Chapter Text
Salazar awoke with muscles stiff from cold.
It was always a bit of a struggle rousing himself in the morning. The fire had long since burned down in the pit, and he curled a little more tightly under the boar pelt he had wrapped himself in the night before. The wet season had not yet truly taken hold, but it wouldn't be long before he found himself waking to a gossamer-fine layer of frost encroaching from beneath the door each day. He dreaded it.
Of course, their hut was no where near as cold as it could have been. There was a rustling somewhere to his right; the scuff of bare feet on packed dirt, the soft snap of a bundle of dried herbs being broken into handfuls. A word, a hiss, and the air in their little dwelling seemed to surrender the worst of its wintry edge far too quickly for a fire just lit. Salazar willed himself to doze just a bit longer against the backdrop of his mother's morning routine. She hummed as she worked, motions practiced and sure even in the dimness.
When at last he did talk himself into shifting, stretching, and opening his eyes, the first thing he met was the snake coiled beside him.
The pitiful thing had slithered into their hut and onto the straw mat he slept on, and it watched him now, still and silent. A smile pulled at Salazar's lips. It wasn't the first time he had woken to an unexpected bedfellow. Whether for warmth or the fact that he wouldn't dash them against the nearest hard object, Salazar wasn't sure, but the water snakes of the ditches and canals surrounding their little dwelling took any opportunity they could to sneak into the tiny hut on the driest patch of land. Pushing himself upright and shaking stringy black hair from his eyes, the boy extended a hand, into which the snake obediently curled.
“Good morning, sweet,” murmured his mother. “Another visitor?”
“Mmhm.” Stumbling clumsily to his feet, the boy shuffled across the length of their home, pried the rudimentary door open with his spare hand and allowed the snake to lower itself to the ground and slither off into the nearby reeds. “Just one this time.”
“Thank the Lord for that. We'll be overrun soon.”
“At least we don't have to worry about mice in the oats.”
His mother shot him a smile he could barely make out in the semi-dark. The only source of illumination in the watery, pre-dawn gloom was the very small fire crackling to life beneath a pile of peat and althaea, and it did little to clarify her features. Not that he needed it. His mother was a drawn, tired woman, but her eyes remained warm, and she never looked on her son with anything less than adoration. Her thick, dark hair was once reminiscent of his but was now shot through with gray, and she kept it bound back with a loop of leather she had worn as long as he could remember. He thought her lovely. She motioned for him to help her, and so Salazar retrieved for her the large, earthenware cauldron their home seemed to revolve around. She hung it carefully on the beam over their fire pit and busied herself with readying their breakfast.
As she worked, Salazar stuffed his feet into a rough pair of leather shoes resting by his mat and slipped outside to run through his chores. Crisp morning air greeted him, sharp and steadying, and he squinted in the thin morning light as his eyes struggled to adjust.
The fens were not beautiful. A long, flat, featureless marsh stretched before him in all directions, marred by ditches and channels, pools of stagnant water, patches of bulrush and, occasionally,what was clearly a half-hearted attempt at a road, abandoned long before completion. Building anything stable, anything of a steady foundation was a near impossibility in this sodden hell hole. Nothing lasted. Nothing could be trusted. The water took everything. It stole all you planted and all you carried, stripped you of anything it desired and left only unbleached bones behind. Fenmen existed at its mercy, laying eel traps and digging trenches, building sluices and waging war, as if there was anything to be done. As if they stood a chance.
They didn't. Salazar knew this to be true.
Salazar pulled his tunic closer to himself against the chill. A thick fog hung low in the air, barely discernible against slate-gray sky. The overall effect was a strange one, rendering the world an uncertain dreamscape pocked with shadow and drained of color. Somewhere far in the distance stood other small huts much like his, housing families much larger than his own, but he and his mother might well have been the last people on Earth for as far into the fog as Salazar could see. The boy had no desire to linger. Picking his way carefully through the mist along a path he knew by heart, he reached their tiny, makeshift dock and pulled hard on the rope dangling off the edge. A sturdy, latticed trap of willow emerged from the canal, soaked and full of frantic motion. In spite of himself, Salazar smiled. It had been a while since they'd caught a few good sized eels. They'd eat well tonight.
It was a cold, wet job, extracting the eels and throwing them into a burlap sack he kept on the dock for just such occasions. By the end of it Salazar was nearly as damp as his catch was. Kicking the trap back into the canal where it hit with a dull splash, he hefted the sack over his shoulder and hurried to the wood pile around the far side of their tiny home, cursing softly when his shoe sank into an unexpectedly soft patch of mud. He wrenched himself free, balanced three fat logs in the crook of one long, skinny arm and tottered back inside as quickly as he could.
