SPELL CAST

The crow with the red eyes, who in human form was Nightshade, sat high in the branches of a shagbark hickory and watched Mistaya return out of the nighttime woods. The girl materialized abruptly, a silent, stealthy shadow. Made blind to her presence by the Earth Mother’s magic, the sentries did not spy her, staring right through her as she passed, as if there were nothing to see. The girl moved quickly to her blanket, wrapped it about herself, lay down, and closed her eyes. In seconds she was asleep.

The crow cast a sharp eye across the clearing and into the woods beyond. There was no sign of the mud puppy. Well and good.

The presence of the mud puppy had upset Nightshade’s plans. She had not anticipated its appearance and still did not know its particular purpose. She was aware that it served the Earth Mother, of course, but that did not explain what had brought it to the girl. A summons from the Earth Mother? Possibly. Probably, as a matter of fact. But why had the Earth Mother summoned the girl this night? Did she know of Nightshade’s intent? Had she warned the girl in some way? None of this seemed likely. Just as Nightshade could not penetrate the Earth Mother’s magic to discover why she had dispatched the mud puppy, neither could the Earth Mother penetrate Nightshade’s magic to reveal what lay in store for the girl. Either could gain a sense of what the other was about, but no more than that. It was a stalemate of sorts. So any attempt to follow the mud puppy and the girl in an effort to discover what the Earth Mother intended would have been quickly thwarted. Worse, it would have revealed Nightshade’s presence in the lake country, and that could easily have ruined everything.

In any case, the girl had returned alone, so the Earth Mother must have finished with her. The fact that she had returned at all strongly suggested that she knew nothing of Nightshade’s plans, so there was probably no reason to worry. Not that the Witch of the Deep Fell would have worried much in any event. Had the Earth Mother or her four-legged messenger chosen to interfere, Nightshade would have found a way to make them regret the decision for a long time to come. The witch’s magic was much stronger than the Earth Mother’s, and she could have sent the elemental scurrying for cover in a hurry.

The crow with the red eyes blinked contentedly. All was as it should be. The Earth Mother had probably summoned the girl to pay her respects as a longtime friend and protector of her mother. Now the girl was right back where Nightshade wanted her, sleeping amid her decidedly ineffectual protectors, blissfully unaware of how her life was about to change.

Nightshade had known that Holiday would send his daughter away when Rydall made his threat against their family. She had known exactly what Holiday would do. The sylph’s premonition—the one Nightshade had dispatched to her in her sleep, as black and terrifying as the witch could make it—had planted the seed for the idea. Rydall’s appearance had brought the seed to flower. Whatever else might happen, Holiday and the sylph would take no chances with their beloved daughter. Nightshade hadn’t known where the girl would be sent, although the lake country and the once-fairy had been her first guess, but in truth it didn’t matter. Wherever Mistaya might have gone, Nightshade would have been waiting.

And now it was time.

Using not just vision but instinct as well, the red eyes made a final sweep of the clearing and the woods surrounding it, a final search of the shadows and the dark where something might hide. Nothing revealed itself. The red eyes gleamed. Nightshade smiled inwardly. The sleeping men and the girl belonged to her now.

The crow took wing, lifting away from the branch on which it had kept watch, soaring momentarily skyward, circling the clearing, then dropping down again in a slow spiral. They were in the last few hours of the waning night, the ones leading into the new day, the ones during which sleep is deepest and dreams hold sway. Darkness and silence cloaked the men and the girl and their animals, and none sensed the presence of the descending crow. It passed over their heads unseen and unheard. It swept across them twice to make certain, but even the sentries, watchful once more now that the girl had returned and the Earth Mother’s vision spell had been lifted, saw nothing.

The crow banked slowly left across Mistaya, then flew back again, its shadow passing over the small, still form like the comforting touch of a mother’s hand. On each pass a strange green dust that winked and spun in the moonlight was released from the crow’s dark wings like pollen from a flower and floated earthward to settle over the sleeping girl. Four passes the crow made, and on each the greenish dust fell like a mossy veil. Mistaya breathed it in as she slept, smiled at its fragrance, and pulled her blanket tighter for comfort. Slowly her sleep deepened, and she drifted farther from consciousness. Dreams claimed her, a conjuring of her most vivid imaginings, and she was carried swiftly away into their light.

The crow rose skyward again and circled back into the shelter of the trees. Now the girl would sleep until Nightshade was ready for her to wake. She would sleep and be no part of what was to happen next.

Descending by hops from branch to branch, the crow passed downward through the concealing limbs until it was only a few feet above the ground. Then it transformed into Nightshade, the witch rising out of feathers and wings in a swirl of dark robes to stand again on the earth in the night shadows. Tall and regal, her beauty as dazzling and cold as newly fallen snow, her black hair with its single white streak swept back from her aquiline face, her smile as hard as stone, she gathered her magic about her and stepped out from the trees and into the moonlit clearing.

