The Witch's Trail

The Witch's Trail: Week 1

No one could say who said it first. Who heard "herbalist" or "healer" or "wise one," and said the word. In the end, it didn't especially matter. The word was spoken.

Soon every ear in the town had heard it, then every ear in the Rhone valley: Mont Clare was bewitched. What followed was inevitable. When there is a cry of Witch! the church cannot simply ignore it; for if evil is not confronted, why are we feeding all these priests?

And so, in the causes of purity, of faith, and of honor, a knight would need to be sent forth as a holy Templar, to strive against this unholy creature and to smite her wickedness. Such was the will of the Lord.

For the equally important causes of budgetary constraints, awareness that this was a wild goose chase and a significant measure of disinterest, this holy Templar would be the least valuable and most expendable knight available. Such was prudence.

And thus was the recently elevated Luc DuLac dispatched on his first quest as a full knight to earn glory and honor. He accepted the assignment with an eagerness that could only have been holy zeal, similar though it may have appeared to the restlessness of a young man who has spent the past three years earning his spurs in a training camp.

Those spurs jangled a reminder in his saddlebags as he walked his pack horse over the last rise and took his first look at Mont Clare in the full moon's light. The thatched roofs and few lazy drifts of smoke from banked fires gave no hint of the corruption that had infested it and the righteousness of the cause swelled within the young knight's heart. Dropping his horse's lead, he drew his sword and knelt, raising up the bare steel in both hands, pleased at the sight of its silhouette bisecting the fickle moon.

"By my honor as a Knight, by my love of the heaven that bends above, I swear that I shall protect these innocents. Before the moon is full once more, I will claim the soul of this witch. So do I swear!"

The drama of the moment lasted until he had to catch his wandering horse.

The villagers of Mont Clare, for their part, had their first proper look at their would-be savior the following morning. The assessment was not favorable.

Rawboned and lean from the rations and training of the camps, they saw scrawniness. The functional ringmail he wore was no shining breastplate even before the many missing rings. The loosest tongues declared him a mongrel at a glance. The more observant among them noted the thickness of his wrists and the profusion of scars across his knuckles and withheld judgment.

Cheeks reddening beneath his helmet at the attention, Luc strode purposefully, exactly as he'd been taught, to the town's square. Tying the horse, whose name was Tonerre, to a hitch in front of the town's sole tavern, he took the very center of the square.

This being the best entertainment of the month already, men, women, children and animals had followed along, forming something between a parade and a mob. Curious eyes peeled for a closer look at the sharply angled face beneath the helmet but were defeated by the early morning's shadows.

"People of... Mont Clare! I am Sir DuLac, come to deliver you from evil." The villagers watched in silence. The closest few heard a softly muttered, "...for cheers to fade, two, three-" before the young man drew his sword and raised it jerkily into the air. "Keep faith, good folk, and I shall rid you of this vile," another momentary pause to fill in the blanks, "witch that plagues you!"

Scattered applause and laughter met him. The pose began to feel awkward almost immediately when a calico-patterned kitten began to rub against the eagle engraving on his left greave, purring loudly. He lowered his sword and sheathed it awkwardly.

"Here for young Mirette, then, are you?" Asked one hunched specimen around a clay pipe. He drew out the pipe and pointed it at the young knight. "Rid us of her, is it?"

"About time," sniffed a middle-aged woman, drawing a shawl more closely about her shoulders. "That Witchhazel is a pox on the purity of this town."

"A pox?" The old man retorted, turning on the woman. "I've known three generations of Sanzette women, and Mirette's no more wicked than her mother was. And I happen know that she cured a pox of your own, who call her Witchhazel!"

Luc watched helplessly as the villagers rounded on each other in an airing of old grudges and accusations. At last it fell to the old village priest, Father Joc, to bash his staff against the cobbles until some semblance of order had been restored.

Somewhat perturbed, but knowing no other way, Luc completed his rehearsed lines, drawing his sword and raising it high.

"By God and Saint George, I swear that I shall deliver these holy lands of Christendom from wickedness!"

This dew a smattering of sarcastic applause and the quiet comment from someone near the back that if he was looking for wickedness and corruption, the Cathedral was back the other way.

Accepting the anticlimax, Luc sheathed his blade once more and turned to the aged priest.

"Father Joc, I presume," he said, which the old man answered with a nod. "Where may I find this witch, that I may fulfill my oath?"

"I have no easy answers for you, my son," the priest said, leaning more heavily on his staff as the villagers dispersed back to their previous business, the show over for now. "There are many favors owed to the Witchhazel among our people, and many who would hide her."

"Then I shall root out those who would conceal her," he declared, and as soon as he had stowed Tonerre at the inn with his meager possessions, he set about doing just that.

Mont Clare was no large place, yet even a village of a few hundred souls has innumerable hiding places and more secrets, and all of them are opaque to outsiders. Yet Luc was patient and he was determined in his questioning, and anyone who is both curious and persistent, as he was, will learn much.

By the end of his first week, he had learned a great deal about the village of Mont Clare. He knew that Monsieur Bernard was maliciously allowing his cows to eat M. Martin's carrots in the latest chapter of their longstanding feud. He knew that Cosette Bernard and Georges Laurent had been married in secret, the priest's complicity bought with a handful of silver and a bottle of brandy, to Luc's quiet shock.

