14. THE FARM OF VALERIE TUCK

It was Ren who first thought of it. Martimeos remembered that later.

They sat in the common room early one fog-shrouded morning, he and Elyse. The witch was chewing noisily at a crisp apple and some flaky bread that the innkeep had left out. Ritter, of course, was not here. He rarely was, when Martimeos was in the room. He always quietly found a reason to leave. Poor man, he finally had some guests for his beloved inn and he could barely find time to talk to them. Well, Martimeos would not feel sorry for the innkeep. He should hang. He should have hanged long ago.

Martimeos sighed, and rubbed his temples, trying to drive this thought from his head. Whether or not Ritter should hang was not the question. He didn’t know what the man had or hadn’t done. It was not good to seize on such thoughts; they darkened the mind, made it difficult to think clearly. And yet thoughts like these found a way to slither into his skull, and had ever since he set foot in Silverfish. He couldn’t think clearly. It was as if the fog that shrouded the village had poured in through his ears.

It was his dreams. He could not remember them well upon waking. But he remembered glimpses. Thorns, black thorns, on vines thick as his arm, thick as his leg, crowding around him, thorns the size of daggers, an endless labyrinth of thorns beneath a leering yellow moon. And on the wind through the creaking, razor warren, a voice. A voice that should not be there. He wondered if he might be going mad, that he kept hearing that voice, dreaming of that voice. He had not in years, and never this often.

Could it be these black thorns that besieged the town, that were slowly growing it over, that gave him these nightmares? Their strange and rampant growth was unnatural, and suspicious. But if they were enchanted, he could not sense it, and neither could Elyse. And though they might have invaded his dreams, it did not seem to affect anyone else. The witch slept like a babe, at least according to her. But she seemed fresh-faced enough each morning that he believed her. She’s as bloody as the rest of them, a small voice inside him whispered. Smiling at the murdering innkeep like he’s her favorite uncle. Martimeos firmly stamped the voice down. Now that was an unworthy thought. Elyse had not even heard of the White Queen before he had told her, had never lived through her war. The witch had never been anything but true to him, as far as he knew. Still, she saw Cross-on-Green, didn’t she? Did she have to talk to the man so much? Knowing what his comrades did? What he might have done?

He wanted to find some sign of his brother, and leave this damned village. Already he was unsettled by the thought that his brother had come here when he had. What had he been doing so deep in the Queen’s lands? What had this place offered him? Why come here at all?

He was still brooding on these thoughts when Ren came in through the front door, traces of mist swirling in behind him. The thief gave Martimeos and Elyse a shy smile as he approached them. Martimeos found the fellow a little odd. He could not hold it that much against him that he had been a thief; truth be told, there had been times when Martimeos himself had been a thief as well, and all the better at it for the Art. Still, if he were in Ren’s knee-high boots, he would have run by now. He thought the boy’s story (and really, the thief seemed barely more than a boy) had some truth in it; he was too young to be a hardened highwayman, surely, but far too trusting of strangers, to be so confident that they might keep his secret. If he was discovered as a thief, Ritter would certainly put him out on the streets at the least, or might try to enact some form of justice. And yet the lad stuck by his odd compact he had made with Elyse. Perhaps he thought it would be bad luck to cross a witch.

Martimeos gave a grunt of irritation as the lad slid in next to him. Too chummy, far too chummy, and it grated on his nerves. He hoped that wherever they went next, Ren would not want to travel with them. With a sigh, he shook his head and tried to clear it of these petty thoughts. It was good Fortune to offer aid to an honest fellow traveler, and if Ren was dishonest, it was no dishonesty that Martimeos himself was not guilty of. It was the damned dreams, and the lack of sleep, fouling his mood.

“I am surprised to see you two here, now,” Ren said, leaning in to whisper conspiratorially, no doubt out of fear of the innkeep’s watchful eye. Ritter was sharp about that, he supposed; he had rightly sniffed out that Ren was a thief. Though the innkeep was not in the common room and would not be, so long as Martimeos was here. Ren could steal all the relics he has hanging on his walls, all for Ritter’s fear of me. “By this time, you are usually out on your search.”

“There is not much here left for us to search, in truth,” Martimeos replied quickly. It grated at him, and he thought that being the one to say it aloud would grate less than hearing others describe his failure. It did not. The fruitless search was like a canker in his mouth that he could not ignore. Yesterday, they had barely searched at all. Elyse and he had wiled away the hours deep within the practice of the Art, sinking so deep into glamor that it seemed they swam in the shadows, but even that diversion had lasted only so long before his dissatisfaction burned through. Yet what was there to be done? Every house searched, though they had to grope through fog to find them, and even draw a map to be sure where they had been (so disorienting was the mist that cloaked this village), and every miserly villager who would say more than two words to them had had their share, and there was nothing, no sign of his brother. Though it was not only that which plucked at his anger, truth be told. It was how much these people wanted them to move on. How much they didn’t want to tell the truth. Martimeos would have taken a sign of his brother, and said damn the village and its curse, only that they were so craven in their denial that it incensed him. Whatever had happened to them, they preferred to turn their eyes from it. It was not merely that they were outsiders. He’d warrant that these people never talked about it at all, even amongst themselves.

Elyse gave him a kick beneath the table to grab his attention, and he stumbled out of his reverie clumsily, like a man half-drunk. “Huh?” he asked, upon noting that both Ren and the witch were staring at him, as if awaiting his comment on something. The witch had a real concern in her eyes. He didn’t like being looked at like that. He put on his best sheepish grin for them. He was always very good at appearing less concerned than he was, when he wanted to seem so, for there was a part of him that would laugh at anything. Right now, that part of him was laughing at himself, for the idiocy of coming to this backwater nowhere on the promise of a demon. Didn’t they always twist their words? “Apologies. I was a bit distracted.”

Ren gave one of his nervous, apologetic smiles that did not touch the corners of his brown eyes. “I was just asking whether or not you thought it might be a good idea to search the farmlands.”

Yes. The farmlands. Brambled and overgrown though they may be, Silverfish did not subsist entirely off of fishing, and did not get all of its food off the meager trade barge that still bothered to come by, pulled along the shoreline by strong-armed, lean mean wielding poles, who only looked at the dilapidated village and shook their head while they unloaded their cargo. Martimeos was considering searching outside the village proper, though he had hoped it would not come to that. Even for a village so small as Silverfish, the farms that fed it could be far-flung, and it could take weeks to scour the countryside and visit them all. And he could not see that his brother would have visited a random croft, besides. But… “I don’t know that there is aught else for us to do,” he muttered, then summoned a smile to his face, and winked at Elyse. “I think you might learn that following me is not as exciting as you thought it might be at first. Tracking down farmers is likely to be even less rewarding than talking to irritable fisherman.”

