A WITCH IN FAERIE
By
RANDY CHANDLER
art by Daniel Rosenberg
Deep in the Faerie Wood the stump witch brooded. Someone --or something-- was interfering with her spells. Her incantations tripped clumsily over her tongue, coming out all wrong, often with disastrous results. Her herbal cures and mystical prescriptions seemed of late to have no affect, and Catkin, her longtime feline companion, was off his feed, and his usual sweet temperament had turned nasty.
"Something's amiss, Mither Mawkins," the stump witch said to herself, "and I mean to ferret the cause of the malady."
She walked out of her little stone house, sat down at her willow stump, and cast the runes upon the stump's burnished surface. The lettered shingles fell with an ominous clatter, but the runic symbols spelled nothing but gibberish. "Zook's thunder!" she cursed.
Next she cast the knucklebones of a troll, but try as she might (and mightily she did), Mither Mawkins could divine nothing from those jointed digits. She swept the knucklebones off the stump and onto the ground. Catkin eyed her warily, then sauntered away with an insolent twitch of his tail.
"Don't think I didn't see that, rat-breath," she shouted after him. "One more insult and I'll turn you back into a pussywillow." If only I could, she lamented.
She spat three times round the stump, then went into the stone house to get her cloak and willow-wand. Pulling the cowl over her iron-gray hair, she set off to make the rounds of the Faerie Wood.
"When witchery won't do," said Mither Mawkins, "womanly wiles will have to."
Her first stop was Booty Hill, home of the thieving Spriggans. She rapped her willow-wand against the tiny mouth of their cave and called: "Spriggans! Mither Mawkins would have a word with you!"
They came roiling out of their cave, a tumbling scrum of arms and legs and ugly faces, biting and swatting one another for the sport of it. At last they disentangled and stood, all six of them, at the feet of the witch.
"What's the word, Mither?" asked Bir the Spriggan leader. The brown fur on top of his head stood up in spiky clumps like a matted headdress.
"Yes, Mither, tell us the word," chirped Tir as he picked a pebble from his bird-like beak and gazed up at her with slanty eyes.
Fir, Wir, Vir and Dir chorused: "The word, the word."
Mither Mawkins held up her willow-wand to silence the sassy Spriggans. She narrowed her eyes and gave them a look to remember in their nightmares (if they had nightmares).
"The word," she said, "is skullduggery..."
As all of one mind, the Spriggans simultaneously curled their rodent-like tails round their spindly legs in their instinctive posture of defense.
"Skullduggery," Mither Mawkins repeated, letting the word settle over the Spriggans like a dark cloud.
"We don't know nothing about that," said Bir finally. "Thuggery, buggery, muggery, sure. But duggery of the skull? Horse manure!"
"Watch your filthy tongue, Spriggan Bir," she warned with her best evil eye.
Bir stuck out his lizardly tongue and crossed his beady eyes to look at it.
Wir uncoiled his tail and gathered courage enough to speak to the stump witch. "Honest, Mither, we know nothing of this skullish business. We're simple thieves."
"Minor villains," added Vir.
"Sure, we kidnap babies sometimes," said Fir, "and leave a baby Spriggan in its place, but that's all for a lark, you see."
"We might blight a few crops here and there, or stir up a whirlwind or two, but that's all the magic we know," Bir said with all the sincerity he could muster.
"True enough," she said, "not a one of you is cunning enough to be behind this wicked business." She rubbed her pointy chin thoughtfully, then said, "Keep your ears to the ground and let me know if you hear anything out of the usual way."
"We will, Mither," pledged Bir with his bony hand over his heart.
"If you don't...." The stump witch raised her willow-wand high in the air.
The Spriggans cringed in unison, then scurried back into their dark hole, no doubt to keep close watch over their stolen treasures.
Mither Mawkins chuckled to herself, then proceeded to her next stop in the Faerie Wood.
The Asrai sisters were shading themselves on the grassy bank of the emerald pool, relishing the seclusion and the deep shadows afforded by the overhanging trees. When the two naked faeries saw the human lumbering through the undergrowth, they immediately melted, leaving two tiny puddles of golden liquid on the ground where they had been.
"Wait, sisters!" the cowled human cried. "It's only me! Mither Mawkins. Come back."
