Witches: Wicked, Wild & Wonderful (32 page)

My mouth felt dry and my skin was cold. It wasn’t inconsequential and I already felt different. There was a feeling in the pit of my stomach that was half ache and half bliss.

“I’m always going to watch your back,” I said. “You’ll always watch mine.”

Jacinta did not look convinced. She raised her head a fraction, like a deer peering through the trees.

“You sure about that?”

“Yeah.”

“Even if we’re not bloodline?”

“We
are
bloodline,” I told her.

Jacinta smiled real big. She let me ride her bicycle that night while she sat in the back, holding on tight as I circled her mantle of stars.

“The Way Wind” is set in author Andre Norton’s Witch World universe. In this alternate universe magic is performed (at first) only by female virgins; sex deprives a witch of her powers.

In much witchcraft lore, witches are involved with sex—love spells, magic worked to invoke or deny fertility or virility. Since the female witch was often an empowered single woman, in many cultures she was also seen as sexually alluring or intentionally seductive. By the Middle Ages, Western European Christianity equated witchcraft with serving Satan, an inversion of serving God. Sex, frowned upon by Christianity in general, was the Devil's turf, so witches were assumed to be lascivious. Witches supposedly sealed their deals with the Devil by copulating with him and frequently participating in orgies.

Still, the equation of virginity—or at least a life not dominated by love for a man—with magical power also has a place in witch mythos. Spinsters learn witchcraft in Mary Norton’s
The Magic Bed-Knob
(1943), on which the 1971 Disney movie
Bedknobs and Broomsticks
was based. Elizabeth Burton’s
Miss Carter and the Ifrit
(1945) has a similar theme. Gillian Holroyd in the 1958 film (and 1950 play)
Bell, Book, and Candle
sacrifices her magic for love. In Alice Hoffman’s
Practical Magic
(and in the movie based on it) the sacrifice for loving a witch takes a different turn: if a woman of the witchly Owens family finds true love with a man, he is destined to die tragically.

The Way Wind

Andre Norton

The crumbling walled fortress and the dreary, ragged town, which had woven a ragged skirt about it during long years, stood at the end of the Way Pass. It was named l’Estal, which in a language older than legend, had a double meaning—First and Last.

For it was the first dwelling of men at the end of Way Pass along which any traffic from the west must come. And it was also the end of a long, coiling snake of a road stretching eastward and downward to Klem, which long ago it had been designed to guard. There could have been another name for that straggle of drear buildings also—End of Hope.

For generations now it had been a place of exile. Those sent from Klem had been men and women outlawed for one reason or another. The scribe whose pen had been a key used too freely, the officer who was too ambitious—or at times, too conscientious—the rebel, the misfit, those sometimes fleeing the law or ruler’s whim, they came hither.

There was no returning, for a geas had been set on the coil road, and those of lowland blood coming up it might only travel one way—never to return. There had been countless attempts, of course. But whatever mage had set that barrier had indeed been one of power, for the spell did not dwindle with the years as magic often did.

Through the Way Pass there came only a trickle of travelers, sometimes not more than three or four in a season. None of them lingered in l’Estal; there was that about the place which was like a dank cloud, and its people were grim of face, meager of livelihood.

Over the years they had managed to scrape a living, tilling small scraps of fields they terraced along the slopes, raising lean goats and small runtish sheep, hunting, burrowing into the rock of the heights to bring out stores of ore.

The latter was transported once a year to a certain bend in the descending road, and there traded for supplies they could not otherwise raise—salt, pigs of iron, a few items of what was luxury to them. Then it was also that the Castellan of the fort would receive the pouch bearing the royal arms containing, ever the same, orders. And now and again there would be another exile to be sent aloft.

The trickle of travelers from the west were mostly merchants, dealers in a small way, too poor to make the long journey by sea to the port of Klem itself. They were hunters with pelts, drovers of straggles of lean mountain cattle or sheep. Small, dark people who grunted rasping words in trade language, kept to themselves, and finished their business as soon as possible.

