The Vine Witch (Vine Witch #1)(42)

After a long silence Sidra leaned her head against the bars and stared into the corridor, where the lamps had long been doused. “Do you hear them? They are crying again.”

Elena glanced over her shoulder. She’d tuned out the low wails and pitiful calls for mercy imprinted in the stone, too consumed with her own worries, but Sidra had called the voices up again so that they echoed in the dark as if rising out of a tunnel.

The sorceress gathered her chain to her and then looped it into a neat coil at her side. “That one,” she said with a tip of her head, “does not believe me when I say there are voices that echo in the hall. They used to keep me up at night. But now I listen for them. I am sorry for them, though I do not know who they are or why they cry.”

She wondered where Sidra came from. Whatever distant land, it was far enough away she’d not heard the tragic history of the valley’s falsely accused. “They’re the voices of the condemned,” Elena said. Her eyes followed the path of a low moan, trailing the sound across the floor to a spot on the wall where a pair of eye-hook bolts would have secured someone by the wrists under heavy irons. “They were confined and tortured here for practicing witchcraft two hundred years ago. Men, women, and children.”

“What, you can hear them too?” Yvette shook her head as she flexed her foot and pulled her stocking up. “Then you’re both loony, if you ask me, listening to a bunch of dead witches.”

Elena recalled the time she and Grand-Mère had traveled to the city to shop for the few rare ingredients they couldn’t get in the village—root of turmeric, dried fish bladder, and fine henna powder, which they infused into their yarn with a binding spell. Unable to find the correct shop on the unfamiliar street, they’d stopped to ask directions of a woman sweeping her sidewalk. At their approach, the woman took out an evil-eye amulet from her pocket and spit on the ground before shooing them away with her broom. Elena hadn’t understood, so Grand-Mère took her to a café for ice cream while she explained their history and why there were still those who held witches in contempt.

“Only most of those you hear weren’t witches.” Elena stood and gripped the bars with both hands as she closed her eyes. Instantly she knew what Sidra had said earlier about the place not being able to stifle a witch’s essence was true. The energy from the rune spell hummed under her fingers, vibrating through the metal like a pulse that blocked her connection to the All Knowing. She opened her eyes again and rubbed her hands together to rid them of the spell’s odd energy. “When the condemned were alive, this place was a regular mortal prison. It hadn’t been magicked yet. Any healthy witch would have had no trouble escaping these cells.”

Yvette snorted. “Or getting caught in the first place.”

Elena agreed and then pictured Grand-Mère. “Though any witch too old or weak to defend themselves would have been as helpless as a mortal.”

Sidra shifted on her feet so that her ankle chain rattled against the flagstones. “Or someone who’d been cursed?”

It was as if the sorceress had used a scrying glass to peer beneath Elena’s skin to inspect the vulnerability embedded on the underside. She rubbed at the gooseflesh on her arms and nodded as a ghost-thought fluttered in her head. Would she have had the strength to escape the witch hunts had it been her in her cursed state?

“What terrible spell did these lost ones unleash to cause their cries to be etched into stone?”

“They were accused of consorting with the Devil and committing evil acts against their neighbors. And it’s true, there were some witches—warlocks mostly—who conjured destructive spells that brutalized a handful of villages. But they weren’t the ones caught and put in prison. It was almost always some hapless mortal from the valley who they were able to coerce a confession out of.”

“They cry for mercy and”—Sidra tilted her ear—“relief from the pain.”

“Many were abused. Tortured. Back then the prosecutors might drag a woman to the river and dunk her head under the water, over and over again, until her lungs were near to bursting. Or they’d shave her head. Or use thumbscrews. Or maybe tear a fingernail loose from the bed and force the injury to throb for hours so that the accused would do or say anything to make the pain go away.”

“Tell her about the stones,” Yvette said, no longer pretending to ignore the conversation.

Elena nodded. “Some had stones stacked on top of them. With every denial, the load increased until the person either suffocated under the crushing load or they confessed convincingly enough to have the weight lifted off before their lungs ruptured from the pressure. Either way, the law got what it wanted.”

“Pain has always been the prosecutor’s handmaiden,” Sidra said, agreeing. Then she closed her eyes and inhaled deeply as she listened. “The women also say they fear the lick of fire at the stake. Did they burn them too?”

“Yes.”

“Alive?”

“Sometimes.”

Sidra lifted her head from the bars. “But now in this country they take the head with a curved blade.” She stared at the empty corridor with the same yearning with which she’d watched the bird escape. “I would trade places with any one of them to have the fire,” she said, then bent to pick up a thin wool blanket she’d been using as a pillow. She offered it to Elena. “Here, you’ll need this tonight. And don’t let Yvette steal it from you, either.”