Elyse gave him an odd look, squinting at him with those strange blue eyes of hers (the ribbons in her hair really did match them rather well), and opened her mouth to speak, but Ren jumped in first. “Perhaps I should go with you as well? I do not think there is much left for me to find around here. I might be helpful,” he said, hope ringing clear as a bell in his voice.

Martimeos stomped flat on that hope, and it would be a lie to say he felt no glee while doing so. He could not know why, but he simply did not like the man much. “Absolutely not. I am sure our questioning has set tongues wagging enough already. If we start banding together to go and harass farmers, they’ll wag even more about how all the outsiders in the town are in a conspiracy against them. Elyse and I, at least we might have an excuse to be there.” He and Elyse could use their tale of being newlywed and interested in a home, and come to a farm to ask how the land was. And they might have another excuse, if they were willing to admit they practiced the Art. In Pike’s Green where he had been raised, it was considered good fortune to have a wizard or a witch speak the Art over your crop. A traveling wizard, newly booted and following the ache to wander, might catch a penny or a bowl of soup or a barn to sleep in for the favor. It had caught him enough of such, when he was first on the road.

Such a boon might loosen a farmer’s tongue, even in places where the Art was viewed with suspicion. That was, if such a tradition held in this place. He was far from home, now. It might be best to only use the offer as a last resort. Still, it was better than going to a farm with no excuses at all. He knew farmfolk, and these days, if they were to show up on their isolated doorstep without a good reason, they were likely to be thought of as bandits or highwaymen.

He felt a small but true wrath alight in him, a small candle lit but burning bright, when the thief looked to Elyse, as if the witch might give him what he wanted. But she was already shaking her head. “I think the wizard has the right of it, Ren.”

The lad seemed sorely disappointed. “Well,” he said slowly, glancing between the two of them. “If you’re sure…” He paused for a moment, frowning. “The closest farmstead to town is owned by someone named Valerie Tuck. You probably saw it coming in, it’s one of the only ones close to the road that’s not overgrown with thorns. I don’t know if you saw her, though, she’s got…she, uh, she wears a bag over her face. I don’t know why.”

The thief had clearly given this some thought. Martimeos could remember it well; they had seen this Valerie on the way in, it seemed. He could still remember the woman with the bag over her face, and the farm that had filled him with such unease. It would have to be that farm that was easiest to visit, wouldn’t it. “It will be the first we go to.”

===***===

It was not long after that they gathered in the courtyard, with the mist swirling about them like ghosts. Something about this fog was unnatural, too, and Martimeos did not like to think about what it might be. The world grew thin, the world grew tired. There were tales told of fog like this; tales of places where you might step into mist and never be seen again, come out in another world not your own, forever a stranger, forever lost. If indeed you ever came out at all, and did not simply stumble Between, never in one world or the next. The whole world’s slipping Between, lad. You’ll walk roads that don’t match the maps, before you’re through. There’s lands where maps don’t hold, because the very land itself melted and faded away to someplace else. You’ll learn.

Martimeos shook his head. Those were some of the last rambling words that his last instructor in the Art had said to him, delivered with the stink of brandy on the man’s breath. Before Martimeos had finally left Pike’s Green. He had dismissed the warning at the time, but there were those who would take the unguarded speech of a drunken, learned wizard as a Telling. Beg Fortune that he would not have to worry about such here.

Before they could leave the inn’s courtyard, though, Ritter appeared from ‘round the bend of a colonnade, frowning at a worn saddle he carried. He had come from the direction of the stables (the inn had the service of one worn, shaggy gray mare named Bela) and slowed when he saw the two of them. Especially when he saw Martimeos. The innkeeper tried his best to not even be in the wizard’s vision, these days. “I thought you might be out already,” he said. Those sharp, blue eyes of his portrayed no hint of nervousness, but he shuffled his feet. “Lookin’ for your brother, and all.” Though he must know otherwise, he refused to acknowledge that they also asked questions about what had happened to the village.

Elyse waited, probably to see whether he would speak to the innkeep, and then gave a small laugh when he refused. “We’ve run out of places ‘round here to look,” she said. “So the wizard and I are off to see if your farmers have any memory or notion of where to find him.”

Ritter had been walking towards his inn door, with that fantastic carved scene of a horseman kidnapping a princess, nodding along as he listened to her words, but at this last he stopped. He frowned, then looked at them, as if considering something, then rolled his shoulders. “The farms, eh.” He paused for an infuriatingly long time, pursing his lips.

“If you’ve got something to say, man, out with it,” Martimeos snapped. It was the first time he’d spoken to the innkeep in days.

Fire came into Ritter’s eyes then, and a dangerous look across his face (oh yes, this man had been a mercenary, for certain, and even now was a dangerous man, Martimeos would wage good gold against a tin penny if you would say otherwise). But he shook his head and gave a small, hoarse laugh, and that anger seemed to drain out of him. “It’s nothing, likely.” He nodded towards Elyse. “But I told you old Mercy Gray went missing. Likely just ran away from…all this.” Saddle still in his hands, he craned his neck in a general gesture meant to take in simply everything about them. Martimeos could almost laugh. The innkeep would acknowledge that something was clearly wrong about this place, but not say what it was. Not to outsiders, at least.“But, well…now Minerva, our apothecary, she’s been out at the farms too, y’see…old Polk’s sheep got spivy, and she was treatin’ them…well, long story short, she was meant to back a few days ago and she hasn’t been. It’s likely nothing. Surely nothing. But if you might ask around if people have seen her…”

The innkeeper’s tone was light, but if a man such as he was giving a warning, that meant he had a suspicion in his gut that something wasn’t quite right. And a mercenary who had made his way with luck and shed blood for Fortune, he had a kenning that was not to be easily dismissed. Martimeos touched the hilt of his blade, and shifted the crossbow over his shoulder. He could be civil. “We’ll be visiting Valerie Tuck first,” he told the man.

Ritter nodded. “That’s good. That’s good. Minerva, she might be there. She has a…a salve…for…” He shut his mouth, peering at them. Apparently, this was another thing he didn’t want to speak of to outsiders. “She might be there,” he finished. “But you…you keep an eye out. And be careful yourselves.”

“Why does she wear a bag over her face?” Elyse called, and for once, Ritter had a scowl for her. He rushed inside, slamming the door.

