I was not afraid.
XXIV
From my father’s stables I took his strongest, fastest horse, threw some food and money into a knapsack and walked to the edge of the city.
I rode as fast as I dared: it could be a long journey ahead and I didn’t want to risk tiring or injuring my mount. Following the river-road, I worked along the valley, marking the days as I slept in hedgerows and bought oats and hay from passing farms for the horse. It had taken Frieda months of wandering through the forest to find us; if the Witch didn’t want me there, I knew the castle would make it fiendishly difficult for me to reach it.
In the end, it proved easier than I had thought; all I needed to do was follow the glitches in time – the women drawing bucket after bucket from the well, great trees shrivelling up into saplings, a stream running backwards. Like poison spreading from a wound, the tears in the fabric of time branched out from the Witch and the wheel.
Where they clustered, I turned off the main road, and into the forest.
Night fell like a finger snap: one step I rode in the sweltering summer sun that burned my forehead and the back of my neck, then next in cool, balmy night. The forest was transformed into a palette of black and grey and blue smudges, leaves and vines and undergrowth losing their definition. I rode between flowing black river and rustling black trees, the moon swallowed up into a slim crescent. It had been full a few nights ago at Klara’s wedding.
I slept bundled up in a travelling cloak at the base of a tree and when I woke, we were in autumn. Drifts of crisp leaves had smothered me in the night and across the mountainside the green of summer was transformed into a fire of red and orange and yellow, ebbing against the evergreen pine trees around the peaks. I rode through autumn and into winter, snow starting as abruptly as night had fallen. A blizzard whipped through only to be replaced by hail and then a bright, windy spring day. I shook the snow off my cloak and set my head down, thinking only of moving forward.
I rode through sleet and sunshine, spring and summer, midnight and midday, hailstones bouncing off my shoulders and rain soaking my hair. I worried time had collapsed so thoroughly I would never reach the castle. Perhaps this was another kind of loop and I was doomed to ride through the seasons like some figure in ancient myth, trapped forever in my quest. I had lost all track of how long I had been travelling, sleeping when I was weary and rising when I had energy again. Days had stopped meaning anything. But slowly, the road began to slope up and away from the river, switchbacking up the mountainside until it reached the village.
The village was frozen in the day I had left; I recognised the same people sweeping their doorsteps or carrying firewood, and small banks of snow were still piled up, forever melting in the July sun. Time had all but stopped, trapping all the townsfolk in a juddering half second of action, twitching their hands, jerking their heads like a puppet show. The Witch’s binding magic had protected me from the loops for only so long before – I would have to move quickly. I led my horse between them, careful not to brush against any of the figures. I wondered how long they could survive like this, not eating or drinking or sleeping. But then if time had stopped flowing, could age or hunger even touch them? I stabled the horse behind the inn with a full nosebag of oats and only a naive hope the loop would leave him untouched.
I turned towards the castle. It rose over the town like a painting, picked out in grey and white and black, a cold monolith of stone and timber and slate. A mist wreathed the forest, smudging the castle’s outline and casting a milky pall over the trees. But it couldn’t hide the vast blackthorn hedge that had sprung up around the Schloss like a wall, twelve feet in height and as impenetrable as the stone foundations of the castle itself. I walked its perimeter, taking in the sharp thorns as long as my finger, the gnarled branches twisting back in on themselves, weaving together as tight as if they’d been worked on a loom. It had been a narrow hedge when I had first come, only another tangled part of the wild wood. Now, it was a moat, a mountain range.
I stood, hands on my hips, and peered up at its height. My Witch lay on one side and I on the other.
At the bridge across the chasm, the blackthorn was especially thick, so dense I could see nothing of the other side. I could hack my way through and find myself tumbling into the raging torrent below. So instead, I returned to the village to cross the river there, then wove a path through wild forest up the mountainside to the foot of the castle. My apothecary garden was consumed somewhere inside; I knew I had found it when I came to a section shorter than most, where little fat blue and purple berries hung heavy on the branches – sloes fit enough to make a cupboard full of jam – and amongst the roots mint and rosemary and kale and peas still grew.
Nestled in the heart of the hedge, one branch growing through an eye socket, was a skull. A living memento mori: rosemary for remembrance, strung round with bones.
It was my garden all right.
And on the other side, the door at the bottom of the Tower – my way in. I had my pocketknife, but it would be about as effective as digging a grave with a thimble. Running my fingers over the thorns I felt an energy humming inside, the raw power of time run amok. I broke off one thorn and between one blink and the next it had regrown. No, this wasn’t a challenge that could be beaten by brute force.
I settled down on the remains of the cabbage patch, now grown so lush and wild I couldn’t tell where one head ended and the next began, and contemplated my options. The path I had lined with flints still showed through the foliage, and I picked up a piece to have something to move between my hands as I thought. This task required patience, and consideration, and commitment.
The memory came to me of the Witch that first morning we had eaten breakfast together. Stubborn and prickly and reluctant to bend – I hadn’t been that much different. I had been determined to make things work the way I wanted them to; I’d wanted to shape the Witch to my will, and had learned how futile and selfish that was. Only when the two of us learned to bend together, to grow around each other like ivy around the trunk of an oak had we been able to build anything that could last.
There was no point forcing something that did not want to be. You could only build on what was.
I weighed the flint in my hand and threw it at the hedge. It didn’t quite bounce, but it wasn’t far off. I could not tear this wall down – but perhaps I could build over it.
Using my skirts as a basket, I began to gather the flints from the paths and piled them up by the hedge. It was shorter here, only just reaching above my head. I soon realised I wouldn’t have enough rocks with the flint alone, so I fetched every stone I could find, fallen branches, anything to pile against the hedge. At the edge of the village, I took stacks of firewood, dragged trestle tables and chairs painstakingly up the hillside to pile at the blackthorn like an offering. Night never fell, only blazing July sunshine hour after hour, burning my neck and wetting my face with sweat. I rested briefly, arm thrown over my eyes, then worked again, building with the most solid and heavy things at the bottom of the pile, and shaping the rest into something resembling a flight of stairs. Once it was high enough I fetched a horse blanket from the stables, then paused to drink from my canteen and steady my nerves.
Slowly, arms out for balance, I climbed the pile of rubble. A handful of stones sheared off in a rockslide and I went down on my knees hard; the motion subsided and I kept climbing. I was perhaps only two metres up in the air, but it felt like I was balanced at the crest of the mountain. Gingerly, I pulled the horse blanket up behind me and slid it over the top of the hedge so I could crawl across its width without impaling myself like a shrike dropping its prey onto the thorns.
At last, I could see to the other side of the hedge; my garden was there, wild and riotous, and beyond, the base of the tower. The door was like new, shining with polish.
I hadn’t thought this far ahead. With no makeshift staircase on this side it was a sharp drop to the ground, but there was nothing else for it: I would have to jump to clear the spikes that protruded from the side of the hedge. I crouched, gathering my nerve again.
Love was a leap of faith.
I launched myself into the air.
b
I was prepared for the climb this time round.
My hands were sweaty from exertion and nerves as I followed the stairs in their tight spiral, impatient to reach the top and frightened of what I might find. My feet and knees ached from the heavy landing off the bitterthorn hedge. I had fought so hard to get this far; now the final stretch lay ahead of me and it felt like the longest of all.
Whatever happened next, I would know one way or another what was to become of me.
