Burn the Witch!
BRIDIE PICKERING
The kindling at her bare feet burned. Flames darted from straw to branches, brushing flickering fingers against Solzia’s skirts. The blaze wanted to devour, and Solzia was an offering.
She choked on acrid smoke as she pulled against her restraints. The ropes chafed her wrists raw, but she only felt the blistering pain of her feet. Solzia danced over embers, desperately searching for a part of her pyre that wasn’t burning. Her world was aflame. Blisters formed and burst, fluid leaking down her skin, boiling under the heat of the flames, scalding her flesh.
Solzia understood burns. It would not be long before her skin stopped hurting. There would be little flesh to salvage. She would endure the pain now, before welcoming the oblivion of nerve damage.
The men of her village jeered around her pyre, waiting impatiently for the fire to consume her. They warmed themselves in the heat, watching the blaze grow. They wanted it to swallow her whole. They wanted the witch to die.
Solzia would not deny their allegations—they never released a girl for claiming she was no witch. She would not beg. She would not afford them the satisfaction of her cries.
Solzia lifted her chin, meeting the eyes of a young girl in the crowd.
The girl—Gianna—had been sick. Her fever had been ludicrously high, her speech slurred when she spoke. She talked like there was someone in the room with her, some hallucination only she had seen.
Solzia knew those symptoms. She had gone to Gianna’s house that morning, offering Gianna’s mother a break while Solzia sat with her child. Gianna’s mother had glanced longingly at her own bed, but her distrust was written over her face. Solzia promised to take care of Gianna.
As soon as Gianna’s mother had left, Solzia started her work. She gave the girl a dose of charcoal powder, and the Calabar extract her mother had taught her to make.
Within moments, the girl’s delirium lessened. She stared blearily at the ceiling for a while before drifting into an exhausted sleep.
Now, hours later, Gianna was well enough to be clinging to her father’s shoulders. She pointed at Solzia through the smoke and fire—like it was a game, and she’d spotted the witch.
Belladonna poisoning would have killed her, but Solzia had saved her. The cost of Gianna’s life was Solzia’s death.
Though Solzia looked, she did not find regret within herself. Instead, she found anger.
Anger at the men of her village who did not care to learn basic herbal remedies. At men who cried witch when they found a woman they could not control. Who screamed witch when women owned property—goodness forbid a woman who was independent of men.
Solzia’s crime had been saving a life. They screamed “WITCH!” at her too.
Anger thrummed through her heart, pulsing down her legs, reverberating through the earth. As the men began to fall silent, Solzia realised the rumble in the ground wasn’t from her anger.
Four horses burst through the crowd, trampling anyone in their paths.
The riders were horrifying.
One was covered in white feathers that were splattered with red, like a carrion bird come from a slaughter. They had a beak where a mouth would have been.
Another had whiskers like a cat. Its yellow eyes were narrowed slits, with ears that twitched with movement, like they heard everything.
The third was covered in deep red scales, with claws in place of hands, sharp teeth visible as it roared like a dragon of folk tales.
The last was dressed in black, horns of onyx towering over its head. Its glowing emerald eyes pierced Solzia’s soul when their gazes met. Talons gripped its horse’s reigns instead of hands.
Two of the monstrous riders doused the pyre with water and bags of sand. Solzia scrambled backward, her back ramming the stake securing her upright. The horned rider stopped in front of her. It climbed down from its horse and walked around her. A slice of its talons freed her from her restraints.
Solzia stumbled away from the steaming embers, collapsing to her knees at the foot of the monster who was her rescuer. She shuddered as the horned creature grew closer, reaching for her. She tried to stand but collapsed to the ground. Her skin pulled tightly across her flesh. Some of her blisters had yet to burst.
The monster knelt beside her. Solzia pulled the hem of her dress away from the mass of her ruined skin and burns.
The devil beside her whispered, ‘Solzia, you’re safe with us. I promise.’
Dizziness spun the world on an axis she couldn’t understand. She slumped into the grass, allowing oblivion to rescue her.
*
Diaboli paced by the girl’s bedside. She had discarded her mask on the floor. The onyx horns were heavy enough that they dropped the mask towards the ground.
Arana—the physician—had told Diaboli that the girl’s burns were survivable. She wouldn’t lose her legs. With time, she would regain the use of her limbs. The scars would be deep, and she would struggle with the pain throughout the remainder of her life. But they had pulled her from the fire in time. She would live.
It had taken them a week to debride her wounds. Arana had carefully removed the ruined flesh, cleaning it gently, salvaging what little they could.
They had kept the girl sedated, under Diaboli’s orders. It was bad enough the girl had suffered through being burned at the stake. She needn’t suffer through the torturous debridement.
Diaboli had never been burned, but she had seen enough women die from it. Their screams echoed in Diaboli’s dreams, reminders of the times she had failed.