His mother's magic had done its job; it was properly warm now. Porridge was starting to simmer in their pot, smelling better than something so bland had any right to, and his mother was sweeping widdershins around the room, prepping for the day's work. She glanced up as he tumbled in, pointing for her son to leave his mud-caked shoes by the door. Salazar didn't understand what difference it could have possibly made, considering everything they had seemed to end up coated in a thick film of mud, but he obeyed regardless.
“We finally got a decent catch,” he told her. “Three or four big ones.”
She smiled, eyes focused on the task at hand. “That's wonderful. Stew for supper, then?”
Salazar nodded. “Any bread left?”
“Some. I think we might come across some butter today, too. Merek's cow is ailing, I've heard. I expect we may see him soon.”
The thought cheered Salazar. They'd been out of butter for months. They generally didn't dare make the several day journey to market, even if they'd had a wagon or a horse to pull it. Their reputation didn't allow for such risks. Aside from what eels they could trap and what stringy, pungeant onions they could grow in the waterlogged garden patch outside, Salazar and his mother were largely dependent on whatever desperate customers made the trek to their little thatched hut for a visit to the apothecary.
The Fenmen called his mother a witch. They were right, of course, but no one had yet cared to prove it. As far as Salazar could tell, they remained safe from the villagers' superstition due to his mother's inherent worth to them; peddling remedies, poultices and potions from the confines of their home, she had saved children and livestock, crops and grandparents – she had pulled entire families back from the brink with great discretion and for only a modest fee. When the priest's empty words failed to soothe an infant's fever, the child's mother would quietly make her way to the easternmost corner of the dismal fiefdom they inhabited, a pound of butter or a block of hard cheese heavy in her sack for trade. No one complained while Salazar's mother was saving lives.
“Come here, sweet,” she was saying, gesturing with delicate, tapered fingers for her son to join her. “Help me check last week's batch, won't you?”
Unquestioningly, Salazar complied. The far side of the room served as his mother's work space. Clay jars lined the walls on rudimentary shelving, and he began pulling a row of them down one by one, inspecting the contents and replacing them. It was a simple sleeping draught, nothing more. The preparation was very straightforward, but it required a fortnight under the waxing moon to settle and grow potent. The recipe was his mother's, passed down from her mother and her mother before her, but Salazar had improved upon it. He had improved on a fair number of her potions; despite a total lack of education on the topic, the boy had a knack for it.
They had their routine neatly memorized. His mother moved fluidly about the space, fingers flying deftly as she prepared a new tonic. The same melody he had heard her singing all of his life lingered on her lips, louder in the tiny space than it otherwise might have been. Salazar nearly hummed along. He avoided her path, checking their stores, tweaking a swelling serum with a quick infusion of ganglerot powder, making quick work of a basket of black mushrooms that had been needing chopping. They were as organized as they could have been, given their conditions. When he turned to show her the quickly thickening texture of a poultice for burns, his mother smiled down at him, deepening the lines around her eyes. She pressed a kiss to the crown of his head.
“How'd you get so good at this?” she wanted to know.
Salazar shrugged modestly, glowing with pride.
It wasn't until he had also beheaded and gutted the eels, carefully separating their innards for future potions while throwing the flesh into a spare pot to start supper with, that the two of them sat down to breakfast. She ladled unseasoned porridge into a coarse wooden bowl for her son and he devoured its contents with gusto. It wasn't a pleasant meal, exactly, but Salazar was silently grateful that they'd had milk to make it with. It was always so much worse with water.
As he was scraping the last of the flavorless paste from his bowl and contemplating another, he first caught the distant sounds of people approaching. His mother looked up, listened a moment, and stood, wiping her hands on the coarse apron around her waist.
“That'll be Merek, I expect,” she said to her son, moving for the door. “A bit early in the day, but I suppose-”
She stopped mid-sentence. The sudden silence was pregnant and instantly tense, and his mother whipped around to face him, features drawn tight. She kneeled and gripped his face in both hands, urgency in every syllable.
“Listen to me, Salazar. I want you to stay inside, all right? Whatever happens, you don't come outside. Do you understand me?”
Salazar didn't understand. He opened his mouth to say as much, but his mother shook her head, wisps of hair flying free of the knot at the base of her neck and framing her face with a sort of unkempt desperation.
“Don't argue. Don't ask questions. Stay inside, no matter what you hear. Promise me, Salazar.”
