Desidia

Spring of 1612 came late to the Pendle village, the earth still stiff with frost when they whispered her name.

Alice.

They called the slight, bonny healer “cunning,” half in gratitude, half in fear. She cured milk-fever and lung-rot, set bones, brewed teas for the sleepless. And in return: a crust of bread, a swath of silk, chosen solitude.

When the King’s courier arrived, scarlet-cloaked, bearing an invitation sealed with the sigil of Lord Ashcombe, whose lands met the horizon, Alice slowly broke the wax seal, read the letter once, twice, then folded it with care. Her refusal was polite, final. She would not attend.

Still the Lord came.

He brought wine with a sharpened smile that never reached his rapacious eyes. When she turned her face aside, denying him, the smile curdled. By midday, the word ‘witch’ had flown faster than a rock dove.

By dusk, the pyre rose from a barren knoll in the town centre – a low mound of timber stacked with grim care amid ashes from past burnings. There was no fair trial, only scripture spat like stones.

Constables tore away her woolen gown, baring her to the jeering crowd. Her flesh prickled through a thin, white shift as they tethered her to an erect timber. The crowd chanted – for blood, for cleansing, for fire – as flames licked at her feet.

Through curling smoke, Alice desperately searched for mercy in every face she had healed, each child she had saved, but found none.

A sound dragged out of her as the fire took hold. A word stretched too long, threaded with ash and heat but sharp enough to slip between heartbeats.

Desidia

The word hissed like a serpent stirring in dry leaves, a malison they would all share. It slithered into her executioner, then coiled around Lord Ashcombe. Horrified villagers fled, yet the blight followed, relentless as smoke.

Limbs grew heavy. Thoughts blurred. The smallest task became unbearable. Desidia settled over the village and the kingdom beyond. Fields lay unplowed. Bells went unrung. Bodies slackened. Brain fog crept in like mold. The hungered screams of babes went unheeded. People sank into beds and corners, starved of will, dying slowly of excruciating, incurable malaise.

A witch’s sibilant curse:

Desidia coils in bone and breath,

This curse my gift to share in death.

One times one and thrice times three,

None undone, so mote it be.