The Witch’s Daughter
The boy’s mother beat him afterwards for kissing the witch’s daughter. He did not cry out.
You saw the witch’s daughter. You know her; eyes like a whip cracking, hair like a tempest, lips like a riptide. Wasn’t yet twelve years old, if memory serves. You saw the other boys who followed in her wake. The skinny, the freckled, the red-faced, the strapping. They approached her with that sort of lustful fear that comes from believing she could murder you with a glance. She might have done, if she willed it, or if she cared to spare them a glance. She didn’t.
I saw them together, the witch’s daughter and the boy. They played silently in the fields. They stared for hours at the stream down the hill from her cottage, unmoving, except to disturb the water now and then. They disappeared into the forest and came out at dusk, covered in brambles and caked with dirt and blood.
His mother doesn’t know what to do. She thinks him corrupted, soiled. She wonders if he’ll be able to find a proper wife. The other boys and girls won’t talk to him anymore. And she has no time to watch the boy, not since her husband died in one of those lordly squabbles. The boy won’t talk to her. She can’t pull him away.
The witch’s daughter taught the boy about foxfire, and how to use it. He taught her about wood carving. She taught him about tying strands of herbs and mushrooms, and what to do with each one. He taught her about hunting, about snares and traps. She taught him about death, and how to see it.
You didn’t see the witch, did you? Skin like weathered oak. Tongue like an angry mare. You didn’t see her beat her daughter senseless. You didn’t see the swelling purple masses cover her daughter’s face. Her daughter hid, then. As she would. The boy saw.
His mother tried to visit the witch, once, to sort things out. She returned home afterward pale and shaken, and did not mention the witch again.
The witch’s daughter gave the boy a small sack of crow bones before she left. I saw him pick one out and drop it again as if it burned his fingers. He looked up at her, and she said nothing, but smiled. Then she leaned forward and gave him a peck on the lips. He did not seem to realize what was happening until it was over, and then it was over.
The witch’s daughter tells the boy she’ll come back, one day, when she knows enough to escape. The boy tells her he’ll look for her, when he’s strong and skilled enough to come to her rescue. The witch’s daughter laughs and shakes her head sadly and tells him not to be stupid.
When the witch and her daughter packed their things into the wagon and set off, the witch’s daughter sat upon the back and stared toward his farm as it rolled away. Furtively, she would take a pinch of dried leaves from a pouch around her sapling waist and let it fall to the road behind them. The witch did not seem to notice. The boy watched her go from a distance, clutching the sack of bones.
Now, the boy stands at his window, and watches the road, like a widow watching the sea.
He’ll be waiting until she comes back.
