The Witch (The Witch Trilogy Book 1) by Cheryl Potter

Author:Cheryl Potter [Potter, Cheryl]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Cheryl Potter
Published: 2011-12-21T05:00:00+00:00

The man stooped, slump-shouldered, over the crackling logs of an open fire. Twilight shadow was stealing over the boards of the hut. No more than an abandoned hovel when he came on it that fateful night; rough-boarded, leaky and verminous, but a safe place, buried deep in the woods. A place apart for a man apart. For a restless, wandering man who once had a home, a family, a position of respect and had lost it all.

He coughed and spat a gobbet of phlegm into the nettle patch outside the door. His fingers found the raised scar tissue around his throat and scratched the itching flesh. Outside, trees whispered and the dead things shuddered in a sudden breeze. They hung by foot, by claw, from the crude fencing he had built; hares, rats, shrews, a magpie, a mole, a mistle-thrush, a squirrel and a cat. Some for food, others as warning to wood wildlife. Begone, for here lies a man of stealth and keen-edged blade.

There was satisfaction in a killing well done, in methods honed until there was no longer need of intricate traps and nets. There was satisfaction too in imagining every startled cry, every death squeal to have come from the lips of the shepherdess.

Surprise, he knew, was the only way to take a wily prey. And the witch was as wily and devious a creature as ever stalked among men. Yet even she could not know that William Kerry had survived the noose, that he had regained consciousness lying in a hand-barrow beside a shallow pit; weighed down by a shovel, grit from the barrow biting into his face and lips. The cold had set into his bones, so long had he lain there half-naked.

He shivered and held his hands closer to the smoky fire, remembering. A loud belch had drawn his attention to the grave-digger who sat back facing him not two yards away, swilling down a pie dinner and a pot of ale. His climb from the barrow had been a clumsy affair, limbs stiff and trembling. He could only think that the grave-digger had been deaf, for not once did he turn. Not once suspecting that the corpse of William Kerry would lift the heavy spade and let it fall on his balding head. And more. That a dead man would strip his unconscious form of clothes and feast on the remains of the pie before scaling the gaol-yard wall and fleeing to the outskirts of the town.

At first he could not understand why he had been spared, when everything that he had ever held dear was gone forever. When all that was left to him was a limbo existence. But slowly the answer had dawned on him. The witch had seduced him, just as she had beguiled Matthew Marsden. She, who had cold-bloodedly sacrificed a young woman to her devil master and bedevilled the Grafton children, had singled him out because he had suspected her from the moment she found that spike in the Prince’s hoof.

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