A Trial for the Driscolls of Moelfyre

A Trial for the Driscolls of Moelfyre 50 MINUTE READ

AM 515, Winter

The woman on the red mare rode into Moelfyre just before dawn on a cold winter morning. Her horse’s hooves cracked the frosty rime on the track into town, stepping carefully around ice-filled ruts left by passing carts, breath fogging in the air. The woman directed it with a click of her tongue. Both horse and rider kept their heads low, weary from a night’s ride. The mare turned to follow a stick fence encircling a plowed field. White frost choked the furrows and the few remaining stalks of barley abandoned after the harvest. A low building with a thinly-thatched roof and an ancient barn came into view.

The rider reached up and tipped back the wide brim of her hat. Dark eyes took in every detail of the small farm, from the plow hidden under tatty canvas, to the rough ring of circles burned over the door, to the empty animal pen at the side of the house. Her mare shivered in the cold breeze. As she watched, light flickered to life behind the closed shutters of a window. The front door opened a moment after.

“It’s you,” a man said, standing bare-chested in the farm’s doorway. He took up most of it, and held a candle that threw glints of gold into his blonde hair and hazel eyes.

“T’is,” the rider said, sitting back in her saddle. “D’you not sleep soundly, Goodman Driscoll?”

“S’quiet here now,” he said. “Heard your horse sigh like the crack of a hammer in the house.”

The rider said nothing. The man watched, arms crossing over his chest for warmth, as her hands worried the reins. The grayish light of the new day began to tinge the sky.

“Are y’here for me, Mistress vch Caerwyn?” he asked, quietly.

“Aye,” she said. Her shoulders squared underneath the snow-dusted swathe of wool she wore as a cloak.

“For burning?” he asked.

“Nay,” she said.

“You’d best come in, then, before we both freeze.” Driscoll stepped back to clear the doorway and held the candle out. “And call me Jon. I’ll be in charge of the fire, this time.”

AM 513, Spring

“Good people of Moelfyre!” Witchfinder Taliesin cried, hands held high, standing on a podium erected in the center of the hamlet. Petals scattered here and there by the new spring and its gentle storms gathered in drifts at the base. “Good people, halt and hear my words! The Church of Abnegation entreats you to honor this season of rebirth and plenty, gifted to you by our Lord, by seeking out and exposing foul witchcraft wherever it hides! Look in your hearts and in your homes! Seek out the sin in your communities and give it onto the cleansing of the church!”

A small crowd had assembled around the podium. It was largely made up of the kind of people who tended to stop whenever anyone loud started shouting, but a few community leaders made a point of pausing too, hearing out the concerns of the church. Among them was the local priest, a man who looked almost too ancient to still be walking around. Delia vch Caerwyn nodded to him as her superior continued.

“…and lastly, may we never forget,” he said, pointing out into the crowd. “It was the prophet Amn himself who at last laid the sword in our hands, and made it known that those who would not keep the purity of faith should not cry out when its strong walls crumble, and let the wolves of sin and magical perversion roam into their homes. We will be amongst you for a fortnight. Think well on what I have said, and seek us out when it is time.”

Taliesin stepped down from the podium as the little crowd dispersed. No one save the priest approached, and he only to shake hands and introduce himself.

“I don’t think you’ll see much work here, lads,” the priest, Father Macklin, said, then on catching sight of Delia again, added, “and miss, begging your pardon. Moelfyre’s a quiet little place. No bouts of fever, no unusual animal deaths… no omens, really.”

Witchfinder Morris frowned from Taliesin’ right side. “Foul witchery can hide well, ye best ken that.”

“All I can say,” the priest said, holding his open hands out as a gesture of peace, “is that I hope you’re able to rest well here, before you set out again on your way, doin’ the Lord’s work.”

“Thank you, father,” Delia mumbled. Father Macklin smiled at her before his eyes slipped to the long haft of the greataxe on her back and he forced himself to look anywhere else. He said his farewells and wandered away, back to the white-washed timbers of the village’s little church. The group of witchfinders watched him go.

“We’ll soon see about all that,” Taliesin said, scanning the village. “Way he put it, this place is too well-off. No sickness? No dead geese?”

“Five-to-one they’ve got a hedge witch tucked up here,” Morris agreed. He hefted his crossbow off his back and made a show of checking its mechanisms as a young milk maid walked by, eyeing the length of it and the quiver of bolts on his hip fearfully. “All that remains is to go ‘bout drummin’ her out.”

“Fearful hard getting a village to turn on a hedge witch,” Delia pointed out. “Usually done too much good for her neighbors to turn her in, just us asking.”

“No shite, greenhorn,” Morris said. “But it dunnae matter how much good she’s done if the whole bloody hamlet starts thinkin’ she’s ready to start a big row with the church in the midst of them.”

“What Morris means is, if the village starts to think she’s more of a danger than a benefit, they’ll turn her over in a heartbeat,” Taliesin said. He rested his hand on the pommel of the plain longsword hanging from his belt and nodded to the church. “We’ve tactics for this. Morris will see to them to start. Once we’ve got one, it’ll be down to you to finish the job, Little Delia. Do well enough here, and you’ll be allowed to range on your own.”

“Us too, again,” Morris pointed out. “So dannae cock this up.”

“Best efforts, y’sour bastard,” Delia shot back. She rolled her shoulders to resettle the weight of Cold Water against her back. “For today, then, just poking about? Least for me, while Morris cooks up your plan?”

“Get a feel for the place,” Taliesin agreed. He pointed out two buildings in particular. “Ask around the tavern, the mercantile. Chat up the locals and see if a name comes up often around glad tidings.”

“We’ll see what they all have t’say again come mornin’,” Morris said, with a broad grin.

Delia was awoken by the wailing. It was an older woman she could just see from the window of the tavern’s attic Taliesin had arranged for them to sleep in. She was still dressed in her sleep shirt and clutched by a young girl, who was crying herself as the old woman wailed and gestured at something Delia couldn’t see.