Of the Klemish exiles, none took the westward road. If there was a geas set upon that also, no one spoke of such. It was simply accepted that for them there was only one place to be longed for, dreamed of, hopelessly remembered—and that lay always eastward.

There had been many generations of exiles, and their children had known no other place; yet to them l’Estal was not a home but a prison of sorts, and the tales told of the eastern land made of that a paradise forbidden, changed out of all knowledge of what it had been or was.

Still there was always one point of interest that stirred the western gate sentries each year—and that was the Way Wind. At the very beginning of spring, which came slowly and harshly in these gaunt uplands, a wind blew strongly from west to east, souring the pass, carrying with it strange scents. It might last a single day; it might blow so for three or four.

And by chance, it always brought with it one of the western travelers, as if it pulled them on into the line of the pass and drew them forward. Thus, in a place where there was so little of the new and strange, the Way Wind farers were a matter of wager, and often time not only, the armsmen at the gate but their officers and their women gathered, along with townspeople, when they heard the outer horn blast, which signaled that the wind herded a traveler to them.

This day there were four who stood on the parapet of the inner wall, not closely together as if they were united in their company, but rather each a little apart. The oldest of that company, a man who had allowed the hood of his cloak to fall back so the wind lifted tufts of steel gray hair, had the paler face of one who kept much indoors. Yet there was a strength in his features, a gleam of eye which had not been defeated, nor ever would. At the throat of his cloak was the harp badge of a bard. Osono he had named himself ten years before when he had accompanied the east traders back from their rendezvous. And by that name he was accepted, eagerly by the Castellan and those of his household.

Next to him, holding her own thick cloak tightly about her as if she feared the wind might divest her of it, was the Lady Almadis, she who had been born to the Castellan’s lady after their arrival here. Her clothing was as coarse as that of any townswoman on the streets below, and the hands that held to that cloak were sun-browned. There was a steady look to her, as if she had fitted herself to the grim husk housing her.

A pace or so behind her was a second man. Unlike the other two he had no cloak, but rather dressed in mail and leather, sword-armed. But his head was bare also as he cradled a pitted helm on one hip. His features were gaunt, thinned, bitter, his mouth a mere line above a stubborn jaw—Urgell, who had once been a mercenary and now served as swordsmaster in the fortress.

The fourth was strange even in that company, for she was a broad-girthed woman, red of face, thick of shoulder. Her cloak was a matter of patched strips, as if she had been forced to sew together the remains of several such in order to cover her. A fringe of yellow-white hair showed under the edge of a cap covering her head. For all the poverty of her appearance, Forina had a good position in the town, for she was the keeper of the only inn, and any the Way Wind brought would come to her for shelter.

“What is your wager, my lady?” Osono’s trained bard’s voice easily overreached the whistle of the wind.

Almadis laughed, a hard-edged sound which lacked any softening of humor.

“I, sir bard? Since my last two wind wagers were so speedily proved wrong, I have learned caution. This year I make no speculation; thus I shall not be disappointed again. Think me over-timid of my purse if you will.”

Osono glanced at her. She was not looking toward him but rather down the wind road. “Lady,” he returned, “I think you are over-timid in nothing.”

After a moment she laughed again. “Bard, life in l’Estal makes for dull acceptance—perhaps that gives root to timidity.”

“There is the priest.” The observation from the mercenary cut through their exchange. He had moved forward, as if drawn by some force beyond his own understanding, to look down at the cluster of townspeople and guards by the gate.

“Thunur,” Osono nodded. “Yes, that crow is well on the hop. Though if he tries to deliver his message to either herdsman or trader, he will not get the better of them. Shut-mouthed they are, and to all of them I think we are Dark-shadowed—they would listen no more to one of us than to the bark of a chained hound.”

Urgell had put his hand to the edge of the parapet wall, and now his mail and leather gauntlet grated on the stone there. Chained hound, Almadis thought, proper term not only for such as this man, but perhaps for all of them. But then a Bard was trained in apt word choice.

