“One is a doctor,” she said. “He’s roused cold babies in their mother’s belly and brought back the dead. He lives beyond the forest. The other’s a witch. She lives somewhere inside the forest, but I couldn’t tell you where. The journal didn’t say. Now listen to me. I don’t need both of them, only one. You’ll go to the witch first. Offer her gold or protection, anything she asks for. If she doesn’t accept, kill her and find me the doctor.”
I had never seen a witch. When I was little my brother told me stories of sea witches who looked like bloated seals and sunk fishermen’s boats, and he’d move in his bed at night to make the floorboards squeak, and he’d repeat, “She’s coming up the stairs, she’s coming up the stairs,” until I cried. I told my younger brothers the same lies after they were born.
“Why wouldn’t she?”
“Why, because she’s the same witch who put the curse on my husband.” The queen shifted in her seat. “Twenty years ago she was living around here. She had a little house on the rocks by the marshes. She fell in love with the king. She was beautiful, but he wouldn’t look at her because she was a witch. When he rejected her she put her curse on him, and said, I give you ten more years. He wanted to leave her be for a while, wait for her obsession to wane, and then pay her to lift the curse. But before he had the chance, the foreign lords got in the way.
“One lord was walking on the foothills with his wife and child, and they happened upon the witch, collecting weeds in her basket. The child was messing about and shoved her a little. Now, I wasn’t there, I was a child myself at the time, but this is what they tell – the witch smiled at the child, greeted the lord and his wife, and went up the path to her house. The next morning they saw that the child had died during the night.
“The word spread that it was her doing. A week later the lords sneaked up to the witch’s house and burned it. But she must have been out that night, because a year later, someone said he saw her walking among the lords’ houses in the dark, and the next morning the child’s parents were dead in their bed, burned to a crisp.
“The witch is dangerous, but she won’t hurt you if you appease her. If you’re going to kill her, wait until she turns her back to you and cut off her head. Can you use a sword? Good. We’ll give you a sharp one, and food to last the entire way, and gold to show them that you really do come from the castle. That won’t be too much to carry. Tonight you’ll sleep here. And now come.” She stood up. “You’re going to see my husband.”
*
She led me through a string of doors and dimly lit halls. There were no guards and no servants. At last we reached a final door. The queen knocked, then put her hand in a deep alcove in the west wall of the room, and lifted a thick, gold-embroidered coat that had been lying invisible in the shadow.
“Put your coat on,” she said. “Don’t shout, don’t comment on the smell. My husband is a man with a true sense of self-worth, and he knows there’s no use pretending he’s what he used to be. But that doesn’t mean he should be insulted.” She breathed in as if she were done talking, but a sad and embarrassed expression appeared on her face, and she added, “He’s your king, after all.”
She unlocked the door and I felt like I’d been hit with a wave of snow. I’d gotten used to the castle’s heat, and the air beyond the door was as cold as the salt flats in the evening. When the shock of the cold wore off, I inhaled and felt a terrible smell. It was a mix of two smells – one, a nauseating smell of putrid flesh, and the other, a sharp smell of salt, the kind that makes a man’s eyes water. Thinking of the queen’s words, I tried not to flinch. I looked around the room, searching for the king. When I understood that my gaze had already passed over him several times, I was glad that I’d been warned not to shout.
***
IV.
I never spoke to the thin man again, and so I couldn't tell him what I'd seen – and if I could, I wouldn't have. In the morning a guard walked me out of the castle. The fresh snow crunched beneath my boots as I left through the gate.
I had a number of goals ahead of me. First I needed to get to the foothills where the foreign lords used to live, then go west to the rocks and find the path under the snow. Up beyond the rocks lay the marshes. My father had told me about them, vast gray places where no man and no animal can live. The water, he said, hums as it rises, and the weeds grow close together like patches of blanket and smell of vinegar. Then begins the forest. It's possible to sleep there at night without a roof over your head. The wind is calm, and a good bonfire will hold. There are few animals there, and one creature who whispers your name while you sleep.
