Bare feet slap the cold floor as Maude is hauled up the steps. The guards split, each seizing a wrist, stretching her along my cross. Rope creaks; wood groans. Arms spread wide, she hangs like an angel of soot and ruin, like the son these fools kneel to every Sunday.
Hay follows, armful after armful, piled high around her ankles until the mound reaches her shins. The dry stalks rustle, again, and again, and for a heartbeat I see the boy: mouth stuffedyellow, eyes wide, red blooming through the straw like poppies. I blink and the vision passes.
Maude is ready.
The crowd falls silent, a held breath thick enough to choke on, as the guard’s voice rings across the square, clear as a cracked bell.
“Maude Taylor, you have been found guilty of witchcraft and the black arts, abhorrent to our Lord and Saviour. You confessed the truth of these crimes yesterday when the judge stood before you. For this, you shall burn until death, your body reduced to ash and dust so that it may never again walk this earth. Have you any last words?”
Silence.
Maude lifts her head, torchlight sliding across her face, catching the cruel tilt of her smile.
Then she opens her mouth.
The sound that tears out is not human. It is the voice I had first heard in the cell last night—low, grinding, layered with a thousand throats. It’s a growl that rises into a screech, echoing from every shadow around the square: the alley mouths, the crevices between stones, the hollows beneath the King’s box. The torches gutter as if blown by a wind no one felt and the crowd recoils, a single shudder rippling outward.
The shadows answer her, pulsing, thickening, as though the night itself leaned in to listen.
“Oh, my sweet darlings. Do you think this fire will finish me? I’ll be back before the ashes cool, wearing your priest's skin as a cloak and your children's blood as perfume!”
The crowd erupts in a frenzy, a chaotic roar that shakes the very ground beneath us.
“What sorcery is this?!” a burly farmer bellows, his face twisted in terror and rage.
Women scream and flee toward the edges of the square, clutching their children, whilst men surge forward like a tidal wave, thrusting their torches toward the haystacks piled high around the stake but unable to reach. The guards hesitate, exchanging wide-eyed glances, their weapons trembling in uncertain grips—loyal to the crown, yet paralyzed by the unnatural horror unfolding.
“Burn her! Burn the witch!” the King thunders from his dais, his voice cutting through the din. His eyes lock onto mine, fierce and unyielding. I nod sharply in return; a silent pact sealed in the heat of the moment.
Striding to the nearest guard, I snatch a flaming torch from his slack fingers. Maude’s gaze bores into me, her black, dilated pupils swallowing the light, her lips curled in that infernal grin. She hawks and spits a glob of venomous saliva that sizzles where it lands on the wood near my boots.
I shake my head, steeling my resolve, and hurl the torch into the front hay pile. Flames leap hungrily, crackling and devouring the dry straw with greedy pops. Circling behind her, I wrench another torch from a second guard’s hand and ignite the rear stack.
The fire spreads in a ring, orange tongues licking upward, smoke billowing thick and acrid into the twilight sky.
Maude throws her head back and laughs—a piercing, unearthly screech that claws at the air, echoing off the stone walls like the wail of a thousand damned souls. The men stumble backward in unison, faces paling, torches dipping low. Even the guards recoil, one dropping his weapon with a clatter. Again, she unleashes that demonic caw, the sound twisting into something profane, as if the depths of hell itself are mocking us through her throat.
“This heat? Foreplay. I’m going to fuck all your husbands tonight now. Especiallyyournew man…” Maude looks to me,then back to the panicking crowd. “Every prayer you ever speak will twist into blasphemy the instant it leaves your lips. Your god will hear only curses against himself, and he’ll answer by turning your tongue black and swollen until it fills your mouth like death. You’ll suffocate on your own devotion.”
The flames climb her like ravenous vines, devouring the white linen of her dress until only ragged, fiery tatters whirl about her torso. Her head lolls against the rear beam of the cross, a wet giggle leaking from her throat, unhurried and unbothered by the heat.
Mad Maude, true to her name.
The laughter from last night, the one that had slithered up the stairwell behind me after I’d left her cell, returns. Not a whisper, not a memory. It erupts from the shadows themselves, a surround of wet, chittering mirth that circles the pyre like a pack of unseen jackals. The crowd fractures. Men drop torches, women shriek, children are hoisted and carried off, the square emptying in a stampede of boots and skirts.
I stay and through the glare I see it: the darkness around Maude thickens, drinking the firelight, a pocket of night that refuses the blaze. It clings to her alone, a living silhouette and then disappears completely.
And then she screams.
It is not human. It is every wound ever opened, every throat ever cut, every promise ever broken, all braided into one glass-shattering wail. The sound punches the air from my lungs. I laugh, short, sharp, incredulous. She actually believed that Doubt and Desire would keep her.
Her skin blisters, splitting and running like tallow. The scream gutters into a gurgle. Her head drops forward, neck snapped by its own weight, as the fire claims the rest of her. The heat presses through my jerkin, a lover’s palm against my chestand I breathe it in: scorched hair, fat, wool, sin. A sweet, cloying incense.
Euphoria blooms under my ribs, light and vicious. The world narrows to the pyre, to the melting mask of her face, to the black curl of smoke rising like a genie freed from its lamp. My pulse slows to the rhythm of the flames. I close my eyes and feel Him settle behind them, warm, patient, and pleased.
I open my eyes and the pyre is wrong.
The body on the cross is no longer Maude’s. It’s the scarecrow from the barley field, sacking split open, straw guts spilling like yellow entrails. Crimson soaks the straw in thick, arterial ropes. The flames chew through it with the same greedy crackle, but the smell is wrong: sun-baked burlap instead of flesh.
