A Recruit to the Jonashire Order of Witchfinders

A Recruit to the Jonashire Order of Witchfinders 40 MINUTE READ

The blow knocked her back, snapping her head to the side and briefly whiting out her vision. Corrupted people swarmed her on all sides. The wound stung. Something was trying to work its way into her body, change her, the way it had changed the villagers.

“If she were mine…”

The others were at her back but the swarm was too large. Their inquisitor was focused on drawing out the witch. Sion rained blows on the debased creatures attacking him, but they barely disturbed the flesh. She heard the whistle of the wind as Slyvi, young Slyvi, Slyvi who was fighting to marry, swung her glaive and cut into another.

“…care not for gold…”

She heard the series of cracks before she realized her knuckles had locked around the haft of her axe. One of the creatures surged at her, splattering her face with spittle.

—lungs tight. Vision red. Cold, cold water around her—

Delia vanished with a scream.

“You said Witchfinders Jace and Hubert brought her in?”

“She was apparently insistent. It’s not uncommon in the newly vindicated, but to have followed sixteen miles on foot behind their horses…”

Father Yarlaine looked up from the book he’d been reading over the glass of his half-moon spectacles. “Sixteen miles? Don’t tell me she’s lame, now, as well.”

“No,” the steward said, straightening his tabard as the father fixed his eyes on him. “Just… small.”

“And you offered her a place among the—?”

“She wouldn’t hear of being a nun,” the steward said. He ticked roles off on his fingers as he listed them. “Or acolyte, or maid, or church sharecropper. She’s obsessed with the Witchfinders. She haunts the doors to our keep, Father.”

“She’s not the first,” Father Yarlaine mused. He glanced out the warped panes of his window at the heavy rain falling on the courtyard outside and frowned. “Although… it does occur to me that it might not reflect well on Jonashire if we let an indigent woman die on the doorstep.”

“Would you like me to run her off?” the steward asked. Yarlaine waved his hand.

“Sixteen miles on foot,” he reminded the man. “If waving a torch and shouting could send her away quietly, Hubert would’ve done it. That inevitable scene won’t do us much better than a body on the steps.”

The steward stood in silence for a long moment as the father thought. After a while he turned from the window back to his desk and pulled parchment and a quill towards him.

“No, she needs to learn firsthand,” he decided. “That’s how it tends to be with the petty nobles looking for a title and the fanatics. Bring her in. Once she sees the work, she’ll flag. Slip away on her own. But for now, we will play at training her.”

“It will be done at once, Father,” the steward said, bowing before turning on his heel and heading back towards the church door.

“Hold a moment,” Yarlaine called. The steward paused in the middle of closing the door as Yarlaine waved the tip of his quill. “Did she give a name?”

“Yes, Father. One of the provincial names. I believe it was Delilah? Delilah vch… something.”

Father Yarlaine began writing in sweeping strokes. “Well, get me the right one before I finish the preamble. Recruits get so fussy when the name in calligraphy isn’t theirs.”

“I’m… not under the impression she can read, Father,” the steward murmured.

“Better and better,” Yarlaine said. “I can always do with less complaining.”

The first Delia heard of her tenuous acceptance into the Jonashire Order of Witchfinders was when the steward opened one of the massive keep doors into her hip. She squawked and rolled out of the way, off of the stone steps into the yard. The rain had stopped a half hour past but the mud was plentiful. She blinked up from it at the steward, who had a paper in hand and a pinched look on his face. She winced as she stood. The torn and bloodied soles of her feet protested the move so soon after her long walk.

“Delilah vch Cedwick?” the steward asked.

Delia blinked and looked around for the other person he could be addressing with that name. She startled a little as she realized he meant her. “Ah, no… Delia vch Caerwyn. C-can I help you, milord?”

“I’m not a lord, I’m a steward,” the steward sniped. He crossed his arms over his tabard, beautifully stitched with the concentric circles of Amn. “And I very much doubt it, but I’ve been instructed to let you in, regardless. Here. Try not to get dirt on this, it’s the only way you’ll be let in by anyone else.”

He thrust the folded paper in his hand out to her. She took it with the cleaner of her hands and gingerly unfolded it. There was a seal in wax at the bottom and the writing within was the finest looking she’d seen. She couldn’t understand any of it, but it was still the most beautiful object she’d ever been offered in her life. She hurriedly stuffed it down the front of her shirt before the steward could snatch it back.

“Alright, then,” the steward muttered. He cleared his throat and began again in a clear, commanding voice. “You are hereby admitted to the Jonashire Order of Witchfinders, an honored arm of the Church of Abnegation, as a recruit on a trial basis— a trial which may be rescinded at any time and for any reason. You will be issued…”

He looked Delia over from toe to tip. His eyes lingered on her bare and bloodied feet. Delia curled her toes as if to hide them, feeling vague embarrassment.

“…clothing, equipment, and shoes befitting your new station,” the steward continued, “and provided room, board, and an education in our craft. What is asked of you in return is your total commitment to our faith, our mission, and the training you will undergo. Do you understand this as I have relayed it to you?”

