Free Winterbringers by Gill Arbuthnott Page A

light and pulled back the curtains.
    There was nothing to see.
    The spotlight illuminated everything for a fair distance from the cottage, but all it showed was the stiff white outline of frosty plants.
    They looked for a few seconds longer.
    “Sorry,” said Josh.
    “That’s all right. You must just have woken up from a dream and carried some of it over with you, or something like that.”
    He turned to go back to bed, but she spoke again. “Look!”
    He followed her pointing finger. A few flakes of snow were beginning to fall.
    ***
    Towards the end of October, Patrick Morton fell ill. I’d paid no attention
to him the day before when he kept complaining of a headache as he worked at the forge, but that morning when I went past his house his mother called me in and told me he had taken to his bed and wanted to see me.
    I went reluctantly, for I’d no wish to see him at all, and found him in his bed all right, tossing in a fever. I was about to creep away when he opened his eyes and caught at my arm.
    “Agnes,” he groaned. “Don’t let them do this to me. You can stop them. I know you can.
    “What are you talking about?” I said roughly, pulling my arm free. “You’re ill. Go to sleep.”
    “They must have cursed me, those other two.”
    I felt my blood turn to ice.
    “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said, my voice thin in my own ears.
    “Beatrix Lang and Janet Corphat – of course you know what I mean.”
    He caught my wrist again and pulled me down close to him, his eyes glittering with the fever. “I know about the three of you. I know YOU would never hurt me, so it must be the other two. They’ve cursed me to stop me speaking out about them.”
    “No, Patrick! How can you say such things? It’s the fever speaking. Beatrix and Janet curse you? What nonsense! I don’t know what you’ve imagined about us, but it only exists in your own head.”
    It was a marvel to me to hear my own voice so steady now, when my legs were shaking and I could feel the blood skittering through my veins.
    His grip was strong in spite of the fever. I twisted my wrist this way and that, but I couldn’t break free.
    “Stop your lying Agnes. Have you forgotten I was there at mid-summer? I saw the three of you working a spell. I know you are a good woman: I won’t ever give you away; but the others …
they should be tried.”
    I stared at him open-mouthed in horror, then with one last pull I managed to wrench my wrist free. “You’re a sick man, Patrick. You don’t know what you’re saying.”
    I ran from the room to find Beatrix and Janet, to warn them. Everything conspired against me that day, but now I wonder what good it would have done anyway if I had managed to warn them. How were they to have escaped?
    Between my chores that day I ran here and there around the village looking for Beatrix and Janet, but I never laid eyes on either of them, for they weren’t in their homes and no one seemed to know where they were. I hoped that meant that they had fled before Patrick had a chance to denounce them, but I had a sick feeling in my stomach about them.
    That evening, I called in at Patrick’s house, hoping he’d have forgotten what he’d been raving about in the morning, but the fever still raged in him and when I went into the room his mother was there, listening to his rantings.
    She gave me a look that was hard with suspicion. “I’m away to fetch the Minister,” she said.
    “He’s not that ill, surely?” I was truly shocked.
    “No. The Minister should hear what he’s saying about these women.”
    I’d to grip the back of a nearby chair to stop my legs giving way under me. If Patrick denounced them to Minister Cowper they were as good as condemned, for he was fierce against witchcraft.
    “I should go home,” I muttered.
    “Aye, I think you should.”
    I couldn’t think what to do, terrified as I was for Beatrix and Janet, and for myself. I could leave the village, run away, but where