Wolf pulled at Frieda again and they fell against the bannister. To my horror, the spindles gave way. The Witch lunged for Wolf and I for Frieda and together we righted them before they could topple several metres to the floor below.
The shock seemed to quell Frieda’s rage for a moment, and the Witch took her opportunity to scramble through the door and away. Now we were three.
‘Let me arrange for a carriage to take you back,’ said Wolf.
Frieda shook her off. ‘No. I wantnothingfrom you monsters.’
Frieda stormed down the shaking stairs and out of the great hall.
I hung back, torn between two paths ahead.
I wanted to follow Frieda. Her rage had frightened me, but I could not deny our questions were the same. The Witch kept a dark secret and I both feared and longed to know it.
Then I thought about the horror on my Witch’s face, the fear and sadness and despair like a child abandoned.
I could not let her fear be proved true.
I followed her.
All illusions I had of comforting her vanished as soon as I entered her study. A vase of dried flowers lay smashed across the floor and she had taken a hunting knife to the cushions of the chaise longue, ripping hunks of feathers and fabric in her rage and anguish. She turned to me, tear-streaked face and knife still in hand.
‘Did you do this? Did you bring her here?’
I flushed with guilt. ‘Of course not.’
‘I should never have let you go back to that damn town.’ She slammed the knife into her desk so it stood vibrating on its point. ‘All you do is bring trouble.’
I felt the words like a blow and my own anger roused. ‘This is not my fault. Is it really so unreasonable for someone to want to know what happened to their loved one?’
Was it so unreasonable for me to want to know my own fate?
‘Oh, I’msorry,’ she sneered, yanking handfuls of books from the shelves in a whirl of paper and ink. ‘Am I beingunreasonable?’
It was strange to feel concern for someone one minute and anger the next. She was infuriating.
‘Do you take pleasure in your cruelty?’ I snapped. ‘What does it cost you to tell her what happened to her brother? She and her mother live trapped in a grief they cannot escape, all for the want of whatyoucan give them.’
The Witch fell silent. A dark light flared in her eyes, and then she stared down at the destruction strewn across the room, a curtain of black hair concealing her face. ‘Cruelty is my nature. It is who I am. You came to live with a monster all others feared. Why did you expect me to be any different?’
‘I know you are no monster.’
‘Do you? Do you know that?’
‘I believe it.’
She gave a laugh that broke into a sob and turned to the window to hide herself from me. Snowfall had thinned and now a little more sun reached us inside the castle; a cold, milky light that iced the hallways and cast the world into a perpetual blue-grey dawn. ‘You have no idea what my life here has cost me,’ she said. ‘Do not ask I pay more.’
My patience broke. ‘Pay nothing and nothing is what you will receive in return. You dragged me here and yet you will not let me near you. You will not tell me why I am here. What was the point? Am I a toy to you?’
She spoke in deadened tones. ‘You are nothing to me.’
It should not have wounded me as badly as it did. ‘You’re lying,’ I said, but I wondered whether I truly believed the words.
The Witch didn’t reply. She remained with her back to me, face upturned to the pallid winter light. We were two amateurs, leading each other foolishly through the rocky path to – to what? Did I mean friendship? Family?
Love?
She did not know the way and nor did I.
