Willow Witch Page 3

  And then another, more chilling, thought: He’s been a prisoner all his life, like a bird in a gilded cage. People would have been telling him what to do, and most likely he never wanted to do any of those things. Come to a tea party at the palace? Hold a speech? Dance with a string of nervous girls? Get on this boat? Look after these horses? He might not even understand that there had been a difference in his freedom.

  Sylvan went back to the fire with a toss of his head.

  The young men had returned with the skinned rabbits and the deer and hung them over the fire. One of them sat down at the fire, turning the spit.

  Sigvald pulled out a flask which he unstoppered and drank a good swig. He passed it to Ludo, who drank, too, and wiped his mouth.

  Soon, the men were all talking and drinking.

  Johanna remained with Nellie, Roald and Loesie at the base of the big tree. It was getting cold this far from the fire. Nellie was shivering, but neither Loesie nor Roald seemed to be bothered by the chill.

  The bandits talked and laughed. Occasionally the waft of the smoke and the increasingly wonderful smell of the meat drifted in their direction.

  “I’m hungry,” Roald said.

  “We’re all hungry.” Johanna met Sigvald’s eyes again across the orange glow of the fire as he lifted the bottle to his mouth and drank.

  “I don’t like these monks,” Roald said.

  “These are not monks.” If they were, they’d have some dignity and manners.

  “I don’t care, I don’t like them anyway. They’re rude.”

  Johanna whispered, “Shh, not so loud.”

  The old grizzled fellow who had shared his horse with Loesie was telling a story. Johanna caught shards of information about a beautiful widow with a young daughter who had rejected his advances. Several of the men made snide remarks about the old fellow’s missing teeth and his attractiveness to women.

  “What dialect do they speak to each other?” Nellie asked.

  “It’s Eastern Burovian,” Roald said.

  Johanna frowned at him. “But we’re not in Burovia.” As far as she guessed, they were in Gelre. Burovia was on the other side of the Rede River. “Can you understand them?”

  “A bit. The monks all speak the same.”

  Nellie started, “They’re not—”

  “Leave it, Nellie.”

  Sylvan got up from the fire and came to them, carrying a leg of meat, dripping fat. He placed it on a wooden plank and proceeded to cut chunks of meat off it with a knife so sharp that he hardly had to make any effort to slice through the meat. One of his bears sat on its haunches behind him, observing his actions with black beady eyes. Waiting to be tossed scraps.

  “Eat,” he said.

  Behind him, at the fire, the bandits broke into loud raucous laughter. Most had red faces from the liquor, but she hadn’t spotted Sylvan drink anything.

  Johanna took a slice of the meat from the plank he held out to her. “Where are you taking us?”

  “You would like to know, huh?”

  “Well, yes. I don’t understand what you want from us. We’re only three innocent women and a harmless man.”

  “Why were you travelling with a witch with magic so strong that I can feel her presence from miles off?”

  Loesie?

  Johanna glanced at her friend, who was stuffing pieces of meat in her mouth with both hands. She chewed open-mouthed, letting a trail of fat run down her chin. Johanna remembered the incident with the cheese. A chill went down her spine. She had trusted Loesie with the sea cows, and Loesie had taken the Lady Sara upstream as Johanna had told her. She had trusted Loesie not to betray them. “She is not a witch. She has been affected by magic, that is true.”

  But what if she was wrong, and it was all part of an evil plan and Loesie had been ordered to take the ship upstream by the person who had put the spell on her?

  He said, “Witch or bewitched, all the same thing.”

  No, it wasn’t, and if he knew anything about magic, he would know that. More likely, he was lying. “So why do you want her?”

  “We protect land from evil magic.”

  Then why do I feel magic about you? The look on his face was dead-serious. What did people here believe about magic? As far as she knew, the eastern Belaman Church also forbade it. The Church of the Triune was considered a splinter group of the Belaman Church, and had more in common with it than either side acknowledged.

  “What are you going to do with us?”

  “The Duke will decide. Now eat. We have no use for dead witches.” He put the board down and watched while Roald put a piece of meat in his mouth. Then he rose and turned back to the fire.

  “He scares me,” Nellie said when he had taken his place with the other bandits again.

  Johanna nodded. Nellie might not have any magic, but she had a good sense of trust. “I don’t know who he is, but he’s not one of the regular bandits.”

  “Do you know what all those tattoos mean?”

  “I think they’re old runes. I went through Burovia with Father once, and we saw old shrines along the river with marks like that. Can’t say if they were exactly the same, though.” She looked aside when Sylvan turned his head in her direction, as if he knew they were talking about him. The firelight made the scar across his cheek deeper and uglier than it looked in daylight.

  “How dare he call us witches?” Roald said, his mouth full.

  “He’s talking nonsense,” Johanna said.

  “Yes, we’re not witches. I will teach these monks that they can’t say things like this.” He made to get up.

  “Sit down, please,” Johanna said. “We need to plan this.”

  To her surprise, he listened.

  “We need to make a plan to get away,” Johanna continued in a low voice. “But we need to be smart about it so that the bears can’t smell us.” The creatures in question were looking at her with their black beady eyes.

