Flight
Wearing a thin white shift and a shimmering mantle of silver, the woman fled the city by night, winter’s fury raging around her. She did not know which cut deeper: the razor-bone edge of the wind barbed by sleet and rain or the city’s ugly hate. But no one would dare burn a witch at low winter.
It was the Hidain festival of Feilebroc. Celebrating the birth of spring while winter yet brutalized the land felt like malicious misdirection, but she would use the Hidain to her advantage. Feilebroc was a liminal time and had been since ages past, when forgotten folken used sacrifice to shape the world into what it had become. That’s why the woman had chosen this night to flee. To use that magic and superstition.
Within the city walls, she knew the people had shaped their goddesses from colored cloths and flowering winter’s bane. They would have marched those tokens through the city streets, chanting the old songs and calling on the true Goddess—Spring herself—to come quickly. At this point, they must be good and solid drunk. At least that was her hope. Her errand required secrecy, for now. If they discovered her, whether despite their drunkenness or because of it, they may be inclined to burn her after all.
The stone walk was slick with ice, and the mist and sleet made seeing difficult. But that was no matter. All she had to do was keep the city wall to her right and follow the path until it opened onto the small promontory overlooking the sea, what the people called the Terrace. Her concern was not for the treacherous pavement or straight shot fall to the stony sea below, but for time and the steady thumping of her fading essence inside her chest. If anyone had been out in the darkness to see her, they had given the woman no thought, nor would they have likely noticed the small bundle she clutched against her breast. If her luck held—or her magic, some might argue—there would be no amorous lovers or mischievous youngsters out on the Terrace to foil her. Feilebroc seemed to draw out both lust and mischief in people, often at the same time.
From inside the city, she heard the reverie reach a pitch of exaltation. Soon the revelers would collect their goddess dolls atop the walls and burn them to light the path for Spring’s coming. It differed from region to region, but in Halenhead Keep, Feilebroc always celebrated Spring—or the Goddess Homủnre—riding forth on the ocean swell. Fitting, the woman thought. The sea would make a path tonight, and though she may not be a goddess, she could play the part.
The woman in white reached the Terrace. It would not take long now, but still she hurried. It would not do for them to find her before she could complete her task. As an icy wind sliced a sheet of mist and salt against her shivering body, her mantle filled with it. Even the strained moonshine through the heavy mist and cloud was enough to reveal the bloodstains against the white of her dress. Yes, she must hurry. Hurry and then wait if must be, but hurry to do the part that would require the most strength.
When they saw her, it must be when she wanted, when she was ready.
She unwrapped the bundle in her arms with care. Just enough to see, but not enough to let in winter. The birthing had not been painful, but it had been bloody. The child was delivered and had barely cried out. Now, she slept in a white clout not unlike the dress of her mother, blossoming with the wine of motherhood—another spring come. The babe’s clout was thicker and sturdier against the weather, but the mist would soak it through before long.
The wind gusted again. She could feel the push and pull of it deep within her. She felt its tune rattling in her bones. The passing had started. Of that much she was certain. Already, she felt the essence tingling as it left her fingertips and tongue. She would begin the song soon. The moon was not quite full behind the clouds, but it was close. She hoped it was close enough. With a gentleness that defied just how very cold she was, the woman placed the child on the wet stones. If the babe was cold, it showed no sign. And cold though it may be, it would not remain so for long.
Cupping her hands around the baby’s face, the woman in white spoke the words of her incantation. The child responded. It felt the power of it. That was good. That would help. Sadness overwhelmed the woman. It came billowing up from within her like a tyrant. Like a bull. No mother should ever need to make such a sacrifice. She longed for time, even moments, to look at her child. To enjoy her. To love her. To remember her in whatever eternity came next. But the urgency of their situation, paired with the crests and troughs of the lively hymn coming from inside the city, drew her back to her task. The celebrants would finish soon.
She had no time for sadness. She had to do this now.
Once all the words that needed speaking had been spoken, she placed one bloodstained hand on the crown of the child’s head. The coldness of it caused the babe to stir, and it cried out. From within her mantle, the woman in white pulled the birth cord. She had squirreled it away in the dank, torch-lit keep where she had delivered.
