The Vine Witch (Vine Witch #1)(65)
Gerda stepped off the platform and strode past Elena, and the curve of her spine bowed against the lace of her mourning dress. She seemed to be shrinking, yet the aura of her power only intensified. Then Elena noticed the witch’s legs. They’d seemingly warped beneath her skirt, forcing her to walk crab-like to her magic circle. Once inside her cone of power, her metamorphosis accelerated, doubling the age of her appearance yet again.
Professor Rackham had said the lure of influence, money, and immortality created a pitfall for magical folk. Power craved power, leading some into dangerous alliances. The sickly sweet scent of lilac water churned in Gerda’s wake, barely masking the underlying whiff of decay. But why change into this hideous creature? What ability did she gain from decrepit disfigurement?
And then it struck her. The bierhexe wasn’t transforming into something new. She was reverting into herself. Hidden beneath the veneer of a powerful illusion lay her true form, one possibly testing the limits of immortality, a body rotting at the fringes from the unnatural extension of life.
“How long?” Just asking the question made her stomach queasy.
The witch stood hunched and balding as a shriveled foot protruded from under her skirt. “Oh, I’ve seen kings and conquerors come and go. Dauphins, emperors, prime ministers, presidents.” Gerda retrieved her black-and-silver walking stick from atop a barrel. “Mark my words—fashions change, causes change, but men’s ambitions never do,” she said and leaned heavily on the cane.
Elena found herself horror-struck at the rate of the transformation yet also drawn in by a curiosity shaped by years of studying magic. “What spell allows a person to endlessly cheat time and fate?”
Gerda stared back through eyes now veiled with cataracts. “When I learned you had escaped from prison, it confirmed an earlier suspicion. You see, I’d already begun to think we had more in common than most,” she said. “It’s why I decided to bring you here. To show you a glimpse of what life can be for those brave enough to grip it by the throat. If you want to hear.”
Elena wanted to scream they had nothing in common, aside from this unfortunate crossroads in time and place. But she’d do anything to keep the murderess talking and distracted from lowering the press against Jean-Paul another breath-stealing inch.
The witch gripped her cane with care and bent to pick up the tasting cup she’d placed at the west point of the pentagram. She sniffed its contents as she waited for an answer. If not for her grotesque appearance and taste for murder, she might have been mistaken for a wise elder, a teacher, a mage. But even the monsters of the world can prove a flashpoint of enlightenment to those stuck in the dark.
Elena agreed with a nudge of her chin. “Tell me about this shadow magic of yours.”
The witch’s teeth had disintegrated to nubs so that she spoke with a gummy, wet inflection, and her eyes had lost their midrange focus, suggesting she’d sunk into blindness. Even so, Elena suspected Gerda’s magic still carried the sharp swipe of a falcon’s claw. Though the crone appeared easy prey, only a fool would attack a bierhexe in her domain.
“When the secret was first revealed to me I was still young enough that I blushed when a man looked at me with a mischievous smile. A complete innocent, aside from a strong curiosity about the world that didn’t conform with the nature of my sex. I wanted to know everything.”
She stirred the liquid in the tasting cup with a rhythmic, almost hypnotic, gyration of her wrist. “I came from a good family. Direct descendants of the bierhexe who discovered the magic of adding hops to beer. Changed beer-making forever. The brewers benefited from more reliable batches, and the hexen stopped being blamed for every natural disaster that destroyed a field of grain or ruined an unstable vat of beer. Because of my lineage, I was apprenticed to the renowned braumeister Hans Steinacher. The secrets he knew about fermentation!
“But I soon learned secrets too. I saw how he cheated his customers, slipping their change into his pocket when their eyes blurred from too much alcohol. And once I watched him conjure a hex to ruin a rival’s crops with mildew.” She shrugged, as if it wasn’t the worst offense. “But the day I learned about his ungodly appetites was when things changed.” The old witch whispered as if relating a whiff of gossip she’d heard at the fish market. “I’d spied on him, you see, with the barrel boy in the cold room. So many fingers and mouths where they shouldn’t be.”
“He knew you’d seen them,” Elena said, drawing Gerda back in when she’d begun to spool off in distant thought.
“Mmm, I would have looked the other way to keep learning his magic, but . . .” A shudder ran through her, a convulsion perhaps brought on by those thoughts she’d revisited. “I was too green to know what lengths a man with power would go to preserve what he’d attained. Oh, but the child doth learn.”
The old witch paused and stuck a crooked finger in the red liquid of her tasting cup. She stirred it once, then licked her finger, smacking her lips before setting the cup back down on the pentagram and turning the handle to the north.
“To punish me and protect his secret he had me cursed,” she continued. “He’d offered me a sample of his latest brew under the guise of wanting to know my opinion.” She “hmphed,” as if ashamed of being taken in by such a notion. “The ‘brew’ turned out to be a barbed potion. It stitched up my voice with a thousand unseen hooks that worked their way into my throat, binding the vocal cords immobile. I couldn’t speak a word, let alone utter a spell, when he was through.”