He had prayed the length of the road, but the prayer had given him no peace.
He laid that at her door, too.
It had taken a day from his own parish to this, in the cart, in the cold, accompanied by soldiers who would not meet his eye.
She hadn’t spoken once throughout it all.
Not to curse him, which he had braced himself for.
Not to plead, which, God forgive him, he had half wanted, allowing him to be tested.
Instead the woman had sat with her hands quiet in her lap and watched the country go by, as though she were the one being shown a wonder.
He did not repent of what he had done.
He was a minister of the Kirk, and the Word was plain on the matter: Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live. He had stood before his own congregation and named her such, and he had been right to do so.
If his hands were cold, it was the season. Nothing else.
They took her after arrival, and he had waited some hours. He understood that the thing had been taken out of his hands.
When he was called at last, the room he entered was of stone and yet warm with rich tapestries hung along its walls and a long window that showed the grey light of the firth beyond.
Candles burning in the day. He had preached against such waste, and here he stood in the heart of it with his hat in his two hands.
The King was in the room. The minister had not thought to be in a room with the King.
He was a young man and set a little apart in a good chair and leaned forward over his knees the way a boy leans toward a cockfight.
Men stood about him who did not speak.
On the road the minister had imagined this, the gathered power of the godly realm bent against the one woman, and had imagined he would feel the rightness of it.
But he did not feel God in this room.
They had set her on a stool in the middle of the floor. Her hair was gone, shaved to the skull, like every part of her, in the searching for the mark.
The shaving made her face strange, old and young at once, a face with nothing left to stand behind. She did not look at him.
Instead she looked out of the window, as though of them all assembled, she were the only one at liberty.
They had stripped her too, and searched her, and found what such searches find.
He had learned of it, in the careful words such things are told in, that the woman bore marks upon her, plain on the skin of her arms, where an honest woman bore none, and that this was the Devil’s own seal and the proof of her.
He had thanked God for the finding.
The marks were nothing like any brand or scar he knew. Instead they were fine, and deliberate, and worked deep into the flesh of her arms, line upon patient line. They looked to be the labour of years, of a steady hand and a long apprenticeship to some craft.
The old certainty rose in him and said, there, there is the Devil’s hand. But beneath it, fainter, a thing he did not want and could not put down, the thought that no Devil would take such pains.
There was a man by the King who did not belong to the room.
The minister could not place him, and that fact worried at him.
The man was no lord, he wore no man’s colours. Nor of the Church. Not a soldier, though he had the stillness of one.
He was well-dressed but his garments were plain and grey, and the thing the minister came back to, after, when he tried to make sense of what he had seen, was that he did not see the man pray.
Every other soul in that room, when the woman was brought to the question, did some small thing, crossed himself in the old forbidden way, or set his jaw and muttered.
The grey man did none of it. He watched her with great attention and interest.
The minister had marked two or three others at the side of the woman. Quiet men, plainly dressed, whom he had taken for servants, or for guards.
He understood now that they were neither. They had the same nowhere-look the plain man had, and were cut to his pattern, and answered to him and to no one else in that room, not even to the King.
It was the plain man who put the questions, though it was the King’s house and the King’s pleasure. He did not raise his voice. He did not once call her witch, and the minister marked that, and could not have said why it unsettled him so.
The plain man had examined her arms when she was brought in.
Not as the others looked, with the quick aversion of godly men. He looked at her arms as a man looks at a written hand to learn who set it down, and of what he read there, he said nothing.
There was one thing he did not read. The thing he had come for, and for that, he had to ask. ‘Where did you come from?’ he asked her. ‘The place. Only the name of the place.’
She looked out of the window.
The minister had braced himself for the Devil; for the pact and the sabbath and the carnal particulars he had dreaded to hear spoken from a woman’s mouth. They did not come.
‘Who are your people?’ A pause. ‘Where do they bide? North, is it, the hills? Give me the country and I’ll not trouble you for the road.’
