‘I’m sure you understand we did not expect you to return – again,’ she corrected herself.
If my father had told her the truth about the Witch, and the fate he had sent me to, I didn’t care. I had been betrayed too many times to feel it.
‘It was the only sensible thing,’ she said. ‘We needed the space.’
I thought of the vast palace and all its unused rooms. I thought of the women I knew of who had lost children, and left their rooms untouched in memorial.
I wondered what mark I had left here. If any.
I was dressed and my hair dried and put up, and the world moved around me like I wasn’t really there. There was to be a dinner tonight to celebrate the miracle of my return. I had tea with my stepsisters, went out onto the balcony to be witnessed by the city, was checked by a doctor.
My visit before had been brief, but enough to reignite the town’s unease. Now I was back for good, fear raged like wildfire.
I had been a sacrifice to keep the rest safe. What now?
No one was safe.
If only they understood just how much danger I had placed us all in, they would have tied me up and carried me back to the Witch themselves.
Perhaps my father was not so uncaring, in that light. He could have done much worse than simply treat me with dispassion.
The dinner was large and lavish. The best part of a year had passed since I had last sat at this table. A year since I had lived as the daughter of the Duke. The building of the railway station was toasted alongside my safety, a sea of red faces and sideburns and silk gloves all drinking to a girl they didn’t know.
I was the centre of attention for a short while. Curiosity about my escape overcame their trepidation; was shetrulya Witch? What dark magic did she weave? What horrors had I seen? I could have told them countless things that satisfied their want for darkness, but I clammed up. The story, good and bad, was mine. TheWitchwas mine. Sharing it with these carrion birds was like pouring water into a leaking bucket; no matter how much I gave, it would drain away and I would be left empty. So I fed them drips, never enough to satisfy. They turned away from me in the end and I excused myself from the table as soon as the last plates had been removed. My route took me past my stepmother’s chair, and I heard a snatch of what she was saying to the Generaloberst seated next to her.
‘...Of course now there’s the matter of role here. My girls have made such good matches, I’m quite at a loss what to do with a girl likethat...’
I was a miracle no one wanted.
b
I went to bed for a week, and nobody stopped me.
After my triumphant return, no one seemed to know what to do with me. The novelty of my escape had worn off rapidly, and increasingly I was greeted by outright hostility. Klara’s wedding was only a few weeks away and my stepmother seemed to occupy every space with preparations; dressmakers and cooks and florists and an army of servants being marshalled for the celebrations. Else would travel back for the wedding, and Johanna had already returned, pregnant again as the emerging matriarch of a dynasty.
I slept in the ugly shell of my old room that my stepmother had put her stamp all over, like a dog marking its territory against a tree. With me gone, the family she wanted had been complete. I had always thought of my stepmother as benignly negligent, more disinterested than wishing me ill; now, seeing myself scrubbed from the palace like a bad memory, I was starting to change my mind.
The me who had lived with the Witch would have done something about it. The me who had tried to turn a haunted, miserable castle into a home. The me who had tried to love a beast.
You are nothing. You’re meat and I am the butcher.
So I slept, and slept, and no one bothered me about it. Sometimes when I woke there was a tray of food on a console table, sometimes there wasn’t. The long summer days stretched out in a glowing, warm-washed eternity of birdsong and sweet-scented breeze. I hated it. After everything that had happened, I had expected to cry, to wake from nightmares. Instead, I was numb. A lump of fat and bone and hair lying in sweaty, ripe-smelling sheets staring blankly at the canopy of the four-poster bed.
I heard my stepmother tell the maids I was resting after my ordeal, but I knew what I was really doing there: hiding. Like I had been when I had first met the Witch in the stables. I was hiding from the choices I had made and the life I could not seem to escape. I had risked everything to escape with the Witch, yet here I was less than year gone past and nothing changed.
And I hid from the truth: I missed the Witch.
I rolled over and pressed my face into the pillow and all I smelled was soap and feathers and sweat.
After everything she had done. After everything I now knew, I still missed her.
But it was over. She was gone.
b
I left my bed eventually because if I didn’t get up of my own accord no one else would make me.
I called for a bath, scrubbed myself clean and spent an hour washing my hair and combing all the tangles out of it, then sat in a sunny window with my hair spread out around my shoulders to dry. While I waited, I cut my nails with a tiny pair of scissors and worked cream into my hands. Then, I dug through the chest of my old things the servants had brought down from the attic to find something appropriate for the weather. It was hot and sticky, and I had eaten well with the Witch and spent less time hiking so my body had changed. My thighs were perhaps a little slimmer and my waist thicker, but I didn’t care. It was the body that the Witch had held on that last night we spent together. It was the only thing I had left with any memory of her. Her, who I had loved, not the monster I had seen at the end.
