Trapped in the Thicket

The underbrush becomes only more difficult the farther I go into the thicket, and I grow only more hungry with each handful of tall grass and tangled vines I grab and cut with my machete. It's tough going, and tougher the longer it goes. Whoever said elves were meant for forests likely never met Rien Monfrense, a poor excuse for an elf if ever there were one—though, in her defense, she is only half of one, on her father's side.

It must be midday already, but I can hardly see the sun through the thick canopy of trees overhead. Taking a pause, I lean against the broad trunk of a nearby tree. I lounge for a moment, swiping moisture away from my forehead with the back of my glove. I pull some of my short, ivory hair, dappled with the sweat of my effort, behind my pointed ears and sigh. I loosen the ties of my jerkin, fan the thick wool a bit to encourage a current of cooling air over my chest. I swipe fingers at my cheeks and my gloves come away laden with dirt and sweat. Looking down, I see how the dust has wormed its way even between the valley of my breasts, adding an ochre tinge to my obsidian skin. I shift the position of the bow slung over my shoulder to prevent its taut string from digging so tightly into my cleavage. My tongue is thick and dry. I pat the canteen at my side, but it rattles against the buckles of my belt, empty.

Where am I? I should've hit the river by now, I'm sure of it.

Suddenly, a distinct odor finds my senses over the smell of freshly cut grass—the tangy scent of roast meat, and the freshly stoked firewood. A camp is near.

Starved as I am, it's all I can do to stop myself from breaking into a full-on sprint at the promise of a nearby meal. Caution, however, guides me to a slower step. Starved I may be, but a deserter too. This could be an army camp I'm approaching, and if the army finds me, I'll suffer a worse fate than an empty belly.

My stomach emits a ferocious, needy grumble; caution can go screw.

I trudge forward through the saw grass and the gripping, thorny bushes, grabbing and cutting, like a woman possessed, the thick brambles that attempt to snare around my high boots and slow me. My shoulders and back ache from the effort. My legs groan and beg me to stop, but I pay them no heed, nor do I pay any to the risk of being discovered by the very army I fled just last night. A worse fate with the army? I'll suffer the risk of a few dozen lashes if it puts a warm meal in me—or even a cold one, at this point.

I stumble into a clearing, a small copse, finding a sight so pure, so beautiful, it compels me to blink several times to clear my sight, lest I discover I look upon only a cruel mirage.

In the clearing is a small hut, built of raw-hewn timber with a small porch and a roof of dried thatch, joisted on rough pillars of tree trunk, bark and all. But that's not what captivates me so. In front of me, barely five feet away, is a fire pit, stones of various sizes ringing a smoldering campfire, above which, on a crude wooden spit, crackles and weeps the most precious sight my amber eyes have ever beheld:

A full rabbit, skinned, trussed, and waiting for me to eat. I tumble forward another step, into the trodden grass of the clearing, reaching my hands as if they alone could breach the distance between myself and this feast. My stomach roars out a curious combination of joy and greed.

Slow down girl, take a moment. Against all cries of my stomach—it thinks it knows better—I halt my ungainly steps. With a deep breath, I clear my thoughts, focusing on my senses. I slow my heartbeat, and use the clarity to sharpen my hearing. Someone's cooking, they must be nearby, but my heightened senses detect no beings among the nearby trees. Without the echo of living nature to guide me, I can be less sure of what lies in wait in the nearby hut, I see no candle light or oil lamp's glow through the crude windows of the small hut. I am surely alone.

Beside me, on a wide, flat rock, is a wooden bucket brimming with fresh water. Thirsty enough to choke, I lift the bucket and upturn it. In my haste, I get more water on my face than down my throat, I'm sure, but my face needed a wash as badly as my throat needed a drink, so where's the difference? I gulp down eagerly, exulting in in the cleansing chill of water down my face and as much as I do each quenching gulp.

I surface for air with a sated gasp and drop the bucket to the ground beside me. There, that's better. I slick damp hair from my face with both hands as assess my situation.

This is no army camp. Of that, at least, I am certain. At worst, this looks to be the home of some defenseless old crone or hermit. Let it never be said that Rien Monfrense took pride in banditry—but let it also never be said that a fear of dishonorable behavior prevented her from engaging in it, in such times of dire need.

