Willow Witch

by Patty Jansen

  “Well, tough,” Johanna said to herself. She remembered first meeting Loesie in the markets and feeling the magical connection straight away. Loesie had smiled at her in a mischievous way and had handed her a basket that showed a bull doing unspeakable things to a cow in a wide green meadow. Johanna had laughed, and had asked if the calves were good this year, and then Loesie laughed. The secret of magic that they both shared had become a point of friendship straight away.

  Like Johanna, Loesie refused to become what people told her to be.

  No matter what the Reverend Romulus had said, Johanna believed that the real, happy, mischievous Loesie was still in that ghostly body somewhere and could be cured if they found the right person.

  Leaves rustled nearby.

  “I’m ready,” Roald whispered. He sounded like a young kid going on an exciting trip.

  They started down the hill, feeling their way down the uneven ground. Johanna could only hear the rustling of leaves, and had no idea if Loesie was with them. She hoped so, because she was going to have serious words with Nellie if she kept behaving towards Loesie like this.

  They stopped when the ground evened out. Johanna listened for sounds indicating that the bandits or any of the animals had woken up, but could hear none.

  It was so dark here that it was impossible to see the slightest thing.

  “Which way now?” Roald asked.

  “We need to get to the horses.”

  “Which way is that?”

  Johanna studied the forest, most of it in ink-darkness. A faint patch of light indicated where the glade probably was. But she could see no horses. More worryingly, she couldn’t see the creek.

  “I think this is stupid,” Nellie said. A sniff indicated that she was crying. “I don’t know if you have seen it, Mistress Johanna, but all these people have magic. If we take the witch, these men will know where she is. Maybe she even attracted them to us in the first place. I’m not being unkind to her, but we can’t escape like this. You know how magic seeks out magic? It happens with you and Master Willems and the witch.”

  “Loesie. Use her name.”

  “I don’t care! They will know where we are because of her.”

  “Ghghghghghgh!”

  “Shhh!” Loesie sounded angry now, and Johanna did not want to get Loesie angry because who knew what trouble that would cause.

  Nellie whispered as loudly as one could whisper, “There is no point escaping! They will catch us. We don’t know where to run. We don’t know how to get food when we get lost. We can’t—”

  “Nellie, what’s gotten into you? If we stay, it will end up badly, especially for you. Those men haven’t seen a woman for a long time. I might have protected you so far, but there is going to be a time that the creep Ludo drags you behind a bush and we will be too late.”

  Nellie sniffed. Her breath shuddered. “Just so you know, Mistress Johanna, if I had the choice I’d rather unwillingly lose my virtue to a disgusting hairy brute than die by the hand of ghosts or other vile magic. And that’s the truth. Call me a coward if you want.”

  Johanna had nothing to say to that. Coming from Nellie, this statement was so astonishing that words would be inappropriate. Nellie, whose first life rule was “virtue”, followed close behind by “appropriateness”. She’d actually said that she’d rather—?

  “Hang on, Nellie. What are you so afraid of?”

  “There’s things in that forest. Magical things.” Her voice cracked. “Ghosts, wraiths, ghouls. Evil things. It makes me feel ill just thinking about them. This is godless country, and no amount of prayer is going to help us. If we go out there, we will get lost and those magical beings will find us. We have no defence. Please, Mistress Johanna.” She grabbed Johanna’s arm in a surprisingly strong grip.

  “Then what do you want us to do?”

  “Wait until we come to a town.”

  “They probably won’t take us to a town.”

  “I don’t care. Please don’t make me go into that forest. Please.” She burst into tears.

  Well, great. What now?

  “Weren’t we going somewhere?” Roald asked.

  At the same time Nellie said, “No.”

  Johanna said, “Yes.”

  Loesie said, “Ghghghghgh!” The tone of distress in her voice made Johanna turn around.

  A horse had appeared in the forest. Well, it wasn’t a regular horse, but one made from luminous mist, floating a forearm’s length above the ground. It walked steadily, trailing tendrils of white vapour.

  “Mistress Johanna!” Nellie grabbed Johanna’s arm and hid behind her.

  Roald said, “How does it do that?” In a genuinely interested voice.

  Oh, for the inability to feel fear.

  “Ghghghghgh!” Loesie charged forward. With both arms, she mowed into the shining apparition. Shards of mist scattered through the night. They swirled, they re-formed, they grew. One horse became six horses.

  They were all quite close, a few paces away, in a half-circle surrounding the group.

  “Nooo,” Nellie groaned.

  “Hmmmm!” Loesie made for the closest horse, her arms raised.

  “Stop it, Loesie.” Johanna grabbed the back of Loesie’s dress. Nellie had sounded like she was about to faint, and she didn’t want to have to deal with that, too.

  The phantom horses paid the group no attention. They stood with their ears pricked and heads in the air. Nostrils and eyes were wide. They bunched together, as if using each other to seek protection against something, real or ghostly.

  Johanna noticed what she hadn’t seen before: several of the animals had cuts in their coats. Blood—or its white misty substitute—ran from the wounds. Then a ghostly man ran onto the scene, brandishing a sword. The first animal—a stallion—reared and let out a scream.