Morris’ heavy snores didn’t pause. He’d come in late last night and fallen asleep immediately after making enough noise Delia and Taliesin had traded bleary looks of irritation before rolling back over. Taliesin was awake but made no move to investigate the noise. He had his hat covering his eyes and a small smile on his lips as Delia stepped over him and slung Cold Water onto her back.

“D’you not wanna know what’s happened?” Delia hissed. Taliesin waved her off.

“I’m sure I’ll know all about it within the hour,” he drawled. Delia shook her head and padded down the stairs past the other sleeping rooms, her boots in her hands until she reached the main hall of the tavern and found a bench to sit on as she yanked them on. She tied her hair back as she stepped out of tavern door towards the old woman in the street. The source of her anguish was immediately obvious.

Splashes of stinking red stained the timbers of the village church. Blood ran down every wall, puddling in dark mud at the foundation, dripping on the petals of the lavender and lilac planted around it. The circle of iron rings that were meant to be hung above the door lay on the steps in their own pool of blood.

“Befoulment!” the old woman moaned. The girl-child trying to drag her away let out a sob. “Heathens have befouled the house of God!”

Just outside the church stood Father Macklin, looking wan. He reached out as if to touch the iron rings but pulled his hand away at the last second. He looked back at Delia with a wordless expression of disbelief. She felt her heart stick in her throat. More and more townspeople gathered as the old woman’s cries went on, prompting new oaths, sighs, and screams at the state of the village’s holy site. Whispers passed from person to person, eyes darted around in fearful glances. Only after nearly a half hour of confusion and fear did a man come forward with a cloth and a bucket of water to start washing the building clean.

Delia was still watching the man work, tall and reaching higher with the span of his arms but still not able to touch the highest of the stains, when Taliesin laid a hand on her shoulder. She startled and found Morris on her other side chewing a bit of jerky. He hid a grin behind his wineskin as he washed his breakfast down.

“We did this?” Delia whispered. “This… this blaspheming was our plan?”

“Sow’s blood washes off,” Taliesin said, nodding to the water sluicing down the church’s timbers as the village man worked to clean them, joined now by a few others. “The taint of witchcraft in a village does not. The longer they go on letting her live because she’s helpful, the more their hearts are opened to the temptation of magic. This seems foul indeed, but the end of the witch will justify it.”

Delia nodded as the milkmaid from the day before brought up her pails, this time filled with more water. Morris nudged Delia’s side.

“Wait till they find the doll,” he said. “Ne’er hurts to toss a child’s toy in w’ the carnage. Bet we’ll be gone afore nightfall, pyre coolin’ behind us.”

“You’ll want to ask around again, now,” Taliesin said. He straightened his church-issued tabard and turned back towards the tavern. “Someone’ll turn up horrified enough to have formed a suspicion in their heart. That’ll be our first lead.”

He wasn’t wrong. Delia made the same circuit she had the day before— quietly joining conversations in the market, buying drinks at the pub, pitching in a hand on a heavy load with chatty laborers. Where she’d found naught but unremarkable local gossip the day before, she now found clammy hands, shut mouths, and one whisper. The whisper came from a farrier, bent over the hoof of a draft horse, who refused to raise his eyes to look at Delia as they spoke.

“Might be a fluke,” the man said, carefully using a metal hook to work a stone loose from underneath the horse’s shoe. “But there’s only one family what keeps pigs year-round, and it’s the same house the village seeks out when… things look poorly.”

“Give me a name, Goodman,” Delia demanded, crouching to fall in his line of sight, pinning him with her dark eyes. The farrier swallowed hard and tilted his head to indicate the road leading away from his stable. Fields of young barley swayed at knee height, almost concealing a distant roof.

“Driscoll,” he said as the stone fell into his hand. “Lorna Driscoll keeps sows… and secrets.”

Taliesin and Morris rode with her when she came up the track along the field with the stick fence. They reined in at the edge of the yard, close enough to intervene if needed, but far enough for Delia to work on her own. She swept the farmstead with her eyes as she rode within spitting distance of the threshold. A dried bunch of lavender hung above the door, swinging lightly in the breeze of the early afternoon. Pots under the windows spilled over with chamomile, peppermint, and sage. The hum of a beehive somewhere nearby reached her ears. In a pen to the side of the house, several massive pigs nosed for slop in their trough. Delia didn’t even have time to dismount before the front door was thrown open.

“I trust you’re here about my slaughtered sow?” the woman in it called, middle-aged but still handsome, with gray-streaked auburn hair and sharp hazel eyes. She caught sight of Morris and the scowl on her face deepened. “Here to pay for her, mayhap?”

“Dunno that I catch your meaning, mistress,” Delia hedged. “D’you have an accusation to lay at our feet?”

“Nay, but my boy does,” the woman said, jerking a thumb over her shoulder back inside the house. “Jon was up making water when your man snatched her. Care not that you’re w’ the church, if y’want pork, you’ll pay like everyone else. And if y’want blood to throw on your own temple, you can pay for that, too.”

Delia dismounted gracefully, taking in Morris’ gobsmacked expression at the woman’s correct guess, and when she turned around found that the sight of Cold Water had worked the dampening effect on most people’s attitudes she’d become accustomed to. The woman crossed her arms over her chest and squared herself in her doorway, but left off with the yelling.

“Lorna Driscoll, I take it?” Delia surmised. She tied her mare off to a fence post and walked up to the door slowly, one hand casually hovering near a flask of holy oil on her belt as she charted the expressions passing over the woman’s face.

“And you are?” Lorna spat.

“Delia vch Caerwyn,” Delia said. “Witchfinder ‘prentice, agent of the holy Church of Abnegation. If’n I can beg a moment of your time, I’ve some questions for you, Mistress Driscoll.”

Lorna opened her mouth to start to argue when a large silhouette appeared in the doorway behind her. It was the village man from that morning, who’d taken up cloth and bucket to wash the church. He was still wiping his hands clean of bloody streaks as he spoke.

“Let them in, Mum,” he murmured. He stared out at Delia with tired eyes. “Your tongue won’t do us any good turned ‘gainst God’s chosen.”

“Pah,” Lorna scoffed. “This wench comes from the same stock as you or I, Jon. Just on account a her hammering her plowshare into a bloody great axe, I’m supposed to—”

“You’re only making things worse,” Jon said, quietly.

