Anon, Agnes could never say which came first, the tale, the witch or the snatchings. By the end of that year, the Year of Our Lord 1598, the elders themselves fained not to speak of it and that autumn became a tale in itself. All told, Dannet was a humble place, a hamlet on the edge of the River Lede with the castle crouched beyond it and marches of oak all around, the forest having as many myths as branches. Agnes, having been born amid them, did not think it her place to question. Too much quizzing might well see her mother reach for a spoon and by the age of nine she’d learnt to hold her tongue whenever Ranulf, her father, came stumbling home of an eve, drunk as usual from the inn. Nevertheless, Agnes liked the stories, vicious as they were, and when the shadows stretched long and the candles flickered, her mother would tuck the girl into bed and give her her prayers, along with good reason to stay out of the woods.
“Long her arms and iron her teeth,” her mother, Maribel, would say, conjuring up yet another story, one bodeful and bloody. “’Tis why our windows needs be small and the cottage so darksome. When Annis comes a-creeping up from her bower, sniffing out children in the gloom, she won’t be able to reach thee, my dove.”
Then, as was her wont, her mother would pull a face to resemble the hag in question and tickle the girl’s ribs, quick to cover her mouth if she squealed. Ranulf, should he happen to arrive at that very moment, wouldn’t take kindly to the noise. A large and ill-tempered man, he liked to pull off his boots and sit by the fire, call out for meat and then fall to snoring to shake the walls. Or sometimes to have poor Maribel in his lap, him grunting away like a sated pig and Agnes under her blanket to shut out the bumping downstairs, and after the sound of her mother weeping. The bruises on the goodwife’s face, by turns fading or fresh, were never quite hidden by her wrinkles or the shadows of the hearth as she sat at her spinning, a dour rake of a woman, but beloved. The only time her mother smiled was ere she blew out the candle and bade Agnes the sweetest dreams, as if the parting vision of the witch hadn’t dwindled away the chance of them.
Instead, Agnes, little Agnes, would lie awake and watch the moon come up, throwing patterns across the floorboards, in the smoke curling under the beams. Drawn by dread or by shadow, the haze fashioned itself into the guise of the one they called Annis, blue faced and lank-haired, her skirts of flayed skin around her waist and her claws a-weaving from doorway to sill. Reaching, as her mother had told her, for whoever she could find.
By her reckoning, Agnes might say it was the shadows that came first, before Beth the tanner’s wife, the snatchings and the men in hats came along. Or before the shaping of them, perchance. Come the first snow on the midden heap, even Agnes had forgotten whether the witch was truly there before, a tale of old, or whether her mother had simply made her up. In church one Sunday, she’d heard Pastor Aldred say much similar about God and his Creation, the divide betwixt dreams and the dirt or somesuch, but the precise words escaped her and all she was left with was the circling darkness before sleep at last claimed her.
That and her mother’s warning, soft in her skull.
Stay out of the woods!
It was why, three nights after that particular one, Agnes was so afeared when her mother took her by the hand and swept off into the thicket.
“Take him, I beg thee.” This from her mother, shawl-wrapped in the clearing, the moon making ogres of the trees. “If thee be there. If thee hearken. I have wine. I have groats.”
Agnes, one hand clutching her mother’s and the other her skirts, wondered why she’d been brought along at all, roused from her bunk at midnight and ushered out the back door with a hush upon pain of a spanking. She’d only ventured into the woods on a bright spring morn when the mayor and his men went a-hunting the mock-hare, trailing a dead cat soaked in aniseed through the thicket and past the little cave before which the both of them presently stood. ‘Annis’s bower’, the villagers called it, the narrow cleft in the bluff with the crooked old oak shrouding its mouth, and all fained to avoid it. They also said that the witch had scooped out the earth with her bare claws and littered the floor in the bones of all the children she’d snatched, tiny, broken and gnawed. They said she hung their skins on the branches as a warning, though Agnes could only see leaves—what she told herself were leaves—rustling in the October wind.
