That night I lay awake on my bedroll in my borrowed tent. Every time I closed my eyes I saw the eyes of the stranger, wide with fear, surrounded by vines and branches.
Every time I thought about him I forced myself to think about his poor wife and how long it had taken Agnes to dress all the burns on her skin. I thought about how some of the burns were infected because he had refused to let her go to the town healer.
I decided to think about something else. This time when I closed my eyes I summoned the vision of the skill tree. I ignored my own skills and focused on the Witch career path. I wondered what sort of magic it was that Agnes had used. It was just idle curiosity. I seriously doubted that it was something I’d be able to unlock.
On my various jaunts through the skill tree I’d noticed that there were a lot of soft magical skills that seemed to be open to everyone. UPCYCLING and MENDING were two from my own tree. At lower levels they were just the sort of thing that people did back home but at higher tiers they allowed you to do stuff that shouldn’t be possible. Someone who’d maxed out Tier 3 Mending could fix complex machinery with basic tools and no spare parts. Do the same with UPCYCLING and you were basically the A-Team without the benefit of a build montage.
There were also quite a lot of magical meta skills like the SCAVENGER and ROGUE versions of SEARCH. Most career paths seemed to have at least one skill, perk or ability that laughed at the laws of physics.
What Agnes had done wasn’t anything like that, though. It was Magic, with a capital M.
Looking at the Witch career chain revealed that witches require humility, patience and a powerful work ethic. The starter skills were all things like HERBALIST, which I had reached Tier 3 of, and which allowed for the identification of medicinal plants and the making of simple infusions with them, and FORAGER, which I also had at tier 3 and was just for finding useful plants. Witches did start with BASIC COOKING, which I had to unlock by maxing CAMPFIRE COOKING, and a career synergy with HERBALIST that gave them a bonus to levelling cooking skills.
There were a couple of psychological starting skills available that ended up in some pretty OP places. INTIMIDATE could unlock the SCATHING GLARE perk that gave Witches a low powered gaze attack. CHARM, which made a person more persuasive and personable; would, if maxed out, lead to ENCHANT, which manipulated other people’s perceptions and eventually to MASTERY, which was straight up mind control.
I was fairly sure that Agnes had some level of CHARM. She was charming, persuasive and beloved beyond what you’d think would be possible given her intimidating looks. I wondered if she’d just ignored the INTIMIDATE chain because all she had to do to intimidate was turn off the CHARM. She certainly didn’t need the gaze attack because she could do more damage with a slap.
The actual magic that Witches could do fell into different coloured chains. Each of the coloured chains had to be unlocked by an achievement. HERBALIST gave someone with the Witch career the chance to get to GREEN MAGIC, via identifying 50 medicinal plants, and WHITE MAGIC, via making 25 medicinal infusions.
WHITE MAGIC was all healing stuff and I knew Agnes had unlocked a lot of that to go with her skills as a HERBALIST and APOTHECARY. It was impossible to tell how far up the chain she’d gone but I didn’t think it was far enough to make the leap across to NECROMANCY. It seemed somehow very on brand to me that if a witch wanted to raise the dead, then she first had to get very good at healing people.
GREEN MAGIC was all plant stuff. It started out being about promoting plant growth and increasing yield and knowing what plants needed in order to thrive. It took until Tier 3 to get access to the more spicy spells. That was the point at which the GREEN MAGIC chain joined the DRUID PLANT MAGIC chain.
The most likely looking spell was OVERGROWTH. The base spell wasn’t all that impressive. It was an area effect movement debuff spell. It created an area of plants that would tangle and hold the legs of any enemy passing. It lasted as long as the caster maintained it. It would disappear if dispelled, if the caster lost focus, or if the caster chose to stop maintaining it. Careful reading of the spell descriptions revealed that you could level up a spell by casting it as if it were a higher tier.
The Tier 4 version of OVERGROWTH didn’t need to be maintained. It was permanent until dispelled or dismissed. It could be used to hold someone in one place (useful in a fight), or to create a barrier, or to encase a structure in protective thorns. The Roses growing over the castle in Sleeping Beauty would be several castings of the Tier 4 version.
Agnes hadn’t cast the Tier 4 version. There was a specific exclusion for living things. The spell could be used as a barrier or a trap but it couldn’t be used to completely enclose them.
Agnes had cast a Tier 5 version of OVERGROWTH. It was a hugely powerful spell. Way more powerful than it needed to be. If she’d wanted him dead she could have just punched him a couple of times. There was something mythic about her choice. Also, the mere fact that she had access to a Tier 5 OVERGROWTH spell made me wonder why she’d focused so hard on GREEN MAGIC. Could it be that she really wanted to be a Druid? Was there some secret tragic backstory?
I didn’t resolve to ask her more in the morning because at about that point I finally fell asleep, but I certainly had it in my mind then and it was still there when I woke up.
