Satan gives his full attention to me now, and I try to make my mind blank, to reveal nothing. At the same time, I brace myself, ignorant of exactly what he plans, but knowing I am in for something bad.
It proves to be worse than I can imagine.
“Do you remember Masada?” Satan asks me with well-honed cruelty.
How can I forget? That ancient rock fortress overlooking the Dead Sea, the scene of one of Israel’s greatest massacres. It is the place where I lost my beloved wife Sarah, and my twins, Mikah and Rachel.
“Would you like to see how your wife and children died?”
No! No, no, no, no, no, I cry silently. It is enough that I feel guilty over their deaths. That I mourned their loss every day of my human existence, which was not that long since I took my own life, but every day of my pitiful two-thousand-year-old Lucipire existence.
My eyes are forced shut and behind the lids I see Sarah, but she hardly resembles my wife with smooth, sun-kissed skin and dancing brown eyes. No longer is she the beautiful woman who strolled through the neat rows of our small Shomron vineyard, laughing up at me, teasing. No, this creature more resembles those pictures I have seen of Holocaust victims during World War II. Gaunt, skeletal, walking like an elderly crone, rather than her twenty-five years. I know then that I am seeing Sarah as she was during the year-long siege of Masada, before the final assault, before the fires set by Roman soldiers. Of which, for my sins, I had been one.
I arch my back on the rack, attempting escape. I scream, the first time in my captivity. A long wail of heartbreaking anguish.
“Or perhaps you would like to see how your children fared?”
When I do not respond, Satan says, “Everyone has a tipping point. Everyone.”
What I see then pushes me closer and closer to the point of madness. And I know, deep down, that he will force me to view this scene over and over, flails to my very soul.
It is too much!
Chapter 1
The Norselands, 1250 A.D.
There’s a little bit of witch in every woman . . .
Regina Dorasdottir loved being a witch, but that had not always been the case.
Witchiness was in her blood, her mother and grandmother before her having practiced the black arts. For years, she’d fought her gifts, especially when she was teased and bullied by the village children and even the youthlings up at Winterstorm castle, but then when she was fourteen, the ignorant village folks burned her mother, Dora Sigrunsdottir, whilst still alive and inside her forest hut, blaming her for a year-long famine. This, despite the fact, that her sweet mother had been a good witch, providing healing potions to the sick, birthing babies, giving, giving, giving.
Regina could not claim the same goodness. After witnessing her mother’s brutal death, a bitterness and rage grew in her like a festering boil. She had to embrace her magical gifts, or explode. After a time, she rebuilt her mother’s home in the forest . . . a hovel, actually, but she did not care. It was only temporary. Eventually, she came to excel and enjoy all that she could do, uncaring if anyone got hurt, sometimes deliberately inflicting pain on those for whom she carried a grudge. And later, over the next eleven years, she did not even discriminate in that way. Yes, she helped a great many people with her healing potions, but that became incidental. If people paid, they got her services.
She loved the power. In a time when women were rarely given authority, she had a shadowy influence over many people.
She loved making money. Forget about being paid in chickens, or barley, or mead, as many healers and midwives were. She accepted only coins, thank you very much, preferably gold, but silver would do, and occasionally copper.
She loved pretending to be an aged, skinny crone with a huge wart on her hairy chin, skin splotches painted on her skin, similar to liver spots, which village cotters referred to as devil’s spittle, and a not-so-lovely, ashy gray hair. Best for a woman living alone in a remote area to appear as loathsome as possible. In fact, she had seen only twenty-five winters, her hair was an unfortunate flame red, also considered a sign of the devil. A raggedy gunna hid an embarrassingly voluptuous figure. Those folks who’d known her as a child were long gone, or unable to recognize this scary creature of the woods. They were suspicious, of course, but accepted her explanation that Regina was gone and she was a member of the coven (with the same name, would you believe it?) who’d come to take her place. The fools shivered at the word “coven” and asked no more questions.
She did not worry overmuch about suffering the same fate as her mother. She was harder than her mother and more careful. Plus, she’d honed a talent with knife throwing over the years, and her knives were razor sharp. She could pierce a running rabbit at twenty paces and gut a randy Viking bent on rape. Never openly. Best not to raise suspicions to another level.