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The Knight is dying.
He’s known it since he felt the sword bite into his side, his own killing blow to the man’s neck a moment too late. He’s known it all the long ride north, none of his efforts enough to staunch the blood from his wound. But now it’s in his bones, cold leaching into him like ice spreading across a lake, and he knows it will be soon. If the Witch is not here, if she will not save him, this is where he will die, in the reeds at the edge of the water with his arms full of goldenrod flowers.
He doesn’t know what the flowers are for. Raven and Owl didn’t tell him that, didn’t tell him how to summon the Witch from the water and bind her to him, and hard as he listens now they have no more advice to give. With the last of his strength staining the grass red at his feet, the Knight does the only thing left to him, and casts the flowers into the lake.
She rises out of the water, maiden and mare, and it is all he can do to lift his horn to his lips and blow. On the third note his faltering breath fails him, but it’s enough to bring his hawk and hound to heel. They strike at the Witch together, his hound baying and snapping at the mare while his hawk tangles his talons in the maiden’s hair. They harry her towards him, and he raises his sword, almost too heavy to lift, surely too heavy to swing.
Between one step and the next she shifts, and the monstrous part of her is gone. There’s only a woman, knee-deep in water the same clear color as her eyes. When she tells him to sheath his sword, he does it with relief, and staggers.
The Witch catches him. When his knees buckle she takes all his weight, her slender hands firm and steady, and eases him down into the grass.
She kisses him then, once, twice, three times on his bloodless lips and with every kiss warmth spreads through him like a spring thaw. It drives out the numbness with the cold, and when it reaches his side he shudders at the reawakened hurt there.
“They said --” he gasps, bewildered with pain. “They said -- you --”
“Peace, fair knight.” She strokes his pale face. “I know what need you have of me.”
She lays him down and strips him bare, frowning at the dark spot of blood blooming on his bandages. There is a spray of goldenrod caught in her hair and she plucks it out and crushes it in her hand. When it’s not enough she finds a second, caught on a stone in the shallow water. With those and clean linen she binds his wound, and for the first time in days, he does not bleed.
More than that - the deep sick sense of wrongness, of things torn and festering inside him lessens every time she touches him. The pain that only minutes ago stole his breath and brought tears stinging in his eyes recedes back to a dull throb, and then to the prickling itch of healing skin, and then to nothing. He would swear he can feel the ragged ruin of his side knitting itself together until he is - not whole, but at least mended.
She reaches to brush a sweat-soaked lock of hair out of his eyes and he grabs her hand, and stares at it. For all her silver and velvet it is plain enough, calloused from hearth-work, skin still reddened and chapped from winter, and he can see no magic in it. But there was magic, for nothing else could have stolen him from death like this, with only common weeds and gentle caresses. She still smells of licorice from the crushed flowers. He pulls her hand closer, and kisses her fingertips, and he thinks she tastes faintly of it too.
She lets him kiss her palm and up her wrist but when he tries to sit up further she pushes him back down.
“Would you undo my good work?” she asks him, eyes serious. “Your strength will not return to you so easily, I’m afraid. But I can lend you mine while you have need of it.”
She leans forward, her dark curls spilling over her shoulder and across his chest where their hands are still entwined, and he knows then how she means to do it. This time when she kisses him there is no pain.
He isn’t sure when the steady pulse of warmth sparks into a more insistent kind of heat. Arousal comes on him so slowly he doesn’t recognize it until it’s tenting his breeches. Her hands wander while she kisses him, tangling in his hair and tracing patterns on his bare skin and when she comes across this evidence of his ardor she pauses and sits back to see it. Her smile is fond and just a little wicked as she undoes his laces and takes him out.
It’s not his first tumble in the grass with a willing maiden, and usually by now he would have rolled her over onto her back, to take his pleasure from her, but he doesn’t. Never in his life has he felt so content as to lie here, languid and pliant while she brings him to full hardness. She takes her time about it, teasing him, finding those secret, sensitive places that make him shiver when she brushes her lips across them.
She works her way back down his chest toward his undone breeches but when she gets there she ignores his prick. At her insistent touch he spreads his legs, and she runs her fingers up the inside of his thighs, to his stones, and the thin skin behind them. No maiden has ever done this to him, and when she finally takes his shaft in her hand and strokes it he nearly sobs with pleasure.
Before it overwhelms him, she releases him, and stands up. He stares, heart pounding, as she strips off her velvet gown and hangs it over a branch. Her thin linen shift clings to her and reveals the gracefully carved curves of her neck and her breasts. Then she strips that off too, and stands naked before him. He can see the freckles on her ivory-pale shoulders and the dark hair between her legs.