“What worse?” Lorna demanded. “We’re the ones who were stolen from, this is—”

“Witchfinders, Mum,” he reminded her. Lorna looked as if she was about to say something else, but then her mouth slowly closed. She looked at Delia with new eyes, taking in again the church-marked tabard under her tatty cloak, the axe on her back, the two men still mounted at the edge of the yard.

“You… I’m… I’m an ‘erbalist,” Lorna stammered. She stepped back into the unmoving body of her son. “Th’ church hasn’t discarded the use of ‘erbs, has it?”

“We’ll all be more comfortable if’n I ask my questions inside, Mistress Driscoll,” Delia said.

The ringing sound of Taliesin’s and Morris’ boots hitting the ground as they dismounted drowned out the rest of the soft, disbelieving sounds leaving her mouth as her son stepped back, she stumbled, and Delia pushed forward over the threshold.

Delia had what she needed before a half-hour passed. She had what Morris and Taliesin wanted a quarter past that. Lorna Driscoll’s son watched the proceedings silently. He only spoke when Delia turned to him at the last.

“Goodman Driscoll,” she asked, “d’you have any word to say to defend your mother, Lorna Driscoll, ‘gainst the charge of witchcraft?”

“Please,” she gasped. “Jon… my boy, please.”

He looked at his mother for a long moment. The process of the testing and interrogation had left her stripped to the waist and sobbing, blood running down her hand from cuts on the pads of her fingers, feet red with angry welts. A conversation seemed to happen between them as he stared into her eyes.

“Nay,” he said, finally. “I do not.”

Morris and Taliesin were taking a luncheon of barley bread and salted pork over the bound and gagged form of Mistress Driscoll when Delia lead Jon into his mother’s bedroom for his own series of tests. The senior witchfinders snickered as she waved him in, Morris raising the circle of rings around his neck and an eyebrow as she shut the door. Her ears burned red in embarrassment. Jon didn’t seem to have seen, and complacently pulled his shirt off over his head.

“Y’understand, Goodman Driscoll, the necessity of the search and tests, considering your relation to the accused,” Delia mumbled. Jon nodded and dropped his shirt on the bedframe.

“Watched when you searched Mum,” he pointed out. He paused with his thumbs in the waistband of his trousers. “Should I go ahead and…?”

“Erm, yes, be best,” Delia said.

She started by looking over his chest and stomach for unusual or inflamed moles, scars, or other marks that might indicate the touch of witchcraft on his skin. His work in the fields had dusted fine brown freckles across his neck and collar bones, but he had no other notable blemishes there. Delia worked down his arms next, tracing the veins standing out against his muscles, the tan on the backs of his forearms from rolling his sleeves up. He had two small pock marks that she knew to be healed pox, from long ago, and nothing to worry about. She paused at a long, curved scar on the inside of his left forearm before discarding it as insignificant.

“First year reapin’, ’bout seven,” he explained anyway. “Wasn’t so good with the scythe as I am now.”

“I know the mark,” Delia admitted. She pulled off the glove and rolled up the sleeve on her own left arm to bare a very similar scar. When she looked up she was startled to find Driscoll staring right at her. He reached out and traced warm fingers over her arm.

“Don’t suppose y’grew the church’s barley back then,” he joked. “Where was your farm?”

“Gwynned,” Delia admitted, without thinking. Driscoll’s face creased with a frown.

“Weren’t Gwynned taken by a fever, years back?” he asked. As he spoke his eyes moved to her bare hand, brows drawing down at the faint scars he found on the tips of her fingers before she yanked it away. “You were…?”

Delia pulled her glove back on and stepped to his side. “Goodman Driscoll, if’n I may continue?”

“‘pologies, Mistress vch Caerwyn,” Driscoll mumbled. He straightened his shoulders as she moved to his back, checking with eyes and hands for marks and deformities. There was a lot of back to cover. She used the reprieve from his eyes to ask a question that bugged her.

“I’ve just condemned your mum to death,” she pointed out. “Most folk ‘ave more hate than curiosity by this point.”

“T’be fair, you don’t know me mum all that well, mistress,” Jon said.

Delia frowned. “That doesn’t answer my question.”

“Did y’ask one?” he replied. Delia flicked his back as she crouched to check his buttocks and legs. He laughed, a deep rumble from the gut that was wholly inappropriate for the situation, but which nonetheless let Delia relax the shoulder muscles that had tightened when he found the testing marks on her own hand.

“Why ask ’bout me?” she asked, as she lifted his feet to check the soles.

Driscoll shrugged. “Could say there’s not many travelers through Moelfyre. Could say I’ve spent more a my hours tendin’ hogs here than I ever got in the tavern.”

Delia stood and circled back around to face him.

“Truthfully?” He looked her in the eyes again. “Goodman Taliesin and Goodman Morris are doing their jobs, workman-like, but you… you don’t seem to know where y’are, Mistress vch Caerwyn. Like you’re sleepwanderin’. S’pose I’m trying to suss out where you’ve gone off to.”

Delia felt pinned to the spot. Driscoll looked down at her from his towering height, not in a disparaging way, but with an expression that felt sickeningly kind. Her hands curled around her scarred fingertips. She felt her throat click as it tried to close up. She forced herself to speak through the feeling.

“M’gonna check your ballocks now, Goodman Driscoll,” is what came out.

“Oh,” Driscoll said, expression falling blank.

Delia had a brief thought that she wanted to die more in that moment than she ever had during the pain and misery of the fever that took Gwynned. Then she banished it and crouched, completing her final inspection, before nodding to Driscoll that he should dress again. She drew the thin dagger from her belt as he tugged his shirt over his head.

“Finger pricks now?” he surmised. She nodded and they sat down on the rickety bedframe, Delia spreading a cloth over her knees as she prepared to make the small cuts on the pads of his fingers that the church prescribed.

“M’here,” she mumbled, mostly to herself. She reached for his right hand and turned it palm up. “I’m doing my job.”

