No, I would take my chances here.
I wasn’t sure if Wolf would act as lady’s maid and expect to unpack my clothes herself, so I left them for the time being and started with my books and papers and carefully wrapped specimens. There was no bookshelf, but a handsome writing desk was pushed up against the wall beneath the windows so I lined up my volumes there and organised my research papers alongside. I had begun reading on the new techniques used to track time in soil strata and I thought to continue my study without my stepmother’s disapproving looks.
My specimens I took special care unpacking. I had insisted on bringing the large, grid-like piece of storage my mother had commissioned for my twelfth birthday. That year before she died, she had begun to take notice of my interests, as though I was a curious spectacle in her own home she could pass the time with. Worked out of polished beech, backed in green baize, the case took the shape of a large square, about two metres by two metres, and split up by means of horizontal and vertical partitions into four hundred individual squares of space. Modelled after a pharmacists’ cabinet, each slot was home to a different specimen of rock. I had arranged them into columns of igneous, sedimentary and metamorphic, marking out the strange birth and life of each piece. Matt panes of grey slate shot through with threads of white, a polished square of granite, freckled amber, a lump of diorite dappled like a Dalmatian, snags of pyrite as gold and shiny as pfennig. At the centre of it all, a geode the size of both palms together, a smooth egg of rock split open and the two halves displayed side by side to show the crystalline hollow within. White at the outside, bleeding to blue and purple, I had always thought the crystals looked like teeth. A beautiful maw waiting to clamp shut.
My father had first gifted me that sharp flake of flint when I was seven. But he had given me more than that: it was somewhere to belong. The earth spread out from my feet to the feet of every other living thing on earth, one endless rocky blanket fathoms deep and centuries old. I was at home where it ruptured out of the ground into mountains and cliffs, raw, rippled insides on display, rock packed tight in striations, crumbling like cheese or glossy like water. Out there it didn’t matter if I was wanted or not. Out there, I would always be enough.
When I was finished I stretched my back and went to the windows to let in a breeze. A good half-metre in depth, they felt like tunnels between the underworld of the castle and the bright day outside. I thought about pulling some of the pillows and blankets from the bed and making myself a reading nook. It would feel better to be only a breath away from nature. The view was beautiful: straight down the valley, the planes of forest-top flanking the hillsides, and in the distance, the shape of peaks. I wondered where the village we had stopped at was from here. Down the valley, surely, but I could see no smoke rising from fires or any opening in the trees.
It was like the wildwood had swallowed up the rest of the world, and I was stranded, an anchorite in the most remote wilderness.
b
The meal was simple, far plainer than what I was used to in Blumwald, but it was hot and filling and I was grateful for it. While I ate, Wolf looked over my clothes trunk and tutted, before declaring she would find a girl in the village who could ‘do’ for me. I wondered if Wolf worked alone or whether a girl from the village ‘did’ for the washing and scouring. I almost protested that I was quite capable of dressing myself, then I thought about rejecting another chance for company and stayed quiet and let Wolf make her plans instead.
There was plenty of the day still left, so I set myself exploring; first retreading my route back to the dank, echoing cave of the hall and then in careful loops to trace the flow of corridor and staircase. I began to draw the outline of a map on a piece of scrap paper but the castle seemed to defy geometry. From the outside it was clearly square, but inside I found myself turning five corners to complete a loop of the building. When I tried to order the lines and angles, I felt sick, a pressure building in my temples. I had always found my way walking from the ground beneath my feet, the touch of the tree bark, the smell of moss or the sound of birdsong; I would do the same here.
The hall was cold: that was the first landmark I fixed in my mind. Cold as the icehouse set into the grounds of the Summer Palace, it was the frozen heart of the castle from which everything radiated – the closer you were to it, the colder you felt. The closer to the walls, the more sunshine soaked in. Though it made no sense – the thick stone walls of the castle should have been the coldest thing. At one end were the doors we had entered through, two storeys high and as thick as my body; at the other a grand staircase sweeping up to the double doors that the Witch had disappeared through on our arrival. On closer inspection, the staircase was rickety and eaten through by woodworm. Several steps were so badly rotted through that they crumbled under my weight. I do not know how the Witch dared to mount them, but I avoided them entirely, finding my way up by the spiral staircases and servants’ stairs.