She straddles him and kneels down, taking him deep with a soft gasp. Her eagerness for this is slick on his thighs but she sets a steady pace, just fast enough to draw him close but not to throw him over. Heat burns through him from every place she touches, his prick inside her, her legs wrapped around his hips, her hands pressed against his chest. It’s too much and he wants more. Wants every inch of her skin against his skin, wants all that heat inside him, wants to kiss her again.
She throws back her head as she comes, clenching tight around him, and that’s enough to finish him off too. The heat in him breaks as he spends, and as it ebbs it takes his consciousness with it.
The sun is high in the afternoon when he wakes again, his head resting on the Witch’s lap.
“Am I allowed to rise now?” he asks her, though he is in no haste to move.
Her laughter sounds like water over stones. “If you must,” she says.
He stands, and stretches, and finds himself as whole and sound as he ever was, all his strength returned to him.
He doesn’t dally then - doesn’t dare, when rumors of his death might already be spreading. He finds his shirt and tunic, scrubbed clean of blood and spread on a bush to dry, and his sword and shield, abandoned in the grass where he dropped them. His horse hasn’t left its grazing, reins trailing under its chin, and his hawk and hound rouse themselves when he whistles. The Witch is silent as he dresses, her face strangely somber when he straps on his rowan shield.
He resists the queer impulse to kneel, and ask for her benediction before he goes. He gets it anyway, and rides away from the mere with her words ringing in his head and the scent of goldenrod fading in the air.
It is two months before his strength starts to fail him. It’s a busy season at court, full of banquets, tournaments and games, and at first he blames the weariness dragging at him on late nights and an over-fondness for wine. But his weariness lingers, and his face, despite the summer sun, grows pale. At the end of the day his hands tremble, and his healed side spasms in pain. He begs off a tournament, and hears whispers that he is languishing with some mortal affliction. He isn’t sure the gossip is wrong.
As the summer waxes, his dreams turn feverish and wild, midnight hunts through a maze of a forest for an ever-elusive prize and the smell of woodsmoke in the distance. His days are a haze of exhaustion, and phantom firelight flickers in the corners of his eyes wherever he goes.
The last dream starts the same as the others. He rides through the forest, the heavy tangle of trees washed silver by the moon. Hounds bell in the distance, and the hunting horns of his companions, but they will find nothing. He alone has caught the trail of their quarry, and alone he follows it, deep into the forest’s heart. For a week’s worth of dreams he has been trapped here, circling the same path, never getting any closer. But this time, he sees a gap through the trees. He pushes through, and steps into a clearing, moss-blanketed and pooled with moonlight, and in the middle of it he sees her. A red hind, head up at the sound of breaking branches and ready to flee. He raises his sword quicker than thought, and the moment before he thrusts it she meets his eyes, and he knows her, but it is too late.
He wakes in agony, as sharp as if the sword had slipped through his own ribs. He lies gasping and sweat-sodden until the fit passes, and as soon as he can stand he packs his saddlebags and heads to the stable.
There are always ravens on the castle walls and in the trees past the gate, and when he rides through, he startles them into flight. One of the unkindness peels off and circles him, lazily keeping pace with his horse.
“You stink of death,” it croaks, and he knows its voice.
“You said the Witch would heal me,” he says. “But now I am cursed.”
“Cursed, cursed, cursed,” the Raven sings. “Cursed to walk and talk, when you should be feeding my kin. But not for long without her, rowan knight.”
He knows the truth of it. Whatever sorcery bound spirit to flesh bound him to her too. He can feel her drawing him back to her like an ache in his heart, and he wants to deny it, but he can’t. Hour by hour apart from her he grows weaker, and soon enough all his borrowed strength will be spent.
“Guide me, or go,” he says at last to the Raven. “Either way I’ll find her.”
“Or you’ll die,” The Raven says. “And I’ll make my nest with your hair.”
He wheels away with a mocking caw, but the next time the Knight looks up, the Raven’s there, flying close behind them. He sticks to them, a speck of a black shadow all the way to the north.
He half-expects the way to the lake to have turned into a fairy path, twisting into the trees and leading him nowhere, but it’s just as he remembers it. The lake, however, is not. The grass is over-grown and drying in the summer sun, the lake-shore sunken in, the water flat and brackish. And it is utterly, cruelly empty. She isn’t waiting for him, as he hoped she might, and the flowers he casts into the water only drift away and sink.
