My lungs hurt with every breath. I can not stop moving. They are coming for me. I did them no harm, but they come for me all the same. They think I am a curse on them but I am the one cursed. The only advantage this accursed existence gives me is the strength, the strength to keep running.

My legs hurt with every step. I can not stop moving, because they are coming for me. Every thud of my feet on the wet forest floor reverberates through my being and hurts my joints. Every step a necessity, another second of life regained. If I stop moving they will catch me, and there is no telling what they will do. If I am lucky, it will be quick, but I have never been a lucky man. I am likely to be made an example.

My head hurts, from the first hit, pounding, making it hard to see, but I can not stop moving. They are coming for me and I’m slowly losing sight in my left eye, blood from the gash where the first stone hit me dying the left side of the world crimson. If I stop moving, my whole world will be crimson and I’ll dye red the soil I’ve lived and cared for my whole life with my own blood.

My body stops. I will my legs to move, but they do not. The pain is too great, they say. We must rest, they scream. I will my legs to move, because they are coming for me, but I can not. I try to breathe but my lungs refuse, to breathe deep, every short inhale a sharp painful stab in my chest. I need to breathe so I can run, I try to tell them, but they don’t listen. My head hurts and the left side of the world goes dark as my eye cakes shut with my own blood.

I turn in the direction I came from. I hear them, now, a distant shouting in between the heartbeats that pound in my ears. They will be on me soon. They will take out their fears and hate on me. They hope that their curse that is no curse will wane when I die but it will not and they will blame it on me regardless. The grass will run red, and I will have died cursed, for nothing.

They run into the clearing and stop a few feet away from me, their boots sinking into the muddy soil. The large one, the one with the good aim and the angry face, takes a hesitant step forward, his club raised as he looks left and right at the others.

“Don’t let the witch-man get away. He’s fouled our harvest for the last time.”

I try to reason with him, again. I’ve done so several times but he doesn’t listen, never listens, not since Ma passed away. They feared her, I think, but they don’t fear a witch’s son, not even one who wears the traditional amulets and attire. I hold up my hands in a sign of surrender.

“I’ve not hurt you, Dendrick, or your crops. The ash rain happens, you know this.”

“Piss on that, half-boy! This is retribution for last week.”

I had indeed not enjoyed his treatment of me six days ago, when I was gathering herbs by the treeline. He’d “accidentally” let his hound loose on me when he “mistook” me for a trespasser on what he’d “thought” was his land. The hound had not harmed me, of course, animals take a liking to me. But he’d scowled angrily at me nonetheless. I felt sorry for the pup, who’d receive the rod later. If I am honest, I would not have minded the brute receiving punishment but, sadly, I am not the witch they make me out to be, as men rarely receive the gift. All I can do is listen to the earth and occasionally say a few kind words in return. If I’d been born the same way as my mother, perhaps a curse would have befallen him, but I am not a lucky man.

“I have nothing to do with your crops. Any of you. It was a bad time for bad rain is all.”

“Go fuck yourself, witch-man. You’ve cursed us, and you’ll undo the curse in blood.” Dendrick turns to his compatriots, the other three men in his wake. “I bet he’s not even a man at all. He probably wears those robes and skirts to hide the fact that he’s a witch, just like the devil-woman that was his mother!”

The others look at him quizzically. Should they not leave a witch alone, they seem to think. Dendrick noticed his mistake.

“He’s no power over your persons, cowards, or we’d have been dead where we stood!” He crows triumphantly at his ability to talk himself out of the hole he talked himself into.

The problem, of course, is that he’s absolutely right. I’ve no true physical strength, and none of the power my mother wielded over heart, mind and plant. I try to say more, but Dendrick does not give me the chance. He’s fast, for a brute, and his club strikes me across the cheek. I try to move with the attack but it is too late. My head rings and I taste mud and blood as my face hits the forest floor. I hope they will make it quick, at least, but the chance of this is slim. My head hurts. I look up in time for his boot to hit me in the other eye and the world goes dark. My face burns and thuds. I can’t see, hearing is hard, and my head hurts.

If there’s a small mercy, it’s that I can feel the moss and plants of the forest underneath me, the forest I’ve made myself a part of my entire life, the plants I’ve tended to like my mother and her mother before her. I wait for another blow, and hope that this one takes my mind with it, so that I might at least be spared the rest of the assault. It does not come. There’s a moment of quiet and the shuffling of feet but my ears are ringing still. Something is put on my head, and I think for a moment it might be a sack, to escort me back to the village. This was a scenario I didn’t dare think about, but, I suppose, a public execution might have been expected.

I open my eyes, hope that I might see anything. My vision is surprisingly clear, neither blood nor mud obscuring the world before me. In fact, there is no burlap obscuring my sight either, though I appear to be wearing a mask of sorts. I look up. The men have not moved. They seem to be frozen in place, quaking with… fear? Looking at something behind me. A voice a thousand generations old and as young as the spring cuts through the air.

“Sshai thi nhat delhang sherrh,” it growls in a tongue older than any kingdom. Its meaning is obvious, to me. We’ve upset the forest. I whisper an apology so quiet only I can hear it. I had hoped the forest might provide me with a place to hide but there are things hiding in the sylvan shades that are far worse than men with clubs. The furthest man tries to run but a tree with the face of a long-dead deer, easily as tall as two men, pulls him off the forest floor and rips him in half as one might pull a wing off a roast chicken. The two discarded halves drop to the mountain floor. There is no sounds but a gentle creaking.

I apologize again, to the forest, for the disturbance. Ask for safe passage. There is no response. I try to stand but my body does not respond, not well, and my head hurts. I touch my forehead. I feel I should be surprised to find I have antlers but I am not. Dendrick the brute attempts to attack the spirit twice his size, with all the confidence of a man who should have none. It grabs his head and squeezes. He falls to the ground with a crunch. His wife would not recognize him, but I’ve sat with her for her monthly pains enough to know she will not mind.

The creature turns to me and lifts me effortless off the floor. This is where I die. I hope for something quick, painless, for my trespass. Instead, it speaks like rotting plants and growing saplings.

“Do neén te ninnau caed wedd.”

I look into the sockets of the skull that is its face, and I know it means me no harm. It sets me down. I am taller than I was. I am… Different. I feel the weight of the antlers when I move my head. My robes fit my form better, now, my mother’s skirt hugging my hips the way they never did when my body was cursed. But the forest has cured me. I look to the two men, quaking in their boots and soiling themselves. I walk over to them with a grace I never possessed when I wore a man’s form and my new green eyes see them clearer than I ever have.

“Go home. Your wives will be glad of your return. Do not enter the forest again unless you speak to me, and do not lay a hand on your dogs. Your harvests will bloom by daybreak.”

They didn’t speak, only turned tail and ran. I turn to the forest spirits, who are slowly dissolving in the green around me, and feel, as if for the first time, the forest floor underneath my feet, the green coursing through me.

I am as this forest. I am its witch, and I will keep it as it keeps me. I will live by the edge and speak for man and tree. I am a witch, like my mother and her mother before her.