“Alright,” he conceded. They sat, her holding his hand out across the cloth, dagger at the ready, for a long moment. Driscoll stared at her and Delia stared at the blade. Finally he reached over with his free hand and guided the dagger’s point to the pad of his thumb. “Just a short nick for these ones, right?”

“You shouldn’t be helping me with this,” Delia muttered. She pushed the blade in until blood welled up, then drew it down.

“No trouble,” Driscoll said, hissing through his teeth as she moved on to his index finger. “After all, t’was I who put you off your work.”

Delia raised the dagger over his middle finger, his free hand still ghosting over the hilt and her hand, ready to help. Blood ran from his fingers but his expression was determined. Delia tossed the dagger down onto the cloth. Driscoll looked up in surprise as she yanked at the neck of her tabbard, drew out her holy symbol, and closed his bloody fist around it.

“Do you, Jon Driscoll, swear to our Lord that you’ve had no dealings in witchcraft, and renounce your mother, Lorna Driscoll, found guilty a the crime?” Delia demanded, hands cold where they held his fist, expression tense.

“Aye, I swear it,” Driscoll said, taken aback.

“Then be done w’ this farce,” Delia muttered. She tore strips off the cloth over her lap and tied off his bleeding fingers. She used the remnant to wipe her dagger clean before she sheathed it. “If you’re a witch, I’ll take another swim. You’re free to go, Goodman Driscoll, though your mum will be coming with us.”

“You won’t get in trouble for this?” Driscoll asked. Delia stood up from the bed with an aggravated noise in the back of her throat.

“Leave off it!” she snapped. She turned to face him with her arms crossed tight over her chest. “I’ve cleared you, that’s enough for most. G’won!”

Driscoll ducked his head. “‘pologies again, Mistress vch Caerwyn.”

Delia forced down a wave of guilt and inexplicable upset. She opened the door again, ushering him back out. Morris and Taliesin looked up from their meal, hands moving towards weapons, but she shook her head.

“He’s innocent,” she pronounced. “Make ready w’ but one pyre, this night.”

The whole village turned out for the burning of Lorna Driscoll. Mothers stood on the village green with babes on their hips, laborers stopped and set aside their loads. A small crowd had already formed to watch as Delia dragged the rough-hewn central post to the podium at the center of town. By the time a good-sized pile of logs and kindling was laid under it, nearer to one hundred people had gathered in front of the tavern, and the market, and the pink-tinged walls of the church.

Lorna Driscoll cried out to all of them as Morris and Taliesin dragged her to the pyre.

“Please!” she screamed. “Please, stop this! All I did, I did for you! For the good of this village!”

“Keep moving!” Morris barked, kicking at her knees when she tried to go limp.

“Every dream and vision I was sent, I bent to your good!” she cried. “Every poultice I made, every spell I worked, I did it in the name of our God and our health!”

People gasped and murmured at the mention of visions, poultices, and spell. Mothers clutched their children closer, whispering prayers and sketching concentric circles in the air for protection. No one stepped forward to speak for her as Morris and Taliesin pushed her up against the post and began roping her to it. Father Macklin, looking as if he might fall if a strong enough breeze blew against him, came out to stand on the church steps in witness. Delia stepped in front of the scene. She swung Cold Water off her back and laid her hands on the butt of the haft as she delivered the charges.

“Lorna Driscoll has been found guilty of the foulest crime, that of witchcraft, and consorting w’ the forces a evil,” she declared. “She has conspired w’ infernal powers to work dark magic, disguised as boons and mercies, upon this town.”

Cries went up, wordless expressions of horror and encouragement to “burn the witch!” Delia held up a hand for silence.

“Her son, Goodman Jon Driscoll, has been found innocent of conspiring w’ her. However, the foul taint upon the village of Moelfyre must be cleansed. Lorna Driscoll will be burned at the stake till her body is completely destroyed. If any would defend her ‘gainst these charges, let them speak now.”

Many eyes swiveled to Jon, who followed behind Morris and Taliesin and took a place at the front of the crowd, watching the proceedings. As in the house before, he said nothing. No one else spoke. Delia nodded after a long moment, then turned to face the accused.

“Lorna Driscoll, will y’accept last rites before your soul is returned to our Lord, God, for your final judgment?” she asked. Lorna shook where she wasn’t lashed in place, but finally nodded her assent. Delia looked to the priest.

Father Macklin made his way down the church steps and up to the woman, wincing as dry branches snapped under his feet. He opened his Book of Letters, but instead of ministering a loud and judgmental last rite, he spoke quietly with the woman. After a few minutes he shut the book, and at the snap of the covers closing, Lorna’s sobs subsided. Her hazel eyes seemed clouded. As the priest stepped down Delia stepped up, hefting Cold Water over her shoulder.

“D’you have any last words before the pyre is lit, Mistress Driscoll?” she asked.

“Would you sing with me, girl-child?” Lorna whispered, eyes staring into the middle distance. “The song your father taught you? How many times should we sing it, t’be safe?”

Delia looked up in alarm. Kindling crackled underfoot as she stutter-stepped back on the pyre. “What?”

“If she were mine, and lov’d me well. Life would be naught but pleasure,” Lorna sang. Her voice barely broke a whisper, but seemed to echo in Delia’s head. She smiled as she carried on with the verse. “I would not care for sacks of gold—”

—red in her vision. Lungs squeezed tight. Cold, cold water—

Delia swung her axe up and around, taking off Lorna Driscoll’s head and seven inches of the top of the post. Screams went up as both fell from the pyre and rolled towards the crowd. Father Macklin fainted on the church steps. Delia thrust her left hand back wordlessly, fingers beckoning. Morris and Taliesin scrambled to grab up the head and bloody piece of stake.

“She try’n speak a spell?” Morris demanded as he shoved the head into her hand. Delia said nothing, right hand white on the haft of Cold Water, arms shaking. Taliesin gestured Morris back.

“No use talking to her now,” he said as he tossed the blood-soaked piece of post between the dead woman’s feet. “Step back for the lighting.”

Not many stayed to watch Lorna Driscoll burn. There was no entertainment in it with the woman already dead. Black smoke and the scent of burning flesh filled the air and drove away the stragglers. Morris and Taliesin left Delia at the foot of the pyre. She took her time emerging from the fog of her rage, the heat of the blaze pushing her hair back from her face and the echo of breath-stopping cold from her mind. She almost snapped back into it at the sound of a footstep behind her.