  In the real forest, the horses in the glade responded with whinnies and snorts. A dog started barking and the other dog joined, growling like crazy.

  Men shouted in the forest. Someone came running down the hill carrying a flaming torch.

  “Come here, everyone, hide.” This was Roald’s voice.

  Johanna stumbled to where he hid, pressed against the trunk of a large tree. When he held a protective arm around her shoulders, her hand touched the tree’s bark.

  The forest dissolved for a scene of fire and death. Men on horses burst into a farm yard, carrying torches and rampaging through a vegetable garden. The barn door was open and horses ran out, showing the white in their eyes. Billowing smoke rose from the roof. A woman ran away from the burning house, carrying a child. She was mown down from behind by a rider with a huge sword. The child, a toddler, fell in the mud. The rider hacked at it until it was nothing but a chunk of bloody pulp.

  Johanna jerked back from the tree, her heart thudding.

  Leaves rustled not far from where they stood, followed by the heavy footsteps and hot breaths of a very large animal. One of the bears. Johanna couldn’t see it but it sounded like very close.

  “Ghghghgh!” Came from somewhere in the dark.

  “Shh, Loesie.” Who knew what that bear would do if it became interested in them.

  The ghost horses pranced between the trees, being light-footed and luminous, while a couple of the bandits tried to round up the real horses on the meadow. Two bandits with torches stood by the side of the creek. Were they looking for the prisoners? The hounds ran through the forest, panicked, whining, barking at everything. One of them would stop near the bandits with the torch, jump around in a little circle as if chasing its own tail, and then continue running.

  Johanna could now see, silhouetted against the glow of torchlight, the fuzzy outline of a bear, much too close. It lift
ed its head, snorting. Its nose wriggled.

  Also silhouetted against the light stood Loesie, with her hand outstretched towards the bear. “Ghghghghghgh.”

  Johanna held her breath. Any moment now and the bear would pounce and they would all be dead. That was why bandits didn’t need to tie up their prisoners: because the bears killed any that tried to escape.

  Loesie didn’t move.

  Johanna sat as frozen. She didn’t want to see what happened but couldn’t tear her eyes away from that silhouette: Loesie with her hand outstretched, the bear lifting its head to her . . . sniffing her palm.

  For several long moments, nothing happened. The blood roared in Johanna’s ears. Then the animal grunted, lowered its head and trudged back up the hill. A wisp of magic trailed behind it. Loesie said nothing but Johanna could feel the magic in the air. Bear magic, which was said to be evil.

  Where did Loesie learn these things? As far as Johanna knew, Loesie only had willow magic, like her.

  In her mind, she heard the Shepherd’s voice. Likely, your friend is already dead and demons have possessed her body.

  Way back when all this started, Loesie did try to warn her about demons, right? Johanna thought back to that horrible moment when she had seen Loesie at her market stand and realised there was something very wrong with her friend.

  Inside her mind, the Shepherd’s voice said, They show us what we like to see.

  What did she like to see? Loesie still in control of her mind, even though she couldn’t speak. Loesie recovering. Loesie being the normal, happy Loesie, and speaking again, being healthy again.

  A couple of the bandits were now coming back up the hill with one of the dogs. Johanna didn’t think the bandits knew the prisoners had gone, but there was no escaping now. There were no places to hide in this forest, and both the hounds and bears would find them quickly, even if they tried to run.

  “Let’s go back,” she said. And hope that the bandits wouldn’t notice.

  Slowly, they walked back up the hill. The further they progressed, the angrier she became with herself. She had hesitated too much when it mattered. Since when was she afraid of the things she saw in wood? Since when had she been such a coward?

  Since seeing that awful forest in Burovia, and hearing its whispering voices.

  They found the hilltop abandoned except for a single bear, and resettled at the tree with their blankets. The bear lifted its head, sniffed the air, grunted and put its head back down on its paws.

  Johanna pulled the blanket over herself and leaned into Roald, who awkwardly put an arm around her shoulders. His breath tickled her hair.

  For a long time, none of them said anything. The bandits were still walking around the forest, coming up the hill to relight their torches in the fire, and shouting to each other. Something about a missing horse and people being out there to steal horses. The latter was Sigvald’s concern.

  But no thieves were found and after a while, the missing horse turned up as well and all the men came back. They returned to their mats, still talking to each other in the glow of the fire. Their voices were angry. Johanna thought she heard Sylvan’s voice most of all. He sat on the other side of the fire and seemed to be angry over someone going somewhere or allowing the horses or dogs to come to a place where the dead live whatever that might mean. But after a while the argument faded into brooding periods of silence. Eventually the participants went back to sleep.

  “We sleep now?” Roald asked.

  “Yes.” Then she added, her voice low, “Thank you for standing up for Nellie earlier tonight. I thought that was very brave of you. I’m sorry that they teased you.”

  “No one can touch my women.”

  She didn’t like being referred to as anyone’s possession, but she was glad that he considered Nellie part of the deal. She wondered if the feeling stretched to Loesie, but didn’t want to push the point. “Be careful, though. These are dangerous men. Some of them are magicians.”