The darkness beyond them held fathoms, a soup too dense for the moon to pierce and the glade a smooth circle of black, the briar leaning in to heed. It was true that a pall hung on the air, the stench of a charnel house or Lord help them, a plague pit, and the branches creaked like laughter with no flutter of birds. What good was a child against bandits or wolves? The castle was miles yonder and all inside would be sleeping. Even a scream in that place would never bring soldiers in time. A certain madness had gripped her mother, a woman who all thought devout, and she stood a-tremble with her sack of gifts and a bound sprig of sage for protection.
For the longest time, all was still. Agnes was not expecting the sound in the dark, the steady clink of iron from the cave that she took at once for a grinding of teeth. A shuffle of earth and the crunch of twigs (bones), she thought, as a darker form seemed to gather at the cave entrance, the moonlight glinting on one bulbous eye.
“Fool of a wench,” the shadows said, “to take the goat’s hoof in wedlock. And here thee come all lachrymose to me. D’ye ken my tale, sot-wife? My many years? I who advised a king at the stones to take seven steps and win a crown should he see the spire at Long Compton. And I who warned another by the bridge that where his spur struck his head would be broken, and his throne at Middleham fall.”
The stench was fouler now, and the shadows thicker, yet nevertheless, her mother answered.
“I know of it, mistress. ’Tis why I came.”
“Vinegar and polished lead, and groats without blood is nothing,” the cave mouth said, and then either grumbled or cackled. “If thee have ken of me, woman, then thee know what Black Annis likes.”
“Then have him, grey tooth. I care not. Wilt thou bargain with me?”
“Faugh! What care I for bitter meat, ale-steeped and sour? Veins filled with petty spite and a tongue stained by coarse words? Hands that have known an innocent neck and a pintel that’s made thee a cuckquean six times over? I’ll take naught that’s not precious to ye, woman.”
It was then that Agnes shivered, the moon, the trees, the stench and the dark nothing compared to the fat white eye that fell upon her where she stood at the edge of the clearing, fit to climb inside her mother’s bones.
Maribel gave a sob, and a curse, and then was wrenching the girl away from the glade. Back to the village and another clutch of days at the hands of Ranulf the granger.
The affair with the shadows commenced soon after, as Agnes judged it, or perchance the meeting in the woods had made her notice at last. To begin with, she’d try her hand of an eve, well after the wick had snuffed out and the moon sailed high in the sky. When the cottage creaked and her father snored, and her mother’s weeping had ceased. There were no longer bedtime stories or aught and only her prayers to ease her. The milky glow through her window—thankfully little and loftward—was enough to make her puppets on the wall, the dancing rabbit, the flapping bird, the swan, the dog and, aye, the witch. Annis she’d never laid eyes on, not clearly, and for some reason she doubted the hag wore a hat, all pointed and black, but the image was on her mind nonetheless. Though past All Hallows and into November, her mother had taken to laying a broom across the stoop and was burning sage besides, as if she’d come to regret her dickering in the glade and feared that Annis might take her up on it regardless. Or perchance Maribel suffered the shame of it, for Ranulf was her husband by oath and the ending of him a sin. Speak not of it! her mother had warned. Lest thee sleep out in the barn. Yet that did not account for her petition in the first place, the beseeching of wild spirits in the brake, which the queen herself looked darkly upon with many a lass gone swinging on a rope. What would the Pastor say?
Troubled, Agnes clutched for her pillow to wipe away tears, to struggle into sleep, when she marked that her makings remained on the wall, dancing still in her absence of hands. The rabbit, she saw, hopped over the shelf and the hanging cross, and leapt through the drapes for the garden. The bird wheeled and vanished up the chimney, dislodging no speck of soot. The witch, turning, stretched out her arms, reaching just as mother had said for the foot of the bed and the quivering girl, each limb longer than a broom.
Agnes never saw where those claws fell or what they might get, the blanket up quick over her head and the darkness a boon.
But she’d marked the weave of shadows.