His mouth opened and closed several times of its own volition. Eyes wide, a knot forming heavily in his chest, the boy could do nothing but nod. His mother embraced him quickly, kissing his forehead. “That's my good boy,” she whispered. The woman then turned, motioned for him to get back, and again opened the door. Salazar crouched in the furthest, darkest corner, heart beating in his ears.
“G'morning, sirs,” he heard his mother call in a voice false with brightness. “It's rare I see company out this far. What brings you?”
There was a rumble of multiple voices, the stamping and whinnying of multiple horses. Above them rose one voice, rough and authoritative and cracking with disgust.
“You will hold your tongue,” it boomed. “Marlene White, on the order of Lord Hadrian Winchell, Margrave of East Anglia, you have hereby been accused of the high crime of witchcraft.”
“Witchcraft?” Salazar's mother echoed. She struggled to disguise terror as confusion. “Sirs, I assure you there is no witchcraft here. The good Lord-”
“She has no love for the Father and Son,” shrieked another voice. “Two floods in as many weeks! Six children lost! God has punished us for tolerating her demonic affairs. She must be dealt with!”
A cheer erupted. Salazar's mind raced. It didn't seem real. Why had they come at the crack of dawn? Were they afraid of what they might find in the dark of night?
“I have done nothing to harm this community,” Salazar's mother said, speaking now with greater conviction. “There is no witchcraft at my hearth. I heal your wounds and soothe your sick. I use what little knowledge of the medicinal arts I have to help whoever I can. You have no quarrel with me, sirs, nor any demons who dwell at my door. There are none.”
“It's not just you, Marlene,” spoke yet another voice, familiar and strangely apologetic. Merek. Merek and his ailing cow. How many times had he come to them for help? “It's the boy. He's unnatural.”
A moment of silence. Salazar could picture his mother trying to speak, dark eyes darting from one man to the next.
“Where is he?”
“Gone,” she replied in a strangled tone of voice. “I sent him on an errand yesterday morn. He should be back in a few days' time.”
“She's lying!”
“String her up!”
“The boy will come for our children!”
“He'll-”
“Silence!” boomed the first voice. There was a pocket of stillness around which Salazar could just make out of the sounds of the fens, the rushing water and soft rustle of small creatures in the thrushes. He couldn't breathe. His head swam. Slithering silently up to him, having slipped through the open door, was the same snake he had found beside him that morning. It raised itself up to examine him, a primitive, reptilian curiosity in cold, black eyes.
“Both you and your son will pay for your crimes against God and this village,” the voice announced. “You have been condemned to death.”
The mob cheered again. Salazar's blood boiled. A great and terrible storm of static and thunder raged in his head, burning in his skin, carrying him away. Beside him, the fire in the pit erupted, jumped six feet in the air and began licking the roof of their home. There was a clamor outside as people began moving and shouting, advancing on the only person Salazar had; his mother's shriek cut through the air, white-hot, agony made auditory, and his silent promise to stay inside simply evaporated. He scrambled to his feet even as the room began to fill with smoke, flames crawling along the walls, and burst out with a guttural cry.
The mob was larger than he would have expected. At least fifteen, maybe twenty people had gathered, many of whom Salazar had known most of his life, clutching clubs and sticks and anything else that could have passed for a weapon. They were led by a haggard-looking man well into his forties, mounted on a pitch black charger and outfitted in armor of burnished iron. A knight of Lord Winchell's, here to do the Margrave's bidding while keeping the noble hands clean. He had Salazar's mother by the hair. A man Salazar had once helped with a chronic headache held a rough length of rope, ending in the unmistakable loop of a noose.
Something deep and ancient awoke in Salazar; something terrible, smelling of blood and fury. The boy screamed and the house behind him was abruptly engulfed in flame. There was a moment of confusion, the knight locking eyes with Salazar and shouting something the young wizard couldn't hear. A handful of villagers moved towards him. His mother's eyes had gone wide with panic. She was also screaming, he realized. Some dim, distant part of him knew that.
The first man to touch him dropped to the ground without warning, covered in large, angry-looking boils. He writhed about in the mud, face contorted in agony. The second to grab Salazar seized him by the forearm and found himself thrown towards the burning wreckage of the hut, hitting a wooden beam with a sickening crack. A third cracked the boy over the skull with a wooden cudgel. Stars exploded behind Salazar's eyes, bringing him to his knees. Someone grabbed him and pinned him down, deaf to Salazar's wordless, furious wail, until a snake attached itself firmly to the skin just below his assailant's eye. The man ripped away from Salazar, stumbling back, clutching at the snake and adding his own hellish shrieks to the din.
