Chapter 1 Helaine
A cruel wind buffeted the church, pushing snow through a break in the top of the cellar wall, and as the ice melted, it dripped down the stones and gathered into little droplets over the packed dirt. I shoved the drops around with my finger, the edges clouding with dust until they appeared as beads of mud. With slow presses of my fingertip, they burst and drained away.
Outside, they set the stage for my execution. I heard the men shouting through the crack in the foundation as they braced the stake against the wind; as they arranged bundles of wood and straw around it.
The townspeople would be pleased to have so grand a fire in the midst of such a bitter winter. And once the hair was burnt away, the smell of a burning body was not so offensive.
The men’s footsteps echoed into the cellar as they stomped the snow from their boots in the threshold of the church above. Their voices grunted and muttered and laughed.
The man in the cell beside mine wept. The judge sent to question him, or lecture him (perhaps save him), urged whispers of prayers from the prisoner.
The judge was not a man I’d seen before in Vergonne, and his fur-lined cloak betrayed his prestige. He was not there to question me, though he lingered outside my door, just close enough to peer inside.
There were only two of us to burn today: a witch and a murderer.
Perhaps there was hope for the weeping man.
I was no witch.
“Mademoiselle Donadieu.” The white-haired priest, clad in a modest black cassock and a sorrowful frown swung the door to my prison open. “It is time.” There was no malice in his face, no scorn in his voice, and his wrinkled hand shook as he beckoned me out.
“Please.” My words were thick with dread and they weighed down the shame in my chest. “Please, Mon Pére, just a moment longer.”
The priest shook his head in sympathy. “Hell waits for you, child. There is no time left.”
The man in the other cell prayed louder, holy words I did not know a witch could speak. Holy words that could not save me.
I pulled myself away from the corner, where my warmth had gathered, and a chill bloomed across my back.
I staggered, and in a strange way of kindness the priest took hold of my elbow and guided me through the church’s little prison. I felt the gaze of the judge boring into my back, but I made no acknowledgement. What room was left for formalities as one marched to their death?
The priest’s feet shuffled over dirt and then scraped over stone as they ascended to the sanctuary, past the pulpit, where a massive bible laid open to the book of Ecclesiastes: the follies of human ambitions, as written out in the priest’s last sermon.
Pére D’Arcy paused by the heavy door to his church, hesitated by the hook that held his cloak, but he spoke no words of doubt or dissent. I reached around him with the arm he did not hold and pulled the cloak free. He cast his eyes to the floor as I draped it around his shoulders and he did not raise them when I bent to kiss his sagging cheek.
“You will be cold, ma petite.” His voice wafted to my feet while his hands moved to wrap around mine. His skin was thin and frigid, and the shaking had worsened.
“I will be warmed soon, Mon Pére.”
D’Arcy’s lip trembled for only an instant before he stepped back and pulled his cloak off to settle it over my taller frame.
“Let me offer you one last comfort until then.” He cupped my cheeks in his hands and resolved to lift his teary eyes to my burning ones. He nodded once. It was time. Pére D’Arcy let me go to push the ornate door open and the violent cold washed over me, cooling my fearful blush.
A crowd had formed among the swirls of biting wind. In the bleak midday, everything was dull and grayed: the faces of the onlookers, their ragged clothes. If not for the black spirals of pine trees filling the distance, the snow-blanketed mountains would not have looked separate from the sky.
The houses, wood and darkened with damp, spit smoke from their chimneys, and the weight of the winter sky pushed it down to twine with the mist of the townspeople’s breath. They bundled together and shivered with excitement and anger, but they hushed when the priest led me past.
I felt their eyes, though my own were cast down. The snow had already been trampled and I slid easily over it to the center of the square. The wooden stake loomed over my approach, and as the people grew quieter, my end drew nearer.
The priest stopped beside me and clenched my hand between his with a single squeeze before releasing me to my executioner. A bride handed to her intended.
“Mon Pére,” I pleaded, reaching for him: the only one to show me any gentleness. “Pére D’Arcy…”
He did not turn to look at me as he walked away.
The baker, a man who snuck me pastries when I was just a girl, took my wrists and shoved me to the mound of kindling. I stumbled over the logs and the twigs scratched my legs, catching in my skirts.
He straightened my back against the beam and bound my hands behind it. My panic edged up my throat, clogging it until I barely breathed.
“Helaine Donadieu,” Seigneur Dupont boomed across the square. He leaned over the railing of the tavern’s wide balcony and pointed a judicious hand down at me. Lord of our town; governor of my fate. “You have not repented your sins. You have not begged God for forgiveness. You bear no shame or guilt for the vicious crime you committed!”
The judge I’d seen outside my cell stood behind him, ever-watchful. The fur of his cloak rose around his ears with each breath. He did not take his eyes off the accused.
There, my trial stood. Beneath the blazing eyes of the righteous, outside the doors of the convent that raised me, my fault was evident. It was indisputable; the blood soaked into the lines of my conscience, as well as my hands.