===***===

It was a lonely, quiet walk, out back the way they had come in, where the village disappeared in the distance behind them and they were once more in the brambled country of razor blackthorn vines. If anything those snarled warrens seemed to have grown even more dense and thickly knotted during their brief time in the village proper. They seemed now to shake even without the wind, and Martimeos could almost hear the whispers in them, the same whispers that haunted them in his dreams. At least the further they got from the lake, the thinner the mist grew. Though it never disappeared entirely. It clung in ragged patches to the ground like stubborn ghosts, swirling around his boots when he stepped through them.

Their familiars were not with them this time. Though they still had the offer of crop-craft on hand to tempt a farmer, they did not want to necessarily reveal that they knew of the Art unless they thought it might gain them an advantage. Cecil, besides, was enjoying his time usurping the throne of the old black cat King, back at the inn. Flit had not had the patience to stay at the inn, and he was somewhere nearby but out of sight, mapping out the farms that they might visit, which ones did not seem abandoned.

Elyse had bought her fae-stick with her, but no longer needing it for walking, she carried it leaning against one shoulder like a club. The witch was quiet and thoughtful beside him, withdrawn, as if those strange blue eyes peered inward at herself, running a hand through her voluminous raven-black hair, chaotic with poorly-tied ribbons. Martimeos was grateful, though it was not that he preferred her to be silent. Most of the time he was glad to hear her speak, cutting as her tongue could be; talk of the Art was always interesting with one who also worked it, and the witch had a sort of charm about her that usually brought a smile to his face. But out here among the thorns, it almost felt as if he could feel them pressing in around him, growing into his dreams, dripping poison into his thoughts, and it put him in such a black mood that he knew hearing another human voice would only inflame his ire. He was not being the most personable companion, he realized. If he kept this up, it might well be that Elyse may change her mind about following him.

It was not so long of a walk to the Tuck farmstead, and it was well before noon that they reached it.

It was not a large farm. Valerie Tuck lived alone, and there was only so much land that a single farmwife could tend to. Large pumpkins and buttersquash dotted the ground, and it seemed that she had begun the harvest, for many of the vines had been plucked clean, and a pile of gourds already sat in a rickety two-wheeled cart by the road. A lone scarecrow with an empty pumpkin for a head rocked slightly in the wind upon the post it was lashed to, straw poking out of his tattered burlap body, with crows mocking his purpose perched upon his shoulders, tugging the straw from him.

Valerie Tuck was nowhere to be seen. As they made their way across the field and to the farmhouse, Martimeos felt a familiar sense of unease grip him; the same unease he had felt last time he had passed this farmstead by and seen Valerie, with her head covered in burlap, not knowing why. Was it simply the oddity of the woman, and the thought of meeting her, that had him so on edge, though?

“I do not like this place,” Elyse said from his side, as he was still wondering this. For all that the witch’s dress seemed too thin for the autumn chill, she had never shown any signs of cold, but now she shivered. “Something feels strange, here.”

“All of Silverfish is strange,” he replied. But he thought she was right. Something did feel strange, here. And it would be foolish to ignore that feeling. The Art gave an intuition about things, sometimes, or some called it a foggy form of Telling. He touched the hilt of his sword.

The windows of the farmhouse stared at them like empty, black eyes as they approached. In places, the white plaster covering its walls had worn away to reveal the baked brown clay bricks beneath. Its thatched roof was badly in need of repair. A coop stood beside it, but there was no sign of any chickens. The house was not large, but it had certainly been built for a family, not for a woman living alone.

They stood on the stoop for a moment. The door was splintered and cracked, and badly in need of a painting. Hesitantly, Martimeos reached out and knocked.

For the longest time, there was no answer. He strained his ears to hear, though, and he thought he could make out the faint sounds of movement within. “Valerie Tuck?” he called inquisitively.

“Perhaps she is not home.” Elyse looked as if she hoped this was the case.

“I can hear something.” Martimeos knocked at the door again. “Valerie Tuck!” he cried, more forcefully this time. “I can hear that someone is in this home. Answer the door, or I will start to think that someone is in Valerie’s home without permission.”

Dread was building in his gut and clawing at the bottom of his heart. He backed up from the door, and put his hand to his sword, ready to draw. What if nothing answered, what then? He knew he heard something within. Would he have to break down the door? What would be waiting for them inside?

Would it even be human?

All these thoughts raced through his head in the scant few moments after he knocked. But someone or something was coming. With slow, plodding footsteps that they could both hear, now, someone approached the door.

All at once it was thrown open, and Valerie Tuck stared at them from the other side.

She was thin, too thin for a woman who worked a farm alone, thin to the edge of famine, like Finnel, but something about her spoke of feverish whipcord strength, hard as ancient wood that turned to stone. She wore a long, black, plain workdress that came own to her ankles and only revealed the bottoms of dirty black workboots, and the hem of her dress was mud-spattered.

The bag which she wore over her face was dirtied, as well. Gray eyes like frozen dirtwater regarded them flatly, from out of the ragged holes cut in the bag for them. And from this distance they got the answer for why she wore a bag over her head. For what they could see, the scant skin around her eyes appeared to be nothing but scar tissue. Part of her mouth looked like it had been carved away, as well, leaving teeth and the raw gum exposed. Martimeos had heard of wasting diseases that would rot people alive, and wondered if that was what had happened to her. And whether she was still contagious.

And more than that, more than her disfigurement, there was the profound sense of something wrong. It was perhaps the Art again that made it obvious, in that primal gut feeling and intuition it could give to those who spent their lives working with it. But something about this woman was wrong, something was crooked within. Madness could have that feeling. And he could believe this woman was mad. She held herself with the feverish intensity of the lunatic, her every muscle seemed poised to spring like a trap; she stared at them both with unabashed contempt, like a princess receiving two unwashed dung-farming peasants.

“What…do you want,” she said, in a half-strangled, slurred speech that clearly took effort to enunciate every word. Perhaps something was wrong with her tongue, as well.

Elyse and Martimeos glanced at each other. For a moment, the woman’s presence had robbed them of their speech. “Apologies for disturbing you, miss,” Martimeos said eventually, with a polite bow. “You are Valerie, correct?” When she merely continued to stare at him, he hurried on. “The innkeep in Silverfish - Ritter, you know him? We are his guests, and as a favor to him we agreed to check on the outlying farms, for he is worried for you folk away from the village proper.

“M’fine.” Her eyes slid off them; they were dismissed. She turned immediately back to the door.

“Hold a moment, miss, please. We were also given the names Mercy Gray and Minerva to inquire about. Have you seen them or know of what happened to them? Ritter believes Mercy might have quit her farm, but is quite worried about Minerva.”