“Aye,” Delia said, clutching her paper through the material of her dress. The steward heaved a sigh, stepped back, and opened the door wide enough that she wouldn’t brush him as she passed.

“Then come in and stop cluttering up the steps,” he said. Delia followed the order as best she could, taking care to move as quickly as possible on her bloodshod feet so as not to look a laggard. The steward disdainfully showed her to the quartermaster for clothes and boots, assigned her a place to sleep in the hayloft of the witchfinders’ stables, and finally brought her to a communal bathhouse to clean up and change.

“I trust you know what to do with this,” he said as they came to a stop before a wooden tub with a bucket next to it. “Well’s next to the armory. You won’t have time to heat water on church missions, so don’t bother getting used to that now.”

“Heat water… to wash with?” Delia asked, looking confused. The steward covered his mouth with a hand and closed his eyes. He shook his head and reopened them with a resigned look.

“Never mind, then,” he said. “When you’re done and changed, report to the forward… the big building, in the center of the keep. I’ll be waiting.”

“Aye, understood,” Delia said with a nod. She followed the steward out with the bucket as he left and drew her water. Getting the full bucket back to the tub with her feet as raw as they were was a difficult task, but eventually she managed it.

Then she was left with a shallow pool of cold water and her reflection in it.

“Not a problem,” she murmured. “Not a… task t’all, really. Just…”

She stripped out of her mud-caked dress and set it aside, taking care to retrieve her paper and place it on a cupboard where it couldn’t get wet. That done, she lifted a foot over the side of the tub and slowly lowered it towards the bottom, her toe just skimming the surface.

“If she were…”

“No, no, no,” Delia said, yanking her leg back. She sucked in a deep breath, then shifted weight from one tender foot to another at the side of the tub, thinking. From the cupboard at the side of the room she took a rough cloth and dipped it in the water. She brought it up and began gingerly swiping smears of mud and road grim from her face. Blood-stained fabric binding the tips of her fingers grew damp and slid away, revealing precise, scabbed cuts on the pads of each. They ached, as did the burns and lash marks on her back.

She was shaking by the time she needed to wet the cloth again.

“God found me innocent,” she whispered to herself as she rubbed away the mud on her arms, wincing every time water ran down them to her fingers. “God found me innocent, I will serve God.”

…as for the recruit Delia vch Caerwyn, misnamed in previous reports as Delilah vch Cedwick, her training continues apace. Besides a trying reluctance to bathe exhibited by many among the peasantry, vch Caerwyn’s chief stumbling block…

Father Yarlaine looked up from his report-in-progress, over the railing and down into the practice yard. A story below, the newest recruits to the Jonashire Order of Witchfinders were practicing form and strikes with basic short swords. Two recruits, Goddard and ap Morwyn, fought each other with blunted practice swords and padded leather armor, whirling around and shouting as they mock-battled. The others practiced on dummies. Among them was the very subject of his next paragraph.

Delia dove in and struck, following jabs and thrusts with rapid horizontal cuts. Her form had little finesse or flair but she hit with a good amount force for her size. Unfortunately, her size was about half that of the other recruits. The dummy barely shook when she struck it. Witchfinder Lieutenant Ewan, who was in charge of combat training for recruits, shouted at her to try harder.

…has been utility and placement. There is typically a place for all kinds of people within our structure, whatever their strengths and failings. However, vch Caerwyn lacks the canniness and intellect required for a focused investigator, which would make allowances for her physical deficiencies. Those same deficiencies make her a very poor front line fighter, considering the beasts summoned by witches which we frequently find ourselves facing. She lacks the talent for lying needed in a false witness whom we might seed in a village, and has no taste for torture— her preliminary evaluation in that area is particularly disheartening.

Yarlaine tapped the feather of his quill against his lips. All witchfinders were instructed in “interrogation techniques,” from tactful ways to twist words to outright torture. He’d overseen the day the greenest recruits were given practice on low-priority persons of interest to the church. Several showed the overzealousness which might be cultivated in a dedicated torturer, most performed as expected, but vch Caerwyn failed outright.

Delia went through the motions, following all the procedures prescribed by her training—searching for witch marks, finger pricking, lashing, burning, swimming—but only in the most strict sense of the phrase. There was no feeling behind her actions, no love for the work, or even just grudging acceptance of it. She seemed to disappear while she did it. A complete mental vacancy that would not do in the face of witchery.

…This is all disheartening in the face of her one overwhelmingly useful quality—her devotion to the cause. She exhibits a tenacity in almost every area aside from torture which is a credit to her character and a boon in training her. If she had any other ability which we could use, and which would work in tandem with that drive, we would have the makings of a valuable witchfinder.

Yarlaine gazed down at the yard again. Delia had stepped back to rewrap her hands and change weapons. Yarlaine’s lips thinned as she picked up the practice axe, a blunted headsman’s which was supposed to be reserved for the most muscled and statuesque recruits. She weighted it in her hands before rounding on the dummy again.

The fact she could lift it now was a sign of significant growth. Her first month of training she’d dragged it around with shaking arms, able only to make a horizontal strike when she spun to build up momentum. A ridiculous display. Now she hefted and swung it well enough, but didn’t have the strength for control that would actually make it useful in her hands.