Summoning whatever dregs of graceful heritage lie dormant in my half-elven veins, I silence my footsteps as I draw closer to the fire. The thick soles of my roughshod boots trace whisper quiet through the grass as I bring myself closer to my feast, step by aching step.

I keep my hearing focused to a knife's point, but still I detect no beings among the trees, not even the small, black squirrels who evaded my poor archery all morning. Not only do elves have a taste for forests, but bows, or so the legends go. More's the pity this elf, or half of one, has no apparent in-born talent towards accuracy, and she spent every arrow in her quiver this morning in fruitless hunt of game hardly worth a mouthful to begin with.

Yet here before her is a feast. No weak, woeful squirrel, but a fat, plump, juice-spitting rabbit! In the dim, filtered daylight, the sizzling sheen of its skin takes on an aura almost holy.

My next step takes me within arm's reach. I grip the roasting spit on one side, planning to snatch it away, carcass and all, and sprint into the woods before I am discovered and whatever small lees of conscience lie left in the empty wine cask of my starving body compel me to abandon my thievery. My glove touches down upon the roughly whittled spit, I wrap my fingers around it, and I...

...find myself quite unable to move.

The startlement that spills through me somehow refuses to transmute into physical response. Paralyzed, as if wrapped in thick chains from head to toe. I cannot move an inch. Not even my fingers, wrapped greedily around the spit will respond. A tremor of warning runs down my neck, far too late.

"Well well," says a soft voice, youthful and curious, from behind. "Seems I've caught something quite a bit bigger than a rabbit."

The supernatural senses of my elven heritage find themselves quickly overridden by the quite natural, quite mortal terror of being caught in the act. Inwardly, I thrash and shake, trying to will myself to life and motion, but it's all I can do just to move my eyes from side to side, trying to catch some glimpse of my captor in my peripheral vision.

She does the job for me, duck-stepping around my frozen body to regard me from the other side of the fire pit.

She wears a clean, but patchwork, cloak, grey and black, long enough to reach her small, moccasin-clad feet, and upon her head is a conical hat, its peak stooped with age, with a wide brim low enough to obscure her eyes, but not her freckled cheeks, nor her brimming smile, widening further with each passing moment. She is a short thing, obviously waifish, the way her simple clothes rest languorously over her slip of a body, but a tremor in the air compels a dread inside my body that clashes with her ineffectual physique. Glancing down to the short, crooked staff she holds casually clasped in both hand behind her back, I realize the source of my unconscious fear.

A glade witch!

The fire's heat buds fresh sweat to my brow. The witch raises her staff into the brim of her broad had, tipping it out of her face and revealing curious eyes of crystalline clarity. She purses her pert lips, regarding me as if I were a sculpture in a gallery.

I groan silently, urging my body to move. Wrenching towards any ounce of strength I can find within, a forcible tremor finds my body. The knuckles of my fingers flicker. I can move! I can move!

"Ah, ah ah," chides the witch, with a leisurely, one-handed wave of her staff through the air afore her.

The air scintillates to life around me. Out of nothing manifests a set of spectral rose vines, glimmering in a pinkish color, around my form. They writhe in patient motions, tensing around my arms and legs, chest and neck, revealing the source of my bondage.

Her casual smile opens wide enough to show teeth. "You're quite caught, I assure you."

My chest sears with the effort it requires even to draw breath.

"It's a long time since I've had any visitors," she says. Bringing both hands before her, she taps the crook of her staff a time or two against her open palm. Though I cannot even think to move, some casual command of hers compels me to do so. Without my input, my fingers untwine their grip around the spit. Her smile morphs to a mock frown, just for a small instant. "Or should I say: any trespassers?"

I make to spit a blithe curse at her, but find my tongue as unresponsive as my fingers. I cannot speak.

With a tut-tut motion of her staff towards me, the spectral shackles slack around me. I tense my body to leap, but before I can commit, the shackles bind me once more. I startle inwardly as my body moves to her command, not mine, my aching legs groaning to life one step at a time, backing me away from the fire. The sheer sense of motion thrills me, even if it is not my own, but my stomach cries out in grief. Paralyzed or no, all that concerns my hunger is that it is now three steps further from sustenance than it was a moment ago.

"That's better," she says. "I'd be a terrible host if I allowed my first guest in ages to slip and get burned."

My hand still hovers in the air, fingers arced around the spit it no longer holds.

