Once upon a dreadful time ou-4 Read online

  Preparation

  “Ah, a monkshood leaf preserved on its autumnal cusp- perfect,” muttered Hradian as she scrabbled among her ingredients. “Powerful she was, but a fool, Little Sister Iniqui. . Now for a chrysalis. Yes, here is one. Wait, wait, my love, this is of a death’s-head moth. Not good. Not good. Instead I need a- Ah, where did I. .? How Iniqui died, a mystery, but I knew she was after the paramour of that trull Liaze. . Here we are, the chrysalis of the papillon dore. Perfect! But I didn’t know just why she would seek out Luc. Yet through my scrying, I now realize what she was after- Huah? Merde! I do not have the skin I need.”

  Irritated, Hradian moved away from the workbench and through the doorway and onto a platform jutting out some foot or so above the scum-laden mire. On the flet squatted an overlarge, bloated toad, one of its eyes shut as if asleep, but the other one open and watching for a midge or fly or other insect straying within range. Hradian hissed words at the warty creature. Its long tongue lashed out to snatch a large fluttering moth from the foetid air, and, after a moment of swallowing, the toad waddled to the edge of the overhang and toppled off to plop into the bog; with awkward but strong strokes of bulbous hind legs, and ineffective and feeble strokes of tiny forelegs, down it dived under the surface of the ooze.

  Hradian returned to the workbench and made ready-moving things from here to there, setting a tin pot upon a tripod and placing a small but unlit fat-burner beneath. She laid out on the table an especially prepared square of vellum, its color flesh-tone, though nigh alabaster, and she weighted down the corners with odds and ends to hold it flat. She arranged other jars and vials and laid out ingredients and examined all, often referring to her grimoire. Finally satisfied, she waited, for there was little else she could do until the last component was obtained. Then she sat on the high stool and shifted a candle closer to her spell book. But even as she idly turned through the pages describing the preparation of the potion, her thoughts were upon revenge.

  “First to die was Rhensibe,” Hradian muttered, her mind going back to the day in a ramshackle tavern when she discovered that her eldest sister had been slain. .

  . .

  No one took note of the old woman entering the small saloon to set her bundle of twigs down by the door. She shook out her shawl, drops of rain flying wide. Then, through the reek of unwashed bodies and acrid woodsmoke and days-old vomit and piss and belch and fart, slowly she made her way among the gathering to the wooden plank that served as a bar. The babble of conversation did not pause, for remarkable news had come by the tinker standing at the fireplace and warming himself.

  “Tore apart, she was.”

  “How?”

  “By the prince’s very own hands, I hear.”

  “What’ll it be, Goody?” asked the barkeep.

  “A toddy,” replied the old woman.

  “How could someone tear a body apart with nought but their bare hands?”

  “ ’F he were an Ogre, he could,” said someone.

  “Non, the prince be no Ogre,” said another. “ ’Stead, I deem

  ’twere a sword what took her down.”

  “Where d’y’ say this happed?” asked another still.

  “Here you are, Goody. That’ll be a copper.” The old woman fetched a coin from the small pouch at her belt.

  “The Winterwood: that’s where it happened. That’s where the prince was.”

  “The Winterwood, you say?” asked a large, bulky man, just then joining those nigh the fireplace. “Why, then, that’d be Prince Borel.”

  “Oui, Gravin,” said someone. “Weren’t you listening to the tinker?”

  “Don’t be getting snippy, Marcel. I was in the pissoir.” At the naming of the Winterwood and Prince Borel, the old woman turned an ear to the conversation.

  “Oi, now, what is it you really know, Tinsmith?” asked Gravin of the lanky man standing before the flames.

  The stranger shrugged. “Rumor, mainly, though there seems to be something to it. Quite a few were speaking of it as I made my way sunwise.”

  The onlookers waited. The tinker sighed and turned and faced the throng, his dark beard and hair still damp from the drizzle outside. “It seems Prince Borel and his lady were travelling to his manor when they were assaulted by someone-”

  “Someone?”

  “Oui. The rumors say it was either a fiend of Enfer, or a vile mage, or a maleficent witch.”

