Title: Immigrant Song
Prompt: Fairytale, twisted, huntsman, obedient, dead
Pairing: Zoe/Kyle
Rating: M
Warnings: Adult themes, language, sexual themes
Summary: 'There is a witch who lives in a forest who he has come to kill' the story begins, it is not a story about the witch, but about the man who goes to kill the witch. Some people know this. Some people know that witches are always older than the stories about them.
A/N: This was written while thinking of all the books I've ever read that have had witches in them. Sandman among other Neil Gaiman works, The Mayfair Witches by Anne Rice, a short story by Ray Bradbury, maybe a couple of movies too, horror anthologies. For all of that I ended up with this short little Coven AU, Zoe is a witch and Kyle is a man who becomes her familiar.
He goes out into the black forest because men who have gone in have not come back out. The citadel city overrun by women who have lost husbands and sons, crying and screaming in front of the castle's chaplain about a witch woman. They are dismissed in the spring and forgotten until they come again in the haze of summer, this time begging for their Queen to care.
They appeal to their common sex, and her sovereign rule without a King who was also taken away by death.
Again they are dismissed.
In the fall the crops rot untended in the fields, the men are gone, some dead, some leaving for land far away from the black forest.
The Queen is unamused.
In the winter she sends her best knights. They do not return.
She sends what she can spare of the worst.
They do not return. Finally a bounty is set for the witch woman and less honest men than knights prepare to go.
He is among them, a simple trapper but the season is over and the gold promised eases his rising doubts.
He is sent into the village, the women do not speak but they scowl from doorways, one tells him to speak to Mad Maddie. They say she has seen the witch, they says she has not been the same since. Another tells him to speak to little Nan, the simple girl who lives closest to the forest. Another says to watch out for the stories the gypsies tell, the red haired woman is a liar, they say.
Mad Maddie's grin is short a tooth, her lips careful to try to cover it. Her hair is the color of dirty straw and she keeps her back to the wall, eyes the door behind him like a cornered animal, he sits and tells her that the women said she has seen the witch.
"There has always been a witch. They won't tell you that."
She offers him nothing but a mean smile and dead eyes, "They used to go to her for things. To help their babies when they caught spots or colic, weak little things when they were taken to her, brought back strong. For charms. And herbs to heal and purge unwanted little ones from their bellies."
"Until she killed those men."
She shakes her head, "No. One day she wasn't there anymore. One day she was gone."
"But the men say it was her."
"What else would it be but a witch?"
"What would a witch want them for?"
"…what would a man want with a witch?"
He looks at the mad girl and sees that once she was beautiful but she is craven now, carved deep by things that have happened. He wonders. He leaves.
Simple Nan's eyes are bright and look more mad than the others.
"They were boys."
"What?"
"Their boys disappeared. Their mothers sent their fathers. But it was their sons that went in first. Except the little ones. The big boys."
"Why did they go in?"
"They were bad."
"Because they went in?"
"They were bad! They told me to go away, but I saw what they did, and so did she."
"Who? The witch? What did you see?"
"They were bad." Again she says it. Mad Maddie stands outside in the distance, watching them. Simple Nan shivers.
"That's enough, you're scaring her."
A red haired gypsy stands in the shadow of the small shack. Simple Nan walks away, out into the distance. He follows her with a glance, "What is she talking about?"
"Cruelty, of course. Have you've seen the hill?"
"I came to see the forest."
"No, boy. The hill is what you should see." She takes him and, "It's all bones."
"Not all of it." She tells him simply. "They can't bury them, not properly. In the beginning they did, the soil turned hard, poisoned the trees and the grass. Nothing lives in this dirt, not even worms."
"The heads are all here."
Hanging from branches on the dead tree by hair and woven rope through empty jaws and eye sockets.
"They just left them where they were put." He notes. And no one saw them placed. The red haired woman shrugs with the bulk of her numerous shawls, "They are cursed. That woman's withered arm."
He'd seen it, in the village, a woman and her dead grey arm, Mad Maddie told him about stillborn children and dying dogs who had come to piss on the tree.
"Why?"
"She wants them to see, this place was beautiful once. The people have soured it."
