to weave with winds and words that tether [solo]

[Libertine]

The witch’s cabin was not made of gingerbread. For that, Sceatt was grateful.

She had hacked her way through a forest of tangled vines and overgrown thorns bushes in the middle of a brewing storm. Her tunic was scratched and torn, and blood stained where briar ripped through skin and into soft flesh. Her boots were splayed with mud and the saccharine stench of rotted foliage. Life was bad, and damned if she had to contend with rain leaking through the roof and bugs eating through the walls of a gingerbread house too.

“Yo. Hold still,” the gargoyle said, pinching the nip of her neck to stop her squirming. But the stone cold fingers coated with icy ointments caressing her back and spine only made Sceatt more squeamish.

“Then stop touching me,” she snapped, hands clenching at the wooden headboard till her fingertips bloomed red with blood and pressure. The mattress beneath her was lumpy and hard. Her tunic top had been unceremoniously shoved up to her neck, leaving a span of unclothed back bared to the heat of a burning hearth and the frigid winds from an open window. The gargoyle knelt behind her, tending to scratches and torn flesh.

“Nah-ah-ah,” Nanny Anny called from the other side of the cabin. “No rudeness in my house, young lady, or there’d be no curse-breaking for you!”

Sceatt grumbled beneath her breath, squirmed a little, and knocked over a can of tinctures. Yellow liquid stink of sulfur wafted through the cabin-home, putting up a valiant battle against the mishmash brew in the witch’s cook pot. The tincture lost. Sceatt was not sure if she wanted to know what the witch was cooking.

“It’s dinner, deary. Got some nice bladder today. Would you like some?” Nanny asked. Sceatt twisted her face to the side to stare. The brew looked green. There were tentacles. But more than that, Sceatt Wræcca had yet to say a word about the cooking pot. Nanny caught Sceatt staring, and the smile blossoming upon the old woman’s rosy cheeks did not bode well.

“You can read my mind.” Sceatt said at last, turning away from the brew to the grandmotherly face bare paces away. She frowned. “You can, can’t you?”

Nanny laughed, and ladled something into a bowl. “What sort of a witch would I be if I can’t?” she replied. “Best not think badly thoughts, lovely. Don’t want to end up a newt, would you now? And I never liked gingerbread houses. Comes with too many ants.”

Heh. Ants. Newts. Sceatt buried her face in her arms and bemoaned her fate. A mindreading witch meant she couldn’t even lie. Life was a cruel son of a bitch, and she just got felt up by a moving stone statue. So what if it was healing her? It touched her tits.

A last smack of stone fingers against her rump, and the gargoyle pulled away. “Might want to keep your clothes off, yo,” it said, bending down to clean the spill. “Don’t want a pretty princess to scar.”

“My cousin liked gingerbread houses,” Nanny continued, bringing her bowl to the stoat table in the center of the cabin. She had to duck to avoid the hanging poaches of… of some sort of plant that smelt like dastardly things. “Said it made for good snaring. Kids like them, you know?”

“Nanny,” the gargoyle said. “I’m done with cleaning, yo.”

“Good boy. Now be a dear and watch the doors, love,” the witch said absentmindedly. She was fiddling with the oven now.

Sceatt pushed herself up to sit and pulled her tunic down, scars be damned. The gargoyle pawed its way past the table and to the doors, where it sat and feigned something lifeless and dead. Against the howling winds and the bursts of lightning strikes that stole through the window, the creature made for a hellish sight.

“You don’t look like a witch,” Sceatt said. Her feet dangled off the bed. The witch looked like a kindly grandmother, not a creature out of nightmares.

“And you don’t look like a boy,” Nanny replied pleasantly. “But here we are anyways. Gingerbread boys, on the other hand, can be quite delicious. Don’t let them get too sentient though. The last one I made ran away.”

Ants, newts, and gingerbread boys. The mere implicit threats were sending tremors of unease down Sceatt’s back. She leaned back and pulled her knees up, cradling them against her chest. It took effort to keep her lips pressed shut. The last time she had insulted a witch, the results had been less than pleasant.

Sceatt could learn to hold her tongue. It all depended on the circumstances.