Perched on a low-hanging branch, the Raven regards him gravely with beady black eyes, and for once stays silent. A breeze picks up, blowing from the hills to frill the surface of the lake, and carries on it the acrid summer scent of green wood smoke. The Knight remembers it out of his dreams. He sighs, and turns his horse towards the tree-covered hills, and rides on.
He reaches a village in the late afternoon, daub houses and fields butted by the edge of the forest, and rides straight into a procession. In his illness he had forgotten that midsummer was approaching. The single muddy street is full of people, carrying crude skin drums, food and flowers and other gifts for the bonfire, for the promise of a better harvest, and he finds himself caught in it.
A cry goes up when they notices him there. “The green man, the hunter,” someone shouts, over the sound of drums and pipes, and someone else grabs his horse’s bridle. More hands grab his arms, pulling him out of the saddle and into the street. They strip his sword and shield from him, and before he can protest the crowd propels him forward toward the square and the bonfire kindling, laughing and shouting. They crown him with a wreath of leaves, and thrust an oak staff into his hand, and then they shove him out into the middle of the square, leaving him standing alone.
“The fire, the fire!” and someone hands him a burning torch. He throws it onto the tower of scrap and deadwood and it leaps into flames.
That is when he sees her, standing on the other side of the square. Her hair is honey-brown tonight, her dress is saffron silk but he recognizes the Witch’s eyes, as he recognized them in the face of the deer. He takes a step toward her, but the crowd shifts around him. The drums pick up a faster beat, and the dancing starts.
It’s no demure court carole; the Knight is passed from partner to partner, spun in circles around the fire until his head reels. They make a game of stealing kisses, pressing lips to his cheek and his oak-leaf crown before they hand him off to someone new. From time to time he catches a glimpse of gold, but he’s too dazed to see it’s getting closer until he reaches for his next partner and takes the Witch’s hand.
His fingers tighten instinctively around hers, but she doesn’t try to break away. She only laughs and says, “Caught again, fair knight.”
She offers him her other hand, and bemused, he takes it. She has her own crown, a ring of buttercups and marigolds spilling fragrant petals where she steps, and when the two of them dance the crowd clears an empty space around them the way the court does around the king and queen.
The bonfire burns down to its roots, and the music shows no signs of slowing. The Knight misses a step, and then another, and cannot catch his breath. He meets her eyes, desperate, and when she nods he grabs her shoulders and kisses her.
He has carried his anger all the way north, but now she’s in his arms he can only think of wanting her. The dance fills the square but he finds a space, a gap between two houses overhung with trees and presses her against the wall, already hard and straining at his laces. He’s impatient, remembering the last time, the way the heat washed through him and took his pain away. She tangles her hands in his hair and drags his mouth down to hers, biting at his lip.
Every other kiss he’s had tonight, every kiss he’s ever had, is a pale shade compared to this, with her breath on his cheek and firelight reflecting in her clear eyes.
He lifts her skirt around her waist so she can wrap her legs around him. He takes her there, up against the wall, hard enough to scatter flakes of plaster at their feet. She digs her fingers into his shoulders and moans so loud that anyone in the square could hear her even over the drums, and he doesn’t care at all. Doesn’t even think of them as he hitches her knee on his thigh to take her deeper, as he leaves bite marks down the pale angle of her throat. Whatever she took from him the last time, he wants to take it back.
When he comes, he buries his face in her breast so she will not see his tears. She holds him through it, and after she leads him to stand under the tree, where they can watch the dancers still gathered around the fire.
“Caught again,” he says bitterly. “Am I to spend my whole life falling in your traps? Or will you break this curse and let me be?”
“Did your faith in me die so quickly, then?” she asks.
“No more quickly than the rest of me.” For the first time in days his breath comes easy, and the tremor in his hands is gone, but how long will that last? How long until this deep-rooted decay overtakes him again?
“I am -- sorry,” she says. “That I could not give all you asked of me. That you couldn’t accept all that I gave. But it was -- a failure, and not a curse. I only meant to help you.”
“If you meant to help, then stay and fix it!”
She shakes her head wistfully. “I can give you tonight. But there’s nothing else I can do.”
The moment he realized he was still slowly dying, he had remembered her parting words. None should harm him, she had said, and proved herself a liar. But he believes her now, though he doesn’t why he does.
“At least tell me how --” he pleads.
“Tell me why you killed the deer,” she replies. In his silence, the fire burns down into sullen embers.
He wakes the next morning to his hound worriedly licking his face. He’s lying in a shallow dike and when he sits up, there’s no sign of a village for miles. His night’s memory has the blurred unreal feeling of a fever dream. Only the lack of pain in his side makes him think it truly happened -- and the oak-leaf crown he finds half-crushed in the mud beside him.
