Chapter 1 - In Which a Dead Man Twitches
CHAPTER 1
In Which a Dead Man Twitches
The potion tasted like burned licorice and old pennies, which was fair because it cost about as much.
I counted the drops into the thimble by the gray light of the kitchen window.
Seven.
But the recipe called for nine. And the bottle was two-thirds empty, while the nearest decent nightroot grew a four-day ride away, so seven it would be, and I would pay for the missing two with a rougher throat and a meaner afternoon.
I tipped the thimble back, and the bitterness flooded the hinge of my jaw, slid down, and settled behind my collarbone like a swallowed fist.
Then I waited. Because after swallowing the medicine, I had to brace my hands on the table in my kitchen and listen to my body. To check whether it would work and let me speak.
Outside, the first birds started up. The cottage smelled of wood-smoke and drying thyme and the cold-iron tang of the potion on my slow breath.
The tremor began where it always did, a flutter just beneath my jaw, as though a moth had gotten trapped under the skin. I pressed two fingers against it. It beat against my fingertips, then thinned, then went still after a count of forty.
“Good morning,” I told the empty kitchen with a sigh.
It came out gravelly, but it came out.
I took the small win and did not look at the cellar door.
*
The garden was waiting for me with its usual disappointment.
I walked the rows barefoot because the dirt was cold, and I liked its feeling. Dew soaked the hem of my dark skirt.
The beans had curled in on themselves again, pale and stunted, and the cabbages were the size of my fists. Four rows of beans should have filled eight baskets by the end of summer. Last year, I had managed three.
Every witch I had ever known could coax a seedling up with a hum, a little nudge of the throat, a lullaby for the leaves.
I could not hum. Humming had been the first thing the Recoil took. It was a small thing to mourn, but I had mourned enough.
So I did it the slow, ordinary… human way. I pinched off the blighted leaves, crushed aphids between my fingers until they smelled of green bitterness, and carried water from the well in two buckets that bit into my palms.
In my head, because I could not help it, I counted. Eleven silver and some copper in the tin, three silver owed to the miller, a bottle of potion that would last nine days if I kept stretching it.
Counting was the one magic I had left, and unfortunately, it never worked.
I was on my second bucket when I heard someone running.
Nessa came across the stubble field with her skirts hiked in one fist and her son on her hip, her breath sawing in and out. The boy hung against her shoulder like a wet towel. He was maybe five, red to the roots of his hair, and I could feel the heat of him from ten feet away.
“Maren, please.” She skidded to a stop. “I know you said not to come before noon unless someone was dying, but he won’t stop burning.”
“I said that to scare off the neighbors. Not you.” I set down the bucket. “Inside.”
I laid him on the kitchen table, on the clean linen, and put my palm to his forehead. It was like touching a stone that had sat all day in the sun. He smelled of sour sweat and the sweetness fever leaves behind, like apples gone soft. His pulse skittered fast and light beneath my fingers, like a bird’s.
“How long?”
“Since last night. He wouldn’t drink anything.”
“He’ll drink for me.”
They always did because I was the scary witch who ate children. The rumor was untrue, and I had never once corrected it. It kept the tax collector away and made the village boys leave my apples alone.
I grabbed the willow bark and the meadowsweet from their hooks, then the honey and the last of the cool water from the pitcher. The tea steeped while I wrung out a cloth and laid it across the boy’s chest. He whimpered at the cold. I tasted the brew at the end of a spoon. It was bitter and green and a little sweet.Good.
The boy’s eyes cracked open. They were glassy and enormous, and they landed on my face.
“Are you gonna eat me?” he croaked.
Nessa made a strangled noise while I kept my face straight.
“Only if you don’t finish your tea.” I held the cup to his mouth. “Small sips, little soldier. It tastes bitter, but drink it anyway.”
He drank, and Nessa made a sound that was half sob and half laugh and pressed the back of her wrist to her eyes.