"But the forest…" It still rises, verdant green despite its black title. The forest stands but no birds sing inside it.
He sleeps by their fire, it is not a new arrangement. Gypsies are thieves and killers but anyone could be a thief or a killer, on lean times he is no exception.
The fire burns to life, it is what wakes him. The sounds of something roasting. A tree animal on a spit, crisping, the fat sizzling away. He stomach growls angrily.
"They chased her into the forest."
The voice is hoarse, rough, dry bark from a tree but it is a girl. He sees her eyes, then her small hand and long fingers, the sharp black nails.
"It is what they do to witches."
She laughs like a crow. Mockingly. A promise of hurt.
"No, the pretty one from the village."
"You are the witch."
"They chased her into the forest and each one laughed, each one had her, and then they left her."
"And so you killed them."
"She came to me with a swollen little belly and one of them followed her to me. He died. And then all the rest. Boys are cruel. Useless. But the knights too proved ungallant."
She eats slowly, chewing bones and gristle, hot grease on her lips and chin and cheeks. He watches it roll down the skin of her throat, tight as a drum.
"Am I in a dream?"
"Do you dream of me?"
"What?"
"I am a witch and a woman, I have my charms and my curse. It is not time yet."
"For what?"
"There is a woman here, she is going to have a son. But it will not be an easy birth, the baby is too big and she is too small. I could not stand to hear her scream."
"No one is screaming."
"Soon. It is not time."
"Who are you?"
"A dream, maybe. A witch. A woman."
"What is your name? Do you have one?"
"It is very old."
"You aren't old."
"Not for a witch. You are very young for a man." She points a bone at him that shines with remnants of swearing meat in his direction.
"I am a man."
"Are you?"
He sees her breasts in the light of the fire. Bare and small.
She sees and snorts, "Would you chase me into the woods, and laugh?" She looks amused.
"Are you a woman?"
"Yes."
"You tear men apart like a beast."
"I like it better than them doing it to me."
"I am not an animal."
"Those boys chased that girl like a scared rabbit, and those knights all lied, lost and hungry I offered to lead them out, one and then another and another. And at night when they swore to lay their sword between us as we slept, that they would not try to come upon me with force all of them broke their oaths."
She rises and around her legs she's draped in red, the black fur of an animal on her hips, "Oathbreakers," she spits the words like poison, "find nothing but curses from me."
He finds her sleeping, on the moss blanket of the ground, small white mushrooms ringing her, hair tangled on tree roots. She screeches when the first manacle clamps over tight on her small wrist, he yanks and her arm pulls straight, the other manacle cinched shut, she will not rise from the ground.
Glares up with bright mean eyes. He tilts his head, "up." Her face turns petulant and then pugnacious when he tugs again, she scowls. "No?"
She spits on him.
He pulls her along the ground behind him as he walks. Sharp underbrush and rocks and mud pushing onto her skin. She thrashes.
There are shapes in the dark, shiny in the remains of their armor, helms gone.
"What are they?"
"My knights." Her laugh is promised pain. In his surprise and distraction she sits with folded legs behind him and pulls the long chain out of his grasp, he hears it swinging into the trees as she scampers off.
The dead men surround him and then they slash him, his knee bows and his arms break and he screams. There is blood on his face, he feels it hot, smells the iron of it.
"Enough of that."
She is above him, far above. Chain links rubbing on bark and leaves in forked branches of the tree.
The Knights yield suddenly, he coughs a spray of blood onto the leg plate of one.
Their metal creaks and clangs away, swords and knives in loose grips, scratching snarled tree roots.
"You have killed me." He accuses and she shrugs, standing above him, her teeth shine very white, "Would you like to live?"
"…yes."
He tastes iron in his mouth.
"Then swear that you are mine."
"…"
An oath.
He says nothing, she is a witch he knows. She crouches at his side and strokes at his hand, he cannot feel it, only see it, "Life has a heavy price." She licks her red fingertips.
"…"
"Do you want to die?"
"…"
"I can make it painless." She lifts her red skirts and bells jingle on the black animal pelt. He can feel the warmth of her thighs, "Yes."
Her mouth tastes like sweet water and he pulls his head away, crying out, like a wounded animal, a scared child, "I don't want to die."
