I knew the moment that King Eadwig died. I woke in the night with a sigh escaping me, as my heart felt faint. I felt him close his eyes just as mine opened. There was no one wail for him. Not yet.
“Osburga,” I whispered. She stirred next to me. “Osburga, he’s dead.”
She didn’t respond. I slipped from beneath the blanket, stirred the fire, set a few more logs in the hearth, and pulled my shawl around my shoulders. The sight had given me the knowledge of now. The problem was not that I could not see things present. The problem was that I was too afraid to see some things at all.
I watched the fire, trying to find my way back to King Eadwig. The sight showed me him easily, now that I had seen him once. His body was still warm. I pondered how long it would be before anyone knew. A servant had recently replenished the fire. It was crackling wonderfully while his body cooled in the bed. I shivered, watching his cheeks grow gray, his lips ashen. I listened, but his body made no sound. There was no life in the room at all.
But then I heard a faint whisper. The sight showed me a woman, a nun, praying. She was on her knees beside her bed, her habit slipping back, showing her brown hair. I listened until the words she prayed filled me.
“May his days be few; may another seize his position. May his children be orphans and his wife a widow.”
An odd prayer. A curse.
Osburga stirred in the bed and I startled at the noise. The sight left me.
“Did you find her?” Osburga asked.
My gaze flew to where my teacher was, now sitting up in the bed, the blank piled in her lap. “You did know where she was.” It was almost an accusation.
She shook her head. “I knew nothing,” she said, “except that you would find her, hunched over the fire like that.”
I stood, surprise moving through me, propelling me towards the bed. “You can see the future?”
She laughed. “Sometimes,” she said. “Only when I really care to know.”
This puzzled me, and I cocked my head the way a curious dog would. “Why did you care to know where my mother was?” I asked.
Osburga’s long hair was loose around her shoulders. She brushed with her fingers, gathering it into a braid. “It is good to know who the wise women are,” she said simply.
The sight came back to me, and I saw my mother end her prayer. She pulled the habit higher, covering her hair again. She smiled to herself, a coy smile, before she rose from her knees and slipped back into the bed. I felt her pleasure. The curse had worked.
A distant scream echoed through my mind. The sight took me back to King Eadwig, who was cold now, and stiffening. The maid standing over him was yelling, and soon the room was filled with men with lanterns, crowding around him, afraid to touch him, afraid of death.
“It was her,” I realized. “That’s why he was sick.”
Osburga raised her eyebrow. “Perhaps,” she said.
I swallowed down the fear that felt like a frog climbing my throat. “Do you think, if I go to the nunnery, she’ll remember me?”
Osburga stared at me blankly, for long enough that I almost looked away. “You are a wise woman now, little witch,” she said. “She will recognize you.”
Somewhere, far away, I heard a woman whisper my name. I closed my eyes. I’m coming, mother.
I lived with Osburga until the season started to turn, and the cold set in, the mornings frosty and the evenings holding a chill that crept into my bones. I had seen my father once, his eyes understanding, even if he was sad. He knew he couldn’t protect me. Only another woman like me had a chance of doing that.
Osburga didn’t teach me anything about the sight. We gathered herbs, and dug roots and chopped ingredients for soups and potions, and sometimes a man would show up and she would send me out of the cottage for a few hours. She slept soundly at night, thought I would wake at the faintest scratch in the forest. She said I would get used to it. As the autumn stretched on, I wondered if she was right about that like she was right about nearly everything else.
“You’re too careful,” she said one wintery morning, when not even the fire could warm me. She was sipping mead from her mug, and gnawing a hunk of bread, wrapped in a huge blanket as she sat at the table. I was crouched near the hearth, warming my hands, watching the flames, listening to the fire crackle. It reminded me of the snap of the horse’s leg.
“Don’t want to get burned,” I said over my shoulder.
“I wasn’t talking about the fire,” Osburga said.
I had known that, but I was afraid of her pushing me. This was not the first time that she had commented on my timidity. “How do I conquer the fear?” I asked, wanting more. The taste of something greater was within reach, but I couldn’t quite open myself to it. It had killed my gran, and driven my mother away. Why did I want it?
“You don’t conquer the fear, little witch,” she said. The term was endearing now, after months of it rolling off her tongue. “You accept the fear, and go forth in spite of it.”
“Accept the fear,” I echoed. My hands and face were finally warm. I stood and turned by backside to the hearth. I met her gaze as I tugged my shawl tighter around me. Osburga sipped from her mug without taking her eyes from me. I felt my throat tighten, and my mouth go nearly dry as I thought about all that I had seen of my mother’s journey from home. I had learned how to see her, to follow her path from our village to the forest, and from the forest to the open wild lands, and to a churchyard where she had met a nun, and then into a nunnery. The sight had taken me with her across these years. I could see where she had been, but I still did not know where she was.
“Perhaps she is still in the convent,” I said. Osburga and I had talked about this often. She knew that it was the last thing I could see about my mother. She went with the sister into the convent. She did not wear a habit when she went to prayer. That was all that I knew. “Maybe that’s why I can’t see her. I can’t see things that are, only things that were.”