Yarlaine had been puzzled at her insistence in using it early on, to the point he actually bothered to speak to her, which he had been avoiding on account of her deplorable washing habits. Her answer only served to deepen his regret at her unsuitability to the work of witchfinding.

“Well, m’hardly a threat-making figure as I am, am I?” she’d replied, leaning on the axe like a common walking stick. She gave the haft a little shake as she continued. “But with this? Mayhap there’ll be a question in their mind of if’n I can even swing it, true enough, but if I can? By my way of thinking, that cuts a different figure.”

He did have to admit that standing still with it the axe did enhance what little potential for intimidation she had. But the moment she swung it, it became obvious she had no mastery.

…As it stands, at the turning of the season we will be forced to move her to church light infantry, or muster her out entirely if she resists that placement. Again, it is a shame. But as poorly-staffed and, to be brazenly honest, ill-considered as we by the church as a whole, we cannot afford to field dead weight.

Yarlaine watched as Delia swung the axe up and then down, going for a beheading strike on the dummy. The practice axe lodged itself in the joint of the wooden beams holding the dummy up and stuck fast. Delia cursed and yanked on it, drawing laughs from the other recruits, but couldn’t seem to get it free. Ewan put his head in his hands.

…Witchcraft still presents a violent threat. We must stand ready to answer in kind. Delia vch Caerwyn does not.

“Where’s the girl-child?” Witchfinder Ewan spat, looking over the group of four recruits gathered to join him on a field expedition. A few shrugged.

“Probably still asleep in the barn with the other animals,” Recruit Goddard suggested, snickering. Recruit ap Morwyn laughed with him. Ewan silenced them with a smack to the back of both of their heads.

“How ’bout instead of giggling, you went and fetched her?” he barked. “She doesn’t get a pass on this just because she’s a touch knackered. Now go!”

The two grumbled as they headed away from the group and out towards. ap Morwyn perked up about halfway, jerked his thumb towards the armory, and shot his friend a grin. Goddard followed him to the well.

“Here’s a thought,” ap Morwyn suggested, slapping a hand down on the crank for the well bucket, “we get the girl up and give her a sorely-needed bath, all in one. Wouldn’t that be industrious of us, mate?”

“Wouldn’t it just!” Goddard agreed with a laugh. “I’ll fetch a pail.”

Getting the water out to the barn between the two of them was less of an issue than getting it up the ladder to the hayloft, especially without rousing any of the horses still sleeping at the early hour. They got up to the hayloft with it the pail mostly full, however, shushing each other as they started to laugh at the prank, and stepping carefully on creaky floorboards and rushes of dry hay.

ap Morwyn nodded to Goddard. They each lifted a side of the pail and crept over to the back corner of the hayloft where Delia slept, wrapped in a wool blanket on a bed of hay. Goddard mouthed a count. On three they heaved the water and let out a vicious cry.

“Good morning, Little Delia!”

Ewan looked up and towards the barn at a sudden scream. Then another, sounding less like the girl, but still frustrating. His expression sunk into a deep frown and he shook his head.

“Damned fools,” he grumbled. He gestured for the other recruits to follow and, in a louder voice, added, “On me. Let’s go make sure they didn’t scare her out of the hayloft to a broken neck.”

There was no more screaming by the time they reached the barn. Ewan pushed inside and waited, expecting his recruits to come sliding down the ladder at the sound of his boots on the hard-packed dirt. All he found were restless animals. The horses looked at him with white-ringed eyes, some even kicking at the doors to their stalls.

“Ho!” he cried up the ladder as he approached. “You lot, come down here!”

Nothing. All he could hear was a faint sound, something like deep, heaving breaths. He rolled his eyes.

“I can hear you, you know!” he shouted. “You don’t want to make me come up there. Get some sort of clothes on and get down here, now!”

Still nothing. He clenched his teeth and kicked at the stray hay on the floor, weighing his frustration with his would-be students against the ache in his knees that never seemed to fade. He finally turned back to the door and gestured one of the other recruits forward.

“Get up there and get them down,” he ordered. “I’ve had enough drag-arsing around. We are going out today.”

The recruit nodded and started up the ladder at speed, taking two rungs at a time. Ewan watched with arms crossed, waiting on some more squawking and outrage.

Delia was on the recruit three rungs from the top.

He shouted as the girl boiled over the edge of the hayloft, screaming and clawing at his face. Ewon was helpless to do anything but yell out in alarm as he watched the recruit lose his hold on the ladder. Delia rode his body back to the ground with a sickening thud.

“What in the hell?” Ewan shouted, drawing his sword in a panic. The last recruit, still by the door, looked on the edge of fleeing as Delia’s head snapped up and swiveled to find him. Ewan pointed his sword at the boy and barked, “Go get Father Yarlaine! The girl’s bedeviled!”

Delia sprang at Ewan as the recruit ran. He blocked the force of her small body with the flat of his sword and shoved her back. It took more effort than he was used to from their combat training in the yard. Her eyes rolled like those of the horses, who reared in their stalls at the sound of screams and the spreading smell of blood. Ewan took a few steps back.