“Thank you,” Goodman Driscoll said, just loud enough to be heard over the crackling of the fire.

“Don’t thank me,” Delia ground out between gritted teeth. “What good’ve I done you, today?”

“More’n you know,” he said. “And you took her head off, so she didn’t scream.”

“Didn’t do it for you,” she muttered. “I’m no boon a yours. If you’re lucky you’ll never see me again, Jon Driscoll.”

Driscoll didn’t say anything else. He stayed at the base of the pyre after she finally turned away and went to get her night’s rest. In the dim of the early evening she watched him from the tavern’s little window. Once there was little left but ash and husks of timber, he fetched the bucket he’d used to wash the church and began dousing the embers, before the wind could carry them off towards the houses.

AM 515, Winter

Jon was as good as his word. It was already warmer inside the farmstead, out of the cold wind, but within a few minutes the man rekindled a small blaze in the hearth and its warmth and glow spread outwards. Delia seated herself in the chair next to it, peeling off her long gloves to warm her hands directly. Jon wandered off, finding a shirt and a kettle somewhere, and put some water on to heat. Delia looked over the house. The furnishings were sparser than she remembered.

“You’ve cleared out,” she observed. Jon smiled, but it was thin. He crouched and added some kind of spice to the water as it boiled.

“Sold things on,” he murmured. “First the hogs, then the tables n’ such.”

Delia unwound her cloak and hung it to dry over the back of her chair as the snow on it began to melt. “Poor harvest?”

“Fine harvest,” Jon said. “No buyers.”

Delia looked up from the flames. Jon was making himself busy, pushing things around and attempting to tidy up some small messes. The chief goal seemed to be not to look at her.

“You were cleared,” she pointed out. Jon nodded, paused, then shook his head.

“Farm weren’t,” he said. He gave her an apologetic look, like he hated to break bad news to her. “Nobody wants nothing what’s from it. Had to sell the hogs to travelers. No one here-bouts would take ‘em. Barley’s rotting in bales.”

“You won’t have seed to plant in spring at that rate,” Delia said.

Jon shrugged. He swept up some stale crumbs of barley bread with his hands and opened the front door to toss them out. A wretched-looking hen emerged from a lean-to at the front of the house and pecked at them. It was the first animal Delia had seen.

“S’this usual?” Jon asked. “Witchfinders asking after the harvest?”

“Some look back, checking for a return of witchery after the first is found,” Delia hedged. She clenched her hands in her lap and stared down at them.

“Haven’t seen anything, meself,” Jon said. “Village saw a fever last winter, took a few, Father Macklin among them. Some dead mules and such. Less mild weather. Moelfyre’s same as any other village, now, I s’pose.”

Delia nodded. Jon finally sat down, directly on the floor. Delia belatedly realized she’d taken the only remaining chair. Her eyes burned and she focused on forcing down the despair clawing at her throat.

“That’s not why you’ve come, though,” Jon surmised as he took the kettle off its hook with a rag and poured some kind of tea in a chipped mug for her. It seemed to be his only mug, too. He poured tea for himself into a small pot with a slight flush of embarrassment.

He looked up at her as he took a sip, waiting for her to say something. After all he’d said, he didn’t even look angry. Just as if he wanted to be sure about whatever she pronounced, even if it was that she’d hold the fire, but was here for his head with the axe she’d left leaning against the doorframe. Her shoulders ached from wearing it on the long ride. Her “mission” from Mother Yvenna rang in her head. The cold was only slowly working its way out of her bones as Jon’s fire grew.

The tears were still a surprise, despite all of it.

“Mistress vch Caerwyn, y’alright?” Jon asked, almost fumbling his pot of tea as he made to stand up. Delia waved at him feebly, hoping he’d stay put, using her other hand to cover her eyes as she wept.

“D-don’t meet many kind people, in my line a work, and not many what stay that way,” she choked out. “I’m— I should go.”

“Nay, s’too damned cold, I couldn’t let you,” Jon insisted, setting aside his tea and standing as if to fetch something for her. He settled on snatching up the warm cloth from the handle of the kettle and offering it as a sort-of handkerchief. She mopped her face and sucked in a breath. He knelt again, and, speaking quietly, added, “Think it’d be best if y’just told me what’s happened, mistress.”

“I’ve been asked by my superior, Mother Yvenna,” she choked out from behind the shield of the rag, “to lay down m’axe and do right by God as a woman.”

Jon’s brows knit. “Become a nun?”

“No,” Delia said with a miserable little laugh. “That’s the problem. I ent married to God, to the church. I ent married to anyone.”

“Why’s…” Jon trailed off as he finally took her meaning.

“She wants you to marry an’ start a family,” he guessed, reaching out to softly take her hands as she mopped her eyes a last time and set aside the rag, “but you… don’t want one?”

“S’not that,” she mumbled, the tears gone but her throat rough from the crying, “it’s… I don’t have good luck w’ family, mine or yours. I’ve done you a bad turn, Jon. But y’were the only person I could think of.”

“I’m witchblood, Mistress vch Caerwyn, or so the village says,” Jon said. “Everything I own, everything I’ve touched. All tainted. Kind or not, that’s no match. What ’bout your own prospects?”

Delia turned her hands in his, laying them palm up to once again expose all the pale little cuts on the pads of her fingers. She laughed in spite of the situation. “What prospects?”

Jon looked down at them for a long moment before covering them back up with his own.

Delia woke up six hours later in Jon’s mother’s old bedroom, which he’d shooed her into after demanding she sleep someplace that wasn’t on the back of her horse. She threw off the rough blanket and sat up to find midday light poring through the cracks in the window shutters. A week before she’d have been awake already and sparring with the detachment at Honsborough Abbey. Now the most she could think to do was get up and make a meal. She opened the door to find Jon already working on it. He looked up with a handful of soft gray feathers, caught in the middle of plucking the hen from the front yard, which now hung broken-necked in his grip.

