The Wolf & The Witch

They entered the Land of Ravines asleep, and were carried to a small village, and cleaned, and bandaged, and laid in a warm bed, by an alpha named James, and his five wives. The six of them warned the wolf and the witch: the ruler of this land is expecting a different couple: Adra and Josh. And because you are not them, if you’re found, you’ll either be killed on sight, or word will be sent, by hawk, to Edward, and the other couple will simply walk out the gate, and across the bridge, and you will die. Josh, Adra’s mate, and Bethany, Deth’s mate, are originally from the Land of Streams. It is imperative to trade, and to Edward, that the land of Moss, and the land of Streams, maintain peaceful relations. Which means it is imperative that either Josh, or Bethany, win and cross the bridge.

Which obviously meant that Lestat and Claire were never meant to make it this far. And it also meant that James, Edward’s younger brother, would see the same benefit to his city, and his land, if Deth and Bethany won. But if Lestat and Claire won? They had already told James and his five wives they were burning the forest and killing the packs and covens, and neither James, nor his wives, had responded. So however accommodating and helpful James and his wives were, the wolf and the witch had to assume they had no allies here. No one would come to their rescue, and no one would come to their aid.

Lestat used their hatchet to cut and strip vines. He wrapped them tight around the sharp end of the iron pike, then he alternated between heating the vines, and soaking them in water- back and forth for an hour. The vines shrank, and tightened, and now his pike had a scraggly wooden handle, hiding the sharp point- designed to look like a crutch for a witch with a bad leg, and not a weapon.

Claire looked up at him. “What next?”

He led her to the shack and opened the closet door. The floor was sunk black into the forest, and small white mushrooms, like drops of sloshed buttermilk, lined the walls and crept up towards the dim light at the cracks. Old tools, and the remains of rags, rotted in the ground. Lestat put the toe of his boot in the black decaying floor and nudged up a sharp wedge of rusted metal, probably from a shovel, or spade. He bent down, squinted in the dark, and picked it up very carefully and held it out. “Next we wedge these into your boots, without cutting ourselves or breaking them.”

Devious as all hell, Claire thought. Damn if he wasn’t sharp as shit when it came to killing people. They worked for an hour, their foreheads together. A sharp sword for killing, and a dull, rusted one for revenge- they had learned that lesson well.

The wolf and the witch knew the only chance they had was entering the city undetected and running straight for the gate- that is what a weak, and scared, and desperate, and injured couple would do. And hopefully the pride and arrogance of wolves meant that they would be thrown in a cell, then made to fight the chosen couple. And because part of their plan was appearing weak, and injured, Claire washed her hands very well, especially her fingernails, and then bit the nail jagged, and snagged it across the back of his left hand, and another long cut across his skin. Blood ran up and over the cut. She scraped her jagged nails across his forehead, just above his scar. She frowned as she did it. These cuts would not get infected, and they would not leave a scar, but they would turn an angry red for a few days.

Lestat took a rock out of the fire with a folded rag, and leaned over towards the stream, then held the hot rock on his face, near his eye- his skin reddened, blistered, sizzled, and he threw the rock away and put his face in the cold stream. Claire grimaced. He emerged thirty seconds later- his face, around his eye, was red. Then Claire did the same- she burned her forearm, not bad enough to scar or get infected, but bad enough to look like a new injury.

Then Lestat ran his clean, jagged fingernail up and down Claire’s recently healed calf, to try and make her appear so injured she couldn’t walk. And he grimaced on the first cut- he couldn’t do it- he could not injure her. He stopped.

“What is it?”

“I can’t hurt you.”

“It’s ok,” she said, and took his hand in hers. “It’s hard for me to hurt you, too. But we’re doing this for us. You’re not hurting me, Lestat.”

He nodded. He knew this was for them, but that didn’t make it any easier. The wolf and the witch looked at each other in the late morning light, in a falling forest of red and yellow. They had been injured many times on their journey, and had the scars to prove it. Like the leaves, they had fallen to the ground red and crinkled and full of holes a few times. They looked at each other, and at their scars, and at their eyes, and they knew the truth, but they did not realize it: their first injury was falling into the sewer- twenty feet into cold, shallow water and hard stone. Their second injury was the cold and its mouth of sharp white fangs, which nearly killed them both. And their third injury? Slapping each other in a dead city. The wolf and the witch hurt each other before either hunger, or thirst, or fear, or sharp rocks underfoot, or aching bodies, or wolves and soldiers and chains and fists and clay pits- they hurt each other before anything else had a chance to hurt them. And now they sat across from each other and struggled just to scrape and scratch the other. They had travelled nearly two-thousand miles in two months, but that distance was easy to measure. Other metrics did not exist in their world to describe the other distance they had travelled. Not in miles. Not in steps.