The witch smiled and raised a brow. She wiped her hands on her apron and approached the bed. “Now then. I’d fancy you want that curse broken, aye? But you’ve got to do something for me too, princess.” Her warm smile stood in odd contrast to her words. “There’re two witch hunters being pests in town. Why don’t you bring me them? I'd prefer the hearts, o'course. Won't say no to them persons either. And then I’ll fix you right up.”

Something was happening in the cabin. Something that rendered the air gloomier, deader, grimmer. The witch’s bargain felt less of a bargain and more of an order or a threat, and Sceatt shivered beneath the waning light. Witches. She hated witches and their bargains. A witch had spelled her into this accursed form in the first place, and she wanted herself back, wanted to be Isen Wuldor instead of Sceatt Wræcca with such wretched desperation wrangling in her marrow that she would sell the world in a gunshot if she had to, if she could.

“Deal,” Sceatt whispered.

The gloom shattered with the word.

Cheerily and brightly, the witch patted Sceatt’s cheeks. “Good girl. Have some scones when you leave. Leave now. Shoo! Storm’s coming and I don’t want you here tonight. Take the boy with you too. He needs the exercise.”

The gargoyle bowed in its spot and went back to looking threatening.

Sceatt nodded, and stood. Her heart thumped heavily in her chest, and she could almost feel it coming up her throat. Screw the scones. Without another word, she bowed to the witch, pulled up her muddied boots, and made for the door. The gargoyle followed her out.

“I don’t like your mistress,” Sceatt told the gargoyle when they were a safe number of steps away from the cabin. “And you touched my tits.”

“You got nice tits?” it offered hopefully.

[Libertine]

It was night, and this was a witch’s realm.

In a witch’s realm, vines grew with the intent to strangle and thorns fed upon the blood of those it pierced. Shadows crept with the subtle grace of a hunting feline whilst the earth drummed with tumultuous lethargy, and trees grew twisted as they aged from poor saplings to ancient oak, contemptible and leafless and sunken dry, forever plagued with death’s lingering touch.

This was a witch’s realm, and it was night. The darkness sang of glorious pasts, of gods moving men like mere pawns on the chessboard of fate, of men pretending to be gods rising up against fate only to fall, trampled beneath the feet of beasts and strangled by their own entangled entrails. Old anger reverberated in the wind, and dead men’s pasts grew louder like a hungering beast, inching forward inch by slowly inch, all stomping feet and ghoulish shrieks screaming pleading begging hoping to live live live—

Evil was abroad, and it stunk of putrid decay and languishing blight. The land seemed alive with it.

There was a man waddling his way through the briars and the trees. He moved slowly, quietly, with the fearful precision of one who was walking upon a knife’s edge with a thousand feet below to fall. Above him, stark clouds covered the heavens like a seamless tapestry, rumbling their discontent to anyone who would listen.

Lightning struck. Thunder followed.

Moments later, an arrow sank deep into the man’s back, piercing the heart, and he fell face forward with a despairing little choke. Leafs and dirt flew at the impact. A dull thud. His eyes waxed over like a newborn babe, and his life snuffed out for eternity. Then the arrow disintegrated into mist.

There was no archer, and neither quiver nor bow. Come morning, there would only be half a bloody body. In a witch’s realm, nameless beasts made short work of freshly slaughtered meat.

A horse neighed and galloped away. Clothing whistled through the wind.

In the distance, someone smiled.

[Libertine]

“I was human once, you know?” the gargoyle said when they reached Underwood. It flew beside her, and Sceatt had been somewhat surprised that its wings were able to handle its weight.

“Never told anyone before. Cause. Never had anyone to tell before,” it rambled on, feet dragging against the stone pavement. “Think I died. Or was cursed. Or something. You’re cursed, aren’t you, princess?”

The creature had chattered on the entire night, through storm and hellish weather and a sleepless night. Its only positive contribution to the journey had been its ability to clear a path through the forest. At least her return from the witch’s cabin had been less fraught with injuries and pain.

“O’ course. don’t know much ‘bout curses. Me, am a healing sort myself. Healed you right up, didn’t I, princess?”

The nice thing about not having an organic living body was, Sceatt decided, the need to not stop. Because clearly, the gargoyle was not going to stop talking—it didn’t need to breath and its tongue would never tire.

