I sat halfway up the stairs that curved around either side the hall, resting my forehead against the bannisters. Above me spread a fresco that covered the whole ceiling, showing the Bounty of Schwartzstein, farmers harvesting sheafs of wheat in one corner, women spinning vast clouds of wool in another, framed by the mountains and the river. On the opposite staircase, the head butler hurried down to the dining room, a notecard held on a silver tray.
I thought about throwing myself over the edge. I could picture it perfectly: the rush of air against my skin, the crunch of bone as I struck the marble. I felt hollow, like a piece of deadwood rotten from the inside out. Perhaps if I jumped, I would only shatter into pieces that could be swept up and tidied away.
Jump, don’t jump. None of it mattered. I was done here.
The door to the dining room opened and my father slipped out. He held the notecard scrunched in one hand and took the stairs two at a time. At the landing, he went left towards his study. Something was wrong.
A moment later, I rose, and followed him.
Two voices came from behind the study door, and a soft yellow light glowed around its edges. My father’s, and a woman’s. There was something familiar about her voice, and I moved closer to listen.
‘You must leave at once,’ he said.
‘I will do as I please.’
‘We haveguests. Most important guests.’
‘You do not think me important?’
A beat. ‘No, I didn’t mean – does it have to be now?’
Through the half open door I could see my father, hands clasped behind his back to stop him gesturing, feet planted firmly and apart – every trick he knew to appear statesmanlike. But the strain in his face was as bad as it had been the day he arrived back from Berlin.
There was something else: fear.
In a large Louis XV chair upholstered in blood red velvet sat a woman dressed head to toe in black. Or not quite toe. She wore a high-necked black dress in shapeless crepe, hands gloved in black silk, and obsidian rounds studded the choker at her neck and the bracelets around her wrist. Her hair was hidden under an old fashioned bonnet, and from its brim hung a heavy black veil that only allowed the slightest suggestion of nose and chin. It would have been the most remarkable thing about her, except for the feet peeking out from under the hem of her dress, completely bare and caked in dirt.
‘Pick a companion or I will chose one for myself.’
All the hairs prickled along the back of my neck.
That voice.
The monster had roused from its cave.
The Witch walked among us.
She rose and prowled across the room to my father, tattered skirts dragging on the floor. ‘Perhaps I’ll go downstairs to meet these charming guests of yours and find one among them?’
I couldn’t look away from those bare feet; something so wild and animal juxtaposed with the plush, mundane tread of the rug beneath them.
‘I forbid it.’
‘What makes you think you hold power to forbid me anything?’
‘I will not have half of Germany thinking us backwards simpletons beholden to fairy tales and – and –witches.’
‘Don’t be a fool. You know who and what I am,’ she said, voice rising like thunder. ‘Give me what I ask for, now, or I will make all the godforsaken souls in this palace tremble with the fearing of me.’
For the first time in my life, I saw my father cowed.
Finally, I understood it. The Witch didn’t take a victim: she made us choose. One person in exchange for all our safety. She made us complicit in her cruelty by forcing us to offer a human sacrifice.
I looked at my father in newfound anger. He knew. He had always known.
Who did he plan to offer her? One of the footmen? A stable hand? A farm boy snatched unsuspecting from the evening fields?
Someone was to be plucked from their life and given a new one.
