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Lady Knight and Sorcerer Fair, Chapter 1
🕑 Added 2022-09-11 19:04:26 +0000 UTCHello, hello! Remember how I ran a poll some time ago to see whether people would be interested in more writing? Well, the interest was there and I've been feeling kinda inspired lately so I figured I may as well kick off a new project.
Here it is!
What can you expect from it? As the title implies, there's lady knights and fair sorcerers and all sorts of things happening to, with and between them - so your standard fare of what you're already getting from me. Genre-wise, I'd place it as adult fantasy. This first chapter is around 9k words, and if you don't enjoy Patreon's formatting (hell, I don't), there's a .pdf attached below. Without further ado, let's get to it!
Content warnings: Graphic violence, sexual themes, mentions of torture, mentions of domestic abuse
LADY KNIGHT AND SORCERER FAIR
Chapter I
“My awful goddess, doom in the sky, I come to you a loving sacrifice. Garb me in bridely white, take me your husband and burden me with divine offspring; should you still desire to unmake all come the gray morrow, then I will stand a silent witness to the end of the world.”
—Song of Solomorn
We first met as hunter and prey.
Who, you ask? Why, myself and Vivian, of course - Vivian, Vivian, fated shadow of mine, little raven fair. Though it seems unimaginable now, I was put on his trail not to keep him from harm, but to bring harm to him, to break him and bind him and take him to a burning stake. He was just a witch, a stray máleficier, and I an unwilling headswoman, driven by poor fortune to undertake the Long March; no oath nor kinship tied us together at first, and we were no more than two ends of one bloody chase.
I will detail this chase to you. Before that, however, in order to properly frame this account and make clear all that needs to be clear, I must skip to when there were no little ravens yet, to when there was only Aloysia an Chais, my own solitary self on the road. As knight errant, I had little to my name, naught but some virtue and strength and one opinionated sword, and it was not a good time, it was no good at all.
There was war, you see. Were I any more naïve, charitable, I would’ve spoken of a war, but it was not a single affair, not one with a clear-cut beginning and end. In my birth home of Nakht, war was the weather, the law, a way of life. It was present, always, a wretched growth nurtured to monstrous maturity by greedy men, feeble men, and there was no killing it, no putting it to rest. Foolish as I was, I knew all this and still tried to push against this order of things, to make Nakht into something it was not and would never be.
I went to war, then, with good men. I fought to halt the bloody crucible, but I only added to it with my futile efforts, and after the defeat of my chosen lord ‘neath the mountain belt of Nakht, I learned that it was not virtue who decided the goodness of men - it was the victor. I was branded a villain and driven out, forced to go on the Long March to the shore of the great sea, and I was to never return to where my shamed mother brought me into the Good Old World.
‘Twas the end of Aloysia an Chais. From there on, I would forever be only Aloysia, with no surname to offer in marriage. Courting altogether was a forbidden comfort on the Long March, as was tourneying, as was any sort of merriness. One walking the long walk was dead to the world, and death they were meant to find on the far shore. Was all that worth one shot at righteousness? Perhaps, but I admit to having felt nothing but regret and indignation then.
“Told you,” came my oldest friend’s only comfort after the whole ordeal, on the border between riven Nakht and backwater Morn. I honored the claymore across my back with no answer, and instead took that last minute on the hedge to take in the rocky sights of my home. I would not forget, ever, the turned back of Nakht.
Morn, then, was no more welcoming.
To the bog-moor kingdom, Nakht was an unloved, rowdy neighbor, and what came from its bowels was sure to be at best a bother to the Mornish. Though I was a Valiant of the Seventy-Two, a swordswoman possessed of every proper mark of ecclesial knighthood, I was not a dear guest anywhere in the fringe marks of Morn, partly also for my noble calling; the Mornish were proud heathens, iconoclasts, not at all glad to see a church-ordained chevalier.
And some chevalier I was, without a cheval even to call my own. Non, I had to prance about on my own two legs, without a steed. I dragged my weight from hamlet to hamlet, and they refused me for the most part, until I came to those corners of Morn that were in no position to turn down help. There, honorbound by the code of the Long March, I offered my aid; there they accepted it, and I took on the mantle of a witch hunter.
It did not sit well on my shoulders, and I did not wear it for long.
In Nakht, where the hateful divine was held in high regard, it was unthinkable to hunt for sorcerers. I confess, I had reviled the holy law at times, as witches were by far the worst facet of the war in my home; those odious little men came and went as they pleased, mindful of no rule and no courtesy, and they brought awful mayhem on their heel. They made fire, and they made devils, and they were kept safe from the consequences of their horrors, for the prelates of Nakht had decreed that only by bowing to the breed of divine Sofia’s consort may the world be kept safe - kept free of the goddess’ meddling. Morn had taken a different path, the path of fire, and that at first seemed the wiser approach to me, until one venture brought me back my faith.
Here, at last, we come to Vivian.
The hamlet which would task me with the sorcerer’s demise proudly bore the most boring name, Oakley, and oaks it did indeed have, withered, looming. It was a gray place, difficult, neglected by the mark’s erling; it still stood only because it had some history, and for there was nowhere further to go, tightly close as it was to Nakht.
“Rather be in squalor than be in Nakht,” noted the blade on my back as we passed through the village’s outskirts, and I gave no answer. Already, we were drawing attention and distrust, and I did not wish to needlessly provoke the Mornish by talking to a sword.
