THE WITCH

EXT. MIDDLE OF THE OCEAN - DAY

The water is still. No land in sight. Blue skies. The picture of undisturbed tranquility.

Slowly, bubbles start breaking through the surface. Small at first, growing larger. They appear with increasing frequency.

Suddenly, a head breaks through the water. There is a loud SPLASH.

THE WITCH

(loud gasp)

There are sounds of THRASHING arms and loud GASPING BREATHS.

****************************************************************************

The woman steps onto the shore, soaked in salt and muttering. Curses drip from her lips like seawater from her hair. Fragments of speech float up on the breeze - broken oaths and foreign obscenities.

Somehow, Kaj knows she is not from here. He has not been on the sand ten minutes - he should not be able to know that she isn’t simply returning from a swim. But, as certain as he knows that tonight the sun will set for the moon to rise, he knows that this woman came here from the sea.

She is dark, on white sand, in bright light and blue skies. Compulsively, unfailingly she draws the eye - drenched in inky fabric, a mane of stormy black curls shrouding her head. She stands tall, utterly upright, as she has been since he first saw her rise from the water. No flailing in the shallows; nor does she seem weighed down by her waterlogged cloak, for all that it clings and hangs from her figure. She walks without change, back straight and head down, through sea and air, over sand and seaweed and rocks alike.

She stops just before the treeline, and pauses, as if considering. She is now level to where Kaj crouches hidden, rooted to his spot by awe or fear or intrigue, he does not know. She has not turned to him - unknowing or uncaring that she’s being watched - but he stills even so, holding a sharp inhale: he dares not breathe. Though he does not know who, or even what, this woman is, he knows she is dangerous.

He doesn’t blink either, but not for concerns about his detection. Instead he watches, stunned, as she lifts her arms on either side, like a bird preparing for flight. Her sleeves are overlarge; fabric drapes from her arms like wings.

As she lifts her arms the air around her shimmers in steam-like wisps. Around her, damp cloth starts to hang more loosely. The bottom of her cloak billows with a breeze he cannot see or feel. Her clothes are drying before his very eyes, and catching sight of a faint cloud forming above her head, he gives a quick, involuntary gasp, adding pressure to lungs already full-to-bursting.

Her head has turned towards him - though he did not see it move - and for the first time he sees her face.

Her skin is wicker brown, with thick eyebrows and thin lips and a pointed nose. But it’s the eyes he can’t look away from. They sit, symmetrical, like pumpkin seeds on either side of the bridge of her nose. Her irises are like the discs of sunflowers, deep and flecked with spots of lighter brown, surrounding a wide, dark pupil.

But where one eye is red and bloodshot, irritated with salt, the other white is blank and unmarked, plain as the taut canvas of a procrastinating artist.

It is that eye, whose gaze he feels pierces him like a spear, point buried in the dirt at his back, keeping him locked, immobile.

He thinks his heart might have stopped.

And then the woman blinks, and he feels his muscles loosen, slightly.

She turns her head back and disappears into the tree line. Kaj finally lets himself breathe. The wisps and shimmers in the air have disappeared, or dissipated, he doesn’t know which.

He feels a drop of water land on his brow.

The skies are still cloudless, but then he feels another.

He looks up, to see a torrent of freshwater fall onto his face.

****************************************************************************

EXT. FOREST - DAY

GROUND LEVEL, SIDE: sturdy black boots, walking fast and purposefully over dirt ground. Not running.

KNEE LEVEL, from BEHIND: bottom of cloak, swaying as THE WITCH walks. Cloak is lightweight and black, flecked with white salt, though completely dry.

Camera rotates vertically as she walks forward.

LOW ANGLE, FULL shot from BEHIND. Her hands are at her side. Almost carelessly, she flicks both wrists, and we see all the salt fall to the ground. She stops moving.

ON HANDS

She gathers her hair into one hand, and uses the other to tuck it into the neck of her cloak. Her hair is wild, frizzy and untamed - except where her hand was. When she lets go, that part remains clenched together, as if she is still holding it. It is not tied back.

As the camera moves closer, we start to hear distant MARKET CHATTER.

Her hands move to the edges of her hood.

CLOSE-UP: framing her face as she pulls the hood over her head. We see the one red eye. As she releases the hood and moves her hands back down, one passes over the red eye, very briefly obscuring it from view. When we can see the eye again, it is white.

****************************************************************************

Iva goes through life in cycles. 

Her family has a small farm an hour’s ride from the edge of town. The town holds a market once a week, and her mother holds a stall there, so they make the round trip in once a week, and for about seven hours Iva gets to explore all the different goods and services while her mother works.

