The Weasel and the Well Witnessed His Broken Vow

The voice came up out of the ground, and the man on the desert road stopped walking.

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He did not go straight for the rope. He stood at the lip of the well and asked questions down into the dark, because an open well in empty country is exactly where a demon waits with a girl's voice, and a man who hauls up the wrong thing does not get a second try. She gave him her name and her father's house. She had come down because she was lost and the thirst had stopped being bearable, and once she had drunk she could not climb back up. Only then did he set his feet and pull.

She came out in torn clothes with grit in her hair. He looked at her the way a man looks at something he has just taken out of the ground alive, so before she had finished catching her breath he asked her to marry him.

The Weasel That Crossed the Road

She wanted to know what he was first. A priest, he said. She told him her family was noble, so if he wanted her he would have to come to her father's house and ask for her properly. But she was not walking away from an empty road on a promise made in the air. They would pledge themselves to each other here, before either of them moved.

"Who will be the witnesses?"

There was nobody there, only sand, the open mouth of the well, and the rope still swinging against the stone.

Then a weasel ran across the ground in front of them and went into the scrub.

"Heaven," she said. "The weasel and the well shall be our witnesses."

They swore it and they parted, and each of them carried the same promise off in a different direction.

The Girl Who Went Mad on Purpose

She kept it. Her parents brought a suitor, so she met him screaming. She threw herself around the room until he backed out of the doorway, and when the next one came she did it again, and by the third the town had settled on the explanation that a demon had her. Matchmakers stopped calling, and her mother stopped hoping out loud. Nobody will marry a girl with a spirit in her, which was the entire reason she had built the spirit.

He forgot her.

Not in one decision he could have pointed to afterward. He went home, he married a woman his people approved of, and the road and the rope and the weasel went wherever things go when a man stops taking them out to look at them.

Two Small Graves

Their first son was three months old when the weasel came into the house. It closed on his throat while he lay in his cradle, and by the time anyone reached him the linen was ruined and the animal was gone.

They buried him. Time did what time does, so another son came, and that one was walking before the year turned. Since the household was busy that morning, he got out of the house alone. He leaned over the well to look at the water, or at his own face in the water, and he went in, and the well kept him.

His wife stood over the second grave and would not let it be called bad luck. "Children do not die like this for no reason," she said. "Two of them, and in these ways. Tell me what you did."

He started to say that he had done nothing. Then the two words were in his mouth before he had decided to speak them, weasel and well, and the whole road came back on him at once. He stood in a graveyard doing arithmetic he did not want to finish, because if the witnesses had been collecting all this time then the girl in that town was still waiting, and she was still waiting because he had told her to.

He told his wife the rest of it: the road, the rope, the girl, and a promise broken on open ground that nothing but an animal and a hole in the earth had witnessed. She heard him out, and then she said, "Go, and take the part God has already given you," and she agreed to the divorce.

Two Words in the Doorway

He went back to the town and asked after the girl. "A demon has her," they told him. "She has been that way for years, and nobody goes near the house." But he said he would take her anyway.

When they brought him in she did what she had done to every man before him: the noise, the thrashing, the eyes that would not settle on anything. He stood in the doorway and waited it out, because there was nothing to say to her until she stopped. Then he said two words, the weasel and the well.

She stopped mid-motion. The spirit that nobody in that town had been able to drive out walked out of the house on its own, because there had never been one, only a girl holding a door shut for a decade with the only thing she had.

They married. He had come to her out of two funerals and she had come to him out of years of being pointed at in the street, and they lived quietly after that. The well on the desert road stayed open. Nobody filled it in, and the weasels went on crossing that ground the way they always had.