I let the rejection sting for only a moment, and then I turned my thoughts back to the garden. Of course. It would be a waste of time to tend a whole garden for one person, but the thought of it lying there neglected and unloved was too much. I had my geological study, but I needed something more to give myself a purpose. For now, I started with separating the weeds from the remnants of the old garden, making notes of rosemary and basil and mint and thyme. Even here, I was ill at ease; I found mugwort and foxglove and other more deadly things planted purposefully alongside the kitchen herbs. I made careful note of where the danger lay.
Once spring came I could set about restoring the garden properly.
If I lasted here that long.
b
I lived, and moved, and breathed alone. It was as the Witch had ordered. I kept out of her way, skirting the tower like a bruise, and asked no more questions of her. I had never been quite so completely alone and at the start I did not know what to make of it. I was afraid of it at the same time as feeling exhilarated. The freedom to wander, unimpeded, with no one ringing the bell for dinner or waiting for me at the breakfast table, had a great pleasure in it. I lived exactly according to my own peculiarities. I tied up my skirts and wore my hair plainly, I ate whatever I felt like and carried apples in my pockets so I could disregard the meals Wolf brought to my room.
In the silent evenings I would sit at my window and take out my mother’s drop spindle and the ragged scrap of fleece. No matter how I tried to hook the fleece or how I twisted the strand, the thread always broke, the fibre frayed. I could not do what my mother had. She was lost to me in a hundred little griefs I found anew each year.
Was this the freedom I had longed for? It was certainly the peace. No Klara chattering inanely every time I tried to read. No stepmother hovering, wondering what I was doing and if I should not be doing something more improving and less damaging to my eyesight. Not even Wolf gave me any indication of her opinion on me. I felt like in some way I had become the untamed beast in the castle that Blumwald was so frightened of, Wolf was bidden to come feed me three times a day like an offering laid at a pagan monument. I roamed wild and uncontrolled.
And miserable.
No, not at first. Misery was a creeping thing, like the dew settling on grass or the cold fingers of frost meeting me in my bed at night and crackling the insides of my windows. I had longed to be left alone, to escape the lie of my family, only to discover this was a different kind of poison. Slow acting, but lethal. At first it numbed me, pleasure leaching from my days like a summer leaf draining of sap to greet the autumn. Then loneliness came, a creeping oily stain that stopped me from enjoying it at all.
I lay sleepless in my bed canopy one night, when I had not seen the Witch, or Wolf, or even a servant for three whole days, my nails to the soft, fleshy insides of my arm. I let them dig in one by one. A sharp bright pain that felt like clarity in a fog, like an answer. It had been – God, how long had I been at the castle? A matter of weeks, and I had unravelled. The potential for newness, a different life, turned brittle and sloughed away like rust. Any drive I had felt, even to find out what happened to the previous companions, dissipated like ash. Perhaps they had suffered as I did, drowning slowly in their own misery, far from the sight of any living thing. A human being was not meant to be totally alone. I understood it now as I never had before; like a plant needed light, a human needed company.
A floorboard creaked outside my door.
I froze.
The boards creaked again.
The pain in my arm fled from my mind. There was something outside my door.
Someone.
I held my breath and waited for the sound to come, but it didn’t. There was a spatter of rain against the window, the sound of wind in the chimney. Nothing more.
Had I dreamed it?
The longer I listened and heard nothing, the more I began to doubt myself. It could have been anything. The castle was strange enough, I knew that. And who could be outside my door?
My arm throbbed, and I felt suddenly foolish and ashamed of resorting to my childish violence against myself.
I did not need to invent horrors in the night. My life was enough of a horror already.
b
The next morning I made sure the oil lamp by my bed was freshly filled, its wick trimmed and glass wiped free of soot.
Still, sleep abandoned me.
The nights were dark and slow like tar; I was a human offering thrown into a peat bog to drown by degrees. I stumbled through my days, clumsy and stifling my yawns, and found myself looking for faces everywhere, straining to hear voices. More often than not, there were none. The reed lights smoked where no servants trimmed the wicks, cobwebs fanned over doorframes unswept.
In the great, echoing halls and dead spaces time flowed so slowly that I began to lose track of myself. Some days I could read a whole book and come out to find the sun in the exact same place in the sky; other times I would wind around a loop or two of staircase to climb a floor and suddenly half the day was gone. The clocks, few that there were, told different times in their different places. I thought I had explored the castle thoroughly in my first week, but still found myself walking down corridors that led to somewhere I hadn’t expected. I mistrusted my own mind.
Perhaps a half week after I thought I heard something outside my room, I took what I thought was the route from my bedroom to a room of books, uncut direct from the binder’s, but found myself in a corridor I didn’t recognise. Through an arrow slit by the spiral stairs I could see I was on the far east side, in the lower half of the castle that overlooked the sheer drop to the river. My rooms were above, and the Witch’s quarters by the Tower were in the west wing near the mountainside.
I opened a door at random.
It was only a door, a human-sized, plain wooden door like all the others I’d encountered.
It opened into the Witch’s study.
I stepped back and shut it, blinking.