But in hugs. In closeness. Claire reached up and touched his cheek, and leaned in and kissed his forehead, and she put her arm around him, and hugged him. She didn’t like to see him hurt, either, or be the one doing the hurting.

Lestat finished cutting up her calf with his jagged fingernail, and they held each other for a few minutes- hurting one hurt the other, and they needed a minute to recover. Claire kissed his forehead, and face, and hands, and Lestat kissed her legs, and they helped each other up.

Then Claire spotted two dead mice under some leaves; then she found a large flat rock with an indention in the center at the edge of the stream. She tossed the mice to the center. She added salt, and the white mushrooms from the closet. She scoured the forest till she found an empty bird’s nest- all to the middle of the stone. She found animal droppings, fresh and old, and snail shells near the stream, and odd orange slimy things crawling up the underside of tree roots. Owl pellets, and the bloated carcass of a squirrel- all to the middle of the stone.

Lestat watched, equal parts fascinated and disturbed. Perhaps this was something they should’ve done before cutting themselves.

She covered the mass of filth with two ragged towels, and reached down in the stream, picked up a rock, and handed it to him.

“You want me to smash this nasty shit?”

“Yep. To liquid.”

He looked at the heap under the towel, then at her. Something about this felt the same as pissing on corpses. He started smashing, and grinding, regardless. Slowly. Carefully. So as not to splash. And Claire took one of their water skins, emptied it, and collected the green-black fluid that ran off the side of the stone.

“So what does this poison do?”

“Do?”

“Yeah? Symptoms? What would happen if I drank it?”

Claire shrugged- as if she knew.

“Really? You have no idea?”

“I don’t have a clue, but look at the color. Do you smell that? It’s got to do something nasty.”

Lestat looked at her nose- crinkled up from having to explain her new poison, and he couldn’t help but laugh at her. He kept falling for her dumb ass over and over- pissing on corpses, climbing over mountains, and now smashing nasty shit for perhaps no other reason but to infect themselves.

“Don’t fucking laugh at me. It’s disrespectful.”

“Sorry.” He was smiling, and grinning, and trying not to. “It’s just, mixing random nasty things into a potion seems to be a very witch-like thing to do.”

She glared at him. “Can you make a poison, huh? Huh?”

He shook his head no, still grinning.

They bandaged themselves, and wore their filthiest, most ragged clothes, and packed their belongings. They left their blankets, and most of their food behind for the mice, and carried only their dire wolf cloaks, two packs, water skins, and the iron pike.

They followed the stream until it fell off the side of a ravine. The trees leaned out, and the yellow leaves fell into nothing, and not wanting to fall off the side themselves, they tied a rope to a tree, and walked out to the overhung edge, and leaned over, and there was no bottom. They dropped a branch, and it fell soundless into the blackness of the ravine. They could see the other side: five-hundred feet away, across the ravine, was the Land of Moss, with its capitol village of Itthon. Five-hundred feet away. Their home.

They followed the ravine a day and a half and then, through the trees, they saw the city of Favoris, and the long bridge that stretched across the ravine, towards home.

As they watched the city from the tree line they saw three gates, all swarming with soldiers and wolves. They stood in the tree line watching as the sun slowly circled overhead, and they both had the same idea: roughly every hour horses pulled carts loaded with large wooden barrels into the city, and then thirty minutes later the same cart would leave the city. Various carts, and people, came and went all day, but those carts hauling large tanks were allowed free passage in- they were not stopped, or slowed, in any way.

“This city doesn’t have a well,” Claire said.

“You’re right- they cart water from somewhere.”

She looked up at him, and he looked down at her, and they smiled in agreement.

The wolf and the witch rode back through the forest, and then out into the plains, galloping in a wide arc around the city. They passed a few trader caravans as they crossed the road, then they were back in trees, following the water carts. Two carts entered the woods and stopped a mile in, near a building with a large water wheel. They backed the carts up, and slid a large wooden lid aside, and then the wheel dumped water bucket by bucket out of a stream, into the tanks. Four men stood by the carts, talking, then stopped when they saw the wolf and the witch ride up.

It was a little odd to the wolf and the witch that a city’s water supply would be left unguarded, but they didn’t question it. If they had more time, and more resources, it might be possible to poison and kill the entire damn city, but they had neither time, nor resources.

