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The world beyond Mehitable King’s small glen grew quiet as it did every night, for just a brief slip of time when the robins stopped singing, and before the night time calls of the owls and foxes began—there was silence.
There was nothing like a perfectly silent wood on the eve of Samhain.
She drew her shawl around herself and bent down over the bundle of rootkin she had gathered over the course of the last warm evenings of summer. They were gnarled brown things, still caked with mud from the edge of the river where they grew, but Mel knew the power they held—because she was a healer—or to the hearthfolk of the town beyond the forest, a witch.
It was not entirely incorrect. Though the title left much to be desired and hardly scraped the surface of what Mel was capable of. But she did not judge them for their small mindedness—they only knew what they were familiar with and what their book told them.
Something chimed behind her, just the smallest tinkle of glass. She looked over her shoulder to see Hopestill batting at one of her jars on the windowsill with his white paw.
“Down, Hopestill,” Mel chirped.
The cat leapt off the sill and into the tall dried grass and fading flowers that surrounded her cottage. She had yet to thrash the garden, or collect seeds for the following spring, instead focusing all her intention on preparing her stores of herbs, mushrooms and roots, for this Samhain was special. The full moon was yet to rise as the gloaming had only begun to fade, but Mel intended to imbue as many of her ingredients as possible with its power that night.
She was very nearly finished.
She just had to clean and jar the rootkin…but something crashed in the woods.
She and Hopestill both looked in the direction of the sound instantly.
It cut through the silence of the forest, and then again…closer this time.
Cold panic ran through her just as the last light of the day faded and from the dark a hulking shape appeared between the trees.
Hopestill let out a low keen, his black tail puffing to twice its usual size.
Her first thought was that they had come for her.
The mad villagers from further south. The ones who created such a frenzy over just a few maidens who enjoyed a moonlit evening, and possibly drank too much or laughed too loud to be considered good company.
Her own sister had warned her of such a fate on her last visit with her husband Adam and their son Mercy. She had given up the ways of their mother for a life out of the woods with a kind and gentle man, she always wished for Mel to do the same…but Rebecca was not tied to the land like Mel was.
The figure between the trees stumbled, and Mel decided, rather recklessly, that if whoever it was had come to burn her house to the ground, or tie her to a chair and throw her in the river, they would probably have at least brought a torch to light their way. Certainly, they would not have come alone. If they had come to murder her, they were being awfully inconvenient about it.
She reached for her stick. It was knobbly, carved and carried by her father before her for half a century and always at her side.
“Who’s there?” she called.
There was no response from the creature, now kneeling in high bramble.
The wood beneath Mel’s fingers creaked as she held the stick aloft and stepped towards the edge of the forest and out of the ring of the warm light that was cast from her open front door.
“I will not hesitate to take up arms against thee.” Not that she had arms. Just her stick, and the infantry musket that had also been her father’s. Though she had no black powder.
The figure staggered upright again, and Mel could tell now that it was a man as his arm extended towards her.
“Help,” he groaned, before falling again into the wet underbrush. The silence of the early evening took over again as he went unconscious.
Mel was not used to strangers.
Mel was not used to men especially.
But she knew when a body had reached its limits.
She rushed forward, and rolled the large man onto his back, even in the dark she could make out black smudges of dirt and blood across his face, she could not tell from where it came, only that there was too much of it.
Her hands came away from his chest wet with it as well.
Of course.
Tonight of all nights.
She still had much to do before the moon crested in the sky and reached its full potential.
The rootkin would take at least an hour to clean.
The man would likely be dead from his wounds by then, however.
She groaned, found a hold on his coat that was not slick with blood, and began to drag him back through the clearing towards her tiny timber and stone cottage. He was heavier than he looked, and he looked massive.
Mel was left panting as she got him through the front door. The cool evening wind whipped around her as she straightened and brushed her hair away from her face. As she looked once more out into the forest, she noted something on the breeze—something different. Perhaps something dangerous.
The man on her floor gurgled unpleasantly.
Heartsbane, comfrey, yarrow…she wracked her mind for the ingredients her mother had taught her. She was more used to curing toothaches of the old trappers that lived in the woods, and tending to newborns whose mothers were desperate enough to seek her out…stopping a man from bleeding to death was just a bit past her comfort level.
Still, she had to try.
Foxfire, and red clay, she remembered in a flash.
She hurried to the shelves, pulling down pots and sachets of herbs then setting them beside the hearth. The firelight fell across the stranger’s face, and for the first time she saw him properly.
He was young, younger than she had expected. And beneath the blood and dirt, rather handsome.
Mel frowned and turned her attention back to her work.
She cut away his coat where it tangled too tightly around his chest for her to remove it properly, and then the once white fabric of his shirt met her eyes. It was soaked entirely through with blood, so red it was almost black. Carefully she peeled it away from the source of his bleeding.
When she doused the area with water the deep gouge in his side appeared. Her stomach twisted and her gaze flickered up to his face, he was still unconscious—and she was glad for it, because the first thing she had to do was going to hurt.
Heartsbane. She crushed the dried leaves into a fine powder and mixed them with a splash of water until they made a bitter paste. She knew how it felt to press the poultice into her small scrapes and cuts from time to time, she couldn't imagine the burn on an injury this large…but it would be sure to steady the bleeding and slow his racing heart.
