Part Two: The Cursed Village

11. END OF THE ROAD

They ended up staying at their campsite beneath the willow, on the farmland outskirts of Cross-on-Green, for two more days in order to let Elyse’s ankle heal, and for Martimeos’ wounds to recover, too. There were times when he thought that perhaps they ought to simply make for Silverfish. They were not far now, or so Flit told him. His familiar could see the great lake of Nust Drim from the air, and even the buildings clustered on its shore that he could only assume was the village they were looking for. But it was too far for him to carry the witch, should she re-injure herself. No, better to heal than to travel early.

And there was the curse, as well. The Dolmec had spoken of a curse, though the demon had not given any hint as to its nature. But the thought of it made Martimeos think that to linger here, by the whispering waters, in the glory of autumn’s colors, was not so bad. Game was plentiful here - they never went without meat to cook at night, and the countryside was, blessedly, peaceful. After the dire journey through the One-Road Wood, it was good to take one’s time where there was calm. Before they must make their way to where Martimeos knew well that darkness dwelled.

He had not told Elyse about the curse, and still did not want to. The witch was ever more inquisitive, and she would want to know why he felt he had to walk into a village that was cursed, and he still did not wish to tell her. She had been a boon to stumble across in the One-Road Wood. A boon still, really - her skill at healing made wounds that might have festered clean, and the knitting of them hastened such that what might have taken weeks instead took days. Martimeos thought still, though, that most likely once he found what he needed in the village that he might leave her behind. It was not that he was eager to, simply that his road was long, and surely at some point their paths would diverge.

By their third dawn there not much was left of his wounds but scabs, and Elyse was spry as could be, and so they left on the first light, south once more along the old stone road. The witch seemed in a fine mood, full of laughter and smiles, perhaps heartened by the fact that she could readily walk again. Though she did keep hold on the stick he had given her for a crutch from the fae-woods. It was a souvenir, she said, though he thought that if you wanted a souvenir from the fae you could probably do a lot better than a simple stick.

Martimeos, for his part, remained quiet, watching her. He still did not know if he believed what she had told him, that she had been raised isolated within a swamp by a witch with a dark reputation, and kept so isolated, especially from men. Though he supposed it was not so unbelievable. She was an odd one, and that might go some way to explaining some of her oddness. He felt a dim pang of worry for her, if she was being truthful. If she was so inexperienced in the ways of dealing with folk, it might bring her trouble. It might bring him trouble, if he were her companion in Silverfish.

The lands that passed them by were much as they were outside of Cross-on-Green, all farmlands grown over and neglected, though at some point the farms were no longer burnt, but still remained standing. He wondered if this marked the official border between Cross-on-Green and Silverfish. When the White Queen’s murderers had come to burn down the farms, how had they decided where to stop the killing? The farmlands flowed smoothly into one another, with nary a break between. And although these farmhouses still stood, their fields were just as untended. And it was all the more uncanny for there being no explanation for their abandonment.

Martimeos broke from the road to see what he could find from one of these houses, a small farmhouse of white and brown brick with thatched roof, with Elyse following at his heels. The roof was falling in and in bad need of repair, but otherwise the house looked remarkably sound. This could make folk a good home, if whoever took it were willing to put in a little work on it, and yet it lay totally abandoned and had for some time, with thick dust billowing up in clouds as soon as he opened the door. “Strange, to see it empty so,” the witch said, coughing, waving her wide-brimmed hat in front of her face to dispel the dust. “Isn’t it?”

It was an honest question. “It is,” he told her. There was nothing inside the home except for a worn and scratched wooden table, lying abandoned on the floor. He closed the door, shaking his head. “It might not be so odd to see one or two old farms left behind, in some places, but not so many as we have seen today.” Cursed, and forsaken, and deserted, he thought to himself, but he kept his silence. He suddenly wondered if they would find anyone living in Silverfish at all. Perhaps it was just as abandoned as Cross-on-Green. He hoped it was not the case. He had to take on supplies.

The sight of the empty home seemed to dull Elyse’s good cheer, and they traveled in silence then. The foreboding sight of more empty fields, more empty homes, cast a pall over their journey and filled them with disquiet. And it only grew as the land began to change.

