Dissenbark
There was to be a wedding in the city, and not a day’s journey away, the people of Kingsboro awaited the royal entourage from Sussail and the coronation of the Princess Isobel. There had not been a Queen in Westrial for nearly twenty years. A witch trained she was, and changes she would make, but most did not know this, and her time was not yet.
This was the driest year they’d experienced since the drought thirty years before, and so all that day they had cleared the land, making sure there was nothing but dirt, and now, as the fires were lit, the people began their song. Dissenbark lifted her voice, for they knew that she was not only the Cure All, but a wise woman of the old ways, close not only to the God in the great cathedral, but to the Gods of the trees, the fields and heath, to the Mother herself gone bone dry and flammable.
The firelight shone on the plains of Dissenbark’s young face as she sang:
“I am the Holy One!”
The women behind her keened:
“I am the Yielding One!”
The women sang again: “I am the Holy One!
“All of the grain on the earth is me.
The skill in the reaper’s hand is me!”
“I am the Yielding One!” Dissenbark keened, stretching her hands out, and the women keened after her, “I am the Bounteous One!”
“All the wealth of the trees is me.”
“The Holy One!”
“I am the Bounteous One!”
The wind lifted and threatened to carry away the fire.
“I am the Holy One!”
“The skill in the reaper’s hand is me.”
Dissenbark stretched out her hands like the priestesses of old. They put the wooden cup in her hands, and she lifted it. She drank from it, and then she passed it to the women behind her. Caitlin Mallory and Dawn Ingalls were among them, white as anything, but surely with the old Royan blood somewhere. What they were was only whispered. Wise women, that was better to say. Dissenbark had been orphaned, and lived on the edge of town. Dawn was a slip of a girl in the service of Dissenbark, and Caitlin in the glow of her first year of marriage to Cotton the Weaver. They passed the cup about, Caitlin first to her flaxen haired husband and then Cotton to another and as kirk bells rang in the night, the women sang:
“I am the Holy One!”
“I am the Holy One!”
When the cup had made its way around the circle, reverently, Dissenbark raised it and spilled the last of the water upon the ground, and then she lifted the two unlit torches lying on either side of her and stepped forward, touching them to the fire as she moved about, and Caitlin murmured:
“So did Tanquare, Queen of the Underworld bear her torches as she came up to meet her Mother, the Belledame of all the Earth, and so did she bring forth fruitfulness again.”
With great care Dissenbark moved slowly at the head of her people, through their fields, swishing the fires over their boundaries, but never touching the fire to the dry grasses, singing as she went:
“I am the Holy One!”
“All that you need I give to you.”
“The bounteous one!”
“I am the bountiful one!”
The fires began up north on the Inglad border. Some in the northern counties said it was in the village of Enlith, and some said Repenton. It seems that they were only filling in village names to give the tale local color, but the summer which had been both hot and dry and given way to a rainless autumn, promising a dry winter and making the land like kindling. The Forest of Oddemim was eaten up by the flames which none could put out. They were halted to the east by the Fenlands and so the West Country and the Greenwood was spared, but wound their way down south through the Old Country, the land where the people had more Royan blood than Ayl. Like a dragon the fire wrapped down the Pindle Valley, and folk were even planning to leave Kingsboro and head south. It seemed, for a time, that the whole country would be engulfed in fire.
The few mages in the land came to the aid of the firefighters, but Westrial was no longer a great land of magics. The witches of the Heap lived far south and kept to themselves, and the women of the Rootless Isle were much too far away.
Nor was that great fire the only one. It was said that the first fire, traveling south, had met other fires, and across the country late autumn blazes burst out, and fields were ravished. It would take till November and the first snows before they were out. By then, much of Westrial was a blackened and scorged wasteland.
In Newbury, Dissenbark Layton and her sisters looked on, for they suspected, as did many, that several of the blazes were caused by needfires gone wrong. Embers let loose. She and Dawn and Mallory praised the Mother for their care.
But perhaps there was not so much care over in Avesboro. There must not have been, for one morning, Dissenbark woke in her small house to see the sky red, and smell smoke blowing from the east. Already the warning horn was sounding. Men set to digging a ditch while women set to packing their belongings. But, in the end they all fled, and by night the fire had blown through Avesboro and taken Newbury with it.
“Damned witchfires!” the village priest declared.
But Dissenbark said, “There is no witch in Avesboro.”
“That you know of,” the priest returned.
“If anyone would know,” Dissenbark stated, “it would be me.”
Overhead, the sky thundered with the promise of too late rain, and its thunder mingled with the mumbling of the people of Newbury.
“This will have to be paid for.”
People were thinking of vengeance, Dissenbark knew. They thought vengeance would do something. They always did.
Not every house in Newbury was burned, and of those burned, not all were burned as badly as others. Some started by saying, “Well, a fire has a mind of its own,” but it was not long before those who had been opposed to her, who never liked witches, began to speak of Dissenbark as “That witch,” and say, “That witch did it.”
Nor was her house burned. It survived with precious little scorching, but then she had set the wards around it, and there was no use telling the people, well now, one of her power could not ward a whole city. She could barely ward her own house.
On the wind, from the merchants in Lisle, there came news of witches being rounded up. Under the law one could not be burned for being a witch, but for being an arsonist? Yes, certainly, and wasn’t the country filled with fires put up by those witches? What, Dissenbark, wondered, would the new King do?
“You cannot wait to find out,” Dawn said. “Me and my man are leaving town tonight. Not now, not when the sun is up, and we’re going to have the house looking much like it always does so no one will know. Cade will go to work in the morning, for the next two days. Give me a chance to flee.”
“But if you flee Newbury,” Dissenbark said, “where will you go that is safe?”
“Ondres way? Or the Old Country, where a witch is still revered.”
Dissenbark was quiet, thinking. At last she spoke.
“You are right when you say the west and Ondres. I will go south, though, to the Rootless Isle. I will begin packing at the end of the day. Perhaps this afternoon. We do not need a repeat of the Burning Times, no.”