Ere the first snatching, there were seven rare days of warmth in the shire and the last of the pleasant ones for Dannet. On the second of them, Col the tanner brought his bride-to-be to the village and Pastor Aldred wed them in the church, blessing their union under a fine arbour of roses. There was a feast with pheasant, poached from the forest, and a message from the mayor though it arrived by scroll on horseback. A day or so after that, when Dannet returned to the business of the harvest and the men rode out to hunt, Maribel her mother found herself yoked to a new companion, the newly wed Beth, charged as she was to teach the goodwife the ways of spinning, the peeling of turnips, the scrubbing of steps and suchlike. Mother had grumbled over the task when they’d broken fast that morning and Agnes had naught to tell her, knowing full well how she favoured her own time and liked to hide her bruises besides, forestalling village gossip.
Yet the sun shone that day on the stoop and the women scrubbed at jerkin and hose, and there was barely a moment of silence betwixt them, the two of them talking up a storm. Beth spoke of her journey from Thorpe-in-the-Glede, her heart full of love for her man and her brightful morrow, and Maribel had smiled at that though her eyes remained sad. Her mother had turned the chatter to broader affairs such as the end of the war betwixt France and Spain, the new plays of Shakespeare in distant London (which one day she swore she would see) and the matter of the English succession, the queen’s health said to be on the wane.
Women as they were, and abreast of the panic in the north, neither were keen on the notion of James, the Scottish king with his treatise on Daemonologie and his notorious hatred of witches. That was dark talk, however, and no good for choring. Maribel had embarked on explaining the proper baking of plum pie for yule and the both of them chuckling at the various sizes of the purple fruit in the wooden bowl (and mention of Ranulf and Col besides), though Agnes failed to see what they found so amusing. One thing she did know; she’d never seen her mother smile so much in her life and her laughter rang through the cottage as if to spurn the coming kiss of winter.
Annis in her cave was all but forgotten and little Agnes to boot. Into the square she skipped, without a by-your-leave, and challenged Hubert the miller’s son to a game of leapfrog, though the boy shook his head and hastened away. Then withal she found Hobbled Jane on the schoolhouse steps and begged her to come play hide-and-seek, but the lass went limping away on her crutches ere Agnes came within a pole of her and feigned not to hear her pleas. At last, the girl dared to engage Noll, an older lad and a laggard, to go fishing on the banks of the Lede. This earned her a spit in the dust at her feet and a stab of the evil eye, causing Agnes to swiftly withdraw. In the shadow of the church, she cursed the plague and the village tattlers, deciding that her mother’s bruises had thus been mistaken, and none too keen to catch their death from her only child. Where Maribel had found kindship, she had found cruelty.
Anon and alone, Agnes set to wandering in the church orchards, drifting under the apple trees in a lattice of shadows, singing a hymn and dreaming of spring, and heedless of the ills beneath the granger’s eaves. There was no wind, barely a breeze, and the sway of the branches under her feet, inked on the uncropped sward, was what caused her to gasp and realise that her weaving had followed her hither, a tide of darkness swirling in her wake.
Claws, she thought them. Reaching. Reaching . . .
It chilled her despite the uncommon sun. And the notion was one that turned her mind to a fresh shaping, if she could but fathom the art. Hands spread and heart aflutter, Agnes laboured long that afternoon, twisting and knotting the shadows into roses, lilies and motifs of fleur-de-lis, long diagonals and the coiling patterns she’d seen on lady’s kirtles in the city, making a splendour of the grass. So occupied was she, so lost in delight, that she failed to mark the appearance of Pastor Aldred until the man cried out and she spied him peering over the parsonage wall, his crumpled bladder of a face drawn in a mask of horror.
“Maleficium!” he hissed, and so affrighted was Agnes that the bottle of rum in the pastor’s hand and the ruddy look of him fair escaped her, as well as his presence in the corner of the garden, some poles away from his pulpit and his books. “Missy, what are thee about?”
Agnes was not bound to answer him. Lifting her skirts, the girl fled, abandoning the orchards, her dreams and her weaving.
Under the trees, the shadows all scattered.