And all around the hall’s high walls, the rotting tapestries. When I looked closer, I saw they depicted battles, great hordes of soldiers in armour, dragons rearing over mountaintops and all of it drenched in blood, limbs mangled, heads rolling on the ground. The red thread had darkened to rust and was wet with damp. I touched my fingers to it and they came away stained claret.
I found myself avoiding the hall if I could.
The next landmark was the Tower. Standing at the western corner of the schloss, the Witch’s Tower was the void in my internal map. Like the coat of arms hacked off my chimney breast, the Tower could only be known from the edges it left behind: a bulging wall that disturbed the dimensions of the other rooms, corridors that ended in smooth walls. A mystery whose solution was carefully guarded from my sight.
The rest of the castle I picked off piece by piece: rooms stuffed with junk and broken furniture, collapsing walls and smashed windows, moss growing between the stones and always a dripping sound I could never quite find. I never saw another living soul save the rats that scurried in the dark corners, and the pigeons roosting in the vaulted roof of the hall. I assumed – I hoped – that Wolf and the other servants were in the kitchens, keeping to themselves. In one grand room I thought might have been a dining hall, I found a portrait that had been slashed through with a knife so badly it was impossible to pull it back together. Like the shattered coat of arms in my room, I traced my finger over the remains of oil paint so old it fractured like mosaic.
Everywhere, shadows. Pools of ink gathering at the edges of rooms, encroaching from the corner of my eye, darker than any shadow had the right to be.
There was something wrong with the castle.
The room next to my own was the only door I could not force: the handle simply did not turn and no amount of wrenching moved it. I kneeled and looked through the keyhole and saw a space much like my own, a sliver of bed and perhaps something that could be a desk. I gave the handle one last rattle then gave up and continued along the corridor.
I stopped in one room populated by travelling cases of varying ages. Seven in total, ranging from a smartly painted trunk like the one my mother had kept her winter clothes in to something so solid and ancient, it looked like a fallen tree trunk, studded with pointed metal rivets and bound in iron. I frowned, thinking of the age of some of the trunks and who they could have belonged to, and shut the door.
I came across the Witch’s apartments quite by accident. Set in an unassuming swatch of second floor corridor to the west, where the windows faced the thick hatch of trees on the mountainside and the light never really reached, there was a study, like to my father’s as the oak was to the acorn. It was vast, a palace of books and rugs and chairs, a huge globe in one corner so old half the world was missing, a fireplace blazing and a chaotic desk the size of my bed covered in broken quills, crumpled blotting paper, spilled ink, yellowing newspapers and a large paperweight in the shape of a clawed foot clutching a nub of bone. There was no sign of the Witch, but surely these must be her rooms. Through a connecting door I spied a bedroom, but knew better than to pry that far. Wolf arrived holding a small bundle of letters and I bolted with an apology.
But my curiosity had been lit. The Witch was something like human, there was proof. She slept and spilled her ink and got cold without a fire. That thought comforted me. She could not be so completely alien, and if only I could find the right way in, there might be a way to live together.
If only my curiosity had stopped there.
Some secrets aren’t worth the pain of knowing.
b
I slept poorly, kept awake by the howling of wolves, the groan and creak of the old building shifting. I had still not been summoned by the Witch and Wolf had said precisely three words to me when bringing a tray of breakfast to my room, so I was acting entirely on my own initiative as I presented myself at the Witch’s study the next morning, hoping to make a good impression.
I was mistaken.
The door was open when I arrived, so I knocked on the doorframe and waited on the threshold. The Witch started at the noise, and on seeing my presence, her beautiful face fell into its habitual sneer. I arranged myself into a smile in return.
‘What are you doing here?’ she snapped.
‘Good morning. I thought to present myself early and see how I could be of use to you.’
‘Of use to me?’
‘Yes.’ I had trapped myself with her and I was determined this would be a different life than the one I had with my family. I pressed on: ‘You were insistent on taking a companion, so surely there are things you want from one. I trust you don’t mind my speaking frankly. We were bound, and now I am yours. Is that not so?’
