Snow Witch

Snow Witch

By AJ Littletower

Aeid

The witch stiffened. Her mouth twisted. With her silver knife, she scraped a mound of dung from the jack of her boot.

The road wound like the track of an enormous, sinuous creature before her until it disappeared into the horizon. A thousand feet had broken its crust of ice, and a thousand wheels had churned that ice to slush. Garbage was flung by the wayside, cold and dirty as frozen piss. How had a man made such a stench? Even the black-tailed mink had the dignity to cover its spoor.

The frozen plain around her was flat and white and silent and still. The morning light broke sheens of gloss from its frost. Snowed under a good two feet, it was icebound in a glistening sheet of crags and knobs. By day, the sun vitrified its surface, and at night cold, unblinking stars froze it to ice again. Rain had patterned it over in endless dimples.

The road to the city was a day’s journey. To trek across the plain, at least three days. Nevertheless, she turned from the road.

She protected her eyes with a piece of black-tail antler, slit to permit only a thin sliver of light to reach her pupils. Men went snow-blind staring unprotected for endless hours across the frozen waste. She ate her dinner of dried elk meat on her feet with the freezing wind at her back. A man could be lulled into death lying a-ground with the wind rasping its lullaby in his ears.

Her robe was woven from the grey and silver hairs of an aged wolf, which concealed her with the colors of hoarfrost. Its deep cowl kept off the glaring sun and the cold. If anyone saw her, they saw only a glint of sun on a snow-laden field.

On her back she bore a pack made from the slick, water-repellent hide of a white seal, an animal she had never seen, but benefitted from none the less. Her grandmother had crept across the glacier of the Thunderhead and clubbed it to death while it slept on a dawn-lit ice pack. It contained thin, silver pennies in a catskin pouch. But of greater value were the herbs and dried things, the powders and tinctures, carried in folded papers and tiny vials. These were necessary to make spells. Some were rare and had taken months to prepare, and some were impossible to replace.

Miles passed away under her feet. She was like an ant crossing the winter heath, unseen and unthought of, implausibly tiny in an immense wilderness.

She drank the dew of the melting snow. She slept for hours in the middle of the second day. And on the noon of the third, she glimpsed the city, Jakobstone, rising up out of the snowy fields, its quartz-flecked granite shining in the sun.

At first it appeared as a carved briquette, small, squat and square. But slowly it widened and swelled into a pile of glittering, towering stones that dominated the landscape, eating up the silence of the wilderness and filling every corner of her watery-eyed vision.

She followed the ice-studded sewage that drained from its gutters until it turned into a dirty stream. It led to a causeway and a smattering of travelers moving towards it from the road. Merchants drove their animals and wares and women up the steep incline. The wheels of their wagons smelled like the blood of accidents yet to come.

She walked among them, up the ramp, which was slippery with excrement.

The over-burdened cartwrights gave her wide berth. The men on foot drew back, making the twisted-fingered sign to ward off evil. The gate sentries averted their eyes from her hooded form, but did not prevent her from entering the city, which was perhaps their duty. Later, they claimed less natural forces caused their lapse. She’d appeared from a cluster of icicles. She’d been hidden by wind-strewn flurries of snow. Even the tax inspector gulped and hid in his guardhouse and within the night had informed the mayor of Jakobstone that she’d entered their gates and was lodged somewhere within.

“What could she possibly want?” the mayor squeaked to the taxman, blanching up to the roots of his thinning hair. Then he made excuses to his appointments and shuttered the windows of his capacious house on the Street of Pillars until word came of her departure.

In the market square, the shopkeepers shrank away. Women standing loosely in their doorways forgot to toss out their refuse and instead turned and locked their doors. The narrow alleys fell silent, abruptly absent of the noisy games of children, and, far down the lane, the solitary slam of a door resounded only to be swallowed by a padded thud of dislodged snow.

A brave shopkeeper, or a very stupid one, spat into the ice where she passed. “Snow witch,” he grated out, his fingers twisted underneath his jaw. He stank of beer and sweat beneath his coat, like the white-clad mounds of dung that ripened at spring thaw and could be scented across the plain.

Like rats, men often devoured whatever they could get their hands on and stole whenever they could get away with it. But she needed a man. And a man, the town would provide. A special sort of man.