Who knew what might come of it, the pastor’s glimpse of her craft? Agnes could scarcely think of it, though the days ahead would satisfy all doubt. She said naught of the matter to her mother for her mother would carp so. And of late Maribel seemed so heartened by Beth, the two firm friends by the end of the week, spinning and scrubbing and chuckling. Her father, of course, oft came stumbling home from the Boar and there was no good time to tell him, not that the girl ever would. Then there was the matter of grit in his stew to thwart the present trouble and replace it with a new one, with Agnes sent off to bed before she could witness the first blows fall and her fingers in her ears to dampen the sobbing. Had she thought it fortune enough, to hope that Aldred, well in his cups, might believe he’d imagined the whole thing and leave the girl to her freedom, the Monday thereafter spared her the worry.
That morn, when all of Dannet awoke to a bloodcurdling scream and men went rushing back and forth with pitchforks, Agnes understood how meagre her woe had been. A greater peril had eclipsed it. Though she’d made sure to sleep (and refrain from her weaving) the night afore had been the last breath of summer, of many childish things. A chill had come to settle over the land. That was the night of the first snatching.
“Took him, it did.” This from the tanner’s wife, pale by the stove. “Grabbed the lad right from his bunk. A wolf or some dastard after a drudge.”
“No drudge, missy, though I wish it were so,” said Ruby, the baker’s wife, who’d come a-visiting to deliver bread, but chiefly for gossip. “They said there was blood all over the chamber, a trail that led right to the window and off into the woods.”
At this, Agnes and her mother exchanged glances, fearful and bright. All the men were out in the fields thereabouts, ahorse and searching in vain. The mayor had sent two soldiers. The pastor was doubtless attending to the parents, Bible in hand and sermons on lips, and all in Dannet was quiet, if not the granger’s cottage. There’d been no hide nor hair of Hubert, the miller’s son.
“Prithee say not . . . ” Beth mustered her breath, her hands twisting the front of her apron. “Do ye think it was her?” A flick of her eyes to the east, to the west, to the thicket all around. “The one they call Black—?”
“Prattle and pish.” Maribel stood, her hands on her hips, the last of her smiles since faded. “Tales for children and fools. Mention her not under my roof.”
Nevertheless, Agnes saw the sorrowful glint in her eye. And even though the sun was high and the day none too shadowed, she alone could guess why her mother went to the window and drew the shutters closed.
That weren’t the last of it, not by a stretch. November proceeded in sombre fashion with the hacking of roots in the bitter fields and the crows cawing in the misted woods like glad omens of doom. Come nightfall, every window stood shuttered or draped, with lanterns and candles upon every sill and doors bolted where afore none had reason to fear. Dannet crouched by the river under woodsmoke and dread, and there was only Ranulf to come home from the inn with tidings of the shadow fallen over the village. Agnes, for her sins, would huddle of an eve at the top of the stairs, ear cocked and limbs taut lest a floorboard betray her.
On the eleventh, Hobbled Jane too had vanished, the schoolmistress sending up such a hue and cry at the church doors that the owls nesting in the spire deserted. All that the pastor and the watch found in the poor lass’s chamber was her crutch and a broad pool of blood, the overturned stool and a scatter of dollies conveying a struggle of some kind.
“’Twas the window that told the whole tale,” her father said, unusually quiet and free of curses. “Shun all that chatter of wolves. None could climb to the upper floor and clean tear off the shutters. Forsooth, there were claw marks and blood all the way down the schoolhouse wall. And speckling the forest path besides!”
There was no sign of Hobbled Jane, however. Not so much as a ribbon. The girl, Agnes thought, had deigned to play hide-and-seek after all and thus proved the champion of it. That night, there was sobbing in the cottage as was common, yet not all of it belonged to Maribel and her daughter.
Under her blanket, Agnes clasped her hands and kept her eyes sealed, no longer keen on moonlight and shadow.
Anon, as that bitter month came to a close, Noll the laggard was taken, and even his pestering in the village let none see him pass without mourning. The mayor, Lord bless him, sent a couple more guards from the city, answering the grievous call, and in they rode with muskets on shoulders and scowls above their trimmed moustaches. Have ye not set a watch? they demanded. What were these peasants to them? Leofric, the blacksmith, cursed them for fools and told him indeed they had. The watch had found the lad’s shoe in the well and what they took to be footsteps trailing off into the brake, each one red in the dust.
