest time. Now everything was bare and empty, resting for the winter.

  Wren was about to turn back for another pass through the village when a small boy came running out of the woods at the far end of the field. He careened over the dirt rows and dead stalks and flew by Wren on his way into town. He shouted over and over again, “Mama! Papa! The sainted mother! Help!”

  She almost followed him back to his house to hear more, but instead she set out across the field. She could see the boy’s tracks easily in the fresh snow and broken mud and at the edge of the field she pushed her way through the dead bushes and entered the woods.

  The trail led downhill and Wren lifted her skirts to step over the broken branches and fallen saplings. Hundreds of brown and silver trees stood silent watch over her, their trunks making dark pillars against the white of the snowy ground. The slope was rocky in some places and icy in others, and she fell more than once before she reached the bottom of the hill. There she found a small stream running over a bed of round stones with bits of ice clinging to the mossy banks.

  Now what? Where am I? What am I doing?

  “Hello?” she called.

  No one answered.

  Upstream or downstream?

  She turned right and started crunching along the snowy bank of the stream, following it back up in search of its source. The water wound through the woods in the deep depression of its bed, and Wren wondered if the water ever filled the channel, perhaps when the spring thaws unleashed the floods that were frozen high on the mountains in the distance.

  As she walked, she listened to the stillness of the wood. No squirrels chattered and no birds sang. From time to time, a frozen branch would crack and tumble to the ground with a dry crash and clatter in the distance.

  Maybe I did it wrong. Maybe this isn’t Yaga’s nightmare at all. After all, these are waking nightmares. Maybe they work differently from regular ones.

  Wren came around a bend in the stream and found a wide flat glen ahead where a cottage stood in the cent
er of a clearing.

  Or maybe this is the right place after all.

  The cottage did not sit on the ground. In the center of the clearing there stood two massive old trees with huge twisted roots snaking and writhing through the frozen earth. The trees were only a few paces apart, and they were both cut off some twenty feet in the air. And upon the tall stumps of the trees was the log cabin.

  Omar said something about this. In Rus they build tree-houses to store meat where the bears can’t reach it. But I never pictured something like this.

  She glanced down at the clawing roots at the bottom of the two trees.

  It looks like the house has giant chicken legs.

  She entered the clearing and eyed the high ring of earth that encircled the two trees. The mound was covered in snow, but as she came closer Wren saw that were dull gray lumps poking up all along the top of the frozen wall.

  It’s probably a stone wall to keep animals away.

  There were two openings in the wall where the little stream trickled in from the north and trickled out to the south, and Wren paused at this natural gateway to brush the snow off the nearest of the gray lumps, and found a human skull staring back at her. She froze, her hand still raised in mid-swipe. A sheet of frozen snow groaned and broken free of the wall for many paces off to the right. The snow crashed to the ground, revealing a wall of femurs and ribcages, and tiny finger bones.

  It’s like something out of the old sagas. Maybe a demon lives here.

  “Hello?”

  No answer.

  Wren entered the ring of bones and began circling the two trees, peering up at the log cabin in search of a door or ladder, but she saw neither. As she walked, the hard crunching of the snow underfoot softened into a wet sucking sound and she felt the ground clinging to her feet. She looked down, expecting warm brown mud.

  Her boots were soaked in blood up to her ankles. Looking back, she saw that the last few of her boot prints were all full of bloody puddles.

  “Yaga?”

  A crow screamed in the distance. She looked up into the woods and stood very still, listening. And as she peered up at the trees, she saw something moving. Many somethings. Slowly, she realized it was the trees themselves. Their stiff and bare branches were all gradually sagging, drooping lower, gently bending and arching as though they had become as soft as supple leather. Shards of bark began to fall away from the branches, revealing the moist pink and red flesh of the trees spotted with dark blood.

  Wren closed her eyes and swallowed hard. She felt her heart pounding and her hands shaking.

  It’s not real. It’s just a dream. Just a nightmare. It’s not real.

  She opened her eyes, but this time ignored the ground and the woods and tried to focus on the cabin high above her.

  “Hello? Anyone?”

  She made a second pass around the two trees just to be sure she hadn’t missed something the first time, but she only confirmed that the house had no windows, no doors, and no way to climb up to it. And with each passing moment, the stark black and white landscape around her was swallowed up by wide swathes of crimson on the earth and up the trees, seeping up out of the ground.

  “Damn it, Yaga, I’m tired of this game. Show me the door already! Show me now!”

  A terrible wooden groaning and keening echoed through the wood, and Wren stumbled back into the bone fence. The soft bloody earth under her feet shuddered, and the ice cracked, and a deep rumbling shook the ground.

  Woden, be my shield.

  One of the trees beneath the cabin was bending sharply halfway up, and the base of the tree began to rise, its clawing roots tearing up the earth. When it broke free of the ground, huge clumps of dirt and snow tumbled from the exposed roots like dead bodies. Then the roots came down to rest on the ground and the other tree bent and tore itself free of the ground just like the first one.

  It’s going to trample me!

  Wren bolted toward the nearest opening in the fence, but the cabin lunged and planted one of its massive tree-legs directly in her path, splashing her with the blood from the pools all around her. The impact shook the ground from under her and Wren slipped backward in the muck and struck her head on the skulls of the fence. As she clutched her aching head, she looked up, expecting to see a filthy mass of roots about to crush her into the ground.

