Honor among thieves

Chapter Thirty-Two

Cythera found her mother down in Swampwall, where the river Skrait entered the walls of Ness. The district flooded every spring, so no one lived there-and because it was so eerily deserted in the midst of the thronging city, it had gained an evil reputation. Supposedly it was full of spirits and deadly wildlife and places where the ground had subsided and would suck a man down to his death before he had time to call for help. In fact it would have been a pleasant, tranquil place if not for all the stinging insects. Whole city blocks there had been abandoned to sprawling vegetation, interrupted only by a broken bit of wall or the sunken foundations of some ancient house.

Coruth came there quite often to collect herbs and simples. When Cythera spied her mother, Coruth was bent over a reddish plant, gathering flower petals. She had a basket tucked under one arm already full to the brim with bryony, dittany, and rue.

“You came,” Coruth said without looking up. “I thought perhaps you had ignored my summons. I hope your journey here was uneventful.”

“I spent a week dodging bandits and comforting girls who had been abused by men and worrying always that some barbarian would find us and kill us all while we slept. I huddled in burnt-out barns by day and clutched myself for warmth at night,” Cythera said. “I was terrified and miserable the entire time. I don’t know if you’re aware of this, but there’s a war on. And now I return to find Ness all but deserted. Mother, what is going on? What have you seen?”

The witch straightened up and smiled at her daughter. “Oh, terrible things. But then I always do. The problem with seeing the future is the same as the problem with seeing the past. So much of it is bloody and brutal. Today, though, the sun is shining and the leaves are changing color. It’s good to see you.”

Cythera felt her jaw drop. She couldn’t remember the last time her mother had spoken to her with tenderness. Coruth was not a particularly warm sort. She was a witch, after all, and witches had to maintain a fearful aspect. “I’ve missed you, myself,” Cythera replied.

“I’ve always loved this part of the work,” Coruth said, and bent to pluck the spiky leaves of a plant so small that anyone else would have passed it by. “So nice to be out in the fresh air, close to green and growing things. Do you know this one?”

“Calendula,” Cythera said, nodding at the plant. “The flower gives it away.”

“Quite so,” Coruth said. “It’s good for reducing a fever. Very useful. What about this?”

She pointed at a wild tangle of grass growing around the base of an ancient signpost. Cythera took a moment to think. Most grasses looked exactly alike, but they had wildly different uses and virtues. “Fountain grass,” she said finally.

“Very good. And why would I want to gather it?” Coruth asked.

Cythera shook her head. She knew she was being tested-this wasn’t the first time she and her mother had played this particular game-but it had to be a trick. “It has no uses that I’m aware of.”

“Really?” Coruth asked.

Cythera bit her lower lip and tried to recall. This had to be a trick question. “Yes. I’m certain. Absolutely useless.”

“Unless I wished to thatch the roof of a house. Or feed a sheep,” Coruth pointed out. “It has a pleasant smell, too, so I might mix it with the rushes I lay on my floor. To a man being hunted by enemy soldiers, fountain grass might be very useful. It might mean the difference between life and death, because it grows tall enough to hide him from view.”

Cythera sighed. “I meant it had no use in magic.”

Coruth laughed. It barely sounded like a cackle at all. “I thought I’d taught you better than that. Magic isn’t all about casting spells. Now, help your old mother out with your young eyes. Do you see any poppies around here? If we’re going to have wounded men stacked in heaps-and we will, very soon-we’ll need something to ease their pain.”

Cythera cast around her looking for the red flowers but couldn’t see any. This was another test, but she didn’t know whether she should keep looking until she found the poppies or if she was supposed to announce there weren’t any. Then she caught sight of a particular purple flower she knew all too well and gasped.

“Did you find some?” Coruth asked.

“No-no, just-look here. Mandrake.”

The witch and her daughter bent low over the plant, which grew very close to the ground. Its fleshly leaves spread out around the purple flowers and shaded the ground below. Mandrake was one of the rarest of plants, and also one of the most useful to a witch. Every part of it was deadly poison, but if properly diluted and prepared, it could work a hundred different charms.

“An excellent find,” Coruth agreed. “And at a time when I have a need for its roots.” She began to reach for the plant.

“Mother, no!”

“Something wrong?” Coruth asked.

“Everyone knows about mandrake. The roots are like little men, and when they’re drawn from the earth they die. But they don’t go alone. They scream in their agony, and anyone who hears that cry will perish with them.”

“Oh?” Coruth asked. “Yet surely there must be a way to harvest them.”

Ah. So this was the real test. Cythera nodded. “You feed a little dog until it will follow you anywhere. Then you tie its tail to the stalk of the mandrake and run away. The dog will try to come after you, and in the process it will pull the root free. The dog dies but you have your treasure.”

