I looked between them both, unsure and uncomfortable.
‘I see.’ Wolf’s face was a hard line. Her hand tightened around her handle of her bag in the moment before she moved, but then she rounded on me suddenly. ‘What is it she sees in you? I do not understand.’
‘Wolf.’ The Witch’s voice was as sharp and warning as a blade.
‘You are nothing. Just a girl. But you have torneverythingapart.’ Wolf sneered. ‘You have no idea what she puts at risk foryou. I have half a mind to drag you up there myself and—’
In the space of a breath the Witch appeared at Wolf’s side, hand around her throat and teeth bared.
‘Do not. Threaten. Her.’
Wolf’s eyes bulged wide, rolling wildly to see the Witch.
‘Stop it.’ I stood so abruptly I knocked my chair to the floor. ‘What are you doing? Let her go.’
The Witch snarled, and dropped her.
Wolf recoiled, a hand pressed to the red skin of her throat, and said with a hoarse voice, ‘You are courting disaster.’
The Witch stalked to the other side of the table, dropped down in her chair and examined her nails in a show of disinterest. ‘I am courting acute boredom. You’ve said your piece, so go if that’s what you want to do.’
Wolf pursed her lips, but took up her bag and left without another look at either of us.
The Witch refused my company again that day, but when I pressed my ear to the door I heard the soft sound of sobbing.
b
At dinner, I was distracted. I did not know where Wolf had gone, and the threat that ran beneath their argument had put me too on edge. The Witch had arrived late, looking more exhausted than usual, and with a wary, hunted look in her red-rimmed eyes. I had visited her in her Tower briefly to deliver lunch and found her hunched over the wheel with her calipers and tape measure, examining the thread wound around the spindle, biting her lip so hard a drop of red blood beaded at her teeth.
In the end, she spoke first. ‘What’s wrong?’
‘Nothing.’
She took a sip of red wine, staining her lips dark. ‘You don’t have to tell me but I’m not spending my evening like this.’
What could I say?
The Witch loved me, but I knew that love would only stretch so far. She had loved Wolf, in a different way, but that had not saved her. There were things I could do, questions I could ask, that would snap that love entirely. I wanted to stay where it was safe.
What I didn’t know had no power to hurt me.
I took a long draught of my own wine, letting it sting down my throat and warm my belly. ‘There’s nothing wrong.’
When we retired to the study, she took up her viola and stood by the window, skimming the bow lightly over the strings as she learned the fingerings of a new piece of music. May was in full bloom, a low, warm moon hanging above the forest and the smell of jasmine and pine sap drifting in on the breeze. I watched her play, the supple movements of her fingers across the instrument, and felt a flare of that heat again. I wanted to put my mouth on her throat, tongue the delicate skin there, nip at her jaw, grip her waist tightly and keep her pinned like an insect so she could never leave me again.
What had her other companions thought of her? Had any lusted after her? She was beautiful, after all, and to a young man her cruelty may have been no deterrent.
A young man – I thought of all of them as young men; though they must have spent their whole lives here, I had never thought of them as growing old. What was it the Witch had said?Their lives ran out.
The Witch played a sour note and the bow screeched on the strings. I frowned.
The puzzle before me was shifting, like a kaleidoscope blurring from one pattern to the next, and soon I would understand what I was looking at.
The Witch threw the viola down in frustration, then dropped into her chair, head in her hands. Today she wore another flimsy dress, black silk cut on the bias with a plunging back and a high neckline like a slash across her throat.
I touched the delicate bones in her wrist. ‘Do you want to talk about Wolf?’
She had come down from her spinning increasingly irate lately and I wished I understood enough about her work to help solve whatever problem it was she had.
