Bare feet silent on the carpet, she circled me, sharp eye looking me over. I felt, suddenly, the weight of my need for her to accept me, the urgency of my need to flee this place. I would take a life of servitude to her than another moment here.
And if she killed me, I wasn’t sure I would mind.
‘Perhaps you would offer me a better place to hide than the stables?’
That seemed to amuse her. The corner of her mouth twitched as it had done before, and I felt a moment of recognition.
She raised one hand to my chin, her fingers tilting my head up as she appraised my face. I had expected the Witch to smell of nightmares, of sulphur and blood and fear. Instead, I smelled a confusing mix of moss and earth and rainwater on stone. She was only a few inches taller than me, but moved as though she were a queen and I dirt on her shoe. The silk of the glove was slippery and cool against my skin and a shiver went through me. I felt like an animal on a dissection table, splayed open under the knife.
‘I have never been given a woman before.’
‘Do I not meet your requirements?’
She gave this some consideration. ‘It makes no difference. You come with me willingly?’
‘I do.’
‘So confident, when you know nothing of me. Nothing of what you are walking towards.’
I met her gaze, the beetle black eyes and blood red lips. ‘No. But I know what I am walking away from, and that is enough.’
She held my chin a moment longer, the intensity of her attention like a great pressure bearing down on me, the world reduced to her and I and the thin air we shared between us.
Then she broke contact, lowered her veil and called my father back into the room.
‘I will have her.’
I didn’t miss the small flash of relief across his face.
I felt strangely light, as though my body were not my own. I haddonesomething.
‘There must be a binding,’ said the Witch. ‘Give me your ribbon.’
I pulled the choker from around my neck and handed it to her. She placed one gloved hand over mine, then wrapped the ribbon around both of us, tight enough my fingertips began to tingle from lack of blood. Face to face at the altar of the window frame, a cold light haloed her from behind, casting her into a dark column of black silk. We were joined at the wrist, at the pulse point, the warmth of her body reaching me even through the cloth. My heart was racing, but her heartbeat was slow – so incredibly slow – and steady. This was strength, life.Power.
‘Swear yourself to me.’
‘I swear.’
‘No. By the old words.’
My mouth was too dry. For a moment I couldn’t work out what she meant, then I thought of the shrine in the woods, the branches laid out on either side of it.
‘By oak,’ I whispered. ‘By ash. By bitterthorn. I swear a bloody oath to you.’
The oldest words in Schwartzstein. Words of the woods and midnight fear.
The words invoked to ward against the Witch, now bound me to her.
I thought she might smile now she had what she came for, but her face was as deathly serious as I felt. Her free hand darted out and something pricked my skin. A dot of red blood appeared on my glove and seeped into hers.
She was speaking but I couldn’t hear the words clearly; like voices in a next-door room or when I was sick with a fever, the sounds and shapes were familiar but I couldn’t grasp them before they slipped away like water. A pressure clamped around my head and my knees threatened to buckle. All along the skin of my arms, my hand, my fingers was a soft buttery light, brightest at the ribbon that bound us, like I was a candle and the ribbon the wick.
Just as apprehension was tipping towards dread, she whipped the ribbon away and the pressure cut out. I rubbed my wrist, working feeling back into my fingers.
‘It is done. You are bound.’ She slipped the ribbon into some pocket concealed in her skirts. ‘Come, we leave at once.’
‘But it is so late,’ I said.