Mud and rain puddles slurped beneath her feet as they made their way through the city, a lone woman followed by a flying gargoyle. It was early dawn, and the sun had barely peaked through the curtain of clouds. Few of Underwood’s residents were out and about, leaving the stone pavements largely empty. Sceatt was somewhat grateful. She looked like a drowned rat and felt like a harangued madman about to hang at the noose, eyes bright with frustrated annoyance in an indignant brew.

And she wanted the thing to shut up.

“Look look look princess, look, yo. Ain’t a common lady, that one. She’s all special-like.” the gargoyle hovered closer, almost slapping Sceatt’s face with its flapping wings. Its claws-slash-fingers jabbed excitedly. “Never seen one o’em before. Sexy.”

With an exasperated sigh, Sceatt shoved her limp hair to her scalp and looked up. And then she whistled. Because damn.

If that witch she had the misfortune of bargaining with last might was a meaty old lady with rosy cheeks and a wobbly chin topped with a fluffy white helmet of hair and could be described by no other word than grandmotherly, this lady here was saucy. Not that this one was a witch, of course, but she was definitely in another spectrum of existence compared to Underwood’s usual woodcutter’s wife fare.

The woman was lounging on a litter of silk and pillows, carried by six hunched figures wearing only kilted wraps around their hips, their scuttling little feet almost running in their mad dash away. The whole manual labour transport was a new concept for Sceatt, and she could not help but raise a brow. But the rich, Sceatt had found, were prone to their own strangeness, and so she waved this little eccentricity away. Strange forms of transport aside, the woman was clad in—were those bells and nipple rings?

Sceatt considered herself a connoisseur of womanly indecency. The first thing she did upon being cursed into a female form was to experiment, and that debacle ended with two cheery bastard children bouncing on her grandparents’ knees. What she had just saw, however, took the cake. It had, in fact, managed the blow up the cake into tiny digestible chunks and shoveled all the pieces down her throat.

Right now, Sceatt had the urge to find a pen and take detailed notes in the name of future experimentation.

The litter turned a corner and disappeared. Bells jingled in its wake. The gargoyle sighed as though in a trance, forlornness mixed with a tinge of desire. Sceatt eyed it, smacked its head, and pulled herself back to rights.

She would have time for bargains and witches and saucy whores tonight. Right now, she would do just about anything for a good day of sleep.

“Think her tits’ll be delicious?” the gargoyle asked as they picked up pace again. “Nanny’ll prolly make good pudding with ‘em.”

“Don’t know,” Sceatt snapped, voice growling low. “Why don’t you follow her and find out?”

[Libertine]

It was evening when Sceatt finally walked out her tiny rented room, refreshed after a good day of silent sleep. The next thing on her to-do list was some decent food, and then came the witch and that godforsaken bargain. The gargoyle followed closely behind, its mouth gagged shut with a bar of iron and a cord of twine.

“Beer!” Sceatt shouted over the din of crowded floor. “And meat, if you have it!”

“Aye!” the innkeeper hollered back.

The inn had seemed a quiet little place during the day, located near the center of the town, its wooden walls and glossy windows shining with good care. The place was clean and well kept on the inside too, manned by the innkeeper and his wife. Come night, however, its first floor became a different place, a gathering place, filled to the brim with tired woodcutters and carpenters pining for a good cup of cider and decent companionship before heading home to the wives.

There was a free spot at the bar, and Sceatt pushed her way towards it, brushing through thick biceps and elephant-trunk-like arms the smelt of sweat and earth and newly cut oak. A few of the men smiled at her, and she gangly grimaced back. Most, however, were staring at the moving statue hobbling behind her. Low murmurs and hushed whispers passed from lip to lip, and those who were close to her started pulling back.

The gargoyle hunched into itself and imitated a whipped puppy, minus the sweeping tail. Its tail wasn’t long enough. There was something about being marginalized that would get on anyone’s nerves. Admittedly, gargoyles were not the commonest sight in these parts of the lands. Most of them had jobs watching abandoned old cathedrals or castles somewhere more villainous, and rarely did one move and followed a human and looked so alive.