She pressed handfuls of the mixture along the worst of it as quickly as she could.
A low groan escaped his throat as the muscles around his wound tightened and rippled.
“Be still,” she murmured, “you are in no state to object.”
Yarrow came next, crushed between her fingers and packed into the wound to staunch what remained of the bleeding. She held it in place until the cloth beneath her hands stopped darkening and his body went slack again.
She stood and threw a handful of comfrey into the kettle already bubbling on the fire. When the water turned pale green, Mel soaked a strip of linen in the herbal tonic and returned to lay it over the wound. Her mother had called it bone-knit, good for bruises and many other kinds of broken things.
The foxfire came last.
She scraped the precious, pale, faintly glowing powdered fungus out of its tiny glass jar and into a bowl where it shimmered as she mixed it with a whisper of goat's milk, and a thimble of red clay. It would not be pleasant—in fact she knew it tasted like the floor of a stable—but it would do more for him than any of her other remedies combined. She had never seen it fail to revive someone.
For good measure, Mel mixed a drop of her favorite valerian root tincture in with the sludge, it would keep him asleep through the worst of his healing, and she pressed the cup to his lips.
His eyes cracked open, just enough for Mel to see the blue of them, so light and cool, they could have been silver.
“Drink,” she whispered.
His lips parted and Mel helped him lift his head enough to swallow.
“Now sleep, you have caused quite enough trouble for one evening.”
He regarded her for just a moment, before his eyelids slipped shut again, and he began to snore.
—
By the time Mel heard stirring inside the cottage, the moon had well and truly risen. It hung, full and heavy with power just atop the trees and lit the clearing with a shimmering blue glow.
She had rinsed her hands free of the stranger’s blood in the spring, and managed to finish her preparations for Samhain. Every ingredient, jar, bottle and crock was set out across the yard to bathe in the light of the moon.
She turned to look through the leaded window.
Just the shape of him, rippled and warped though the glass, made something she couldn’t name twist inside her.
She thought of his eyes as he drank from her hands so obediently. His broad chest beneath her fingers…it must have been the moon, or the night, or the changing season, but she felt a little out of control at the thought of him…just on the other side of the wall.
Hopestill brushed against her legs and let out a pleading whine, surely confused as to why there was a stranger laying in his spot in front of the fire.
“He’s not staying long, don't fret.”
Mel patted the soft spot between Hopestill’s ears and shook herself out of the stupor that had come over her.
She pushed the door open and the man’s head whipped around, his eyes wider than she had seen them until now. He was seated upright, and his hands hovered over his side where the bandage hid his wounds.
“What did you do to me?”
Mel scoffed.
“I saved you, what did you do to yourself?”
He shook his head, confused.
“I can't remember.”
Mel stepped closer and dropped to her knees to inspect beneath the bandage. Her fingers glanced across his skin, and he shifted away with a hiss and a painful wince.
“Stop squirming,” she muttered, “You came to my house and asked me for help…now I have given it to you, and you must be still.”
He nodded, jaw going slack.
“Good, now tell me what you remember.”
“There was a…creature.”
Mel bristled at the thought.
“What kind of creature?”
He shook his head, and squeezed his eyes closed tightly as he tried to put the pieces together.
“I thought it was a bear at first. But, when it lunged, I could have sworn it spoke.”
Mel’s fingers went still on the edge of his bandage, and his eyes opened one at a time.
“A talking bear?” she asked incredulously.
“I know, it sounds…I’m sure I sound mad.” The man shook his head so that a lock of his dark hair fell across his face and Mel looked down again at her work, the sight of his eyes and his loose hair making her suddenly very aware of how close they were.
“Stranger things have happened on a night like this,” she whispered, pulling back the bandage, revealing freshly healed, pink skin in the place of the wound that had been there mere hours ago.
The veil was thin on Samhain—and Mel’s magic worked a little quicker…but sometimes, it allowed for darker things to arise from earth.
The man sucked in a ragged gasp as he looked down at his own body and saw himself whole and healed.
“How is that…how long have I been asleep?” he asked.
Mel busied herself with cleaning the remnants of poultice from his skin with a wet cloth and stood to throw his bloodied bandages into the fire.
“Not long,” she muttered over her shoulder, “now have a seat over there, so I can look at your face.”
He staggered to his feet and Mel rummaged through a trunk to find one of her father’s old shirts.
He pulled it over his head when she offered it to him, and Mel had to duck her head not to laugh when it hung like a dress over his hips. This stranger was large, but no one she'd ever met had been taller or broader than her father.
He sat on the bench Mel pointed to and tipped his chin up, as he waited for her to resume her inspection, Hopestill hopped up beside him, and he gave a soft sigh as he looked down at the animal.
Mel stepped close again.
“What did you say your name was?” he asked as Mel took his chin between her fingers to assess the scrapes across his angular jaw and well proportioned nose.
“I didn't.” She reached for a jar of salve and spread it down the side of his face.
“Well, what is it?”
“Mehitable, but my friends call me Mel.”
He leaned back, his eyes darting across her face.
“I’m Frank.”
Frank.
She thought the plainness of his name did not suit the exquisiteness of his features.
“Frank,” she murmured, returning to his wounds, the one at the corner of his eye in particular, “Tell me what the talking bear said to you.”
—