Cries of anger and indignation echoed throughout the valley.
These people knew me the way a raven knows a mouse, and they spat their knowledge at my feet with their curses and insults.
The daughter of the devil.
A sullied and impure thing.
Satan’s Whore.
“For the murder of Sister Agnés Arnauld,” Seigneur Dupont bellowed, “an unfathomable crime against our people and against our Holy Father, I hereby sentence you to be burned alive.”
The scars that rippled over my skin itched and stretched. The sweat on my brow froze against the air.
“May the Lord have mercy on your soul.” Seigneur Dupont flicked his wrist at the baker, who carried a flaming torch above his head. I had not seen him retrieve it, but now it dominated my attention.
The people cheered and chanted as the man stepped ceremoniously to the edge of my pyre, the hungry flames in his hand lurching for the wood. He bent down.
My body pulsed, my vision blackened with each violent beat of my heart, so I closed my eyes, waiting for the heat to build.
In terrified anguish, I inhaled the sweet smell of pine in the wisps of smoke that fed up from my feet. The snap of wood as it was consumed filled the air, but nothing else.
The townspeople wanted me to scream in horror and agony, but I would not appease them. The people who had known me since I was a child, barely able to walk, were so quick to condemn me to die.
Though I had condemned a woman of God to the same.
This was my penance: an eternity in Hell, delivered by fire.
But the warmth did not grow the way I knew it ought to, and the smoke did not suffocate.
The cut of a scream sliced through the streets and I snapped my eyes open. The crowd scattered before me, the torch that encouraged the flames to ravage me lay extinguished in the snow, but the fire set to the mound’s perimeter continued to eat its way towards me in steady licks.
No one watched me anymore. Blood melted the snow where the crowd had gathered, bodies steaming in the cold. Those not stricken down scurried like roaches in the light; rodents from a boot.
The beam I was fastened to vibrated from their screams and thundering footsteps. All around me, the snow turned to puddles from the fire’s heat. Sweat seeped through the layers of my dress; my skin felt tight.
My persecutors were gone, dead or hiding. The baker’s body had been thrown to the side, his blood dripping the path of his trajectory. His clothes had been torn open across his back where a row of narrow gashes punctured his flesh. Teeth marks.
The wolf was back.
Terror seized me anew. Maybe to burn would be a kinder fate than being eaten.
I looked back to the climbing flames, watched as they weakened from one blow of wind only to be fed by the next.
I had to escape.
The air thickened around me and I breathed in shallow bursts. Keeping my eyes cast to the ruddied snow, I lowered myself down the stake, closer to the fire, until I crouched near its base. The heat singed the edges of my clothes, making them curl and blacken.
With all the strength my position allowed, I pushed back against the stake until it shifted in the frozen soil. Smoke filled my nose and stung my eyes.
Through the haze, an animal nearly the size of a bear lunged for the tavern. Screams echoed from the building with each thundering shove of the beast’s body against its doors.
I squeezed my eyes shut, painful tears pouring out from beneath my lashes.
The beam would not be free of the dirt no matter how I pulled.
The smoke filled my lungs and my coughs did little more than invite more clouds of black in.
Perhaps I should have prayed, but no god would save me now.
Pressing my arms into the stake until my skin broke against it, I heaved with my legs. The wood dug into my back, but I pushed and pulled until I felt it budge again.
My knees blistered beneath my skirts.
The fire was too close.
I pushed again. This time, when I heaved the wood, it rose.
With a sharp exhale, I lurched upward and back, bringing the wooden beam with me. I fell back into the snow, the stake burying itself between my shoulder blades and pressing my hands into the hard ground. I gasped for breath, fresh tears freezing where they ran into my hair.
The wolf stalked near enough to hear its paws crunching the snow, but I could not move from the shock of my fall.
Maybe it would think me dead and leave me alone.
As my breath returned in shallow gulps, I turned my head to see the creature pacing outside the tavern, distracted and agitated.
I shifted, sliding up the length of the stake as I watched it, and when it shifted in my direction, I went still, limp and unblinking. My eyes were sticky and dried out from the smoke.
When the beast faced back to the doors, I would move again, using my legs to push myself up. My hands tore and screamed against the earth, and my legs, broken with blisters, ached and stung. The fabric of my clothes stuck to the ones that ruptured.
At the top, I slipped free and slowly eased my arms around my feet and legs to bring them to the front of me, keeping my gaze on the wolf.
I had never seen one so big.
The pounding of my heart threatened to catch the beast’s attention and I willed it to quiet as I stood. The wind caught me in a cloud of smoke and I swallowed a suffocating cough that raked against the walls of my throat. I pressed my hands against my lips, holding my breath as I took slow, light steps backwards, away from the fire. Away from the manic beast.
On the balcony, above the stalking wolf, I found the judge still standing there, the black fur of his cloak turning him to his own feral creature. He watched me with a clinical stare, but he could not come after me.
The wolf stood sentry beneath.