Sceatt pretended not to notice. Instead, she kicked the barstool back and sat with a flourish, legs set wide like a man. The gargoyle settled itself by her feet, hunched and squatting and drawing circles on the wooden flowing with its sharpened nails. Seconds later, a pint of beer and a platter of roast slid their way into her hands. She eyed it eagerly. Her belly growled.

“Thanks,” she muttered to the innkeeper, and dug in with the restrained gusto of a man who had subsisted for months on berries and roots and was frantically starved for meat but wanted to put up some semblance of being all respectful.

It was pretty darned difficult to eat like a madman whilst looking like a lady. Sceatt made mental notes of this fact.

She was gingerly—or not so gingerly—cutting up the last bit of meat when a voice chirped up to her side. It sounded like a child.

“Lady, are you a witch?”

It looked like a child too. And there were two of them, a male and a female, both with large hazel eyes beneath long lashes that beamed sincerity and innocence and pink fairy cotton fluff. Two child-shaped tiny humans who barely reached her shoulders sitting down, and their legs dangled and kicked like there were no tomorrows atop the high barstools.

And they were looking at her.

[Libertine]

Children, in Sceatt’s not quite humble opinion, were demon spawns and the devil’s get set upon earth to torment the free and virtuous, not that Sceatt had any claims to virtue after her fourteenth birthday. Their appearances usually signaled messy episodes that ended in piss and drool and rattling agonized shrieks. If a man—or a woman—was intelligent, they would get out and away the moment one of those little buggers opened their monthes.

Obviously, Sceatt was not very intelligent today.

She popped the last bite into her mouth and chewed. Sometime between the start and end of her meal, two children found their way to her sides, and she had no clue how it happened. They sat to her left, hands on laps, in little white and brown frocks that had seen better days. The boy was carrying an adult sized crossbow upon his bony back, and his shoulders sagged visibly with the weight.

Huh, she thought. Didn’t notice the buggers coming. I must’ve been hungry. The latter thought was steeped in sarcasm.

“No. I’m no witch,” she told the two little things. There was something stuck in her teeth and her tongue could not reach.

“But sis, you’ve got a gargoyle,” the girl-child whispered in with narrowed eyes, her little cheeks flushing red to match the scarlet of her hair. “Nobody but a witch has got gargoyles.”

A swig of beer, Sceatt soon found, was a good enough remedy in getting stuck flesh out of one’s teeth. It worked a little better than licking the thing out, but was a little less effective than a toothpick or a nail.

“Not my gargoyle,” she said slowly, gazing into her beer as though it bore all of the universe’s secrets. “I don’t got it. It’s got me. I didn’t want the darned thing.”

The gargoyle’s ears drooped. The boy growled, his sticky little fingers moving towards the crossbow on his back.

Sceatt swerved in her seat and turned to face the little buggers. Her feet brushed against the gargoyle’s head, and it leapt up in surprise with hands on its head. That earned a few laughs from the nearby crowd who were desperately pretending to be not listening to this conversation.

“And it didn’t used to be a gargoyle anyways,” Sceatt continued with a shrug. “It was human. Thing said it got cursed into this stoniness. I bet it was a witch who’d done it.”

Bitterness burst into her tongue upon the word cursed, and it tasted of rotting eggs dripping with vinegar. She drained her beer to wash the taste away. The innkeeper refilled her pint in silence.

“Oh,” said the girl.

Good beer had the unruly penchant to loosen one's tongue, especially when one’s mind was on other things. For an innate liar who had little dealings with truths, a loose tongue usually dealt with more imaginative untruths. This inn had good beer too, and somewhere along the road Sceatt felt the need to… continue.

“Bet it got cursed for something stupid,” Sceatt muttered on. “Like fucking a vampire’s corpse.”

The gargoyle quivered in its spot. The children shared an inscrutable look. The innkeeper slid two cups of milk into their sticky little fingers, and the boy murmured a thanks beneath his lips.

“I’m Grettie. And my brother is Hansie,” the girl informed Sceatt primly. “We’re witch hunters.”

“What’s a fucking?” the boy asked with furrowed brows, his first words since arrival.