In autumn, the Knight tells people he is going on a pilgrimage in the north, to drink from the blessed wells and light candles on some holy saint’s grave. None of the court asks why. It is a common enough journey for the sick and dying, and while he has hid the signs of his increasing infirmity better this time, the rumors persist.
He would, he thinks, be better served by such a pilgrimage than by another futile quest to beg a few more months of life from the Witch. To beg her, as ardently as he knows how, to do more to end this, more than one night’s love that leaves him sick-hearted and unsatisfied. But he made his choice.
The northern forest is dark and nearly impenetrable.The narrow woodcutter’s path he follows in is quickly swallowed up entirely, leaving him to clamber over moss-slick rocks and fallen trees. He would not have trusted another horse over that ground, and even so he walks more often than not. He relies more and more on his hound to scout ahead the clear ways through the dense tangle of trees and undergrowth. But he has only half-remembered dreams and a vague inward sense of nearness to guide him and soon enough he’s hopelessly lost.
Behind him, out of the forest, is only his death, so he presses forward anyway. Just after nightfall, an owl calls to him from the hollow of a tree.
“Why do you ride this way?” the Owl says.
“I seek the Witch of the Westmorland,” the Knight says. “Who I was once told dwelled by the Winding Mere.”
“She dwells in many places, and she wears as many faces,” the Owl replies. “How many of them would you know?”
“As many as it takes, until she heals me.”
The Owl turns its head, and stares at him with large golden eyes. “You will be long in hunting, then, I fear,” it says. “But if you follow the red fox, you may find what you seek tonight.”
They’ve hunted fox many times before, if never in deepwood like this. His hound catches the scent in a nest of fallen leaves not far from the owl’s tree. It’s slow-going, a twisting trail that criss-crosses rocky hollows and swift-running mountain streams, doubling back and leading them in circles through the brambles, but they never quite lose it. Once or twice he even hears leaves rustling ahead of them, although it is too dark now to see it.
Near to midnight they start drawing closer, and he can hear it more often. They’re almost on it when the trees start thinning, and he catches a glimpse ahead of them of the moonlight in a broad meadow. He brings his hound up with a gesture, and goes more slowly, as silent as he can.
Someone cleared this meadow with a purpose, he can tell. Long ago, for there’s no sign of axes on the trees and the ground’s all been claimed by sweetgrass and ivy. But someone laid stepping stones, now well-worn into smoothness, in a path across the stream. Someone put a ring of stones at the end of it on the far side of the meadow, and an altar in the middle of the ring.
He doesn’t see the fox in the grass until his hound whines at his feet. She’s a graceful little vixen, the same ruddy color as the autumn leaves, standing ears pricked and alert on the near side of the stream. She’s close enough to run to ground now, and his hound’s legs are twitching, ready for his command, but something stays him.
The fox crosses the stream, jumping nimbly from stone to stone. Halfway across, he blinks, and when he opens his eyes the Witch is stepping off onto the far bank.
He leaves his sword and shield in the trees and works his way quietly around the edge of the clearing, stepping carefully around patches of moonlight. But the Witch is oblivious to him, all her attention on the altar. She sweeps it clean of dead leaves and cobwebs, and spreads out a feast, bread and cheese and red-blushed apples. He hides and watches, and when she kneels down before the altar, head bowed, he steps out of the trees and lays his hands on her shoulders.
She doesn’t pause in her spell, lips moving silently in words he doesn’t recognize. He is too wary to disrupt her, and instead he studies her face, her heavy waves of fox-red hair, her rapt expression as moonlight spills over her and whatever enchantment she is casting comes to its peak.
She lifts her head and opens her eyes, and there is no surprise in them that it is him standing before her.
“Thank you, fair knight,” she says with a wry smile. “For letting me finish.”
“What magic was that?” he asks her. He can see no change in the meadow around him, feel no difference in the crisp autumn air. But there are, he knows too well, more insidious magics to be found.
She laughs, and her laugh tonight is the ringing of struck stone. “No magic but prayer,” she says.
“And who do you pray for?”
“For the souls of the dead, carried through the door into Summer,” she says.
The Knight thinks of the solitary pilgrimage he invented for the court, lighting candles over the bones of a long-dead saint for the sake of his own soul. He is a foundling, unmarried, no lovers and no kin. He has mourned for no one, and he has long known that when he dies no one will mourn for him.
“Do you pray for me?” he asks.
“Always.”
And he has no answer to that except to kiss her.