Well, she says farm, but it’s really just the one field. And she says family, but that’s really just her and her mother. She has a father, but he spends half his time mentally absent, and the other half physically.

It gets lonely. No one else lives nearby - certainly no other kids - so market days are really the only chance for friendship and adventure she has. She spends half her life just waiting. Her mother never has trouble waking her in time leave, even though they usually set off before dawn. Sometimes she readies herself in the morning having not slept once the night before.

What she always forgets, though, is that the market is never actually that exciting. The merchants and sellers have no time for one curious child, and their children no desire to make any. They have their own friends and their own groups, and even when they are friendly, she struggles to make herself fit in, to keep up with their games and their energy and their ease in navigating a town that will always feel a little foreign to her.

So she wanders the market alone. To begin with that is enough. But there is only ever so much variation: the same peddlers peddle their same weekly wares. And seven hours is a long time to have to entertain yourself. 

By midday, she will have exhausted the market, and it’s people her, and she will start longing to return home, where if nothing else, her isolation is at least familiar.

And at the end of the day, she and her mother return home, and she is content for another day and a half, before she begins to grow restless again. Time softens her memories, and hope springs eternal, and she begins to long once more for the coming market.

So the cycle continues.

This market day is different though.

It started the same. People and stalls and loud voices, and the ever-rekindled hope that this time, this time, would be different.

Well, she hasn’t made any friends so far. That is still constant.

But she can hear far shouts make way for whispers. She strains her ears, and can just make out hushed voices, as they speak of hooded women washing up on the beach. 

And then she sees her.

The figure she cuts is striking. Her walk seems more like a march, and she brings with her a wave of silence - heads turn wherever she passes, their owner’s words and actions alike forgotten in her wake.

Iva is just a few steps from her mother’s stall. She hurries there now, ducking behind a pallet of cabbages and poking her head out over the top so she can still see.

To her surprise, and her thrill, the woman turns towards her. She hides her head, on instinct, and when she raises it again she sees the woman is now walking in her direction.

Iva edges closer to her mother. She lays a tense hand on Iva’s shoulder, but her voice does not quaver, under the heavy gaze of what must be the entire marketplace, when the woman stops in front of her.

“May I help you?” she asks, and then the rest of their business is conducted in voices too low for Iva to hear, and too rapidly for Iva to follow.

She does see her mother hand over a small bag of seed, and some roots and leaves that she tends to hide behind her more standard produce. In exchange, she sees the woman plunge a hand deep into her cloak - deeper indeed, than Iva would have thought possible - and draw out a bulb, and a single stem of purple purse-shaped flowers and deep, dark berries. She presses both into her mother’s hand, and then turns in a swish of fabric and walks away.

Iva’s eyes watch her leave. She reaches a hand out to prod the woman’s strange berries, but it is batted away. Her mother is not looking at her. She holds the cutting with delicate caution, as if scared it might ignite, but Iva watches her pocket it anyway.

She turns her attention back to the woman. She walks fast - she hasn’t left the market yet, but Iva suspects that won’t be true for long. She doesn’t fit, in this small town; she exudes peril and adventure.

Iva slips away from her mother’s stall and follows her.

It isn’t difficult. She is hard to lose sight of, and Iva is overlooked often enough that she has learned to use it to her advantage. Still, she tries to keep some distance away, and darts between trees for cover when they head into the forest.

In a clearing deep in the forest, she watches as the woman procures first wood, then tinder, then parchment and ink from within her cloak. She watches intently, as she builds a small fire, and then crushes the roots in one fist, and the seeds with a finger and thumb, one by one, and throws them all to the fire. She kneels beside the flames to scribe a letter. Iva cannot see the words, but even from her distance she can smell the new and strange aromas of the fire. It’s intoxicating.

The woman tosses a handful of fallen leaves into the flames, and they send up a spiraling plume of smoke. 

Nothing happens

And then she hears a piercing, approaching birdsong.

She watches in wonder, as a magnificent red kite dives through the tight corkscrew of smoke, pulling out just before its plumage could catch.

She watches in awe, as the bird stops before the woman, and extends a single, docile leg. She offers the letter, rolled tight even though the ink could not possibly yet be dry. The kite clutches it in one claw and takes off.

She watches with fervour, and vows to ask her mother what the woman took, so that she can try repeating this strange ritual for herself.

****************************************************************************

EXT. FOREST - EVENING

THE WITCH sits cross-legged in the middle of the clearing, facing still-glowing embers. Her hood is down, her hair is still invisibly held back. Her eyes are closed, one ear tilted towards the sky as if she’s listening for something.

A bird appears high above. It circles once, twice. As it begins its third round we cut back to THE WITCH, who flings a hand out sideways and up. A knife flies out of her sleeve. We follow its path. It pierces the top of a piece of parchment presumably dropped by the bird and pins it to a tree.

