My soul.
My soul riding me down the river like I’m a coracle, my mind trapped inside.
30
I feel…
I feel…
I feel but don’t feel the press of water in my lungs, my stomach, my throat. I feel but don’t feel the strange weight of my soul as it scampers up and down the length of my body, and finally sits on my chest instead of floating up, of flying wherever souls are meant to go. It takes a moment to examine itself –myself – a wispy thing, doll-like, pudgy. No, it doesn’t bear too close an examination. Instead, it –I– turns its attention to my corpse, cadaver, meat sack, shell, husk.
Canoe.
Floating. Lifted by the water, travelling loose-limbed and uncaring down the river. Behind me, the village – twenty years of life around it – haunted by all those I’ve saved, called friends of one degree or another. Loved them in my own way. Or tolerated them, but isn’tthatlove? Not a one of them to be seen, except Kian Arnold and his open mouth.
And the god-hounds.
All five standing on the jetty, watching the witch go;watching their good work all done. Their mission fulfilled. They’vesavedBerhta’s Forge. They’ve left the place unprotected from whatever’s in the forest and stealing the children from this place. What I wouldn’t give to get my hands on their flesh and bones, to remake them like clay, weaving pain into their core.
Soon enough, they’re gone; the river’s pace picks up and I’m speeding along, a little dead boat without a course, yet the waters are surprisingly gentle; I don’t bump against rocks or floating logs, almost like the navigation is carefully plotted. I don’t know how long this continues, and at no point does my soul try to leave – perhaps fear of drowning, perhaps fear of flying, or perhaps simple curiosity. Or it just has nowhere to go.
I think of the tales of witches who’ve escaped, told to me by Fenna and the fosterlings she’s brought, by other Visiting Sisters who helped me; tales told because it’s important to give hope to those who flee. You can run on fear alone, yet it burns through you, eats your reserves, but add hope to that and you can run forever. The belief that you can be one of those who survives.
There was the girl long ago who summoned a daemon to carry her away from an unwanted marriage to a prince of Lodellan.
A woman who made herself so small she slipped beneath the door of a locked prison cell and made her way to freedom.
The young woman who even as the flames of the pyre rose towards her feet, redirected the river to drown the town and its citizens and dowse the fire.
Three old women who turned into swans and flew away from the rabble trying to arrest them.
Another who, with a flick of the wrist and a whispered word, turned a mob into lemmings and the lot of them scampered over a cliff.
And didn’t I escape? Didn’t I run from what I’d done, what I’d built? Didn’t I flee across deserts and plains, mountains and seas? Didn’t I survive a most dangerous voyage and claw back decades of a new life? Didn’t I try to do better, be better? Didn’t I succeed until now? Didn’t I succeed until my luck ran out?
I think about Rhea and the baby and Tieve, all alone in the cottage, not knowing what’s happened to me. Not knowing what’s to come. I think about Fenna in that filthy cellar, unwashed and broken, self-loathing at her betrayal, her shame a choking thing. Yet I still can’t find it in me – not even dead, drowned and bobbing along like sea wrack – to blame her. Or not too much. What they put her through, those men of god, that torment and torture. I cannot guarantee I’d have kept my silence. I cannot claim that I wouldn’t have sold the souls of any I’d ever held dear the moment they pulled the first fingernail from its bed or cut the first curse into the skin of my breast, made a window in my ribcage with their knives, taking the very canvas of me to add to their book coverings. How long will she last? Will they drown her too or cut her throat or burn her or let her hang from hastily erected gallows on the green, staining the grass where children play with an unjust death? With something Berhta’s Forge has never seen before? A woman put to death as a witch. I was the first – will Fenna be the second? Rhea the third? No. Rhea will be taken to Lodellan, her death must be a spectacle. Prince killer, assassin, witch.
Above me, all those leaves and branches, the canopy of treeswith flashes of the plum-coloured blackness oozing across the sky. I think about the other city, the one I fled, about the child I changed who was whisked away crying in the smoke and fire of that last night; about the high sorceress thrown onto a pyre with so many books from her library to make sure she burned a merry blaze; about the last of the loyal men-at-arms who marched me through the streets, many losing their lives to get me to the harbour. Their expressions as they turned away from the dinghy that rowed me out to the ship… no love for me, their duty done, the city falling to ruin… Did any of them survive? To see a scarred princess returning to make a claim?
A gentle violence, now, done to my body by the water and my soul clutches at the wet bodice to stay in place; a set of rapids that I’m tossed down, until at last, I’m spat out into the Black Lake.
Here, I think, here is where I sink and rot. Food for fish. And what of that wispy little soul, when its vessel is gone? I float away from the agitated flow, into the smooth glassy black – so cold, so cold. Bobbing and wheeling, moved in circles as if by another current altogether, spinning starfish-like, no volition.
Except something grabs my feet.
Grabs my ankles and I think I’m about to be eaten while my soul watches, too scared to do anything. Will it – I – be slurped in like some airy treat? Dessert?
Green-tinged hands, lightly scaled, long nails, grasp me and tow me down, down, a’down into the greeny-black depths and it feels like a second drowning. My soul, immortal, smoky, clinging to my chest like a terrified child as we descend.
***
How to describe that next journey?
Not just beneath the surface of the lake, not just the obsidian-dark water all around, the sense of its cold touch, almost oily, and not just the fading of the sky and trees as I was pulled deeper and deeper, but then gone entirely as I was dragged into drowned tunnels beneath the forest, beneath the earth, thick roots poking through, scratching at my body, at the skin and hair, the sodden fabric of my dress, but not making the way any slower for whatever was towing me along with a powerful stroke. My certainty I was going to be a meal, but the longer the journey continued, the less certain I became. What kind of creature keeps its larder so far from its hunting grounds?
The end, when it comes, is unexpected. Suddenly, we’re out of the tunnels and it’s up and up and up until I shoot from the water, high, high, high, then down again to slam onto a grassy bank, narrowly avoiding the branches of a sprawling juniper tree. If I were alive, that wouldhurt. If I were alive, I’d have let out a scream to rival Kian Arnold’s when I fixed his broken leg. As it is, my soul squeaks loud and long.
But I’m not alive, am I? What even am I, but a soul clinging to a body turned very cold very quickly. A soul that should have gone by now, wherever it is such things go. But my soul, resolutely not going anywhere, loosens its determined grip on my corpse, and looks around, sightless, eyeless, but somehow seeing.