“What can we do for you?” one of the men asked. He watched the two people- they looked beaten up and rough- bandaged, and scraped, with ragged clothes.

Lestat hopped down, and helped Claire down. He turned to the men and smiled. “I have an offer for you,” he said. “Both horses, and this money-“ he reached into his pack and found their pouch of stolen gold coins and tossed it over. “To sneak us into the city in one of those water tanks.”

The men opened the pouch and looked at each other. Two horses, and a lot of money, but if they were found out…

“We’re the last couple,” Claire said, and slipped part of an old shirt off the cuff. “Edward is expecting us, but we do not want to be taken to him just yet- we want time to spy on the other couple before fighting them.”

The men looked at each other again- they knew all about the two couples, and that cuff looked real. And they knew the alpha was expecting them, and they knew the last two couples would fight to the death for the authority to rule the Land of Moss. Spying on their opponent was a fairly smart idea.

One of the men held his hand out, and Lestat stepped forward and shook it. “You’ve got a deal, and best of luck to you. That other couple has their own small group of men with them, and they’ve done nothing but cause trouble every night. I hope you two kick their asses.”

Claire smiled, and squeezed Lestat’s hand. “Oh, trust me- we will.”

The wolf and the witch climbed up into one of the wooden tanks- fifteen feet tall and ten feet wide. They attached a rope to the top, and slowly floated up as the water, bucket by bucket, filled the inside. Thirty minutes later Claire and Lestat were hanging by a rope in a black tank full of water, with perhaps one foot of air in the top. Then they felt the cart lurch and the water sloshed their faces. Claire held tight to Lestat, and Lestat held tight to the rope, and they made their slow, wet, sloshing way towards the city of Favoris. They passed straight through the city gates- wolves and soldiers prowled the gates, but they didn’t check the tanks, and the wolves couldn’t smell Lestat and Claire because they were submerged in water. They felt the cart lurch again, then jostle over cobblestones, turn a corner, and a few minutes later the cover slid off. Lestat climbed over the side, and helped Claire, and Claire was very careful with the skin of black-green liquid. She opened it at the last second, and squeezed the potentially poisonous mixture into the water, then Lestat held her and hopped to the ground. The men didn’t notice.

The wolf and the witch looked at each other, smiled, and took off. Wrapped in bandages, carrying Claire, and two packs, and an iron rod with vines wrapped around the sharp end, Lestat ran through the evening crowds for the gate, shoving people aside. Guards saw them coming, and lowered their swords and spears, and Lestat charged them.

“Stop! Halt!” one yelled, and stepped forward and raised his spear. They didn’t stop and the soldier threw the spear at them. It was a very good throw- it would’ve gone through Lestat’s chest, except he turned, caught the spear out of the air, and threw it back. And missed. The spear rattled off the stones. He ran forward and lowered his shoulder and plowed two guards out of the way, shielding Claire, but as the guards fell one grabbed his foot and they all went tumbling to the ground. More guards came running. Lestat wobbled to his feet, Claire in his arms, and dodged a sword, and another- he kicked a sword away, and just dodged a spear, when a soldier tackled him to the ground. Claire reached around and ran magic out of her arm and flung fire across his face. The soldier rolled away, and Lestat hopped up again and headed for the gate, and again he was tackled. Lestat turned and punched, and his punches were not strong enough- he did not break jaws, he did not send teeth flying, and no men were knocked out. Claire ran magic out of her arms, and tried to set some men on fire, but her magic was too weak. More guards came, and surrounded them, and stomped the wolf and the witch into the stones. Lestat growled, rolled away, and scrambled to his feet, and tried to run again when the sharp tip of a spear caught his side and blood ran, and the sharp blade of a sword knicked Claire’s arm, and blood ran. Thirty soldiers surrounded them, then fifty. The wolf and the witch were only ten feet from the gate, but they could go no further. Lestat knelt down in front of the soldiers, and begged for their lives, and a heavy boot came up and his nose and lip busted and blood flew in an arc and he was knocked back. Lestat covered Claire, and curled up on the stones as heavy leather boots stomped them into the street. He groaned, and begged, and eventually pretended to pass out. Claire did the same- cussed, pleaded, and pretended to pass out.

Villagers gathered and watched. Merchants, and children, and families gathered and watched. Chains were locked around Lestat’s waist, and chains locked around Claire’s, and the two were pulled down the dirty street, leaving a thin trail of blood on the stones.