  “I’m not afraid of them.”

  No, she feared as much. She suspected he couldn’t lie. Maybe he didn’t have the capability for fear either. Right now, she felt jealous of his simplistic way of thinking. He didn’t worry much; he just lived. He knew lots of things, but attached little emotional value to them or even to his life. When someone said, “Walk,” he walked. He protected what he considered his property.

  In the space under the blanket, his body was warm against hers, and in an odd way, comforting. She needed that, because she was running out of ideas and no one else seemed to have any.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “What for?”

  “I can’t look at you tonight. It’s not that I don’t want to see you, but it’s too dark here. I can’t see anything.”

  Johanna almost laughed. “That’s all right. You can look some other day.” After all the things that had happened, that was what he thought about?

  “Yes. I want that. It’s good.”

  If ever they were safe and warm enough, if she could convince him to be gentler, if they were in a comfortable and clean bed, it might be good. Or even in the too-narrow and not so very clean bunk in the Lady Sara’s cabin. The thought of the ship left abandoned at a disused jetty on the river made her eyes prick. That was part of her family’s wealth, back there. She owed it to her father to try to get back to the ship. And the thought of her father brought more tears.

  Roald said, “I just remembered something. My mother said that when I married, I had to tell my wife at least once every day that I loved her. I haven’t done that yet. Do you want me to say it three times to make up for it?”

  Johanna choked up. For a long time she couldn’t speak, trying to swallow away tears which came anyway, leaked out of her eyes and ran over her cheeks. Eventually she managed to control her voice just enough to say, “Just once will be enough. It doesn’t become different or better by repeating it.”

  “It does. Every day, she said, because it’s one of the things that people forget to say to each other.”

  “Oh, you silly.” She pressed herself against him, wanting to snuggle in his arms, but likely he didn’t even understand the importance of his mother’s words; he just repeated them. He didn’t react to her touch.

  “I love you. I love you. I love you.” Spoken in his detached and strangely sincere way.

  Johanna wiped tears from her cheek.

  In the same sincere way, he asked, “Do you love me?”

  She took a moment to think about that, but not for very long. “Yes. I think I do.” Or she could come to love him, given some time. Not in the way Father had loved Mother. Not in the way a brother would love a sister. But in a caring way. Roald was honest, simple-minded and immature most of the time, but completely sincere. He hated pomp and ceremony, and he hated being in the spotlight. The more pressure people put on him, the more strange things he did or said. He was odd, and unpredictable especially when provoked, but he was not dumb.

  In the darkness, she reached up to him and stroked his cheek. The stubble of his beard scratched under her fingertips. Again, he didn’t react, but she tried not to let that hurt her. He doesn’t know any better.

  What sort of upbringing had he received? How much had his mother and father hated him?

  “Mistress Johanna? What are we going to do now?”

  “Go to sleep, Nellie. We’re not going anywhere tonight.” And damn, she felt angry about that. She’d have to find another opportunity to escape in a place that was even further from the Lady Sara, from where the ship would be even harder to find. What if they arrived at the place where the bandits were taking them tomorrow morning?

  The night was full of questions and no one had any answers. The bandits snored by the fire. The bears snored,
too, and grunted occasionally, as if they were having a dream about . . . what did bears dream about?

  Roald also fell asleep, a warm weight against her. He twitched occasionally. Nellie mumbled in her sleep. Johanna wasn’t sure if Loesie was asleep, but every now and then, she spotted a faint glow of magic in the place where she had last seen Loesie. Little wisps that curled into the air. Once, she thought she could make out Loesie’s cupped hands by the light of the faint glow. She tried to ignore it, but it scared her. If only she knew what was wrong with Loesie and what she could do about it.

  She watched that spot of light, waiting for Loesie to do something that would tell Johanna for sure that she was now possessed by an evil lord, but of course that would be all too convenient a thing to happen. It didn’t.

  Somehow, Johanna must have fallen asleep, because the dark forest bled into green pastures with cows, and happy farmers bringing cheeses to market. All the usual people were there: the clog-sellers at the markets, the silly nobles with their Lurezian fashion, and even Octavio Nieland, holding his wine glass by the stem with a gloved hand, giving her a look of superiority.

  Was Octavio Nieland even still alive?

  Nothing would ever be the same, ever again.

  ‎

  Chapter 4

  * * *

  THE NEXT MORNING dawned misty and bleak. Johanna woke up in the warmth of the blanket and Roald’s body. Leaves and branches of the tree above her glistened with moisture. Occasionally drops fell to the forest floor. Their soft plocks were the only sounds in the muffled silence. She lifted her head. Roald was still asleep.

  A lone figure stood at the bottom of the hill, looking over the misty glade where the horses grazed peacefully. Not a sign of last night’s chaos remained. Johanna could make out some churned leaves at the bottom of the tree where they had sheltered last night, but that was all. That tree was so close to the camp that she was almost glad that the escape attempt hadn’t been successful. In the mist the hounds and bears would have a huge advantage. They would never have gotten far.