“Jour,” I instead greeted the first man to return my stare - the lamplighter, I guessed by the look of him. It was late morning, not night, but lamplight was needed at all times in Morn, to point the way through the rolling fog.
“You’re late,” he said in turn, “Nakht was already here. We’s not anyone else to spare for your herd.”
“I’m not Nakht. From Nakht, vi, but not here on Nakht’s behalf.”
In silence, he moved to the next lamp on the outer street. In silence, I followed him.
“Why’s you come here, then?” he asked when it seemed clear that I would not simply leave. I brought my gauntleted hands together, into a Nakhtish kindness-prayer gesture.
“To help, my good man,” I said, “I am a knight on the Long March, doing my duty on the way to the sea. Paying the tithe for my sins.”
To my great surprise, the lighter’s demeanor flipped entirely. Suddenly, I was a lamp to him, the brightest of all on the street, and he looked at me with a moth’s wonder.
“Do you kill devilkin? Witches?” he asked, his duty all but forgotten for the moment, “you’s a mighty big sword there, so you have to, right?”
“I can do that, vi,” I said. Behind me, the sword in question gave a satisfied purr.
“You gotta go to the mayor, then,” he said and pointed somewhere, and I saw nothing. Nothing but the fog, anyway. “Now. Now. Why’s you still here?”
Glad to see some enthusiasm, I left the mad lighter to his lamps and went where he’d motioned to. To walk in the cloud white of Morn was as parting veils, so thick was the mist that it was almost felt; and I saw little through, naught but disjointed sights of ruin.
There were people. Bit crestfallen, gray as the land, but mighty determined to live where they did. They did not meet my eyes; I did not hassle them.
There was a chapel in Oakley, or had been. The place was decrepit, dusted, long since abandoned. It jutted out of the fog only briefly, and then sank back into it to once again lie forgotten.
There was a stake at where I assumed the town square to be, and it was the most orderly of all the things and people I’d seen in Oakley. It had been built with care, in anticipation of a rare spectacle, and it was almost sad to see it empty. Unused. Cheated out of its function.
“Feels like home, does it not?” said my companion. Indeed, such stakes were not uncommon a sight in Nakht, though I suspected that one for burning - in Nakht, skewering was the more favored pastime.
“Hush,” I sighed over my shoulder and made away from the grisly reminder. Near, as I’d thought, I found the mayor’s house, marked apart from the rest of the townlet by a heather wreath ‘pon its door.
Gently, I knocked. Gently, I was greeted a minute later, by a petite woman weary beyond her years.
“Jour,” I said to her, “I am a knight on the Long March. I come to offer aid.”
“Aha,” she hummed. The old melancholy written into her face deepened. “I see.”
She stepped away from the door, but left it open, and I was thus invited to follow. I had to bow quite low to pass through the frame, as it had not been built with my magnificent plume in mind - and even had I been helmetless, I would’ve been made to hunch at the very least, overtall as I was.
“You’ve a big weapon, lady knight,” said the woman inside, “big enough to gut devilkin.”
“Vi, vi.” The ceiling was not much higher than the door frame, and I decided to give up my helmet after all, revealing my unkind features. “He is an athame, hewn from a Body in the sky and made to kill devils. Glaiviehas is the name, Glaiv.”
“The sword’s?”
“The sword’s, vi.”
I expected another question to follow, or a whole slew of them, but the matron asked nothing. I was partly glad for that, and partly not; caustic as we were to one another at times, it was a joy to introduce my blade friend, my third arm afforded to me by the heavens. Alas, the Mornish did not care for the hellish or the heavenly, it seemed, and accepted only that which did not come from too high up or too far down.
I could appreciate the simplicity of that, at least, if not the faithlessness.
Quiet, the matron brought me to an austere room that seemed the dining hall. It was largely void of furniture, the floor creaked, the walls were singed; it was as if the house had been only recently reclaimed, or fought over perhaps.
“We have a devilkin here,” said the woman and took the room’s only chair, “my son dragged it from a hole in the earth.”
I inclined my head, ash-blond hair falling over my collar ruff. My task was going to be a familial matter, then. A personal affair. Drama.
“And where is your son, hm?” asked Glaiv. I made no effort to rein in his mouthiness, not again.
The matron winced.
“It speaks,” she sighed into her hands, not afraid but deeply worried.
“Unfortunately.” With a dull whistle, I drew Glaiv over my shoulder and held his bony length at my side. He was not much of a looker out of glorious combat, more reminiscent of a stripped spine than a noble blade. “Though there’s merit to Glaiv’s curiosity. Where is this son, hm? Witches can banish their summoned devilkin.”
“Oh, no, he is not a… Witch.” The matron paled at the word. “If only. If only. He is simply wicked. Volatile. I’ve always known this. Should’ve smothered him in the crib, spared us all his antics…”
She muttered on, and I let her mutter, and I did not listen. Her hatred for her own flesh and blood was unsettling, and I did not wish for it to poison my mind.
“What do you want me to do?” I asked after she’d spent all her breath. Glaiv chuckled at the rant, as ever amused by the many madnesses of our kind.
“Stop the devilkin from killing our sheep,” said the matron, “and bring my son back home.”
Her last request almost seemed a sweet sentiment, though I felt it to be anything but. The boy was to be delivered not into a mother’s warm embrace, but as a captive, a prisoner. The stake, I thought, the stake likely was his fate.