He is gentler this time, his need no longer edged with anger. His anger could not make her fix this dying part of him, and he has neither the desire nor the strength to try again. But there is some answer she hasn’t given him, some balance he hasn’t made and he will keep coming back until he finds it and is healed.
He eases off her plain black robes and trails open-mouthed kisses down her neck and into the cleft of her breasts. They are full, the nipples puckered, and when he circles one with his tongue she moans deep in her throat. He teases her with fingers and tongue until she sprawls back on her robes, back arched and gasping, and then he goes lower.
He spreads her thighs and studies the place between them, slick and swollen and thatched with reddish curls. She shudders when he traces it with his fingers, and when he follows with his tongue the ground moves too.
It’s not like the last time, heat rising through him and burning out his sickness. It flows into him through her, thick and slow like honey, like the taste of her when he has two fingers in her and she sobs with pleasure. Again and again he brings her over, thighs trembling, fingers digging into the earth, and on the last time he goes with her, spending without a touch, just from the sight of her.
Three times he has lain with her, for the sake of a wound that won’t heal and a pull in his heart he cannot understand. He wonders, lying next to her beside the altar, what offering she would leave for him, and cannot bring himself to ask.
It is the longest night of the year, and the Knight can ride no further.
He’s somewhere in the mountains - where, he doesn’t know and cannot reckon. Snow has been falling all day, fat white flakes that deaden sound and sense, and in the last hour the sky has darkened and the wind started blowing, bitingly hard. Even wrapped in wool and fur his hands and face are numb, and he knows it will not be long until he freezes.
He finds a hollow in the mountain-face, dank and still stinking of last winter’s bear but sheltered from the wind, and room enough for the four of them. He drags in what little dry wood he can find and piles it in the middle for a fire. The fire is small and smoky, the wind coming in from the mouth of the cave making it sputter. He has no food left; the weather for days has been too poor for hunting, his hawk huddled damp and wretched in his saddlebag. He wraps himself in his cloak, hungry and exhausted and aching. This is not where he wanted to die.
He can feel the rot spreading in him, choking off his life. This morning, when he woke, the ground was stained red underneath him. He had told himself that surely he would find her tonight, that surely she wanted to be found. But now it is too late. His hunt is ended.
He presses a hand to his side and grimaces. His shirt is black with blood and frozen to his skin. For months he has been dying by degrees, life draining out of him like water out of a cracked cup. He thinks that perhaps it would have been better if that blow had killed him on the battlefield. If the Raven and the Owl had held their tongues and the Witch turned him away to die. If he had not spent the last three seasons chasing riddles and false hopes.
But he cannot bring himself to believe that. To believe that he would have been better dying without seeing her. He has hated her and cursed her for what she did to him but now that he knows he will not escape death he only wants her to be here. To stroke his hair and kiss him and promise it will not hurt. Whatever she would have of him now he would give, if it meant she would stay until the end.
A gust of wind tears through the cave, driving snow against him like needles. It blinds him for a moment, eyes stinging and watering, and when he can see again, there she is.
Her hair is scarcely darker than her white samite gown, and she looks like an apparition carved out of ice, but she is certainly real. His hound goes to her, twining around her feet like a pup, and his horse huffs and lets her stroke his forelock. Even his hawks rouses itself and chirks sleepily at her. He is dumbfounded, but she only smiles at him sadly.
“I would not leave you to die alone,” she says.
His replies catches in his throat. He stares at her, stooped under the low ceiling of the cave, the hem of her dress steaming from the fire. He remembers the moment she first rose out of the lake, mare’s body surging against the water. He remembers the fire caught in her hair as she danced, remembers a feast laid out for the dead, remembers a kiss. Remembers a deer, slain in a dream, water-clear eyes fixed on him. How many times can he catch her? How many times can he die?
He is too weak to stand, but he kneels at her feet and stretches out his arms, offering up his wrists like a prisoner.
“I cannot chase you any more and get no closer,” he says softly. “I am yours. To do with as you will.”
She kneels too, and takes his hands in hers. She leans forward and whispers in his ear, “Then I will you to live.”
The sky is clear when he wakes, the sun just lifting, wavering and weak, over the horizon. Standing at the mouth of the cave, he can see his path down out of the mountains. He had not been so lost as he had thought, in the dark and the blinding snow.
The Witch comes up behind him, and kisses him on the nape of his neck, fond and familiar as a lover. Even in the deepest cold of winter her touch warms him through.
“When I see you again --” he says.
“You are healed,” she says. “Well and truly now. And did I not tell you once that none could harm the knight of the Witch of the Westmorland?”
“You did,” he says. “You did. But, when I see you again - I will bring you flowers.”