Save for me.
‘Mother. Stop this.’ Frieda brought the wheel to a halt and turned to me with eyes like fire. ‘What good does it do you to come here? What do you want from us?’
I blanched. ‘I only wanted to understand why the Witch takes us. I don’t know what it is for and no one will talk to me.’
‘What does it matter? You escaped. Only a fool would go back.’
I bit my tongue. I did not think they would welcome knowing that the Witch had let me go of her own accord. I rose and thrust my hands into my muffler to stop them from trembling. ‘I apologise for intruding.’
Frau Hässler’s bent fingers closed around my wrist. ‘How did you escape? Why are you the only one? What did you do?’
I backed against the door. ‘I don’t know.’
‘Please. There must be something. What about the Witch? Tell me, what did she do to my son?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said again.
I was a worthless substitute for what she had lost. It would have been better if I had never brought the letter, I saw that now. It would have been better if I had never come back to Blumwald at all.
‘Please – don’t go –’ Frau Hässler scrabbled at my wrist but I slipped from her grasp.
I was not proud of it, but I fled.
b
Fear and suspicion chased me back to the palace. People crossed the road to avoid me, bolted their doors shut and I even saw lines of salt crusting windows. I was marked by the Witch and now I carried her curse with me. This deep into winter, day was only a suggestion, a few hours of lighter sky before night returned. The snow had stopped but heavy, low clouds covered the moon, promising more. The mountains rose vast and blank. I moved through the streets unthinking, no longer afraid of being a woman out alone after dark. Now I was the frightening thing that moved in the shadows.
I don’t know what I had expected from that meeting, but the pain of Frau Hässler’s loss was too close to my own buried grief for my mother. There was nothing meaningful I could learn about the Witch from people who saw her only through the lens of their own heartache.
Still, I could not shake the image of the unfinished letter. I could think of countless explanations but all felt flimsy in the face of what I knew: no companion had ever returned from the Witch’s castle, except me. Why? What had happened to them? And what made me different?
The Witch had not made me promise to return, and in truth I feared doing so. Some dark secret lurked within the walls of the castle, within the heart of my Witch, something more than anyone in Blumwald could begin to imagine. Frieda was right. I would be a fool to go back.
And yet.
Could I see a life for myself here?
I had known the answer to that when the Witch had come before.
For better or worse, I had caught the Witch’s eye, and after a lifetime of being unwanted, that was too precious a thing to lose. Whatever had happened to the previous companions, perhaps it could be different for me. It already was: I was here, free, with the Witch’s blessing. She needed me to return, and however pathetic it might be, I so desperatelywantedto be needed. Perhaps I could be the one to solve the mystery of the Witch if I lived long enough in it. If that was the cost of having a place to belong, maybe I was willing to pay it.
There was only one thing still holding me here.
b
I found my father attended only by a maid sitting by the door darning a sock. The deathly pall that had shrouded the room the night before had gone and the curtains had been drawn back to showcase the faded sunset. Before my stepmother could evict me again, I excused the maid and closed the curtains against the night.
The Witch demanding a companion from my Father played over and over in my head. He knew something. Wolf knew something. They all knew something about the Witch and no one would tell me the truth.
‘Papa?’ I drew a chair to his bedside as his eyelids fluttered open.
‘Mina?’ His mouth made the shape of my name.
‘I am here.’ I clasped his hand between mine; his skin was paper-thin and felt as though it could tear if I wasn’t gentle. Though the colour had returned to his face, his ordeal showed in the hollows of his cheeks and deep shadows around his eyes. In the turn of a season he had become an old man.
‘Mina?’ A light of recognition crossed his face and he struggled up. ‘You can’t be here, the Witch—’
I pressed him back into his pillows. ‘All is well. She permitted me to travel.’