There had been no midwife. No one would dare. But there had been two guards who’d stared from just outside the cell door. They had believed her to be a witch, so the show of a witch she’d given them. She had given birth standing. She had stooped forward as the child came and caught it up into her arms. This had unnerved her audience. “Unnatural,” she’d heard one of them whisper. Then she had cut the cord with a shard of broken pottery. The woman had known they would not trust a witch with entrails, even the natural kind that came from birthing a child. It wasn’t until she’d knelt over the puddle left on the floor and lapped at it like a dog, still holding the preternaturally quiet child in her arms, that the witnesses could take no more. They had scampered away like rats from a torch. She had stood and pulled on her white dress then, tucking the cord away in its folds, had wrapped her baby, taken up her mantle, and then used the key that she had stolen two days before.
Out on the Terrace now, she could feel just how much of her physical strength that little show had cost her. And even though she needed the vitality inside her more than strength of body, being physically weak would make the deed more challenging. And she was bleeding heavily. Something had not gone well in the child’s delivery. She took the birth cord now and wrapped one end around her own finger and the other around the wrist of the child, holding it in place with her thumb. Then she wrapped the babe as well as was possible in the cloth and picked her up again.
She turned to face the city.
High above her head, the revelers had reached the walls with their goddess dolls. She knew they were high in drink and merriment. Though cold and miserable, the night was young, and there was yet much to celebrate before dawn. In their distraction, the celebrants did not look upon the Terrace beneath them. They were too busy fixing their near life-size dolls to spikes built into the stone for this very purpose, readying to set them alight and call forth the true Goddess. After, tradition demanded they let baser passions reign. The Goddess would approve.
In a voice that rang sharp and clear like a bell, the woman in white called out. Her voice carried on the mist and sleet and seemed to grow more substantial from it, for all at once, the noise of celebration on the wall ceased. With wide drunken eyes, the people looked down at the witch.
She stood against them, defiant. That she was below them did not matter. She would make them feel the gravity of her stare. Her body had grown weak; she had spent most of her ehwain for the incantation over the child, but the revelers did not know this. It was not her magic that caused the city folken to hush. That was the simple magic of their own fear and superstition.
Yes, she had been captured, but she knew the people of the city yet feared her. She had been pregnant to bursting, but that did not make a witch weak. She had been forced to watch the death of her beloved. No doubt they assumed his corpse paraded before her cauterized her weeping heart and gave power to her hatred, and in that, they were correct. Afterward, no one dared visit her keep in the dark hours. She knew folken loved a witch burning almost as much as a low-day celebration, but only if they did not have to tend to the witch themselves.
They could not stop her now. They would come for her, but not right away. Not before it was too late.
The winter wind gusted, turning her silver shawl into a violent nimbus about her head and shoulders. There was a gasp in the crowd. It began with one or two and caught like a plague. It wasn’t the frightful image of the mantle nor the fierceness of her stare that caused it. She knew it was the white dress, now almost halfway stained in blood, and the newborn child that had all too suddenly become lively in her mother’s arms.
She wanted this tableau to permeate their thoughts. To curse them with remembrance. She wanted them to see everything and to remember every detail. She wanted them to understand, even if their understanding was false.
Yes, the woman thought. Give them a good show, love. Again, she looked at her child—her daughter—and longed to hold her and love her for a lifetime. She mourned this loss. She could only hope to hold the memory of her darling during the long night stretching out before her. This was not what she wanted. Of all that she had lost, this would be the worst. The injustice that she should be forced to this flooded her with fury, and once again the pulsing radiance of her vital energy swelled inside her. She saw it reflected in the alert eyes of her daughter. She felt it stirring within the mist and wind and sea swell, her kindred. Their song a roar, rising to join both the mother’s lamentation and intention. She turned her face again to the crowd.
“See this,” she said. “See this and understand. I, Delahré, give no man or woman the right to end my life.”
Again, she waited. Feeling the energy coursing through her, she longed for someone to test her in this. To come forward. No one did. It seemed all the mischief had gone out of them.
