‘Holda, tell me.’
At that she stiffened, raised her head, eyes flashing.
‘That is not my name.’
I tried to touch her hair in apology, press a kiss to her cheek but she pushed me away.
‘That hasn’t been my name for centuries.’
She rose again, pacing before the fire. Her blackened soles, the cracked nails, seemed all the more horrifying paired with her delicate dress, as flimsy as a shift. She looked like a thing of fairy tales, something wild and cunning disguised in silks. I remembered the first time she had come to my family’s home, the way she had sat in my father’s study like a panther I had seen in the Berlin Tiergarten, all coiled action and whip-sharp reflexes. A predator biding its time.
‘Call me what I am. What you have always known me as.’
My mouth was dry. ‘Witch?’
She sneered, pleased at my guess. ‘As they know and fear me across the land. That is more who I am than that girl. She never got to find out who else she might be.’
I reached for her again, and she drew back sharply. The threads between us were so fine, so fragile I didn’t dare test their strength any further.
I let my hand fall. ‘Perhaps you could find out now who else you could be. With me.’
‘You don’t understand.’
‘Then tell me.’
‘Mina.’ She cupped my face in her calloused hands. ‘Stop digging. You will not like what you find.’
My cheeks burned too hot and I felt as though she could see my transgression writ plain across my face.
I said nothing more and we salvaged something of the evening, but I spent each moment watching her from the corner of my eye.
I had to know. Whatever it would cost me, I had to know.
XIX
Market day transformed the village into a bustling centre. While I was not welcomed, neither was I driven away; everyone had their own business to attend to. I tacked myself onto the end of the row of sellers, spreading out a piece of tarpaulin on the road and laying out my herbs and barks and teas and powders. I had wondered if I might see Wolf, if she remained in the village – but I saw nothing. Whether she was here or not, I was hardly someone she would want to seek out.
After so long in the isolation of the castle, the market was overwhelming. Everything was on offer: travelling tinsmiths parked their carts to mend pots and cobblers sat outside their shops to patch soles; tailors sewed buttons and haberdashers sold ribbons and reams of lace; butchers skinned glossy rabbits and farmers unloaded crates of potatoes and cabbages and spinach; spinsters with bags of dyed and raw yarn and chandlers selling bundles of tallow and wax candles. Like pilgrimage to a shrine, people from up and down the valley and beyond, farmers and crofters and foresters, had all made their way into the village perhaps for the first time in a month or more.
Most ignored me. But curiosity or ignorance got the better of more than one, and I had a slow but steady stream of women buying painkillers, fever tonics, teas for colicky infants and infirm elderly relatives. More than one crossed themselves before and after dealing with me, but I sold my wares all the same.
It was an uneventful day, marked only by a goat getting loose from its tether and running through a stand of turnips before being caught, the lesser disaster of the baker burning a batch of loaves, and the dressmaker carrying a vast bolt of velvet through the crowds like the pied piper leading half the townswomen behind her. After my fraught evening with the Witch it was almost a relief to do something so mundane.
By mid-morning, half my goods were gone and I bought fresh kartoffelpuffer and bratwurst to eat for lunch, spending some of the coins I had gathered in a show of good will to the rest of the stallholders. I was dipping the sausage into a pot of mustard when a woman came up to me carrying a baby on her hip. I thought she looked familiar, but so many of the women had the same work-hardened aspect, wore the same dark dresses and stiff aprons.
‘How much for the snakeroot tea?’
‘For fever?’
She nodded, and I gave a price that she only haggled with briefly before digging coins from the purse tied to her belt. The baby wriggled and she dropped them, struggling to bend down and balance the infant.
I reached over a bundle of dried lavender for the coins and had a flash of déjà vu.
No, not déjà vu. This really had happened already. This morning, she had been my first or second customer, asking for snakeroot and dropping her money. I stopped, sat back on my heels.
‘Did something happen to the last batch?’
She looked at me blankly.
