Before she had taken ten steps, Grayling could see that the woman was not hidden in the trees. She was tree, all the way to her chest. Her battered old face reflected both horror and hope, and she waved her arms—not yet branches—in distress.
Grayling’s heart stopped and then hammered. Belike the woman was witch or wizard, and the smoke and shadow had come for her grimoire and left her turning tree! Did the evil force loiter still? Grayling could almost feel her own feet hardening and her ankles tingling. She dropped the gathered wood and, trembling and stumbling, crashed her way back through the woods. Behind her she could hear the woman shouting, “Come back, ye hag-born wench! A plague on ye, Mistress Do-nothing! The devil take ye!”
Right she turned, and left, and right again. Where were the others? Where was the road? Which of these trees had been a person, a person like her, like her mother, now a horrid creature of roots and wood and sap? Gasping and heaving, she burst through the forest onto the road where the others awaited.
“An old woman,” she said, once she could speak again. “Tree to her chest.” It was the stuff of nightmares. Was that how her mother looked now? Or was she tree entirely? Was there any turning back from bark to flesh?
“Aye,” said Auld Nancy, “as I told you, I have seen many such. Wise men and cunning women, magicians and wizards, gone to trees. ’Twas a pitiful sight.”
Pitiful and ominous and frightful. Grayling dropped down next to Auld Nancy, sitting close enough to feel the comforting warmth of the old woman’s body. Seeing the woman becoming tree had made their venture more frightening and more dangerous. Would the smoke and shadow come for them, too, if they meddled? Grayling’s toes tingled. What would it feel like, turning into a tree? Would it hurt? Would your feet and your legs know what was happening?
The rain fell harder, and travelers bustled or scampered or huddled within their cloaks. Auld Nancy wobbled to her feet. “Thundering toads!” she shouted to the drenching skies. “I be discomforted enough! Rain, away!” she cried, shaking her broom. And the rain stopped.
Suddenly murmurs swirled in the air like dandelion fluff. Witch! Weather witch! She who commands the rain! A young woman with a basket full of kittens quickly backed away, but others pushed forward, eager to secure a favor.
“Our hedge witches and hags are gone,” one said, “and we know not where. Will you serve? I wish a warm wind to dry my field.”
“Have you other spells?” asked another. “I would curse my brother-in-law.”
“The miller!”
“My pig-headed horse!”
Auld Nancy said over and over, “We are not that kind of witch,” and Grayling pulled her sleeves from grasping hands and shook her head no no no. If she had the magic they thought she had, she would see these pestering folks bewitched away, Or turned to stone, or frogs, or geese.
“Make way! Make way!” Blue-coated soldiers in tall buckled boots and iron helmets, with war hammers and sharp swords at their waists, marched toward them, followed by a man mounted on a fine black horse. His sun-darkened face was crisscrossed with angry scars, his mouth was hard and tight, and his nose . . . his nose was silvery, stiff, and shiny. Like metal. Nay, it was metal! His nose, lost no doubt in some battle or duel, was now made of metal, fastened to his face with a black leather band. A metal-nosed warlord with a band of bullies. Grayling shuddered and backed away.
He pointed to Auld Nancy, Pansy, and Grayling. “Take these three and chase the rest of the rabble away,” he directed his troops in a voice, thought Grayling, that could freeze fingers and toes on a summer day. “I have need of their magic.”
“We are not that kind of witch,” Auld Nancy said again. The soldiers poked at them with their swords and waved branches of holly and bay to protect against evil in case the three women were indeed that kind of witch. Grayling could sing to the grimoire, Auld Nancy make weather, and Pansy—well, what could Pansy do?—but they could not overpower a troop of men with horses and weapons. And Desdemona Cork was gone.
A soldier prodded Grayling toward a wheeled cage woven of hazel branches and banded with cold iron, hitched to two tired-looking horses. She kicked at him, but he swung at her with a switch of holly sprigs. The toothed leaves caught her beneath her right eye and left a jagged cut. She yelped as she was shoved into the cage, and her basket was lost behind her.
There came a trembling in her pocket. “Not now, Pook,” Grayling whispered. “Anon, but not now.” But indeed the mouse leaped from the pocket, shook himself, and became a goat, eyes bulging and beard a-waggle. With a furious bleat, the goat disappeared, and a raven, cronking, soared into the sky.
The soldiers stared at Grayling a moment and then backed away, waving their holly branches fiercely. Auld Nancy snorted. “We are not that kind of witch,” she repeated.
Grayling held the hem of her skirt to her bleeding cheek. “Auld Nancy, be there nothing you can do to stop this folly?”