It took me three hours to reach what was left of the foreign lords' houses. The roofs had crumbled and the walls had been torn apart for firewood by my ilk – strong and quick, yes, and dying of cold each winter. Only the stone chimneys remained, peeking out of the snow like the big brothers of the gravestones on the hill.
When I got to the rocks the sun was high in the sky. I reached the top soon enough, but I was tired from the climb, and I made my way to the ruins of the witch's house before realizing what I was doing. I sat on the remnants of her chimney and looked around. I could see the wall of the king's fort behind the old hill, and to the other side, the gray marshes.
They were like nothing I'd seen before. Ash colored water, and green weeds showing through stains of thin snow, as far as the eye can see. I lowered the sheathed sword into the water and dragged it along the shore until it wouldn't move, then took a cautious step forward. Beneath the water and the snow there was an area of solid ground. I took a second step.
I walked for a long time. I heard the water's humming, I smelled the vinegar in the cold gusts of wind, and I took breaks for food and drink. When I saw the forest the sky had already begun to grow dark, but I made it. I reached the green mass of pines and walked until I could no longer feel the wind. I found some stones and enough dry branches, and with the thick matches the queen had given me, lit a fire which I hoped would last through the night. I unrolled a sealskin sack and crawled inside.
That night I dreamed of a white haired woman who looked very much like my mother. She walked around my bed, placing a plate of steaming food by each leg. “Go on,” she said, “eat.” The longer I waited the angrier I could see her becoming. Then she said my name in full, as though scolding a child, and I woke up. It was dark. Half asleep, I thought I could still hear my name echoing in the air.
*
I woke up the second time from a feeling of cold. The sky was gray, with a few thin strips of sun flashing through the clouds. The fire was dying. I ate a quick breakfast and continued my journey deeper into the forest.
I hadn't been walking long when I saw the girl. She stood barefoot behind a skinny pine, a slim figure in a white underdress. At first I thought someone had leaned a corpse against the tree. The girl's hair was frozen, and the underdress soaking wet. It couldn't be a living person standing like that in the cold. But as I approached I saw her chest rising and falling, and her eyes, icy blue marbles, moving in their sockets.
“Welcome back,” she said.
“Speak up, what did you say?”
She repeated the words I thought I'd misheard.
“We've never met,” I said, and then a thought came to my mind. “You're the witch.”
She smiled. Her lips were healthy and red. “I'm no witch.”
“You're the witch. I come from the king –”
“Sir, I'm no witch.” She smiled again. “Really, I'm not. Come, come.” She began moving away slowly, like a sleepwalking child. I followed and grabbed her hand. She felt like fur. I pushed her against a thick tree.
“Witch, I –”
“Sir, I'm no witch. Really, I'm not.”
She scared me. “Why are you whispering?” I asked.
She chuckled without making a sound.
“Why aren't you cold? You should be cold.”
She put a slender arm on my shoulder, and I felt arrows of coarse fur scratching my nape. She smile
d as she pulled me toward her, and for one moment I gave in. In that moment I saw her neck stretch out and grow long, until her eyes were looking straight into mine.
I grabbed her face with my left hand and hit her head against the tree. All I saw through my fingers were red lips, but I felt hard fur and a slimy animal nose, and too late – teeth. She bit me. I took her by the hair, sensing only cold fur and a sharp pain in my hand, and I pulled out the sword and swung it, then brought it down hard.
I dropped the head on the ground. The bleeding wound on my left hand was full of hard black hairs. I tried pulling them out but pain shot up to my shoulder each time. I took a flask out of my pocket and poured the golden liquid on the wound. Blood kept dripping down my fingers onto the snow, and I knelt to make a bandage.
Once I'd tied my hand I understood that I could no longer stand up. My head was heavy, and a blunt pain was spreading from my arm to the rest of my body. I thought I saw movement where the corpse lay. I tried to hold my weight but my legs collapsed and I fell face first into the snow.