Contempt flared back to life in those scar-set eyes, contempt and something more, a sort of offended incredulity that she should be asked this, by them. Valerie made a deep growl in her throat, and her lips curled back, making her look even more corpse-like. “No.”

She turned once more to the door, and this time spun around with a baleful glare when Martimeos stopped her, her fists clenched knuckle-white. “Please miss, just a moment more of your time,” the wizard got out hastily. “I am only here in your village to search for my missing brother. He would have come through years back, seven or more, and looked much like me-”

“No,” Valerie snapped, and this time she spat at their feet. Somehow, it did not spoil the impression she gave of a princess entertaining unruly visitors who had overstepped their bounds. She would have beheaded them for their offense, if the world was right. Unfortunately it was fallen, and the most that she could do was spit at them. “G’way.” And then she spun, her dress whirling around her, and slammed the door to her home so hard that it echoed across the field and sent crows roosting among her pumpkins scattering into the air.

The offer of crop-craft died on Martimeos’ lips. He stared at the door, but all he could hear was Valerie stomping away from it, the knock of her boots on the wooden floors fading somewhere into the house.

“Serpent’s tits, her face,” Elyse swore, after a long moment. She whispered, as if Valerie might still somehow hear her, as if the woman was still waiting just on the opposite side of the door. She leaned on her stick, as if just seeing the woman for those brief moments had taken the breath out of her. “What do you think happened to her?”

“I don’t know,” Martimeos replied quietly. He remained staring at the door for a long moment, and Elyse did not question him. Perhaps she felt the same way he did. Valerie was home, and at least that was good. She was disfigured and crooked of mind, perhaps, but that…that could not possibly explain the nagging feeling this farmstead gave him. A strange, broken old woman was not enough for the intuition granted by the Art to be provoked. What was it about this place?

Perhaps they should have both left well enough alone. And yet, even with that sense of uneasiness, their curiosity was pricked now. Around the side of the farmhouse they walked, leaving prints in the soft dirt, but all that was there was a stack of firewood. The coop was empty, though it seemed like it had not been not that long ago. It smelled deeply of chickens, and white down still lay scattered on the ground in front of it.

Elyse tugged at his sleeve, and he glanced at her. “Hey, wizard,” she said, “The well.”

She nodded toward the simple stone well that lay in the far corner of the field. They approached it, stepping delicately through the pumpkin patch, ignoring the protestations of crows who cawed raucously at them when they drew near, far more afraid of them than they were of the impotent scarecrow.

The first thing they noticed was that no crows were in the fields near the well, though the pumpkins grew as thick there as they did anywhere else. The second was the odor; a thick and cloying scent that hung heavy in the air, the smell of something gone rotten, though that was not quite all - it was accompanied by a strange, fishy-sweet smell, as well. It was wretched, it seemed to invade their throats and their very stomachs as they breathed it in. It was like nothing they had ever smelled before.

And there was that sickening sense of dread that rose within them. Something wrong, something gone foul, like something that you know deep in your heart already but still wounds the soul to know. Like watching your house burn down with your family inside it, and knowing, knowing that they were dead, and yet some whispering place inside, you wouldn’t be satisfied until you see the sad lumps of blackened flesh and melted fat and charred bone, some part of you wants to see it precisely because you know it will break you forever. There was something in that well. Martimeos had to know what it was. He took a step forward.

But something stopped him. Elyse was tugging at his sleeve again. She was coughing, tears in her eyes, looking on the edge of retching. She pointed, not to the well, but toward the ground. The pumpkins nearest the well had swollen, gone dark, almost purple, and soft. Some of them had burst open and spilled forth a rotten black putrescence, lumpy and oily, which toppled over in piles like innards. Just looking at it made him want to gag.

And then, suddenly he was, just like Elyse. The desire to look into the well was not gone, but overwhelmed by sheer physical revulsion. They backed away, coughing, retching, until they could no longer smell it, no longer see the rotten, burst pumpkins. “That is no normal crop-sickness,” Elyse said, gasping, wiping tears from her eyes. “Fah, that was foul.” She was pale, and looked as if she might be sick again at any moment. “It felt…it felt like a wound. Like a wound larger than any man might take. If someone’s whole body was nothing but infection and open pits, it would not be a big enough wound to feel like that. What was that?”

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“Something is in that well,” Martimeos replied grimly. He took a deep breath to steady himself, then started marching, swiftly, back to the farmhouse. “We can’t leave Valerie here. No one ought to be near that.” Elyse followed after him, but even as he said the words he knew them for a lie. Valerie knows already, doesn’t she. Oh yes, she does. It’s her farm, she would have to be blind not to know. And when you first crossed her path, she was standing right over the well, wasn’t she? She was. She knew. Whatever was in that well, she had already been in contact with it.

Once he stood before the door of the farmhouse, he hammered on it with enough strength to dent the wood. “Valerie Tuck,” he shouted, and his cry sounded more accusatory than he had meant it. Or perhaps not. That sick feeling of dread. “Valerie Tuck, come out. You cannot remain at this farm. Something wicked has taken root here!”

There was no answer. Before he could knock again, there was the sound of something heavy clattering, deep within the house. Then silence.

“Valerie Tuck!” the wizard cried again, but there was nothing, and he did not wait long for a reply this time. The door was locked, but the rusted latch and the wizened wood of the frame could not withstand a few heavy kicks. The door crashed aside with the whining squeal of bent metal and the creaking groan of breaking wood.

Inside the house it was quiet, and filthy. It seemed that Valerie had not cleaned in years. A thick layer of dust and dirt covered everything, except those paths which she took through her own home and the spots that she occupied. The path in front of the door was tramped clean by her footsteps. Here was a fine wooden table with four chairs, only one of which showed any signs of having been pulled out and sat on in recent memory. A shelf which carried four cups, only one of which had been touched, the other three covered in grime.

“VALERIE TUCK!” This time, Martimeos shouted as loudly as he could, loud enough to make dust fall from the shelves. As if in response, there came a noise that sounded like muffled shouting, from somewhere beneath them.

He drew his sword, and made no attempt to be quiet - if something was here for them, it certainly already knew they were there. Beyond the table there was a stone wall with a small, narrow door set into it, and throwing that open revealed a set of narrow, cramped stairs which led down into a cellar. The flickering glow of a candle danced against a dirt wall, from somewhere around the corner, and the sounds of muffled, strained speech were clear.

“Stay well behind me,” he whispered to the witch, and she nodded furiously, eyes wide, clutching her stick in both hands like a cudgel, ready to brain someone.

He had to duck his head to make his way through the door, and crouch as he walked down the stairs. The stairway was small, and cramped, and he was uncomfortably aware he would have barely any room to swing a sword in it. He squeezed through it, down, his shoulders scraping the walls, down into the cellar.