“What is wrong with you, girl?” he demanded. “Snap out of it!”

Delia circled him, dressed for sleep in a water-soaked chemise, short-cropped hair wild around a bloodless face. She half-crouched like some kind of animal, chest heaving with forceful, snarling breaths. In the second he took to consider her she charged again. This time she grabbed hold of his sword arm. Ewan tried to maneuver her to the ground as she attempted to snap it in half, gauntlet be damned. He roared as he pushed her. She roared back, took a different grip, and with a feral strength wrenched his arm out of the shoulder socket.

Ewan fell back and his vision tunneled. His sword hit the ground as his arm fell limp, white hot pain surging through it from the shoulder down. Delia reared back and pressed her advantage. She hit him again. The unnatural strength behind it put him on the ground. He fought to get his good hand in her hair, to yank her off, even as her freezing cold fingers wrapped around his throat.

“Get hold of her!” Father Yarlaine shouted as he wrenched Delia back by her chemise. Five more witchfinders swarmed her, trying to pin and legs as she fought them, clawing at eyes and snapping one man’s fingers with a scream. Yarlaine took four deep fingernail gouges down the side of his face before they finally got her to the floor and bound her with leather from the wall of tack in the barn. Yarlaine leaned over and braced himself on his knees as he caught his breath. Ewan let himself fall back on the barn floor.

“What in the name of God was that?” he asked, clutching his useless arm to his chest. “Jace and Hubert tested her, they said she wasn’t a witch, but that—”

Yarlaine daubed at the blood streaking down his face with a linen handkerchief as he looked down on the struggling girl, barely contained by the knotted tack. His expression was hard to parse, but he didn’t look scared, or angry. Nearer to contemplative.

“She’s not,” he said. His voice was quiet and slow, as if he was carefully choosing each word before he spoke. “I’ve heard of this, though never seen it with my own eyes. I suspect ap Morwyn and Goddard will not be coming down out of the loft. It is horrifying, but… it could also be useful.”

“You’re very calm for a man who’s lost two—” Ewan glanced at the recruit Delia knocked down the ladder. A large pool of blood had gathered under his head. “—three recruits, not to mention the use of my damn arm for a while, all to some girl who’s gone mad! What’s at all useful about this mess?”

“Iron doesn’t come out of the ground beaten into swords,” Yarlaine observed. “It needs forging. Imagine what this, when forged, will look like.”

Ewan sat up and looked around him, grimacing in pain as his shoulder shifted. Someone had finally climbed into the hayloft and was gingerly lowering the body of Goddard down to a witchfinder below. The recruit’s head lolled on a broken neck. Another witchfinder laid a sheet over the recruit on the ground, the linen soaking up blood and molding to his face. Delia was quiet now, muscles lax, apparently unconscious. Her looks reverted from a feral snarl to the soft expression of a young woman asleep.

“I shudder to,” Ewan whispered. “You’re a madman, Yarlaine. All I can say is, I hope you get her pointed in the right direction before you let her off the leash.”

Yarlaine snorted and gestured for a witchfinder not helping with the bodies of the recruits to throw Delia over his shoulder. “Don’t lose too much sleep, Ewan. There’s much to do before then.”

…In the far north they are called berserkr, in the far south gekke vegter, and have been hinted as existing in the histories of many other civilizations which I have so far perused. Humans capable of taking on unnatural strength when sent into a fury, able to endure and deal magnitudes more pain than they might while at peace. There is no magic at work in them, only an all-consuming rage, which pushes their bodies and minds to a feral edge. To have found such a capability in a peasant girl so slight…

Delia sat in the interrogation room before Yarlaine, bound to the heavy oaken chair with built-in manacles, hair dripping into her lap. He made notes in a journal he carried as he paced the damp stone pavers, Witchfinder Jace standing by. He held a pail of water and waited for Yarlaine’s word.

“Delia, look at me, please,” Yarlaine commanded. She answered with a growl deep in her throat. He sighed and closed the journal around his charcoal pencil with a snap. “Delia. Listen.”

It took a while, but the girl raised her head and looked in his direction. Her eyes still roved the entire area restlessly, but it was a significant improvement over last month, when she responded to human voices only with shrill, wordless screaming.

“There we are,” he said. He knelt on the stone to be on eye level with her. “Very good. The better you understand orders in this state, the safer you and your compatriots will be.”

Delia made no response. After a moment her eyes seemed to center on him, then skittered away to the open dungeon behind him. He stood and reopened his journal.

…it is truly a boon of God. Perhaps questions would’ve been prudent to ask before her acceptance as a recruit, but conversations with Witchfinders Hubert and Jace since the incident in the barn have proven fruitful in understanding Delia’s condition. She was swum as part of her trial for witchcraft but crawled out of the water under her own power, proving her innocence and saving her life. She exhibited no sign of her current madness then, but, on reflection, Hubert suggested it might have been this altered state that allowed her to follow the pair back to Jonashire without flagging.

“How’s her breathing, Jace?” Yarlaine asked as he wrote.

“Calming,” the witchfinder said. “Shallower, but more calm.”

