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In Lannisport, there is a witch.
They whisper of the holy woman who cured a boy of deadly pox, the mad woman who doomed the blacksmith’s daughter with a cackle. Young women go to her, desperately in love with young men. Boys slip into her pointed tent, tossing coins and asking for tales of their future fame. Babes born too early, faces blue in the early hours of the morning, cough and cry beneath her crooked fingers.
(Wicked words and clever hands do not make a witch, but the old woman with the foreign name, whose words croak from her throat and slip with the strange sounds of the east, is a witch.)
Maggy the Frog, they call her. Once she was young and beautiful, married to a loving man. But age and other, darker things took their pound of flesh, carrying the youth from her body and the beauty from her face.
Now, she is Maggy, the old witch who sits in the shadows of her tent and smiles with no teeth.
(They curse her, too.
When children die, young lives slipping away beneath her grasping hands.
When young women spend their nights alone, beds cold with the absence of their husbands.
When boys go mad, chasing the ghost of the future.
They curse the witch who asks no questions and tells no lies, who grasps their dull coins in a wizened hand and smiles while she destroys them.)
-
The lion’s golden daughter is no fool.
But youth and love
(She believes she is in love. Perhaps she is a fool.)
But youth and ambition cloud the clearest of minds, and the lioness is no exception.
-
She steals away in the night, face pale beneath her dark hood and tight with determination. The lioness has keen ears, and she has heard of the old woman who can turn back death, who beckons love with a crooked finger. Who knows things no ordinary woman should know.
(The lioness wants to know. She wants to know it all.)
One of the maids had visited the old woman. She told the other women of the green tent, of the witch who sat within. The witch who allowed her three questions for three coins, three dull pieces of metal for a glimpse of her future. The answers, the maid had said, came easily to the witch. Like she had read them from a great book.
The lioness had listened, concealed within an alcove. Three questions. No great number, but it would be enough. Enough to know the path her future held.
Now, armed with three rough edged coins, clinking dully within their leather purse, she goes to the tent. Two girls, their own coins held by similar purses, follow close behind. Their cloaks, bound tightly against the night, sweep along the dirty ground. There is no moon and the tent rises like the mouth of a great cave.
Face paler, but still set with determination, the lioness reaches for the dark flap. It falls open easily, and the pale hand is withdrawn quickly. Surprised. She sets her thin shoulders, tosses her pretty head.
(Leather scuffs on dirt. One of the girls, running for home.
She doesn’t want to know.)
Pressing shaking lips together, the lioness ducks beneath the flap. Her friend scurries after her, afraid of being left behind. The flap falls closed behind her, settling into place despite the midnight breeze.
-
The tent is dim, the only light coming from the flames burning in a crude metal brazier. Smoke curls in delicate shapes, twisting through still air and throwing the flickers of the flame in strange patterns across the tent walls. There is no witch. The tent is empty.
Rage and disappointment and smoke burn the lioness’ eyes, and she blinks against the sudden tears that gather there.
(She blinks.
A fraction of a second.)
The witch sits hunched behind the brazier, her face distorted through the flames and smoke. She’s speaking, muttering to the coals, but even the lioness’ keen ears cannot make out the words.
She opens her mouth, to speak, to scream, to cry for her mother, but the smoke fills her throat and chokes the words from it. The witch looks up from the flames, pauses in her muttering. Ancient yellow eyes bore into green, and a bony hand rises.
Come closer, the crooked bones of the bent finger say.
(Run away, her blood and bones and tightly strung muscle scream.)
The lioness steps closer, the fine lines of her face slack with
(Disbelief.)
(Belief.)
(Fear.)
She has eyes only for the witch, who stares back with the great strange eyes that gleam in the wrinkled planes of her face. The pale hand fumbles at her waist, slipping three coins from their purse. They dig into the thin bones of her tightly clasped fist, the three coins for the three questions.
They clink quietly as they fall, and she flexes her hand, red marks where they dug against skin and bone.
The witch looks at the coins cupped in her outstretched hand, considering. This close, the lioness can see the bright coals of the brazier, glowing with heat. When the smoke catches their light, the witch’s yellow eyes are cast red.
(Red for fire. Red for blood. Red for fear.)
With a hand that shakes ever so slightly, the witch raises three fingers. Three fingers for three coins for three questions. The lioness nods. She knows.
(She’s going to know so much more.)
The witch takes her thumb between bony fingers and pierces, pressing the twisted knife until blood beads beneath it, bright and warm and red.
Leaning her crooked body forward, the witch drinks the blood of the lioness. For a moment, her yellow eyes close, and her ancient face seems without life. A smear of blood remains on the shrivelled lips and a grey tongue darts out, catching it and drawing it in.
Her eyes open once again, and as she grasps the dull coins in her wizened hand, the witch smiles, smiles with no teeth and green gums still red with blood.
(Maggy the Frog knows, and Maggy the Frog smiles, and Maggy the Frog destroys.)
-
“When will I wed the prince?”
“Never. You will wed the king.”
“I will be queen, though?”
“Aye. Queen you shall be…until there comes another, younger and more beautiful, to cast you down and take all that you hold dear.”
“Will the king and I have children?”
“Oh, aye. Six and ten for him, and three for you.
“Gold shall be their crowns and gold their shrouds.
“And when your tears have drowned you, the valonqar shall wrap his hands about your pale white throat and choke the life from you.”
-
They run from the tent, the lioness and her friend.
The witch screeches behind them, wild with the rage that comes from a less civilised age. But she cannot see, her yellow eyes filled with the potion the lioness cast at her. So the witch screeches, words wild like her rage, cursing them in the strange, twisted language of her youth.
(She still tastes their blood.)
They run, until they can run no more. Beneath the walls of the great castle, they shake and pant and cry, clutching each other. The words of the crooked old witch still echo in their minds, casting twisted shadows, like the flames on the walls of her tent.
If we never speak, her friend tells her, words pulled out between shuddering breaths, of what the old woman said, it will be unimportant. It won’t be true if we do no speak of it, so we must not.
(It will be true. It is already important)
The lioness is not afraid. But she agrees to never speak of the woods witch in the green tent, or of the words she gave them. But she remembers them, remembers the feeling of first knowing, and waits.
Waits for the witch’s words to turn true.
-
The lioness marries a king. She is young, she is beautiful.
Three children are born of her, none of them by the king. She no longer knows how many children have been born by him.
The king dies and her son wears a golden crown. She is no longer so young, she clings to her beauty.
There is much she holds dear.
She watches with sharp eyes for the queen, younger and beautiful, that will take it all from her.
She waits for the valonqar, the little brother, to steal the life from her body.
(When she dreams, the world is full of smoke.
It presses around her, dark and cloying, full of flickering lights and writhing shadows.
In the midst of it all, Maggy the Frog laughs.)