“That is one as makes trouble—” Forina had come forward also on the other side of the soldier. “He has a tongue as bitter as var, and he uses it to dip into many pots. It would be well to keep an eye on him.”

Urgell turned his head quickly. “What stir has he tried to set, goodwife?”

“More than one. Ask Vill Blacksmith what a pother made his sister sharp-tongue him. Ask of Tatwin why three of those snot-nosed brats he strives to beat learning into no longer come to his bidding, ask Solasten why she was pelted with market dung. Ask me why the doors of the Hafted Stone are now barred to him. A troublemaker he is, and this is a place where we need no one to heat old quarrels and pot new ones!”

“If he is a brawler, speak to the guard,” Osono suggested. “But I think he is perhaps something even more to be watched—”

“What may that be?” The bard had all their attention now, but it was Almadis who asked that question.

“A fanatic, my lady. One so obsessed with his own beliefs that he is like a smoldering torch ready to be put to a straw heap. We have not an easy life here; there were many old hatreds, despairs, and these can be gathered up to fuel a new fire. Ten years ago, one of his nature arose in Salanika—there was such a bloodletting thereafter as the plains had not seen since the days of Black Gorn. It took full two seasons to quench that fire, and some brands still smoldering may have been scattered to blaze again—”

“Such a one as Thunur, you think?” Almadis demanded. “L’Estal has answers to such—have we not?” The bitterness in her voice was plain. “What are we all but outlaws, and we can exist only as we hold together.” She did not turn her head, but she loosed one hand from her cloak hold and motioned to that dark, ill-fortuned spread of age-hardened timbers which surmounted the wall of the shorter tower. “That has borne fruit many times over.”

“He has a following,” Urgell said, “but he and they are under eye. If he tries aught with the western travelers, he will be in a cell within an hour. We want no trouble with them.”

Certainly they could afford no trouble with the few who came the western road. Such wayfarers were their only real link with a world which was not overshadowed by the walls about them and the past which had brought them here.

The gray-robed priest had indeed been roughly jostled away from the gate. He was making small hops, for he was a short man, trying to see over the crowd before him the nature of the wayfarer who was now well within sight.

“It—it is a child!” Almadis was shaken out of her composure and came with a single step to stand beside the mercenary. “A child—! But what fate has brought her here?”

The wayfarer was slight, her bundle of travel cloak huddled about her as if it were intended for a much larger and stouter wearer. Hood folds had fallen back on her shoulders, and they saw hair that the wind had pulled from braids to fly in wisps about her face. She was remarkably fair of skin for a wilderness traveler, and her hair was very fair, though streaked here and there by a darker strand closer to the gleam of red-gold.

There was no mistaking, however, the youth of that slight body and those composed features. She walked confidently, and at her shoulder bobbed the head of a hill pony, still so thick with winter hair that it was like an ambling mound of fur.

Bulging panniers rode on either side of a packsaddle. And that was surrounded in the middle by what looked to be a basket half covered by a lid.

Contrary to all who made this perilous way through the high mountains, the girl carried no visible weapons except a stout staff which had been crudely hacked from some sapling, stubs of branches yet to be marked along its length. This was topped, however, with a bunch of flowers and leaves, massed together. Nor did any of them look wilted; rather it would seem they had just been plucked, though there were yet no flowers to be found in the upper reaches where reluctant patches of snow could be sighted.

“Who—what—?” Almadis was snapped out of her boredom, of that weariness which overshadowed her days and nights.

As the girl came to the gate, there was a sudden change. The Way Wind died; there was an odd kind of silence as if they all waited for something, they did not know what.

So complete was that silence that the sound Osono uttered startled them all.

“Who—what—?” Almadis turned upon the bard almost fiercely.

He shook his head slowly. “Lady, I have seen many things in my time, and have heard of countless more. There is said to be—somewhere in the western lands—those who are one with the land in a way that none of our blood can ever hope to be—”