Ilse Witch

She gestured him away and to the side, and he moved as if a puppet in response. “Wait here for me,” she said. “Wait, until I return.”


She went out the door into the night, a spectral figure sliding effortlessly and soundlessly through the shadows. The Ilse Witch liked the darkness, found comfort in it she could never find in daylight. The darkness soothed and shaded, softening edges and points, reducing clarity. Vision lost importance because the eyes could be deceived. A shift of movement here changed the look of something there. What was certain in the light became suspect in the dark. It mirrored her life, a collage of images and voices, of memories that had shaped her growing, not all fitting tightly in sequence, not all linked together in ways that made sense. Like the shadows with which she so closely identified, her life was a patchwork of frayed ends and loose threads that invited refitting and mending. Her past was not carved of stone, but drawn on water. Reinvent yourself, she had been told by the Morgawr a long time ago. Reinvent yourself, and you will become more inscrutable to those who might try to unravel who you really are.

In the night, in darkness and shadows, she could do s1o more easily. She could keep what she looked like to herself and conceal who she really was. She could let them imagine her, and by doing so keep them forever deceived.

She moved through the village without challenge, encountering almost no one, those few she did unaware of her presence as they passed. It was late, the village mostly asleep, the ones who preferred the night busy in the ale houses and pleasure dens, caught up in their own wants and needs, uncaring of what transpired without. She could forgive them their weaknesses, these men and women, but she could never accept them as equals. Long since, she had abandoned any pretense that she believed their common origins linked them in any meaningful way. She was a creature of fire and iron. She was born to magic and power. It was her destiny to shape and alter the lives of others and never to be altered by them. It was her passion to rise above the fate that others had cast for her as a child and to visit revenge on them for daring to do so. She would be so much more than they, and they would be forever less.

When she let them speak her name again, when she chose to speak it herself, it would be remembered. It would not be buried in the ashes of her childhood, as it had once been. It would not be cast aside, a fragment of her lost past. It would soar with a hawk’s smooth glide and shine with the milky brightness of the moon. It would linger on the minds of the people of her world forever.

The Healer’s house lay ahead, close by the trees of the surrounding forest. She had flown in from the Wilderun late that afternoon, come out of her safehold in response to the spy’s message, sensing its importance, wanting to discover for herself what secrets it held. She had left her War Shrike in the old growth below the bluffs, its fierce head hooded and its taloned feet hobbled. It would bolt otherwise, so wild that even her magic could not hold it when she was absent. But as a fighting bird, it was without equal. Even the giant Rocs were wary of it, for the Shrike fought to the death with little thought to protecting itself. No one would see it, for she had cast a spell of forbidding about it to keep the unwanted away. By sunrise, she would have returned. By sunrise, she would be gone again, even given the dictates of what she must do now.

She slipped through the door of the Healer’s home on cat’s paws, moving through the central rooms to the sick bays, humming softly as she passed the attendants on duty, turning their minds inward and eyes elsewhere as she passed so they would not see her. The ones who kept watch outside the castaway’s curtained entry, she put to sleep. They sank into their chairs and leaned against walls and tables, eyes going closed, breathing slowing and deepening. It was quiet and peaceful in the Healer’s home, and her song fit snugly into place. She layered the air with her music, a tender blanket tucking in around the cautions and uneasiness that might otherwise have been triggered. Soon, she was all alone and free to work.