For soon, the fields did not seem merely abandoned and overgrown and gone to meadows. No, they were being choked, choked by the curling blackthorn plant that had choked the oak in the plaza of Cross-on-Green, those strange, unknown dark vines and their blood-red flowers. At first when they had spotted it, it only seemed as if it were a little more thick than it grew elsewhere. But then they saw thickets of thorns, tangles of vines as big as a house, and then found them crawling over low stone walls, then pulling down the bricks of abandoned homes and creeping through the windows. And then they passed by an entire field that had been swallowed by it, no sign of any building that had once been there, just thornvines swaying in a long, moaning wind, grown taller than they were.

Both Martimeos and Elyse had been off-trail in the woods before, and they knew how thick thorn bushes could grow where people did not walk, but this was beyond anything either of them had seen before. The vines pulled down trees, they loomed over the stone walls and collapsed fences separating the farmlands from the roads, and finally they grew across the road itself, straining to each other across the cobblestone, tangling and knotting together so thick that Martimeos eventually had to draw his sword to hack them a way through. When he did, the cut vines bled black ichor, so much that they actually oozed puddles onto the ground, and they smelled like death.

“Fah!” he growled, yanking on his cloak as the thorns tried to snag it. It seemed almost as if they grew together behind them as soon as they walked through. He disliked the thought of them touching him, and not only because they were thorns. He was the only one, either. Cecil would not even step among them, he would wait until a hole was carved and then gather himself and make a mighty leap over them. Flit refused even to land on them for a moment. Elyse seemed the only one unperturbed, merely frowning as she prodded at the liquid they left behind with her stick, and then to his shock bending down to feel it with her fingers. He did not know how she could stand to touch it.

“Why do they not have anyone come and clear this from the roads?” she asked quietly. Her dark blue eyes settled on him, troubled. “How long has it been like this?”

It was the same thought he had been having. Nobody had cared to travel this way for a while, clearly. Did Silverfish have no one to come by to trade? Even the meanest village would see the occasional outsider. Unless they were totally abandoned. Perhaps these vines choking the land were the curse the Dolmec had spoken of. “I don’t know,” he told her.

They walked on.

It grew colder, and a fog began to settle in the land, as if the slate-gray sky had come down to embrace the earth. Trees had fewer leaves here. While the ones in the One-Road Wood had been in the full blaze of autumn, here they were black and skeletal, the wind plucking the last few dead, brown leaves from their branches.

The daylight had begun to dim when they came upon their first sign of life. A farmhouse whose field was not overflowing with thorns, and actively tilled, filled with mounds of pumpkins and squash. A woman in a long, black woolen dress, dirty from her work, bent over an old well in the far corner of the field, rail-thin and crooked. They stopped to watch her from the road, for a while, before Martimeos called out. “Hullo!” he cried. “How far now to Silverfish?”

But when the woman rose, over her head she had a rough burlap sack, with a few holes cut out for the eyes and mouth. She did not answer them. She simply stood as they passed by, watching them, motionlessly. When they waved, she did not wave back. The moment they looked away from her, the sound of a slamming door rang out, and when they turned back around she no longer stood in her field, and the curtains by one of the windows of the farmhouse stirred.

“What do you suppose was wrong with her face?” Elyse asked, her voice barely above a whisper, as if the woman might hear them. “Was that why she would not talk to us?”

Martimeos didn’t know, and he was not sure that he wanted to. A quiet dread had gnawed at his stomach when he saw that woman, and he was glad to be well past the farm, too. Something about it made him uneasy, and he could not name what.

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He was a bit surprised to see anyone living here at all, but then thought came to him. Most folk in these lands did not fear the Art. There were those who were suspicious of it, but most did not hate it. But there were those villages, hidden away from all others, where a true loathing of the Art, and of wizards and witches, made folk abandon ideas of decency and civility. He himself could pass as a normal traveler, and Flit was inconspicuous enough. Elyse, though, with her hat, and Cecil walking along by her side in a way no normal cat would, was very obviously a practitioner of the Art, and he told her as much. “Perhaps it would be best to put your hat up, and for Cecil to travel away from you, until we know the feelings of these folk, at least.”

