Two and Twenty Dark Tales (17 page)

The witch kept crying. “My arms…”

“The body is but a dwelling place for the soul. When you are burned, your soul shall not perish, but have everlasting life with our saviour,” James said.

“
Burned
?” the witch shrieked. “But I-I confessed!”

“And now, the cleansing fire will purify your sin,” King James informed her, and Susana shut her eyes at the thought of the torment to come. It was the worst way to die that she could imagine.

The wretch moaned, and then cried out, and then screamed so hard it rattled Susana’s very bones.

She was nearly at the end of the corridor, about to turn left, when an eerie green light emanated from the torture chamber. She froze in horror. Like a glowing mist, it glazed the stone walls and ceiling. Then she heard the king heaving loudly, as if in mortal peril.

“My lord!” Susana cried as she broke into a run.

She flew around the corridor. The king’s back was to her, and the tall, stately monarch stood with his legs wide apart and his arms flung open. His head was thrown back, and his moans were frightful. The green light was rising from the bruised and bloody old woman wrapped in rags, stretched tight on the rack. It billowed toward the ceiling, then draped down over the king like a shroud.

“Sire!” Susana shouted in a high-pitched voice, dropping the tray and the torch. The goblet clanked and rolled. The king jerked and staggered, looking over his shoulder in her direction. His Majesty’s eyes—nearly black—were rolling back in his head.

“He steals it,” the hag hissed through broken teeth.

The noxious light played over King James’s body, as if caressing him. He shook from head to foot like a foaming dog. Quaking, Susana forced herself to go to him.

Before she reached him, the light flickered out. The king swayed, his head drooping, and shuddered hard. A hiss rose like steam from the rack. Susana gasped. God’s blood, what had just happened?

The king raised his head and looked at Susana. He was clear-eyed, and he smiled gently at his “page.”

“Robin. I had begun to wonder if you’d fallen down the stairs and broken your neck,” the king said.

“Forgive me, Your Majesty,” Susana managed to grind out, careful to keep her voice low and gruff. She knelt on one knee and picked up the cup, the tray, and the bread. Then she collected the torch and awkwardly rose. “Pray, sir, what was that horrible green light?”

“One last attempt to kill me,” James replied, sneering at the hag he had tortured. “Did you hear the abomination confess?” Avoiding the sight of the rack, keeping her eyes on the torch, and thinking of flames; Susana nodded. “Confess, and beg for mercy, then seek to murder me after I had assured her that Christ had forgiven her?”

So is she dead?
Susana trembled.

“Did you see?” the king bellowed at her. Susana jumped.

“Yes, Your Highness, I s-saw,” she assured him. “‘Twas fearsome.”

“Say nothing of it,” the king said quickly.

She looked up at him in surprise. “Sire?”

“If my chaplain heard that she had tried to kill me, he would refuse to absolve her of her sins before her burial. But I know that in her deepest of hearts, there was goodness.” He looked over at the rack. Susana did not.

“Shall I fetch help, Your Majesty?” she asked.

“No. Fetch more wine,” the king said, sounding a bit merry. “My faith in our Savior protected me from the evil she sought to inflict. All is well.”

“Come with me, sir, please,” Susana begged. “What more is to be done here?”

“Much is to be done,” the king replied, his cheeriness evaporating. “Witches do not act alone. Where there is one, there are many. And they are waiting in their cells for their last chance at salvation.”

She quaked. The green light had covered him. What if the others tried to enshroud him with their black magic as well?

Reading her hesitation, the great man tousled Susana’s short, mannish locks and said, “Fear not. Is that not what the angels tell us? Fear not, lad. I am the Lord’s good servant, and this is what I must do.”

Susana stared at him. Surely, these words uttered from his mouth were a sign that her angel was nearby. That she was on the right path.

“Yes, Your Majesty,” she said, bowing low. She saw witchblood on the stem of the goblet and quickly moved her fingers away. She began to leave when the king took the torch from her.

“Make haste to return,” he told her. “I thirst.”

“Yes, Your Majesty,” Susana replied.