She looked at the girl on the bed. Her hair was dark with ashes and soot, but Diaboli thought it would have been golden. Her face was relaxed in sleep. Her long lashes cast gentle shadows over her cheeks. There was a feverish flush to her cheeks, a warning sign of infection. She was not yet through the woods, but she was alive.
Diaboli could not save all the women accused of witchcraft. But she had saved this one.
She refused to let any more women die. It was why she wore the mask.
Men feared her mask. They stumbled away, running for their lives, fearing the devil’s retribution. They did not think the devil was real. They did not trust what they could not see.
When they saw Diaboli, she made them believe.
They thought she was the devil, come to rescue her concubines, to save her witches. It was a story Diaboli wanted to believe.
The first time she’d heard the story, the ending had been a tragedy. Diaboli had not been the devil in a mask. She had only been herself. A girl, accused of witchcraft, and conspiracy to commit witchcraft. Her noble father had bribed the village men in exchange for her life. Another girl had burned alone, when Diaboli was supposed to burn with her.
The only conspiracy between them had been love.
The villagers saw women who loved each other that strongly and deemed it enchantment.
It was witchcraft, to love a woman instead of a man. The punishment for witchcraft was death. Only women died for witchcraft.
It was Diaboli’s mission to save them.
She stared out the window at the community she had built. They had cabins in the forest, and each one was made of wooden logs slotted together. They weren’t spacious. They had enough room for a bed and personal effects. The girls she had rescued treated the cabins like a utopia. It was a safe space, where the men would not think to search for them.
Diaboli had made it safe. The mask, her devilish persona, offered them protection. Men did not follow the devil home.
Men were afraid of monsters lurking in the dark. They had not thought to look into mirrors to find the true face of evil. The monsters had always been men, and they inspired Diaboli’s crusade.
She made herself a monster in their image. She reflected their darkness at them. They knew they had committed a sin, in burning these women, and they were desperate to escape punishment. They fell over themselves to escape her clutches. She drank their fear like fine wine.
Diaboli was the figure that haunted their nightmares. She was not the only monster that men feared.
Each time she rescued another woman, they made their own mask, creating a monstrous identity. These girls were not witches. They were monsters.
*
Solzia climbed through an open window, into a dark room. It was the middle of the night. The only illumination was the dim moonlight drifting through the open window.
She stood by the bedside of a sick child. There was a glass of water on the nightstand. She mixed a powder into the water. It was an herbal remedy, designed to ease the child’s symptoms, to help them regain their strength so they could fight off the illness.
Solzia did not look human. She looked like a sea dragon. She wore a mask of indigo scales, the edges painted burnt gold. The snout was open, the inside of the mouth an inky purple. The mask’s serrated teeth flashed gold in the moonlight. She was not yet wearing her gloves, with their knife-like talons. Instead, she left her hands bare, in case the child woke. If they saw her hands, they would know she was human. They would not fear the monster she pretended to be.
It had been a year since she had woken up in the forest, since she had donned the mask and chosen this life. She would never return to what her life had been. Here, she would always be a protector, never a victim.
She touched her fingertips to the child’s head, lightly, so as not to wake them. It was a blessing of sorts. A little mark of the safety she wished them to have.
She climbed back out the window.
At the next house, she walked in through the front door. She found another child, another room. She hid inside the wardrobe. She pulled on her gloves, strapping the talons to her fingers. She peered through the slats of the wooden door.
The girl’s father opened the door in the dead of night. He approached her bed.
Solzia opened the wardrobe—the hinges she had oiled did not creak. She moved behind him, silent as a wraith.
She pressed her talons against his throat, and he became biddable. She led him out of the house, into the garden. She slit his throat. His lifeblood poured over her gloved hands, watering the garden.
Solzia abandoned the body in the grass near the forest. She did not care how long it took the villagers to find the corpse. His daughter was safe from him. That was all that mattered to Solzia.
The body would serve as a warning to the men. It would remind them there was a monster in their midst, and she was the vengeful kind. She hoped her presence would make the men step more carefully. Solzia hoped she inspired fear. She hoped they searched for her in darkened alleys, checked under their beds, hesitated before extinguishing their lanterns. She hoped they looked for her in the dark, and second guessed every decision they were making, wondering if she was watching them.
Diaboli’s monsters were all watching. The men were not safe from monsters, not yet.
Solzia drifted back to the forest. Diaboli waited for her at the edge of the pine trees. Solzia intertwined their taloned hands. They walked back into the darkness of the forest.
They disappeared into the pines: two women who were not witches, but they could have been. The only witchcraft they possessed was the illusion of a mask.
Bridie started writing as soon as someone taught her how to hold a pen. They have not managed to wrestle the pen away from her. She wrote her first novel at nine and published a novel at thirteen. She writes queer fiction under the guise of romantic fantasy.