“Tell me you didn’t kill your only chicken to feed me,” Delia groaned.

“I’m eating too,” he said, lamely. Delia buried her face in her hands. John dropped the feathers into a growing pile on the tabletop next to him and nodded towards the hearth. “Stoke the fire?”

Delia frowned and poked up the bed of coals from earlier, busying herself with building kindling over the glowing embers. Fresh flames shot up while Jon finished plucking and then butchered the chicken. Delia crouched and stared at the fire as it built, the guilt from that morning returning to settle in the pit of her stomach again.

“Jon, I—”

“Can I tell you something, Delia?” Jon cut in, out of the blue.

“Course,” Delia murmured. She laid a log over her kindling and waited to see if it would catch.

“You wanted to know why I said no word in defense of my mother, when you burned her,” Jon said. Delia froze with the kettle half off the hook, in the middle of a thought about scrounging up some more tea. “She was a hedge witch. As good a witch as a witch can be. You didn’t ask, but you wanted to know.”

“Aye,” she said, quietly, pulling the kettle down. She dipped some water out of a bucket Jon had brought in to fill it. She watched the man out of the corner of her eye as he took the chicken to pieces and began loading the meager chunks in his cook pot.

“Afore I were ten, wasn’t allowed further than the farm fence.” Jon considered the gizzard of the bird for a moment before tossing it in too. “Mum told me I was her dear and only son, that she needed me, and that I’d never leave her. Didn’t know the power of words then.

“At fifteen I tried to go down the road to Hayvilch, to get a milk cow I’d been offered cheap,” he continued, adding in some softening carrots and other bits of unsold vegetables. “Ten paces from the old barn at the village edge, I felt hands around my throat. Couldn’t breathe right again till I ran back to the yard.”

Delia felt a cold prickle wash over her skin. She stood and found herself moving towards him, toward his broad back, curving as his shoulders pulled in and his voice lowered.

“When I fell in love for the first time at seventeen, me and the girl both came down w’ a dreadful pox,” he murmured. He took the ladle and bucket from the hearthside and dipped water into the cook pot. “She didn’t get better.”

Delia reached out and laid her small hands on his back. Jon drew a deep breath before speaking again. “I remember Mum tending me, during. I remember the curse she spoke.”

“What was it?” Delia asked.

“That if I ever wanted to wed, to leave and start a family of my own,” he said, “the bride would have to kill her first.”

Delia stared at the span of his back framed between her hands. It slowly began to shake. It took her a moment in her shock to realize that Jon was laughing.

“You…” Delia sputtered. “What?”

“Still haven’t tried to leave the village since I were fifteen,” he said, wiping his blood- and chicken slime-smeared hands off on a rag, “but, the way I see it, I might could— w’ you.”

Exhausted, Delia leaned her forehead against his back and groaned, which seemed to only make him laugh harder.

“You don’t know a thing about me,” she mumbled. “You’ve no idea what you’re getting into.”

“All y’know ’bout me is that I’m kind, and me mum were a witch,” he pointed out. He shot a look over his shoulder at her as he took the sides of the cook pot and made to move it to the fire. “‘Sides, I fancy what I’ve seen so far. Can you chop wood too, or is it just heads?”

“Cheeky,” Delia chided, flicking him in the back as she stepped away. She watched him settle the pot over the fire, and though her eyes hurt staring at the flames, she couldn’t look away as he added another log and embers puffed up on a plume of smoke. “You joke. But do you not feel… bound, following her prophecy? A witch’s words?”

“Are you not bound by the Mother’s order?” Jon asked. He took a seat in the chair by the fire as the pot began to warm. Delia opened her mouth but he shook his head. “Yea, I know, it’s different. But it’s still obligation, if’n you want to go looking for them.”

Delia perched on the stone rim of the hearth looking at him. Jon leaned back in the chair with his eyes closed, wearing a pleasant smile that curled up at one corner, as if he was thinking something funny. The smell of cooking chicken slowly filled the house.

“…you don’t, do you?” Delia finally asked.

“Not really,” Jon said, peeking an eye open at her. “You’re awfully pretty.”

Delia bit her lip and tried to look mad. “I’ve a job w’ the church I care for. Wouldn’t be around much to cook and wash. Really be gone more oft than not.”

“Will you come back?” he asked.

“I could be persuaded,” she said, crossing her arms, fighting down a smile.

Jon leaned back and closed his eyes again, apparently content. “Then would you stop trying to poke holes in something good, mayhap, and eat your betrothal chicken?”

“Is that what this is?” Delia asked, leaning over and looking in the pot, her tone and the expression on her face so comically skeptical that Jon burst out laughing again.

AM 516, Spring

The new pastor for Moelfyre, Father Jeddeh, was a man with a forceful personality, which was all Jon could credit for the village turning out for the wedding. A month ago Jon had broken down the pig pen and cleansed the ground so that now it would be a pleasant enough field of grass. Villagers milled around on it, scrubbed for the occasion and in their better clothes, but none looked happy.

Matthias Jorl, the only person who could play an instrument in Moelfyre, picked despondently at his fiddle strings in a chair by the feast table. He’d been gracious enough to play Gwahoddwr for the wedding on account of a favor he owed Jon, and had collected their couples’ purse by tradition. But the purse was light and none of the other traditional celebrations had been done. Delia had no father to bundle her away on a horse for the Chase. Jon had no family with him to bargain her bride price while her family argued back. The fact they’d secured the church to be wed in, rather than the whole ceremony happening in the old pig pen, was nearly a miracle.

Jon would’ve liked to blame the dour mood of the event on that lack of tradition, or the shadow of his mother hanging over the land and the occasion. Really, it was because of the screaming.

Delia had gone in to wash and change into her dress a half hour past. Shortly after, the screaming had started. At first it was more voices—Delia, from what he could tell, and the few village girls who’d been brave enough to be her maids for the ceremony. Now it was just Delia every few minutes with a shrill scream.

Jon paced outside the house, staring at Father Jeddeh, who’d elected to stand in front of the door as a defender in lieu of Delia’s father. Delia screamed again and the man winced, tugging at the collar of his vestments. After a moment of intense eye contact he finally bowed his head and said, “It’s fearful bad luck to see the bride before the wedding. But, perhaps, in this case…”

“I’ll take it,” Jon said. “Move.”