“And, Robin? Call out to me in the passageway upon your return. I will tell you when it is safe to approach. I would not want one of these witches to inflict their attacks on you. I am protected by the divine right of my kingship, but
you
are only a page.”

Protected by an angel, mayhap
, Susana thought. But she said nothing. She feared for the king, but she was grateful that he would protect her from evil.

As she re-climbed the stairs in darkness, she heard more screams, terrible ones, and smelled smoke and burning flesh.

“God’s wounds, does he burn one of them here? Now?” she whispered, and tears of horror trailed down her face. Her heart thundered in her chest and she paused, feeling sick and faint. She shut her eyes tightly and bit her lower lip, struggling not to retch.

Then guilt prickled her cheeks as she made haste to fetch the wine. It was the very least she could do, when he braved such terrors on the behalf of all his subjects, including her.

When Susana reached the ground floor of the castle, the jailers and guards made sport of Robin Fletcher’s obvious distress. The men had become hardened to the pleas of the wicked. They mocked “the blood-boltered old whores” the king put to the question. When Susana poured more wine for her master, they laughed at how “his” delicate hands trembled.

More rude comments followed as Susana stumbled back down the stairs, deep down into the pit. Her foot touched the floor and she minced slowly back down the passageway.

Ragged screams buffeted her ears, these ripped from a different throat. Susana’s hand clenched the torch as she crept forward. Her heart pounded, and she was dizzy from holding her breath.

Then the same strange green glow spilled down the passageway. It was stronger and brighter than before, reaching farther into the corridor as if to seek her. Susana trotted backwards like a child escaping the tide on the beach.

“We know what you’re doing, warlock!” a woman shrieked. “And we’ll stop you!”

Then her words became a wail, and a cry, and then there was nothing but nonsensical gibbering and green light that threatened to wash over Susana’s shoes.

She started to retreat; then something knocked against her heart, as if asking entrance. Then it felt as if someone wrapped their hand around her wrist and urged her forwards. She struggled, but the pull was insistent. She tried to cry out to the king for help, but she found that she couldn’t utter a word. Whether mute from fear or an enchantment, she didn’t know.

Inside her mind, she heard the words
Fear not.
As distinctly as the first time, as clearly as if someone spoke them directly to her. But she was still afraid as she began to move toward the green light. Then as quickly as she came forward, it receded, until it winked out and she stood in the circle of her torch’s fire.

“You thought to thwart me.” King James’s tone was low and angry. The malevolence in his tone gave Susana pause. He sounded not like himself at all. “But I took it.”

Susana was pulled forward again, until she could see into the torture chamber. An old woman had been manacled by each wrist, and hung from chains bolted into the ceiling. She was covered in blood, and her head rested on her chest. But the king…

All she saw was black on blackness; then she made out his silhouette. From the head of his shadow, two horns protruded. Horns like the Devil’s own.

Stunned, she covered her mouth and darted back around the corner. She pressed her back against the stones and bit her lip to keep from screaming.

I did not see that. It is not as it seems
, she told herself.

“Robin?” the king called in a loud voice. “Have you come?”

She was paralyzed with terror. She had to clear her throat twice before she could speak. “I am here, Your Majesty,” she called. “I have your wine, sire. May I approach?”

“You may,” he said grandly.

Her heart stuttered; she laid it down to a miracle that she had the ability to move. She saw the king with his back to her as he lifted the woman’s head by the hair and stared into the glassy eyes. He let the head drop and turned around.

For one moment, his eyes seemed to be completely black. But no, they were his normal, deep-chestnut brown.

“Wine. Good,” said the king.

He reached out a hand to take the cup, and Susana, overcome, sank to one knee in a chivalrous gesture to mask her fear. His fingertips brushed her knuckles and sharp, ice-cold pain burrowed into her bones. Her head lowered, tears welled, and she listened to the thunder banging like drums against the castle walls.

“Did you overhear her confession?” the king asked. He attempted to sound neutral, but she detected an edge of suspicion in his voice. As if, perhaps, Master Robin had seen and heard what he should not.