In her dreams Mistaya was a bird with snow-white feathers flying across a land of bright colors. There were forests of emerald green, fields of butter yellow and spring mint, mountains of licorice and chocolate, hills of crimson and violet, lakes of azure, and rivers of silver and gold. Everywhere wildflowers bloomed, sprinkled across the land like fairy dust.

A bird with black feathers flew next to her, leading the way, showing her the miracle that lay below. The other bird said nothing; it had no need for words. Its thoughts and feelings buoyed Mistaya’s small feathered body. She was borne as if on a wind, sailing down their currents, riding atop their gusts, stretching out to soar along their slides. It was wondrous, and it gave her an intoxicating sense of having the entire world at her wing tips.

The flight wore on, and they passed over people looking up from down below. The people craned their necks and pointed. Some called out to her and beckoned. They were people she had known in another life, in another form, and had left behind. They might have loved and cared for her once; they might even have helped nurture her when she was a fledgling. Now they were trying to lure her back to them, to draw her down so that they could cage her. They begrudged her the freedom she had found. They resented the fact that they no longer controlled her destiny. There was anger and disappointment and envy in their voices as they called out, and she found herself eager to get far away from them. She flew on without slowing, without looking back. She flew on toward her future.

Beside her the bird with black feathers turned to look at her, and she could see its red eyes glimmer with approval.

Having come completely clear of her shadowy concealment within the trees, Nightshade turned her attention first to the two sentries who kept watch at either end of the little clearing. She let them see her, all cloaked and hooded, a tall black shape as menacing as death. When they turned their weapons toward her, knowing instinctively that she was trouble, she brought up her hands and sent her magic lancing into them in twin flashes of wicked green fire. The sentries were engulfed before they could cry out, and when the fire died, they had been transformed into rocks the size of bread loaves, rocks that steamed and spit like live coals.

The Witch of the Deep Fell came forward another few steps. She pointed at the line that tethered the caravan’s animals, and it flared and turned to ash. The horses, Lightfoot and Owl among them, bolted away. Nightshade gestured almost casually at the camp’s cook fire, now no more than a clump of dying embers, and it flared alive, rising upward toward the heavens as if it had become some fiery phantasm risen from the earth. A moment later Mistaya’s carriage burst into flames as well.

Now the remaining members of the King’s Guards woke, blinking against the sudden light, scrambling clear of their blankets, and reaching instinctively for their weapons. They were pitifully slow. Nightshade transformed five of them before they even knew what was happening, catching them up in her magic, turning them to stones. The others were quicker, a few even swift enough to leap up and start toward her. But she pointed at them one after the other, a dark angel of destruction, and they were struck down. In seconds the last of them were gone.

Now the clearing was empty of everyone but Nightshade, the sleeping girl, and the astonished and confused Questor Thews and Abernathy. The latter two stood in front of Mistaya to protect her from harm. Everything had happened so quickly, they had barely had time to wake and come to her side. Questor Thews was weaving some sort of protective spell, his hands, as old and dry as twigs, making shadow pictures in the glare of the revived fire. Nightshade collapsed the spell before it could form and came forward to stand within the light. She swept back her hood and revealed herself.

“Don’t bother, Questor Thews,” she advised as he prepared to try again. “No magic will save you this time.”

The old man stared at her, trembling with rage and indignation. “Nightshade, what have you done?” he exclaimed in a hoarse whisper.

“Done?” she repeated, indignant. “Nothing that I did not intend, wizard. Nothing that I have not planned for two long years. Do you begin to see now how hopeless things are for you?”

Abernathy was edging away, searching for a weapon to use against her. She made a sharp gesture, and he froze in his tracks.

“Better, scribe, if you stay where you are.” She smiled at him, contented by the feeling of power that washed through her.

Questor Thews straightened himself, attempting as he did so to regain his dignity. “You overreach yourself, Nightshade,” he declared bravely. “The High Lord will not tolerate this.”

“The High Lord will have his hands full just trying to stay alive, I think,” she replied, her smile growing broader. “Oh, I think he will have them quite full. Too bad you won’t be there to help him. Either of you.”

Questor Thews saw the truth of things then. “You have come for the girl, haven’t you? For Mistaya?”

“She belongs to me,” said the witch. “She has always belonged to me! She was born out of my soil, in my haven, from my magic! She should have been given to me then, but the fairies intervened. But not this time, wizard. This time I will have her. And when I am finished, she will not ever wish to leave me.”