A large foot, Ranulf claimed, belching from his joyless ale in the Boar, and toes splayed outward, yet bloody and human all the same. The soldiers returned from the woods empty-handed.
Agnes had shuddered to hear it, appraised of only one who dwelt in the thicket and wondering, wondering at this turn of events, that the children she’d hailed for gaiety that day should have all gone into the darkness. Snatched and hied into shadow, she thought, their cries fading betwixt the trees. The old tale bubbled in her mind, a sour broth, and she wished she’d never heard it. Could a tug on a thread of shadow here, a weaving there, bring such a blight upon them? Or had her mother, begging for murder in a black glade, invited the witch to their door? Who could say? The wind? The moon? And the creak of the trees outside, inked upon her bedroom floor, all seemed to her as long arms reaching . . .
By the church one frosty morn, the pastor charged the men to dig three empty graves and summoned all to attend the service after. As mothers wept and fathers glared, Aldred beseeched the Lord for His mercy and spoke long of prayers unuttered and libations unperformed, and the touch of the plague on Dannet akin to the judgement passed upon Egypt, countless ages ago. When the man turned his tongue to talk of devils in their midst, and meddling and conjuration besides, all in the pews wailed and shuddered.
“Thou shalt not suffer . . . ’Tis written!” cried the pastor, thumping.
Yet none shuddered as much as Agnes, the granger’s daughter, who looked up to find the pastor’s eye had fallen upon her and thus grasped the seed in his mind.
There was comfort in the cottage, after a fashion, but not for little Agnes. One afternoon, after sweeping and peeling, and Ranulf said to be checking on the sheep (though perchance at the inn), the girl came down to the hearth in search of bread and warmth. There she spied her mother and Beth, the tanner’s wife, knelt together before the fire. What further evil had come to pass that both should be prayerful, here in the middle of the day? Maribel had taken the woman’s head in her hands and pressed it fast to her bosom, so close that at first Agnes neither marked the undoing of laces on her mother’s bodice nor the swell of her naked breasts. Like the bottle of rum in the pastor’s hand, she fained not to see it, the weeping of the goodwife and the soothing it brought her, but marry, her eyes drank in the sight. And with a twitch of her fingers, the shadows of the hearth veiled Agnes too, a darker patch stretching out to the foot of the stairs and rendering her unseen, a mere sapling in the gloom. Ashamed and a-tremble at matters of which she had no ken, Agnes held her breath and withdrew up the staircase, begging her belly for silence.
Speak not of it. Stay out of the woods.
Hearken she would to Maribel’s counsel.
That night there were makings on the chamber wall and the hands to shape them. A boy, a girl and a laggard all formed, and left playing there in moonlight while Agnes clasped her fingers together and recited her evening prayers.
Shadows in place of absent friends. Comfort where there was none.
December brought a gale and men to the village.
The men, whom the pastor hailed as Grimwald and Jorin, were holding tightly to the high-crowned hats upon their heads when Aldred brought them to the cottage. All around, the chaff from the rooftops went swirling with the smoke, a wind on which the devil himself might ride, bringing fresh horror to the granger’s door. The broaches pinned to their upturned brims bore crests both royal and churchly, and their garb was fine—too fine for Dannet. The pastor, coif headed, fiddled with the cross around his neck as he informed the gawping Ranulf that from the city they’d come, seeking out the evil that plagued them.
“‘Tis not she, father!” This from Maribel, tearful and wild on the stoop, her hands a vice on her daughter’s arm. “Close thine ears to the village ado, for whispers ever wrought wickedness. Agnes hies to church every Sunday, does she not? Unhand her, sirrah.”
Aldred pulled a face to show what he thought of that. The one called Grimwald (the ‘sirrah’ her mother had addressed) tightened his grip on the girl’s other arm, keen to draw her hither to the road and the carriage that awaited there. Black it was. Black as Annis.