As soon as he turned the corner, he saw, tied to a chair, and gagged with filthy linen, a stout old woman with frazzled gray hair tied tight back into a bun, red-faced and straining against her bonds, clear blue eyes pleading with him, trying to tell him something. Before he even saw the warning in her eyes, he guessed what was coming.

He whirled, and there, standing behind him, was Valerie Tuck. She held a shining cleaver in her hand, raised above her head, bearing down on him.

It was the candle that saved him. The candle that Valerie herself had probably placed there for light. It was too narrow to bring up his sword in time, and so cramped that even if he had backed up, Valerie’s strike would have bitten very deep. But there was that candle, and the bright little spot of hunger in it, and so Martimeos seized on that, seized on the Art, and turned that small hunger into a ravenous, devouring need, and turned it on Valerie.

The tiny flicker of the candle jumped, becoming a gouting burst of flame that quickly melted the wax, but it was alright. Because that hunger was spilling hot orange light onto Valerie’s dress, and there was its new meal.

She went up like a dry pine tree.

Valerie screamed and wailed, a frantic, keening cry, and it was not long before that cry shook in her throat, became heaving moans as the flame bit into her and the smoke tore down her throat. She dropped the cleaver and beat at the flames devouring her skirts in a frenzied panic, stumbling backwards. The narrow cellar contained shelves lined with large clay jugs, and she crashed into one of those, screaming. With a groan it toppled over on her, the clay jugs shattering, and the smell of brine washed through the cellar; they had contained pickles. It doused the flames, at least, and Valerie lay there, moaning, beneath the shattered crockery and the broken shelves.

All of this took place in moments, but to Martimeos, it seemed to go on for hours. He turned back to the old, bound woman, only to find that Elyse had come behind him, having produced a dagger, and was cutting through her ropes. When the witch took the linen from the woman’s mouth, she spat, and coughed, half-moaning, half-sobbing, hysterical, her lips dry and cracked, her voice raspy. They helped her to her feet, and Elyse gave her a drink from her waterskin, even as they hurried her along, but the woman was weak - who knew how long she had been tied up like that - and so they half-carried, half-helped her up the narrow stairs. Martimeos walked backwards up them, pushing her up with his back, and was glad that he did.

He could scarcely believe it, but as they were near the top, there came a great clattering from down the stairs, and Valerie appeared at the bottom of them, clutching a sharp shard of crockery in one bleeding hand. When he first saw her, his thought was that she must not be human, she must be the walking dead. Most of her dress had been burnt away, or charred to the flesh of her legs. But the most shocking thing about her was the bag was gone as well, and her head exposed.

What had happened to her face could not have been a wasting sickness. It was too precise, too obviously done by intention. Lined scars crisscrossed her head and face, which looked like little more than a skull with scar tissue molded on it, too close to be natural, as if some of the underlying muscle had been stripped away. She was bald, scalped, such that her hair could never grow back. The lined scars were carved in intricate patterns where they met, and most disturbingly of all, Martimeos could recognize some of the logic of sigils in them. Someone has carved a work of the Art into her living flesh, he thought, and for one wild moment he realized that more than anything he wanted to know what craft had been written in her skin.

Her eyes blazed hate and she scuttled up the stairs after them, croaking something in a tongue now too smoke-damaged to make sense. But Martimeos was prepared for her. He could not swing his sword on this narrow stairway, so he caught her with a thrust beneath the armpit, and pushed forward past resistance. She screamed. He could hear her blood spattering on the stairs. She raised her bloody shard of jar to strike at him, and he kicked her as hard as he could, square in the face. He could feel what was left of her nose crumple beneath his boot.

She flew down the stairs to slam against the wall and crumple there, moaning, blood covering her jaw in a fan from her nose, clutching an arm that now seemed to hang too low and too loose in its sleeve. She was trying to gurgle out something, but speech was far beyond her now. “Lleekrrrm,” she cried, reaching out towards him, all the humanity stripped from her face. “Leekrrrrm. Heez.”

As horrible as this was, he would wish later that this truly was the last he had seen of her.

They got the old woman up out of the cellar, finally, and Martimeos slammed the door shut behind him, then grabbed the table and wedged it as best he could between the door and the wall, pinning it there, thinking then that if Valerie survived her wounds, she could at least be taken in for justice. The old woman was still crying, but at the very least she did not seem to be leaning on Elyse so much anymore. She walked with a limp, and she rubbed, sobbing, at the angry red welts around her wrists, but she seemed to be able to move under her own power, if in a doddering way.

Suddenly the old woman gave a keening wail, one that reminded Martimeos uncannily of the one Valerie had given when she went up in flames. She stumbled forward across the kitchen, nearly falling, to grab a silver locket from where it lay on a small side table. “Oh,” she sobbed, pressing it to her lips, “Oh, this was Mercy’s! Oh, she said she had killed her, I didn’t want to believe it…” She broke down into heaving sobs once more.

That only left the one then. “Are you Minerva?” Elyse asked, putting a hand on the woman’s heaving shoulders. “How well can you walk? I do not think we are safe here, yet.”

The old woman did not seem to hear them, not at first. “They were friends since they were little girls,” she murmured, in a vacant, disbelieving way. Her eyes swam over towards them, and in them there was nothing but questions and tears. “How could this have happened?”

Martimeos thought he might have some idea. That well, and whatever sickness lay within it. But right now was no time for idle talk. “If you cannot walk, I will carry you. We are leaving here, now.”

The old woman simply remained staring for a few moments, but finally she straightened, and some steel came into her. She wore a simple brown frock, with a belt around her waist from which hung a satchel and other small pouches. She tucked the locket into one of these, now. “Demesque and Karilail guard your soul, Mercy,” she said quietly. Her tear-streaked face now wore a stern, no-nonsense expression, though she could not completely hide the fear that touched her, in trembling hands and nervous eyes. She did not question how Elyse knew they were not safe. They were her rescuers, and they had earned a rescuer’s trust. “I can walk,” she said hoarsely. “For a bit, at least.”

If the woman questioned their urgency, she did not give voice to it. It might have seemed that all was at an end; Valerie was stuck in her cellar, and the road was not far off at all. What did they have to do except to walk to it? Only that Martimeos still felt the fear in his blood, and he thought Elyse could as well. Valerie herself was not the only threat here. Dread still dragged razors across his stomach as they bustled Minerva between the two of them and hurried outside.

They had taken perhaps three steps towards the road when it happened.

A long, inhuman groan bellowed from within the stone well, sending crows scattering into the pale gray sky. It droned on and on, ever-louder, drowning out thought, taking up space in the skull, until it seemed that even vision was not important before the magnitude of this endless, alien sound.