Salazar pushed himself up and briefly wondered why the ground seemed alive. It shimmered with activity, and in every direction, the men of the mob were shrieking, bucking, and scrambling to get away. Dozens of snakes pursued them. Hundreds. Every reptile in the marshlands had come to Salazar's aid, slithering after their quarry with a cold and agile fury.
His mother was clawing against her captors, motioning for Salazar to run. She deftly kneed the man with the rope in the groin and lunged toward her son, and for a moment, Salazar thought she would make it – grasp his hand, pull him out of harm's way, and disappear with him into the mist.
The knight reared up on his war horse and caught the woman in mid-stride. Salazar couldn't even cry out. Round, gray eyes, clear and wise and etched with deepening crows feet – those eyes went wide with understanding, flickering with panic, dark with terror. Thin, pale lips mouthed the same word over and over. Run, they were saying. Run. The hunting knife was a silver streak in a dim world of smoke and fog, and it raked across his mother's throat with brutal efficiency.
Somehow, Salazar couldn't quite make sense of what he was seeing. Blood had never seemed that red before. Her body went limp. The light left her eyes, replaced with an empty glassiness that seemed unnatural and wrong. She didn't respond when Salazar screamed for her. The knight dropped her and she crumpled, doll-like, in a patch of mud and gore, already forgotten.
Salazar's voice seemingly stopped working. The words had left him.
When the knight turned, his sights landing again on the small, filthy boy shivering in the early morning chill, his expression grew grim. He dismounted, clutching to his side the knife still slick with his mother's blood, and gestured for Salazar to come to him.
Numbly, Salazar obeyed.
His hand was heavy on Salazar's narrow shoulder. “Do you know why I've killed your mother, boy?”
Salazar couldn't respond. The man's eyes were a light, watery gray, a mockery of the unbending iron of his mother's gaze. There was no storm in this man's eyes. Not like his mother. Not like Salazar.
“She was a witch. As are you. It is the only kind thing to do, child. Death is a preferable fate.” The knight's eyes fluttered shut and he kneeled to pray. “Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name.”
Without knowing what he intended to do, heeding only the storm rumbling in his flesh, Salazar reached up and placed his palm against the cheek of the knight. The man who had murdered his mother looked at him in confusion, his prayer dying on his tongue; he seemed incapable of ripping away from the touch. A wordless noise rose up from the back of the knight's throat, a strange, halting, choking sort of groan. Those weak gray eyes rolled backwards into his head until only the whites were visible. Blood began to pool in his ears and drip from his nose. The body convulsed inside its armor. Salazar grit his teeth, his pulse pounding in his head, fire skipping through his skin. Something in him snapped, and just like that, the knight was gone.
Salazar stumbled back from the man – the corpse, now, which collapsed much as his mother had done. His eyes cast around, panicked and desperate; men still rolled in his clearing, nursing injuries or fighting serpents, though many were retreating. Those that still could. His hut was still burning, a plume of black smoke uncurling against the sky. It would draw others. He couldn't stay here.
His mother still lay in the mud, lifeless and bent at an unnatural angle. Tears stung Salazar's eyes. He couldn't leave her, he couldn't. He scrambled to her side, slipping twice before he reached her. Empty eyes stared up at nothing. She was still warm, though the blood blooming down the front of her dress had already cooled. She had spun that dress herself.
“Mum,” he squeaked, though he knew full well it would do no good. “Mum, come on.”
He tugged fruitlessly at her shoulder, mind racing. He had heard tales of wizards appearing and disappearing at will, but that power was beyond him. He couldn't pick her up, couldn't even get purchase on her form, mud-slick as it was. A frustrated sob erupted from the boy. To his right, the war horse was prancing nervously, wanting to escape nearly as badly as Salazar did. His mother had said to run.
With tear-blurred vision, Salazar bent and kissed his mother's hair, as she had so often kissed his. He stumbled to his feet and climbed gracelessly atop the horse, who was not expecting a new rider and reared. But Salazar clung tightly and did as he had seen farmers and soldiers do before, digging his heels into the animal. The horse's instincts finally won out, and they were running, galloping away.
He looked back only once. Though he could still smell the iron bite of blood in the air, the clearing was disappearing into the haze of flame and mist. The fens were claiming it. Taking it for a sacrifice.
Salazar buried his face in the neck of the horse as they rode. With every step, he wished for death.