Nothing.
She had given them nothing when questioned before. They had put her to the pain already, and she had kept her silence under it, and now he asked again, gently, in the warm bright room, as though the asking were itself a mercy, as though he had all the time there was.
The King could not keep still under it.
‘Ask her of the ships,’ he said. ‘Ask her of the wind off Norway that near had me to the bottom. Ask her what was promised her, and who came to her in the dark, and what shape he wore.’
There was a tremble in the King’s voice the minister had not looked to hear in a king: the tremble of a man worrying at a tale he could not leave alone.
The plain man inclined his head to the King, courteous. And yet did not ask her of the ships.
No one in the room seemed to find it strange, that the King had asked a thing and not been given it. The King himself did not seem to feel it.
The minister felt it.
It was, he thought, the strangest thing yet in a day of strange things, that a man might set the King’s own wish quietly by.
Instead, the plain man turned to the minister. ‘You knew the woman.’
‘I knew her for what she was,’ the minister responded, and his own voice came strange to him in that room, thin and country and small. ‘She came among us at the back of harvest. She had cures, and the folk went to her, and I saw the peril in it, and I performed my office.’
‘Where did she come from?’
The minister opened his mouth, but found he had no answer in it.
He had named her witch and never once asked her where she was born. It had not seemed to signify. The servants of the Devil come out of the Devil. He had not asked.
He had not thought to ask.
And now the one man in the realm who wished to know was looking at him, mild and patient and waiting, and the minister had nothing to put in his hand.
‘She never said,’ he managed at last. ‘We did not ask her.’
‘No,’ the plain man agreed with a sigh. ‘You did not ask.’
One of his men leaned forward and said a low word to the plain man.
The minister caught it. Portitor. Not witch, not woman. The carrier: a word out of a sickroom, a word for the thing that bears the sickness and is not itself the sickness.
‘It costs you nothing now,’ the plain man said to her, turning back. ‘It is only a place. Tell me the place, and there is an end of it.’
She just looked at the window.
And the minister understood, that the plain man did not care whether she had lain with the Devil. Did not care for her soul. Had not come within a mile of her soul.
He had come for the place, and the place was the one thing in the room he wanted, and he would put the whole world to the fire to have it and reckon it no sin.
The King believed; the minister had heard it in his voice, the hunger of a frightened man for a Devil that would explain his fear.
The minister believed too. And the plain man stood between the two of them and used them both.
He had named her before his own session. He had set his name to it, and his certainty, and his God. And his certainty had been a small clean thing in a small clean parish, and other hands had taken it up and carried it here and set it to a work he had not understood.
Above the firth the light moved. A wind came off the water and found the long window and worried at the leads, and the candles bowed all together, and the grey of the day went dark for a breath, the darkness that stands in the sky before great weather.
The minister saw her two hands tighten, and he thought God forgive him, he thought it and could not call it back, that the weather was hers. That she did not raise it. That she held it.
The King heard the window and made a small cry. ‘There. The proof of it.’
The plain man did not look to the window. He looked at her hands; and his stillness did not alter. ‘Give the King his bonfire,’ he murmured.
One of the men whose work it was asked about the rope.
The custom of that country, the one mercy it kept even here, even of a witch, that they would thraw her at the stake before they set the fire, so that she was gone out of her body before the flame came to it.
The plain man weighed it the way he weighed everything.
‘No,’ he said. ‘Don’t strangle her first.’
And then, because the minister was staring at him, he spoke gently, ‘She may yet have something to tell us.’ He said it kindly. He said it the way you would grant a fretful child one more hour before its bed.
He made a small, quick gesture with his hand. The two still men beside the woman stepped forward and the minister of Garvald was taken out into the cold with his hat between his hands.
He never learned her name. Nor the name of the place she would not give, the place she had kept behind her teeth through the questioning and now would keep through the fire.
And it had had no need of his God, nor of his Devil, nor of his certainty. It had needed only his hand to point.