‘And the knowledge of what inevitably must come. It is a slow acting poison, time. Your mother has died, your father will follow. You will be alone. This is the nature of time. It strips everything from us, and we are mercy to its flow.’
Holda sank to the floor, skirts pooling around her, tears flowing steadily down her face. I wanted to go to her, hold her. Her hands shook, a look of naked panic on her upturned moon of a face. ‘Stop – please – I don’t want to see this.’
A darkness gathered around Berchta that overshadowed the golden figures of the vision. Beyond the window, the sun died, swallowing the tower in an oppressive darkness.
‘Oh, but there are worse things than time flowing forward. Worse things than the future coming to meet us.’ She braced her hand around the wheel and stopped it.
A pressure closed around my head instantly, so splitting I thought I might vomit. The darkness encroached from all sides, and I was consumed by despair. Berchta moulded the air, drawing the golden sand into new shapes. The little girl by her mother’s deathbed once again but now her mother squirmed and writhed, trapped forever in the agony of death.
‘If time is not spun in steady measure all manner of torment will wreck the world. We could be prisoners of one moment forever, crushed under time’s weight. Or we can be unmade entirely.’
Berchta fed the wheel backwards. The thread snagged, tangled, unspooled in knots from the spindle. The graveyard split open and corpses were lifted out, the dead reborn. Crops curled into themselves and disappeared into the ground, rain sucked up from the earth fleeing to the sky. Rivers ran backwards, walls unbuilt themselves.
The world came undone.
She released the wheel from its tortured backwards turn, and the vision disappeared.
Berchta put Holda’s hand on the wheel and set it turning forward again. ‘Do you see, Holda? Time is a precious and tyrannical ruler. It makes hags of old maids, it will steal your youth and your beauty. It will steal your loved ones, carving away at you until you are alone and desperate enough to doanythingto change your fate. But it is our master, and we must serve it. The wheel must turn. The thread of time must be spun out in careful measures or the world will be nothing but ash and dust. What you hold in your hands is the fate of the whole world. Do youunderstand?’
Holda shook her head. ‘No – please, make this stop.’
‘It cannot stop!’ ordered Berchta. ‘It must never stop! Time must be spun: that is the duty of the wheel. It is a responsibility a woman must bear. And I will bear it no longer.’ Weariness consumed her, and I saw a great age settle across her shoulders. Then she wound the golden haze around her fingers and touched them to the kneeling Witch’s forehead. ‘I pass this curse to you, Holda von Hohenfel: you will spin alone, until the end of time.’
Tears wet Holda’s cheeks. ‘What did you do?’ she whispered.
‘You will see.’ Berchta went to the door. ‘Be a good girl. Do your duty. We are in your hands now.’
And with that, she left. The click of the lock was loud in the silence.
Holda stumbled to the door and tried it though she and I both knew it was futile. The wheel was losing momentum. The spindle was bare, the thread hung snagged and tangled. Holda was slowed too as time thickened like honey. It was as Berchta said: the wheel spun time and if the thread was not kept even and smooth, time itself bucked. She fought for too long, nails scrabbling at wood.
Then Holda turned to the wheel, staring it down like a soldier in the vanguard; terrified, but with growing resignation. She was face to face with a monstrous task, and there was no one else to take her place in the line.
My heart broke a final time, seeing my Witch make her choice.
She moved like a swimmer battling a fierce current, carving her way back to gather the thread from the floor, set her hand to the wheel and encourage it forward. It juddered, stiff and uncompliant under her inexperienced hand, but it began to turn and after a few minutes’ work, the tangled, dropped thread was re-wound on the spindle and the crushing pressure lifted from my temples. The sun dawned again, a balmy, cool light spilling across the floor. Somewhere beyond was the sound of a carriage and horses clattering down the switchback road to the village. Still, Holda stood at her work, feeding the fibre into the twist of the thread, measuring out the turn of the wheel with her back as stiff as a tree, rooted and unbent. Her face was wet with tears, but I saw dawning in her what I knew of her now: she would not break. She would not surrender. If this was the challenge before her, she would rise to it, and master it.
I only wonder that in four hundred years she never found a way out.
I could bear to watch this no longer. With my formless body, I reached for the wheel again. For a moment, something like a hand took shape, ethereal enough Holda did not notice, and I thrust my finger into the thread. Into the flow of time.
The world blinked out again and I was dragged into the current. I was drowning, struggling in a riptide that pulled me under.
I fought for the surface, broke into the light for a fraction of a minute – there, Holda again, eyes smudged dark from lack of sleep, and a servant ushering her away from a spindle wound round thick with golden thread. For now, time was well spun. She had done her job.
Something caught my ankle and I plunged under again. I fought the inexorable force of time. Each time I reached the surface, I saw a glimpse of Holda in shorter and shorter snatches, saw her spinning, her life moving at glacial speeds of hours and hours alone in silence, spinning the golden fibre. Saw her shatter the coat of arms above the fireplace in my room, slash the painting of her stepmother. Saw her face harden, the angles grow sharper.
The girl died and the woman I knew survived, beautiful and cold, cursed to spin and shackled to her Tower.
Time had me in its maw and all I could do was pray it would release me in the place I belonged.
Something brushed my wrist.
I turned, slow and dazed, and saw my Witch –myWitch.
I had been found.
Her hand closed around my arm so tight I felt her nails puncture skin, her face a terrifying, cold blank mask only inches from mine.
