Up on the cleared stubble of the grazing pastures, I sat on a grist outcrop to eat my lunch. Summer: dead and gone. I marked it in the bloom of red smudging the base of the oak leaves, the freckle of gold sweeping the birch.Quercus robur, the monstrous oak trees that planted themselves firm with broad branches sweeping the forest canopy,betula pendula,the silver birches clustering close with their trunks like peeling skin. They marked time better than any clock or candle or bell in the rings of their trunks and the spread of their branches. All around the forest fanned out like a pack of cards, dense and overlapping, arguing for space. It curved around Blumwald like a cupped hand, across valley to climb hillsides and along riverbanks.
From my vantage point above the city, I saw my father’s carriage hurtling along the valley road. At this distance it seemed to move as slowly as an ant, but from the cloud of dust around the wheels and the way the rest of the traffic parted like a ripped seam, I gathered they must have been going at some lick. I took another bite of my apple and chewed. He wasn’t due back from Berlin for another week; this was either terrible or excellent news. Schwartzstein was a scrap of land as big as the space between my thumb and forefinger when I held my hand out before me, and my father was its ruler. We had slunk around the edges of history while all around countries merged and split and feuded and warred. A nation of sheep and wool and spinning. No one noticed us, except the Witch.
My father had different plans now: we were to be noticed by someone else. Chancellor Bismark was unifying Germany and we were to become part of the new Empire. I wanted to know what the news was, but I also knew the best way to be around my father was not to be there at all. This was one of the first laws I learned: if he was in a rare good mood, I was welcome to provide entertainment; if his attention was turned to his duties, I was to pretend I didn’t exist at all.
Finding a snag of fleece in my pocket, I plucked two thistles to card it in the old way, watching the carriage draw closer. In a sheep-riddled place like Blumwald, fleece was caught on every fence post, oily and ripe with ovine scent. This was a hunk the size of my palm; cream turned grey with dirt and caught up with burrs and spindly leaf stems and grasses. I brushed it rhythmically like passing over the beads of a rosary, my fingertips waxy with lanolin, to work out the knots and detritus until I had a piece of fibre ready to be washed. A scrap like this would be good for nothing but a drop spindle, spun by hand to add twists to the fibre until it became strong enough for weaving and knitting. I had no spindle of my own to do it, only my mother’s, which she had kept more as a toy than a means of creation. I thought of the doe again, her milky teeth bared in a death grin. In a few more years, I would have had a dead mother longer than a living one.
I waited until my father’s carriage reached the Summer Palace, then made my way back. I still had one living parent, and the more he withdrew from me, the more I wanted to find a place by his side.
At the tide line where the wheat fields met the bracken and saplings, a spate of shrines were scattered like a warning. A hollow scooped out at the base of an oak, in it a dish of salt and scraps of iron, a twist of yarn and a saint’s medallion nestled among it – Saint Anthony of Padua this time, for protection against evil – a bough of ash to one side and a branch of blackthorn on the other with a cluster of dusty purple sloes still attached. A smear of something red across it all. I thought of the old words: by oak, by ash, by bitterthorn. Half prayer, half invocation. An oath for protection, for binding. All of it a plea against the dark.
In the distance, above the golden canopy of the dying forest, about as far as I could see on a clear, bright day, was the Witch’s Castle.
The Witch was our curse, the hazy shadow to the bright light of Blumwald. Once a generation, every fifty years or there around, she would descend from her castle to take a companion. One young man plucked out and never seen again. We lived according to the long seasons of her reign: the years directly after her visit like spring, joyous relief and hope. Then, summer as the memory of fear faded. Autumn would come, though, and we could no longer pretend we were safe. Finally, as half a century approached, winter set in, cold and bitter and full of dread.
Dukes rose and fell, wars shifted our borders over centuries, and still we lived tied to the rhythm of her want. It had been a little over fifty years since the Witch had last been seen. We never knew the exact moment she would strike, only that she would, and we lived around the fear of her like a volcano smoking and spitting ash, one eye raised to its fiery summit. An immutable fact that framed the world in salt sprinkled along doorways and windowsills, candles ever-burning on chapel altars, shutters locked tight at the first brush of dusk.
My mother in her worse moods called the Witch a curse on men for their coldness. To be taken from their masterful positions and turned over to the use of a woman. I thought the Witch took them because she could. Because it was a transgression. Who would lose sleep over another woman sacrificed?
I thought she took men because she wanted us to know her power.
A candle had been left burning in one shrine. In a flash of anger, I snuffed it out. Salt and iron couldn’t protect you from loss. The hurtful truth of death was that it was as mundane as a meal uneaten, a cup knocked over. Exquisite pain that meant nothing. All this was nothing but a hopeful lie.
A twig cracked behind me.
I could see no one, but I felt a prickle along the back of my neck as though I was being watched. As though, in extinguishing the flame, I had opened a door, and something was waiting to come through.
I doused the smouldering candlewick with water from my canteen and hurried on, leaving the shrine in disarray behind me.
b
Shaking off the darkness of the forest, I made for the palace and my father’s coach. Past the cathedral, the dry market day in the square, dominated by stalls of cloth and yarn, haberdashery, ironmongery, candles and knives and buckets repaired. Past bakeries already emptied to crumbs and the coffee house, tables outside with waiters fetching small cups of steaming black coffee and soft rolls and pats of creamy butter. I would take breakfast there on a warm morning, with my sketchbook propped before me to outline the rooftops and cobbles, the carriages and water troughs and sprays of clematis shivering up the wooden-framed buildings. I plucked a blossom as I passed, tucking it in my belt.
From the window of my bedroom I could see Blumwald in almost its entirety: at one end was the cathedral with its glistening roof of coloured tiles like the side of a grass snake, at the other, our palace, and between them ran a street like a spine. From it spoked side streets, alleys, squares and wells and market places, tided up by the city walls that were only as tall as the rooftops these days and unmanned for many a generation. Downriver were the tanneries and slaughterhouses turning the water a churning brown with run-off, and the new wool mill with its thundering mechanical loom. My father thought only of railways and factories, but wool and spinning had been the lifeblood of our duchy for centuries before us. In the back alleys and attic rooms of houses, a legion of women still worked at their wheels to bring in a little extra money.
And above us always, the mountain, and the Witch’s castle.
My father’s horses were being stabled when I arrived, and an unfamiliar man in expensive but travel-stained clothes was directing the unpacking of a series of briefcases and what looked like equipment I’d seen in my geological journals.
My stepmother and stepsisters were in the drawing room, conversation racing along some thread I couldn’t catch.
I tried to slip past but was stopped by my stepmother’s voice. ‘Mina? Is that you?’
I stepped into the doorway. ‘Yes.’
A series of menu cards and sheets of notepaper were scattered on the tables between her and her daughters.
‘Where were you this morning?’
‘I went for a walk.’
She looked over my mud-stained appearance with thinned lips. ‘Are you planning to join us once you have made yourself presentable?’
I made a non-committal noise and went to find my father instead.
Soon, I would be the only daughter left at home.
Klara was engaged, Else was already gone to her new husband in Munich, while Johanna had only returned to have her first child. I saw her one day changing muslin squares that she had tucked down the front of her dress. They were stained creamy yellow and smelled strongly of milk. When she spotted me she had shrieked and shooed me from the room with accusations of spying.
