The Cunning Man || ONC 2021

7: Cunning

"I don't really understand what happened," Nora whispered up at me about an hour later.

Her clothes lay out front of the fire, which I had built up in an attempt to dry them. I'd taken the shirt off my own back and wrapped her up in it, then followed that with a blanket I pulled out of a chest in the corner closest to the cabin's narrow bed. We now sat on said bed together, my back against the wall and Nora nestled in my lap. She'd stopped shivering, but her skin was still pale and the blotchy color in her cheeks concerned me.

"I didn't think anything was unusual at first, though I scolded him for letting himself into the house when he knew you weren't there."

"Yea," I sighed. "Guess I let him learn a bad habit when I was a bachelor. Never bothered locking my doors, and he came by so often that he eventually stopped bothering to knock."

"He started getting belligerent when I insisted that I didn't know where you'd gone. Then something changed in his eyes," I felt her cheeks tighten in a frown against my bare chest. "It was like a-a switch was flipped, or something. He grabbed a hold of me and we tussled a bit. It's all so blurry now, but I swear I saw his eyes turn completely black for a second or two."

I almost forgot to breath. "Come again?" I wheezed.

Nora lifted her head and eyed me with alarm. "Does that mean something?"

"Uh," my mouth had gone as dry as sandpaper and it took a second for me to work up enough spit to unstick my tongue from the roof of my mouth.

I began to shake my head. "That's impossible. Harlan was perfectly normal when I talked to him at the jailhouse the morning before I left."

"Cade," Nora chose her words carefully, but the tone within them was urgent. "There was something about Harlan that didn't feel right."

She leaned even further away from me and worked a hand out from beneath the patchwork quilt I had cocooned her in. "I think you need to stop wearing this," she cupped my charm in her hand and lifted her eyes gravely up to mine. "It might have helped you control your magic in the past, but I think it's only blinding you now."

"No," I stubbornly refused.

"Your fear is preventing you from seeing something important," she lifted her chin in what I was coming to recognize as a gesture of defiance.

I didn't have a comeback for that, so we stared each other down like duelists. I could see it in her eyes when she decided to switch tactics and then thought through what she intended to say. Yet I was still surprised by her question.

"Are you a Hexenmeister?"

"What?" I sputtered.

"Are you Hexenmeister?" she repeated, with all the patience of a schoolmarm.

"No," my eyebrows knitted together in a puzzled frown.

"But you wear a ward that's been painted with a fraktur-style star. It's clearly Penn Dutch."

I shrugged, unwilling to go anywhere near an explanation of why I wore a symbol from a magical tradition not my own. Nora huffed in irritation at my silence.

"If you're not a witch, and you're not a Hexenmeister, then what are you?"

"What bearing does this have on anything, Nora?"

Her tone turned sharp. "I could have broken my neck, trying to get out here to warn you that something of a magical or supernatural nature has gone amiss. The least you could do for my trouble is tell me who you are and how you fit into whatever's going on."