Wolves Among Us (22 page)

“I have always allowed these tests, my friends,” Bastion said. “There are lawfully prescribed tests to know if a woman is a witch. Woe unto me if I am not careful in my work, for the very souls of these women are in my hands.”

“Prove to us they are witches, or leave this village today,” Stefan said.

“If you had labored with me, Father, you would have seen proof already, but you have chosen to spend your time cowering in your church, too afraid to confront the Devil. Did I not see even Dame Alice here trying to drag you out? But to appease you, let us test the women.”

Bastion grabbed Nelsa by the elbow, pulling her to her feet. Nelsa stood much shorter than Bastion, her head coming to his shoulder. Her face grieved him. He had never seen it so red from tears.

“Tie her with her wrists around her back,” he ordered. A man stepped forward, taking a rope from Bastion’s chair.

“What is the test?” Stefan asked.

Bastion waited for the knot to be tied, then took hold of her arm and walked through the crowd, dragging Nelsa behind him. She began to cry again. Dame Alice lunged after her, trying to grab her away, but Erick restrained her, pressing her face into his cloak, whispering in her ear, trying to calm her. He looked at Stefan with an awful expression. Stefan shook his head. He had no answers. He had done everything he knew to do.

“Mercy,” Nelsa cried out, searching for a face that had kindness upon it. “Mercy. I am no witch.”

“Then why did my son die in your arms?” a blacksmith called from the crowd.

“Sir, I do not know! That is the work of God, not me!”

“God would never allow that! You should burn for your crimes!”

“What is this test?” Stefan yelled, trying to catch up and cut through the crowd following Bastion. Bastion led them to the river, which stood at the south from the village. Stefan heard it before he saw it, the sound of the moving water and the life in the trees that went right to the edge. Bastion led them through the trees, into the water, walking out several paces with Nelsa, turning her to face the crowd.

“It is a well-known fact that a witch cannot drown. A witch has given the Devil everything that has made her human. In the water, without heart or spirit in her body, she is weightless.” Bastion walked Nelsa further out into the fast-moving water. Stefan saw the whitecaps moving in the same direction as the dark clouds touching the horizon. A storm descended. Bastion walked her out until the water came to his chest and nearly to her chin. He shoved her deeper in and let go.

Nelsa screamed, just once. Stefan saw her head bob up, her mouth gasping for air. But the whitecaps slammed water in her face, and she took in more water than air.

“Save her, Father,” a woman beside him on the banks whispered to him.

Stefan turned, sick from the vision of Nelsa. “What can I do?”

Nelsa did not surface again. Bastion walked back to the shore, shivering. The villagers stood, dazed, watching the water for signs of life. The whitecaps rolled on.

Stefan grabbed him by the arm. “She did not float. She drowned. She was innocent.”

“The water ran cold today.” Bastion rubbed his arms, shivering.

“She was innocent,” Stefan repeated.

The villagers looked back and forth between the two men.

Bastion turned to them. “Did you see the way she fought? Did you hear her scream? She did float—I saw it—but Satan took her under. She wanted to confess everything.” He clucked his teeth. “You are in greater danger than I imagined.”

Someone took off their wrap and offered it to Bastion, who accepted it with thanks and set back toward the village.

One by one the crowd turned and followed Bastion. None of them looked at Stefan again. Stefan waded out into the water, his hands skimming the surface. As if she might surface, as if it were not already too late for her. And for him.

Stefan stood in the green water, motionless. He watched it flow past, the current urging him to follow Nelsa in death. He closed his eyes, imaging the sweet, cold water flowing over his face, pushing him down, underneath the world, to a better place, a quiet place where God alone took responsibility for suffering. A place where God answered every question from a crystal throne. A place where His rule gave perfect clarity. Stefan would be just another soul in His care. His troubles would be over. There would be no more riddles, no more confusion as he stood helpless beneath the cross.

Stefan took another step deeper out in the water.

A hand grabbed him around the ankle, and he heard a cry again, but as if from another room.

He screamed, pushing back through the water for the trees, finding his footing and running until his side burned so badly he had to stop and breathe. He had imagined that. He was distraught. A branch had caught him by the hem. He glanced back in the direction of the river. Nelsa’s body was already far from here. She was dead.

“You must choose,”
someone whispered.

Stefan covered his ears with his hands.

“What do you want from me?” Stefan screamed. “Am I in the place of God?”

“You must choose. Are you a shepherd or a hired man?”

Stefan saw no one near, no animals fleeing in fear. Alone he cowered under a tree.

“Choose,”
came the voice, much further away, an echo from the mountains that surrounded the river.

“Choose.”

Stefan watched the full moon outside his window in the dormitory. He could not sleep, not with the outrageous light pouring in his room at this hour. Prayers would begin soon anyway.
There is no point to sleeping,
he thought.
I cannot find rest. I do not know what I heard or what it meant.

Bastion slept at the other end of the room and did not stir. His sleep was always deep and calm.