THE WITCH stands up and walks to the tree. The parchment is perfectly caught at her eye level. She stands between us and the letter, blocking our view. She tilts one head to the side, considering, then turns and walks back towards us, stepping over the embers as she does so. 

CLOSE-UP: the heel of her backfoot, kicking some embers up behind her.

CLOSE-UP: one wrist twisting into her side.

As she walks away and out of frame, we finally see the parchment, now glowing at the edges, slowly burning up. We may not be able to read all of it. The important part is as follows:

THE LETTER

… good to receive your message. The Viche still believes that his people drowned you at sea. We thought it best not to inform him otherwise.

We believe he feared you were conspiring to move against him, and thus sought to preemptively eliminate you from the board. Needless to say, he has made a grave error. We await your further instruction and call….

Before our eyes, the letter burns and crumples to ash. The bark behind it is completely unmarked. Only the knife is left.

****************************************************************************

He can taste blood.

He can taste blood and he doesn’t quite know why.

 This morning had been fine, he knew that. The morning had been great, actually. He’d risen with the sun, and left his house through his bedroom window. Jax had been waiting for him, round the front. They’d spent hours together, wandering the empty streets and then the market, ducking into alleyways, and generally, wilfully ignoring any and everyone else.

And then, by late noon, Zev’s luck ran out, and they couldn’t escape quick enough, and they ran into Len, and Min, and some mutual friend of theirs he doesn’t know the name of. And Len started talking, and he could feel Jax’s mask go up, and just like that he knew he’d lost him, for the rest of the day. 

Zev says that they couldn’t escape, because it’s easier than admitting to himself that Jax might not have wanted to.

The short is, that Min started making noises about heading to the cliffs, and Jax went along with them, and Zev tagged on too, because if there’s one thing he is sure about, it’s that he’ll follow Jax anywhere, even when he really, really wishes he could make himself walk away.

And that was that.

Looking back, he thinks he remembers overhearing, something, about some strange new woman, but at the time he’d been preoccupied trying not to look suspicious, while Len was swiping some moonshine from Div’s unattended stall behind them, and he’s never that certain of his hearing anyway.

At the time he’d ignored anything being said around him entirely. They headed to the nearest beach and slowly worked their way up to the cliffs from there, and four of them spent the rest of the day loud and drunk, and he’d spent it quiet and withdrawn and regretting ever leaving his house that morning. And then feeling guilty about that regret.

It was dark by the time they’d finally made it to the top of the cliff face, Zev lagging some way behind everyone else. Jax had hung back too, to be near him while they climbed - he still doesn’t know how to feel about that, whether to feel touched or offended or any one of the myriad other jumbled emotions only Jax can make him feel.

And there was a moonlit woman, cloaked and hooded, sat at the cliff’s edge. She had her back to them as they were coming up, and Zev doesn’t quite know how it all got started - too far away, too distant from the rest of the group, in every sense - but he thinks that they - Len and Min and their hitherto unnamed friend - had been trying to sneak up on her, until all of a sudden they found that they couldn’t.

Physically, couldn’t. As if a barrier was blocking them.

By the time he and Jax reached the block, the situation had already devolved into a shouting match. He’s not sure what was said - he kept Jax on his deaf side, whenever they were out with other people, whenever he felt he had legitimate reason to fear being left vulnerable. It was comforting. But it did make it harder to understand ill-thought and rage fuelled curses, especially through drunken slurs.

He remembers though, perfectly, the woman’s voice as, now standing, she turned, and smiled, and spoke with a voice as cold and clear as the night air, “You really ought to learn to bite your tongues.”

Now, he can taste blood.

The pain is slower to register, building in waves.

The woman is still smiling at them. Zev gulps. It feels like swallowing molten metal.

Min is sputtering. Blood drips from his mouth - he looks ghoulish.

He feels fingers clamp around his wrist. Jax. He’s turning him around, and then dragging him along, and then they’re running, through the dark, with no clear direction beyond ‘away’.

The blood rushes into his throat, threatening to choke him, and splatters across his face when he tries to cough it out.

****************************************************************************

EXT. CLIFFTOP - NIGHT

THE WITCH lies on her back, staring at the starry sky. A RED KITE lands beside her. It pecks her hand once, sharply.

THE WITCH

(laughing) Patience. Our time is coming.

She raises a hand. The KITE hops to perch atop it. Camera follows the hand as she lifts the bird up to see it against the sky.

The stars around the bird seem to brighten as we watch, as if she has lined the bird up against a constellation of itself in the sky.

THE WITCH

(voice heavy with promise) Tomorrow.

FADE TO BLACK