Work Text:
"Before, you had the body of both maid and mare together," the knight said as she bound his wound with a poultice, covered it over with stems of goldenrod woven together, braiding each one over and under him like a fly being wound into a spider's larder. "Was that your true shape, or is this?" He spoke to fend off the weariness from the long chase, the loss of blood, not from any hope of receiving an honest answer. She was, after all, a witch.
"Why do you ask for answers you have no intention of believing?" the witch said, giving him a knowing look out of her jet-black eyes, and showing her teeth in a smile at his subsequent consternation. "It's your face that gives you away, pretty boy, not your thoughts." She pulled another long stem off the rowan shield she was using as a trencher. The silver sword lay nearby, green-shredded sap and dirt coating its cutting edge. "Very well, then. What would you say if I told you I had been born on a mountain far south of here, nearer to the sun, a daughter of one of the wisest healers and teachers the world has ever known?
"As he had no son at the time, my father took in boys to train as heroes. For centuries I did all the laundry and mending, the herb-gathering and cooking and washing up, and gleaned what wisdom I could from his students when my father was nowhere to be seen. He wouldn't have approved, you see. Of my ambitions, or my methods." Idly as the witch spoke she caught in one hand a wand of goldenrod, drawing the woody stem down like a bow. With the point of the topmost yellow plume she traced a line over the bare skin just below his breastbone, watching him shiver at the touch. "After I had learned quite enough, I left. And now here I am, and here you are. How is that for an answer?"
The knight shut his eyes, swallowed hard. The smell of the bruised and fraying stems made him queasy. "To have known Achilles and Perseus, Jason and Theseus. And yet you fled at the first sight of me." He met her eyes with an effort, almost defiantly. "No, I find it hard to believe you've ever known much of heroes."
"Fled from you?" she laughed. "A draggled little thing at death's door, chasing me through my own brakes and shallows?" She stood up then, looking as tall as the sky above him, the silver chain at her waist glinting like a belt of stars. "Oh, my dear one, my brave and stubborn knight. You are many things, but you are not a hero. Not yet." She bent and laid one hand over her green and gold handiwork and the grey, sapping ache of the injury beneath. Where she touched, he felt no pain. "Still deep, almost as deep as your heart. You'll be a while recovering." She left him there on the sand bank of the mere to sleep.
His dreams blurred into waking like the night mist blurred the water into grass, grass into mountains and the sky beyond. Once toward morning he thought he saw a long-bodied shadow on four legs, stalking its slow path across the lake like a heron. It stooped suddenly to snatch a fish up out of the water. He saw pieces of its meal drop away as the creature tore at the still-wriggling body with fingers and teeth. Afterward he dreamed of the witch in velvet blue, walking from star to winking star. It isn't her, not really, he told himself and for a moment or two he almost believed it. He felt the memory of her touch on the injured place above his heart, and the yellow of the goldenrod sank into his skin like sunlight, keeping him warm through the cold hours before dawn.
"How did you come by a horse and hound from Faerie?" the witch asked at breakfast the next morning, watching him as he ate.
"I didn't," the knight admitted between one bite and the next, leaving the fish but devouring the greens with an appetite that surprised him. His horse and hound and hawk had all returned sometime in the night and were presently busy finding their own breakfasts. The grey hawk, ordinary by all appearances, wheeled and stooped above the mere, while the brindled hound with its red ears and eyes like glowing coals ranged in and out of the tall grass. The milk-white stallion with the red mane and tail lifted its head from grazing to look around every now and again, as if bemused by the others' incessant motion. "The horse belonged to my grandfather. He rode him out of Faerie, by way of the crossing where the roads to that land and Scotland and hell all meet, with the girl who saved his life sitting in front of him on the saddlebow."
"That girl being your grandmother," said the witch, smiling slightly as she fed stem after dried stem to the cookfire. The goldenrod had withered away overnight to grey plumes and brown, crackling leaves, so she'd replaced the poultice and it wrapped it for the time being with a strip of his own cloak, freshly patched and laundered along with the rest of his clothing.
The knight nodded, and finished the last of his greens and the briny broth they had cooked in with a most unknightly slurp. "The hound belonged to my father during the seven years he spent in Faerie. It followed him when he left. Because it liked his doggerel so much, he said. And as my father had inherited his father's name and the horse, so I inherited my father's name, the horse, and the hound."