"Then swear to me."
He purses his lips, she waits, finally he sobs, "I will be yours."
"Swear."
"I swear it."
His pants are undone and the warmth of her thighs can't match how she feels deep inside, her cunt hugs him tightly, wet, hot, like the taste of death, iron and blood, she keens, "And so, you are mine now. Sleep."
Inside her cave there is a pit of fetid filth, it is where she puts the parts that she has taken from the men. Later when he is aware of being alive, aware of her brittle voice and small hands touching his face, he is aware that his body is not his own. It is one she has fashioned for him.
She shushes him with a rasping sound, says he has time yet to go in the stinking pit, rotting leaves and small white mushrooms, night soil, and the rancid bite of animal urine.
"It will meld you together."
She points with a long nail at a rounded urn by the bed of furs she nestles into, "That's where I kept your head."
Her teeth are white like beached bones.
Again she points, towards a niche lighted by long tapers of tallow that smoke nastily, there is a long plate, polished iron, it gleams in the low light of the cave, "That is where I kept your cock."
He cannot speak to her.
His throat is rough. The sounds he makes are animal.
His mind is ravaged.
She beckons him from her bed of furs, nude and savage. An animal he has never seen before. They make love like beasts. She lets him have her in all the ways a man may have a woman, hard and often.
Kingdoms fall and rise, the forest remains, gypsy come no further than the mouth of the cave and girls wait in the woods for her. But time flows, in years and decades a century comes and goes by and she tells him there is plague everywhere, pestilence. In the aftermath she tells him things flourish, grow again.
When they leave the cave, a long time after he first woke in it, the world has changed but she does not seemed surprised. She leads him out and away.
France is where they had been.
The language where they go is familiar, but the way the words are spoken are strange. There are boats and an ocean and sunlight, salt spray, finally there is the damp heat of a new place.
They speak.
He asks, she answers.
She says it was time to go, the land had spoiled, as it always does. The magic in is gone and everything useless, dust, forgotten. She says here, in New Orleans there is new magic. There is a pulse in the land she has not felt since she was very young a very long time before he'd ever seen her. She looks the same to him.
The world has new smells and so does she. Her skin no longer smells of tallow candles and her hair no more of tree sap, she is lilac and hyacinth.
They come across priestesses of new religions, hierophants, acolytes of dread rights, witches, small sorceresses, one has a man with the head of a bull, another a dead man of evil deeds brought back from beyond the shroud of death.
He asks about what it means.
She flicks a foot up from her bath water, pouts prettily, and sighs rapturously. "Oh, ma chere, a witch must have a familiar, a companion to ease the ache."
"What ache?"
"In our hearts and speaking bellies, the ache between our legs, the tear we stitch again and again in what we have as souls. Tattered and thin. We ache, very much, deeply and always."
"Come here then."
She leans forward in the tub, slides to the other end on her belly, arms reaching, pulling herself up with fingers climbing his body, "Ma chere." She sighs again, in rapture, in his arms.
Girls come to her still. They call her Madame Zee.
She reads tarot and palms and wears layers of silk that are transparent when she walks across the room, he wears a suit, drives her along the near empty streets very early in the morning and very late at night, he knows she does not really sleep, not in the same way as everyone else.
There are other witches, one whose touch is icy relief in the balmy summer, another who is a consort to a king much older than even his own beautiful master, three who appear at once, knitting at her table, one who dresses as a man and kisses her like one, another who dresses in silks too, who smells of rot and talks of beings under the ocean.
They come to visit, to see if one of their kind is well and alive and doing as they should.
It is strange.
Since he has been with her she has known no one but him.
They call her Eve and his mistress rolls her eyes, taps her nails. Later she tells him it is just a joke, she is no Eve, though her name means Light in a language never taught but instead translated. In this new fast world with light everywhere. She is the brightest.
The forest and the cave. The ships leaving from plague ridden cities of gold and grandeur. The new world reformed, smelling like spring. Parlors of simple arts and fortunes. Her journey is not unique, it is simply shared by her kind.
A coven of women whose words promise pain.
He knows that pain is simply life, it is light and black oblivion only death. It still terrifies him.