“No, sire,” she said. “Ought I have?”

“No. It is well with you. I alone must bear that burden. I heard it before she died.”

“That is good, then, Your Majesty,” Susana forced herself to say.

His reply was a mean chuckle, nearly a snigger, like that of a small boy who had committed an offense, and reveled in not having gotten caught.

God strike me dead for thinking poorly of the king, but there is something amiss
, she thought, as the king drank down the wine.
Something very wrong
.

The room spun. She felt her heart hammering in her chest, followed by a frisson of awful, life-threatening fear that skittered up her spine.

There is nothing here for me to do
, she told herself,
but to obey the commands of my king. That is where my duty ends.

“Take this cup from me,” King James ordered her. He sighed with mournful weariness as he held it out to her. “Ah, would that you could take it all from me.”

As she took the cup, words poured into her mind:
It will be taken from him, and you shall help.

As if to stifle her from crying out, a kiss brushed upon her cheek, bestowed by one invisible.

Fear not
, said the voice. But she was more afraid than she had ever been in her entire life.

Like a dirge, like a march to the scaffold, thunder beat against the castle as Susana and King James left the torture chamber. But Susana had the worst feeling that she would be back there soon, in a very horrible way.

Here Endeth Part the First

Life in a Shoe

Heidi R. Kling

“There was an old woman who lived in a shoe,

Who had so many children she didn’t know what to do,

So she gave them some broth without any bread

And whipped them all soundly and put them to bed.”

– Mother Goose

S
HE
wasn’t always like this.

Before the New Rule, when it was just Zeb and me, she’d take us outside and push us on the swings higher, higher! And we’d lean back so far my hair would breeze the sand and Zeb would jump off and we’d all laugh like pure happiness in the sun and the wind.

But since the New Rule, since choice was a thing of the past, she’d had one baby after another after another, turning our two to four, our six to eight, until there were ten of us (and counting) living in one shoe-box apartment south of a town no one cared about.

The twelve of us shared two bedrooms and one bathroom.

She shared her room with the youngest of us: the baby and the toddlers, too young to sleep alone. The rest of us piled into the second room. Four boys sharing a double mattress on the floor—one Zeb found behind the dumpster, stained with urine and other stuff I tried not to think about. They slept Charlie Bucket style, while the girls—my two younger sisters and myself—shared one lone twin.

When our father was on leave from the military he shared the room with her, and I took care of the babies in the living room, in front of the wall TV. It was constantly left on, blasting segments of news footage from the wars around the world: Iran and Israel the most recent and, apparently, the most popular of the five.

Father’s visits were a mixed blessing.

We liked his regulation pockets, lined with lint-covered candy. Oh, we’d line up like it was the best thing since sliced bread (which it was). He’d pat our heads and let the boys count his new scars, and then look over at mom and, in a voice not unlike the war reporters’, say, “Now it’s your turn for a treat, old lady.”

The last time he came home, her dress was clean, clear from milk stains on the breast. Her dark hair was combed, her lips shining with gloss she must’ve stolen, because no way could we afford that. She’d smiled and let him drag her into the bedroom like he was the best thing since sliced bread (which was arguable) and I’d turned up the volume of the limbless soldiers and rotting crop news until Mom banged a warning on the wall.

Why must the little ones be exposed to their noises? That was the real warning: a shrill sound, an alarm, a warning that in a few months, long after he’d gone, we’d see the result of his visit.

The stomach swell of another mouth we couldn’t feed.

After Dad left, her smile lasted only until the sickness began. Her groaning was replaced with hurls of vomit into the toilet, or sometimes the kitchen sink if she couldn’t make it in time.

“You okay, Mom?” I asked. She slapped my hand off her shoulder with the growl of a rabid dog. My eyes stung more than my hand. But I was used to this. And as her stomach grew, so did her anger.

“Warm up the broth!” she shouted on a day she was particularly agitated.

“Don’t we have any bread? The cupboards are bare.”

“Of course we have no bread. If we did, don’t you think I’d give it to you?”