Loneliness had a bite to it.
The Witch and I had twined together like vines, needing only each other. Now I withered alone, and the grief was staggering. I am not sure what madness came over me in those days after she left, but it was something altogether dark and different.
For days at a time I spoke to no one. Wolf had made it clear she disliked me, and so we avoided each other, and the maids who dressed me were mute and scurried about their business as though I was as frightening as the Witch. I would sit at my window and twist my mother’s drop spindle between my fingers in echo of a motion I did not understand how to make. Sometimes I would pass the Witch’s study, and test the door to her Tower: still locked. For a moment, I could imagine she was still behind it, consumed by her work, and I would see her in a matter of hours. But evening would come and I remained alone.
I had been left, again. I had done what the Witch had asked and cut off my curiosity, closed my eyes to the secret of the previous companions, but even that bargain had not brought me what I craved. I was alone, abandoned, a fate that no matter what I did I seemed unable to escape.
I took to lying in what I thought of as the summer room, the empty chamber near the kitchens where I’d seen the silent maid. Painted-shut windows looked over a lush green forest, the scent of wildflowers and sap on the warm air, and light streamed crystalline through the glass. It was the scene of such terrible horror, but also a keen memory of my Witch. I could not bear fresh cut flowers. They were beautiful for a moment, then I was forced to watch them wither and die, abandoning leaves and petals, drooping as they lost their battle to live.
As April wore on the weather outside grew closer to the idyll in the summer room, and I took myself out more often to my kitchen garden. Seasonal streams had appeared around the Schloss what felt like overnight, a whole mountain-head of snowpack rushing to the valley floor, stripping earth and grass and saplings from its path. My herbs were coming in strong, wild little bushes of basil and coriander and thyme. Spring had even released some dormant plants I had not known lingered, wild garlic and sour sorrel filled the gaps between my planting, and bilberries sprinkled across the heath-like scrubland of the abandoned beds. I saw a glimpse of that happy future then, in the soft growing things and the breeze and the yellow stone walls.
I set to. Trowel and shears and apron equipped, I passed the hours turning over fresh earth, weeding and planting, digging irrigation channels and scratching names on wood markers, picking aphids off stems and mending nets to protect the small thicket of strawberries and green beans, tending courgettes into flower, the long hair of carrot tops and fat pea pods ripening in the sun. The herbs thriving and vegetables bedded in, I turned to the final, unused corner of the walled garden. It butted up against the castle, the round sheer stones of the Tower marking the boundary, and all of it overgrown with nettles, bracken, bramble vines and dandelions. I was ready to start the apothecary garden anew, carefully sectioned off from the edible plants, unlike before.
The brambles I cut back, relegating them to a hedge-like shape at the rear of the bed because I hoped to harvest blackberries come autumn. The nettles I yanked up wearing thick gloves and set aside for Wolf to make tea and soup and salve. The bracken was the saddest to dispose of – I knew no other use for it and it grew like a weed in any open clearing. Still, I piled up the fronds to use for mulch. The dandelions I set about last. These at least could be well used in the kitchen, but I also knew they grew vast taproots far below the surface soil, spreading their kingdom like veins and arteries.
I was sweating, kneeling on a bed of bracken, bare hands and trowel digging deep into the earth, following the line of stem and root, hair stuck to my temples and the back of my neck as I worked down, down, down.
My fingers brushed against something hard – the root? It was long and slender enough to be, but hard like iron, like a tree root. It was too far down to see clearly, and I worked the soil out of the way with the tip of the trowel until it came loose. Not a root then – the length of my arm but a smooth knobble at either end, no fibrous snap as it separated from the plant.
I drew it up, and sat back on my heels to look at what I had found.
It was a bone.
White and scored with dirt, a complete bone buried at the base of the castle.
It was so strange I only stared at it in blinking confusion. What was a bone like this doing in my garden? I turned it over, too numbed by shock to be horrified. Was it human? Some unfortunate animal?
I looked at its size, measured it against my arm as the slow, creeping knowledge settled in me. Thiswasa human bone. There was a person buried here.
I looked around, half expecting the Witch to be stalking across the grass, black dress flared out behind her and face twisted with rage. I had found something I knew I shouldn’t have. But there was no one there, only birdsong and the drift of shadows across the ground as the clouds scudded overhead.
As if in a trance, I leaned forward again and began to dig. At first I turned up little fragments of finger bones, then the curve of a rib, somewhere, the hummock of a hip. The trowel hit something large and solid. I worked around it, easing the earth apart, and then there it was, staring up through the loamy earth: a skull.
I fell back in shock, scrubbing the grave dirt from my hands, and tumbled straight into the thorny thatch of brambles. They tangled in my clothes, my hair, pulling up pinpricks of blood like constellations across my skin. The more I struggled the more entwined I became, heels digging into the soil, wrenching, scraping, until I struck the castle wall with the crack of an elbow and the back of my head.
But not the rattling, metal pain of stone. A dull thud of bone on wood. I twisted as best I could to see what lay behind me: a door. Ivy hung in curtains over it, the brambles twisting around the hinges, hiding it from sight. Still, there it was, swollen with snowmelt and rusted shut, but a door all the same.
A door at the bottom of the Witch’s Tower.
Silently, slowly, I unpicked myself from the thorns until I stood free. Only a pace or two back and the door disappeared from view, but I planted its location in my mind, fetched the shears and set to careful work uncovering it.
It was small, unassuming. Enough for one person to slip in or out unnoticed. I’d seen something like it before in books. It was a traitor’s door, meant for the lord of the castle to flee during an attack, but notoriously used by traitors escaping to join the enemy. I ran my hand over the soft, damp wood feeling it flake away, tracing the crude iron hinges, the fat, blunt keyhole. Built into the base of the castle, it must have been here since the first stone was laid. And this rust, the brambles, how many years had it lain unused? It might take a little work but with some oil and brute force, it could still be opened.
Above, the turret of the Witch’s Tower was a blot on the April sky. I knew I was tugging at things that should not come loose. The Witch was like a flower bud, with each petal I pulled off, another lay curled below; if I kept pulling and pulling, soon I would end up with nothing but a barren stem. The bloom would be dead.
Want and fear warred in me. I could have this happiness here, with the Witch, but it came at a cost. I must turn my eye from horror. See beauty in rot. Home in a charnel house.
But I had seen the door now and it was not knowledge I could forget.
I knew, for better or worse, I would go through it.
b
It took one night’s restless sleep for my will to break. I packed up all I needed and descended to the apothecary garden. I buried the bones at sunrise. They were grainy white and perfectly whole, as though someone had lain down at the foot of the tower and slept until overtaken by death. I placed each gently back into the hole with the dandelion roots, and covered it over with dirt. I did not want the Witch to know what I had discovered.
Oil wicked along the door’s rusted hinges like snowmelt coursing through runnels in the mountainside. Between the oil and a crowbar I found in one of the endless rooms of junk, I prised the door open enough for a body to squeeze through. Before I did, I tied the end of a ball of yarn to the hinge and tucked the other into my belt. I had spent enough time in the Schloss to understand it could not be trusted, and I had read enough books to know to leave myself a breadcrumb trail back out. Oil lamp lit, I slipped inside and began to climb.
Almost at once the spiral staircase was pitch black. So dark, my eyes strained wide, the world shrunk down to the haze of light from the lamp picking out the steps ahead, the curve of the wall under my hand. From outside I had seen that the Tower was windowless all the way to the top, not even an arrow slit puncturing the smooth stone façade from the base to where a small square window nestled under the eaves. The way ahead of me was long and dark.