[Libertine]

The proverbial shoe dropped, murdering enough imaginary ants on its way down to qualify as a high risk war criminal with genocidal tendencies in the imaginary ants’ criminal court.

Huh, Sceatt thought. Witch hunters.

She looked at the children. She looked at her beer. She looked up. The innkeeper stood there nodding, a barrel of unopened ale hefted on his shoulders.

“Yes, ma’am,” he said solemnly. “They speak truth, ma’am. They got rid of the last witch and her gingerbread house, ma’am. Everyone in these parts know it, ma’am.”

Huh, Sceatt thought again. Gingerbread houses.

“What’s a fucking?” the boy repeated. There were milk whiskers on his lips.

The gargoyle leered, and tugged on its gag. The boy sneered at it and drank more milk. Sceatt watched, half bemused and half annoyed, but mostly numb with shock, and wondered if this was more trouble than life was worth. Nobody answered the question.

“You got rid of a witch,” Sceatt stated instead, speaking to the girl. The girl seemed more sensible.

“Yar, sis! We shoved her into her own oven and everything and it went boom!” the child spoken with shining enthusiasm as only the children could, all flying fingers and dancing limps. “The gingerbread house got burnt and everything though, and it gave us cavities.”

So this was what the witch’s bargain had set her against. Two hell spawns on one side of the equation and a nefarious old woman with powers beyond reckoning on the other, and Sceatt was half tempted scramble away right now as quickly as her legs could go, curses and bargains be damned.

Her lips curled, and she looked at her beer again. Yet, somewhere in the depths of her belly was the acid of desire and venom of hope, the poison of yearning and the toxin of need, and she clung frantically to the lifeline of maybe with a vengeance that surprised even herself.

For half a stringy chance then, she would play this game to its end.

“We’re hunting for another one now,” the girl—Grettie—whispered conspiratorially over her milk. “And we’re getting paid and everything and the Madam promised us a cake. A whole cake. Just for us.”

Sceatt cocked a brow and thought she had a hunch of who this other witch might be. If she was lucky tonight, fate might have just dealt her a playing chance. The Madam, however, was someone new in the game. A mild sense of suspicion began chewing upon her bones.

“Who’s this Madam?”

“She’s our ben-ne-fac-tor,” the girl said, stumbling over the last word. “She told us witches got gargoyles. That's why we came, you know? Some-body outside said there's a gargoyle inside.”

A benefactor who knew something or the other. Sceatt rubbed her temples. This Madam was not as interesting to her as these children were, and the witch did say something about accepting 'them whole persons'. All Sceatt had to do was to... point the children to the witch and watch them go, right?

“Can I join your search?” Sceatt asked. “I’m looking for the witch too. She’s stole something of mine, and I want it back.”

The children stiffened in tandem and shared another look. The boy clenched his cup tight, and the girl patted his shoulders. Both of them eyed her shrewdly, suspiciously, sceptically. The gargoyle joined in, ogling her warily.

“Promise I won’t take your cake?” Sceatt added, palms out in offering, with as innocent a smile as someone like her could offer.

The girl nodded slowly, with guarded apprehension still wildly visible on her face. “We’ll take you to the Madam first, sis. She'll look you over.”

“I don’t trust you,” said the boy. “Still think you’re the witch.”

Suspicious little buggers, the lot of them.

[Libertine]

“You liar!” the gargoyle keened in distress when its makeshift gag was finally pried off. “What’d Nanny take from you?’

Sceatt shot it a look that somehow managed to convey you fool and use your brain and shut your trap, please. They’ve retreated to her rented room under the guise of packing up, and Sceatt had a number of questions and niggling suspicions clawing at her throat for the gargoyle, and the pair of children were standing outside the door, waiting.

The room was a bare one, with barely room for a bed and a small writing table, no luxuries and all bare essentials. Yet, the bed had been a good bed, and she had felt rested until those two little buggers cropped out of nowhere.

“Nothing. I lied. That’s what I do,” she hissed, ducking her away across the bed to reach the chair, stuffing clothes messily into her travel pack. “Does your mistress know they are children?”

Its face twisted into a look of touchy dignity. “Nanny knows all, yo.”

