The Witch was frowning. ‘How long?’
The Wolf considered the girl. ‘Can’t say for sure. Didn’t see her go home last night or arrive this morning, then found her here. It’s getting worse.’
‘I know that,’ snapped the Witch.
The girl was a narrow thing with flaxen hair and no chin to speak of; she wore the plain dress, apron and wooden clogs of any scullery girl, and her sleeves had been pushed up to the elbow to keep them out of the soapy water. Only, it was no longer soapy but brackish and greasy like sink water left to sit too long, and her arms were red; fingers, when they emerged with each dish, wrinkled like raisins.
Something grew tense in my stomach. I remembered the disturbing image of the maid stood silently in the corner of the kitchen room at night.
‘What’s her name?’
‘Hanna.’
The Witch padded softly over the well-worn flags of the scullery to the girl. ‘Hanna. Tell me: what you are doing?’
The girl turned, brows furrowed, then her face brightened at once. ‘Oh! Yes, Frau Wolf, I have the loaves rising here.’ She turned and walked past the Witch, Wolf and I to the other side where she indicated an empty alcove next to the fire used to boil water for the cleaning. She stood glassy-eyed for a moment, not registering the missing loaves, then turned again, going back to the sink. ‘I’ll clear these last dishes and go home, if it pleases you.’ She put the clean dishes into the water and began to scrub again. I could see she had scrubbed them so many times the pattern had started to wear away.
‘What’s wrong with her?’ I wanted to ask if it was the same as what had happened to the maid that night, and why the Witch had been down there with her, but I did not want to interrupt further.
The Witch began to speak softly to Hanna, touching her temples, moving her hand back and forth as though pulling thread from fibre at the spinning wheel, working in the twist. Gradually, the fog seemed to lift from her face, the slackness of her expression shifting to a dazed blinking, like someone roused from a daydream. Hanna came back into the world, and drew her hands from the water, looking at them in confusion.
‘I was washing the dishes.’
‘And what a good job you did,’ said Wolf, sweeping past and pulling Hanna’s shawl and hat from the peg. ‘We expect a quiet day today, so why don’t you take the rest of it off?’
She helped a befuddled Hanna out the door and the Witch and I were alone.
‘What was that?’
She looked at her own hands that had drawn whatever thread of time back into place, and the dishes on the draining board, pattern scrubbed clean. ‘People get tangled sometimes, if they spend too long in the castle.’
Like the anomalies, too much raw time spilling out from the wheel.
‘Does it happen to all the servants?’
‘No. But many. I work through the night to fix any snags I can find before anyone is affected. But I cannot find them all.’
‘Like that night in the kitchens? The previous maid?’
She nodded.
Horror flooded through me. I had thought myself jumping at shadows but a nightmare had truly been unravelling around me. That poor girl.
Another unpleasant thought struck me. ‘Have I ever been... tangled?’
‘No. When I bound you that first night the magic I worked conferred a little protection upon you, just as I have been able to protect Wolf. You sail through it like the storm can’t touch you.’
She didn’t say it as though it were a good thing.
The past months raced through my mind: the Witch pacing outside my door, the fear I had felt, never knowing she was not the source of it but my saviour. I thought of the day she found me in the bath – had she come to my room to work her magic and keep me safe?
She carried such a burden and I wished desperately there was some way I could share the weight.
I reached for her but she stepped away. ‘Go back to your plants, Mina.’
I was dismissed. She went to her tower and I went back to my garden and the abandoned box of flints. I didn’t understand what had happened. She had told me how the wheel worked, but I could see there was more she held back. Something that made her unhappy.
I sat down heavily, deflated by her thorns that had punctured me. I had hoped we could hide in our fledgling happiness a little longer, but I knew it would fail at some point. I thought of the bones buried beneath me, and all the questions I was still too frightened to ask. If the companions truly were just that, why had she kept it from me for so long?
