Fear gripped me at once.
I was alone in the dark and the footsteps had come back.
I lay as cold and still as snow, paralysed. I could not escape. No matter what I did, I could not escape this darkness that followed me.
The thought sparked a new one: if I could not escape, then perhaps I should stop running.
Perhaps I should face whatever I was running from.
Silently, I slipped from my bed and padded softly across the room. I thought to surprise the pacer, but it was as though the sound was woven to my own movements; as I advanced, the footsteps retreated. When I opened the door a fraction, all I caught was a whisper of black skirts disappearing around the corner.
The Witch.
I gripped the doorknob tighter
The Witch paced outside my door and I did not know why.
Hot with sudden anger, I followed her. How dare she torment me like this. We had made our bargain, she had no right to frighten me so.
As I turned the corner, a flash of deeper black amongst the shadows showed me her path. With my lamp gone out, I stumbled after her as best I could, but it wasn’t long before I was lost. One part of the castle looked much the same as another in the dark; I could not have come far from my room but I found myself entirely turned around.
The first door I tried opened onto a storeroom so unremarkable it did little to help me orientate myself. The next was a bedroom, just as indistinct. The third door was cold to the touch, and I stepped inside hesitantly.
I had not come to this room before. The wall facing me held a series of magnificent windows with pointed arches, but each had caved in, the stone crumbling and worn to expose the room to the night sky and prickle of pine trees on the hills beyond. A blanket of snow drifted through the open wall, banking in corners and glittering like felled stars.
The wrongness sat heavy in my stomach; the longer I stood in the room, the more I felt consumed by dread. This was not right. I did not belong here.
I left as silently as I had entered and searched my way back to my room huddled into the shadows, as though the castle was a creature that could sense my movement and I did not want to wake it. At last I came to the locked door beside mine, and once inside my room I barricaded myself in.
Perhaps the Witch was right: it was better not to pry.
I might not like what I would find.
b
The snow that had started when I was stranded in the forest had not stopped since. Every part of the castle was freezing, and my nights of poor sleep meant it was an effort to drag myself out of bed each morning. A thick snowpack swallowed the forest over a metre deep, the surface rippled and puckered by the wind. The castle had been closed down, windows shuttered and outbuildings locked up, with only the rooms we used regularly kept open and warmed. I found myself dashing between my bedroom and the study wrapped up in my winter cloak, breath clouding in the stone corridors glittering with hoarfrost. I thought then of my mother’s grave, of the stone angel looking over it and how it would look draped in a cloak of ice. My mother had loved the bite of winter as though it was the only thing that could bring her to life.
This was the longest I had ever spent without visiting her.
Sometimes I wondered who I might have been if my mother had lived. I grieved over a figment, a ghost of something that never was and never could be. An echo of another girl I would not know.
Some vast, yawning space opened up beneath me. I would never visit my mother again. We were truly parted forever.
I worked to keep those thoughts far from me.
Naturally, my mind turned to the Witch. I tried to keep my promise not to pry, though it was not easy, shut in for days against the snow that piled against the windows. I wanted to know why the Witch had been outside my room. I wanted to know what it was she wrote in her ledgers. And behind it all, was a low hum of ill-ease about my predecessors.
But our agreement was all I had to keep me from my loneliness, so for now, I would bite my tongue, and stay my hand.
Instead, wrapped in my cloak, I raided the three different libraries in the castle, gathering books on garden planting, guides to herbs and edible wildflowers, medicinal plants and useful shrubbery and brought them to the study with an eye to making a plan for the kitchen garden once we reached the other side of winter. There might be seedlings lying dormant that I could salvage, but I wanted to have a list prepared for Wolf to send for cuttings and seeds of anything else I wanted to cultivate. My rocks lay neglected, while my botanical readings grew in tottering stacks around the floor. The Witch, bit by bit, was moving out from behind her desk or the shadowy armchair, and closer to me. The knowledge warmed me: something, at least, was growing in this frightening place.
There was a room I knew that was well stocked with gardening tools, though they were all in a state of disrepair. It lay near the kitchens and I could reliably find my way to it most days. One morning around the middle of December I had gone hunting for a better trowel as the handle of the one I had taken first was rotten through with woodworm. At the bottom of a cupboard stuffed with twine and pegs and cracked pots, I thought I saw the flash of metal. When I crouched down I saw that I was right – but it was a tin of keys, not the blade of a tool.
I thought of the key to the Tower that hung around the Witch’s neck. Temptation called me. Would one of these fit that lock?
No. I must not. The risk was not worth it. The Witch had begun to trust me, I could not squander it.
Then another idea struck me.