That reply was not helpful. Did the witch purposefully send her on a goose chase with a couple of children playing prey? As much as Sceatt abhorred the company of children, there was something about this situation seemed a tad distasteful, like a cruel joke or a malicious prank.

“What about the gargoyle with a witch thing? What’s that about?” she demanded, going back to her packing. “Is it common witch lore?”

“Dunno. Nanny never said nothing,” the gargoyle replied.

She glanced at it. It shrugged. She threw a shoe at it. The shoe missed its target and landed on the bed, leaving behind a scattering of dried mud and dirt. She stuffed the last clean linen into her pack and paused, hands on hips, with the travel pack dropped to her feet. The gargoyle fluttered its way to the door, eyes down and feet shuffling.

Sceatt had a haunting suspicion that she was missing a piece of the puzzle, a key wedge of the picture. The children found her before she found them, were declared themselves too easily, and suspected her of witchcraft because of a gargoyle.

Did the witch plant the gargoyle on her for some dastardly mastermind plan? And who was this Madam figure who seemed to know a far farthing?

“Let’s go,” she beckoned to the gargoyle. “Let’s see who this Madam is. And don’t say a word about Nanny, or I’ll gag you again.”

Sceatt was a paranoid little bitch. Paranoia practically was her nature.

“Why’d your mistress want their hearts anyways?” she asked the moment before opening the doors.

“Ah. Heart goes well with toast?”

[Libertine]

The journey to the Madam’s residence was mercifully short and quiet, and neither the children nor the gargoyle made much of a fuss. The moon lit their way down the cobblestone paves, half-crescent though it might be. The night was young and cloudless, the stars shining bright in their spots, and the road was mostly clear of crowds. The houses alongside the paves bore well lit windows and smudgy silhouettes of their residents, but few of the residents left the comforts of their homes.

Sceatt counted her fortunes and thanked the gods, including the ones she did not believe in, which was most of them. She didn’t like crowds. And she didn’t like potential eye-witnesses when she was planning something.

Grettie the girl led the way, and Hansie the boy trailed behind with his crossbow pointed towards the gargoyle’s back. Neither spoke. Soon, the group found themselves in the outskirts of town, surrounded by the woods and forests, where the closest house would be a few miles up the road.

The residence itself was a quaint little tower straight out of a storybook. Three floors high and round as pie, with an odd little balcony at the top floor and a pointed black roof like a decent witching hat.

Huh, Sceatt thought with a half scoff. How quaint.

The girl knocked thrice quickly on the giant wooden door. It opened a moment later, and before them stood a spindly old man with wafts of white hair and beard, wrinkly like a prune wearing a kilt and little else. He was a whole man, but something about him felt patched together, as though a breeze could send his head tumbling to the ground and his body bent the other way. It might have been age. Sceatt sniffed suspiciously.

“Ahh. Something wicked this way comes,” the old man creaked into the hallways behind himself.

There were tumbles and shouts coming from within, resounding within the halls and to the doors. Then quickly, footsteps came thudding, like a troll on a summer day. The children treated the noise like a perfectly ordinary occurrence.

“Is your thumb pricking again?” a woman screamed from within the house. “Show whatever it is in, alright? And get some tea!”

“Aye aye,” the old man creaked again, before turning back to the motley crew. “The Madam will see you now.”

The crew found themselves shuffling in. The entrance halls led to a little round parlour with all sorts of trinkets—was that a staffed lion’s head?—cloistering on the wall. The room was badly lit by candles along the walls, and there were no windows. There were a few mismatched couches arranged in irregular shapes around the room, and one wooden sitting table holding a vase of wilted roses.

“Nice place,” Sceatt muttered.

The old man disappeared. The children needed no invitation, and climbed onto the couches. Sceatt followed suit, with the gargoyle lurking behind. Footsteps shuffled at the door, and in ran a woman who almost tripped over the gargoyle on her way in.

[Libertine]

“You’re wearing clothes,” Sceatt gasped incredulously into the temporary silence.

The gargoyle sniggered, and everyone else simply looked at Sceatt, but she brushed it aside. Here was the woman. That woman. The one they saw this morning when the gargole and Sceatt first struggled into town this morning, and whereas the woman was clearly not dressed then, she was smothered in layers and layers of black and gray now, along with a pair of giant glasses that hung off her face like a giant mole.