  The old woman’s dark eyes widened, and she leaned forward, the better to hear.

  “And then. .?”

  “Well, they were in the Winterwood when the attack came, and apparently the attacker was torn asunder.”

  “By the prince?”

  “By his woman?”

  The tinker shrugged, but Gravin said, “Most likely it was

  by his Wolves. Savage they are, I hear, when the prince be threatened.”

  “What about his sword? Couldn’t he have cut the attacker up with his sword?”

  “Non,” replied Gravin. “The prince, he doesn’t carry a sword. Just a long-knife and a bow, or so they say.”

  “What about something like a Bear? I mean, there’s a rumor that a Bear sometimes is seen in the company of the prince.” The pot-mender shrugged and turned back to the fire.

  A momentary silence fell upon the gathering, and the old woman cleared her throat and asked, “Did the attacker have a name?”

  “Arr, a meet question, Goody,” said the barkeep. “Did the attacker have a name? I mean, mayhap we can riddle out whether it were a fiend, a mage, or a witch.”

  The tinsmith sighed and said, “The only thing I heard was that it was one of Orbane’s acolytes.”

  At the naming of Orbane and an acolyte a gasp went up from the gathering, especially from the old woman, followed by a pall of silence.

  But then the tinker added, “I think it was someone called. .

  now let me see. . something like, Wrenlybee, though that isn’t it at all.”

  The old woman’s cup slipped from her fingers and fell to the floor with a clang. “Wrenlybee? Do you instead mean Rhensibe?”

  The tinker turned and slowly nodded. “Ah, oui, Goody, I think that was it. Rhensibe.”

  With a screech, the old woman flung a hand out toward the stranger, her fingers clawlike, her wrist twisting. The man gasped and clutched at his chest, and fell to his knees, and men drew back in startlement and fear, though one, Gravin, sprang to the tinsmith’s aid.

  Wailing, the old woman spun ’round and ’round like a dark,

  whirling wind and hurtled toward her bundle of twigs. She snatched it up, and-lo! — no bundle it was, but a besom instead.

  Out the door she slammed, ere any could seem to move.

  “Witch!” cried Marcel, and leapt in pursuit, the others charging after, all but Gravin and the tinker, who yet wheezed and said, “Someone dropped an anvil on my chest.” Outside, no old woman did the men find, though across the face of the moon a ragged shadow darted.

  . .

  “I was up and away ere they could act,” muttered Hradian.

  “And when I searched in my dark mirror for Rhensibe, all it showed was a scatter of bones there in the Winterwood snow.

  Borel will pay for this, I swear.”

  Hradian’s thoughts were interrupted by a loud chorus of croaking from the mire, as if every toad and every frog were sounding an alarm, though no alarm this, for swamp creatures fall silent when danger draws nigh. No, this was something else-a signal, a calling-and the bogland was filled with a racking din.

  “Ah, good. Crapaud has done his job.”

  Again Hradian waited, and once more her mind fell into thoughts of revenge. “Next was Iniqui. Her end came at the hands of that slattern Liaze. But how, I know not. All was fiery when I sought Iniqui, nothing left, there below a frigid, obsidian mountain. . ”

  . .

  Carrying a broom-a twiggy besom-over one shoulder and a rucksack slung from the other, the small child wended through Market Square, loo
king at this, purchasing that, especially mosses and herbs and oddities. Strange things for a child to want, now, weren’t they? Or so the goodwives asked themselves.

  Regardless of whispered comments, the child meandered on, filling her satchel with odds and ends-dried lizards, living newts, sheep’s eyes, and other peculiarities. Why, one might think she was a- Ah, but that could not be. She was nought but a child after all.

  The day was dim and damp, the low-hanging clouds grazing the tops of even the meanest of buildings. Yet this was mountain country, and often did clinging air and misty vapor curl through the town; one merely needed to be bundled against such. Nevertheless, it was market day, when farmers and mendicant friars and merchants and other such gathered to trade or sell their wares. Occasionally a swindler or cutpurse would show up, but the local men quickly took care of such unsavory riffraff.

  At one corner of the square, two men sat at a table, an echiquier between them, other men standing and watching as the echecs game went on, quiet conversation among them.

