Where A Witch Goeth

Chapter Fifty-Eight: A Witch Cometh This Way

Even later...

Primitive baking, I reflected, was actually its own kind of magic. Though in this dark realm I had long ago depleted what magical reserves I once had, to the point of no longer even remembering how it felt to be a real witch, I supposed I had turned into a sort of kitchen witch after all. Truly, it was no small feat to bake cookies over a fire on a scavenged elfin shield. With no more in the way of ingredients than ground nuts, wild berries, a mushy edible tuber somewhere between a banana and a potato, and some hard-won tree sap.

I was just shimmying a thin piece of bark beneath the last perfectly browned delicacy and transferring it onto a piece of cleaned and dried animal skin that I used in lieu of both platter and table when Nick padded into camp with two small creatures in his mouth. He laid them at my feet and sat down in front of me, his tongue lolling out of his mouth. His snout quivered and his eyes darted between me and the cookies, but he was too polite, even in wolf form, to sniff them for fear of drooling on them.

I dropped to my knees in front of him and picked up one of his two kills by its rabbit-like ears. "Mmm, my favorite," I smiled at him. "We'll have a feast tonight, won't we?"

He licked my face. I didn't really mind, but the wolf didn't have the same perspective on this expression of affection that I did as a human. If I didn't stop him, he would take it too far-to the point that I began to feel guilty, as if his tender ministrations were a kind of intimacy. In order to stop him, I threw my arms around his neck and buried my face in his fur, and teased. "Gross. I don't know where your tongue has been."

He snorted, but he left off licking and shook his head, freeing himself of my chokehold on him. He dipped his muzzle to look me straight in the eyes, and then stretched up his neck. That was his signal to me that he wanted to change.

I pulled Silvan's crystal—now encased in an intricately woven holster and necklace—out of my pocket and tied it around the wolf's neck. He immediately padded toward the bushes where he'd left his clothes when he changed earlier. With the crystal around his neck, he made what was now a swift and painless transformation.

"Going to clean up," he called over his shoulder, now in human form, as he rose from the bushes, a fur casually clutched around his waist.

I nodded. He'd been in wolf form for a number of days, between our last scouting of the Unseely castle and the long trip away from there to here--the outer perimiter of our ever-expanding exploratory ring of the terrain. We were always searching for springs, in the hopes of finding one active, but we never did. However, when we finally reached our outer perimeter after each reconnaissance trip to the Unseely castle, I would make camp while he hunted. There wasn't much game here, and Nick was compelled to hunt at least as much as we explored. I made jerky from his kills now to sustain us during our long treks, but we had finished the last during our scouting mission.

Now, I worked on gutting his kills. We'd eat one for dinner and leave the other to smoke, providing us with meat for a couple more days. He'd hunt again tomorrow, probably, before we set off in our ever-expanding spiral, searching for a portal, a settlement of people like us, a hospitable place to make a permanent base—but we never found anything that was better than wilderness, danger, and isolation.

While he was gone, I prepared myself for his human return. It had been a couple of weeks since we were together as humans. Nick mostly stayed in wolf form these days. It was best for both practical and emotional reasons. He was a better hunter and protector as the wolf. And when he was human, it was getting harder and harder for us to lie to each other about going home, and harder and harder not to pretend that this wasn't our permanent life together now.

I prayed to Succellus daily, but all my prayers go unanswered. He was not coming to save us. We were on our own.

A few muttered swearings from the direction of the creek made me smile. Nick wasn't used to bathing in the frigid water as a human very often. He was only changing to human now because I'd made the cookies—a decidedly human treat. By the time I had both rabbits dressed and skinned, he was back, his sandy hair that now flowed to his shoulders dripping wet, the rest of him still large and muscled beneath his drape of animal skins, and his grin still modern-- reminding me of a life we once shared in a world I would probably never see again. Now, nothing but Nick's smile could remind me that things like cars and radios and take-out had ever existed.