Yarlaine held his journal to his chest and stepped back. “Good. Again.”

Jace swung the pail and splashed Delia with about half of its contents. She screamed, writhing in her restraints, head snapping back and forth unnaturally as her fingernails added to the gouges on the chair’s arms. Yarlaine approached again once she had flung most of the water out of her hair.

“Delia, look at me.”

Delia turned, lips pulled back in a snarl, but she looked at him. Yarlaine smiled.

“Now, look at Jace,” Yarlaine ordered. He was careful not to point, glance, or incline his head. After a moment, Delia turned and looked at the other witchfinder. Jace took a step back. Yarlaine clapped in delight, which made Delia startle in her restraints and begin trying to lash out again.

“Very good, Delia!” Yarlaine said. He opened his journal there in front of her and wrote again as she snapped her teeth at him and screeched.

…This rage isn’t a force of nature that cannot be tamed. Over the months I have worked on her she has shown dramatic improvement in basic understanding, distinguishing between friend and foe, and the precision of her movement. It is my firm belief that, like that of the warriors of the extreme north and south, the madness in Delia can be honed into a fine edge at the church’s disposal.

“Should we call it, for today?” Jace asked. He shifted the bucket in his grip and grimaced. “It’s been near to six hours.”

“One last thing,” Yarlaine said. He leaned forward, drawing raised eyebrows from Jace, and spoke to Delia again. “Here. Look here, now. Look at me. Do you know me?”

No response. But Delia stared directly ahead, in his direction if not at him. Yarlaine nodded. Then he pulled the lever that opened the manacles on her wrists. Jace clambered for the cell door as Yarlaine took more measured paces back. Delia surged up out of the chair to her feet, hands tensed into claws. She took two quick steps forward.

“Do you know me?” Yarlaine repeated, in a firm voice, fighting for eye contact as hers roved over the cell in front of her. Delia advanced another step. She was nearly within striking distance. “Do you know me, Delia?”

Delia stopped. With what seemed like incredible effort, her dark eyes slowly centered on him, muscles in her jaw jumping as she clenched her teeth. But she stayed in place. Even when Yarlaine chanced to move again, to open his journal and make another note, she made no lunge towards him.

“Yes, you know me,” Yarlaine said. His smile was radiant.

“Father… what are you doing?” Jace whispered, plastered back against the bars of the cell, holding himself absolutely still. Yarlaine stepped forward into Delia’s space and tucked the journal under his arm. The woman let out a low sound of warning but did not attack.

“Taking the next step,” he said, with a chuckle. Then he reached forward with agonizing slowness and took the girl’s face in his hands. “I think you’re ready, aren’t you, my child?”

Delia’s eyes rolled back in her head. The trembling, barely-restrained fury she’d held in her body loosened all at once as she collapsed, sagging into Father Yarlaine’s arms. The rage was banished. Jace dropped the pail and sat down in relief and Yarlaine made final notes.

…Next week her training begins anew. The strain she puts on her body during her rages, while fatiguing, has begun to build strength in her which might otherwise have been impossible. She must be taught to fight as if a different person— for she is, now.

A different person who, if the new training is as successful as I project it to be, will cut quite a figure with a headsman’s axe.

“You must understand Ewan’s point of view, of course,” Father Yarlaine said. “Due to… well, the events in the barn, he is reluctant to complete this exercise with you.”

“Can’t blame the man,” Delia agreed. She wrung her hands around the haft of the large axe she carried now, holding it low as they crouched to move through underbrush. “I’m just grateful y’were willing t’keep me on, with the burying expenses alone being more than I’m worth.”

Father Yarlaine, dressed not in his usual priestly vestments but instead in the chain and tabard of the Jonashire Order of Witchfinders with a longsword on his hip, shook his head. “You have no idea of your worth, Delia. Now stay low and quiet. These are sensitive, aerial hunters.”

Delia fell silent and even lower as they stalked through the forest. The two were otherwise alone on this final test, Ewan having refused to lead Delia with the other recruits on the standard mission. Delia didn’t mind. She hadn’t been overmuch loved amongst the rest of her cohort after killing three of them, and word of her strange “gift” quickly spread amongst new recruits.

“These creatures, which Bestiary-Keeper Wren has taken to calling ‘carrion crows,’ were an unfortunate result of a successful witch hunt in this area,” Father Yarlaine explained, voice a hushed whisper after another long stretch of silent tracking. “Their master kept them in check, but, unlike many of the monsters witches may call upon, they were not banished when he was burned. They instead fled to terrorize the countryside. You must always stand ready to do your whole job, Delia. Even in situations like this. Sometimes a muddy trek through the hills is what’s required to finish what you start.”

“Y’know I’m unopposed to mud, on general principle,” Delia joked. Yarlaine cracked a smile as they rounded a deadfall.

“I also know you’re a very poor whisperer, now,” he said. Then he stopped and held a hand out. “Hold. Do you hear that?”

Delia cocked her head. Now that she was focusing, she could make out something over the creaking of the trees in wind and their own breaths. A sound like twigs being snapped and crushed, and the scraping of something sharp on something rough and unyielding. She lifted her axe higher. Yarlaine nodded and stepped back so she could take point. Her hands trembled on the haft of her axe as she edged past a dense copse of trees and peered into the clearing the noises came from.

