‘You’re back again,’ he said.
‘I am.’
‘Well, then.’ He glanced around his advisors and servants then back at me. ‘Let’s get you home.’
I followed him to the carriage and allowed the seat to be covered with a travelling rug before I sat on it with my dirty clothes, and was driven all the way to the Summer Palace, dazed and silent. I thought of the Witch. Was she in her study now? Did she look out at this summer sky as I did? Or had summer been lost to the chaos of time unravelling where she was?
It was a short journey to the palace over cobbles that shook the carriage.
My father pulled down the blinds over both windows.
‘It’s time to tell me what happened,’ he said, and it was the softest I had heard his voice towards me for a long while.
I looked at my hands, scored with dirt and sunburned. My fingers were long and slender like his, but squared off at the tip like my mother’s. Pianist’s hands, she had said when I was little and my father had loved to listen to us play together.
Whathadhappened?
‘I found out the truth,’ I said simply.
He sighed. Leaned back on his seat and pinched the bridge of his nose. ‘I had hoped you wouldn’t.’
I felt strangely calm. I knew I should be angry with him, or upset, but I felt neither. Only this muted, heavy sensation. Too much had happened and I felt sapped of my ability to feel any more.
‘It is a secret passed between each duke. A solemn duty. One you must not share, do you understand? If the people knew what the Witch truly had power over...’
That was why he had been so frightened of the Witch when she came. Why he had been ready to let me go.
‘You knew, and you sent me with her anyway.’
‘Yes. I am prepared to do whatever I must do for my duty.’ The line of his jaw was set tight, no warmth or gentleness in him.
I looked him in the eye. ‘You let me go to my death.’
He held my gaze; the duke sat opposite me, not my father. For the first time, we sat together as equals.
‘Would you think differently if I had married you to a distant prince, sent you alone to a strange land and seen you perhaps only once more in my lifetime? Every parent sends their child out into a life they cannot guarantee will not be short and difficult.’
I thought of him that day in his office, concerned with his conference and Bismark and making thisproblemgo away. So he had. Me, and the Witch, out of the way.
This was not home.
We stopped outside the city walls, traffic halted in either direction as a path was cleared for the royal escort.
He had told me before what he thought my duty was. My oath to the Witch.
‘You think I should have let her use me.’
His silence gave his answer.
Then, with a small shake of his head, he said, ‘What’s done is done. She will find someone else.’ His finger tapped against the window frame in an uneasy beat.
The thought of it made me sick, but it was all we could both hope for. The wheel needed a soul or it would be the end for our world. All I had done was change my death for another’s.
We reached the palace and the carriage crunched over gravel as it pulled up to the steps.
‘Tell me one thing. One thing, and I won’t ask again.’
He nodded for me to proceed.