The fire roared and crackled in the night’s deep silence, an enthusiastic accomplice to the witch’s scheme. Questor Thews and Abernathy were scarecrow figures trapped within its light, helpless to escape. But they refused to crumble.

“Holiday will come for her,” the old man insisted stubbornly, “even if we are gone.”

Nightshade laughed. “You do not listen very well, Questor Thews. Holiday must deal with Rydall first, and Rydall will see him destroyed. I have planned it, and I will see it come to pass. The King of Marnhull is my creature, and he will bring about Holiday’s destruction as surely as the sun will rise on the new day. Holiday will struggle against his fate, and that will give me great pleasure to watch, but in the end he will succumb. Stripped of his child, his friends, and eventually his wife as well, he will die all alone and forsaken. Nothing less will satisfy me. Nothing less will serve to repay me for what I have been made to suffer.”

“Rydall is your doing?” the wizard whispered in shock.

“All of it is my doing—all that has come about and all that will be. I have made it my life’s work to see the play-King reduced to nothing, and I will not be disappointed.”

Abernathy edged forward a step. “Nightshade, you cannot do this. Let Mistaya go. She is only a child.”

“Only a child?” The smile fled from Nightshade’s face. “No, scribe, that is exactly what she is not. That is where you have all been so mistaken. I should know. I see myself in her. I see what I was. I see what she can be. I will give her the knowledge that you would keep hidden. I will shape her as she was meant to be shaped. She harbors within her soul demons waiting to be unleashed; I will help her set them free. She has the power of a child’s imagination, and I will use that. Let this be your final thought. When I am done with her, she will become for me the instrument of the play-King’s destruction! One more time will he see her, will he clasp her to him, a snake to his breast, and on that day he will breathe his last!”

She saw the hopelessness in their eyes as she finished and waited for them to react. Questor Thews was already trying furtively to gather back his scattered magic in a spell of protection, his gnarled fingers working in the shadow of his skinny body. She smiled at the futility of his effort.

None of them saw Haltwhistle edge out of the forest shadows to stand just within the clearing far to one side, splayed feet padding gingerly, sad eyes watchful.

“What do you intend to do to us?” Abernathy demanded, risking a quick glance over his shoulder at Mistaya. He was wondering why she did not wake up.

“Yes, Nightshade, what?” Questor Thews pressed. He was trying to give them more time so that he could complete the forming of his spell, not realizing that he was already far too late. “Would you turn us into rocks as well?”

Nightshade smiled. “No, wizard, I would not bother with anything so prosaic where you are concerned. Nor you, scribe. You have been a constant source of irritation to me, but you have interfered for the last time. Your lives end here. No one will ever see either of you again.”

There was a moment in which time froze, the witch’s words drifting away on the crackle of the fire. Then Questor Thews’s hands came up, magic flaring in a wide arc before him. Abernathy turned swiftly toward Mistaya and reached down in an attempt to snatch her up. Nightshade laughed. Her arms extended, green fire exploded from her fingertips, and her magic rushed forward in a surge of energy and dark intent to engulf her victims.

As all this was happening, Haltwhistle’s head drooped, his body slumped, the hackles on the back of his neck rose, and something akin to a mix of moonlight and frost rose off his cringing form and rocketed across the clearing. An instant before Nightshade’s magic struck Questor Thews and Abernathy, smashing the wizard’s flimsy shield to smithereens, the moon/frost reached them first.

Then the witch fire consumed them, and they were gone in an instant’s time. Nothing remained but smoke and the stench of something charred and ruined.

Nightshade wheeled about. What was it she had seen? That odd glow come out of nowhere? Her eyes swept the clearing quickly, then reached into the woods beyond. Nothing. She narrowed her gaze. There had been something, hadn’t there? She lifted her hands and sent witch light deep into the trees, seeking out any living thing concealed there. Small rodents, insects, and a handful of ground birds scattered before her power. But there was nothing else.

She turned back finally, vaguely dissatisfied. The clearing was empty of everyone save herself and the girl. The King’s Guards had been turned to stones. The wizard and the dog were gone, never to be seen again. Everything had happened as she had intended. She was free to continue with her plans.

Still …

She brushed aside her misgivings in annoyance, walked over to the sleeping girl, and stared down at her. So much to be done with you, little one, she thought in satisfaction. So many lessons to be taught, so many secrets to be revealed, so many tricks to be played. Can you hear what I am thinking?

The girl stirred within her blankets, dreaming.

Yes, sleep on, the Witch of the Deep Fell urged silently. Tomorrow your new life begins.

She bent down then and lifted the girl into the cradle of her arms. Light, like a feather quilt, she was. Nightshade stared down at her new child and smiled.

Then she turned the air about them to icy mist. A moment later the clearing was deserted.