The witch lowers her staff, extending a hand to remove the spit from the fire. Turning her eyes to the heavens, she appears in meditative thought. The rabbit quite done, she dawdles the cooked beast lazily through the air, using the spit as if she were conducting an opera with it. My body quavers, the only motion it seems to maintain any capacity for, as the tantalizing smell wafts through the air and into my searching nose. My stomach roars its grief through the quiet clearing.

I watch helplessly as she impales the spit in the ground front of me, close enough that I could reach and grab it, if could somehow find some untapped wellspring of movement lingering in my stultified form. My gut roars and fights against me from within, begging me to move, stretch, smack down her hands, and claim my well-deserved meal.

Standing afore me, she squats down and rests her staff upon the grass. Noting the gurgling sound of my stomach with a wrinkle of her pert nose, the witch smiles all the more. "Hungry?" She asks, as if apropos of nothing.

I make to reply, to tear her apart with my words if not my hands. I am urgent to even spew out some rank curses at her, anything to show I still possess some small amount of will. But I find myself unable to even flex my throat with the simplest sound.

Turning her attention to the rabbit, the witch bends forward and tears a soft strip of flesh from its side with no apparent discomfort, though the meat must still be quite hot. With languorous delay, she wraps her lips around the ragged bit of succulent white meat, pulling it into her mouth. My toes curl inside my boots; for their impertinence, the vines around me constrict, choking my next breath out of me in a gasp.

The back of her hand swipes casually away at the clear juices that spill over her plump lips as she chews. Then, swallowing, she says, "It lacks seasoning." She reaches up to my face, cupping my cheek and overwhelming my senses with a redolent, appetizing fragrance as she wipes the juices on her fingers into my skin. "You've the smell of a city on you, and all the pomp and pretension that brings; you wouldn't enjoy such a simple meal, I'm sure."

By now, my eyes brim with hard tears. A meandering whine catches in my throat, the pitiful sound to weak to surface. In truth, it's a miracle I could make it at all.

"Oh?" She asks, affecting a clear insouciance. "Do you mean to say you would enjoy it?"

She turns to the spit. Placing her hands atop her knees, she regards the trussed rabbit for a moment as long as an era. Then, with practiced hands that belie her soft, youthful appearance, the witch takes one of the seared haunches between her fingers and cracks it easily away from the bone.

My lips struggle even to quaver. My eyes flicker voicelessly, struggling to convey my need. The glade is still, but for the inquisitive creaking of insects in the grass around us, and the occasional flutter of a bird alighting the trees.

With effortless poise, she pins the haunch between her forefingers and spins it like a child's toy. My eyes flick to the ground, fearful she'll drop it, knowing that I'd give anything to snatch it up even if she did, and swallow it whole, dirt, grass, and all.

"Well, it's never been my custom to deny a traveller in need." Finding me bereft of response, the witch cants her head, and continues her monologue for my benefit. "But glade witches are trading folk, you might've heard, so I suppose that means a trade's in order. Give me your name and I'll give you a bite."

Like a bubble caught in my stomach after a hefty swig of booze, a burst of energy climbs straggling up from my core. But before I can speak, the vines around my neck tighten all the more, and the sound of my voice is lost amid the popping suffocation of my breathing.

"My dear guest, don't go to such efforts on my account!" The witch reprimands, her face quite white with feigned embarrassment. "I'd no idea the task I provided was so burdensome." Bringing her fingers to my mouth, she draws down the suffering flesh of my lower lip. "After all," she continues, "names are the first thing you give, wherever you go and whenever you come."

My nostrils flare, awash in the perfume of flavor lingering on her fingers so potent I can taste it from smell alone. If I could twist myself but an inch, I could capture those fingers between my teeth, bite them clear off, and claim that aroma for my own—as hunger drives me over the brink of madness, I truly believe whatever lingering taste lies upon those deft fingers would be more than enough to satiate me. As the witch tenderly opens my teeth with her single finger and presses the pad of it down against my frozen tongue, I cry out, I cry for all I'm worth, begging my body to obey, but my neck is like a set of iron coils; hard and inflexible.

Pressing the slender digit of her forefinger against my clenching teeth, she explores brimming wetness within my mouth that core, unsatisfied hunger has brought—I'm sure I'm fairly drooling, by now.