“Show me where the devil came into the world,” I said. Off we went then, to the first clue left behind by my quarry.
It was not far.
It was in the very same house, in fact. I’d seen many doors to the Deep Dark Under before, but that one - ma dea, that one was something else. There was no sigil, no cover, only one bloody hole in the earth that had served a birthing canal for whatever had come through. Not much was left of the house’s cellar where the gate had been opened, and that the homestead itself still stood was a small wonder.
Glaiv buzzed in the hole’s presence. He cracked in perverse anticipation, he boiled and bulged.
“Valeforias,” he said, his voice choked with bloodlust, “my dear mirror. We have to find it, Aloysia. We must. Oh, we must. I demand it!”
“Easy, Glaiv,” I said, feeling in part his thrill. It was good to be put to a violent purpose again.
“My man was here when it happened,” the matron wheezed, sick from the sight and the iron reek of the hole, “my husband. I did not see him after.”
“Dead,” I said dryly. The gore all about was telling. “Your son’s a witch, selle. Should’ve gotten him bridled.”
“He’s not. He is not. He is a creature. Go after him, will you? See for yourself.”
And after him I did go then, to indeed see for myself.
There was a scent trail left behind, imperceptible to my senses but clear as day to Glaiv, and Glaiv did thus guide me on that path, he pointed the way through the mist. We went from the matron’s dwelling, and then away from Oakley altogether, into a marsh that stretched under the village’s northermost precipice.
There, there I was glad for the fog, I must say. Strange things squelched beneath my sabatons in the water, and I was happy to see none of them.
“It is so very close, ma dea, so very potent,” Glaiv spoke to me over my wet steps and the croaking of the bog, “my lady Aloysia, we must be after a grand warlock here, nothing ordinary. The matron lied, the matron lied, I am sure of it.”
“Hm.” Bar my filthy steps and nature’s bubbling, the swamp was solemnly still. “Why would she lie to me?”
“They do not love the Nakhtish here, do they? To try and feed them to the village monster, yes, that seems a brilliant plan to me!”
“Brilliance is in short supply here.”
“You underestimate the bloodlust of your kinsmen, mistress dear.”
“Or perhaps it is you overestimating it,” I said. Right after, as if the world itself was set on proving me wrong, I stumbled on a hard mound that did not so easily give under my boot - a human body.
Or what remained of one, anyway.
Bowing down, careful not to dirty my plume and cape in the bog muck any more than necessary, I looked over the waterlogged cadaver. I surmised it a young man, still in scraps of quilt and clutching a pike. There was one half of him at my feet, and then another nearby, the two of them strung together with one gut line not yet rotten away. Something had taken him into its hands or paws, a bastard not of our world, and pulled him apart like a sewn doll.
“Not just sheep, then,” I said and squeezed Glaiv’s throbbing hilt. Over the dead man I stepped, and behind—there came a melody.
No, not a melody. A lament.
It was human, most definitely, as devils do not cry. Cautious, I went in the direction of it, and soon enough I came upon the source: a wee man so tangled in his own dark hair he could’ve easily been mistaken for a fen willow. He wasn’t far from the sodden carcass, and wept for the pikeman’s fate perhaps, or perhaps for his own hurt - his right ankle was bloody, crushed.
“Jour,” I told him when he was fully in my view, near on a damp lagoon bank, and I came no closer to him. I did want to, I dearly wished to go comfort the poor thing, but it was safer to keep away, not to mention gallant. Because, unfortunately, he did wear nothing but his looping hair.
He also did not note my greeting at all.
“Jour,” I said again, louder, and startled him out of his lament. He looked up, dark eyes sheened over with tears, and began to shake wildly at the sight of me.
“Easy there, cher,” I sighed through the cross slit of my helmet and dared step forward. That, as I learned right after, was not at all a wise move.
The mushy ground beneath - in the water and all about - became unsteady. It undulated like a rug in the wind, and I thought it a strange quake, but that it was not.
“Aloysia,” hissed Glaiv, quicker to gather his wits than I, “let me be your anchor - your hitch.”
I nodded, dropped to one knee and with that drove Glaiv’s bony edge through the rising ground. It went up, rumbling, and Glaiv shrieked, he wailed in unhinged bliss.
Soon, it became obvious to me also that our road to the weeping boy had been no road at all, but the length of a great creature - the body of a lurking devilkin. As Glaiv had presumed, it was a child of Valeforias, sixth prince of the divine consort’s womb, and it bore its progenitor’s awful features: too many horns, too many eyes, too many legs, the segmented body of a centipede. It was slick with sedentary muck and, where I’d plunged Glaiv into it, also with black devil blood.
“Ma dea,” I laughed when it coiled around to see who dared sting it, “here you are!”
“MORE! My lady Aloysia, open my eye, I beg—!” demanded Glaiv in choked voice, and I obliged him right away. I pulled his edge from the wound and held him above me, and in one precious second he got what he’d begged for.
There was a gash above his hilt.
Black ichor ran down his length, into the opening.
A slick tongue slithered from within to lap up every drop.
Glaiv’s mouth opened, and within it was an eye, Sofia’s eye, gazing bitterly upon the world. In a way, Glaiv was the goddess’ grandson, and he became as her at the taste of a devilkin: savage, serafic. His edge widened with ash-white flame, and his crooked crossguard bloomed into a pair of wretched bone wings.
