"She's a witch!"

"Burn her!"

"Burn the witch!"

"Witch!"

Not again...Danika whined in her head as she started throwing things into her duffle bag. Hvitserk was away on business. Again. Ever since the Polo campaign, Hvitserk ran a very successful company of mercenaries which guarded trade caravans all over Europe. It allowed them an easy excuse to move around as much they needed to and provided Hvitserk the necessary excitement. The Polos had provided an excellent reference despite their rather hasty departure from China. However, someone needed to hold down the fort and to be honest Danika had gotten a bit tired of having to fight random dudes to prove she was tough. If I'm gonna fight, I might as well fight for a good reason. And so she was reliving her Robin Hood days in the small towns and cities in Upper Bavaria. This time she wasn't stealing though.

At night she'd roam the streets in a nice dress with her knives well concealed in her sleeves and a new mask (a gift from Hvitserk from one of his travels) affixed to her face. This was a Venetian mask, beautifully done with paint and trim. She still had the old wooden one in Iceland, but it was in no shape to be worn after almost five centuries. All she had to do was wait. Inevitably some lecherous creep would see her and consider her easy prey. Little did they know. She wouldn't always kill them. Sometimes she'd only castrate them. It really depended on how they behaved. The more violent they decided to be, she returned in kind. "These violent delights have violent ends," she mused to herself. Only two hundred more years until Shakespeare. Once she could go a week without being harassed then she moved on to a different town.

Once again she realized that she may have gotten herself into this mess. Naturally it didn't take long for stories to spread about a beautiful woman who enchanted men to their untimely deaths. I'm not enchanting anyone. The only requirement was that I was female, really the bar was not high.

And after five centuries, Danika had become accustomed to the world as it was. Were there still things she was actively looking forward to and wary of? Yes. But did her every decision revolve around its potential impact on the historical record? No. She wasn't really cognizant of the fact that she was from the future anymore. She was just incredibly smart and incredibly long lived. And now incredibly annoyed.

Thankfully, screaming villagers with torches and pitchforks can be heard coming from a distance, so she had plenty of warning. Donning her cloak and pulling up the hood, she left her house and began walking towards the woods. She would have taken her horse if it would not have made her recognizable.

As she crept silently through the streets, she passed piles of bodies. Stacked next to a pile of hay, left on a cart, leaning against walls as if they had simply fallen asleep there were bodies everywhere in various states of decay. The mass graves were overflowing and so the dead sat like sentinels in the street, a harbinger of what seemed to be everyone's future. Well, almost everyone's. The reeking scent of death and decay was everywhere, there was no escaping it. Milky blank eyes followed Danika as she walked, but thankfully none of the living witnessed her flight. She was in the clear until she turned around and chanced to see down the main road to the town square.

"The bakery was closed," Hvitserk returned to the house bread-less. As a result he pulled out a bowl and poured some flour into it, along with some salt. Danika leaned the axe against the wall and piled a few more pieces of wood onto the fire. She poured water into the pot over the fire, but not before setting two cups of water on the table next to Hvitserk.

"Oh? How come?" she asked. Hvitserk downed the first cup of water and poured the second into the bowl, where he began to work the flour and the water together into a dough.

"The baker's daughter has been ill and this evening she died."

"How sad," she muttered, twirling one of her knives over her fingers and in a flash cutting white carrots and some other green vegetables into ribbons. She set down the knife and swiped the cut vegetables into the pot of water which was just starting to bubble. Looking back she asked, "Didn't the innkeeper's son also die of illness recently? The older one?" Not paying attention her hand grazed the side of the pot. She hissed and pulled in her hand, watching as the small burn faded away.

Hvitserk nodded. "That was strange. He was 14 years old and a strong one. I was not expecting him to succumb to sickness." At this point, Hvitserk was beginning to pull the dough, twisting it and looping it back upon itself. Before long, noodles dangled around his hands and he tossed them into the pot which was beginning to give off the comforting scent of warm vegetables.

Danika sat on their one table and kicked her legs back and forth. Hvitserk pulled out a porcelain spoon they had brought back from China and dipped it into the pot. Blowing on the spoon lightly, he waved in front of her face to see if it could tempt her eyes to refocus. She opened her mouth and closed it around the spoon, taking the handle from him. He sat down in a chair at the table and put his hand on her knee.

"Your mind was off somewhere. Where did it go?"

"I'm just thinking about the sick children."

"You have seen so many lives come and go, why do these ones capture your thoughts so, when I am sitting right here?" He held out his arms in a gesture of mock offense. She put her hand on his forehead and pushed him back. He leaned so the chair kept tipping back farther. She reached out to grab his shoulder before he fell but he caught his knees on the underside of the table and stopped himself. She could've slapped that silly grin off his adorable face.

"It is still sad that they are dead," she put on that teacher voice she used when she was explaining complex concepts from the future, "BUT I'm more thinking about what it could mean."

