Dennis McKiernan: Once upon a dreadful time

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.

Some two candlemarks after the arrival of the retinues, when the travelling kindred had freshened themselves and had changed out of their riding clothes-the 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?”