The clearing ran alongside a bend in a weed-choked track that could generously be called a road, and in its center was a cart tipped onto its side, spilling broken crates towards the encroaching forest. Perched on rocks and the partially collapsed cart were five beasts that, to be fair to Bestiary-Keeper Wren, did loosely resemble crows. Crows however, as a general rule, didn’t have arms with wings attached underneath which ended in vicious claws. They also didn’t use those claws and their long, serrated beaks to rend the flesh of horses and men alike. They weren’t usually the size of hunting hounds, either.

“Spotted,” Delia said, doing her very best to whisper. It wasn’t good enough. The beaked heads of the carrion crows swiveled towards her and two took wing, letting out ear-piercing caws. At the signal there was a commotion in the nearby canopy. Delia’s eyes widened as three more descended from surrounding trees, all eyes on her and Father Yarlaine.

“We can’t take four apiece!” she hissed. “Father, what do we do?”

“You can’t take eight by yourself, you mean,” Father Yarlaine corrected. Delia took a grave risk to whirl around and stare at him, only to find the older man laying his sword on the ground. “I haven’t been able to swing a sword with any force for fourteen years. So, I present you with a scenario you will surely face someday, Recruit vch Caerwyn: all of your compatriots have fallen. You are the last standing to see them home.”

“What?” Delia cried, whipping her head around to glance at the fast-circling carrion crows. “Y-you can’t be serious, Father! I can’t—”

“You must,” Father Yarlaine said, “or we will both perish. I put my life in your hands, Delia.”

Delia swung back to the gathering force of birds, loping forward on their twisted legs, some wheeling through the air to dive at her. “Father, no, I…”

“Stop running from the fear,” Yarlaine called over the screeching of the monsters. “Embrace it, and let it make you strong.”

“If she were mine—”

Delia stepped back until she almost stood on the Father. Muscles in her back and arms locked tight as panic flooded her mind.

“—and lov’d me well—”

The axe was light in her hands. Light, and her body knew it, now. Her breath left her all at once in a sigh that fogged the cool air around her.

–dark underneath, silver bubbles floating up. No hand to grasp as the cold, cold water—

The blade sang as she swung it.

Father Yarlaine was waiting on her when she came to, busying himself by plucking a handful of long, black feathers out of the mounds of flesh and broken bone around her. He hummed as he worked, inspecting the tips of each gore-flecked feather for some quality only he recognized.

“What do you think?” he asked as he spotted her eyes opening. He held up a feather. “Wren will want the bodies for study and burning, but do you think I could fashion some new quills without him growing wise to my scheme?”

“What… ‘appened, Father?” she croaked. Her throat felt raw and there was a dark gap in her memory. Familiar feelings, if no less unsettling for their frequency since the beginning of her new training.

“You passed,” Yarlaine said. He crouched at her side and laid one of the feathers on her chest. “It would seem there is no test the Church of Abnegation can lay before you which you will not unexpectedly overcome.”

“You… y’can’t have been serious, to lay your sword aside,” Delia said as she forced herself to sit up. Every muscle in her body burned from the exertion of the rage. She looked at Yarlaine with horror in her dark eyes. “T’come out here with me, an’ you knowing y’had no way to rightly defend yourself!”

“I am not talking out of my backside when I say you must turn weakness into strength,” Yarlaine said. “It was a barghest that clawed my back to the point of near-uselessness. I turned the idle hours of my recovery and eventual retirement into a wealth of knowledge which, in turn, defended me today.”

Delia frowned. “I defended you today, and it was a near thing, that.”

“I knew you would,” Yarlaine said. He yanked a handkerchief out of a belt pouch and used it to daub some of the blood from her face. Delia stared the man down for a long, tense moment. Then she sunk her head into her hands and let out an exhausted laugh.

“I’m a witchfinder now, am I?” she asked. Yarlaine stood, tossing the ruined handkerchief aside and tucking his pilfered feathers into his tabard. he shook his head.

“Not yet,” he said, “but soon enough. Now, help me set up the signal for the keep. You’ve been very polite for an axe-wielding peasant madwoman, but even you must be excited for the looks on your cohort’s faces when you return with twice the kills they managed today. No need to hide that.”

“Of course, Father,” Delia said. She was helpless to do anything but smile, even through her exhaustion.

“In recognition of your achievement in spycraft, you are awarded with this dagger,” Ewan said, laying a shining dagger with the circles of Amn on the hilt in the hands of the recruit before him. The recruit, scrubbed spotless and wearing his finest tabard for the Ceremony of Accomplishment, bowed his head and accepted the blade. “May you always find it ready to aid you as you fight in the shadows to spread the light of Amn, Witchfinder Gregori.”

“Thank you, Witchfinder Lieutenant Ewan,” Gregori said, voice a little wobbly. The recruits lined up alongside him refrained from snickering only due to the gravity of the occasion. The entire assembled clergy of Jonashire watched from the stories above the practice yard, appraising the church’s newest agents.