It was thanks to those wings we were able to escape the devilkin’s first lunge. It snapped at us, but I was already in motion by then, leaping off its length. Glaiv carried us much further into the mist than I would’ve gone by tossing my weight alone, and we landed out of the beast’s sight.
Unfortunately, I did not see any of it then, either.
“WORTHY! WORTHY!” brayed the blade, mad drunk on the devilkin’s humors, “ALLERS, ALOYSIA! VICTORY OR DEATH!”
The Valeforian came after the sound of Glaiv’s voice, springing from the fog like a flying serpent. I dug my heels into the muck under my feet and raised Glaiv to meet the centipede’s pincers in a deadly parry. It was massive, twenty times my size at least, and any ordinary woman would’ve never stood a chance at meeting its strength. Myself, on the other hand - well, I had Glaiv.
The force of our impact pushed me back a good yard, grime and water spraying all about us. Glaiv, my sturdy friend, absorbed most of the blow into himself, and his glowing edge cut deeply into the devilkin’s snapping pincers. Before it realized the might of its adversary, its mandibles came off; through its fangs we cut then, right across its ugly maw.
“DEATH, DEATH, DEATH,” chanted Glaiv over the creature’s soft, distressed cries. I pulled him free of the Valeforian to deliver another blow, but the devilkin did not face us again. It recoiled, turned and began slithering away.
It was sad to see. Disappointing. Unsurprising, too, as any devilkin was only as strong of will as its summoner, and if the mess of a boy on the bank had called this one, then it had been bound to come one mess of a creature. Great enough to pull apart stray militiamen, perhaps, but not a holy chevalier.
“DEATH,” shrieked Glaiv, merciless, and opened his fingerlike wings. I sighed a prayer to his mother in the far sky, Iehas, and sprang after the devilkin.
Again, Glaiv carried me.
Again, we struck. We stabbed into the tail of our running game, slowing it, stopping it. Then came the mincing, the butchery; segment by segment, we cut it, and Glaiv grew longer with every blow, greater, until he was the size of a seraf’s holy sword. Easily, he portioned the weak-willed devilkin, and it did not reform after, it did not struggle against its end, seeping as black slime back into the Deep Dark Under.
“IEHAS,” raged Glaiv above its melting carcass, and then said, again, in softer voice: “Iehas. For you, maman, a dear kill.”
“Bah.” I shook the sword in my hand and looked around to see if there was anything of the devilkin I could take back as proof of its death. The tusks we’d cut off first dissolved as the rest of it, as every piece of a devilkin was bound to.
Unfortunate.
“One half of a deal down,” said Glaiv, gave a disgusting, wet growl and began reordering himself into his stagnant form. Had I not been used to him, his filthy sounds and motions would’ve turned my stomach. “Now for the witch, hm?”
Without an answer, I strode swiftly along the fading Valeforian and tried to find the weeping boy’s bank. That spot I did find, but the waif wasn’t there.
“He couldn’t have gotten far,” said Glaiv, and he was right. There was a red trail left behind by the witch’s wound, and I followed it for less than a mile to find the wretchlet. He was no longer sniffling, perhaps to try and be sneakier in silence, but he looked no less miserable. More, if anything.
“Cher,” I nicknamed him and swung Glaiv over my shoulder, where the blade could clutch onto my plated spine, “are you not cold?”
The witch said nothing. He pulled his head between his shoulders, tried to shrink. I loosed the clasp of my cape and swung it over him, covering him whole in the raven-crested black satin. It was a good fit on his pale skin, under his dark hair.
“Was that yours?” I asked after he shyly tugged the fabric closer. I pointed back, to where the devilkin fell.
“I didn’t mean to,” he said in thinnest voice, “I’m sorry.”
He admitted to his guilt, and I needed no more to ascertain his nature. Since he could not walk, I knelt down besides to lift the bundle of him in my arms. He was a full man, tad soft-featured - filleson we would’ve called him in Nakht, maiden-man - and he weighed next to nothing despite. He was lighter even than Glaiv, unnaturally so.
“Se bas, all good. I’ve dealt with worse.” I thought to let Glaiv give an account of some heroic emprise of ours, but Glaiv was sated, Glaiv went to sleep. “A decent first attempt, regardless. What’s your name, wizard?”
“Vivian,” said Vivian, and I would not forget, ever, his teary introduction. After that, I took him home to die, but that was not the end of it - that was as far from the end as it only could be.
Se mal - I am skipping too far ahead again. I shall tell this story in order, and in that order, we went to Oakley - and there was a sad, foul reunion.
You see, amie, a family is a difficult matter. I know how it is to be at odds with one’s blood, as I’d been made to leave my mother’s nest early, too early. Alas, that is the way of things in Nakht, especially where nobility is concerned; landladies hardly have the time to waste on a babe at their teat, and Marquise an Chais was not at all a matronly, caring sort. She’d left me with a convent when I was six or seven, and we’d met only twice after that, always in war - once on the same side, and once opposed.
Still, despite this, I had no personal quarrel with Anette an Chais, and would’ve treated her to the same courtesy I afforded any honored chevalier. It was wildly improper to disown one’s family in Nakht, and seeing such always left a sour taste on my tongue; what right does a mother or father have to disdain a sin of their own making? None, I say, none at all.
Vivian’s mother, unfortunately, was of a wholly different sentiment.
