My father came to my door an hour before dawn, holding a cup of coffee.
‘Here.’ He placed it beside me where I sat in my travelling clothes. ‘Do you have everything you need?’
I looked at the trunk, the carpetbag by my feet. I didn’t know how to answer him.
‘Did you ever love me?’ The question surprised me as much as it did him.
Confusion, fear, the faintest glimmer of embarrassment. He closed his eyes. ‘Of course. You are my daughter.’
Even now, he couldn’t say the words. That was all the answer I needed.
‘What will you tell them?’ I hadn’t seen my stepmother or stepsisters since the Witch.
‘I can raise them and you can tell them yourself.’
I shook my head. ‘Explain it however you want.’ I didn’t owe them anything any more. ‘You said I was waiting for my life to begin. Well, it’s begun now, don’t you think?’
‘Mina—’ He stopped me as I stood to leave. After a moment of struggle, all he could offer was, ‘It had to be done.’
The twenty years of life together, and he ended them like that.
I said nothing, but drained my coffee cup and left my father to carry my bag downstairs. As we passed the bedrooms, I caught a sliver of each tableau through the half-open doors: my stepmother wrapping her dressing gown over her nightdress, Klara kneeled at the foot of her bed in morning prayers, Johanna with her eyes shut and her hands clasped around her stomach.
It was over. It was all over.
Only the Witch was waiting for me at the palace doors. She wore the same outfit as the night before – black dress, veil and gloves. So still and unnatural, she seemed to radiate the chill of stone.
I wondered if she slept.
I could not imagine her doing anything so human.
My trunks were lashed to the roof of the carriage as I waited in the blustery wind. Dawn was feeble, thick cloud cover keeping us half in night. I felt strangely clarified, like a shard of crystal through which sunlight poured and split into the colours of the spectrum. Whatever tension had been boiling inside me had dissipated; I had done something drastic and snapped it like a piano string tuned too tight.
The pain had lifted.
For now.
b
The snow held off as we travelled, a lowering black blanket of cloud that stalked us up the valley. The Witch’s carriage was large, a glossy black plush interior that smelled like damp and mould and upholstered in black velvet so cold it felt wet. It put me in mind of a coffin.
My experience of long carriage journeys was to be wedged in against Klara, bustles and skirts taking up too much room. In contrast, the Witch’s carriage was impossibly large, space between us almost for another person. The two horses I had seen hitched at the front could never pull something like this and yet we seemed to move at the speed of a locomotive. I did not understand how that was possible, but I decided not to think about it. For a while I looked out of the window, watching the horses swallow up the earth beneath their hooves, but I began to feel sick and confused, so I closed the blind and confined myself to the musty interior. The storm that threatened never quite came, only speckling handfuls of rain against the windows.
Through it all, the Witch sat silent. Still.
Closed up with her, I felt more frighteningly aware of her than before. I was entirely at her mercy; my death could come at any moment. Perhaps she would wait until I turned away, strike like a viper and I would never know it. Or perhaps she would toy with me, cultivate my fear, like fattening a pig.
I had thought I could welcome death, but now it faced me I found myself a liar.
I thought perhaps she slept, but when my skirts brushed against hers she twitched them away in distaste; when a rut in the road jolted me towards her, she leaned away at once. At all times, she sat perfectly upright, gloved hands folded in her lap and heavy veil hanging over her face. Was it stuffy under the veil? Did she find it hard to breathe? Did she feel trapped? Or was it armour, making her feel safe? Mercifully her feet were hidden under the hem of her dress. I don’t think I could have stood it, being trapped for hours only centimetres away from those hideous, filthy feet.
I shuddered, and turning back to the window, I began thinking again about that pale, porcelain face beneath the veil. Why did she hide it? The townspeople thought her a monster, a beast of a woman as outwardly ugly as she was inside. Was she happy to let them think it? And the question I dared not ask: what did she want with me?
I realised I knew nothing true about her at all. I had a set of assumptions, the scraps of scattered legend passed down by my mother, and the deep sense of unease that roiled in my gut. I felt like a rabbit in the woods, knowing that it would never understand the mind of a fox.
Somewhere along the way, I had lost track of our progress. I knew we could only be further up the valley or into the next river-lined furrow in the mountains, but I couldn’t quite place myself from the shape of the peaks. It was the single most disconcerting feeling, like missing a step going down stairs, expecting solid ground and encountering only a lurching void. Following the river, it would eventually take you north to Nuremberg or south to Munich. All travellers took that road, the post riders and the farmers bringing food in to market and the merchants shipping huge bales of wool on barges along the water – and the railway would follow it too, eventually. But we didn’t. At some point when the blind had been down, we must have taken a fork, though I had not noticed the carriage shifting direction. We still moved impossibly fast but now the road was narrow and rocky, the tree line creeping closer on either side. And slowly, steadily, we climbed.
Dusk swept in between one bend in the road and the next. Trees became an impenetrable thatch of black and grey; no lanterns hung from the posts of the coach. How could we manage such incredible speed without seeing clearly? Just as I worried that the Witch intended to carry on through the night, we came to an inn nestled at the side of the road, half-timbered with a sharply gabled thatched roof that overhung the ground floor, ready to stand the weight of snowfall. It was a modest place with only two storeys and no sign outside, but lights were blazing in all the windows, and I was relieved at the thought of one more night between myself and my fate.