Like two little waterfalls rising up instead of falling downward, the Asrai sisters re-assumed their comely shapes, the last of the twin puddles disappearing into their feet.
"Wishes, Mither," sang Azri.
"Blessings, Mither," sang Azra.
"Yes, yes, thank you, ladies. I just wanted to ask you, have you noticed anything...untoward lately?"
Azra looked puzzled. Azri said, "Toward the un? Goodness, no. Unless..."
"Less the un?" queried Azra, looking even more puzzled.
"Unless," Azri continued her thought, "you mean yourself, Mither, when we saw you walking in the air."
Mither Mawkins sighed. She had forgotten how difficult it was communicating with the Aasrai; their small brains were attuned to music no one else hears and little else. "You didn't see me walking in the air," she said.
"Oh, but we did," insisted Asra.
"We did," echoed Azri. "And when we asked you what you were doing, you growled at us."
"And frightened us so that we melted away for the rest of the day."
"Sisters, you are mistaken. I don't know how to walk in the air. I don't know any witch who does, though they say it is possible for one with power enough."
"But it looked like you, Mither," said Azri. "Except for the eyes."
"What about the eyes?" asked the stump witch.
"Oh, they were terrible!" Azra trembled.
"Red and shining!" Azri quailed.
"Well, my eyes are black, as you can plainly see."
As the Asrai sisters went on about the air-walking witch, earthbound Mither Mawkins ambled off, wondering what the little faeries had actually seen.
Next she stopped at the bank of the river that courses through the heart of the Faerie Wood. She bent down, picked up a rock, spit on it, then tossed it into the water. A moment later Peg Powler surfaced, her huge mouth opening and closing like a guppy's, her big eyes scouring the riverbank for prey.
"Hullo, Peg. I don't suppose you've seen anything strange hereabouts, have you?"
"None stranger than you, witch," Peg Powler said in a deep, watery voice.
"Meaning what, then?" Mither Mawkins scowled at the river-prowler and stealer of children.
Peg's long hair floated about her shoulders like flattened marsh grass, and the puffy, wrinkled flesh of her face hung like melting tallow from her oversized skull. "Strange it was to see you walking across the river without getting your feet wet," she said in a tone of disapproval.
"I never--" She stilled her own tongue. There was no point in telling Peg Powler that a mere stump witch has not the power to walk on water.
"Practice your black arts elsewhere, witch," Peg growled. "I'll not have you scaring children away before I get a chance to take them down."
Peg Powler disappeared below the river's surface, and Mither Mawkins turned and walked toward the road. Now there could be no doubt; someone who looked like her was abroad in the Faerie Forest, performing feats of wizardry unknown to her.
"'LO, STUMPY," boomed a large voice behind her. She turned round just in time to be hit in the face by the wind from the giant's mouth. His breath was fouler than ditch water and twice as rancid.
"Don't call me that, you big oaf," she said to Jack-in-Irons, haunter of lonely roads and collector of bashed heads.
The giant raised his huge club in the air, rattling the chains that festooned his enormous girth. "JACK NOT 'FRAID O' YOU."
"Well, you should be," she bluffed. "I could shrink you down to the size of a flea."
Jack-in-Irons scrunched up his face into an expression of bewilderment. "JACK SEE RIGHT THROUGH YOU," he said, pointing a log-like finger at her. Then he laughed a booming laugh that gave Mither Mawkins a pain in her head.
Thundering Lord, how can this simple-minded behemoth know I've lost my powers? Then as she raised her willow-wand she saw what Jack was talking about: the hand holding the wand was becoming transparent! Near panic, she looked beneath her cloak and saw that her hands were not the only parts of her that she could see through. "I'm fading away," she whispered to herself. "All of me is going."
A Pixie appeared on her shoulder and spoke in a wee voice: "Come with me, I'll show you to safety."
She flicked the puckish sprite off her shoulder, declaring, "I'm not so foolish as to let meself be Pixie-led. Be gone, twit!"
Jack-in-Irons laughed his rolling-thunder laugh again, but Mither Mawkins ignored him and walked on down the road. There was powerful magic at work, and if she didn't soon discover its cause--and its remedy--she would slip into oblivion and altogether cease to be.