Osburga was still studying me. She took another sip from her mug. The fire was roasting my rear, so I took a step towards her. She put the mug down on the table, and took a bite of the bread in her other hand. Saying nothing as I reasoned out a problem was Osburga’s preferred method of instruction. She said nothing, so I knew I had gotten it wrong.
“Accept the fear, ” I said again. Osburga continued chewing slowly. I sighed and crossed the room to the table, sitting opposite her. She tore off a hunk of the bread and passed it to me. I bit into it and methodically chewed along with her.
“Did you know that King Eadwig is ill?” she asked me.
A test. Osburga could see what was as easily as she could see what had been. She wanted me to accept the fear to see for myself.
A shiver ran over me, one that wasn’t related to the chill in the house. It was the kind of chill that accompanied a fever. Fear shook me. A fever could kill. I swallowed the lump in my throat, waiting for what the sight would show me. I closed by eyes, slowed my breathing, and felt the fear in my belly like a stone. I focused on it, drifting down to meet it. I opened to it, and then suddenly, I saw him. King Eadwig was burning with fever, in a grand bed, nearly out of his mind with pain. There were men standing around the bed, observing, powerless to do anything for him but offer beer and wine. He was sweating, and his skin was pale, like death had already touched him. I pressed a hand to my face, feeling the fever in my own cheek.
“He’s dying,” I croaked, my throat tight with fear. It was not to be spoken. The King was anointed by God. To speak of his death was to speak a curse.
I opened my eyes, peeling myself away from the vision that the sight had given me. Osburga was smiling at me. “Do you think they will accuse a woman of bewitching him?” she asked.
I knew nothing about King Eadwig, except that Cynewulf was his ealdorman, and that Cynewulf had ruined my mother’s life. “If there is a woman near enough to him that has offended the wrong man, I suppose they will.”
This seemed to please Osburga. She finished eating her bread and picked up the mead mug again. She took another drink, her eyes shifting from the golden liquid to me. The blanket she wore tumbled off her shoulder, and she tugged it up around herself again with her free hand. I shivered, wishing I had stayed near the fire. I munched the part of the loaf she had handed me and waited for whatever it was that she was turning over in her thoughts to escape from her mouth.
“Are you afraid to learn the truth about your mother?” she asked.
It made me wonder if she had known all this time, and not told me. I pushed away the thought. You could go looking for an answer, surely, but that didn’t mean that the sight would give you one. “I am afraid that when I find her, she will be dead.”
Osburga nodded. “Use that fear,” she said. She finished the mead and placed the empty mug on the table between us. I looked into the empty vessel, trying not to imagine it as a metaphor for what I would see when I finally found my mother.
I peered through the bracken, staring at the smoke coming from the little cottage just deep enough into the woods that you couldn’t see it from the clearing. The mossy, rich smell of earth and wet leaves filled my nostrils as I crouched behind the fallen tree, mustering the courage to creep forward. I knew the woman inside the house wasn’t dangerous. My cousin had seen to her plenty of times. Goda came for love potions but I had come for something harder to find: answers.
My legs were cramped from crouching for so long, and the damp from the leaves was starting to take to the hem of my skirts. I rose unsteadily, clenching and unclenching my fist a few times to still my nerves. Then, I hopped over the fallen tree, and crunched my way through the underbrush to the front door of the house. Before I could talk myself out of it, I knocked softly three times. Goda said that Osburga, the wise woman, would answer from within before she opened the door. You had to tell her what you wanted first. If she didn’t like your reason for coming, she wouldn’t let you inside.
“Who comes and why?” Osburga called out from inside the cottage. I could hear the faint sound of movement towards the door. I closed my eyes, imagining her on the other side of the wooden slats between us, pressing her ear to the door just as I was.
“It’s Eadgyth,” I said shakily, “and I want to know what happened to my mother.”
The door creaked open slowly, and the woman who stood in the doorway was not as I had imagined from Goda’s description of her. She was tall, and she looked much younger than I had thought she would. Her hair was a rich brown that hung in waves to her waist. She was wearing a simple brown dress and an apron. Her eyes were kind, but there was also wariness there. I could feel the hurts she carried, for just a moment, a flash of the sight that had me seek her, to ask for her help in seeking out my mother. I shut my eyes against the vision that was taking me- a woman hanging in a tree, and a fire that consumed the place where she had lived, a horse screaming in pain, and a man who walked with a limp. I gasped at the clarity of it, but shook it away from me as I searched the eyes of Osburga, waiting for her to invite me in.
“What do you need me for if you have the sight like that, little witch?” she asked.
The dreaded word on her tongue stilled my heart. It was one of the only things I remembered of my mother. Witch. That’s what my father said she was. That’s all she was remembered for. “Please,” I said, not knowing what else to say. “I don’t know how to control it, and I know my mother would, but I don’t know where she is.”
Osburga opened the door wider, and stepped out of the door frame, to allow me room to pass. “You don’t control the sight. You learn how to let it not control you.”