I began crawling away from the creature, my arm burning with each motion. I crawled faster, almost managing to stand up a few times but always crashing back onto the ground. The boundaries of my vision narrowed. I made a last leap, and saw a house standing surrounded by trees. I called for help but heard nothing. I shouted again and again, unsure of whether I had become deaf or mute, as I crawled to the front steps.
***
V.
After my body went away, there was a numb, mindless darkness. It didn't last long, and soon I felt my eyes being forced open, and I was back at the fort, looking down at the king. In that vivid half dream I saw him looking at me the way he'd done then, waiting for my reaction.
At first I thought he had no legs. I saw his head, his arms, and his chest, sticking out of a square piece of wood on four wheels. Then I noticed the board was elevated. The king's legs lay behind him. His waist was held tight by the round hole in the wood. He put his hands on the floor and pushed, wheeling himself toward me and out of the shadow. I wished he hadn't done that, and I bowed my head, and I said, “My Lord. Your Majesty.”
The head was hideous. A bent nose, a mouth pulled to the side, a disfigured skull protruding out of the skin. His jaw, his cheekbones, his forehead – most areas of his face – were covered in sharp, cone shaped growths, gray little bits like the recently formed horns of a lamb. They appeared to be made of transparent bone, and a few moments passed before I realized they were salt crystals. His hair was thin, with only a few lone chunks of black on his head, and I could see that his entire skull cap was covered with the salt growths. The skin around them was reddish and dark, like dying flesh. His mouth was open. The teeth had been pushed outside of the jaw by sticks of hard salt, and I saw their roots through the transparent matter. An overpowering feeling of disgust took over me. And when he spoke, a vile, shameful curiosity made me stare deep into his mouth, at his flapping, black, nearly dead tongue.
“Next month everything will be all right,” he said. “Either you'll have brought me my cure, or I'll be walking in heaven on my two dead legs. They're waiting for me already.”
I looked at the legs lying motionless on the floor. What was once skin had petrified into salty bone.
“If you can't bring the cure, kill her. Promise me that.”
I did, and he didn't say much else. Only, “Thank you,” and then the queen led me away.
***
VI.
The first thing I felt when I regained my senses was that I was lying on my back and that I was warm. Then the rest of my body's regions awoke, one by one, and when at last I could open my eyes, I was hurting all over and a lump of dull pain beat in my hand.
I was in a room. The surface beneath me was soft – a bed – and I felt the weight of a thick blanket on my chest. A red fire burned in a small hearth. A woman's voice said, “Can you move?”
I made my right hand into a fist under the blanket. “Yes.”
I lay there quietly for a few minutes before beginning to wonder whose voice it was. I turned my head. She had long black hair and white skin, like the foreign lords, and her lips were painted red like their wives', but darker. Her face reminded me of my blood on the snow, and I remembered the creature.
“I was bitten.”
This startled her and she shuddered in her chair. “I think I know who did it,” she said. “What did it look like?”
“A person that wasn't a person,” I said.
“Yes, that's the one. But what did it look like?”
I wanted to tell her, but I felt my mouth grow weak, and I sank into a deep sleep. When I woke up the air smelled of food. The woman stood by the hearth with her back to me. I said, “Water.”
She brought a cup and raised it to my lips. That was the first time I noticed she was more beautiful than the women in the pictures. The thought put a quiet terror in my head.
“What is this place?” I asked.
She smiled a smile that made me feel like a child. “It's my house.”
“How did I get here?”
“You banged your head on my door. You were screaming, I'm blind, I'm blind, I can't move my arms. I dragged you inside and cut the stingers out of your hand, drained the poison as well as I could, cleaned it, stitched it up. A big part of your palm is gone, I don't think you'll be able to move your fingers all right. But you're lucky, I've seen the skeletons that thing leaves behind. It won't come near the house, but it might be waiting when you leave.”
“I killed it,” I said, and then, “Thank you.”