She reckoned there was but one chance to come out of this mess with her skin (and the rest of her) intact. What I should've done to begin with, she chided herself. She left the ancient road, cut through the wildest part of the forest and made her way to the forbidding barrow of the Will-o'-the-Wisp. Few faerie folk understood that the Will-o'-the-Wisp was an oracle, and those few were reluctant to consult the mysterious flickering light, the ignis fatuus, for fear that its prognostications were actually curses, but Mither Mawkins had learned that the Wispy One's words were truthful so far as you didn't in some way anger the fiery oracle.
As she approached the partial clearing where the huge mound sat like an island amid a dark sea of trees, she heard a shuffling tread and a rustling of leaves behind her. She spun around and shook her willow-wand at the diminutive willow tree that was stalking her. "I've no time for your nonsense, stupid tree," she hissed. "Away!"
Muttering to itself, the uprooted tree shuffled away, its branches dangling in apparent dejection. The witch turned back to the shadowy barrow and knelt at the foot of the earthy mound. Gazing up at the twisted limbs of the dead tree rooted in the center of the mound, she reached into her mouth, grasped the loosened eyetooth and yanked it out. She ignored the pain, and tossed the bloody tooth onto the barrow as an offering.
"A bit of my blood and bone freely given," she said. "In return I would have your wise counsel, if it please you."
A dim light began to flicker near the exposed roots of the dead tree. The low-hanging limbs seemed to move toward her like the gnarled fingers of a giant hand, feeling the air around her. The eerie light shone brighter and gathered itself into a floating ball of cool fire.
Coming from deep within the barrow, the crusty low-pitched voice spoke: "Here you are not. At your home of stone, death from the shadow."
The fire flickered out. Mither Mawkins got to her feet, and started for home on travel-weary legs. She was too tired to even try to make sense of the oracle's words. All she wanted now was to go home--perhaps for the last time.
The sun was setting when she got home. As the day's light waned, so, it seemed, did she; her body was losing its substance, and her cloak felt as if it might at any moment fall off of what was left of her. Her grip on the willow-wand was tentative at best--as was her grip on life.
"I was wondering when you would show up," said the woman emerging from Mither Mawkins' little house of stone. Catkin rubbed himself against the stranger's ankles.
She stopped in her faint tracks, clinging desperately to the willow-wand. The woman coming out of the house was her double. Not a weakened, transparent Mither Mawkins, but one full of life and brimming with self-confidence. "This cannot be!" she cried. "Who are you?"
"I am the new you," her double said with a hearty laugh.
They stood facing each other over the witch's stump.
"A spitting image, sure enough," she said. "Except the eyes. Your eyes are full of red fire, just like the Asrai said."
"Dragon-fire," boasted the red-eyed witch. "That's right. I mastered the Dragon Spell."
"Then you've lost your soul." The willow-wand slipped from her grip, With great effort she managed to pick it up with both hands.
"I've lost nothing and gained everything. It's you who has lost."
"I don't understand. How can there be two of us?"
The crimson-eyed Mither Mawkins smiled, showing perfect teeth. "You are nothing but a shadow of the self I was," she explained. "And like a shadow, you will be gone with the last light of day."
"No!"
"Yes, my little shadow. When night falls, you shall be gone forever. But I, Mither Mawkins, shall live for hundreds of years."
The fading witch suddenly remembered the enigmatic words of the Will- o'-the-Wisp, and now she knew their meaning. Tightening her grip on the willow-wand as best she could, she leveled it, aiming its sharp end at her foe's chest, and thrust it with all her remaining might into the heart of the usurper. Blood splattered the stump, obscuring some of the sacred symbols carved into its burnished surface. With her eyes flaming fiercely, the wounded witch staggered backwards, mouthing angry curses.
"Death from the shadow," Mither Mawkins repeated the Oracle's words. "And I am the shadow."
The dragon-fire in the dying witch's eyes spread like wind-driven flames, and very quickly the unearthly fire consumed her body.
Turning her back on the burning carcass, the shadow-self of Mither Mawkins sat down on the bloody stump to watch the last light of day fade from the sky.
"Well, Mither Mawkins," she said to herself, "let's see what nightfall brings."