In the village, everyone turned from me. They would not help the Witch’s companion.
I wondered then, if they knew. I thought of my father’s fear when I had returned to visit.
He had known the Witch would kill me, and sent me to my fate anyway.
There was no one coming to help me, and no one I could ask for aid.
All I had was myself.
As always, I was alone.
I walked as hard and as fast as I could to start, still feeling the ghost of the Witch’s fingers closing around my arm at any moment. I walked through the night, blessed by a full moon that followed me along the cart tracks. I walked three nights and days before I came to anything like civilisation and I wondered how I would ever find my way back to Blumwald.
Did I mean to go back?
I knew what I risked by leaving the castle.
Without another life fed to the wheel, the Witch would have nothing to spin. Time would collapse, then stop all together.
It would be the end of the world, and I had left her to face it alone.
I shook the thought off and kept walking.
When I had finally broken out of the Witch’s valley it had been like rain after the baking heat. Broad fields planted with barley and hops spread across the valley floor, between it the silver ribbon of the river and the meandering path of the road. From the shape of the mountains and the position of the sun, I knew the way to Blumwald. I walked numb to the pain in my limbs. I knew this: the swing of my arms, the ache of my thighs, the rise and fall of my chest.Thiswas home.
Any hope of a life with the Witch had been a delusion. There was only one way it could ever end.
Cracking my joints, I levered myself out of the ditch and chased after the cart to flag it down. I bartered the earrings I still wore for a ride in the back with its cargo of beets and goat fleece heading for Blumwald. In my bedraggled, dirt-stained state no one would recognise me as the duke’s daughter; I was just another road-worn girl working her way to the capital. I was nothing.
You are nothing. You are meat and I am the butcher.
I shuddered and buried my face in my hands. I could not let myself think about it. I was miles from home and there was no space to break yet. I pinched the insides of my arms, pressed my fingers against my eyes until the tears stopped. All around me the smell of beet and earth and goat was overpowering. At the front of the cart, sitting beside the farmer was a girl, no more than ten or eleven, who had a hank of wool in her lap and a drop spindle that she worked like a toy. My mother’s drop spindle still lay among my things in the castle, lost to me forever.
I lay down on a sack of fleece, head pillowed on my hands and watched the thread grow between her fingers, the spindle twisting at the flick of her fingers, as we bumped our slow way towards the old home I had fled.
b
‘Good god!’
My father dropped the blueprints he was holding up to the sun. He wore his summer linen, muddy boots set firm in the foundation trench that had been dug for the new railway station.
‘Mina? What are you doing?’ He climbed the ladder out, followed by a retinue of servants.
Halfway to Blumwald I had seen the cuttings for the new railway track begin, a wide swathe of land stripped bare and dug out in preparation for the laying of sleepers and steel rails. I had hopped off the cart before we got to the city walls and walked through the shantytown that huddled around the edges. Half the clapboard houses had been torn down already to make way for a new road from the gates to the station, and the dig was racing ahead in the fine weather.
‘Hello, Papa.’ My voice was hoarse from lack of use. How long had I been walking now? A week?
I heard the whispers starting already, like they had before:
...escaped the Witch a second time...
...companion returned...
Let them talk.
They had all sent me to my death without a moment’s hesitation.
My father stopped an arm’s length away, still too awkward to cross the boundary to intimacy, even now.