“No, you couldn't have done that.”
I wondered whether I had really seen the carcass move. “I cut its head off.”
Her lips tightened. “You don't have a knife with you.”
“I had a sword. I must have dropped it.”
She stood up from the bed. “What were you doing in this forest?”
“I come from the king. There's a witch living here, I need to find her.”
She opened her mouth but remained quiet. There was a look of anger and discomfort on her face. “Well, you've found her,” she said at last.
“You're the witch?”
“I'm not a witch, and your king's a clown. But if he sent you to look for a witch, then he sent you to look for me.”
I became very aware that I could barely move. “I wasn't going to hurt you,” I said. “I came to give you gold, or whatever you want.”
“What for?”
“To take the curse off the king.”
“Lord, you're all clowns. Every one of you. There's no curse.”
“No one will hurt you. Come back with me and take it off of him, and he'll give you anything you ask for.”
“You think I'm lying to save my skin, but there really is no curse. I'll feed you tonight, and tomorrow I'll see what to do with you.”
She fed me a soup of garlic and ground chestnuts, all the while muttering, “Ungrateful, ungrateful.” I felt ungrateful. The woman had saved my life, and I was wishing I had the sword with me so that I could cut off her head. But I knew I couldn't move my arms well enough to even feed myself, and I dreaded tomorrow.
She wiped my mouth and moved her chair to the far end of the room. She put out the lights. As I fought to stay awake, her eyes were looking at me like the eyes of an animal in the dark. They were still there when I drifted off.
*
The next morning I woke up in an empty room. The woman was gone. A pitcher stood by the bed and a long brown tube sprawled out of it, its end lying on the bed next to me. I moved my head and managed to bite onto it. I sucked and felt water pouring into my mouth.
She came back a few hours later with my sword. “Found it,” she said. She laid it down on the floor and brushed her fingers through her hair, pulling it back behind her ears. “I've decided. I'm not going to kill a cripple. But once you get well, you better not try whatever the king told you to do to me. I can't lift a curse that doesn't exist.”
I wanted to believe I wouldn't be killed by that woman. “You really aren't a witch?” I asked.
“Really.”
“Then what's wrong with the king?”
“He's sick.”
“There's no sickness that turns you into a thing like that.”
“How would you know? You're a salt man, aren't you? You don't know anything.”
I didn't try to prove her wrong. “I want you to not be a witch. This helplessness, I don't need it in a witch's house. But the king's turned from a man into a monster, and sickness doesn't do that. Why would he say you cursed him if you're not a witch?”
She sat down on the side of the bed. “I told him that, but it's not true. You know how your people make up their stories. When they started calling me a witch I didn't mind. It was a stupid rumor, but through the servants and the foreign lords, it got to your king, and it brought him to me. I was glad it did. It was just a lie, the curse. He said he'd marry me, and then a couple months later he said he wouldn't. I told him I'd cursed him, I was angry. It was just a lie. I already knew he was sick, but I hadn't told him. Those delicate types, when they go out too much and breathe in the salt, it settles down in them. That's it, there's no curse.”
*
Three days passed. She fed me chestnut soup and took me walking in circles around the well until I could walk by myself. Then she led me up the stairs and showed me the two rooms on the second floor. There was one of clutter and tools, and another one, a dark room filled with books.
“Are they all yours?” I asked.
“Some are. The rest were here when I found the house. You should have told me before, I would have brought you something to read if I knew you could.”
In the evening she found the forgotten food in my coat pocket, and we ate the dried meat with baked potatoes from her garden. She said, “I haven't had meat in a long time.”
“There aren't any animals here?” I asked.
“No, there are, but I can't hunt.”
“That's strange,” I said. “I figured you can do anything.”
*
Another two days passed and I couldn't move my left hand, but I felt well enough to go out and hunt down a boar. I hung it between two trees and showed her how to skin it, and she said, “What's the use? I won't catch one by myself once you've left.”