Bastion finds rest. What is wrong with me, that I try to do what is right and cannot sleep?
he thought.
He brings terror, and God blesses him with sleep. Have I been so wrong about You, Jesus? Do I even know Your voice?

Stefan sneaked out still in his bare feet, the wood floor blessedly quiet. He stood blinking in the moonlight, listening to the sounds of the sleeping village. He heard rats rustling through the gutters and empty market stalls across the lane. Rats here grew to be the size of cats, and the cats had given up trying to catch and eat them. The air, so crisp and clean it almost sparkled, told him that no one had begun throwing wood and manure into their fire to cook breakfast.

She’s not sleeping,
he thought.
She can’t be, not in this moonlight.

Stefan approached the cage. The cover lay on the ground. The witch Ava looked up at the moon and turned when he came near.

“Would you cover me?” she asked. “I do not want to see the moon anymore.”

“It is beautiful tonight.”

“I like being covered,” she said.

Stefan lifted the cover and began throwing it over the edge of the cage, moving around to each corner, pulling and tugging it into place. He stopped when he reached the last end. He couldn’t see her very well now, just her silhouette. She sat, her legs crossed, facing him.

“You should speak it out loud,” she said. “It’s why you cannot sleep.”

Stefan looked up at the sky. He couldn’t see any stars. Just that brilliant white eye, staring blindly at the world below.

“You are not a true believer,” she whispered.

“In Bastion? No.”

“In God. Why else would you be here, talking to a condemned witch before dawn? You cannot sleep because you do not believe.”

“I do not believe in myself. Nothing I say seems true.”

“You believe in the power of your words. That is the poison you drink.”

Stefan yanked his head back as if she’d scratched him.

“Bastion teaches with words, yes,” she said, “but he is a man of action. He has worked since he arrived. That is why he sleeps so well.”

“Bastion is wrong,” Stefan said, glancing behind him.

“Are you jealous? He has many followers, even here in your own village. Your own people love him over you.”

“It’s not love. It’s fear. What he does makes them fear.”

“Then make them fear you. Or love you. It looks the same to me.”

Stefan groaned and flicked the cover over the last portion of cage.
I should sleep,
he thought.
This will profit me nothing.

“Father, look upon me. Bastion offers me freedom. He has given me a way to atone for my sins, to satisfy this guilt that is eating me alive every minute. I gave him a witch, a woman to terrify the crowds. But you and I? I can offer you nothing. And what have you offered me?”

“I offered you the truth.” He pulled the cover back up. He wanted to see her face.

“But what good is your so-called truth to me?” She scrambled to him, her face inches from his, her filthy fingers wrapping around the bars. He flinched, but she could no longer hide the humanity in her eyes. “Will your truth mend my heart?” she continued. “Will it make me forget my son? Will it set me free of the guilt and pain that pierces me through every time I take a breath? I don’t want your truth. I want peace. I want my son. Can you give me that?”

“No. But I can bring you beer,” he said.
Saints help me,
he prayed.
I am losing my mind. I am reduced to offering drink instead of wise counsel.

She wiped her face, streaking black from her palms across her cheeks. She blinked rapidly before answering. “Yes.”

Stefan returned with a tall mug of his best beer. Water would kill a woman in such a weak state, but he used the best grains, the most careful attention, for his beer. Many ailing people felt renewed after a mug. Probably the only miracle he had ever offered or witnessed.

He couldn’t fit it through the bars, so she pressed her face against the bars, opening her mouth, and he poured it in. He tried to be careful and not spill it, pushing the mug against the bars, watching how he tilted it, willing the stream to go slow and not spill over.

She drank it all, using her long skirt under her shift to wipe at her mouth, leaving a wet stain across it.

He looked at her, this mess he had created. She looked down at herself, then at him and burst into laughter.

“Shhh,” he urged, glancing behind. “I would be stoned for this.”

“I have not tasted beer since my arrest. Just spoiled wine reeking like vinegar, whatever dross Bastion did not trust to give the village pigs. And never clean water, though I am tortured by the sound of the rivers as we travel. You cannot imagine my thirst.”

She looked up at the moon, squinting.

“One time,” Stefan said, “I ruined a batch of my father’s beer, spoiled the hops, letting them ferment, so I fed them to my mother’s pigs. I didn’t know pigs could get drunk. My father came home from the fields and found all his pigs staggering about, foaming at the mouth. He thought them possessed, so he ran them all off into the forest out of fear for his life. We had no bacon that winter.”

She laughed, and Stefan did too, shaking his head.

She reached her hand through the bars at him.

Stefan remembered the beating she had given him, but he did not step away. Her hand touched his face. He reached up and caught her face too, and they stood in the strong moonlight, not looking away from each other.

A light shifted in the dormitory windows as someone inside walked past a candle.

Stefan dropped his hand and replaced the covering. He ran inside the church before his crime could be discovered.