After I brought the boy back to the village, there was much cheering, though of the sinister sort. It was a relief that he’d been found, a dark relief, same as when folks would rejoice at the catching of a murderer. And a murderer he was, but even a killer deserves a wicked mother who who comes to file the bars of her son’s cell at night; Vivian’s mother would’ve done no such thing ever, offer no kindness to her only child. At the sight of him in my arms, she dropped the mask of a somber crone and became something else, something vicious.
“Justice!” she spat and shrieked in front of her half-broken house, in the stake square to which Oakley followed me to welcome Vivian home, “there it is, devil-spawn, you little bastard bitch. Thought you’d get away, didn’t you? Well, none of that. None of that for you.”
Vivian said nothing. He stared blankly at the sky, and I felt my hands grow colder, as if bitten by frost.
“What an awful girl,” came a familiar voice from behind me. The lamplighter I’d met before swam out of the fog, out of the crowd, and went to stand at my side. He saw the witch the same way he’d seen his lamps: as something to be filled with oil and given to fire. “I thought old Harlow had a son. Complained ‘bout him so often…”
“No girl, no son,” hissed the matron, “it didn’t come of us. I swear, I did not birth this. A bird stole my sweet boy from his cradle and left behind a wicked egg.”
The stinging rime spread along my forearms. Though he seemed away in mind, Vivian heard the townsfolk clearly, and what they said made him uneasy - and that unease manifested into the world as magiehe did not quite control.
I needed to put an end to the situation, one way or another.
“The devilkin is dead,” I said, “it went back to the Deep Dark Under. Here is the one who summoned it. I recommend you get him bridled.”
“Bridled?” asked the matron, not understanding and not caring to, “he killed my husband! His own—nay, not father, I do not believe that, not anymore. And those that went after him never returned, nobody but you, lady knight.”
“Fit for the stake,” said the lamplighter gleefully, “it will see use after all!”
And the matron agreed.
And the fog people agreed, too, and sang, “Light! Light!”
And the sky, unsettled by the chanting, opened for rain.
“Well,” I said, water droplets drumming against my visor, “not today, it seems.”
“Tomorrow, then!” screeched the matron, and then softened again as she spoke to me directly: “Good lady knight, would you—?”
I did not know what she asked of me. To serve a warden? An executioner? I nodded regardless, as I was honorbound to do, and asked for a prison to take the boy to until the weather settled. There was no gaol in Oakley, though, meager as it was, and no cellar to fit a witchling.
No one was keen to take him as a guest, either. Myself, I could’ve found shelter with the townsfolk perhaps; Vivian, their kinsman, was a noxious curse to them, worse than any Nakhtish pillager from the west.
To the forgotten place I took him, then; to Sofia’s crumbling bosom.
There was one half of a roof yet in the fog-drowned chapel given to the decay of ages, and a speckle of ordinary kindness found its way to me also after the curious mob had dispersed, in the form of one maiden bringing me dinner. Quiet Vivian, limp like a doll but easier now that he was away from mother, sat in the grass sprouting from between the broken tiles - right where I’d put him. He did not have it in him to crawl away, to crawl anywhere.
To him, the maid did not extend her favor. She gave me a bowl of broth, titled me fair lady knight, and told me to share naught with the curseling. Away she went after, back into the drumming rain, and I did not care to heed her words at all.
“Vivian,” I spoke to the witch still swaddled in my cape, “why did you kill your father? Was it an accident?”
“No,” he said. I paced about the remains of the church - it was one hall, grown over with grass and ivy, with a faded altar at the far end - and then looped back to my ward. He’d begun shaking again, and the frost he’d involuntarily spread over my arms before now coated his mangled leg. It hurt him, it grieved him, but he did not have the mind nor the tools to fix it with the sorcery that coursed through his veins.
“I would have your deathbed confession, boy,” I told him, set sleeping Glaiv aside and sat by him on a mouldered pew, “give me that, and in return I will give you your last rites.”
He said nothing. He looked up, nightwell eyes full of pitiable sorrow, and my heart throbbed. Ma dea, he might have been just the saddest creature I’d ever seen, the sodden mess of him.
I handed him my gifted bowl, and he didn’t take it. I offered him a spoonful directly, then, and there he cooperated, like a pup too dumb to feed itself.
“You called me a wizard,” he said suddenly, his mouth still full, “am I that? A wizard?”
“Vi. Else you’d not be summoning horrible, horrible things.” I loosed my helmet and slid it off my face, to show the boy a crooked smile. It did not comfort him much, as I’d expected; the women of the an Chais line were forever cursed with a serpent’s grin. “Or, rather - you’d be a wizard if you mastered the five foci.”
“Five foci?” he asked, his voice now louder, with a bit of spring to it. He was a curious thing.
“Mhm, vi. If I remember, they must be the goetium; the scripture; the staff; the grimoire; the sphere.” Again, I handed him my dinner, and he took it gladly this time. There was a subtle grace to his every motion, an ethereal lightness that could not be trained - only inherited. Every sorcerer was of serafic heritage, but in the case of Vivian, a fallen cherub must’ve bred into the family less than five generations up.
Shame that he was destined to die. A great shame indeed.
“Mother told me I wasn’t human,” he said after scooping out the last of the bowl, “she said that I was a bird wearing human skin.”
“And your father believed her?”
“No, not at all.” Vivian paused. “He found the idea stupid. Feather-brained Viana’s stupid idea. He agreed that I was not human, though. Am I, lady knight?”