Minerva shrieked, and Elyse was screeching curses, but Martimeos was barely aware of this, his mind overcome by the torrents, the endless crashing waves of sound that flooded his mind. Some small part of him held on in the obliterating deluge, though. And that part of him realized that their voices were far away. Some dim notion of vision came back to him, some shred of his attention spared for what the eyes might see, and that small part of him realized that he was no longer supporting Minerva’s shoulder, no longer with the witch. No, he was sprinting across the field, careless of where he trod, squash and pumpkins caving beneath his feet, stringy pulp clinging to his boots. Towards the well.

Why? Why was he doing this? This small part of him, that clung to himself, didn’t know. It thought that perhaps he was even trying to play the foolish hero and do something about the thing in the well, even though the obvious smart thing to do was to run. But slowly, that strange, long moan that issued forth from the well tapered off into silence, and like flood waters drawing back to reveal a shipwreck, the rest of his mind was exposed as it withdrew from his thoughts. And it had something hooked in him, snared in the part of his mind where the red ugly thoughts were, and it was pulling him forward.

Elyse was screaming his name, and with what clarity of thought he had, with some part of himself Martimeos reached out towards those screams, as if only he could grasp them like a rope and resist the tidal pull of the thing in the well. But her voice was too small, too thin to serve as an anchor.

He was close now. His boots squashed through black, rotting, corrupt pumpkin-guts, and something in the wicked ooze squirmed. Not pumpkins. Not anymore. He knew the smell must be horrific, but it was as if his nose was blind to it now. Some awful, muggy heat was pulsating from the well, too, and as he drew close he could feel it pouring from the earth in rancid, fetid breaths. His mind scrambled frantically, pathetically, like a bird caught in a trap, trying to escape, trying to resist, but it was too late. His gloved hands gripped the lip of the well, and he peered over.

There was something there. Something in the bottom of the well. Not water. It was difficult to see in the murk, but down in the dark, down past slick stone, deep in the cold earth, something pale and grub-like squirmed in red wetness that welled up like blood out of a pitted wound. A cloudy, globular something danced in and out of shadow.

But what was in the bottom of the well was almost irrelevant. Because it was the sensation of something, something else oozing into his head that occupied his attention.

Suddenly, in his mind’s eye, Martimeos saw himself. And then he saw himself through the eyes (it has no eyes, what it has is something else) of the thing in the well. And what he saw of himself there was a monster. His teeth stretched into fangs, his face contorted into something thin and snakelike. The red scarf that hung about his neck became a wound dripping blood onto a body that was stretching, cracking, popping, changing…

And even as he saw this, Martimeos felt himself begin to change. Not his body, no, but some part of him, if this went on, some part of him would be this monstrous thing. He’d look human but be a monster, and he could already feel his thoughts turning into a monster’s thoughts; dizzying him as they twisted and bent, the sick glee deep in your chest of hurting…

NO, he thought, and tried to claw himself back into shape. He didn’t know what he did, didn’t know what he had done other than refuse, but the image of himself shrank back, blurred and lost its monstrousness. It was merely him again, merely Martimeos. Olive-skinned and hair long and wild, well past his shoulders, tall and slender but not snake-thin, and his dark green eyes more tired and his expression more grim than they used to be.

He felt the thing in his mind recoil, like a snail retreating back to its shell. He could also feel…emotions, he supposed they must have been, emanating from it in waves. And he would never say that what he felt from this thing was any human feeling. But if there was any it came closest to, at this moment, it was confusion. He felt it groping around, blindly, through his thoughts, and after getting over his feeling of revulsion he realized that thing couldn’t see (Not see. It does not see in the way we do. It cannot see what it cannot make its own).

It felt the thing seize on something, a bubbling sense of triumph oozing off of it like oil. And suddenly the image before him changed. He was no longer looking at himself. He was looking at the common room of the Night Fisher inn; from an odd angle, from above, as if the roof had been cut away and he was floating where the rafters would have been.

It seemed very, very real. A fire crackled in one of the twin fireplaces, and Martimeos could feel the heat of it on his skin. The orange light of the flame banished the shadows to the dark corners of the room. With a gentle warmth, it illuminated Ritter’s relics; his fanciful little House of the Gods, the maps that hung on his walls, gleaming on the polished spines of his books. Again, and oddly for this moment, it struck Martimeos just how sad it was for this place to be empty all the time.

And there in the center of the room stood the innkeep, except all his soldierliness and discipline had gone out of him now, and his sharp blue eyes were not flat, the light draining out of him, seeing nothing. Ritter was screaming his death-scream, the sort of scream that takes your soul with it, and he clutched his hands to his stomach, trying to keep his guts in, blood soaking his entire lower half. And Martimeos watched as that monstrous version of himself, with serpentine, curdled-rotten glee, twisted a sword in the old mercenary’s guts.

Martimeos felt a sense of deep shame. Shame, because he had wanted to kill Ritter. He had thought about it, especially as his time in Silverfish wore on, as the dreams robbed him of yet more sleep, and his mood became blacker and blacker. Part of him had indulged in visions of torment for the old man. And why not? Ritter had been the White Queen’s dog. Who knew what the old soldier had done in her name? The horrors Martimeos had seen; Cross-on-Green was only the beginning of what the Witch in the West and her servants had done. He had traveled amongst the Freetowns of Dorn and seen the ruin she had wrought there, where it seemed everyone you met had lost half their family to her wicked ambition; he had seen the fields at Durnholde, where her forces had finally broken at ruinous cost to the city itself, where even to this day farmers were likely to turn over bones and skulls and rusted swords and armor when they pulled their plows...

And what they had done to David.

And yet Martimeos knew, as he watched the vision that this thing in his mind had shown him, watched Ritter bleed his gut-blood screaming, that this was what had allowed the thing to catch a hold in him. This was the red, ugly thought that it had snared him by, a thing this foul could not find purchase except in those who had a desire for torture and cruelty, and Martimeos was ashamed to find this honest urge in him. This thing thought that by showing him this bloody wish fulfilled, that it might gain power over him and shape him like clay.

Except that knowing this and feeling the shame made the thing’s power so much weaker. He could feel it already shifting in his mind, knowing that something had gone wrong. And to his surprise, as he hung above the common room of the inn, he could still feel the hunger of flame, from the crackling fireplace. He could still feel it, and he could still speak to it through the Art and heighten that hunger. For only a moment, he wondered on how strange this was, that flame in a dream, or a vision, might live as much as true flame did. But then anger came upon him, anger for this thing that butchered and bent his thoughts, and so he reached out with the Art to seize upon this flame, his only weapon. To his surprise, it bent to his will much easier here than any true flame ever had, and so he built a raging inferno of starvation in the fireplace, and he sent it out into the darkness of his mind, where this thing hid.

