Besieged: Stories from the Iron Druid Chronicles(20)
“Hi. Back away, join your sisters, and you can live. You might even summon Hecate again someday. Or I can kill you now. What’ll it be?”
She said nothing but retreated, always keeping her eyes on me, and I watched her go, keeping my guard up.
With a little bit of help from the elemental communicating through the earth, I located the horses—they hadn’t run far—and convinced them that they’d be safe if they returned to give us a ride back to town; when we got to the stables they’d get oats and apples.
While I waited for them, I knelt and checked on Shakespeare. He was unharmed except for his drunken oblivion; he’d likely have a monstrous hangover. But while he was out of immediate physical danger, he still needed magical protection. The witches might not be able to curse me, but they could curse him, and it would occur to them to try before I left the field. But the piece of cold iron in my purse that I’d been anxious to hold on to earlier would do me yeoman service now. I fished it out and, having no string or chain on me, bound it to his skin at the hollow of his throat and made it a talisman against direct hexes. It wouldn’t save him from more carefully crafted curses using his blood or hair, but I’d address that next.
The witches huddled together and eyed me through their bearded masks as I hefted Shakespeare over his horse’s back, a task made more difficult by my wound. I did what I could to hide his face from their view and was particularly careful about leaving anything behind for them to use against us later. I located Shakespeare’s vomit and my blood and, with the elemental’s aid, made sure that everything got turned into the earth and buried deep.
I snuffed out the fire too, binding dirt to the wood to smother the unnatural flames, and that not only left the crossroads really dark but prevented the witches from doing much else that night. They complained loudly that they needed it to heal.
“Don’t try to summon Hecate in England again,” I called over their cursing, giving the horses a mental nudge to walk on. “England and Ireland are under my protection. I won’t be so merciful a second time.”
A tap on my cold iron amulet warned me that one or more of them had just tried to hex me. Since Shakespeare didn’t immediately burst into flames or otherwise die a gruesome death, I assumed his talisman protected him as well.
“Good night, now,” I called cheerfully, just to let them know they’d failed, and we left them there to contemplate the profound disadvantages of summoning rituals. The risks are almost always greater than the reward.
Once we were well out of their sight and hearing, I paused to recover my cold iron talisman and place it back in my purse. Shakespeare helpfully remained unconscious until we returned to the stables and his feet touched ground. He was bleary-eyed and vomited again, much to the disgust of the stable boy, but rose gradually to lucidity as his synapses fired and memories returned.
“Marquis! You live! I live!” he said as I led him away to the White Hart, where I would gladly fall into bed in my room. His eyes dropped, and he raised his hands and wiggled his fingers the way people do when they want to make sure that everything still works. “What happened?”
I remembered just in time that I was supposed to have a French accent. “What’s the last thing you remember?”
“The witches—”
“Shh—keep your voice down!”
More quietly, he said, “The witches—they killed those men.”
“Yes, they did. Is that all?”
His eyes drifted up for a moment, trying to access more details, but then dropped back down to me and he nodded. “That’s the last thing I remember.”
Fantastic! That was my cue to fabricate something. “Well, they threw the men in the cauldron, of course, while I threw you over my shoulder to sneak out of there.”
“What? But what happened? Did they eat the men?”
“No, no, it was all divination, the blackest divination possible, powered by blood. They were asking Hecate to reveal the future for them.”
“Zounds, God has surely preserved me from damnation. And you! Thank you, sir, for my life. But what did they say?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“What matters did the hags seek to learn? The future of England?”
“I heard nothing beyond a general request to let the veil of time be withdrawn, that sort of thing. They were out of earshot before they got to specifics.”
“But the chanting, before—you heard all of that; you translated some of it for me. What were their words, exactly—I need a quill and some ink!” He staggered into the White Hart Inn to find some, time of day be damned.
And that put me in the uncomfortable position of creating something that sounded like a spell but wasn’t. I couldn’t very well provide Shakespeare with the words one needed to summon Triple Hecate, knowing that he would immortalize them in ink.
So once he found his writing materials and demanded that I recount everything I could recall, providing a literal translation of the witches’ chanting, I spun him some doggerel and he wrote it down: Double, double toil and trouble …
“And now you know why I shivered, Granuaile, when you said, ‘Fire burn and cauldron bubble.’ ”
Granuaile cried, “You wrote the witches’ lines? No way!”
Shrugging and allowing myself a half grin, I said, “You’re right. Shakespeare didn’t write what I said into Macbeth verbatim. He played around with it a bit and made it fit his meter. Much better than what I said, to be sure. And the mystery of Hecate’s summoning remained a mystery.”