“No, no, no, no,” I wept. I was crying, shaking, coming undone.
“Oh you will watch, girl,” Starling whispered in my ear. “You should be there with her, but you’ll at least watch. Every twig that catches light, you will see. Every scream from her withered throat, you will hear. If it weren’t for the fact that your mother’s still a beauty and temptress to our lord, if it weren’t for her having swayed him, you would be kindling too. And believe you me, one day? I will see you burn too. One day.”
I tried to wrench away, dragging my arm downward between our bodies, but he pulled me closer.
“Trust it, Roberta. I will make it the cause of my life.” His voice had returned to that silvery quality he used, the nearly kind way of speaking. “It is the only way to save your soul.”
I was weeping, wilting, my gaze swinging from Magda to my sister to my parents. I spotted a face I had not really noticed in winters. Ilsit was standing closer to the side of the crowd that seemed to be mostly residents of the keep. Next to her were Wynne and Kent. Wynne looked grim, and Kent looked intrigued but not upset. Ilsit’s fingertips covered her mouth. Her often-ornery face was slack as she watched the guards deliver Magda to her fate.
Magda was being forced at spearpoint, barefoot and unsteady, to clamber up the sharp protrusions of the pyre to where a young guard balanced on a board nailed to the side of the stake. He instructed her to put her feet on it, next to his. They had untied herhands and he rebound them, this time around the stake and behind her.
My arm was still held by Starling.
“Look to this, people of Sheridan,” he went on, his call booming out in the square. He had the attention of every soul gathered. “Look to this and know that this be a holy thing. Our souls are doomed to burn in the demon realm after we die.Unless! Unless we repent for being born craven, wretched, feckless. Unless we seek salvation in the teachings of our saint, a man so selfless he worried over the souls of men and women everywhere and set himself on fire as an offering to the afterlife. He sent himself to hell in our place. So that we would escape the eternal blaze, so that our souls could be at peace after we depart this mortal life. But this? This is what happens when you do not repent. When you do not seek salvation. This woman? This Tintarian? She had every chance at salvation, and she spat on it. She lay down in those woods, prostrated herself to her goddesses and her gods. She made idols of trees and of rivers. She told your wives they did not have to have as many children as their bellies could deliver, that they could avoid the blessings of motherhood and be selfish. She robbed you of your very offspring, unborn, ripped them from the womb. And theonlyway to give her soul a chance is to have her burn here, in this life, for that refiner’s fire to have one last moment to reconcile her soul. This is her reckoning. If she burns in peace, if she accepts her fate, then perhaps she will not awaken on the other side a thrall to demons, burning for eternity.”
There was a hush. Every face in the crowd was stilled, eerie, lit by the torches held above their heads.
And then, unable to keep the sheer relish out of his voice, he said, “Light it.”
“No!” The word tore out of me, weak and broken.
52
THEN: BLOOD
Iwas not alone in my grief. In the crowd, most women were openly crying, their heads shaking, hands over their children’s eyes.
Starling must have noticed this when I did, for he said, “Mothers, you will make your children see it. See it and know that this is a holy undertaking.”
No one spoke as four guards stood at four places around the stake and leaned down to bring torches to the pyre. Only the crackling of the wood, dry and ready, easily catching flame, could really be heard.
But then, there was a hollow cackling. A sibilant laugh that was so loud it sounded as if it came from the chest of a big man—not a small, elderly widow—resounded in the square. It was more powerful than it should have been, echoing off the stone buildings nearby. It was weightier and carried farther than what seemed possible. Perhaps it was amplified by the utter stillness that had gripped our town, or perhaps her gods gave her the gift of a resonating death rattle.
And then she spoke.
“My body is a great mouth. My bones are its teeth. That is why, even when you cut me deeply, you will still feel my bite. I can stillbite!”
The fire licked at the wood but had yet to reach her feet or the small board she balanced upon. Magda pushed herself up on her toes. Though her face and her voice were brave, her body recoiled from the heat. But she continued.
“Cut the body down, but the mouth’s howl echoes, you see. The evidence ofme, the proof of my havingjust lived, is my testimony. Yes, I am the woman who lived on the edge of the forest. Yes, I am the one you call witch and hag. Yes, I am the one you murder tonight. And two goddesses will not let my blood dry quietly. And one god, the true god of fire, weeps for me. And worst of all, I tell you.Thisis worst of all. The trees and their desperate branches see you. The birds cry. Foxes and bears and wolves and wildcats whisper it, in peace, to deer and coneys. Coneys tell lizards and the lizards tell the fish. That howl they repeated?Thatis the god without a sex, neither god nor goddess but another, the one they mistakenly call Brother Air. They are not confined to man or woman.Theyare the screech in the night. And they will come for you and yours. They will claw at your windows on stormy nights, crying out for me, asking you where I am and what you have done with me. I leave you with this! After you kill me, I would not return to the land I once called mine. I would not go back to the edge of the woods, brothers and sisters! The great god of air will come for you. There is no haunting like the haunting of air!”
My vision was blurring, stung by more than the growing blaze.
Tears tracked down Magda’s cheeks, but an eerie smile remained on her mouth as she spoke her last words. “All four will come for me! All four love and cherish me, and I will be at peace in the trees. My spirit will wax and wane with the moon.”
I moved so quickly, the guards and Starling were too stunned to stop me. I slipped from the priest’s grasp and leapt from the wagon, pelting past the men around it. I was a short distance from the stake and reached it before I knew what I was doing. What I had intended,I did not know. I hurled my body at one of the guards standing around the fire.
He crossed his spear in front of his body and pushed it out at me.
I grabbed the rod of it and pushed back.
“Back!” he growled. “Go back to the wagon.”
Two of his fellow guards stepped near to him.
“Let herself throw her lot in with the hag and burn,” said one.
“You’ll be next, Robbie,” the other of them said, and I realized he was not Perpatanian but a boy I had likely played with once or whose sibling I had played with. “Go back to the priest!”
