First Witch's Tale

He walked us up to his office, then told me to wait in a side room as he interrogated Cemburu. It felt like hours before he summoned me and asked me hundreds of questions about just what had happened and why. It was a painful process and it left me feeling more than a little insulted, although I supposed he didn’t know my word was good. I asked him a handful of questions of my own, but he refused to be drawn on most of them. The precise nature of the thing was one of them. He got very tight-lipped when I asked him what it had been, and chose only to say that it had been incredibly dangerous and I had been very lucky to survive. I had the feeling he thought I knew more than I did about the thing, but I didn’t. He dismissed me, eventually, with congratulations - and a warning to keep my mouth shut.

I did, until now.

I returned to classes. Cemburu rejoined us, two weeks later. Quite what Bernard had said to him was never disclosed, at least not to me, although I had the impression that his possession was deemed sufficient punishment for his foolishness. Cemburu was a changed man. We didn’t become friends, not really, but we did learn to work together when the school faced other threats in the next two years. It was difficult, yet we managed.

Me? I was the first witch in Whitehall, but I was not the last.

Let that be my legacy.

Afterward

Chapter Eight

Cemburu smiled at me.

I felt utter terror threatening to overwhelm me as his face stretched in inhuman directions. His eyes pulsed in tune with his heartbeat, pulsing with a diabolical power. The thing was inside him, I realised numbly; it was possessing him. He stretched, as if he was slowly getting used to his new body. I swallowed hard as he ran his hands down his body, resting them on his erect member. I saw no mercy in the burning red eyes. He was going to kill me, after he had had his fun. And at that point I feared I would be begging for death. Cemburu was gone. The thing had taken his place.

My nerve broke and I ran, heading into the woods. Magic crackled behind me as the thing started to follow me. I could feel it, a burning presence at the back of my mind, like feeling the sun shining on my back. I cursed Cemburu under my breath as I tried to pick up speed, to reach the castle before the thing caught up with me, but I had the feeling it was useless. The woodland paths were twisting around me, threatening to turn me around and send me walking straight back into its clutches. What the hell had Cemburu been doing? What the hell had he summoned? The thing was powerful, so powerful its mere presence poisoned the air. I hoped Bernard and the other senior magicians could handle it, but I was afraid they couldn’t. It was just too powerful. And yet …

I heard laughter echoing through the trees. The path twisted again and I found myself walking straight towards the thing. Cemburu’s body was glowing with an eerie light, the bloodlines steaming as the thing steered him onwards. I yelped as a hand, stretching in inhuman directions, reached for me, then jumped and fled back into the woods. It was one of the Awful Folk, I was sure. Nothing else could control the land around it. I dared not go back to the castle while it was on the prowl, even if it let me. I didn’t think the other magicians had any way to deal with it. Back home, we knew to avoid the mounds. It was a tacit admittance that walking into their territory meant we might never be seen again. And yet Cemburu had been and gone many times.

It let him go, I thought, as the path twisted again. I was suddenly running on the spot. No matter how hard I ran, I made no progress. I felt the thing behind me, felt its fingers brushing my rear, and forced myself to run harder. The world seemed to twist a third time. I was somehow falling to the ground, as if I had just run over a cliff. It let him go so he could cause trouble elsewhere.

My mind raced. It was not in me to give up. There had to be a way out. I tried to recall what I had seen and come up with a plan. The magic had followed the blood, hadn’t it? Perhaps if I got the blood off Cemburu’s body the thing would be dislodged and sent back to wherever it found it. Perhaps … I couldn’t think of a way to do it. My body ached, a grim reminder that I would tire and eventually fall. The thing didn’t seem to have any sense it could tire. Cemburu hadn’t been the fittest person in the world, but the thing could drive him on until he dropped dead. Or … I recalled the old tales, the ones rarely told to children, about men who’d been hag-ridden. It was possible he could be driven on forever.