  “I think we should wait until we come to a town,” Nellie said. “You often say things because you like to believe that they’re true, but I don’t believe you can find your way back to the Lady Sara.”

  “We’ll find our way, once we escape. It might not be the shortest way, but we’ll get there.”

  Nellie pursed her lips.

  No one said anything for a while.

  “Who is this Duke?” Nellie asked a bit later.

  “I have no idea,” Johanna said.

  “I think we are close to Duke Lothar’s land,” Roald said.

  Johanna frowned at him. She had to keep reminding herself that he’d spent the past few years in this region. “Who is he?”

  “Duke Lothar Anselmus Wilhelmus de Marty-Loessinger, duke of Nieheim, prince of Florisheim, commander of—”

  “We don’t need the entire page of names.”

  “He considers himself second in line to the Barony of Gelre. He is Baron Uti’s half-brother, older than him, but born of the wrong blood. The Baroness Machteld, who is Uti’s mother, gave birth to only one son. Lothar is the son of the Baroness’ sister Gunhilde, who was much prettier than Machteld and whose four children are said to have had four different fathers, one of which was Uti’s father.”

  Nellie frowned at him. “That’s a lot of terrible gossip about a single royal family. It’s not very nice.”

  “It’s true. Things that are true don’t need to be nice.”

  “Who told you all this?” Johanna asked.

  “Everyone knows this. Especially about Gunhilde. The duke doesn’t look like the Baroness Machteld at all.”

  Everyone in Burovia where he had been maybe, but it was news to Johanna. “But the baron doe
s not consider the duke in line to the throne?”

  “No, but the duke thinks he should be. He tried to kill his half-brother twice. Last time was two years ago, when he hosted a dinner for the baron and his family in his castle and planned to poison them. When the baron found out, a lot of the duke’s people were cast out of Florisheim.”

  “I bet they were.” They’d probably gone on to become rogues. Maybe these bandits were some of them.

  “Why would the duke be interested in us?” Nellie asked.

  Roald didn’t answer that question. It was probably beyond him. He knew facts and he knew how to do things by routine, but he had trouble doing something with those facts and drawing conclusions from them.

  Johanna thought she knew why the duke was interested in them: because of magic. And she wondered how much this had to do with Roald’s stay in Burovia and a certain religious order, or with Baron Uti’s presence at the ball, and maybe—she shuddered—maybe the burning of Saardam was simply another attack on Baron Uti, dressed up as an invasion by rogues. Had he died in the fire, too?

  Some pieces of the puzzle were coming together.

  The main figure in the war was Baron Uti, whose son had told Johanna that Gelre used magic at court. And here were a bunch of rogues who wanted to protect the land from magic, or maybe just any magic that was not the right kind, and they worked for the duke.

  And the conflict was also about a Burovian religious order, and religious groups forbade magic. And about a king who was said to have been in negotiation with a necromancer, necromancy being a serious form of black magic.

  Wasn’t this starting to sound like the Church of the Triune had a hand in it? That same church that had been banned from most lands?

  Johanna ate her chunks of meat, which were dry, overcooked and hard to chew.

  Nellie was having trouble as well. “This meat is very stringy.” She wriggled her tongue in her mouth as illustration

  “It’s because it’s a deer,” Roald said. “They live in the forest and have to be tough. There’s deer, and wild pigs, and badgers, but they’re not very good eating. Pheasants and rabbits are, but they live near fields.”

  “Have you seen all these things?”

  “Seen them, caught them, eaten them. Pheasants are best, but you have to pluck all their feathers and that’s annoying.”

  Nellie said, “I don’t know how you could stand it, with all these horrible oak trees.”

  “Beech, not oak. Beech trees are nice and tidy. Oak trees have big knots.”

  “Well, whatever.” Her voice sounded angry, close to breaking.

  “No, it’s important. With oak trees, you can—”

  “I don’t care! I hate this forest! It’s disgusting! I am disgusting, and there is nowhere to wash anything.” She burst into tears.

  Johanna put an arm over her shoulder. “Come on, Nellie, I need you to keep it together.”

  “I’m done with keeping it together. I want clean clothes. Look at this bonnet.” She yanked it off. Underneath, her hair was lank and stringy. She lifted up her skirt and showed the underskirt beneath. “Look at my underclothes.”

  Johanna could smell it before Nellie showed her: the white chemise was streaked through with dark brown stripes of blood. The same dark stripes also ran down the pale skin of the part of Nellie’s leg that Johanna could see.

  Johanna met Nellie’s eyes, pools of embarrassment and horror. “You have your monthly bleeding? Why didn’t you say anything?”

  “With that disgusting man at my back? He would just have laughed. Ladies’ problems are not real problems at all.” She buried her face in her hands. “I feel so dirty, Mistress Johanna.”

  “Cowpats, Nellie. I’m sure we can do something to help you out.” She rose and wormed her underskirt from under her dress. She gave Nellie the wad of fabric and noticed that it was pretty dirty, too. “Here. Use this. Wrap it around yourself. Wash it out in the creek tomorrow.”

