Besieged

The witches huddled together and eyed me through their bearded masks as I hefted Shakespeare over his horse’s back, a task made more difficult by my wound. I did what I could to hide his face from their view and was particularly careful about leaving anything behind for them to use against us later. I located Shakespeare’s vomit and my blood and, with the elemental’s aid, made sure that everything got turned into the earth and buried deep.

I snuffed out the fire too, binding dirt to the wood to smother the unnatural flames, and that not only left the crossroads really dark but prevented the witches from doing much else that night. They complained loudly that they needed it to heal.

“Don’t try to summon Hecate in England again,” I called over their cursing, giving the horses a mental nudge to walk on. “England and Ireland are under my protection. I won’t be so merciful a second time.”

A tap on my cold iron amulet warned me that one or more of them had just tried to hex me. Since Shakespeare didn’t immediately burst into flames or otherwise die a gruesome death, I assumed his talisman protected him as well.

“Good night, now,” I called cheerfully, just to let them know they’d failed, and we left them there to contemplate the profound disadvantages of summoning rituals. The risks are almost always greater than the reward.

Once we were well out of their sight and hearing, I paused to recover my cold iron talisman and place it back in my purse. Shakespeare helpfully remained unconscious until we returned to the stables and his feet touched ground. He was bleary-eyed and vomited again, much to the disgust of the stable boy, but rose gradually to lucidity as his synapses fired and memories returned.

“Marquis! You live! I live!” he said as I led him away to the White Hart, where I would gladly fall into bed in my room. His eyes dropped, and he raised his hands and wiggled his fingers the way people do when they want to make sure that everything still works. “What happened?”

I remembered just in time that I was supposed to have a French accent. “What’s the last thing you remember?”

“The witches—”

“Shh—keep your voice down!”

More quietly, he said, “The witches—they killed those men.”

“Yes, they did. Is that all?”

His eyes drifted up for a moment, trying to access more details, but then dropped back down to me and he nodded. “That’s the last thing I remember.”

Fantastic! That was my cue to fabricate something. “Well, they threw the men in the cauldron, of course, while I threw you over my shoulder to sneak out of there.”

“What? But what happened? Did they eat the men?”

“No, no, it was all divination, the blackest divination possible, powered by blood. They were asking Hecate to reveal the future for them.”

“Zounds, God has surely preserved me from damnation. And you! Thank you, sir, for my life. But what did they say?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“What matters did the hags seek to learn? The future of England?”

“I heard nothing beyond a general request to let the veil of time be withdrawn, that sort of thing. They were out of earshot before they got to specifics.”

“But the chanting, before—you heard all of that; you translated some of it for me. What were their words, exactly—I need a quill and some ink!” He staggered into the White Hart Inn to find some, time of day be damned.

And that put me in the uncomfortable position of creating something that sounded like a spell but wasn’t. I couldn’t very well provide Shakespeare with the words one needed to summon Triple Hecate, knowing that he would immortalize them in ink.

So once he found his writing materials and demanded that I recount everything I could recall, providing a literal translation of the witches’ chanting, I spun him some doggerel and he wrote it down: Double, double toil and trouble…



“And now you know why I shivered, Granuaile, when you said, ‘Fire burn and cauldron bubble.’?”

Granuaile cried, “You wrote the witches’ lines? No way!”

Shrugging and allowing myself a half grin, I said, “You’re right. Shakespeare didn’t write what I said into Macbeth verbatim. He played around with it a bit and made it fit his meter. Much better than what I said, to be sure. And the mystery of Hecate’s summoning remained a mystery.”

“The words alone wouldn’t have been sufficient to do the deed, would they?”

“Not initially; I was worried about the cumulative effect. With such frequent invocation, the goddess might have grown stronger and chosen to manifest at any time, with or without a sacrifice, and you don’t want that version of Hecate to appear in a packed theatre.”

Granuaile shook her head. “No, you don’t. Why did they curse the play, then?”

“Shakespeare never saw Hecate summoned but knew that the witches looked to her somehow, so she got written into Macbeth. The Hecate in his play is a single character and not particularly fearsome or strong. They thought his portrayal was demeaning, and that inspired the curse.”

“So they remained in England?”

“Long enough to see the play, yes. I don’t think they realized that they had met the playwright in the past; they simply took grave offense and foolishly cursed it in concert within the hearing of others. They were caught and burned soon afterward.”

<I’m kind of glad I didn’t live in that time, Atticus,> Oberon said. <Over-boiled sausages are so disappointing. Dry and flavorless like kibble.>

That was your takeaway? Bad sausage at the White Hart Inn?

<Wasn’t that the climax to your tragedy? Or was it the end where you and Shakespeare never even took a spoonful of what they were cooking in that cauldron?>

It wasn’t a tragedy, Oberon. Nobody died except for those three guys, and that was only because they were too stupid to leave us alone.

<Nobody ate anything delicious either, so it sounded like a tragedy to me. I mean, you had witches smeared with blood and fat, so there had to be some meat cooking in there.>

It truly was a rough time. Luckily, your circumstances are different. You got to eat what we cooked over the fire.

Oberon rolled over, presenting his belly, and stretched. <Yeah, I guess I have it pretty good. But shouldn’t you be getting to work, Atticus? This belly isn’t going to rub itself, you know.>

I obliged my hound and asked Granuaile if she felt like round two. She nodded and tossed me another beer from the cooler, grabbing one for herself. The pop and hiss of the cans sounded loud in the darkness, but after that it was only the occasional snap of the comfortably orange fire and the song that Gaia decided to sing to us under the unveiled stars.





This story, narrated by Atticus, takes place six years after Tricked, Book 4 of The Iron Druid Chronicles, and two weeks after the events of the novella Two Ravens and One Crow. It was originally published in the Carniepunk anthology and has since been slightly revised and expanded from that version.