The crimson witch Read Free Page B

CRIMSON WITCH
        
        She bent over the cauldron, her hands clutching at the iron rim, squinting her eyes so that her eyebrows almost met, and concentrating as hard as she possibly could, concentrating until her head swam a little and her blood pounded dizzily in her temples. The liquid in the pot was hazing, eddying with ebony and ocher, streaked through with gamboge and silver, damping out the picture of the man and the dragon that she had been watching so intently. Too intently. She had become so absorbed in the picture that she had neglected to hold it on the surface of the liquid. Now it was slipping away from her, lost in the swirlings of colors. She doubled her force on it, set it to bubbling again. The silver formed bubbles that burst and splashed back as ebony onto the gamboge surface, swirling into cream and ocher and amber… Once more, froth collected at the edges of the pot and boiled there until she eased back some of the pressure of her magics. Then the liquid cooled again, smoothed into a mirror that reflected her face, the perfect greenness of her eyes, the perfect upward tilt of her haughty little nose. She snorted, stamped her foot, released control of the liquid.
        The hearth fire flickered.
        Outside, the storm had reached the mountain and was surging against the peak, caught in the down-drafts that were turning it backwards onto the valley once more.
        Lightning flashed.
        Thunder erupted, boomed, crashed backwards, echoed into quiet, only to erupt again, pounding, stomping across the sky.
        She exerted herself again, turned on her magics. The liquid cleared once more and presented a picture of a man riding a dragon alongside a deep gorge toward a natural bridge that would eventually carry them across the river and into Lelar. The man clung to the great horny ridge of the saddle, fighting to stay on during the bumpiest moments of the ride, leaning against it and relaxing when the way grew smooth. He was truly a handsome man with a magnificent mane. She wondered what thing could draw him from the peace on this side of the gorge to the horror and evil that lurked in Lelar.
        Then she remembered to get mad at him again. “Damn it!” she snapped, stamping her foot hard on the floor again. She kicked the kettle and screamed almost at once, dancing around and trying to grab hold of her injured toe. When she got hold of herself, she reached into the toe with her magics and set everything straight again. It stopped hurting.
        She turned back to the cauldron, called the picture back again, and concentrated on hating him. He had used her! She mumbled the words of the proper chant. She mumbled them forwards, then backwards. She blinked her eyes thrice, twitched her nose to the left once and to the right twice. Then she concentrated…
        But he remained seated on the dragon, cocksure as when she had begun the chant, as undamaged as he had been before she had muttered a single word. She had cursed him to fall into the ravine, fall into the steam to a fiery death on the hot boulders below. But there he sat. Cocksure. Damn him! She spat into the liquid and tried again. This time, she tried to ash him, to burn him with searing fire of the sun, to crumple him into dry, gray useless dust. But that didn't work either. He leaned against the horny hump of the dragon's back, oblivious to her efforts, unaware that she was using her powerful magics on him.
        She let the picture cloud, turned away from the cauldron.
        Wasn't she Cheryn the Daughter of Mulgai?
        And wasn't she the Witch of Eye Mountain?
        “And aren't I the Crimson Witch, feared by all the Commoners?” she asked the walls of the room, the tapestries that covered the dirt and rock beneath.
        But the walls did not answer.
        “Well, aren't I?”
        Still-silence.
        In anger, she struck life into two rocks and repeated to them the question that the