A passing merchant overheard, his donkey laden with lumpy bundles of uncombed wool. He looked at her with eyes creased from sleepless nights. Lifting his hand, he made a sign, his fingers curled and beckoning. A gesture of good luck.

So, not every man in Jakobstone hated the Children of the Thaumaturges.

It was nearly dark when she came to the Street of the Pick. The tall houses of the dank and clammy lane shouldered against one other as if fighting for a glimpse of winter sun. She finally stopped at a painted door. She touched the apple tree described on its surface, its branches bowed with heavy fruit.

A skinny, red-nosed man answered the door, a thatch of yellow hair sticking up at the back of his head. After his surprised utterance of a few unintelligible words, she stuck her foot in the crack as he tried to shut the door. He was too frightened to push her back out into the snow.

“Ya be waitin’ heah,” he stuttered, his accent so thick, she barely understood him. He ran into the dim interior of the house. She did no such thing, of course, but followed him inside and down the corridor, which stank of onions. Beyond lay a common room alight with a blazing fire in the hearth. Wide-boned rafters lifted the ceiling of tar-chinked pine. The few windows were small and cheerless.

“The witch of Gnarl Mountain is at our door,” whispered the man to the stout woman slicing vegetables at a long table. The woman glanced up with mild irritation, first at her husband and then at the woman clad in winter standing in the shadows.

“Shuddup, ya fool,” she said to the man, her northern brogue somewhat more comprehensible than his. She coughed wetly into her apron. The witch hoped it was not the dinner stewpot she was preparing.

“Whaddaya want with us nah?” The inn woman peered curiously at her.

The visitor pulled back her cowl. The husband yelped, jumping back and slapping his hand upon his wife’s shoulder as if he expected a skull or some other ghastly visage. But the witch’s face was young and smooth. Crisp, dark hair fell straight to her shoulders. A flush from the cold stained her pale skin, and the eyes that stared back at them were as black as two bricks of coal. “I need a room.”

The man’s hand squeezed hard into his wife’s flesh. “We’re pretty full right nah,” the inn woman said, trying to shrug him away. “Try the Lamb on the Street of Cupolas.”

The pack of seal fur slid from the witch’s shoulders to the floor, jingling with the faint sound of coin within. The inn woman wiped her knife on the same apron she used to wipe her nose. “Well, perchance we can work a thing out,” she reconsidered. “How long be ya wanting to stay?”

“With any luck, I will be gone in the morning.”

The woman’s fingers twitched against the wood as if already reaching for the coins. “Well, perchance I got one’na my good rooms open. But it’ll be more than the other rooms. So, ya’d hafta pay more, see?” She stuck her hand inside her apron. “Ya got silver?”

“What about a wauld instead?”

The inn woman rubbed her mouth. “What kinda wauld?”

“For thieves? You’re on the Street of the Pick.”

“But I gotta stable yard in back, too.”

“For both then,” the witch agreed.

The husband let out a squeak. “Nah, we canna take it,” he waved at the witch as if shooing away an insect, his fear of her staying greater than his fear of her person. “Sorray, but ya canna stay here.”

“Shuddup, Pever.” The inn woman took little notice of him. Her hand twitched again inside her apron. “Just the womenfolk talking here. Besides, not your decision, but mine.”

“Ti’m your husband, ain’t I?”

“Yeah. But ti’s mine inn. Go see that cook brought up the new cider from the cold yard. We’ll sell it for the brisk night.”

“Buh-,”

“Go’n nah, husband.” She turned him around firmly. “Nothin’ but woman’s work out here. I’ll work out terms with our ... guest.”

As Pever exited, shaking his head, the inn woman finally fished inside her pocket to bring out a dirty rag to cough into.

“Damn’ed fool,” she muttered to no one in particular. “He’d be happy ta’get the thieves ward if a rune-learner came intah here. But none ever does. Not for a long time.” She looked up at the witch. “Ya gonna curse my house ’stead of set a thieves ward on it? Like Pever thinks?” she asked.

“No.”

“Make his thing shrivel up?” She crooked her little finger.

“No.” The witch’s lips twisted.

“Then your ward’s as good as another’s.”

“I never said a ward,” replied the witch.

“What? You said t’was a ward.”

“No, I said a wauld.”

“What’s the difference?”

A pause and a shrug. “A wauld is better.”

“Ti’ll do fine, then.”

There was another pause until the witch realized that the woman was waiting for the wauld, now.