I hesitated at the threshold, shifting my weight from one foot to the other. “Can you teach me?” I asked, tentative as a mouse, my voice barely more than a whisper. As if in response, the wind rushed through the trees around us, rustling the leaves in an eerie way that made my skin crawl. My mouth went dry, as the feeling of power moved through me. I shut my eyes again, stilling it, willing it away.
When I opened my eyes, Osburga was still standing before me, her hand resting on the door as if she had half a mind to close it on me. We stared at one another for a time before she finally asked, “Well, are you coming in, or not?”
I dipped my head in a bow to her, and ducked through the doorway into the dim cottage. She had a fire going in the hearth. Herbs were drying, hung from the ceiling along the walls. She had a stack of books, which astounded me. Only the monks had books. She smiled at me, as if she knew what I was thinking. She gestured to the table, shoved against the wall, next to a bed that looked too big, too grand, for a single woman alone in the woods. She had fabric over the windows, rather than shutters. I wondered how she kept out the chill.
I sat, and Osburga joined me. “Now, little witch,” she said. “Tell me why you’ve come.”
“I told you. I need help finding my mother…”
She interrupted. “You also said you want to learn how to control the sight.” She raised at eyebrow at me.
I swallowed hard as my hands began to sweat. This was a test. I held her eyes as she held mine. There was a spark of amusement there. She laughed after a moment, a short, pleasant sound that reminded me of an owl. I wondered what she would look like as an owl. A wise one, haunting the woods. It seemed fitting.
“Eadgyth,” she said slowly, as if she was savoring the sound and the feel of my name in her mouth, “you are a strange little witch.”
“I’m not a witch,” I protested. I thought I did not sound confident at all. “At least, I don’t want to be a witch.”
“Neither did I. But we don’t get to choose these things, do we?” Osburga reached for my hand, and she stroked my palm with her finger. She hands were weathered, the nails caked with earth. Her touch was light and soft. A smell of honeysuckle filled the air. I sighed with pleasure. Osburga smiled back at me, lovingly, like a proud mother. Like I had done something wonderful, though I wasn’t even sure I had done anything at all.
“How long have you had the powers?” she asked. She withdrew her touch from me, and the honeysuckles faded along with the pleasure.
Fear replaced it, a tightening across my chest and in my throat that threatened to have me squeaking out answers to her again. “It awakened in me before my mother disappeared… I was four, maybe five.”
Osburga nodded. She looked thoughtful, eyeing me as if to determine how old I was now. Would she know my age as she knew my name? Her eyes wandered to the hanging herbs. “Your mother was Wulfrun,” she said, her tone inquisitive.
“You knew her?” I asked.
“I know of her,” Osburga said. “They say she cursed the son of King Eadwig’s favorite ealdormen.”
I nodded, confirming the story that had propagated like gnats. “That is what is said of her.”
Osburga wrapped her knuckles across the table three times. “Tell me what really happened, little witch,” she said.
I wished she would stop calling me that, but as the sight took me, I knew I couldn’t argue. “Lord Cynewulf wanted her,” I said. The vision of my mother with Cynewulf was shadowy, the darkness of the forest at night, obscuring what had happened. I had seen this many times before, and the memory of it, though not entirely mine, lived inside me. I let the sight take me further into the dream. “She was gathering in the dark… something for her medicines. She did it at night so no one would see. Except he was there that night. And his son was there too.” I watched as Cynewulf and his son, Ealdred, confronted her, tried to persuade her, offered to pay her. She refused, and she had run from them to save herself from their violence. I felt the sweat begin to soak through the armpits of my shift as my heart raced. My mouth felt dry as a old bark.
Osburga touched my hand. I gasped in surprise and the sight left me. She leaned her face towards me, her eyes searching for something within, some kindred flame to which she was drawn. I could feel it too, our shared nature, as if we had been wrapped together in the same package once. There was a similar color to her soul, and I could smell on her the power that took hold of me sometimes. “I know Cynewulf, ” she said, her words like iron. “And his son would have been just like him, except for that fall from his horse.”
The horse had tripped over a stone. I heard the horse scream while I was darning socks. But the horse was not near at all. I saw my mother react to it too, dropping her knitting. I shook with fear, wondering, later, as I watched Cynewulf’s men carry Ealdred into the village on a litter, how I had heard it happen. Ealdred’s leg was twisted, he was screaming in pain. His cry was like the scream of his horse. Even then, the sight had me, even as young as I was. I had seen the horse go down, saw Ealdred fly from the saddle. The snap of his leg in the vision sent a shiver through me. His howling woke the dead. My mother had heard it just as I had heard it. I swallowed down the taste of his marrow that filled my mouth as I remembered. “They blamed by mother. Said that she had bewitched him.”
“Did she?” Osburga asked, her eyes now sparkling with mischief.
“Of course she didn’t,” I said, but the protest was weak, and grew weaker as I watched Osburga’s smile grow. “What do you know?” I asked.
“I know that if you are accused of bewitching, it usually means you have the power to do it.”
A shiver ran over me, as hair of my arms stood on end. “And… how would I know if I have the power to do it?” The question slid from me before I knew I was asking it.
The Quick and the Dead 