A gout of flame leapt up into the dark, even as the vision of the Night Fisher inn fell away, and then pain, true pain - whatever this thing was, it had that in common with humans, then - screamed out of the thing, washing over him from the corners of his mind. Something dark within his blood laughed. He was stronger here, of course he was, it was his mind, his dream, and he knew, he knew that some part of him danced with one foot in dreams already. And so the gout of flame became a gale, the sort of baking heat that an entire house aflame would give off, and the thing in his mind shrank and quailed. He could feel it trying to slither out of his mind, and perhaps he should have let it. And yet in a fickle moment he knew he could keep it there to face the flames, and so he did, and all the cruelty he had ever felt towards Ritter he focused on this thing now. Ritter, who knew what he had done - but this thing, this repulsive thing, had come into his mind to violate him, and so he would give it a taste of the Hells. It had dared to dance with him in his own dreams.

A voice boomed out of the dark, then. It came slow, with great pauses, faltering, as if the thing had trouble making the words, but each word came with the roar of grandiose and unquestionable authority, knowing that it would be heard, expecting to be obeyed.

And they were not really words, no. There was no true sound, here, and the thing did not think in words. It was a way of touching his thoughts that did not, in every way, scream of domination, and the thing, whatever it was, was ill-practiced at it.

ENOUGH. I NEED NOT (SEE/KNOW/CONTROL) YOU TO KNOW YOU ARE HERE TO SEE MY WILL DONE.

“I am here for no such thing,” Martimeos spat, but even his ire melted away as he marveled at the dimensions to which he had built the flame, and yet it kept on growing. It was a pillar of flame in the darkness of his mind now, white-hot at its base, and it ate at the thing, though he could not see it, could only see the brightness of the flame burning in the darkness. He had never built a flame so large and so hungry in the world outside his mind, and here now he found the hunger took on strange new dimensions. It would eat more, now. He wondered if there was anything at all that flame would not eat if it grew hungry enough.

YOU ARE. EVEN IF YOU DO NOT KNOW IT.

A pause.

DO YOU SUMMON

(An image of a flame of wild and impossible colors, a flame which shone in the colors of the rainbow in its corona. A sense of laughing mockery and contemptuous scorn.)

Martimeos did not know what to make of that. Perhaps, though, letting this flame burn within his mind was dangerous. What would it use as fuel when it could no longer burn this thing? And so he stopped feeding its hunger, started draining away the hunger from it, and to his surprise it was much more malleable than a flame in the real world might be, as well. Once a flame’s appetite had grown large enough it was a struggle to stamp it out. But here, flame seemed tamed and ready to obey. Soon, the pillar of flame had reduced itself to sickly yellow grease fires, burning thick black smoke on…on something, on whatever this thing was in the dark of his mind that he still could not see. “What are you?”

(A vision of time so long that it lost meaning. If a man’s life was a grain of sand, this sense of time was an entire mountain. The wild, lurching sense of falling from the sky, turning away from something that burned and tore and ripped and shattered.)

Martimeos was quiet for a very long time, hiding in the shadows of his mind. He had felt dwarfed by the sense of time this thing had shown him; felt as if he were crumbling to dust even attempting to hold the idea of it in his mind. If this were true, and not some alien idea of a boast, then this was the oldest thing he had ever known. A demon? Perhaps. “And what is it you think you bid me to do, shattered one?”

YOU WILL BRING VALERIE HER REVENGE. FOR WHAT WAS DONE TO HER AND HER FAMILY.

Martimeos was stunned to find that when it thought of Valerie, the shattered one’s thoughts sang with what might be thought of as love. At least it did not feel as vile as everything else the shattered one thought of. “I have no interest in avenging her. And I doubt very much that if you had put the price before her in the beginning, she would have agreed to pay what you demanded of her.” He knew, with a disgusted certainty, what had happened to the first the chickens on Valerie’s farm, and then to Mercy. Something as wicked as this feasted on pain, and flesh and blood.

SHE WOULD HAVE. I KNOW HER WELL. SHE HAS PLEDGED HER VERY SOUL TO ME. VENGEANCE IS ALL THERE IS TO HER NOW. SHE KNEW THERE WOULD BE SACRIFICES. UNLIKE YOUR GODS, I ANSWER PRAYERS.

Another pause.

SHE IS JEALOUS OF YOU.

Martimeos would have said more, only that there was something drawing him out from this place, now, and that as he was lifted out of the dream and towards the light, he felt the shattered one slip out of his mind…

===***===

Into the light of day, and chaos.

He stood, standing over the well, staring down into it, still staring at the grub-pale squirming something and the red wetness and the vomitous infected wound that was the shattered one’s flesh in the living world. His hands held onto the edge of the well in a vise-like grip. His arms ached, as if every muscle in them had been tensed to trembling strain, and felt knotted and hot.

Elyse was shaking him as hard as she could, screaming his name, when she was not gagging and retching from the smell of vicious rot and corruption that welled up from the very soil here. Eyes wet with desperate tears, she was trying to pull him away from the well, but his grip while in the fugue had simply been too strong.

And even as he turned his head to look at her, even as the witch laughed in the simple relief of knowing that he was still in there, he saw broken doom racing towards them.

He would never know how Valerie had escaped from the cellar. Shattered as she was, as burnt as she was, he had thought it very likely that she would have died from her injuries before anyone came to bring her up. And yet somehow she had, and even now was sprinting towards them across the field. She was at once a macabre and absurd sight; her skull-face slick with blood, the ragged tatters that were the remains of her dress flapping around her knees, and her one dead arm hanging limp and flopping as she came at them.

Pathetic though she might be, she had the strength of feverish madness on her side, and Martimeos was too slow in recovering to bring his sword out before she crashed upon them.

Or really, upon Elyse. Perhaps thinking that Martimeos was too tough meat, Valerie dove for the witch.

Elyse, still busy retching, did not even seem to realize Valerie was coming for them until the crazed lunatic was upon her. That wild, frantic fear in her strange blue eyes was familiar. It was how she had looked when the demons had attacked them both, just after they had met, and she had fallen and sprained her ankle. It was the death-fear on her face; it was the way Elyse looked when she thought she might be killed. Only the first time he had seen that, she had been a stranger. He had only known her for a little while, but still, now seeing that expression on her face twisted his own heart with fear.