  The girl paused when she heard one of the onlookers utter a particular name.

  “. . Liaze, they say.”

  “And where did this come from?” asked one of the men.

  “I heard it over at the Poulet Gris.”

  “Ah, pish, what do they know? ’Tis nought but drunks who frequent that place.”

  “Well it was but a rumor.”

  “And this princess and a rooster killed a witch?”

  “Pecked her to death, I shouldn’t wonder,” muttered someone.

  This brought a round of laughter from them all, quickly hushed as one of the players scowled up from the board. When the bystanders fell silent, that player then moved his tower and said, “Check.”

  It brought a mutter from the onlookers, for they had not seen it coming. It was after all a revealed check rather than one from a direct move.

  Long did the opponent ponder his options.

  Finally, one man whispered, “Did this witch have a name?”

  “Iniquitous, I think.”

  Behind them the child shrieked, and there came a cold blast of air, and when the men turned, no one was there, though the clouds just above swirled in turbulence, as if something had shot through at speed.

  . .

  “I didn’t realize it then, but now I believe the obsidian mountain must be where the key was forged.” Hradian ground her teeth. “Stupid, stupid Iniqui. She should have known there is a much easier way. She died for her stupidity, and for that Liaze shall pay.”

  Of a sudden the croaking din outside ceased altogether, leaving behind a deafening quiet. And then there came a splat of feet and a stench, a reek, as of swamp bottom. Hradian turned.

  At the door stood an eight-foot-tall Bogle. Dark and Goblinlike he was, and bald and naked, his swollen male organ erect. He smiled, showing wicked pointed teeth, and he gestured toward the bed.

  “Bah, you fool,” spat Hradian, “I need a live three-horned sticky-tongue.”

  The smile vanished.

  “You heard me: a three-horned sticky-tongue, and alive.

  Now go.”

  The erection drooped, and the Bogle glanced from the witch to the bed and back.

  “I said go!”

  The creature, his organ now flaccid, turned and dove into the turgid waters.

  Her black eyes snapping in irritation, Hradian muttered and fumed and stared at the now empty doorway. Another splat sounded out on the flet, and the overlarge, bloated toad waddled across to take up station nigh the door. Hradian stepped to the opening. “I need to teach you, Crapaud, a different signal for those times I merely want an errand run.” Hradian returned to the bench, alternately thinking of the aroused Bogle and of the vengeance she would wreak upon Valeray and all his get. “Including you, Princess Celeste, for you are the youngest, and you slew the youngest of us-Nefasi. . ”

  . .

  Mid a great celebration in the port city of Mizon, a matron asked one of the celebrants what the ado was all about.

  “Women are safe again, especially demoiselles.”

  “Safe? From what?”

  “Have you not heard? The Changeling Lord is dead.”

  “Dead? How?”

  “A chevalier, Roel by name, slew him.”

  “I do not believe it,” said the matron, shaking her head.

  “King Avelar himself announced it.”

  The matron sighed. “The Lord of the Changelings dead?”

  “Oui, and not only that, but the king also said that Celeste, Princesse de la Foret du Printemps slew one of Orbane’s acolytes-a witch named Nefasi.”

  The matron shrieked and turned and fled away through the gay crowd.

  . .

  “And she, too, will pay, will Celeste,” muttered Hradian.

  Again the witch paced the floor, waiting for the skin she needed, plotting her vengeance, and thinking of the Bogle as well.

  A short while later, once more the Bogle appeared at her door. In his hand he held a squirming lizard-a pale brown three-horned sticky-tongue.

  “Bon!” crowed Hradian. She took the reptile from the Bogle and placed it in a widemouthed jar and capped it with a tin plate. Then she turned to the Bogle and gestured toward her bed.

  . .

  With the Bogle finally gone back into the foetid swamp, Hradian, now naked, returned to her grimoire and the elixir she would brew. She filled the tin pot with a greenish-yellow fluid from a jar labeled “bile,” and then lit the fat-burner below.