And not just from hunger, much to my dismay. Though I might try to ignore the heat building in my dusky cheeks, I can do no such thing against the sore press of my stiffening nipples against the rough wool of my jerkin, nor can I against the clenching press I find building inside of me, somewhere south of my abdomen, quite different from the hunger pangs the witch is forcing me to endure...

"Dear, dear, dear. You've gone all red!" She says, rapt with thought, seemingly paying no interest to the quavering pulse of my tongue beneath her touch. "If I caused offense in asking, I surely did not mean to." Glancing down, then, the witch widens her eyes, looking back at me with a knowing smirk. "Unless, there's some other reason you're unable to say...?"

Glacially, she trails her wetted finger away from my lips and down over my chin, to my neck, where the constrictive, spectral vines that bind my speech release their hold on my throat at her silent touch. Suddenly, a clear, effective breath finds my lungs. I gasp in a lungful of clean, crisp air, unable to even finish my inhale before...

"Rien!" I say—or shriek, more like.

Clasping her hands together with aplomb, the witch beams her eyes, bright as aquamarine, into mine. "Wonderfully done!" She says, "And I, of course, am Cereza, the witch of this lonely, untamed wilderness." Taking my still-extended hand, she removes its glove before shaking it gladly between her two smaller ones. Her skin is supple as young leather.

"I can't tell you what a pleasure it is to make your acquaintance. It is a lonely wilderness, as I've said." Mid-introduction, a flicker of hesitation crosses her brow. "Oh, but what's wrong...?" With an inquisitive flick of her eyelashes, she looks towards me, then down at the ground...

...where, in her hurry to applaud my success, she deposited the rabbit haunch directly into the grass and dirt.

"Isn't that disappointing," she says, mild frown finding her lips. "I'm sure you won't want it now, it's gotten all dirty!"

"Please," I croak between struggling breaths. "I'll take anything, anything at all."

"Now now." She glances to what's left of the rabbit, still intact on the spit. "Don't denigrate yourself so, dear guest. It's important for a person to desire what they deserve, and deserve what they desire, don't you think?"

I gasp, struggling to lock eyes with her, but I find even the concept difficult to entertain. My vision blurs. "I-I need it."

"You have a need." Squatting to the ground, Cereza retrieves her staff. When she stands, she places it against my chest. As she speaks, the crook of it traces a casual figure-eight motion around the outline of my breasts. "I suppose I do too. What's say we see which of those we can fulfill, on this wonderful morning of our auspicious meeting?"

In the wake of her staff, the vines follow, squeezing my breasts, shaping them. A spike of pleasure finds me somewhere in the itchy caress of the woolen jerkin around my sensitive nipples. I cry out, and the witch titters in response.

"Exactly so!" She praises me, before losing herself in a pensive expression. "Well then, how shall we start? In the stories it's often with a kiss, no?"

She steps into me, her body small beneath its voluminous cloak, wispy frame suggesting none of the power that lies within her. As she stands on her toes to find my lips, and reaches her hand around my neck to position me, bending over, to ease the difference of our heights, the brim of her hat catches beneath my nose before flicking over it, bringing a tickle across my face and eyes. Again, I find myself unable speak, though it is not, I suspect, due to any magical interference on her part. With the promised haunch lost to the dirt beneath me, and me still unable to move, my throat can do nothing but spill wrenching sobs out into the forest all around us.

But when her lips find mine, I cling to them like a rope dangling above a chasm. I press myself into her kiss, squeezing shut my eyes and chasing the wet, cloying warmness of her mouth.

It is a chaste kiss—and trust me, Rien Monfrense has known many an unchaste one—but the feeling is shocking just the same. Bundling one arm around my neck—the other holds her staff limply at her side—Cereza kisses me with a quiet, gentle sincerity, her nose brushing warm breaths across my face as she loses herself between my lips, and captures me between hers just the same. Her arm embraces my neck tighter and tighter, better than any spectral shackle, as the kiss goes on. In this moment, I would wrap my arms around her and squeeze her twice as tight, if she would only unbind me—though I would never dare to ask.

Too soon, she breaks our connection. Her arms untwine from around my neck, and she takes a simple step or two away from me.

"That was a wonderful kiss, Rien." A crimson hue has found her freckled cheeks, and she smiles, seemingly bashful. "Much more satisfying than any story, if you'll permit me saying."