‘You bought snakeroot tea from me already this morning.’
I looked closer and saw the glassiness to her eyes, the way they were focused somewhere behind my head. I thought of the scullery maid scrubbing the pattern from the plates.
I picked up the coins as I had done that morning, counted out her change and gave it back to her along with a twist of tea.
‘Thank you.’ She put the tea and coins in her pocket and left without another word as the baby began to wail.
Just as it had done a few hours ago.
I put the lid back on the mustard and wrapped up the remains of my meal, a slow dread creeping over me. Did the strangeness of the castle stretch this far?
I thought again of the Witch coming from her spinning wrung out and miserable, the work so delicate and demanding.
Something was wrong with the wheel.
Steadily, the same trickle of customers came to my stall, bought the same things and left in the same order as they had come before. A snag. I considered the possibility of a coincidence, that I was mistaken in recognising the same people. The goat became loose again and even then I tried desperately to find a way that this wasn’t happening. The Witch said the binding spell had conferred a little protection on me, but how long would that last if the loop grew vast?
The bread got burned, the dressmaker carried her bolt of velvet past the stalls and then the woman was back, baby on her hip.
‘How much for the snakeroot tea?’
Just like Hanna, that same vacant expression. I stayed silent and she nodded, reaching for coins I hadn’t asked for. They dropped, I picked them up and gave them back to her.
When she left, I packed my goods back into my baskets and walked the length of the market road. If I hadn’t known, I would have thought everything was ordinary. Of course everyone was ignoring me: I was the Witch’s companion. But they ignored me even if I spoke to them. In desperation I tried wilder and wilder things, clapping my hands right in front of one woman’s face, brazenly taking a piece of strudel from the bakery, even slapping one man as my panic grew.
The Witch had told me the dangers of her work not running smoothly but to see the effects in person was more frightening than I could have imagined. The unnaturalness stung like nettles, prickling unease, the need to do something, anything, to stop it.
Like mechanical figures on a clock, the people around me replayed the same moments over and over: the burning of the loaves, the goat, the velvet. At first I had thought myself outside of the snag, immune to its snare, but in a moment of sick realisation, I saw that the Witch’s protection had faltered and I had been caught up in it too. Clapping my hands in front of the woman’s face, stealing from the bakery, slapping the man, my body like a puppet I couldn’t quite control.
I ran faster, breathing harder, a scream building up inside me I couldn’t find the way to let out. This couldn’t be happening.Bread. This couldn’t be real.Goat. The Witch wouldn’t let it, she wouldn’t let me drown like this.Velvet.My Witch loved me.Clap. She would come for me.Steal. I had to believe she would come for me.Slap.
A soft hand pressed against the side of my face, the scent of juniper and mint, and something gold and shimmering rose up like a veil lifting. The Witch stood over me where I was crouched in the street, arms wrapped around myself like a shield. My face was wet – I had been crying, but I didn’t remember. I couldn’t remember.
‘You’re back. You’re back.’ She stroked my hair, held me as I shook. My body came back to me, the world coalesced into something tangible beneath my feet. A fat fly buzzed past my head and above clouds scudded across the sky.
I whispered, ‘Never, ever let that happen again.’
‘I won’t. I promise.’
The Witch led me to a tree stump and I sat, head between my knees, unwilling to watch her circle the market, weaving time back into shape, rescuing us all from our prisons. After an age, I realised the market sounds had moved on. There were conversations happening around me that I hadn’t heard before. I lifted my head in tentative hope, and found no Witch, only a normal day rolling on as though nothing had happened. A man stopped by me and my baskets of herbs.
‘Do you have any snakeroot?’
I shuddered, snatched up my things and hurried away, followed by his frustrated voice. The Witch, I found at the far end of the market where the houses gave way to forest and cliff curling up to the castle. She was slumped under a silver birch, as pale as its peeling bark and so still she could have been part of the forest itself. Her eyes were closed, sunk deep into her skull and smudged around with bruises.
I kneeled, touched her knee to rouse her. All my anger and fear slipped away. She hadn’t meant to hurt us, and she had tried her best to put it right. I helped her up the hill, her arm around my shoulder, mine around her waist to support her home, her weight heavy and warm at my side. I had never thought of her as fragile, but I saw now that she was. She was just a woman, like I was. With no Wolf to cook for us, I scratched together a meal from the antiquated kitchen, bringing up a bowl of salty chicken broth and thick flat noodles up to the study, where I lay the Witch out on a sofa and covered her with a blanket. I helped her spoon it into her mouth until she held up a hand: no more.
I put the soup away and sat with her quietly.
‘Tell me what happened.’
She looked at her hands, at the callouses on her fingers from centuries of working the wheel. ‘You saw. A loop. The loops are a snag, the most common kind. Imagine a cloth woven from thread: that is the world around us. There can be dropped and twisted stitches, flaws in the warp and weft. Time is everywhere in everything. Not only the passage of your day, but in the passing of the seasons, the ripening of fruit.’
I knew it well. I had seen how time was marked in the rocks beneath our feet and the oil burning in our lamps, the hair growing from my head.
It was everywhere, and so everything could go wrong. Like the human body with a myriad of ways to fail and function.
The horror of the wheel and the Witch’s responsibility struck me anew: the scope of disaster that lay waiting.