"A generous legacy." The witch's smile turned wider. "If not an auspicious one. It seems odd to me that the Queen of Faerie would have let your father go free after seven years, especially considering who his father was." She studied his face with the the same intent, unreadable expression she had affected while examining his wound. He could feel the tips of his ears burning under her scrutiny. "Either you failed to inherit your father's famed honesty, Tom-my-Tam, or you're very lucky to be here at all. A little of both, I think."
The knight picked at his fish, letting little shreds fall to the ground to the delight of his hound. "We all have our secrets." He looked up in time to catch a strange look on the witch's face, something like sadness. "It's you, though, and not luck I have to thank for my life," he said, suddenly mindful of the gravity of his situation, his lack of courtesy. "I owe you a debt."
The witch nodded. He half expected her to name the price then and there, and felt himself torn between sudden hope and horror at the thought.
"I'll need to gather more goldenrod for tonight." She reached out and lay her hand once more over his heart. "Not so deep, but still not well enough. You'll need untroubled sleep to mend." She whispered a word too quiet to catch, and after that he remembered no more.
He woke suddenly in full dark, rustlings and splashings all around. He was lying on a bed of goldenrod; he could feel the yellow heat seeping into his bones. Something warm was lying next to him. The knight thought of jet-black eyes and hair, of splashing hooves, of teeth and nails tearing into flesh, gentle hands winding the leafy stems around his wound, taking away the pain. It isn't her, he told himself over and over again, afraid to stay, even more afraid to leave, until the brindled hound turned over and licked his face with a tongue smelling unavoidably of fish.
It was full daylight and the mist was rising before the witch returned to him. The knight had saddled his horse and had just turned to take up the rowan shield and his sword -- both of which were cleaner and in better repair than when he had last seen them -- when she appeared, arms folded inside the deep blue velvet of her sleeves.
"I am well enough to go?" he asked, wishing he could have left without a farewell.
"If not, you'll know soon enough," the witch said quietly, giving him another of her penetrating looks. "In any case, I would not keep you against your will. Who waits for you, that you must hurry away?"
"My betrothed," he said, not meeting her eyes.
"Ah, of course," said the witch, still quietly, as the hound gamboled round him and the stallion shook its red mane impatiently. "She must be very beautiful. Or very wealthy."
"Both, as it happens." He secured a newly oiled saddlebag full of fresh provisions behind his hanging shield, still not entirely sure whether he intended to eat them or toss them aside as soon as he was out of the witch's sight. "She's also a king's daughter."
"How very fortunate for you."
"And a changeling as well."
"Oh?"
"Well, there'd be no question of a common knight marrying her otherwise, would there?" He pulled with needless savagery at a stubborn buckle. "She gave me the hawk, and taught me to understand its speech -- the speech of all beasts. It's a knack she has. But she doesn't have a heart, you see. For all that she has everything else, she doesn't have that." The sound of his voice to his own ears was defensive, defeated, miserable. "So I gave her half of mine, thinking it was a fair exchange for getting half her father's kingdom in return when we wed."
"And then you went away to war," the witch said, as if this story also was old to her.
"Yes."
"Did you want to be killed?"
"I thought so at the time."
"That was very foolish."
"Yes." The way he said it, it was almost a laugh. "But not as foolish as giving away halfheartedly what should have been given whole, or not at all. I intend to get it back from her, if I can. But she's a fierce one, my betrothed, and her father even more so."
"Ah," said the witch, so very softly, "but what a tale it will be if you manage, despite all odds, to find success in your endeavor." The knight stopped his fussing over bags and buckles and turned to look at her at last as she approached him. "And the odds needn't be entirely against you." She leaned in close and, when he didn't draw away from her, she kissed him once and twice on the corners of his lips, where the secrets lie, and a third time full on his mouth. "Go with the protection of the Witch of the Westmorland, provided you promise to return and tell me all about it afterward."
"I will." He could feel what was left of his heart racing under her hand. "I swear it," he added, a little too earnestly.
Her hand dropped slowly away from him as she took a step back toward the winding waters of her mere. "Lying is a dangerous pastime, my pretty one, Tom-my-Tam," she warned. "Especially with witches. But I choose to believe you." Her face held the same strange sadness he'd seen the day before, but her voice was golden-warm as her kisses had felt, still sinking their memory into his skin. "Now go."
And so he rode away for the Kirkstone Pass, hound at his side, hawk on his wrist, stealing a glance back every now and again to see the witch with her jet-black eyes looking after him, until the melting mists took her from his sight.