  When the fluid began to simmer, one by one and at certain times and most carefully she dropped the ingredients into the seething liquid: the turning monkshood leaf, the chrysalis of the golden butterfly, the belladonna berry, and more. At a critical point, she retrieved the lizard from the jar and held it against the square of alabaster vellum. The reptile’s eyes independently turned this way and that, as if seeking a way to flee, and its prehensile feet sought to grasp something, a branch, a limb, something by which it could escape this thing holding it.

  Hradian jabbed the creature, and it shifted color. “Not vert, you idiot,” she spat at the now-green lizard. “Can you not see what I hold you against?”

  Once more she jabbed it, and once more it changed color, this time to a muddy brown. Again and again Hradian tormented the reptile, and again and again it changed tint-russet, beige, ochre, yellow, jade-all to the witch’s frustrated shouts, but of a sudden it took on the hue of the vellum, and in that moment, Hradian broke its neck.

  Swiftly she skinned it, and dropped that into the tin pot on the tripod above the fat-burner. She threw the flayed remains of the lizard out onto the flet, where Crapaud snatched them up with his long tongue and swallowed them whole.

  Referring often to her spell book, all night Hradian muttered arcane words over the bubbling brew, and she dropped various leaves and stems and berries and blossoms and insects and other such into the simmering liquid, adding goodly amounts of her own urine to the mix and small amounts of her feces.

  And she spat into the pot, and ran her finger through her crotch and stirred with that finger a single circuit widdershins in the liquid as well. Then she pricked her hand with a needle, and blood and teardrops came, each of which she dripped into the mix. And with silk strings she briefly dipped various ores and crystals into the brew, hissing strange utterances all the while, loudly singing these words when she repeatedly bobbed a flake of alchemically transmuted gold in and out of the fluid as the concoction boiled down and down.

  At last she reached the end of the lengthy recipe laboriously detailed in her grimoire, and she removed the pot from the flame and cautiously poured every last drop of the warm and ocherous result into a small vial and capped it. Then she laughed in glee and danced nakedly about her cote, holding up the potion and crooning.

  Suspicions

  Some two candlemarks after the arrival of the retinues, when the travelling kindred had freshened themselves and had changed out of their riding clothes-th
e women into silks and satins and soft slippers, and the men into trews and jerkins and such-the distaff side gathered in the green room, while the men gravitated to the armory to inspect the arms and armor to be used in the tournament to come.

  As tea was served to the ladies, Simone looked about the intimate chamber, with its velvet walls the color of pale jade, and its floor of a tile an even lighter green. The comfortable chairs they sat in were upholstered in an emeraldine fabric bearing a pattern of tiny diamonds of light yellow. They sat in an arc about a small, unlit fireplace ensconced in a corner, the room comfortable on this summer eve with air wafting in through open bay windows.

  Glass-chimneyed candles in stands lit the chamber with a soft glow, reflecting highlights from the gilt frames of several modest landscapes: a placid lake nestled among snowcapped mountains; a green glade half-seen through a curling fog; a herd of horses racing across sunlit, rolling hills, and running before a distant storm sweeping after. In addition, on the wall above the mantel hung a quartet of individual small portraits of children-two boys and two girls-presumably those of Valeray and Saissa.

  Simone’s gaze then went to the arc of women: to her left sat Avelaine, and then on ’round deasil were Camille and Saissa and Liaze and Celeste and Michelle. In a pocket high on Camille’s gown slept a small sparrow-Scruff his name-a thing Simone found most curious.

  To the left of each chair stood a small round table of some sort of dark wood, on which one of the maids placed saucers and cups, and a second one poured tea for each lady, the third adding milk and honey if so desired. A sideboard of the same dark wood-ebony? — sat against one wall, and there the maids placed the tea service and then withdrew.

  When the staff softly closed the door behind, Saissa took a deep breath and peered down into her cup, as if seeking tranquility therein. Then she raised her gaze to the gathering. “For nearly four years I have at times felt as if someone or something vile has been in my chamber. Yet when I look about for the source, nought is there. The feeling comes and goes, and oft is very brief, though at times it has lingered awhile. I understand that Liaze, Celeste, Camille, and Michelle have sensed the very same thing, have had the very same experiences. Not so?”