By the time the sun had cleared the hedgerow, the boy’s skin had gone damp and his breathing had slowed and deepened. He was asleep against his mother’s shoulder with one fist closed on a corner of my tablecloth.
Nessa dug into her apron pocket and came up with three copper coins, warm from her body. I counted them in my head before I could stop myself. My stomach did a hopeful little flip. But my conscience stomped on it.
I closed her fingers over the coins.
“Buy him an egg,” I said. “And always boil the water first. That’s not a witch’s advice, just plain sense.”
“Maren, I can’t just…”
“You can, and you will.” I held the door open. “Go on. Before he wakes up and starts liking me.”
She hesitated on the threshold. “They say you… you don’t like people.”
“They’re right,” I said. “I don’t.”
She went, with a look over her shoulder that I ignored. I picked up my basket and the little knife for cutting willow bark, and went down to the river.
*
The river ran low that morning, thin and brown over the stones, and mist hung above it in ribbons. The air was chilly enough to sting my nose. The only sounds were the water chuckling over the shallows, a crow complaining from the alders, and my breath, which whistled faintly at the top of every inhale when the potion was wearing thin.
I smelled the mud before I saw the willows, cold and rich, a green rot that always made me think of beginnings. I had my knife out and my eyes on the bark when I saw something pale in the reeds.
I took it for a heron.
Then, I took it for a birch branch.
Then, I saw it was hair.
It was the palest hair I had ever seen. Pale as bleached linen. Pale as the first snow on a field, and it lay across the gravel in a long tangle that shone against the mud and the dark river weeds like something spilled from another world.
Beneath it, a body lay on its side, half out of the water, one arm flung over the stones.
A man. A young one, not much past twenty, if that.
I stood there with my knife in my hand and looked at the thing in front of me and refused to feel anything about it.
He was tall. Even lying down, he took up more of the bank than a man should.
His shirt had been ripped open down one side, and what showed beneath it was a soldier’s chest, broad and sculpted, muscles you only earn by hauling and swinging and carrying things for years.
His forearms were corded. His knuckles were scarred. The skin of his throat and cheeks was the color of candle wax. His lashes were long enough to throw shadows, dark against his white face, still beaded with river water. His mouth was full, slightly parted, faintly blue at the corners. His nose was big and crooked, broken at least once and badly set, which should have ruined him and somehow made it worse.
Even dead, he looked like a man people wrote poetry about.
I resented him already because the dead should have the decency tolookdead.
I crouched and touched two fingers to his throat. His skin was as cold as the stones beneath him and unbearably smooth, like something polished by the river.
I waited for a pulse and counted past thirty without finding one.
When I turned his head with careful hands, my fingers came away sticky.
There was a dark, dried crust at the back of his skull, caked into all that white hair, and beneath it the bone felt wrong, a soft give where there should have been a curve. Blood had run down his neck and dried to a rust-brown stain.
And yet the strangest thing was the smell.
Or the lack of it.
Death smells sweet and thick, and I had been around enough of it to know it from a hundred steps. This man smelled of cold water and river mud and iron, and nothing else.
No, I thought.Not my body. Not my problem.
I had a firm policy about strangers’ corpses, and the policy wasno.
Somebody’s son. Somebody’s lover, with a face like that. Somebody would come looking, probably, with a cart and a priest and a great deal of weeping, and it would all go smoothly without me.
I wiped my fingers on the grass and stood, and I scoffed at him in my ruined voice.
“Next time, pick a different river,” I told him.
Then I turned around and walked away.
I made it a dozen steps before I stopped. Children fished here. In summer, they stood knee-deep in these very stones with their trousers rolled, shrieking at one another. Nessa’s son would be one of them next year.
I sighed, and the sigh caught on the hitch in my throat and turned into a cough.
“A body shouldn’t rot where children fish,” I muttered, to no one, and went back up the hill.