  “But it’s your best—”

  “Use it, Nellie.”

  Nellie took it without a further word, and went behind the tree.

  ‎

  Chapter 3

  * * *

  THE BANDITS talked and drank well into the night. They reduced the deer and rabbits to a pile of bones which they threw to the dogs. The bears got some uncooked chunks of meat, the front legs and the head and neck of the deer, and proceeded to tear strips of meat and sinew off the bones with their teeth. One of the animals then trotted off to the creek and made a mess of the pool where Johanna had tried to collect water. It stood in the shallow water and dug in the sand with its claws. Then it repeatedly stuck its head in the water and nosed around. What it found there to eat, Johanna couldn’t see, but it chewed noisily and wetly.

  When it got darker, Sigvald made one of the junior bandits get up to pass the prisoners mats and blankets. They were a collection of horse blankets and quilts, probably stolen from farms the group had raided. Johanna noticed that the young man was unsteady on his feet from the liquor. If they escaped now, how many of these men would be too drunk to ride?

  The mats were thin. The forest floor was not very comfortable. The beech trees had knotted roots which came right through the thin mats. The blankets were scratchy and not particularly warm. A musty, unwashed smell hung about them.

  Johanna wrapped a blanket around her shoulders, and watched the bandits in the glow of the firelight. Nellie sat to the right of her, her knees drawn up to her chest and her skirt wrapped around her ankles. Roald sat to her left. He didn’t seem to be bothered by the chilly night air.

  Loesie lay on her side on the mat, facing away from the group. Johanna hoped that she was finally asleep.

  The bandits talked and laughed, emptying one flask of liquor after another. Their voices increased in raucousness and their slurred speech made it even more impossible to understand the men. She wasn’t sure if any of them understood each other anymore. The old grizzled fellow fell flat on his face when he reached for the bottle. A moment later he was snoring, to the great hilarity of the others.

  Johanna dozed a bit, leaning her head on her knees, but she kept falling over, and when she lay down, the ground was too hard to be comfortable. It got cold.

  An eerie wailing birdcall echoed in the forest.

  Slowly, the fire died to a faint orange glow. There were only three bandits left around it, and one disappeared on the other side of the hill and didn’t come back. Another fell asleep, and the last one stumbled to his feet. He stood there swaying, silhouetted against the dying fire, before lumbering off to his mat. Not much later, the men were finally all asleep. A couple of them snored loudly.

  The bears also snored, a low rumble.

  Johanna dozed off, but jerked awake when that bird called again. She had no idea how long she had been asleep—she guessed not more than a few moments—but her heart was thudding. There were no sounds other than the roaring of blood in her ears.

  “Nellie?” Johanna whispered as quietly as she could.

  Nothing.

  Johanna held her breath to listen, but all she could hear was the bandits’ continued snoring.

  If they wanted to escape, this was the time to do it, now that the men were all blind drunk and asleep. The bandits had even been drunk enough to forget to tie their prisoners up, or to forget to take the dogs back from the meadow. Johanna nudged at Nellie’s shoulder. “Let’s go.”

  “What? Now? By ourselves?” Her voice sounded scared.

  “This is our best chance. They’re all drunk. The bears are asleep.”

  “I agree. I don’t like these monks at all. We should go,” Roald said.

  “Shhhh. We don’t want to wake them up, especially the animals.” She didn’t t
hink Sylvan would set the bears on them, because obviously they had more value alive than dead, but those dogs down near the creek could make a lot of noise if they were spooked, and wake everyone up.

  The meadow was invisible from here. Moonlight made light patches on the canopy, but no moonlight pierced through to the forest floor, where it was dark as ink.

  All of a sudden Johanna had to think of what happened last night in the cabin of the Lady Sara and how scared and unhappy she had been.

  She’d been stupid. They had been safe aboard the Lady Sara. In fact, she’d been stupid about getting married for most of her life. She’d been a constant worry for her father, her stubbornness a source of irritation for him, and look where it had got her.

  I swear when I get out of this alive, I’m going to be a good wife and make my husband happy every night. She didn’t care, she would give anything to be back in that cabin and submit to him again. The only part of her that had been hurt was her pride, and in the scheme of things, she was struck by how utterly unimportant that was.

  She crawled to her feet. “Let’s go. Take these blankets.”

  Fumbling in the dark, she rolled hers up, and there were noises that indicated that the others were doing the same.

  “Do you really think this is a good idea?” Nellie asked.

  “Shhh. Loesie?”

  “Does she have to come?” Nellie whispered. “We can come back for them later. She’ll attract any people looking for magic.”

  “Loesie is my friend.” Why was Nellie always so annoying? Because she’s usually right. “Come on, Loesie.”

  “Hmmmm.”

  “Can you help her, Nellie?”

  “Me? But I can’t—”

  “Please. Nellie, can you just once do as I say?”

  “I always do as you say, Mistress Johanna, and it gets me into a lot of trouble. I don’t think this is a good idea.”

  Please, Nellie, this is not the time to have stupid arguments. But Nellie was right. Loesie’s presence would attract attention. From what she gathered, it was what had attracted the bandits to them in the first place.