  But instead, the cabin leaned back and forth, stomping its tree-legs one by one as it shuffled around and around in a slow circle within the bone fence, stepping back and forth across the tiny stream. Eventually it turned halfway around, and stopped.

  Wren remained still and silent, her eyes darting around the clearing, waiting for something else to happen. But nothing did.

  She sat up, and then stood up, her eyes fixed on the cabin above her. There, in the wall of the cabin facing her, was a door. A door that had not been there before.

  “Okay, that’s something. But how am I…” She glanced around again for a ladder and saw that none had appeared during the cabin’s clumsy dance. She looked back up at the door. “Well, it is a witch’s house, I suppose. She wouldn’t need a ladder.”

  Wren held out her right hand and focused on the sun-steel ring on her finger. It took very little effort to make her own soul shiver just right to make the ring buzz ever so gently against her skin. She pulled the aether in from the clearing, in from the woods, in from as far as she could reach. The cold mist slithered over the pink snow in thin wisps, but eventually she had enough. Wren sat down cross-legged and gathered the aether under her, and then she lifted herself off the ground.

  She had never lifted herself so high as the cabin, in fact she had never risen more than a few feet off the ground. So she moved slowly, struggling to keep the small cloud of aether beneath her as dense as possible. Two feet, six feet, ten feet. Wren kept her eyes on the door and tried not to think about the vast empty space forming below her legs.

  When she reached the height of the cabin, Wren grabbed the wooden handle of the door and pulled herself forward so she could stand on the shallow lip of the door sill. With a pillow of aether at her back to keep her from falling, she wiggled and shook the handle until the clasp popped free and the door swung out toward her. She waved the aether forward, and it delivered her safely into the cabin.

  The interior was very dark, as the only light inside came from the doorway that she was now standing in. There were no windows, shuttered or otherwise, and no hint of a hearth or candles to light. So Wren held up her sun-steel ring a second time and squeezed it tight until the eight meager souls inside it made the ring glow with a dim orange light.

  “Yaga? Are you here?”

  She stepped inside. The door slammed shut behind her.

  Instantly a dozen large candles sprang to life, but Wren had barely glimpsed her surroundings before an ear-splitting screaming erupted all around her. She slammed her hands over her ears and squeezed her eyes shut from the pain of the noise, and she crouched down as a wave of vertigo swept through her, threatening to send her spinning to the floor.

  Wren didn’t move. With her eyes closed and ears plugged, she waited for the screaming to stop, but it didn’t stop. She couldn’t tell if it was one voice or a thousand voices, male or female, near or far. There weren’t even pauses for the screamers to catch their breath.

  After several long moments of this, Wren cautiously opened her eyes and squinted at her surroundings. She was still inside the small cabin, still crouched just inside the door, and from her position she could easily see everything around her. And what she saw was terrifying.

  Her legs gave out beneath her and she fell on her side, she forgot how to breathe, and all of her insides turned to ice.

  There were two dozen men screaming, and one woman screaming back at them. The men were not standing or sitting in the room. The men were the room. The men were the walls, their bodies melted and twisted and flatted against the logs of the cabin, their bodies turned and bent and leaning at every angle, their heads hanging out into the room
to scream. And they were all the same man, the same ugly man with limp black hair and a drooping black mustache and a large crooked nose.

  Some of them were blackened with frost and some were white as bone. Some even had bones erupting through their skin as their bodies stretched out across the walls. And Wren realized that there were no candles in the room after all. Every few paces, there was a hand or a foot or a face on fire.

  In the center of the room lay Yaga, curled up on the floor with her clawing hands wrapped around her white head. Her screams came from her belly as she kept her face down and did not look up at the tortured men around her.

  Wren felt her hands shaking. They felt so thin and fragile and useless, her hands. Her belly felt hollow, and she couldn’t think a single thought, couldn’t form a single image in her mind because the screaming crowded into her ears, drowning out her own thoughts. The only thing that welled up inside her was a single word:

  Out.

  She crawled across the floor on her hands and knees, trying to cover her ears as she moved and keeping her eyes narrowed to slits so she wouldn’t have to look at the screaming faces on the walls. When she reached Yaga’s foot, Wren grabbed it with both hands, shuffled around, and started crawling back toward the door.

  The screaming wormed its way inside her, piercing her head, gnawing at her chest and bones like a thousand hungry locusts. Her heart sank by degrees with each passing moment, from shock to disgust to fear to despair to self-loathing to an all-consuming desire to die, just to escape the screaming.

  But still she crawled, and she pulled on the witch’s leg.

  When her head struck the door, she reached up and fumbled with the wooden handle, but the door would not open. Tears poured down her cheeks as she pounded on the door, and she moaned wordless prayers for silence, for darkness, for sunlight, for death, for anything but the fiery chamber of screaming faces.

  She slammed her hand against the door one last time and it swung out and open, and Wren tumbled out, dragging Yaga with her. The two women spun out into the cold, empty air and Wren had a brief glimpse of the blinding white snow before she struck the ground and lost consciousness.