I brought Marzipan back with me, with the spade strapped to her saddle. If I was going to spend the morning digging, she could at least carry the tools. I left her grazing at the top of the bank.
The ground beneath the willows was soft, which was the only thing about that morning I could call a mercy. I picked a spot above the flood line, where the roots would hold the bank, and I dug.
The spade bit into the earth with a sound like tearing cloth. The smell of turned soil rose around me, dark and sweet and a little sour. Digging a grave, I decided, was a lot like gardening, if gardening ended in guilt. The sun kept climbing, and by the time I had gone down a foot, the first blister had opened on my palm and the second was thinking about it.
“I’ve buried a dog,” I said, wiping sweat from my temple. “A goat. And one very disappointing cabbage. You’ll be the first person. I hope you’re flattered.”
The man lay in the grass beside the hole where I had dragged him, on his back now, his white hair fanned across the green.
He was still beautiful andstilldead.
The thin sunlight did nothing for his color.
My mouth tasted of copper, and my throat had gone tight, which meant I was spending the last of my morning’s potion on a dead stranger. I braced the spade, and I looked down at him.
His finger moved.
Just one. The first finger of his right hand, where it lay open on the grass. It curled, slowly, the nail scratching the dirt, and then it lay still again.
I stared at it.
I stared until my eyes burned. The river went on talking to itself, as though nothing had happened. My heart was beating in my throat, in the exact place the tremor lived, and for one terrible second, I could not tell the two apart.
A twitch. Dead things twitched. I knew that better than most.
I crouched. I pressed two fingers to his throat again, and held them there, and counted slowly to sixty.
Nothing.
Cold, and still, and nothing.
But his finger had moved. A man with a crushed skull should not have a finger to move, and he should not have lain a full night in the reeds without a single crow or fox or beetle touching him.
I was a tired woman, but I was not a stupid one.
I looked at his face. At the long wet lashes, the broken nose, the sweet slack mouth.
“No,” I said.
My voice cracked down the middle of the word. Then I said a second word, a much worse one, that my mother would have washed my mouth out for.
I should have gone home and left him there. Instead, I caught myself watching his hand, waiting for another movement. Hoping for one.
That frightened me more than the twitch. I knew what I could talk myself into if I stood here long enough. I pressed my blistered palm against my throat and felt the damage I already lived with.
Then I looked at the shallow grave. I could not put him in it while I was still waiting for him to move.
*
Marzipan was a fat dun mare with a white blaze and a temperament like warm bread. She stood, grazing at the top of the bank, tail swishing, unconcerned with the dead. She lifted her head and blew gently when I walked up with my blistered hands and my murderous face.
“Don’t,” I told her. “Not one word.”
Her expression suggested she had several.
Getting him onto her back took everything I had. I hooked my arms beneath his, locked my hands across his chest, and heaved, and his head lolled against my collarbone, his cold hair sliding across my neck like a handful of silk.
I swore with every breath, creatively and at length. Marzipan, who had heard it all before, ate a thistle.
I hauled him up in stages, one hip, then a shoulder, then the long legs that kept sliding off the other side, until at last he was draped over her saddle like a very handsome sack of wet grain, white hair hanging, one boot missing.
I leaned against the mare’s warm flank with my forehead on her neck, sweating, shaking, tasting copper, and breathing in horse and river and the iron smell of him.
“If you die on my horse,” I told the dead man, “I will be…veryangry.”
He did not answer, and Marzipan twitched an ear.
I took her bridle and started up the hill toward home, with the sun hot on the back of my neck and a body swaying behind me.
I wasnotgoing to do it.
I had sworn it off on the worst night of my life, on my knees, with my own voice bleeding in my mouth. The jar in the cellar behind the pickled beets was going to stay exactly where it was, untouched and unopened, for as long as I lived.
I said so out loud, three times, on the road home.
Marzipan flicked an ear at every one of them, like a creature who knew a liar when she heard one.
