Or perhaps their life would be over the minute they left with the Witch.
I wanted to think if my mother had been here, she would have been braver than my father, but I knew it wasn’t true. She would have collapsed under the pressure of the Witch’s will, helpless. They had both always pretended to be so helpless, as though their choices were something foisted on them, not the result of their own desires.
I had thought myself helpless, too.
At the mercy of my father and stepmother, disposed of as a lady’s companion before I became any more of an inconvenience.
I realised I was going to do something extremely stupid. I was going to do it now, before I understood the difference between reckless and brave.
‘I’ll do it,’ I said.
It was like stepping off a roof. Slipping under the ice. Drastic. Exhilarating. Destructive.
The Witch and my father turned to me as I pushed the door open.
‘Mina, what are you doing here?’ My father’s face was wide with horror. ‘Go downstairs at once.’
I ignored him. I was terrified, but in a numb, distant sort of way. Like I was walking out on stage in my debut role, and watching myself from some great height. ‘I’ll be your companion,’ I said to the Witch.
I waited for my father to protest again but the guilt was written clear across his face; he was considering my offer. I saw he would do it. He would send me with her if it benefited him. And it would: the problem of the Witch cleared away without another soul involved, and the problem of me. His conference to woo Bismark could continue undisturbed, and his duchy would be safe another fifty years. I thought of how it would look for him: a noble sacrifice by a selfless ruler to secure a future for everyone.
All it would cost him was his first-born daughter.
Good. I was glad. At least this way I knew where I stood.
‘Mina—’
‘Father.’
‘You don’t understand what you’re saying.’ He looked like an old man, tired and folded in on himself.
Perhaps he did care for me in his own distant way.
It wasn’t enough. It would never be enough.
‘I know what it is I do.’ I turned to the Witch. ‘If you will have me.’
‘You?’ A note of something almost like amusement coloured her voice, and I wanted to know what type of face lay under that veil. One that could still express humour, it seemed. One that was not just cold and commanding.
‘Will I not do?’
She cocked her head. ‘Leave us,’ she said to my father.
‘She is my daughter—’
The Witch turned to look at him, veil pleating around her face like the statues in the graveyard forever weeping over tombs.
He stopped talking.
Avoiding my eye, he left me alone with the Witch.
She caught up the edges of her veil and lifted it in one smooth movement, casting it behind her. I drew in a breath sharp with shock. The Witch’s face was smooth and pale like chalk, her eyes impossibly dark, lips full and red.
The gloss of black hair, the quirk of her lip – and finally I placed her voice.
The woman in the stables.
I blushed, thinking of what she knew of me: a coward, hiding.
