Seventh Apprentice by Joseph Delaney

Author:Joseph Delaney
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781448195534
Publisher: RHCP

After the witch had left the pen, I kept still for a long time, hardly daring to breathe lest the sound drew attention to me. I feared that she might change her mind and come back early to slaughter me.

Then I started thinking over what she’d said:

I’ll cut away your thumbs and then feed you to my little pet.

My master had told me that some witches cut off the thumbs of those they killed. Then they boiled them in a cauldron until the flesh fell off from the bones in which magic could be stored.

But I didn’t have thumbs any more, did I? I had trotters.

My mind seemed sharper now, and words that had been beyond my grasp now tumbled into my head and waited eagerly for me to use them.

Illusion! That was an important word.

I remembered my earlier thoughts on how all our senses combined and reinforced each other. But if we were being deceived, one sense might just point to the truth. I had recognized the witch for what she was because she stank of pig. No doubt the ‘nectar’ I’d drunk had altered my senses in some way. Maybe now, at last, they were returning to normal – which was why I could no longer bear the smell of the manure. Peter didn’t seem to have undergone a similar change. As I watched, he opened his eyes and trotted over to the pig muck again. He began rooting inside it with his snout, found something interesting and gulped it down.

A seventh son of a seventh son had some resistance to the spells of a witch. Maybe that was why my mind, at least, was changing back to its human condition.

I looked down at my trotters. They seemed real enough, but as I continued to stare at them, they began to shimmer. For a moment I grew dizzy and the world spun about me. Then, suddenly, it was my hands that I was looking at. I was on all fours, and turning my head, I could see my boots. I was still wearing my sheepskin jacket and cloak, although they were covered in stinking slime and dirt.

I hadn’t changed after all. It truly had been just an illusion – and I had finally managed to overcome it.

I glanced across the pen at Peter. Now he too had reverted to his former human shape, the piece of dirty sacking still clinging to his shoulders.

Finally I looked up at the three dead pigs hanging from the beam by their hind legs.

My heart lurched as I realized that they were no longer pigs. I could see their true shape.

In the middle was a human skeleton. Next to this hung an old man – probably Farmer Sanderson, I guessed. The other man was big, with a huge belly and a leather apron that hung down lbelow his head. His eyes were wide open in death; they stared towards me but saw nothing. It was a pig butcher. It was Peter’s father.

From all three murdered humans something was missing.

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