Free The Necromancer by Kevin

One moment he thrashed violently; the next he stood still, every muscle in his body tense and straining.
    Thrashing, then still. Thrashing, then still.
    His face changed from dark-red to a bluish-gray color.
    He bit his lip. Blood and mucous foamed from his mouth. He gurgled and choked and struggled.
    Then, he died.
    The executioner let go of one end of the rope, revealing the dark bruise it made, and the body slumped down limply against the stake.
    Marshall redirected his attention to Odara, who looked like some child’s mistreated doll, made to suffer at the whim of the child’s tantrums. She couldn’t cry anymore. Her eyes and mouth had dried up just before leaving the prison. In her present condition, she felt it would be a miracle if her baby had a chance of survival even if she somehow managed to avoid execution. She was simply too thin and ragged for her womb to be able to sustain life, and she knew that. At this point, death would almost be preferable to the alternative. Odara wanted it to be over.
    “Odara Crawford,” Marshall said, reading from a
    separate scroll. “You have been charged and found guilty of practicing damned witchcraft and its incumbent sorceries and black arts, and of traffi cking with the Devil and his Infernal Spirits whereby you did steal away the power of speech from one Annabel Lawson. Do you now wish to confess these crimes as I have heretofore described them?”
    Odara stared wearily and said nothing.
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    “Then it is the judgment of this tribunal on this, the twenty-eighth day of November, in the year of our Lord, sixteen-hundred and seventy-two, that you be burnt at the stake till you are dead, whereafter your soul shall be most surely conveyed straight away to Hell to burn in the Infernal Pit for time everlasting. Amen.”
    He nodded to the executioner again, who then jumped down from the scaffold. One of his guards handed him a burning torch.
    Someone in the crowd yelled, “Burn her! Burn the witch!” Someone else joined in, and soon the whole crowd was chanting, “Burn the witch! Burn the witch!”
    The executioner set Colin’s pyre fi rst. Then, after it caught, he started Odara’s. The wood was treated with pitch and caught fast with blue and yellow fl ames. Soon the fi re was burning up to her feet. She screamed as the fi rst fl ames scorched her fl esh.
    “Odara!” Fergus called out as he rode into the throng of spectators. He had fi rst seen her when the executioner was setting Colin’s pyre, but he had failed to recognize her without her long dark hair and the weight she had lost since her imprisonment. Seeing her now, battered and starving, he charged toward her through the hostile crowd, regardless of those his horse was bound to tread over.
    “Fergus!” she replied weakly, squirming away from the fl ames.
    Marshall turned to see Fergus riding in fast through and over bodies.
    “Seize him!” he yelled at no one in particular. “Seize him now!”
    Men and women clawed at him from the ground and
    grabbed at his horse, almost knocking them both over. His 73
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    path to Odara was blocked densely with people converging on him. He had no choice but to retreat, if retreat was possible.
    He turned the horse about and galloped away, kicking off the hangers-on. The bodies scattered before him while the people behind continued their pursuit.
    He looked back over his shoulder at Odara. The
    fl ames had engulfed her, and were at work on her, charring her body alive as she screamed and shrieked.
    Fergus rode on, then stopped for a moment when his pursuers were a safer distance away from him.
    He looked back at Odara’s fl aming body again,
    thrashing frantically in place. The ropes that bound her burned through, and she leapt down the pyre into the crowd, still fl aming. A couple of men holding a horse blanket threw it around her and tossed her back into the fi re. The wood collapsed around her as she fell into it, and she let out one last, terrible