“Alack, she hies to the orchard too,” the pastor replied with a thin smile. “Of late, I spied her dancing there, cavorting with infernal spirits! We must put her to the question, mine comrades and I. ’Tis for the good of us all.”
With a sob, Maribel turned her ire upon Ranulf, who, still bleary from the inn the night afore, was loath to stand in the path of the mayor’s men. Or to cavil at the church.
“Ye craven! Ye knave! A plague upon thee! Wouldst that I’d ne’r parted my legs and blessed thee with Lucifer’s get!”
Agnes reckoned this somewhat harsh, but understood her mother’s anguish. Naught had gone well since their walk in the woods and it seemed plain that her refusal sore vexed her, and where she placed the blame. Her husband she might loathe, the ties that bind. But there were other entanglements, stronger ones, and those the goodwife cursed too.
“Blasphemy,” said Aldred, unmoved.
“Soft, mother.” Agnes, little Agnes, neither struggled nor wept, gazing up into the face of the pastor. The goodly gentlemen. “I shall go with them.”
Nonetheless, in her heart, the girl stoked the embers of a darker choice. Were there not shadows under the clouds? Was the room behind her not stuffed with them? What little it would take for her to raise her hands, to reach out and conjure a whip to lash the men from her door. Or to summon a horse a-leaping from the flames and carry her in smoke into the forest. Or to pluck at the darkness under the trees and assail the gentlemen themselves, binding velvet arm and stockinged leg, binding throat and drawing tight, enough to choke air and sunder flesh, paint the sward with their righteous blood. Though it pained her, Agnes understood then that she’d never see their hats left lying in a pool of red or the pastor’s face as he observed them, the man grasping the true shape of shadows and the weight of his sainted Hell.
Instead, Agnes bowed her head. She left her mother weeping there, trapped in the arms of her hated lord husband.
In the gale, the shutters clacked.
It sounded like laughter. The grinding of teeth.
Thereafter it seemed that the pastor knew not what to do with her. Or rather knew and lacked the authority. The gentlemen, Sir Grimwald, Sir Jorin, insisted in the hall of the parsonage on the need for restraint, considering the girl’s age and the outcry it might cause. Aldred, in his fashion, had spittle on his lips while he spoke of brimstone and flails and prickings, of duckings, screwings and days without food, the usual business of a royal questioning and the devil and his servants knowing no earthly years, said he, whichever the shape they wore. Three children snatched or dead, he went on, and all in the village afeared, prattling of a hag with claws and teeth of iron, lurking in yonder wood. Here then, cried he and pointed. Here is thy ‘Black Annis’. Wilt thou wait another night, another moment, so she may strike again?
Beads of sweat had broken out on his brow. Perchance the gale outside had parched him, for he licked his lips when he glowered at the girl.
Agnes, for her part, muttered a prayer.
“Be that as it may, father,” Grimwald replied with the sketch of a bow, “this business must come before a court. Come morn, we shall take her to the castle.”
So it was that they locked Agnes up in the pantry, in amongst the rats and the dirt. Her last glimpse of the pastor was when he shut the door, him red-faced, rattled and aquiver, and she left to the shadows alone.
The girl feared them much less than he.
Come midnight or thereabouts (it was futile to mark it in the dark), Agnes looked up from her weeping at a face at the window, a square portal high on the wall. Long had she sat and considered her chances, yet the girl had the wisdom to know that any show of strength, any weaving of the darkness to escape her gaol, would only see her sooner to the gallows. Where could she run? To Thorpe-in-the Glebe? To London, penniless? Nay. She fained not to dwell on the rumours of this or that goodwife carted off from the shire hamlets and never had she heard of a one of them returned, but the gloom was no good for such thinking. Thirsty, cold, her belly grumbling, Agnes determined to face her fate without struggle, to recite her prayers and trust to the good Lord above to come and deliver her.