“Aye,” she said, “I withhold that right. And I stand before you, a free woman. See you this child? She is not your child. She is my child, and we are one.”
Then she once again cried out her incantation, her bal-frue . . . She felt the thread binding her to her daughter tighten as the passage began. The words of the ancient tongue were lost on the ears of her congregation. It was mumbling to them, but that truth would provide them with no peace. The language meant little, but the alien sonancy enhanced the show. As she spoke the words, the mother took a step backward. Then another. She continued to speak with deliberation as she moved away from the wall. Soon, the incantation took the shape of song, and the bal-frue was glistening in her extremities and depths like sunlight. She felt it envelop her and the babe. She felt the wind and mist and sea braid themselves between her and her daughter. The mother in white took another step backward.
From their lofty vantage point atop the castle wall, their goddesses now wet and limp with the salty mist, the mystified people watched the witch as she backed away from them. One tiny little woman, who could have seen no less than ninety low winter festivals, broke from her paralysis and spoke aloud. Only those closest to her could have heard her words over the wind, which had become jubilant along with the roar of the sea below—both tuned to the rising song of Delahré—but the mother they called a witch did not need to hear the old woman’s exclamation to understand.
Then the old woman cried out. “She backs to the cliff, she does. Aye, yeh see it true. She backs further yet.” The mother in white heard as those closest to the old woman realized it was true. They picked up the cry in whispers and spread it in a fan of gossip through the crowd. They could all see it now. The witch was moving farther into the icy dark. Obscured by the mist and sleet, the cliff was there even if they could not see it. And beyond the cliff, nothing. A steep and instant drop to a foaming, salty death below.
And yet the mother stepped backward, ever closer to its edge. Her song was luminous now.
The child cried. It was not an unhappy cry, but only the fussy grumblings of a hungry infant. Delahré lamented she would never know the feel of her daughter’s mouth on her breast. She could not risk another look at the child’s face: it may be more than she could bear. And the babe would be near invisible in the mist now on any account. The wind had caught the song and was swelling with it in great sheets of ice and fog. The mantle was a dripping wing of gossamer moonlight, as pale in the storm as that of the actual moon. Her white dress had wicked her mother’s discharge all the way to her waist now so that the cloth was a shining thing, heavy with her life’s blood, and it moved on the rising wind as though alive.
The mother’s song was near its end, and so was her walk. From the wall, the people looked down at their witch but seemed uncertain what to do. They could not go after her now; it was too late. She knew they understood that much. There was no use trying to capture a dying witch. They would have burned her alive, anyway. They had meant to burn her while the child still lay within her. And the child, now born, would not be suffered to live any more than the mother who bore it. But no one burns a witch on a Hidain. Only festival had stalled them on their errand. But there was no escape for either of them now, and the people saw as much. The only way back from the Terrace was through the wall into the city, but the witch did not intend to flee—not inside the city, at least. It was that reality that frightened the people above all else, perhaps. What she meant to do instead was unthinkable. They could not allow her to finish the deed, for unspeakable evil would be spawned. Yet they could not prevent it.
The woman’s smile was icy and without happiness. Even the satisfaction of leaving an entire city haunted by her actions was not enough to make up for her losses. Their fear that this act would cling to them like a sticky ghost, spoiling the coming spring—perhaps spoiling the city itself—was not without some satisfaction, but Delahré wanted more. She wanted the city punished, yes. But more than that, she wanted to watch her daughter grow old. And though she could not watch the child grow into womanhood, the girl would. Despite the Keep’s misunderstanding of the witch’s actions—her apparent suicide—this final act was not one to bring death but to preserve life. The Edönic bal-frue was part but not the whole. She held the baby close to her chest. “Grey,” she thought . . . She felt her essence swell with the child and smiled. “May wisdom find you and bring you home. May strength keep you. May truth and love bind you up. You will always be daughter to me.”
Then she stopped. The wind blew again, and the moonshine filtered through the clouds as the mist parted. The people saw the woman in a bloodstained gown take one final step from the cliff and into darkness. The child in her arms had stopped fussing.
For the briefest of moments, they flew.