“Oh, it’s you people,” the woman said when she stopped her run by crashing into the couch with the children. Her eyes darted towards Sceatt and the gargoyle.”You got me a gargoyle. But not the witch. What’s the trouble? And who’s the woman?”

The boy shrugged. “S not our fault,” he muttered lowly and jabbed in Sceatt’s general direction. “How’d you know this one’s not it?”

The woman slouched and crossed against her quivering bosoms. One of her brows rose with a painstaking slowness. It was a good slouch and a good brow-rise, and signaled something along the lines of don’t kid with me and oh, really?

“She’s not,” the woman said briskly. Her hands flapped in a way that’s clearly significant, though Sceatt wasn’t sure in what way.. “She’s not witchy enough. Doesn’t have the spark.”

What spark, Sceatt thought. And how’d you know anything about them witches?

Hansie’s brows furrowed further in suspicion, and it scrunched his face up into a knitted bun. Some children found anything adults say suspicious, and Sceatt was willing to bet this was one of them.

Of course, Sceatt herself was that type when she was a he and still a child. Then she grew up and became a she, and still she could not shake off the deep suspicion that everyone out there was out to get her and had heinous plots to do so, and therefore it was smarter to cheat them out of house and hold before they dealt the same fate unto her. Hence her lies and her trickery and the ever abiding wariness.

“She wants to join us, Ma’am,” Grettie piped in. “For the hunt. I thought you’d wanna know, Ma’am.”

I want to deliver you to my employer, actually. But Sceatt mumbled her agreement in the background. The woman pushed up her glasses and stalked towards Sceatt, who stood because something in the air commanded it.

“Madam Acwellan,” said the woman with her hand stuck out. “What’s your game?”

Sceatt shook the hand, although the process felt like rubber bands snapping ferociously upon her palms. There were precisely three shakes before Acwellan dropped her hand abruptly.

“The name’s Sceatt. A witch stole something of mine and I want it back. Thought I’d hitch a ride from your kids.” She shrugged with a small degree of apologetic peevishness and a large dose of unapologetic testiness.

Acwellan’s lips pressed into a thin line. “What’s stolen? Your manhood? I would think you took something from a witch instead. Where’d you get a gargoyle?”

The issue with innately suspicious people was that they tended to think everyone else thought the same way, and the thoughts typically ended with they’re out to get me. Fate and the Universe at times helped things along by putting innately suspicious together, whilst stirring the pot with a dash of confusion and white noise.

Something in Sceatt’s eye ticked, and her fingers twitched involuntarily. She already had an unfortunate experience with a woman who knew too much yesterday, thank you very much, and could do without another.

“It found me. Said it was cursed,” Sceatt snapped. And it hadn’t even been an outright lie. The gargoyle nodded once quickly from where it stood and hid behind a couch. “It’s looking for the witch too. We have valid reasons, Lady. What’s yours?”

“He,” the Madam said.

“What?”

“The gargoyle,” she snipped, drawing away from Sceatt and throwing herself into a seat. “The gargoyle’s a he. The witch lost me a brother and a sister and I want her dead. The brother was last night. I’ve studied her for a long time.”

The old man came back with tea and scones piled perilously high on a plate, and the treats wobbled as he placed the plate onto the sitting table. The tea looked like as though it had passed out of the other end of someone’s body. One of the scones fell and dented the ground.

“I don’t care,” the Madam continued. A light snarl began inching its way into her voice. “Go together. Go alone. Just get me the damned witch. Have some tea. And scones.”

Doesn’t explain everything, like why you’re not going yourself. But Sceatt took the excuse as what it was—an excuse, and sat back down. Nobody in their right minds ever told the whole story. Her job was to fulfill her own bargain and deliver the children, and everything else could wipe their own asses without her.

And yet, watching Hansie and Grettie sitting there with avid eyes wide open, watching the conversation without interjecting another word, lashes quivering from the air and knobbly knees clasped tight together... they weren't anything special, were they?

“Why the children?”

“They’re not the first ones,” the Madam said. “And they’ve got rid of one before.”

Bet they’re the cheapest too, Sceatt thought.