“What an absolutely horrible thing to do,” Coruth said. She clucked her tongue. “No dog deserves to die like that.”

Cythera steeled herself. “Witches can’t always be kind. Sometimes they must be ruthless, for the greater good. A witch is beyond common notions of good and evil, but not beyond true morality. She must know when doing a little evil will prevent great suffering later. And she must be willing to take on that weight.”

“I see you’ve actually heard some of the things I tried to teach you,” Coruth said. “Yes. You’ve even memorized some of them. I suppose that’s a good start.”

“I see now why you wanted me to return to Ness,” Cythera said. Her blood felt as cold and greasy as river water in midwinter. “You want to train me to follow in your footsteps. To become a witch.”

There had been a time when Cythera begged her mother to do just that. When she thought that having that power would be the only way to be free, to live her own life, instead of just becoming some man’s wife. Coruth had refused her, back then, and Cythera was mortified because she thought Coruth was telling her she wasn’t good enough. She’d been so distressed she ran right into Croy’s arms.

Now-when she’d finally found love with Malden, love that wasn’t the same thing as iron chains around her neck-now when she had a reason to want to be a normal woman, now-only now-Coruth seemed to have changed her mind.

“Yes,” her mother said. “You have it. Though you don’t know why yet.”

Cythera lowered her head. “Because Ness is going to need as many witches as it can get. That’s right, isn’t it? The barbarians will come here. They’ll try to take the city. And we need to fight back.”

“That isn’t it at all, actually,” Coruth said.

“Mother,” Cythera said, drawing herself up to her full height. “You do me great honor by offering to train me. I’m not sure that I want this, however. I-”

“I wasn’t asking if you wanted it,” Coruth said, not even looking up.

Cythera held herself very stiff, as if she could make this moment pass her by if she just held perfectly still.

“You once wanted the power I offer you. You wanted the power of witchcraft, so you could be free. As so few women in this world ever get to be. You were wrong in thinking that it would give you freedom-a witch is never free. So I denied you.”

“I don’t claim to understand what you mean,” Cythera said. “I only know that a witch can’t marry. She can’t even take a lover. Mother, I’ve found something with Malden, something that-”

Coruth’s voice as she interrupted was hollow and free of inflection. Cythera knew that voice well. “You will have your chance to be his lover. You will be happy with him, for a short while. And then you will do something so horrible that you will never be able to look him in the eye again.”

Cythera’s jaw dropped.

That was the voice Coruth used when she made prophecy.

“You’ve seen something,” she whispered. “You’ve seen my future. Will you tell me what it is that you see me do?”

“No,” Coruth said in a more natural tone.

“But-something horrible? So horrible that… Mother! What am I going to do?”

“You’re going to train to become a witch, because it is the only way you can avoid what is to come. I’ve seen enough to know that. Now. May we stop pretending that you have a choice? That what you want actually matters?”

Cythera wanted to cry. She wanted to wail, and run away, and go as far from Ness as she could get. She balled her hands into fists. Clamped her eyes shut. Finally, she nodded.

“Good. Let’s get started with your training, shall we? Lesson the first.” Coruth’s hand shot forward and grabbed her wrist. It felt like the claws of a demon digging into her flesh. Cythera cried out but the pressure only increased. She could never have broken that grip-not even Croy could have resisted as Coruth forced her hand down to the soil, forced her fingers to lock around the stem of the mandrake plant.

“Mother? No!” Cythera screamed.

“Pull,” Coruth said. And their two hands, locked together, dragged the mandrake root free of the ground. Cythera tried to cover one of her ears with her free hand, thinking to block out even a little of the deadly sound, the death throes of the root, which were always fatal, always deadly to anyone who dared to The root came free of the ground without so much as a squeak.

It looked nothing at all like a man either, not really. She had been expecting a tiny homunculus with staring dead eyes and little fangs. Instead it looked like a root vegetable, brown and fibrous, bifurcated at one end to give the barest suggestion of legs.

“But-”

“Lesson the first,” Coruth said, “is this. Think. Always, always think. Have you ever seen a plant that had lungs or a throat? The mandrake root can’t scream. Even if it could, what sound could possibly kill someone? At worst such a scream might give you a headache, and there’s plenty of willow bark around here to help with that.”

“But every authority agrees,” Cythera said when she had assured herself she was not dead. “Maybe this isn’t true mandrake, maybe you’re just trying to make a point, a point about… about…”

“That’s real mandrake, all right. Don’t believe everything you’re told. Half the old stories about our art are just that-stories. Stories made up to scare off the uninitiated. It would be too dangerous to allow just anyone to play around with mandrake, so we made up this silly story about screaming roots to keep their grubby little hands off of it. Here. Take this basket. We need a round dozen of those roots for what I have in mind.”