Three rows of barley at Gorse Dyke are burned to the stubble in a ring, and the barley outside it stands green right up to the edge. Inside, the soil is gray and fine as flour. Farmers say nothing sprouts there for seven years. The iron nails in the nearest fence post have all bent their heads toward the middle of the ring and gone blue, and they stay warm to the thumb on a frosty morning. This is what a warlock leaves when a bargain is finished: a clean circle and nobody standing in it.
The first mention is a churchwarden's margin note from Gorse Dyke, written in a plague winter: a ring in the Long Acre, cause not found, sheep refuse it. A century later the parish of Rudd holds a run of the same notes. Each is followed a week on by a smaller entry about a debt called in, a name struck from a roll, a child sent off to an aunt. Then the nails enter the records. Tenants began tracking him by them, walking the fence lines until the posts leaned inward, and some parishes still do. Nobody has found a bootprint.
I have seen the warlock twice, both times across a field at dusk. He is long in every part, a gray man in a black coat closed to the chin, with hands that hang to his knees. His left eye is pale as a boiled egg and does not move when the right one does. On his right palm is a brand shaped like a shut eye, and when he opens the hand it glows the green of a spoiled lantern. He smiles the whole time, on one setting only.
In Rudd no one answers yes to a stranger after dark. They say 'we'll see,' because a warlock reads yes as a signature and collects on it. Children learn the phrase before their letters. Ansel Dray, who keeps sheep above Rudd Lane, swears it is one man, wearing the same coat since his grandfather was a boy. Nothing I have seen can confirm that, and I report it as he gave it. What I can report is arithmetic. I have measured eleven circles in four parishes, pacing each one and then running a forty-foot surveyor's chain across the widest part. Every one is nine feet two inches across.
- Classification
- Pact-bound human spellcaster
- Habitat
- Farmland, fence lines, parish margins
- Danger
- High
- Size
- 6 ft 8 in, long-limbed
- Activity
- Nocturnal
- Realm
- Farm parishes and field edges
- Binomial
- Pactor cinereus
- Diet
- Plain bread, black tea, spoken promises
- Temperament
- Courteous, patient, collects on debts