Elyse gave an indignant sigh, and Cecil seemed to be regarding him with flat, yellow eyes, as if the cat was considering whether or not to trust him left alone with his witch, but his mistress saw the wisdom of it. She raked her hands through her long, tangled hair as she collapsed her hat neatly and tucked it inside her robes, knocking loose twigs and leaves. There was no helping her odd, ragged dress - and if people were truly hateful towards the Art, they would take any eccentricity as a sign of dark magic - but at least now it was not blindingly obvious what she was.

Finally, as the sun had begun its journey downward towards the horizon, they reached the village proper. The clear, gentle banks of the lake of Nust Drim lay before them, and fog rolled in off the placid water. A sign greeted them as they moved towards the cluster of buildings on the lake’s shores, swinging gently in the breeze, creaking as it did: It simply read “SILVERFISH”, with a painting of a peculiar fat fish beneath it, with a white belly and whiskers and a gleaming silver back. At least, it looked as if the fish had once been silver. It still glinted in some spots, but in most places the once bright paint had flaked away or faded. Black thorns climbed up the post that held it.

Here, the buildings were made from the same tan and white bricks as the farmhouses in the countryside, but the roofs were made of wooden slats that looked as if they had once been brightly painted green and blue, though as with everything else here, they were dull and worn now. As they moved through the village, they couldn’t help but notice that even here it looked like most of the buildings had been abandoned for years – houses and shops both. There was, however, a pier that led out into the lake, and even a couple of small rowboats tied there. Not a soul was on the streets, though there was still some light left in the day. The only sign of life was blue woodsmoke rising from the chimneys of a few of the homes. And up to the very outskirts of the village had the blackthorn crept, until it swallowed even a few of the homes that stood not very far from the others. It all felt hedged in, surrounded, as if the very buildings themselves were huddling together against what was slowly devouring them.

It felt odd to walk into the heart of a village and have no one greet them. Clearly very few lived here anymore, compared to how many once had. But this was not Cross-on-Green, razed and ruined; people still did live here, and yet not one of them had said anything to the pair of strangers who had come into their midst. He wondered if they were being watched. He swore he saw flickering movement out of the corner of his eye, and his hand went to his sword. But Elyse only looked at him questioningly, and when he looked, there was nothing there.

The stone road ran through the village center and curved down, continuing on around the edge of the lake. As they drew close to the shores, thick with tall, golden reeds, they could see that some distance out into Nust Drim stood an island, not very far out. It rose above the fog on the surface of the lake, and on it stood an old stone building, squat and dark. Not Aurelic - their buildings were always grand, straining towards the sky, delicate and imposing at once, with soaring buttresses and grand arches, and intricately detailed stonework. This was more plain, with unadorned stone and thick columns, capped by short, curved steeples, though still impressive in its own way. It appeared to be some sort of manor that dominated the hill of the island, almost a castle. It had to be old. No one these days would have built such. Stretching out into the lake, towards the island, were the broken remnants of what must have been a bridge between it and the mainland. An arch here, broken stone post slick with lake-slime there.

Eventually they walked through the village entirely, following the road until it went snaking on out into the wilderness once more. But there, just at the edge of where they thought the village must end, was another curious building. Of the same squat architecture and thick limestone as the manor they had seen out on the island, but this much smaller, as small as a house, and built strangely halfway in and halfway out of the lake itself, though this was clearly intentional - it had not sunk into the lake over the years by accident. Thick columns sank into the water to support it. And it was free of the black thorns that crowded around all the other buildings out here on the outskirts, none growing within ten paces of it.

It had no doorway, either, just a wide-arched entrance beneath a grand portico, and the interior seemed cavernous, despite its small size. The back half of it which sank into the lake was actually open as well, so that lake water flowed into a tiled pool in the interior, and it seemed almost something of a grotto. A small, simple stone altar stood in the center of the pool, rising above the water, and upon it lay an icon, a silver statue of a beautiful woman who from the hips down had the tail of a fish, smiling serenely, beatifically at the water around her.

And there was a man. Martimeos almost did not notice the fellow until he had walked into the building, so quiet was the man, off to the side, in the shadows. He was kneeling, hands on his knees, and his simple clothing, a plain woolen shirt and trousers, seemed too loose, and he was far too thin. The man was staring at the silver statue on the altar, quiet and still, but when he heard footsteps approaching he turned. “Oh,” he said, somewhat tremulously. “Oh. I don’t think I’ve met you before.”