As it happened, it was Mirabel, her mother, who came to her rescue, tapping at the weathered glass. Then a tinkle and a scatter, and arms reaching down, plucking her daughter from the pantry. It was dark and the wind was still up, blowing the woman’s hair into snakes. Agnes saw the cuts on her cheeks regardless and knew that Ranulf the granger had punished her for the event that noon, for bringing queen and clergy to his cottage door. A storm was brewing and lightning flashed, causing Agnes to wonder which was the worst of it—the parsonage or her own hearth, for surely her father had even less to thank her for and the mayor’s men would come a-galloping . . .
But Maribel was heading into the woods.
“Be quick about it, my lass,” she said, dragging her daughter behind her into the thicket, her grip once again like iron. “Thou hast better hasten thy steps. The hours fleet by and thy chances short. If they see thee off to the castle, that shall be the end of it. It matters not which path we choose. All now are thick with thorns.”
Anon, shivering, the both of them followed a winding track and emerged at last on the edge of the clearing, the circle of black in the woods. This night there was but a sliver of moon to make out the narrow cave mouth in the bluff, the old oak hanging over it. And the leaves that fluttered that were no leaves, each one thin and veined enough for the season, but the size of tattered flags. White stones littered the floor of the hollow and in a moment Agnes knew them for skulls, either fresh boiled or licked clean, she thought, counting their small round shapes in the gloom. A miller’s son. A hobbled girl. The squat leavings of a laggard. How such a notion came to her, she couldn’t say. But she reckoned that the shadows knew, aye, and thinking thus, it was the shadows which spoke.
“Come ye again, sot-wife, as ye always come, wild-eyed and breathless with need.” In the darkness before them, a fat white eye greeted them with grim satisfaction. “What hast thou brought me this time? A necklace stolen from a dame? A pickled pintel for witching? A stale crust of bread?”
“Nay, Annis,” said her mother. “Hearkened well, I have. Thee can cease thy feasting in the village. The time for taunting is done. I bring thee a daughter gallows bound. The most precious thing in the world and my keeping.”
“Ah, to hear thee foretell her fate.” The witch cackled as before, thick with naked mockery. “What can one of flesh know of it? Naught, woman. Naught.”
“There is no other fate for one such marked.”
“Forsooth. Forsooth. Then tell me of thy terms.”
“Why, the same ones as before, mistress. In return thee must take him from me, coarse tongue and all. Take the whole of Dannet for all I care! Leave only mine own Beth, the tanner’s wife, so that I might pluck some joy of it. Little Agnes should prove payment enough.”
Alack! To hearken to her mother’s words drove nails through the girl’s breast harder than any pricking. For here in the glade was the cause of her rescue and none to counter elsewise. Maribel’s heart had passed from her child like the sun and shone down on another, abandoning her to the dark. Lucifer’s get, she’d called her, and spited Ranulf her father just the same. What ill had Agnes ever brought her mother to find herself so used, plucked from under the parson’s nose and shoved like a groat into the shadow? To the hag in the cavern mouth?
There, Agnes spied a secret to which Maribel was blind, the bulk of the witch mishappen yet half formed, a bloom of darkness with a glint of teeth, the bulge of a gibbous eye, no more. Rags and claws born of a tale, and long arms reaching out, each a spear of gloom betwixt the trees.
Reaching . . .
Breathless, tearing at the grip around her wrist, the girl knew then the womb whence the witch had ushered forth and all her ravening with her.
“So thee have chosen. So mote it be.”
Ere the words had left the girl’s mouth, Maribel turned to face her, her face quite the mirror. For there in her grasp indeed stood a glass, lank-haired and squint-eyed, her delight in exchange for alarm. Oh, but she was one who’d wed her flesh to the shadow and since clothed herself in the whole of it, the moment her mother struck her bargain.
Wings of night unfolding, Agnes, born of a tale and blood, of bitterness and weeping, offered Maribel a glittering grin, each tooth a blade of iron. A scream shook crows from the branches, cawing, but the echoes did not last long.
Then she turned, the girl, the one they had come to call Black Annis, and swept in shadow through the midnight trees.
There was a husband ahead in the village, a husband and a father. And a pastor with gentlemen under his eaves. And anon, and anon, endless houses with little windows and soft, sleeping babes.
And the wind alone lay betwixt them.