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Aldo and Fred were usually the first up so it wasn’t that surprising to see them, even though they looked a lot rougher than they usually did in the morning. It also wasn’t much of a surprise to see Agnes. She was usually one of the first up so she could get the barrels filled for bathing. Jethro, on the other hand, was usually one of the last to get up, but he was already sitting by the fire making a drink out of dried dandelion roots that people called dandy-pick-me-up but always reminded me of coffee.
I sat down beside him. “Couldn’t sleep then?” I said.
“I think I got a little,” said Jethro, “In fits and starts.”
Agnes joined us by the fire. She held out a mug for Jethro to fill, “I slept like a baby,” she said.
“Liar,” I said.
Aldo and Fred gasped. I wasn’t sure how much of the gasp was serious.
Jethro smiled and filled a mug for me.
“Okay,” said Agnes. “I may have woken a couple of times during the night.”
“Well I had nightmares,” said Aldo. “I don’t remember them very well but I wasn’t happy when I woke up.”
“He woke up several times while I was laying there, not sleeping,” said Fred, adding some crystallised honey to his mug.
“I don’t know if anyone else is going to ask this so I will,” I said. “Is he still alive?”
We all looked at Agnes. She looked into her mug, then sighed and said, “Yes.”
“So what are we going to do with him?” I said.
“We don’t have to do anything with him,” said Jethro.
“That’s still a choice,” I said. “We wouldn’t be choosing to do nothing, we’d be choosing to let him die slowly. I’m not saying he doesn’t deserve it, I’m saying it’s morally worse if we just passively let it happen and pretend it’s not a choice.”
“You’re the survivor type,” said Agnes, looking at me, even though Jethro was also a survivor type and had more levels than me, “how long does he have?”
“The rule is three minutes without air, three days without water, three weeks without food,” I said. “Though that’s only a general rule. The longest that anyone lived without water, that we know about, is just over 4 days. It’s not a pleasant way to go. He’ll be delirious for at least a day.”
“And if I supply him with water?” said Agnes.
“Just plain water and it will take three weeks or so. People have survived longer if they had a lot of stored fat. He might linger as long as six weeks if he’s kept warm so he’s not using energy to maintain his body heat. He’ll probably start to hallucinate some time in the second week.”
“And if I add a little nectar to the water, just enough sugar to keep him going?” said Agnes
“He’d survive until either malnutrition or exposure got him. I don’t know how long that would be. You’d be better asking your crystal ball. Which should also tell you that I would not accept that. It’s too cruel.”
“Shouldn’t we ask his wife?” said Fred.
“It’s not fair to put that burden on her,” said Agnes.
“There’s always the chance that she still loves him enough to demand that we let him go. Which would not stop him from killing her,” said Jethro.
“She might even go back to him,” I said. “Particularly once the child is born.”
“Really?” said Fred.
Agnes nodded. “Mind you, labour can do strange things to the mind. Mothers get very luvvy-duvvy. I don’t think she would but I also wouldn’t be totally shocked if she decided that a child needs their father.”
“So for the sake of the child we have to make this decision then,” said Aldo.
“I vote that whatever we decide he never has the opportunity to get back with his wife,” I said.
The others agreed.
“The easiest way to do that would be to just kill him now,” said Jethro.
“If we’re not going to let him out,” Fred said, “Then the kindest thing would be to kill him right now, as clean and quick as we can.”
“Do we want to be kind?” said Agnes.
“We’re not serving his wife by continuing to punish him,” I said. “We’re just satisfying our own desires for vengeance against a man we find despicable.”
“We’ve already punished him more than the law around here would have,” said Jethro. “That’s if we could get the Constables to take the thing seriously at all.”
“It would be a very poor lookout if we couldn’t manage to be better than the Constables,” said Agnes. She looked at each of us in turn, as if gauging our resolve. “Very well. Do we kill him now or do we let thirst take him?”
She pointed at me and the word, “Now,” was out of my mouth before I had the chance to think about it.
She pointed at Jethro. “Thirst,” he said. I had not expected that.
Aldo didn’t wait for her to point and said, “Now,” right after Jethro spoke.
Fred hesitated for just the briefest moment when Agnes looked his way before he said, “Now.”
“Then my vote is not needed.” She drew the wand from her belt and pointed it toward the stranger, still bound by vines and branches and hanging from the tree. Again the green tendrils of magic darted out from her wand and into the trees. I heard the snap of his neck breaking from the middle of the camp on the other side of the road. She then commanded the trees to pull his body high into the foliage and then pull him into the heart of one of the trees. “In time bards may sing of this and scholars may search for the skeleton of a vile husband hidden inside a tree by a witch but don’t tell anyone for now. Let her think that we scared him off and he got lost in the woods.”
“Agreed,” we all said, as one.
Agnes put her wand back in her belt. She held out her now free hand. The others all reached out to touch it, Agnes jerked her head to encourage me to do likewise. The moment I did she said, “I now bind you to your word.”
There was a new bell sound, subtly different from the various dings I already knew, and a sudden flash of yellow lettering in the corner of my field of vision. It said COMPACT SEALED.