“Mhm. Indeed.” He was distressed enough; I did not intend to burden his mind with explanations of sky heritage. “A man like any other, cher.”
He ticked at the word. Frowned. Grimaced. “Man. Manlet. That’s what they called me. One half of a son, not quite a daughter.”
“Ma dea, that is quite adorable.” I leaned forward, into my hands. “Manlet! I’d not heard that before. Yes, indeed - like the quaintest island becomes an islet, and the thinnest river a rivulet, then the littlest man must also, by the same rule, become a manlet.”
Vivian looked aside, not at all amused by my epiphany. I extended a hand to him.
“Déshan, friend. My apologies. I got carried away, and should’ve said only that you were sweetly small,” I said and I meant every word spoken. Sorcerers were made a little ugly by their malicious edge, but they were beautiful underneath, pretty in the way of a porcelain doll. Vivian was dirty with blood and mud, wrapped in the tangle of his knee-length raven hair, but what I’d seen of his body was pleasing to the eye.
Reluctantly, he placed his delicate hand in mine. It made him a little happy, as he gave a muted smile, and his snow-white cheeks flushed light pink.
The rime creeping over his wound withdrew, also.
“I wanted to kill my father,” he whispered to me, his satin voice in sharp contrast to the horror of his confession, “I wanted nothing more than to kill him, to be rid of him.”
“Because he was not good to you.”
“Because he kept me in the dark for so long,” Vivian said, desperate, “he would always step on my leg, crush it so that I’d not run at night, and he would yell, ‘Grow! Grow into a full son, you boy-girl twig!’”
I leaned down and brought his cold hand to my lips. It was a gentle, courtly gesture, not at all proper given my own disgraceful situation, but I could not help myself. Ma dea, the poor boy’s brood was right mad.
“Then he came to me once,” Vivian continued, redder in the face after the kiss, “a week ago, sick with drink, and he was done hoping and pleading, lady knight. No, rather bury a dream than to live on with a nightmare…”
He said no more, and he did not need to. I stroked his fingers and rested back, listening for a while to the rain falling outside.
“Méshan, boy, for your confession,” I said, “I owe you a prayer and favor.”
“A favor…?” he asked, half-idle in mind, stuck in a dire memory. I squeezed his petite hand to bring him closer to myself, into reality.
“That is the Nakhtish way, to give the condemned one last wish before the end. What is yours, Vivian?”
The witch gave no answer, and he breathed quickly, and his lips quivered as if I’d just given him an impossible riddle. I knew not what scared him so about my query; was it that he’d never been asked his wishes before? Was it that he wished for something unspeakable?
No matter - in silence, in the absence of a true demand, it was proper of an executioner to proffer mortador, lover’s mercy. That was the Nakhtish way, the way of passion and war, and I had little else to give besides.
“Very well,” I said after a long, long pause. With a grunt, I pushed myself off the bench and knelt before the witch. “Take off my gauntlets, cher, and as much as you’d like after.”
He understood exactly what was being offered to him, I think, but he was also terribly shy, so very clearly a maiden not only in shape. His fingers fumbled about my gloves for a bit, and they managed to loose the proper links in the end, to slide off my draconic gauntlets; and further than that he did not go. He left the rest of me locked in sleek plate, blushing fiercely at my revealed hands.
I laughed. Not to mock him, but in jolly appreciation of his lovable coyness.
“Is that all?” I asked and reached behind to do away with my frill collar. Once it was off, Vivian took my hands, impatient to hold them again, and pulled them to his bruised skin.
Where he bled into the grass, a poppy flower bloomed, and then another. I made no note of it, content to simply glimpse magie, and busy with my mouth besides; rather than waste my tongue on words, I came closer to the witch and pecked him under the ear.
And he was glad to be touched so, treated for the first time with kindness and more; he stopped clutching my hands and instead wrapped his arms around my neck, latched onto me like a blood-hungry leech. Deeming the grass too cold a bed for loving, I took Vivian by his minute waist and brought him to what remained of Sofia’s altar.
The poppies followed. The witch left a red petal trail, and it crept up the stone throne I sat him on, and it was as a bride’s loosed garter.
“Let,” I said into Vivian’s ear, but he only clutched me tighter after, and I had to squeeze him back to reason with him. My raven cape slid off him in the embrace, and he was revealed to me in full again, the alabaster whole of him threaded over with strands of nightblack hair. Once he let go of me - after minutes of pressing together, his skin against the dark steel of my shell - I took in the sight of Vivian as he was on the altar, and my heart stirred.
Suddenly, I longed to see him made proper, with hair braided and lace all over his soft curves. He would look then as what I’d seen on cathedral tapestries in Nakht: saint sorcerer Solomorn, consort to divine Sofia.
“Sorry,” he stuttered, and then again in my tongue: “De—déshan. You can close your eyes, or leave me altogether, if this boy-girl twig revolts you also.”
“Oh you silly, silly thing,” I sighed and squeezed his bare thighs, “ma dea, if only.”
Before he could say any more, I tugged him a little closer to the edge of the altar and leaned in to tongue the line of his stomach. He gave a faint moan at that and fell back on his hands, enjoying fully my spoiling of him, my worship of his waist and navel. Underloved as he was, he was quick to stiffen in the groin, and I went on and down to administer what I’d promised - merciful loving.
