The Witch pulled a ledger open and dipped her quill into the ink. ‘She’s not a prisoner. If she wants to leave, she can leave.’
I fell quiet. The Witch didn’t look up from her figures, so I went to my chair by the fire, looked unseeingly at a paper on mineral deposits in the Rhine valley. My mind was filled with the image of the trunks all in a line. Wolf was no prisoner, she could leave.
But I could not.
I was the prisoner here.
And so was the Witch.
b
That evening the Witch insisted she needed time alone, so instead I went back via the door to last Tuesday, looking for a book that I had misplaced. It was quiet in the study, no fire in the grate and the day outside pallid and lifeless. The book was nowhere around my desk, so I looked over at the Witch’s – I had spent enough time with her now that I was familiar with its chaos. It felt like a lifetime ago that I had been hidden behind the settle, spying on her reading a letter rimmed with black. I wondered again who it had been from.
I moved the papers aside with the tip of my finger in idle curiosity. Half the surface was taken up by her ledgers, the pages covered in spidery figures tracking her work on the wheel. There were a few pieces of correspondence with the names of politicians in Bavaria and Austria, even as far as Prussia and Luxembourg, all discussing her work in the most abstract terms. The newspaper headlines were full of Bismark and unification and the expansion of the railway, something that felt a world away now. Perhaps it would come to affect us someday. Time spun on and we could not hold it back.
There, tucked towards the bottom, was the letter with black edges.
I shouldn’t. I had promised.
Though I knew about the wheel now. Surely that promise had outlived its necessity.
I thought of that day I had seen her receive the letter and how distraught she had been. My Witch, bent and broken with grief. And I thought of Wolf’s accusations that the Witch was making herself miserable on my account. If I knew what had hurt her, perhaps I could know how to comfort her better.
I eased the paper out. At its head was a coat of arms that seemed familiar; it took me a moment to recognise it as similar to the crest that had been hacked from the wall above my fireplace.
Frowning, I read on.
It was a short message, in the firm hand of a clerk.
...I write to inform you of the death of Konrad von Hohenfel, last of the Hohenfel line. With no living relatives, the estate will pass to the branch line...
Hohenfel – I had heard Berchta say the Witch’s full name: Holda von Hohenfel.
I sat down heavily. No wonder the Witch had cried.
There was another letter with it, again lined in black, writing of irregularities in the accounts, a daughter from centuries ago whose line could not be traced. The missing daughter was the Witch. It summoned her to Vienna. This was what had taken her away from me.
Perhaps this was it. This was the reason the Witch had kept me at a distance, refused to talk to me of the past companions. They had died on her, one by one, and now her family was gone entirely. Every last person she had ever been connected to.
And yet, I thought of the bones under the earth in my garden.
The bones at the base of the Witch’s tower.
Edgar’s unsent letter.
The blood on the clothes.
Wolf’s demand for the Witch todo it now.
There was some piece I was missing. Like a trick eye puzzle, the answer was hiding in plain sight, if only could let myself see.
b
At breakfast the next day, Wolf served nothing. Instead she arrived in a travelling cloak, carrying a small bag.
‘Have you changed your mind?’ she asked.
The Witch folded her arms. ‘No. Have you?’