Father Jeddeh stepped aside and Jon went in. He found the village girls huddled by the hearth, looking like frightened rabbits in their soft brown and gray dresses.

“What’s happened?” he demanded. “Where is she?”

The girls pointed to his mother’s bedroom door, but one grabbed his leg. It was Jenna, the milkmaid, face bloodless and eyes wide with fear. The small flowers she’d braided into her hair shook as she looked up at him.

“She screamed for us to get out,” Jenna stuttered. “We pulled her a bath, heated the water an’ everything, but when we tried to help her in she screamed and told us to get out.”

“She’s possessed!” one of the other girls insisted, the farrier’s young sister. “The way she’s carrying on, she can’t be of the church!”

“It’s the house,” the last girl moaned, Marnie’s daughter who helped her run the fish market stall, hands tangled in her hair and yanking on it so hard her scalped turned white and red. “It’s this house, it’s a witch’s house, Jenna, I told you we shouldn’t’ve come to the witch’s house!”

“God, Heidi, shut your gob!” Jenna wailed. Tears still rolled down her face, despite her temper, marking her as scared the same as her hysterical friend.

Delia screamed and this time, worked up by telling Jon their tale, the girls howled with her again. Jon stepped back and shook his head as he moved to the bedroom door. Through it he could hear Delia breathe— deep, heaving breaths that sounded too big for her slight body. He tried the door. It opened a hand’s width before hitting something and stopping. Jon pushed in with all his weight and felt more than heard a groan as wood scraped across wood. He made a space wide enough to pass through and stepped into the room, finding the bedframe had been pushed against the door to barricade it from the inside. In the center of the room was a large washtub, filled almost to the brim with water.

Delia stood in it, naked and shaking, hands clasped white-knuckled on the edges of the tub. She was submerged to mid-shin, and her long hair swayed around her face as she slowly descended a few more inches. Jon saw her see him, and her teeth clench as she held back a scream. Jon shut the door behind him as he stepped forward. “Delia, what’s happened?”

“Get out,” she snarled through her teeth.

“What’s wrong?” he repeated, moving slowly towards the tub. “You don’t need to boil yourself, if it’s too hot just…”

“Jon,” she said, voice strained from her screaming, arms shaking as she held herself still, “get out.”

Jon hesitated. Then he stepped around the tub and crouched next to her right hand.

“Can I help?” he asked.

Delia stared at him for a long moment. Her eyes were so damn dark, a gray or brown so deep it might as well have been black, and in that moment they didn’t quite look human. She stared at him, and then she nodded. He covered her right hand with his and she twisted hers to lace their fingers together. Delia slipped a scant inch further into the water and screamed again as if she’d been burned. Jon took a firmer grip, supporting some of her weight.

“Did they test you… because of this?” he asked, quietly.

“No,” Delia panted. “This is because of my test.”

Jon didn’t know what to say. Delia took her left hand off the other side of the tub and he took that one too. She stared down at the water and sucked in a shuddering breath.

“Your mother knew,” she whispered. “I don’t know how, but she knew.”

“You don’t have to do this,” Jon assured her, bracing to help her down or lift her out. Delia clenched his hands so tight her fingernails started to dig in.

“It’s my wedding day,” she said, voice cracking as she started to cry. Her tears dripped off her cheeks into the bathwater with soft plinks. “I want to look nice on my wedding day, Jon. I don’t know why I’m like this, and I just…”

“It’s alright,” Jon murmured, soft and slow. “It’ll be alright. We’ll get you down, very slowly now.”

“Everyone’s waiting,” Delia pointed out. Her tone was twisted with misery. Jon scoffed and slid his hand up and down her forearms.

“They think my damned house’s haunted by a ghost witch, and half are only here so Father Jeddeh won’t shame them at next prayer,” he grumbled. “Let ’em stew a bit.”

Delia leaned forward till their foreheads touched. With their hands clasped tight she slowly began to descend again, the water creeping over her knees, up her thighs, around her belly. The whole time she sobbed, angry and sad and scared, but trying. Finally she hit the bottom and Jon helped her lean back. By then she was boneless, exhausted and barely aware of Jon leaning her head forward to put a cloth behind her neck.

“Does the church know?” he asked, rolling the cloth so the side of the tub wouldn’t cut into her neck. Delia laughed without feeling.

“They know,” she murmured. “It’s usually useful.”

Jon scowled. “You being scared to death is useful?”

“Me being angry is useful,” Delia corrected. She paused before asking, “I wasn’t well, at first. Did… Are any of the girls hurt?”

“Nay, just scared shiteless,” Jon assured her. He glanced back at the bedframe pushed against the door, studying the gouges in the floor that suggested it’d been shoved with incredible force. He looked back at his would-be wife, pale and small, muscled but hardly a towering figure. She leaned back in the tub almost insensate, apparently too tired to keep fighting now that she was all the way in.

“Did I hurt you?” she asked, very quietly.

Jon sat at the side of the tub in his best clothes, half-moon fingernail gouges slowly going from white to red on the backs of his hands, and watched this strange and dangerous woman he’d taken such a liking to breath in and out with a practiced slowness.

“Would you tell me what happened,” Jon asked, “when you were tested?”

Delia blinked her eyes open and looked over at him. Sitting, with her head leaned back and the morning sun leaking in the cracks of the walls to light them, Jon saw her eyes were actually brown, dark as the crust on a good rye bread and warm as they looked at him. She raised her hand again and reached for him, cupping the side of his face without her small, cold fingers digging in.

“It would take a while,” she murmured, “and be hard in the telling. You’d have to be patient with me.”

“Waited more’n twenty years for a witch’s curse to break,” Jon murmured, folding his arms on the side of the tub and settling his chin on them. “I can be patient.”

So she told him.

That night, Delia rose from her marriage bed and went to the window, hugging Jon’s shirt around herself as she looked out over the fields towards Moelfyre, towards the church’s white timbers and the open yard she’d lit a pyre in years before. Jon had ripped out and sold much of his mother’s lavender after the trial, but part of a bush still grew beneath this window and scented the night wind.