He heard many tales of the witch from the village folk, but no word of the wretched blasphemies and dark rituals he hunted. Instead they told him of bones mended and rashes cleansed, of visits to the bedridden and the enfeebled to tend their ills. Lies, obviously, told by those frightened of the witch's wrath.

He pressed the villagers for details of her appearance, that he might recognize his quarry, and from their fragmented descriptions he built a picture of her within his mind. Her hair was cut short, they all agreed, though some claimed it to be reddish, others blonde. She was slim of build, he learned, pale from her work indoors and in the moonlight. The village women spoke of her dimpled cheeks and blue eyes, of her small hands with strong fingers. At night, by candlelight, he worked at scraps of paper with charcoal, seeking to make a portrait of her as described.

Try as he might, he could not find the face that he drew wicked.

Of the witch's location, however, the only thing that he learned for certain was that she was not in the village. That Sabbath, still troubled at accepting the blessing of a priest he knew to be corrupt, Luc stayed late with the farmers in the Inn's common room upon the pretense of seeking further local knowledge. Their stories were entertaining, the wine as plentiful as expected, yet even in alcohol, worries are hard to drown.

After many more cups than was advisable, Luc made his way unsteady way to his room. He had resolved that his search would next take him to the vineyards and the wild places around them, and though he had planned a start at daybreak, rest resolutely refused to come.

The knight stared drowsily at the low-burning candle beside his bed that was the one luxury of his rented room, willing himself to sleep. The candle's flame grew in his vision, swaying now in an unfelt draught as though it danced for him. In the heart of the flame the shifting patterns of light reshaped into the curve of cheeks and chin, the softness of hair and even the laughter within burning eyes. Lips the shade of fresh-forged steel pursed in a smile.

"Do you seek me, young knight?" They asked, vowels softened in an accent he knew not.

"I do," he murmured in the certainty of dream.

"And shall I come to you, hero? Or will you come to me?"

"I will find you, and I will claim your soul," he replied. "So I swore..."

"Yet I have found you first," she said, and even in near-sleep he could hear teasing in her voice. "I would not wish to deprive you of your chase, of course, but I will claim a prize for this victory. I choose... a taste of my pursuer."

Luc's eyes drifted shut. The dream had stopped making any particular sense at this point. "So be it," he agreed and stretched his arms above him in a yawn.

And there they stayed.

Luc opened his eyes once more in curiosity, but the candle's light was gone and only a single beam of moonlight took its place. In the half-moon's light stood a silhouette, the moonlight's shadows hiding much but revealing the feminine curve of hip and shoulder. White teeth showed in a smile. "Such a fine dream," said the figure in the candle flame's voice.

"Mmmm," Luc replied. It was not the first dream he had had of a woman's company since entering his training, though this felt somehow different. And yet, what could he do about a dream? The figure moved from the moon's beam into shadows and Luc allowed his head to fall back, troubled by his own sadness at the dream's early end. Soft fingers on his shins, sliding up past his knees and along his thighs, made clear that it was not finished as yet.

Those hands ran up his legs, and following, the pebble hardness of her nipples scraped along his inner thigh in agonizing pleasure. Her tongue dragged along the ridge of his hip bone and then over his belly button as she pulled herself up his body, nestling the aching length of him between her breasts. There she held him, letting him pulse in need against her chest, matching the beat of her own heart. Gentle lips and sharp teeth on the hard muscle of his stomach sent his arms straining, but whatever hidden bond she had placed upon him was unbreakable.

Another soft bite drove his hips off the thin cot and she gave a soft chuckle at his impatience. Sliding back down along his body, she took him in both hands and touched her lips to his manhood's tip in a kiss and her breath tickled him unmercifully when she spoke.

"Will you seek me still, hero?" She asked, sliding her hands upward and down.

"I wiiiillll," he groaned, eyes tightly shut. "T' th' ends of th' earth an' back."

"Then there is a prize awaiting you," she said and with gentle, immeasurable cruelty she drew back to fade into the darkness with a Cheshire grin. Even as he ached, his strength fled and sleep at last drew him down and away.

A memory of a voice wishing him sweetest dreams, lips kissing his cheek were as uncertain as everything else beyond than the lingering need, all of a piece as the finest and most frustrating dream of his life.

The following morning he loaded his provisions upon Tonerre and set out as planned for the vineyards and woodlands, seeking to dismiss the dream as nothing more than the result of too much time spent obsessing over his prey. Yet as we have said, Luc was of a curious sort of mind, and some questions he found hard to dismiss. How, for example, had he managed to fall asleep at the end of a dream? And from where had these strands of hair, reddish or blonde depending on the light, come from, to be wrapped around his wrists when he awoke?

End Week 1

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Thanks most kindly for reading! This is rather different from anything else I tend to write (closer to romance than my usual combination of flowery prose and filthy smut), but it's what I felt like writing.

There are three further chapters to follow, as the structure might suggest, following the phases. When they might arrive, well, who can know? We will see what the moon inspires.

Filthy dreams,

SLH