‘You don’t understand what you’re asking.’
‘I do. Let me in, Holda.’ The name was strange and sweet on my tongue. Holda, the tricked girl in the tower, my Witch.
Her calm vanished in the space of one word to the next. She wrenched her arm away from me like I was poison, that fragile cord between us disappearing into smoke.
She looked at me with eyes like ice. ‘I’m your monster, don’t forget. I remember what you’ve called me. Witch. Monster.Cruel. Get out while you still can.’
‘That’s not –’ A darkness built around us and I felt the hum of tension in my head, an instinctive prickle of adrenaline.
‘I mean it,’ she hissed. ‘Getout.’ Her voice rose to a shriek. ‘Get it through your thick skull. I do not love you. I willneverlove you. Leave and never come back. I don’teverwant to see you again.’
To my shame, I turned away from the woman I loved, and fled.
XVI
Istormed down to the kitchens to corner a maid and demand a horse be readied so I could ride out and take the air. I could not stand to be confined to this miserable wreck of a home any longer. My father had told me I could not stay in Blumwald, the Witch had told me I wasn’t welcome with her. I was sick of not being wanted, of being a problem wherever I went.
In my room I dressed warmly, riding habit and stiff boots then marched through the castle, the hall with its rotting tapestries and burned out staircase, past the empty stables to the horse that had been brought up from the village; mounted, I carried on through the misty gatehouse and across the narrow bridge to the forest.
I hated the Witch. I hated her with a fury that frightened me. I wanted to melt the flesh off her bones, I wanted to train birds to peck her eyes out, I wanted to crush her slowly under a huge boulder.
In sharp odds with my sour mood, it was a fresh morning, the midday sun winking between the crowns of the treetops. My horse was a gentle dappled mare quite different from the steeds that had drawn the Witch’s carriage. The trees rolled out on either side of me, unending. Ash trees followed me as I rose, marking a swathe of limestone, a few lonely oaks arcing up, and everywhere beech, all garlanded with ivy vines thick as my forearm. The dirt crisp with dew and a tangle of blackthorn guarded the forest on either side of the path, its wicked spikes dancing dangerously at eye level.
I thought of when I had first come to the Schloss, that great thicket of blackthorn encroaching the walls, as effective a defence as any moat. Bitterthorn, my mother had called it, named after its pebbly sloe berries that we picked every autumn after the first frost. A fruit so sour and bitter I had cried the first time I ate them raw as a child. As bitter as the woman now trapped inside.
My mother had been the one to feed me the berries, plucked fresh from a tangled thatch of thorns in the woods behind the palace. Boiled up with sugar they made a tart jam, she had said, or soaked in gin a warming drink. Thinking of the sweet summer fruit of the palace gardens, I had pressed a handful between my lips, broke their skin with my teeth and then the sharp flavour had washed across my tongue, a shock so severe it was like a blow. I had spat out the pulpy mess onto the grass.
My mother had laughed, entertained by her own trick as I cried and scrubbed my mouth out with my sleeve. Not bittersweet, she had said. Only bitter.
Finally, I broke through the canopy. Ahead, the valley broadened and I could see a thin line of fields amongst the woods. Behind, the forest tangled thicker. And among it, the Witch’s castle on its barren outcrop.
The idea slunk into my mind. I could simply keep riding and never return. In Blumwald there was nothing left for me, but I could go to Munich, get a job as a governess or some other spinster role.
And be alone again.
Like a magnet that only repels, I was a solitary creature. The Witch had her curse and I had mine.
But now I knew the Witch’s loneliness was one of duty, of sacrifice.
What was mine?
I stopped the horse dead. Looked at the narrow path curving along the river, unmarked by any hoofprint or cartwheel. Looked back where the road inclined, climbing towards the Schloss and its spur of limestone.
The Witch had railed and cursed at me, but I knew her better now. I understood the terrible secret she kept in the Tower, the lonely curse that had trapped her for so long. The mysteries of the castle seemed benign now, pieces of a puzzle I could begin to fit together with time. The ledgers, why she paced the hallways at night, those answers were surely connected.
I thought for a moment of the body buried in my garden. Why did I see horror so easily? The castle was old, it must have gathered bones from long before the Witch’s time.
I had betrayed her trust by going into the Tower – but it was more than that that had upset her. She had been exposed, all her vulnerability and weakness. She had been laid open to me and found it too much to bear.
I turned my mare around and moved up to a brisk trot, hooves eating up the ground, moving faster and faster as I leaned into the decline.
Love was complex, conditional. Not all sweet, but not all bitter.
How many times was I going to be a coward? How would anything ever change for me if I gave up on myself whenever things became hard? If I turned this anger and hurt in on myself?
I had stayed with the Witch before out of fear of my old life, and that there would be no other place I was needed as the Witch needed her companion.
What I did now must be more than that.