The witch bought up her fae-stick to fend off Valerie, but the maimed woman ignored it as if it wasn’t even there. She still clutched a jagged shard of pottery in her bloodied hand, and she pushed it towards Elyse’s neck. “Leeeekrrrrm!” she cried from her ruined throat and tongue. “Imsskrrrm! HEEZ!”

Valerie was not a large woman, but Elyse was smaller than her, and the witch shrieked as she was driven backwards. Martimeos realized with horror that Valerie was trying to push Elyse into the well and cut her throat at the same time. Fear setting fire to his blood and finally clearing his mind from his stupor, he leapt into the fray. He practically ripped the two of them apart, sending the witch stumbling away. Valerie, however, immediately turned on him, that blood-slick shard seeking his throat now as she grappled with him. Her blazing eyes drilled holes into his as he spun her, trying to wrestle away from her surprisingly strong grip. “Imssskrrrm! Imssskrrrm!”

He spun her, seized her hands. She wormed away from him, and her shard tore a line across his cheek. He roared in pain, and shoved her away as hard as he could, and sent her flying, sprawling across the well.

She did not fall in; the well was too narrow for a person to easily topple into. Her legs lay draped over one side, while the back of her skull cracked across the other, and she looked up in a daze.

What happened next would depend on who you asked.

Martimeos heard a voice.

YOUR REVENGE IS PURCHASED, VALERIE. YOU PLEDGED YOUR SOUL TO ME AND I CLAIM IT NOW.

Elyse always swore that she heard nothing intelligible, but rather only heard another low, growling moan vomiting upwards from the well.

They both agreed on what happened next, though. Valerie snapped, as if she were being suddenly folded in half by a giant invisible hand, her legs going about her ears. The crack of her spine breaking sounded like a rotten tree finally toppling over. Blood gouted from her mouth, a red wet hole. And then she shot down the well, dragged down it, with a terrified wail, and Martimeos could not stop himself from thinking but now I will never know what the Art carved on her face meant.

He thought he heard in her wail a tinge of regret. Perhaps she went to her fate knowing what she had done, what she had sold herself to, how she had damned herself. But perhaps not. Perhaps he was just imagining things. Most likely she died stupid and mad.

The wail disappeared with a splash, and Valerie Tuck was heard from no more.

===***===

Martimeos and Elyse stumbled away from the well, half-running, supporting each other as they did so, back across the field, to where Elyse had left behind Minerva to watch these two mad young people in wide-eyed horror. (For her part, Minerva would always deny hearing any voice or seeing Valerie snap in half. She would always insist that she simply fell down the well. She never wanted to acknowledge the awful fate that befell a woman she had seen grow from a babe into adulthood).

It was quieter, now. A surreal calm settled down over the farm, a queasy silence that did not seem to belong, given that they had just seen a woman broken in half and dragged away to horror. Crows, driven away by the initial commotion, were returning to the field, cawing lazily to each other as they drifted down to alight amongst the trampled pumpkins and peck at their guts. Martimeos wondered what they might say, if he could understand the crow-speech. Most likely nothing but complaints about how their meal had been disturbed. Birds rarely paid attention to the doings of man, unless man was trying to hunt them. As a general rule, most birds were disdainful of anything that could not fly, and thought such things barely worth talking about.

His mind was wandering. It was what it did when he had just seen some awful bloodiness. When the fear-fire faded from the blood and all that was left was the reality of ruined bodies and death. It was not the first person he had seen die, and not the worst death he had seen either, but he thought the sight of Valerie folding in on herself, the pop of her spine, would stick with him. He supposed, at first, that Elyse was quiet in contemplation of this too - perhaps she had never seen anyone die before - but that was not it. She was quiet in stewing fury.

“You are a complete imbecile,” the witch hissed at him. He glanced down at the her in surprise. She was not looking at him. Instead she stared straight ahead, frowning, a hard look in her eye. “An imbecile. Why did you run towards that well? What did you think you were going to do?”

She sounded so furious, and oddly hurt, that he wasn’t sure what to say. “I…was not under my own power when I did so. I was drawn to it.” When her silence persisted, he went on. "It...the foul thing in that well, it spoke to me. After a fashion. It spoke of Valerie wanting revenge. I think it meant to use me somehow, but I was able to throw off its call."

"Revenge, was it," she murmured. The witch squinted at him, now. Spots of color stained her cheeks, and she worried at the dark ring she wore with the thumb of her hand. “I did not feel drawn to it at all. Minerva neither.”

Martimeos remembered the ugly thoughts that the shattered thing in the well had hooked him by. Heat rose to his face as he remembered his shame. If such a thing hooked people by their bloody thoughts and wishes, he probably shared company with murderers in being drawn to it. “Perhaps I simply have more cruelty in me than you do,” he said softly, then regarded her again. In a way, the fact that she had not been drawn to the well was another circumstance vouching for the witch’s trustworthiness.

Elyse, however, merely snorted at this. “Is that so? If you make me run after you like that again, wizard, I think you’ll find I have enough cruelty in me to make the Dark Stranger weep.”

He was about to say that she had not needed to come after him if she did not want. But he considered what might have happened if she hadn’t. He would have been left stupefied by that well, and very likely Valerie would have simply tipped him over without even knowing. Would the shattered one have let her do that? Wasn’t he supposed to be ‘the instrument of its will’? (Whatever that meant, he was very much determined not to be that). He glanced back towards the stone well and shuddered. He thought that very likely for a thing like the shattered one, its appetites came first and foremost. And so to the witch he merely said, mildly, “I thank you for the rescue. You likely saved my life.”

The witch huffed, then stared at him, then down at her hand, still toying with her ring, and then shrugged her shoulders. “You saved mine, so one good turn deserves another,” she grumbled. Then she grimaced at the hem of her dress, spattered with stinking black pumpkin-gore. “I will say that you owe me extra for making me tread through that foulness. Fah!”

===***===

They would rejoin with Minerva, who would regard the wizard and the witch with both awe and hope. They would get answers from her, in time, for Minerva was not like the other villagers in Silverfish. A long and hard life had blessed her with wisdom and canniness where it had left others dull and numbed by what they had seen. She respected the Art, as was often the case for those who worked with herbcraft, which was mistaken for the Art by the ignorant often enough, and often put apothecaries in the company of wizards and witches. And she was too old and had seen too much to let shame still her tongue and make her keep secrets.

And while they walked away with her, supporting her on each arm (at least for a while, before Martimeos had to ask a neighbor for a horse to carry her, for her feet failed her), none of them looked back at the farmstead of Valerie Tuck. If they had, they might have noticed someone sneaking out from the woods that bordered her croft, to approach the old well.