‘It is.’ She looked pale, and that note of fear had returned to her disposition. It baffled me. What could she have to fear in me? I almost felt angry. How dare she be afraid when I was the one so vulnerable.
‘It would make things easier if you gave me your name,’ I said. We had always spoken of her as the Witch but if we were to live together I needed to make her something different than the legend who kept us bound by fear.
Her lip curled. ‘Of course it would. That’s the most important thing to girls like you, isn’t it, etiquette andniceness.’
I shrivelled. If I were at home I would have slithered away by now, disappeared into the trees or shut myself away with my collection. But I was far from home and my old self felt distant. ‘I see nothing wrong with wanting to be thoughtful and considerate in my dealings with others. Perhaps that is an alien idea to you. But so be it, if you will not tell me your name then I shall call you Witch.’
The Witch said nothing. Her lip was still curled, but now in amusement not contempt. ‘Very well, that can be my name to you,’ she said and went back to the letter she was writing.
A moment of silence passed and I realised she meant to dismiss me. At this point my irritation with her was passing into genuine confusion. WhatwasI doing here?
I gestured at the chaos of papers on her desk and thought of that stinging moment of miscommunication with my father. ‘Can I help you with your accounts?’
She didn’t look up. ‘No.’
‘Then perhaps I could play you music.’ I looked around but saw no piano, the only instrument I had any acquaintance with.
‘That will not be necessary.’
With the last of my courage, I entered the room and placed myself before her desk.
‘You bound me, you brought me here, and now you ignore me. Why? If you don’t tell me what I’m here for, how am I ever meant to help you achieve it? Tell me, what did your previous companions do?’
I thought she might rage at me. Anger snapped through her like wind in a flag, and her fingers clenched around her pen. ‘You are here because I require you to be here. That is all you need to know.’ Her voice was calm and cold, frighteningly so. ‘Any further curiosity on your part is of no interest to me. Do not think to pry into my business behind my back because I assure you I will know, and if I find out, I will make my displeasure known swiftly and with no remorse. Do I make myself clear?’
For the first time, I saw something old behind her eyes. I saw the ancient Witch of the wildwood looking out at me from behind a pretty porcelain mask. An instinct deep within me sensed danger, just as I had in my father’s study when she had first come to us. It felt as though my guilt was writ clear on my face. I had already snuck through the castle exploring. Did she know? My own death hung on the horizon, pricklingly close.
I swallowed, and stepped back, making it all the way to the door without turning my back on her.
‘Very well. I won’t bother you again.’
I should have fled then.
Instead I lingered in the corridor, at a loss for what to do next. Without the Witch, I had no purpose here and that thought loomed before me like a cliff edge. If I fell, surely I would die.
The door to her study opened and I hastily concealed myself in an alcove housing a grandfather clock. The Witch emerged, brows furrowed in thought, and drew a key on a length of cord from beneath her bodice, and unlocked an unassuming door beside hers. I caught the flash of spiral stairs and then the door swung shut and she was gone, the sound of a lock turning like the final punctuation at the end of our altercation.
Cautiously, I crossed to the door and placed my hand against the wood. The Witch’s Tower. The only place she had forbidden me to enter.
I climbed the stairs back to my room, thinking about the words that had caused her to lash out. She didn’t want me to know about my predecessors.
She had been furious, but I thought perhaps I had seen something more.
She felt guilty.
I feared what would come if I found out why.
b
Living in the schloss was like going back in time. Like picking through the layers of striated cliff-side, marking earthquake and landslide and drought and flood, the schloss was an archaeological dig through decades –centuries –of domestic life. I found Wolf in the kitchen cooking over an open fire, no range in sight, and a thatch of copper pots hung from the ceiling between the foliage of drying herbs and ropes of sausage and garlic and paprika peppers and swags of thyme and rosemary and basil and mint. It was beautiful, but it was like something out of a woodblock carving in a children’s book. The woodsman’s cottage, the fairy-tale kitchen. Wolf waved me out with the same disinterest she would wafting out a fly. Two village girls assisted her and neither acknowledged my presence.
The rest of the castle was the same. Of course I had expected the schloss not to be on the gas or have a flush toilet – but this was something else. My bed, on inspection, was a proper tester, with layers of mattress ranging from pea shuck at the base, to straw, to horsehair and then the newest layer of feather. Below, it was roped with pegs to tighten. The bath when it was brought to me was a vast wooden thing like a barrel split open, tarred and held together by ornately wrought metal bands, and filled with buckets of water heated in the kitchens. Rush lights lined the hallways and wood smoke came from my fireplace. And yet, I saw servants rarely. There were the maids in the kitchen, and the girls who came to help me dress most mornings, but I never saw the same face twice and too often when I spoke to them they drifted past as though I were the unseen ghost haunting the castle, their eyes glassy and vacant.
The more I thought about my situation, replaying the scenes in my mind like a magic lantern show – The Witch Arrives, The Daughter’s Sacrifice, The Offer Accepted, The Women Bound – the more questions I had. I had seen the Witch from my window on occasion drifting down the road that led back to the village, veil over her face and long skirts dragging. It should not have shocked me so to see that she was no real monster, but I confess it did. She looked young, yes, but not quite as young as me. Perhaps Johanna’s age. That brought strangeness with it again: a woman unmarried, without children. Living alone, riding where she wished in her carriage and making demands of my father. It did not fit with the world I knew, but to look for answers would be to risk more than I could afford to lose.
I ventured outside instead, following the path from the castle I believed must lead to the village. It was strange, from Blumwald the Witch’s castle was always visible on the horizon, jutting out from the trees like a snapped bone, but now I was here, Blumwald was nowhere to be seen. Perhaps it was some odd trick of perspective but I could catch no glimpse of my old home. There were only the mountains, and the pines, and the river.
The snow still held off, but it loomed in the heavy, brittle clouds as an ever-present threat, and the air was so sharp it felt like pins against my face and in my throat. I relished it. Something truly alive, distractingly so. The more time I spent alone in the castle, the more I felt like one of the dusty, cobwebbed pieces of furniture abandoned decades past. I longed to be back in my forest, to feel the cold and wind and rain like a second skin.
