Besieged: Stories from the Iron Druid Chronicles(18)
“What are these naked wenches?” Fire Face said, and then one leapt straight over his horse’s head to tackle him backward out of the saddle. Cheek Boil and Pigeon Liver were similarly bowled over, and the horses bolted, not bred or trained for war. The strength of the witches became evident in the next few seconds as they stood each bandit up and employed those knives, drawing them across the men’s throats with an audible slice of flesh. As their life’s blood gouted into the mud, the men tried in vain to stanch the flow with their hands, but the witches dragged them to the crossroads in front of the cauldron, then pushed them into a triangle formed by their shoulder blades, each of them facing a different direction.
“Come to us, Hecate, Queen of the Moon!” they cried. “Your vessels await!”
“Oh, no,” I said, and rose to my feet, drawing Fragarach. They really were going to summon her.
Shakespeare would have joined me, no doubt, but was trying to vomit quietly on the cabbage instead. His earlier drinking had soured his stomach, and seeing a murder so starkly committed brought a good measure of it back up.
I couldn’t reach the witches in time to stop the summoning and I had Shakespeare to worry about, so I had to watch. We’d be leaving as soon as he finished emptying his guts. The bandits began to twitch, then shudder, then buck violently against the witches’ staying hands on their sternums; their eyes rolled up in their heads and their tongues lolled out of their mouths while blood continued to squirt from their carotids. And then it all stopped for a second, the air charged, and the hairs on the back of my neck started like the quills of the fretful porpentine, for Hecate slipped out of whatever netherworld plane she’d been occupying and into the bodies of those three bandits, simultaneously her sacrifices and her new vessels. Their lives were forfeit, their spirits expelled who knows where, and Triple Hecate had new flesh to command far from Thrace.
Except she didn’t much like the look or feel of that flesh—it was male, for one thing. So she set about changing it to suit her, and that was when Shakespeare looked up from his retching to see what else could horrify him.
The witches stepped back from the bodies, since Hecate was occupying them now and they stood on their own power. But the skin of the men’s faces split and melted as it changed shape, and muted popping noises indicated that their very bones were being broken and re-formed to suit the will of the goddess. The bard did me an enormous favor at that point and fainted into the cabbage patch after a single squeak of abject terror. It meant I wouldn’t have to pretend to be a French nobleman anymore or hide my abilities.
His squeak, however, did catch the attention of one of the witches, and she was just able to spy me and hiss a challenge into the night. “Who is there?” she said in accented English.
The other two swiveled their heads at that, and the one who had killed Cheek Boil said in Greek, “I will look. Hecate must not be disturbed in transition.”
She darted in my direction, bloody knife out, as I was thinking that perhaps Hecate should be disturbed in transition. Any aspect of the goddess summoned in this manner would fail spectacularly on measurements of benevolence and goodwill. Deities that manifest through animal and human sacrifice tend not to engage in acts of philanthropy.
The witch located me and rushed forward, no doubt assuming that I was as slow as the bandits had been. But I was not only as fast as she but better armed and better trained. Her unguarded lunge, meant to dispatch me quickly, got her an arm lopped off at the wrist and a face-first trip into the mud. Her mask crunched and she howled, cradling her shortened arm with her good one. She was far too close to Shakespeare for my comfort, though she hadn’t seen him yet. The wisest thing for my own safety would be to cast camouflage and disappear, but they might find and slay William while searching for me, so I kept myself visible and moved purposely away from him to the other side of the road, which looked like a turnip field. The witches all tracked me, and the one I’d wounded pointed with her good hand.
“He’s not human!” she shouted in Greek. “He moves like us!”
“I’m a Druid of Gaia,” I announced in the same language. If Shakespeare revived and heard any of this, my cover wouldn’t be blown. “I mean you no harm if you mean no harm to the earth.”
“No harm!” the wounded witch shrieked. “You cut off my hand!”
“You were trying to kill me with it,” I pointed out. “And I chose to maim when I could have killed. Considering what you’ve just done to those men, I think I have the moral high ground.” The hot waxen features of the former bandits were slowing, congealing, solidifying into female faces, and their hair was growing long and dark at an alarming rate; their frames shrank somewhat in their clothing as they transformed into feminine figures. “Isn’t talking more pleasant? Let’s chat. Why are you summoning Hecate here?”
“The Druids died out long ago,” one near the fire said, ignoring my question.
“It’s funny you say that, because I was going to say there were no Thracian witches in England.”
With a final crescendo of chunky bone noises and a slurp of sucking flesh, Hecate finished transforming the bodies of her vessels into her preferred manifestation, and three women who could have stepped off a Grecian urn—long noses, thin lips, flawless skin, and all kinds of kohl on the eyelids—took deep breaths and exhaled as one. They weren’t of differing ages in the mold of maiden-mother-crone: They could be teenaged triplets, which made sense since it was really a single goddess in there, and I regret now that I never asked her if she took pleasure in confounding storytellers with the problem of whether to use singular or plural pronouns. I’ll stick with plural for the moment, because after the synchronized sigh that the witches and I all simply watched in awe, their eyes fluttered open and they spoke in creepy unison: “Blood.”