I had an appointment to keep.
My maid stopped me with a touch at the crook of my elbow. ‘Take care, Your Highness.’
‘What for?’
A knowing look crossed her face and I thought of the huddles of women I passed in the streets exchanging stories of eggs with red yolks, blood being drawn from wells, clocks that stuck at midnight.
‘She is overdue, Your Highness. When she comes, best none of us draw attention to ourselves.’
I shook my arm free in frustration. The Witch had poisoned every mind but my father’s.
The night had been cloudless, dropping the temperature so much my breath clouded before me like mist and the sun crested low over the mountains, a distant pale star in an endless stretch of blue. The town was still cast in shadow from the peaks, but as I made the short journey it retreated like a tideline, uncovering the honey-coloured stone belt of the wall and spires prickling the sky.
Late-autumn forest skirted the flanks of the mountain, bare-branched deciduous lowland and dense pine-prickled upland, before giving way to scrub and grass in the higher reaches where any trees struggled to survive the raw weather, and a rangy herd of winter-hardened sheep grazed on the last grass before they were brought inside for true winter. In the hazy distance, the Witch’s castle rose above it all. I thought about the last leaves falling, the foxes shifting their hunts beneath the earth, the forest floor brittle and frost betraying every move. I wondered what it would be to live in the wild side of the forest. We could see her castle, but it could not be reached. The road would twist like a strand of yarn if ever you set your direction towards her, looping around itself to reach no destination at all. There were stories of grieving parents following after their sons when they were taken, but none ever reached her. Some never made it back to Blumwald at all.
In the far edge of our land was the family chapel. My mother wasn’t in the crypt with my father’s parents; she had a grave of her own, a chest tomb in white limestone, watched over by an angel, head bowed holding a never-wilting bouquet of flowers. It was extravagant and sometimes I wonder if my father did it as penance for what had come next.
I kneeled where her name was carved into the lid. She deserved to be remembered more than any of the men the Witch had taken.
She hadn’t been perfect. She hadn’t even been easy. But she had been mine.
I traced my fingers over the letters, picking out the moss that was growing there, then laid flowers from the hothouse, a burst of life amongst the desiccated bracken and heaping brown leaves. A memory came to me: my mother waking me in the middle of the night, wild-eyed, pulling me to the open window of her bedroom, the pale cotton of her nightdress flattened against her breasts and stomach by the wind that flooded in. Above us the clouds had eased apart and between their dusty forms the moon floated as fat and round as a coin.
‘The mother moon,’ she said, wrapping her sinewy arm around my shoulders. ‘The maiden waxes into the mother then wanes to the crone. You and me.’ She kissed the top of my head and I leaned into her warmth. A rare moment where it felt as though we fit together, mother and daughter.
A month later she was dead.
I thought of us there, maiden and mother, waxing and full. And the Witch in her castle, the crone. The waning moon, swallowed by darkness.
b
I heard the first whispers of the Witch’s arrival as I walked back.
‘Soured the milk in the pail with a look,’ said a woman carrying a bundle of straw. ‘Has the face of a demon, all crooked. You can see the evil in her, our Albert said.’
Another woman crossed herself. ‘Set all the cows lowing up at Rottenstedt. And when I set about breakfast, all the boiled eggs peeled blood red.’
In the centre of town it was as though midnight had come at midday. Every shop was shut, every window shuttered and barred. I walked alone past abandoned carts, dropped papers. In the market square, a figure cut across at a run, a boy in his early teens on the verge of tears. A door opened, swallowed him up and the bolt rammed home in a scrape of metal against rust.
I stopped at the only open door: the cathedral. It was empty and my footsteps echoed around the baroque vaulted ceiling. White marble curlicues frothed around the altarpiece and pale murals flowed across the walls and ceiling. Tucked into both sides of the nave were chapels. The saints glowed rosy with votive candles: patron saints of missing people and protection against evil. Each shrine was decked in twists of yarn, raw fleece, undyed rough spun alongside delicate lace weight skeins. Lights bristled like fireflies, like stars, a hundred tiny points of hope, of desperation. Kneeled before one altar was Frau Hässler, lace mantilla across her hair.
I shivered. It was the time of the Witch.
b
At the Summer Palace, fear was ripe in the air. The crush of extra servants hired for the conference, the valets the politicians had brought with them, their wives’ maids, who had crowded the palace and its courtyards, had all vanished like dew. Only a few of our own staff remained, exchanging whispers and glancing towards the town beyond the gates. I looked at the girls my age and younger, the older women and the men with white in their hair, and thought so few of us had been alive the last time the Witch visited. For most of us all we knew was the childhood terror of our parents, passed on to us.
In the kitchens, my father had made a rare appearance below stairs, wild eyed and skin flushed red above his beard.
‘You mean to tell me they’veallgone?’
The head butler was a squat man who picked habitually at his cuticles. His fingers twitched as he replied. ‘Your Majesty, we cannot force them to work.’
‘How the hell am I meant to hold a dinner for the Chancellor of the German Empire with no damned footmen?’
My father’s voice, the way he bit his words, roused an instinctive fear in me and I slipped back outside.
Rain had begun to fall, so I stepped into the stables instead. It smelled acutely of manure despite being freshly mucked out, the animal scent of horse and oiled leather. I followed the soft sound of whickering, past my father’s Hanoverian stud Gunnar and Klara’s dappled mare Lorelei, and a great number of horses belonging, I presumed, to my father’s guests. At the end of the row the storm lamps had blown out. The horses were agitated, stamping and snorting and huddled to the right of their stalls. I frowned. It was as though they were all leaning away from the very last stall, where the shadows lay deepest. I could see something moving – human or horse, I could not tell – and there came a long, slow rasping sound.