"I thought we left things like fate and prophecy behind a long time ago."

"Is this you saying you're leaving me?" Now it was Danika's turn to jest.

"Heeeeyy," he pulled her off the table and into his lap. As usual she put up a ceremonial fight before settling in comfortably, her right arm behind his neck, the other playing with the collar of his shirt.

"As I was saying," she continued, "wait, what was I saying?"

"Something about me being handsome and an excellent cook."

"Nooo, ah! Sick children yes! Remind me of the year?"

"1347. Why?"

Danika pursed her lips and her brow furrowed. Hvitserk followed suit as he saw her scrunched up face. "Then that confirms my suspicions. These children are just the beginning of one of the worst plagues in human history." She said something after that but Hvitserk was still getting through the first part.

"WHAT?!" Hvitserk said.

"I said your pot is boiling over."

"No before that-oh!"

He jumped up and stirred the soup, settling the bubbles back down. Danika was setting bowls onto the table and over the crackle of the fire he could hear her quietly singing, "ooooooo fleas on rats, fleas on rats…"

There was a wooden stake standing tall surrounded by stacks of hay of kindling. Icy blue eyes bore into Danika and arms of strong men wrapped around her arms, her legs, and her torso. The stake got bigger, or closer. There were ropes and she couldn't move. The smell of the dead bodies was overridden by the smell of smoke. Her hair burning, her skin burning, everything burning. And Ivar's smiling face, staring at her.

But Ivar was dead. Ivar was gone.

The stake was neither bigger nor closer. Nor was it lit. She was still at the end of the street. There was no scent but that of the corpses. However the voices of the oncoming villagers were much closer. Turning her back she took off as quickly as her dress would allow into the safety of the trees.

The house was empty. A layer of dust sat on the tables and bowls and the air was still, empty of her voice. Their bed was neatly made, but had not been slept in. Hvitserk pushed aside a rug near the fireplace and pulled up the floorboards. The recessed hole underneath was empty of her duffle bag and other effects. So she had run then. Unfortunate, I had hoped she was just out bringing home something yummy for me to cook, he thought disappointedly. The question now was where had she gone? He began to look around for a note or any other sort of clue which might lead him to her hiding place. He checked under bowls and in all their secret hiding places. There was nothing. She never would have left without giving some means to find her.

"If you're looking for your wife, she is gone." Hvitserk turned sword first to the voice. It was the priest, standing in the doorway. His hands were held up amiably in the face of Hvitserk's sword.

"So I gathered," Hvitserk sheathed his sword, "Did she give word where she went?"

"I doubt it. But you're better off, son. That woman was a witch, in league with the devil."

Hvitserk's hand, which hadn't even left his sword yet, considered pulling it out again to kill the priest for such an insult. But he settled for squeezing the pommel tightly to contain his anger. The priest misinterpreted this tension for fear.

"Don't you worry though. We cleansed the house. We found a paper with some devilish language on it and were sure to burn it along with anything else unholy." Well that explained why he couldn't find any word from Danika. That note probably had it.

"Anything? Else?" Hvitserk's knuckles were going white from squeezing his sword so tightly. Blindly the priest carried on.

"Well the witch escaped so we wanted to make sure she hadn't left anything behind to curse us."

Hvitserk released the handle of his sword in relief. He wouldn't have to go hunting for her charred skeleton again. Even in 500 years, once was more than enough. The priest unknowingly accepted this relief as validation. He walked forward to lay a comforting hand on Hvitserk's shoulder. Hvitserk noted the beginnings of yellow blotches and boils on the man's skin.

"Huh."

Quick as a flash, Hvitserk's sword protruded out of the priest's back, the priest's hand still sitting on Hvitserk's shoulder. The man gasped only once before falling like a sack of potatoes off of the blade and onto the floor. Taking a rag, Hvitserk swiped the blood off his blade and sheathed it again, tossing the rag onto the floor when he was done. As for the blood on the floor there was nothing to be done. Hvitserk wasn't coming back here. He was going to die soon anyway.

He dumped the priest's body with the others on the street, before mounting up and riding out. If he had been wiser he would have asked the priest when all this was. Now he had no clue how far she could have gotten. But after 479 years he knew her well. Time to go hunting.

Ahhh yes, the Black Death. Lovely. I highly suggest looking up the 'fleas on rats' song. Both greatly educational and disgustingly catchy. People did burn witches at this time, especially as some people believed them responsible for the plague (instead of ya know, hygiene).

THE COVER ART IN ITS FULL SIZE CAN BE SEEN ON DEVIANTART UNDER MIMITATIONBALANCE. In the next few chapters you may get to see where that cover art came from.

This was a short one. But I'm very excited because the some of my favorite storylines are about to begin :).

As usual, direct any comments and/or questions to the reviews where I will happily answer them with the next update.