“I’ve never—,” said Vivian, and then no more after I took him in my mouth. He tasted of earthy marshwater, and smelled of the same, but it was oddly pleasant then - oddly suiting. He had the look of a bog haunt, the scent, the savor; he was my lover from another world, my eerie monsterling to please.
And pleasing him was not hard at all.
My lips played only briefly at his girth, his length; I licked a wet bead from his tip and he came right after, gave in to a sobbing reverie. I held his knees apart throughout, and I gladly took his every white spill, but swallow it I did not - I knew better than to drink so much of a sorcerer’s seed. Rather it drip on my breastplate than cloud my mind with strange visions.
“Thank—ishan, ishan,” sniffled Vivian after, once again trying to speak words he’d gleaned in our conversation, and I did not care to correct his clumsy attempt. For a moment, he was at blissful peace; for a moment, his pain abated; for a moment, all was in order.
The poppies grew fiercer, thicker. They crept up his leg, made him one red petal stocking.
“And your prayer, cher,” I said, and I knelt at his altar as before a lord, and I offered my hand up for holding. He took my fingers, and he coiled up on the stone slab, still red in the face and groin.
“We don’t pray here,” he whispered, kneading my fingers as a dear treasure, “it’s no use.”
“Nonsense. Would you like me to teach you a prayer?”
He stared at me for a long while, and he nodded after, and he closed his eyes to better hear what I was to tell him. Patiently, I then taught him these words, until he could remember and repeat:
Iehas, Iehas, in the Sky on High,
Of Sofia’s womb, Solomorn’s seed,
I’ve done war in your name,
And I ask a favor.
Iehas, Iehas, bane of Valeforias,
Of Sofia’s seed, Solomorn’s womb,
I’ve honored your mother,
I ask you to keep me from her.
Iehas, Iehas, Sixth Body above,
I’ve chosen you of the Seventy-Two,
I’ve honored your father,
I ask you to ferry this soul into his embrace.
And we prayed together after, in our field of poppies, in our bedchamber given to ruin. We did not sleep, but one wears slower in good company. Though we spoke not a word outside our orison, there’s intimacy to be found in shared contemplation; warmth; magie. And so fond was my witch of the prayer that he sang without pause all night; and then on and on after the sky cleared.
Because the sky did clear, unfortunately, come the bleak dawn. I’d hoped for it to give us at least until noon, but nature was not so merciful, and neither was Vivian’s mother. Like a rooster harpy, she came to the church door just as the last raindrop fell, and she screeched, “It’s time! It’s time for you to die!” until we agreed to walk with her.
Vivian, still chanting in soft voice, walked also on his own. Vivian, wonder witchling, made it so overnight that the poppies ate his hurt and made him able to stand, to hobble. A small boon for him to be able to walk to his own execution, I thought; I would’ve gladly carried him, but that little show of strength was important to him, before his mother especially.
She did not much like to see him half-mended.
She hated to not see him fully crippled. Were I not in the way, then she would’ve beat him in front of the church, I’m sure of that, to undo all of his healing.
“You’ve done us a service, lady knight,” said the matron to me after we set out into the morning fog, all kindly again once she wasn’t looking at her failed offspring, “we don’t have much here to give you in return, poor folk as we are, but you’ve our eternal gratitude.”
“I’ve no need of a reward,” I said, and it was something of a lie; I did have some need of supplies, but the law of the Long March barred me from demanding payment. “I want to be done with this and away.”
“Oh, it will be over soon, I swear. I swear!” cried the woman and reached for Vivian’s hair to drag him faster. I slapped her fingers away right as she tried, and she gave me a strange look, and she did not try again.
“Mrhm,” grunted Glaiv at the gesture, just roused from his slumber, “it would seem to me that you care for the witch, my lady Aloysia.”
“Chut,” I barked, and more we did not say. Until the stake, it was only Vivian’s whispers in the fog, and at the damp pyre - there began the awful noise, the braying of humanity at its worst.
I will not lie to you, friend, by claiming the Mornish any worse than the Nakhtish. The torment of others had always been a cherished pastime in my home, the bloodier the better; in the name of the molting devil Orianakht, we had perfected the art of stripping a man of every piece of skin before he died, and we made a show of every staking, breaking, undressing of a body. I’d been taken to see some of our foremost maestro’s performances, and while I’d found some beauty in their macabre work, never had I enjoyed the audience - the mindless hollering of common people at another’s misery. A crowd’s cheer at an execution was the ugliest sound in the world.
I could then scarcely stand Oakley singing for Vivian’s death. Ma dea, I had to lean on Glaiv to not keel over and spew bile before the pyre.
And for once, Glaiv did not mock me for it.
“We need not stay,” he whispered after I’d brought Vivian to the stake, “these people are keen to deal with the witch.”
He was right. Not every soul in Oakley came so early to watch the fun, but many did, and many were eager to throw tinder bundles to the stake, to cover the dampest wood with proper kindling. The mad lamplighter was there also, closest to the pole, and he brought fire.
Regardless, I could not see myself abandoning my charge just yet.
“Vivian,” I spoke instead to the witch as his mother fastened him to the stake, so tightly that he could scant breathe, “cher.”
He did not answer me, or look at me at all. His throat was sore from reciting, his voice gone, but still his lips moved to silently recite the prayer I’d taught him.
Asking him for any last words would’ve been a waste of time.
“What godless land this is,” said Glaiv after the lighter’s torch fell to the witch’s feet, “to burn one so very much like greatfather.”
