Joseph Lewis: Wren the Fox Witch

Wren grimaced at the sight of her mentor falling to the ground, but she kept her hands up, keeping the wall of aether as solid as she could, even though it kept her trapped inside the church with Omar alone near the doorway. She yelled at the Yslanders, “What do you want from us?”

Thora stepped inside and said, “I want him to suffer for what he did to us. For what he did to Magnus, and to Ivar, and to everyone else in Ysland!”

Leif glanced at Wren once before focusing on the Aegyptian wheezing and bleeding on the ground. The snow and ice on the floor was rapidly steaming away, and the stones themselves were beginning to glow red beneath the burning blade of the seireiken. Wren could see Omar’s fingers twitching, and his lips moving, and his eyes darting as his blood trickled out across the floor. The arrow in his back shuddered with a steady rhythm.

It’s in his heart. He can’t fight. He can’t even get up.

Wren shouted, “Get away from him!”

The young man and woman ignored her, and Leif knelt down near the seireiken, its white light revealing his pale, thin features.

“I said get away!” Wren pushed outward, shoving her wall of aether forward. The swirling mist crashed toward the church doors in an avalanche of cold vapor, knocking Thora and Leif straight out into the street. The blast rolled Omar over twice, snapping off the arrow between his shoulder blades before the mist thinned and fell back to the ground.

Wren dashed forward and dropped to her knees at his side. He stared up at her, his breath coming in tiny gasps, his chest pounding, and his frightened eyes darting wildly. She saw the barbed head of the arrow poking up through his shirt, and she took his hand. “This is going to hurt.”

Omar nodded with his eyes.

She reached down, grasped the arrow shaft, and yanked it straight up through his flesh and breastbone. She had to fight for every inch as his body seemed to cling to the deadly missile, dragging at it as though his heart and muscles wanted to hold it inside. But it came free, dripping with dark blood, and she tossed it aside, and then held open the stained silk shirt to watch the man’s warm brown skin gently fold itself closed, leaving no mark at all. Omar’s breathing slowed, becoming dry and easy again, and his heart slowed, no longer pounding and shaking his body. The man sat up, massaging his chest with one hand. “Good God, that hurt. It’s been years since I’ve been arrowed.”

“Arrowed?” Wren grimaced as she helped him to his feet. “I don’t think that’s a word.”

“Oh, please. When you’re forty-five hundred years old, you can make up all the words you want.” He picked up his bright sword from the steaming stone floor and peered out the door at the street. “I must say, your aether-craft is coming along quite nicely. You must have thrown them back two dozen paces.”

Wren resettled her black scarf over her hair and ears. “Three dozen, at least. I’ve been practicing every day.”

“I can see that,” he said as he sheathed his blazing sword, returning the church to the shadows and the starlight. “You may be one of the best aether-wrights I’ve ever seen. And I’ve seen two!”

She smiled and hoped she wasn’t blushing. “Aether-wright? Is that what I am now?”

“I’m very old. I make up words. Didn’t we just talk about this?”

Wren was about to speak, but then she frowned as she listened to a fading echo. “They’re running away.”

“Really? How thoughtful of them.”

Wren and Omar stepped out into the road where the bright moonlight fell gently on the glistening ice and snow between the dark, empty houses. Row upon row of snow-capped roofs covered the hills as the city spread out below them, holding back the black forests on the higher slopes. A dozen church steeples stood tall and thin in the night air above the cottages like toy soldiers keeping watch over the empty streets, and the wind carried the ceaseless wooden creaking and keening of the houses as they shook before the wintry blasts.

Wren looked down at the fresh boot prints in the road leading south, deeper into Targoviste. And beside them, she saw several other fresh footprints.

“Bare footprints?” Omar pointed at the ground. “Now who do you suppose was out here without any shoes on?”

Wren felt her ears twitching as they tried to follow the distant sounds. “They’re over that way,” she said, pointing southeast.

Omar touched his chest again. “I must say, I’m not entirely pleased to see those two again. What with the treachery and the murder, I just get the feeling that they’re not good people, not the sort I would want my apprentice to associate with, anyway.”

“Well, that’s just typical,” Wren said with a pout. “You’re even more miserable and controlling than Woden.”

He looked at her with a curious smile. “You still talk to your god?”

“From time to time. I don’t want to trouble him too much, what with me being so far from Ysland. It must be a terrible burden on him to have to listen to my prayers from so far away. After all, he doesn’t have fox ears.”

“Well, that is very considerate of you.” He tousled her hair, knocking her scarf askew. “But back to the matter at hand. Bare feet and missing murderers. I fear we must do the right thing, and stop them. The murderers, not the feet.”

Wren sighed. “All right. But then you have to cook supper.”

“Fair enough. I am the better cook.”

They set out at a brisk trot, following the footprints through the streets, winding their way past broken down wagons in the middle of the road and other strange bits of furniture and cutlery and foodstuffs, all frozen and rotting in the street, covered in bright clear ice or blue-white snow. Wren glimpsed a broken chair, a shattered lantern, a handful of tin spoons, and a burlap sack of blackened beets as she ran.

Sounds of violence echoed from the next street. Grunting, yelling, the clangor of a sword, the twang of a bow.

Omar sprinted around the corner, his blazing seireiken hissing with heat and snapping with flecks of lightning as he drew it out. Wren dashed up beside him, her sling laden with a cold stone.

“Nine hells,” she whispered.

Leif and Thora stood back to back in the middle of the street, their weapons raised. All around them in a wide circle lay bodies, broken and dismembered bodies and limbs and heads lying in the snowy road. There were no weapons on the ground, just as there were no shoes on the feet of the corpses. The dead townspeople lay in tattered dresses and suits, unshod and unarmed, their bare skin shining deathly pale in the moonlight. Outside the ring of bodies stood three more half-naked people without so much as a stick to defend themselves with.

Thora loosed an arrow straight into the breast of an old woman.

And a second into her throat.

And a third into her eye.

The old woman stumbled forward, but did not fall. Behind Thora, two men lunged at Leif with empty, groping hands, leaping clumsily over the bodies of the fallen. The one-armed warrior hacked them down, chopping off arms and heads as fast as he could, and the limbs thumped down into the snow like hail stones.

“Good God!” Omar ran forward, his sword raised. “Stop! You sadistic cretin, stop!”

The two townsmen collapsed in pieces at Leif’s feet, and he dashed around Thora to cut down the old woman, who was bristling with arrows from her eyes to her knees. With her head and arms removed, she fell to the ground and lay still.

Wren spun her sling once and sent her stone flying over Omar’s shoulder to smash the bow out of Thora’s hands. Omar jumped over the mound of bodies and brought his burning seireiken down on Leif, but the young man leapt back, yelling, “They’re dead! They’re all dead, you old fool!”