Lorna Driscoll had smelled of it, when Delia leaned in to hear her final words. Probably kept a sachet of the dried leaves in her shirt, to ward off evil spirits, as ironic as that seemed after the fact.

The wind moved through the house in whispers. It would take a lot of work to put the place right, to plug the gaps against the wind that Jon hadn’t bothered with, him so close to starving. The barley had rotted, so new seed would have to be bought, and new animals, and furnishings— which the wedding guests should’ve brought, but had shied away from doing.

Delia tried not to hear the words of her father’s song in the whispering of the house. The lavender played tricks on her nose, though, pulling her back into memory.

She heard the floor boards creak as Jon rolled out of bed. He wandered over to her with the slow but purposeful gait of someone still mostly asleep. After a moment of hesitation, he wrapped his arms around her middle, and she leaned back into him.

“You well, Delia?” He mumbled. She canted her head to the side.

“M’thinking about burning your house to the ground,” she said. Jon made a “huh” sound and propped his chin on her shoulder.

“Our house,” he corrected. “Why?”

“Think I’m mayhap a fortnight away from hearing your mother’s voice in the walls,” Delia muttered.

“Can’t sell the place,” Jon said. “Wedding purse was six gold, which is fine, but won’t buy a better one.”

Delia weighed her options. The thin metal band on her finger made her left hand heavy, but helped her think. Finally, she admitted, “I’ve a hundred gold buried in a sack near Gloustchen.”

Jon choked. “You… what?”

“The church pays well enough, and I had no one and nothing to spend it on,” she mumbled. “D’you think we could get a better place, with that? I’ve no mind for the cost of things, not for years and years, since the fever took Gwynned.”

Jon started laughing, deep in his chest, and it rocked Delia as he held her. “Might do, might do. You fancy a castle?”

“No,” she said. She pushed away a little and turned in his arms, to look at him properly. “You fancy leaving, going far away from this wretched place?”

Jon looked down at her. He seemed a golem made of wheat and pale gold, the way the moonlight played over his tanned skin and blonde hair, turned him back into the statue of a man she’d glimpsed that first morning, after the sow’s blood, patiently washing the timbers of the church clean. He cupped her small face in his big hands and leaned down to kiss her.

“And all you ask is to burn this place?” he asked. She sniffed, a little embarrassed with herself.

“We don’t have to.”

“Nay, s’fine,” he said. “My main concern was where we’d sleep after. The barn’s draftier, if you can believe it.”

Delia laughed and leaned into him, imagining a house that didn’t smell of old lavender, but new wood.

All told, everything Jon wanted to keep fit on the back of the red mare. Delia loaded her up, redressed in her traveling clothes, while Jon knocked apart the old stick fence and tossed the pieces over the threshold into the house. Moelfyre slept on while Delia cleared dry brush that would catch from around the house and tossed it inside for kindling.

Delia paused in front of the threshold, the concentric circles of Amn Jon had carved after his mother burned looking down on her from the transom.

“D’you want to light it?” she asked. She looked back over her shoulder at her husband, flint and steel in hand, with three newly-made oil-soaked torches at her feet for the burning.

Jon stood back by the mare, but looked at her thoughtfully before stepping forward and taking up one of the torches. He turned it over in his hand as she offered the flint and steel.

“Don’t know that I can manage the torch and the striking the way you can,” he said, “but I’ll throw the first, sure.”

Delia lit his torch with a deft strike and it burned hot between them. She lit the remaining torches off of his, then nodded for him to step forward. Jon considered his childhood home by torchlight, pacing down the length of the front wall, past the empty chicken coop and the field where they’d come with the village after the wedding to sup. He turned and came back to stand in front of the front door again.

“Had a thought I should throw it in her bedroom first,” he said. “Then… I dunno. S’pose it’s ’cause you already burned her. Didn’t seem right.”

“Right in the front door, then?” Delia suggested. As Jon thought about it she held her torches up. “It’s not too late to stop till the fire’s caught, Jon.”

“That wisdom part of your witchfinder training?” Jon joked. His smile died when she didn’t laugh with him. She just nodded, staring down at the torches clenched in either hand.

“Through the front,” Jon agreed.

He stepped back, and with a mighty heave pitched the torch far into the building. Delia went round the sides, touching her torches to the thatch, tossing the spare into the barn. It took a long moment, but a deep red began to glow in the heart of the house as flames licked up the eaves. Jon stepped back and Delia left her last torch burning against the west wall to join him.

“You ready?” he asked. She hummed her agreement, and they turned on foot, Delia leading the mare, to walk down the road past the field into Moelfyre. It took them past the church, past the mercantile, past the tavern. The tavern was the only place still awake. Matthias Jorl stood around the side, having a piss. He frowned as they passed, confused, but his eyes widened as he traced their path back up the road to a column of smoke lit by red and orange.

“You…” he sputtered. “You’ve burnt it!”

“Thank you for the fiddling, Goodman Jorl,” Delia said as they passed, with a small but genuine smile. “T’were the finest gift we got.”

Jon nodded his goodbye to the man. The red mare walked behind them, a bundle of clothes wrapped in an old blanket slung over the saddle.

“D’you have a preference for north or south, east or west?” Delia asked. “Can’t be too far from Honsborough, but there’s a fair few villages between here and there which might suit you.”

“I…” Jon swallowed as he looked out on the dark road ahead of them. “My love, I’ve no idea.”

Delia looked at her husband seriously for the first time since they’d lit the house. For a man of well over six feet, with arms like thick tree branches and a freshly-shaved face already threatening stubble, he looked as lost as a child. Delia held his hand in hers as they passed the old barn at the edge of Moelfyre.

“I’ve made a hash of your life, haven’t I, Jon Driscoll?” she asked.

“Nay,” he murmured. “I’m eleven steps past the old barn, and I breathe.”

Delia leaned into his side, feeling small and grateful. “There’s pretty country to the west.”

Jon squeezed her hand. “Show me?”

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED 12/9/2016 | REHOSTED 2/27/2024