A thick tangle of something golden and light and warm was wrapped around the distaff, ready to be spun.
But no hands worked the fibre.
At the base of the wheel lay a body, pale and deathly. Like scraps thrown onto the discard pile, only a collection of flesh and limbs. Her life hung around the wheel, stripped back to raw material ready to be fashioned into something else: time. The fabric of a life stretched out like thread to be woven in a pattern of loss and joy, creation and sorrow.
But the Witch did not spin.
It was her duty, but what did it matter, without her. Without Mina.
The weight lay on her shoulders, and for the first time in four hundred years, it was too heavy.
She would let the world die, frozen in an unmoving moment like an insect in amber, like a body in a peat bog. She would let the world come to an end, rather than let her hand be the one that took Mina’s life.
She would not spin. Even if it meant her own death, the death of all life, she would not spin.
With the very last scraps of time left to her, the Witch sunk to the floor, tangled her fingers in Mina’s hair. Lay down beside her love, wrapped her arms around her to keep her lifeless body warm, and let time stop.
XXVI
Iwas everything and nothing. Everywhere and nowhere. I felt myself light, like a cloud, like the vaporous mist from a kettle, or a hunt’s kill in winter, side ripped open and organs steaming against the snow. I was light, and darkness, tomorrow and yesterday, never, and always.
I saw the Witch lie down with my empty body. I knew I had sacrificed myself to the wheel for a reason, and some distant part of me despaired. My plan had not worked. I should have known she would not spin if it were my life to be used. I looked on her face for a long time, and I thought, somewhere, my heart was breaking.
It was not the first heart that had broken in this Tower.
Just as when I had touched the wheel before, I was dragged into the twist of time’s thread. I saw all four hundred years of the Witch’s life with the wheel spread before me.
I saw the Witch again, young and desperate, pacing the tower for days alone. She span and span as the golden fleece on the distaff dwindled; a servant came at last, drawn by the weeping in the Tower. The moment she touched the wheel in curiosity, her life flowed out of her body just as mine had, and wrapped itself around the distaff, ready to spin. The Witch recoiled in shock. Then, in hideous comprehension, she searched for some way to reverse it.
I saw her fail.
Spinning on, though she had to stop to retch, hands shaking so badly the thread was lumpen and ropey and time snagged around the castle in loops she didn’t understand how to untangle.
I saw her roll the body down the stairs and out of the Tower door into my garden where the bones sank into the earth and flowers grew from eye sockets and rib bones.
I saw it happen seven more times. Each time the Witch fed the wheel, it lasted for the span of life the victim had remaining: a half-century, sometimes more, sometimes less.
It broke my heart to watch her learn it.
At first the Witch brought someone to the castle for help. She was lonely and scared and thought with assistance, she could study magic well enough to find some other way to spin, to break her curse. He was a kind-hearted scholar who loved learning and taught her to play the viola. With his help, the Witch mastered a little magic, but when they tried to harness the complexity of the wheel’s powers as Berchta had done, that power was old and unfamiliar and evaded her grasp. When the news came that her father had passed away of old age, the scholar stroked her hair while she sobbed, and told her she still had him for family.
But the thread grew thin, and the wheel needed a life.
The life of someone she had grown to love, to trust, to lean on when she was scared or exhausted or hopeless.
The Witch fed him to the wheel at knife-point, blood staining the doublet and hose I had seen locked away in his trunk, because what other choice was left.
I watched her break, then.
I watched her bawl until her voice wore out because no one was coming to save her. The curse was true: she would spin alone until her fingers withered and her back bent double, until the end of time.
My Witch didn’t make the mistake of loving again.
She learned to measure out her attention, to tidy away her heart. Love wasn’t worth the grief it brought.
I saw six more companions come.
I saw none leave.
