As I blinked myself awake, she quietly marked her place and set the book down.
‘Wolf said you would be back with us today.’
I could just about manage to turn my head to her, blinking, my body little more than a lump of lead from my neck down. The dreamy, delirious state had passed and now I felt as though I had been run over by a cart.
I wondered at her sitting vigil. Perhaps she needed the company as much as I did.
‘Here. Drink this.’ The Witch passed out of view for a moment, then came back with a tin mug of water. Perching on the edge of my bed, she held the cup to my lips, then settled me back down.
I felt every place where her skin touched mine like an iron brand.
An effect of my illness, I was sure.
We hung there for a long moment: me collapsed on the pillows, hair fanned out around my face, her leaning over me, expression intent and watchful. I remembered curling against her in the forest, the rapid rise and fall of her breath and her strong arm clamped around my waist.
‘I notice you too.’ My voice was hoarse and cracked.
She tensed, drew back from my bed and turned her head so the dark sheet of her hair fell over her face.
But I had spoken now, and it could not be taken back. ‘Tell me the truth. Why am I here?’
Her hands twitched on the arms of the chair, and I thought she might tell me. But I should have read her better: her body was a taut line, all rigid muscle and fleeing energy. I had been wrong before. She wasn’t annoyed by me.
Without a muttered excuse, she picked up her book and fled.
She wasscared.
b
It took me several days to recover from the chill I had caught in the forest, and another few after that for my ankle to comfortably bear my weight. It was the first time I’d slept soundly since arriving; whatever Wolf was giving me for the pain knocked me out and I almost began to forget about the horrors that haunted me.
All things considered, I had been extremely lucky – no, not lucky –fortunate.Fortunate that the Witch knew how to survive a night in the snow, fortunate she had noticed me missing, fortunate she had decided it worth her time to come after me. I had plenty of time laid up in bed to think about these things. The Witch said one thing and did another; she claimed to loathe my presence, but she risked her own safety to protect me. I thought perhaps for once I might have understood something about her: she was proud, too proud to admit she needed someone. A companion.
But she did need someone. She needed me.
I thought about my predecessors again. Had she told them she was afraid to be alone, or had she treated them as she had treated me? Had she started out open and grown closed? What had hurt her so badly she saw no other way than to tell me I was nothing to her?
When I was able to leave my rooms again it was like seeing the castle through new eyes. The dank, mouldering hallways, crumbling masonry and rotted panelling no longer felt frightening; now it only felt unbearably sad.
To keep my weight off my battered ankle, I used a carved walking stick that I had found in a coat stand amongst moth eaten astrakhans, silk umbrellas and one impossibly heavy Russian winter coat trimmed in fur. The Witch herself seemed to have vanished into her Tower for good. I no longer caught her watching me from windows or lurking in shadows. I waited outside her door for hours and it never opened. She was simplygone. I looped the castle twice a day hoping for some hint of her, but it was like I was a ghost haunting an empty house.
So I retreated to the window seat I had created in my room, wrapped in my winter cloak looking out of the frosted windowpanes over the snow-covered treetops. I didn’t dare go walking on my own again in this weather; the snowy forest floor offered a hundred unseen obstacles and it would only take one misstep to leave me injured and stranded again.
I wasn’t sure the Witch would come for me a second time.
My spirits sunk lower and lower. I was so lonely I felt physically cold. Every room was too chill, too big, too quiet; there wasn’t enough flame burning in me alone to warm them. Sometimes I would break something just to feel the violence of it, snip off locks of hair or smack a bruise into my leg. I clung to that night in the forest, thinking it meant something, that something in my relationship with the Witch would change, but I was a hopeful fool.
The first night I went without Wolf’s medications, I woke softly with a clock somewhere chiming three o’clock. The night was inky black with cloud cover. I lay still, waiting to understand what had roused me.
Then I heard it: the creak of the floorboards outside my room.
This time it seemed more deliberate, as though someone was shifting their weight while completing a task. Then – clear footsteps pacing outside.
Fear gripped me. The heart-pounding fear of something unknown prowling closer at my most vulnerable moment. For a breath I was struck by the thought that I would not be allowed rest; that I was being punished for wanting more than my lot.
I held my breath.
Silence.