Ewan took a fine rapier from the steward standing next to him, whose task it was to pass forward ceremonial weapons handed off by other stewards. Ewan held it out and the next recruit raised his hands to receive it. “In recognition of your achievements in leadership and decorum, you are awarded this rapier. May you always strike with swiftness when rooting out witchery amongst those who share your peerage, Witchfinder Maximus.”

Delia didn’t catch whatever thanks Maximus made to Ewan. She focused on facing straight forward, and not glancing upwards like she had at the start, only to find countless pairs of eyes on her. She could feel them even without looking back— sizing her up, comparing her to the others, finding her wanting. She wasn’t near as tall or as clean or as dignified as her peers. Yarlaine sat where she could see him, but even his encouraging nod had done little to banish her feelings of inadequacy when lined up with the rest.

Ewan stepped in front of her. For the first time in a while, she locked eyes with the lieutenant. His lips were thin, as if suppressing some expression, but he managed not to frown outright. Delia couldn’t bring herself to see what it was he reached back to the steward for as her turn came.

Murmurs went up from the clergy as he held out a massive axe.

“In recognition of your mastery of unrelenting rage, you are awarded this battleaxe,” Ewan said. His tone was nothing but respectful as he concluded, “May you prove to every non-believer the true strength of faith, Witchfinder vch Caerwyn.”

Delia took the axe. Her arm didn’t dip or shake as Ewan put its weight in her hand. She glanced up. Yarlaine smiled as a woman in church robes whispered in his ear. The eyes from before were now on her arm as she held the axe with ease.

“Trust in me, Witchfinder Lieutenant Ewan,” she managed, through a throat tight with embarrassing tears. The axe in her hand was the match of her blunted headsman’s axe, but finer, with a haft of dark wood and an edge shaped to complement the circles of Amn inlaid in the body of the blade. It was the most beautiful object she’d ever been given in her life.

She pulled it close before anyone could snatch it back.

“Think I’ll call it ‘Secret-Keeper,’” Gregori mused, as the new witchfinders milled about the courtyard of the keep after the ceremony. “I asked Witchfinder Taliesin, and he said most name their ceremony weapon.”

“I guess it makes sense, seeing how important this was,” Maximus said, looking up the length of his rapier as he pointed it skywards. “What do you think, for mine?”

“‘Prick’?” Delia suggested. Her happiness from the ceremony buoyed her into engaging with the others, but she deflated as the crowd of recruits gave her incredulous looks. She hugged her axe close. Then Maximus burst into laughter.

“Will you kill me if I don’t use it?” he joked, and the smile creasing the corner of his eyes told her there was no more venom behind the reference than had been behind her suggestion. She managed a smile and shook her head. He pointed to her axe. “You gonna name yours?”

She held it out and looked at it, turning it this way and that to admire the way the light played off the dark, honed steel.

“Cor, I dunno,” she admitted. “I’m piss-poor at namin’.”

“Peasant’s Fury?” Gregori suggested. She barked a laugh and thrust it at him, making him stumble and shout while the others started laughing too. She stopped when she felt a familiar hand fall on her shoulder.

“Already culling the unworthy?” Father Yarlaine asked. “A dagger against a greataxe isn’t much of a fight.”

“Father!” Delia said, smiling as she pulled the axe back and turned to face him. He waved off the others and they went, dispersing to celebrate or pack, depending on their assignment. Delia hadn’t yet gotten hers. Yarlaine inclined his head and she walked at his side, axe hefted onto her shoulder, as he began to weave between the buildings of the keep.

“I’ve come to deliver your first assignment,” he explained. “Mother Yvonne, of Honborough Duchy, is interested in you apprenticing to the witchfinders currently assigned to that branch of the church. Of late they’ve dealt with beasts which did not play so nicely with our more subtle agents. She was very impressed with my reports on your abilities.”

“Thank you, Father,” Delia said, ears heating with customary embarrassment at the man’s pride in her. “Honborough, huh? Can’t say I’ve been out that way. Then again, afore all this, I ent been further than a few villages from where I was born.”

“It’s an agreeable duchy, if alarmingly flat,” Yarlaine observed. “I think you’ll find it a good fit for you.”

They walked on in silence for a while, watching other new witchfinders and various members of the clergy on their way to important duties, talking in excited whispers, or setting out for their parishes. Yarlaine folded his arms at his back and looked up as they rounded the armory. The stables loomed before them and Delia froze mid-step.

“I overheard your conversation with the other new witchfinders,” Yarlaine said, tone conversational, as he moved towards the stable doors. “No ideas for a name for that fine blade, then?”

“Never had t’name anything afore,” Delia said. She followed Yarlaine into the stables with her head bowed. “And… well, it ent like I read an’ such t’get ideas.”

“Not everything comes from books,” Yarlaine observed. He stopped at the foot of the ladder up to the hayloft, which Delia had been moved out of and into the actual recruit’s barracks after the discovery of her rage and beginning of her second training. “Though most things do end up in them, I’ll give you that.”

“Why are we here, Father?” Delia asked. Yarlaine laid his hand against the wood of the ladder.

