We had both been alone for such a long time, the Witch for far longer than I. It could not be an easy transition to make, an unfamiliar new reality to acquaint herself with. I confess I did not feel quite at home in this yet either.
I carried a dark, lurking knowledge: what I would do, so as never to be alone again.
XVII
The Witch came to me at breakfast the next morning, wearing a fashionable tea gown; sleeves and collar of delicate lace, a long line of buttons from throat to hem, the generous bustle where the fabric split in a precise pleat, all had been made up in shining black.
‘Come.’
It wasn’t a request.
At the tower, she pulled the key on its length of cord from beneath her bodice. ‘I suppose there’s not that much point locking it any more,’ she said, hand resting on the knob. Then the two of us began the ascent.
It was a much faster climb this time, only a few loops around until we opened onto the circular room at the top. The wheel stood alone, and around it wound the softly glowing golden thread. Only now there was even less fleece left on the distaff than before.
‘You wanted to look so badly. Well, go on then.’
At her invitation, I walked around the wheel, being careful not to touch anything. ‘It spins time.’
‘Yes.’
I hesitated. She had made the overture so she must be expecting questions, but it felt as though I was walking across the glacial mountaintops, groaning ice and hidden crevasses. ‘What happens to the thread once it has been spun?’
The Witch hovered a hand above the golden bobbin. There was no end to the thread wound around, only a point where it faded, its substance dissolving into the shimmer in the air. ‘It is used up. I do not fully comprehend how. I do not believe that is for us to know.’
‘Did your stepmother know?’
‘I have no idea. You saw for yourself all she told me. I made a study of the books she left behind, obtained any tract on magic I could trace, but there is nothing written about the wheel. I taught myself a little of her magic, but I am not the Witch she was.’
‘She cursed you to stay here and spin.’
The Witch’s face was a study in blankness. ‘She was done with it, so someone had to.’
‘You didn’t try to get anyone else?’
Her eyes narrowed. ‘You’re asking if I would do to someone else what she did to me? If it were an easy curse to break, don’t you think I would have broken it?’
My eyes went back to the golden stuff wound around the spindle. I thought of what Berchta had done, the magic she had worked with it to show the Witch her past and future loss. I thought of the misery I had seen in my time, and felt a shudder of gratitude that it was not my life on show.
‘Are there other spinners? How far does your responsibility lie?’
It had sounded from Berchta as though the fate of the whole world rested on the wheel – but could that really be true?
‘I don’t know,’ she said simply. ‘I have never travelled too long from this castle. There is only so much thread the spindle can hold at once. I must return to tend it before the thread runs out.’ The Witch looked sick. She indicated a notebook and pencil, and a series of measuring instruments that lay in a basket by the wheel. ‘I try to understand it as best I can, measure the rate the thread is used up, the rate at which the fleece is spun, but after four hundred years I still know so little...’
‘Your ledgers,’ I said.
The Witch nodded.
She went to the window, looking out over the mountainside tumbling into a verdant spring green. ‘No one taught me how to do this. They left me, and I had to work it out for myself. My stepmother was a true Witch, I am only a pale imitation. I know how to spin the thread of time, and I know how to untangle it when it becomes snagged. That is all.’
‘Is that not enough?’
She didn’t answer me, and I wondered what tender wound I had pressed against.
I tried again. ‘What happens if you do not spin? Will time stop?’
‘Yes. We think of time as something immutable, inevitable...’
