The Legends of old Lies

7 - Motherly Love

A metal bucket rattled off a bale of hay as she bumped into it. A cloud of confusion was in the air as clearly as if she could feel it. Like cotton sliding deeper into her throat with each breath. Ioanne forced herself to stop and look down at the mother that had fallen to her knees beneath her.

Once Ioanne had carried a memory with her and cherished it like a treasure. A breath of warmth that she pressed against her when the world grew cold and dark. The image of her own mother, sinking to the ground and raising her arms in a desperate, impossible plea from losing her daughter to the priest who had come to do his duty. In all the terror the little girl had once felt at the uncertainty of her new journey, she had nevertheless been flooded with unexpected relief. A witch was not born among joy. They did not grow into the loving arms of a blood family. Not them, the children who slipped into the world at the whim of evil spirits and cruel demons. The birth of a witch was direct evidence of a sin one had already committed, or would commit. So they spoke and so they believed. The signs appeared early.

In the absurd hope that this miserable part of her would disappear if they ignored it long enough, they had done just that. Anything to hide the lurking curse in their midst. But in doing so, they had fallen over their own feet. Who could have failed to notice that they never took the child in their arms, that they could not love it or even look at it without losing the colour on their faces.

But then, when the priest had come to place her under the control of a master - her mother had shed hot tears. That woman who, despite all her efforts, had never dared to touch her for long, as if she feared burning herself on the child. On her knees and full of fervour. Ioanne had been sure, now this... this had to be love she always longed for.

She had carried it with her for a long time. Until it was explained to her. The truth behind it and the shame that befell a family when news spread that a witch had emerged from their own midst. That was why her mother had cried. Not because she had lost the child.

Carefully, this mother before her lifted her gaze. "Please! We will do anything only..."

"Hush!", Ioanne interrupted the woman with the quivering voice. A tone accustomed by stubbornness and command. The next moment she regretted it, for the mother suddenly wore a panic-stricken glint in her eyes.

"I don't mean..." Ioanne gasped. "Not because of him. Or you. I'm not going to take anyone."

Relief brushed over the expressions of the parents before her. However, quickly caught up again by the lingering irritation that followed unfulfilled apprehension.

It had to be the stirred feelings. The unexpected experience that rattled one when one had died and risen again. Why else did it sweep her off her feet so much that, overcome by the need to sit down, she actually staggered towards a small narrow bench and lowered herself down.

Motherly love... she did not know. She had thought it, had been disappointed and now did not trust it either. But she knew something else. Something of all-encompassing intensity. Witches had no blood-related families. They were taken from them as soon as it became clear what they were. But in time they found something similar. They found brothers and sisters among themselves. Ioanne, too, had had a little sister. Two, in fact. She had lost both of them.

Was it the distorting guilt connected to them that had dragged her to an unfinished death?

Sitting down, Ioanne ran a hand through her hair. A few of her strands still caught in the fine braided locks.

"She hit her head!" the father, still kneeling on the ground, murmured over the shoulder to his wife. Whispering as if he really assumed the stranger could not understand him in the small stable. She heard him but said nothing to dissuade his assumption. Perhaps he was right. Should he believe it. Then this time she would ask the questions and perhaps receive real answers.

"Why should I have taken him?" she began.

The woman farmer frowned uncertainly. Slowly the parents rose again and brushed straw from their skirts and trousers.

"Because of the law. Because all boys are put into military service for three years as soon as they turn eighteen. And we would have complied if he had been a boy like any other but like this... The whole village helped us to..."

Ioanne raised her hand and the woman faltered in her rumbling, trembling babble.

"Then the war is... not over?" she continued asking. Her fingers lowered again. Settled down on her knee and clawed into it. She had been sure she had fought the final battle. An ultimate battle.

This time it was the man who answered. "There is always war." He looked at her doubtfully as if he couldn't quite believe the absurdity of her question. "And not just one. It's we against... everyone else."

"We..." Before Ioanne could quite finish her words the boy, so very protected, approached from the side.

"The council of witches. Are you not a witch?"

"Shh!" his father quickly interrupted him. By then, however, Ioanne was already leaning further forward, peering at the others in a way so insistent that her small body, battered by dirt and bruises, seemed much larger. She had never been the strongest, the most capable, the smartest or the best at anything. But she possessed a look in her eyes that others could not escape.

"A council of witches." she put the word in the air, tasting it on her tongue. When they had been nothing more than a small army driven by vengeance, cutting through superior numbers like the blade of a retributive deity, the notion of a council had been a mere thought. She licked her dry lips uneasily.

"The city, Lutejan. How long has it been since... since it burned down?" A jerk went through her voice and her fingers slid into a tense knot over her knees.

The answer to this came quicker than she would have expected. And simpler, accompanied by an irritated shrug of shoulders as the woman in front of her put her hands on her hips and explained directly.

"One hundred years. Very precisely, in fact. The anniversary feast is the day after tomorrow."

A rush swept through her head and through her veins. She heard it flowing and swirling in her body as if her insides had turned into a rain-borne storm. The world beneath her seemed to churn. She felt the vibration in the ground, but seemed to be the only one doing so, for the three others only looked at her in wonder as she sat there. Her eyes widened, her mouth opened into a soundless gasp.

"It's going to be a big party!" the shepherd boy announced over the pressure in her ears. "She has the same name!" he then went on to declare, seeming to brush aside the tension billowing around her as if he really didn't register it. Like a child. An enthusiastic child that looked like a sheep and was as big as a man. Not a soldier, she believed them.

"She has the same name as the liberator." he told his parents. "Like the heroine who overthrew the tyrant and created the Council of Witches. Ioanne!"