[Libertine]

The Madam was not going to pay Sceatt for this business. Once that was made impeccably clear, the little crew was let out and set upon their merry way.

“The forest,” Grettie said once they were out the door. “Witches always live in forests. Ma’am said so.”

Hansie nodded, and unfurled his crossbow from his back. “Okay. But still don’t trust the ‘goyle beastie.”

Sceatt blinked. A small smudge of disbelief had marched its way into her brain and plunked down to settle. That these children were so trusting of that Madam woman said something about the children, and Sceatt was not sure if it was a good something. There was a story there. There had to be a story there. Because otherwise she would be following two little dolts, and that would say something about her that Sceatt didn’t want said.

The children weren’t that special, were they?

***

“Scones are part of the lore, yo,” the gargoyle whispered beneath the canopy of night.

The silence of the primeval forest hung heavy with unspoken threats, and the group had already veered off the well trodden paths of the woodcutters into the unknown. They trudged in a row, headed by Grettie who now held a knife and tailed by Hansie with his crossbow. Sceatt stayed in the middle, whilst the gargoyle flattered its way back and forth, at times hacking at the tangling overgrowth to clear the path and at times dropping back to chatter with Sceatt.

“What?”

“It’s politesse or somefink. They always offer scones and tea if you come invited,” the gargoyle hurried beneath its breath, its voice only for Sceatt’s ears. “Nanny said so.”

Sceatt stepped over a prickly hedge that clearly had ideas about its station in life. A branch swept out to greet her, only to be introduced to the dagger in her hand.

“What are you implying?” she hissed. Another witch?

The gargoyle shrugged and went away. Hansie yelled something that sent trees quivering and raining leaves.

The Madam was a suspicious little she-dog, and no sir, Sceatt was not being hypocritical at all. Even so, to accuse the Madam of being another witch seemed slightly unseemly. What was another witch sending witch hunters off to the first witch for? To get rid of a rival? Or to get rid of pests? And what was that crack about wanting the old witch dead?

Perhaps there was something to the idea. Or perhaps this shebang was just a whole wallop of unlikely coincidences, which had been known to happen occasionally. Thoughts turned in her head like a suckling over a roasting pit, dripping trails of dubiety into the crevices of her mind.

The forest, however, took precedence. Dried mud cracked beneath her feet as she dodged another vine, and she hurried her way forward.

[Libertine]

It was night, and this was a witch’s realm.

In a witch’s realm, treacherous trails baited the traveller’s feet with false promises of rest and a full belly, only to send the victims down a lingering path of half-dead despair where nothingness itself giggled and drooled. Nothingness veiled the land like a thick blanket, dulling footsteps and quelling birdsongs, dimming the sights and blocking the smells, till one felt as though one stood on a waft of black mist that went nowhere.

This was a witch’s realm, and it was night. Visitors could walk for months on end and find nothing, till their skins sloughed off like parchment sheets, and throats cracked and bellies concaved from ill sustenance, and they could pray and beg and rage and wail and still find nothing. Finally, finally, the weary visitors would find themselves succumbing, fading, pawed into lips of nothingness and becoming part of the old anger that reverberated through the air, coming together with the dead men’s pasts as one great beast that howled through the night, a giant hulking paw raised in wait for the next unsuspecting victim.

When one went hunting a witch in her own realm, it was a witch’s choice to receive the visitor or not. Those whom she wished to greet would greet her eventually. The others found their end, one way or another.

It was a midnight without stars, and with a sharpened sickle blade for a moon. Here were the lowly hanging clouds, so low that they seemed within reach, as though a man could tip-toe with an outstretched hand and touch charred edges, edges so pregnant with rancour, so heavy with bile. Crickets chirped. Sullen winds were singing a quiet reprieve, a funeral march for the newly dead and a remembrance hymn for the long since buried. There was the occasional croak of a lone frog and the sometimes battering wings of a nocturnal bird.

Here were two children, a woman grown, and a flying beast made of stone, and as they trod the treacherous path, stray rocks tumbled and fell and clashed against the tangled roots of ancient trees.

In the distance, a pair of eyes watched, gleaming. In the distance, an owl hooted, darkly.