She stiffened, a wave of anger rolled off her.
‘Do not dare tell me what to do. I do not dress foryou, and I owe no one my face, least of all some pampered nobleman’s daughter who knows a world so small it could fit on a thumbnail.’
She left me at the table and I burned with shame and fear. She was right. I knew nothing of this world. I was out of my depth. She had assessed me, and dismissed me, and was completely correct in it.
Outside the air was brittle. I could taste the snow poised to fall. The carriage and horses were drawn up outside and it seemed so normal in daylight. I walked around it once, trying to make sense of its strange dimensions, the uncanny speed with which we had moved. Nothing but an ordinary coach, only a little old fashioned and heavy on its vast wheels. The Witch mounted the step and disappeared inside. I felt a moment of panic at that threshold waiting before me. The inside of my arm was still sore from where I’d pinched it.
I focused on the pain, and climbed into the carriage.
We departed. In daylight I could see now that the building was not quite as swallowed by the forest as I had thought. A slender river ran around the back and on through a village; we mounted the hummock of a bridge and drove through the centre, where I saw faces at windows, a flash of pale skin and hollow eyes before they vanished. A few scrawny chickens pecked through the dirt, and in one place, I saw a bucket freshly abandoned, the ground around it stained a richer black with spilled water, as though someone had heard the approaching carriage and fled. An uneasy knot grew in the pit of my stomach.
We turned another bend, climbing sharply upwards through the forest so that now the hamlet was laid out in full like a map. Beyond, the road switchbacked up the mountainside, bordered by craggy overhangs of raw rock face, and spindly trees, barren for winter. I could see why we stopped; traversing this road without daylight to air our path would be far too perilous.
And above us all, lowering over the forest, was the Witch’s schloss.
A castle, medieval in foundation, with generations of additions mounded up into a monstrous, looming thing, perched on a spur of rock that jutted out from the mountainside. On three sides a drop, one sheer to the river winding hundreds of metres below, the other two far enough to break your neck; the final side rose up to the peaks above. The road wound around the base of the spur, almost lost amongst the rambling thicket of blackthorn, spikes prickling along its branches like claws. Mist cast the world in an unreal milky pall; I could hear the river thundering below, but it was lost to the veil. Above us, the castle was inhumanly large. Great stone fortifications made up its base, slick with moss and weeds, and above it, jumbled walls rose up to a confusion of angled grooves and spiked turrets. The more I looked at it the less it made sense. I could see windows, squares that must make up rooms and rounded places I thought would hold spiral staircases.
Our path made a final curve to a bridge that spanned the chasm between the rest of the mountain and the castle. Lowering my window, I looked out as far as I could. The world was washed out, even the trees had lost their lustre, and the sky was a low frost waiting to fall. Ahead, the bridge reached a gatehouse, a blank portal through which I could see no more. I longed for a kite to cry, a fox to bark. Something natural to tell me I was still in the world I knew. Instead, silence.
The carriage slowed as we crossed the bridge and the metal shoes of the horses rang loud on the cobbles. The great iron-barred doors creaked open, and we passed through to a courtyard.
As at the inn, the Witch didn’t wait for anyone to help her out. She flung herself out onto the flagstones and near flew to double doors set into the vast bulk of the castle. They swung open before her like a swarm of fish parting around a shark, and then she was swallowed up by the dark interior.
I paused a moment, pulling my cloak more tightly around me, to take in my new home. There were weeds growing between the cobbles and a number of the outbuildings had fallen into disrepair. Our driver led the horses not towards the stables – grand things that had one had space for countless animals, now scuttled like wreckage – but back through the gate, the doors clanging shut behind him. I had wanted to speak to our driver, our strange silent attendant of the journey, but he had hurried away. I had never even seen his face.
I could not go back, so I had to go forward. I climbed the steps to the great hall, and before I had time to think about what I was doing, stepped inside.
A vast, vaulted ceiling spanned above us, beneath my feet flagstones spread out, chipped and dirty and unloved. Two great fireplaces ruptured the walls at either end, both empty and cold. Wood panelling had once covered the stone of the walls up to shoulder height, but it was half rotted away, planks sheering off like dead skin. A wooden staircase swept up two floors above, and reaching to the ceiling was a dense thicket of tapestries, lost to smoke damage and gloom.
Struck through the middle of it like a split wound, a gash of limestone mountain, bedrock thrusting up to cleave the hall in half. It was as high as my shoulder and entirely wild.
This was not a home.
The Witch was halfway up the hall when she ripped the veil from her face and flung it to the floor. She kept marching onwards and I hurried to keep up, hesitating a moment at the pooled swathe of lace, debating whether to pick it up. Was that sort of thing part of my duties as companion? I left it, and caught up as she reached the staircase.
As before she stopped, blocking my way. Her face was unreadable. Not blank – it was anything but. That beautiful face, its sharp cheekbones and wide, storming eyes, had an expression too complicated for me to understand. The disdain for me, the anger I had seen before was there still, but also something of sadness about her eyes, exhaustion, and was that – fear? Then the expression closed off in a snap and there was only a sneer twisting her perfect mouth.
‘Go wherever you want, but stay out of my way.’
‘Where should I—’
‘I don’t care. The Tower is off limits.’
Before I could say anything else, she stalked up the stairs without looking back. The doors at the top slammed behind her.
Alone in the vast hall, I went back to the veil and picked it up for something to do. Then I turned slowly around, taking it all in. This mausoleum, these withered remains of some past, glorious world. This grave that I was to live out my life in.
For the first time since offering myself, I let myself stand still and look at the thing I had done.
I knew there was no steel in my spine. I was a soft, stupid girl who had sent herself into exile for want of a little attention.
Now I was trapped in a prison of my own foolish making.
WINTER
VI
Clutching the Witch’s abandoned veil, I walked the dungeon-like halls and staircases of the castle until I opened a door on the first floor to find a bed made up and my own trunks sitting at its foot, just as at the inn.
