Sunday

The Sunday crossword puzzle and my weekly writing group. I don’t ask a lot out of Sunday.

She had been interrogated. You wouldn’t know it to look at her, Sergei thought. There was not a spot of blood, for one thing, and although her left eye was blackened and swollen shut, he knew for a fact that she had arrived here like that. A souvenir of the front, he’d been told, though possibly self-inflicted. Already the medics had seen to it and her other wounds, and she was in better health than most of the other prisoners that had arrived the same day. There was nothing about her now that bespoke of hardship or captivity, much less the fist and boot of a proper interrogation.

The recruits they sent him, these young boys from the country, were so helpless and timid. They handled her with kids’ gloves, if they handled her at all. The duty sheet nailed outside the cell door said she had last been visited three hours ago, shortly after the noonday meal, and questioned. He saw the word forcefully penciled in beneath that but knew it was a joke. The boys meant well, even those who were enlisted only because the farms held no more work, but they wouldn’t know forcefully if it slapped them across the face. They would put their questions to the woman, dutifully repeat the scripts they had been handed, but they did not recognize her danger. They did not understand that you needed real force to loosen the enemy’s tongue, that you survived this war only with cold steel in your veins, and that you should never suffer a witch to live.

He had not seen the witchcraft himself. Even the soldiers who had delivered the prisoners, had faced this woman and her compatriots on the field of battle, would speak only hesitantly about what the hag had done. Darkened skies, a river turned to mud. Sergei had seen these things himself in the war’s early days, before the enemy’s mages had been killed, before he’d lost his leg and had been re-stationed here. Now, though, these magics were less common, more woman’s work, and the soldiers who encountered them were perhaps less prepared to act. They could not even tell him if she’d lost her eye in the volley of fire or…