“I could say that you’ll need a horse for the trip, which is true, and set aside my other thoughts,” Yarlaine said, “but that would be fleeing from a confrontation with what we’re both remembering. You killed three people here, Delia.”

Delia pulled her axe close. “I don’t remember.”

“Nevertheless, it is so. Three recruits died. Though there was no precedent for such an event, common sense dictated that I should’ve seen you killed for it— banished, at my most lenient.”

Father Yarlaine stepped away from the ladder and looked down at the ground. What he was remembering there, Delia had no idea of. She swallowed a knot of irrational fear in her throat, made of the thought that this had all been an elaborate and especially cruel way of punishing her for that morning. She imagined having to give the axe back. Maybe die by it. But Father Yarlaine shook himself out of his thoughts and laid his hand on her shoulder again.

“A half-measure,” he pronounced. “Just being shot of you would’ve been a half-measure then, just as much as it would’ve been a half-measure when you first turned up on the steps of this keep. The true work—and the true reward—has been in seeing you to this day. I wanted to bring you here to tell you that, if there’s one thing I hope you truly take to heart from our time together, it is an abhorrence of half-measures.”

Delia’s brows knit in confusion. “Abhor…?”

“Hatred of,” Yarlaine explained. He turned them both to look out the doors of the stable, back onto the sun-washed pavers and buildings of the Jonashire keep. “I saw a drive in your training, and in the mastery of your rage, that you must remember to apply in every aspect of your work, even the mundane. You mustn’t leave a hunt half-finished, or a trial, or settle for something only half so good as it could be. Even in something as simple as picking a name. I figure you’ve come up with something passable, something which honors our God or sounds suitably noble to you.”

Delia held her axe out before them, frowning.

“I’ve honestly nothin’ on the mind,” she said. Yarlaine shook his head.

“You think more than anyone gives you credit for, Delia,” he said. “Indulge me, one last time. Tell me your thoughts as they come to you, as we did in your training.”

“M’thinking of all y’taught me,” Delia said, settling into the familiar exercise. She let her eyes unfocus and her thoughts drift, concentrating on talking, on putting one word after another. “The scariest thing y’ever did was that bit in the woods, what with the crows. Remember you saying, jus’ afore it all gets fuzzy and blank, sommat about… making fear into strength.”

“Yes,” Yarlaine agreed. “I can’t claim ownership of the idea, as it was taught to me when I was closer to your age, after the incident with the barghest. But it, too, is an important lesson I hope you’ll hold on to.”

Delia’s eyes refocused on the edge of her axe’s blade.

“Think I know what t’name it,” she said.

The smell of burning thatch was overwhelming in the small cabin. Delia’s fists still throbbed from where she’d pounded them on Sion’s chest, trying to beat the life back into his cooling body. Fleur—no longer the upright inquisitor, but a woman like her, Fleur—sat crumpled nearby.

“Does he wake?” she croaked, voice rough from commanding the witch out of hiding and crying out after. Delia hung her head over her cousin’s body.

“Nay,” she said. She pushed away from it towards Slyvi, checking that her chest still rose and fell. Her breath was so faint Delia almost wished for a piece of silver to put before her nose, to check for actual fog of breath, but she pushed her gnawing anxiety away.

Fleur sucked in a sharp breath. Delia looked back and followed her line-of-sight to find Sion’s arm jerking. For a moment, she hoped. Then, as she watched, his chest crawled and jumped off the ground for a moment, unnaturally.

“No,” Fleur whispered. “No, no, no.”

“S’too late,” Delia said. Somewhere nearby a timber groaned and cracked.

“Take Slyvi,” Fleur said, suddenly. She waved smoke away from her nose and pointed at the door to the witch’s cabin. “The roof has caught, we must leave now!”

“And jus’ leave ‘im?” Delia asked, forcing herself to her feet despite the fatigue her rage during the battle had left in her muscles. Her axe worked wonders as a point to pull up on. Fleur’s lips twisted, and she jerked her head away from Sion’s periodically-twitching corpse.

“There’s nothing to be done for him, now,” she said. “We must—”

“—finish the work,” Delia cut in. She leaned on her axe, more tired than she could say. “The witch’s dead, his beasties outside’re done for, and the ones what were in the village we already took care of. That just leaves…”

They both looked down on Sion, his ceramic mask lit with an orange glow by the growing fire.

“Do it, then,” Fleur ordered. She limped over to Slyvi and gathered the young woman up, struggling a little at first but finally able to drag her through the cabin door, back out into the clearing. It swung shut after them. Smoke filled the air with a dull, gray-ish tone.

Delia reached down and carefully tugged Sion’s mask free. His open eyes and tangle of scars lay bare. She remembered her eldest, Rhys, patting those scars when he was just three, Sion visiting her home for the first time and charmed by the young life enough to set his mask aside. That mask she tied to her belt, and his eyes she shut with another soft touch. Then she put her weight back on her own two feet again, lifting her axe as high as she could in the confines of the cabin.

“Goodbye, cousin,” she murmured.

Cold Water came down, and finished the work.

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED 1/3/2017 | REHOSTED 2/27/2024