“I should say not,” Martimeos replied slowly. There was something off about the man. His face bore an expression of gentle confusion. He was not old, but he gave the impression that he was, like someone who had lost his wits and now viewed life through a haze. Even his hair was more sparse than it should have been for his age.

Martimeos blinked in surprise as Elyse strode boldly past him, careless of the fellow and not waiting for an invitation. The man did not seem to mind, though, merely looking at the witch blandly while she cast an eye about, apparently approving of what she saw. Martimeos followed after her. It was surprisingly warm within this open building. Two braziers burning low with hot coals stood in the corner, and the thick stone held onto their heat such that even the wind could not drive autumn’s chill too far in. “We are visitors to Silverfish,” he told the man, “Only it seems that not many live here anymore. We have walked the length of your village and you are the first soul that we’ve seen.”

“Oh,” the man replied, as if he didn’t really understand. He got unsteadily to his feet. His face was long, and red, as if burnt by the sun, and his dark eyes seemed always wet, as if he were perpetually on the verge of tears. His hair was the color of ash, short, and his scalp showed through it in patches. When he rose, it became clear that he was even thinner than Martimeos had first thought. So thin, in fact, that he and Elyse exchanged worried glances. Was famine what had taken this village? The man’s ribs clearly poked through his shirt. But behind him, on the floor, was a clay plate with a hunk of bread and even some fishmeat on it, and a cup of water. They simply lay untouched.

Martimeos introduced both himself and Elyse, and nearly leapt forward when the man staggered. But eventually the fellow seemed to gather himself a bit. He found his balance, and his eyes focused on them as if seeing them for the first time. “I greet you,” he said apologetically. “I am called Finnel...I am sorry that I am the first to meet you.” He looked around, and his loose sleeves flapped as his arms fell against his sides, in a remorseful gesture. “Silverfish is…not what it once was.”

Rolling his shoulders, Martimeos let out a held-in breath. He was glad that the fellow could speak sense. He was beginning to wonder if he might be a madman, and those could flare into sudden violence, no matter how run-down they looked.

“What is this place?” Elyse asked suddenly. “What a strange little building, all open as it is.”

“Ah,” Finnel replied, and a smile that was too wide for comfort spread across his face. “This is…a temple, I suppose.” He waved his hand towards the half-fish, half-woman statue lying on the altar. “For the Lady of Calm Waters.”

Elyse looked to Martimeos again, and he shrugged while Finnel wasn’t looking. He had never heard of any Lady of Calm Waters, though there were many places that had little gods of their own. Though a temple was unusual in a village so small, at least by his reckoning. He himself had ever seen a building dedicated to worship until he had visited a larger town.

Finnel was staring rapturously at the statue once more. Martimeos cleared his throat. “I was wondering if there might be an inn in the village, or if not, someone willing to put us up?” He had never yet seen a village that did not have, at least, a small inn with a couple of rooms. Then again, he had never been in a village that had been abandoned as this. He considered simply taking up in one of the deserted houses, but any innkeep might resent being denied the custom, and he wanted to remain in the good graces of the people here, if he could. He might need them, to find what he was looking for, and an innkeep might be one who could be the most helpful.

The scrawny man nodded, and he seemed so eager to help that Martimeos almost felt bad about how poorly he had thought of the man earlier. He told the fellow that they simply needed directions, but Finnel insisted that he could walk them there. He brought them back the way they had came, and along the way Elyse prodded him with questions about the thorns. “How did they become so bad? Do they grow so quickly?”

Finnel blinked at her. “I…I have not paid attention, I suppose.” He looked around, frowning at the thorny vines creeping through yards and gardens.

“It is pulling down your farms and houses, man,” The witch replied disbelievingly. “How could you not have noticed?”

“I am…was…a fisherman, not a farmer.” If he took umbrage at Elyse’s tone, Finnel gave no sign of it. He was as placid as the lake. “I thought things were becoming overgrown, but…” He smiled, but the pain in it was clear. “That’s just the way things are, here. Just the way they ought to be.”