“Vi,” I said, but I did not agree with him, not fully. Are you surprised to hear me say so, amie? I did consider Vivian’s destined death most unfortunate, and a great waste also, but there was no denying that it was just. Wretched as they were in Oakley, the people were right to do away with a murderer, even if they’d made him themselves, even if they were just as much at fault. This I had to acknowledge as an honorable vagrant, and for that reason I could not have acted any other way than I did. And I do not regret my stoicism in the matter; after all, t’was not needed of me to play the swooping savior.
Vivian, heir of sorcerer Solomorn, brought about his own deliverance.
When the cracking fire licked his newly mended ankle, his voice came back to him, but it was changed. Like a merry bird, he chirped up at the smoke-choked sky, and it was a silly image and a sillier sound to the pitiful villagers; his mother laughed so much at my side that she wheezed, so entertained was she by what she thought a son’s deathbed madness. Had I not known the sound from Nakht, then perhaps I would’ve cherished Vivan’s dying birdsong; had I not known it the tongue of ravens rather than madness, then perhaps I would’ve smiled also.
“Oh dear,” said Glaiv, “that is enochia.”
“That is enochia,” I agreed, gripped Glaiv’s hilt with both hands and drove him through the cobblestones beneath my feet, to put his bony length in between the stake and myself. His crossguard flourished into finger wings, and just in time; a split second later, Vivian brought his magie to bear again, and it was a terrible wonder.
I know not whether it was fear or hate that made him so powerful in the moment; most likely it had been my loving of him at night, as it is the coursing white that gives any sorcerer his power, and I’d stirred Vivian’s with my ministrations. Nobody had taught him to speak the language of the heavens, I was almost sure of that, but he glimpsed it naturally through the prayer I’d given him, or perhaps with no help at all; fully certain was only that he wove it into an enochian spell, and that spell was the doom of Oakley. It stormed in and by quickly, too quickly to make for the crown of this story; this is all that I remember of it:
The light went out.
The smoke became fog.
The fog gave way to a flushed sunrise.
Ice went out of the witch in coruscating waves.
The village screamed.
The village quieted.
A garden grew over the snow grave of Oakley, a garden of poppy flowers.
“Mon pa,” swore Glaiv at the end of it. He was rimed all over, with buds blooming in his fuller, but he’d kept me from the worst of the spell. I gave him my quiet thanks and looked around, at the devastation.
It was beautiful, in a way, same as the morbid displays of Nakhtish artists. Vivian had brought about winter in the midst of spring, a cover of white to smother all life and serve a bed for his garden. Oakley was frozen underneath it, perfectly still, perfectly silent. Vivian himself was as his apocalypse: white and unmoving, limp by his stake.
I wanted to go to him. I wanted to feel his faint breath, if there was any at all in him still. Before I could get up from my knee, however, there came a scratching at my back.
Not all of Oakley had been unmade, it seemed. Not the chief; not the hateful mother.
“Solomorn,” sobbed the old matron, half frozen but alive yet, surely from having stood just by me as the storm hit, “why?”
I closed my eyes and pulled glaive from his sheath of earth. In my breast stirred the an Chais serpent; venomous; vengeful; I prayed for the woman to not tempt it, so that I would not stray from my good path.
“A curse,” she wept, and then spoke the words I’d hoped not to hear: “We didn’t deserve this. I didn’t deserve this. Finish it, lady knight, I beg of you.”
And finish it I did.
With a grating screech, Glaiv slid across the side of my armor as I thrust him back, right through the wretch behind me. I grimaced at the wet sound of the woman’s demise; it tasted bitter, the leave of my virtue, the giving of soul to vigilantism. But I’d heard enough of her prattle; I’d suffered enough of her presence in the world.
“Yeowch,” spat Glaiv, drinking in the blood of the matron’s gut, “this is one bitter breakfast for poor Glaiviehas, my lady.”
To not torment the sword any longer than I needed to, I pulled him free of the dead woman right after she sighed her last breath, and I wiped his length clean with my raven cape. He was glad for that, and purred pleasantly after I’d slung him over my shoulder to walk the both of us to the sorcerer.
Vivian, the dear, murderous thing, was still alive. Méshan dea, he was alive, and unharmed, and breathing steady. And I was under no obligation to change any of that, as the people I’d sworn to aid were all quite dead.
Non ser de mord, as they say in Nakht. One’s no duty to dead men.
“Oh, I know that look,” said Glaiv, “we’re about to be awfully chivalrous.”
With a chuckle, I cut Vivian’s rope and caught the kitten weight of him in one arm. Though he was entirely bare again, the winter he’d brought to the village seemed no bother to him; his skin was smooth, not scaled over from the chill.
“Before we go, may I suggest taking a bit for the journey, Aloysia?” said Glaiv after I’d gently thrown unconscious Vivian over my other shoulder, “I’ve a feeling these people won’t have much more use for their belongings.”
I scoffed. “We’ve done enough for today. Let us not stoop to thievery.”
“Thievery? Never, my lady. Graverobbing, on the other hand…”
I laughed and set out towards the sun, through the poppies and the frozen dead. At Glaiv’s advice, I stopped briefly before leaving the townlet - only to find clothes for the witch, I swear! - and then made for another part of Morn, another town, another emprise. I did not abandon my Long March, and still walked towards the far sea, but nothing kept me from bringing Vivian to safety. And in order to make him safe - and to make the world safe from him - I needed to first find him a witching bridle.
