Sometimes the arrangement was purely mercenary, a stipend paid to a family, a man kept prisoner like food stored for winter.
Sometimes, early on, she would try to make them happy. Books or music or food, whatever they called for.
More often, in her darkest years, when it felt as though her soul was a corroded, twisted thing long burned out of her like wood turned to charcoal, she let her anger and despair rule, and she reigned terror on whatever human sacrifice had been flung into her path.
In the end, it became routine.
The years sloughed away like the mountaintops wearing down or rivers gouging deeper into the earth.
A life was spun, it wore out, she summoned another companion with the threat of wrath and dark magic.
She learned better than to grow attached; when one life ran out, a new one must take its place.
Finally, I saw Edgar. Sat at his bureau, paused in the act of writing when a much younger Wolf interrupted him.
‘She will see you now.’
Edgar stood abruptly, dropping his quill.
‘But—’
‘All will be explained. She waits for you in the Tower.’
I watched him go, curious and unthinking.
At the top of the Tower, the Witch stood wreathed in shadows. The light from the wheel had ebbed to a glimmer, but it was enough to ensnare Edgar, just as it had me when I had broken in. He reached a hand toward one spoke, and the Witch interrupted.
‘No. Not there. The distaff. Can you see for me whether it is damaged?’ Her voice was as low and dark as the night beyond the window.
Edgar nodded in his trance, and put his hand to the distaff instead.
The Witch turned her head away in that moment, hiding her face from what she did. So well-practised after so many years that she could kill with a word.
When it was done, Wolf returned; together they rolled the body down the stairs and into my garden.
I saw his body rot, the soil welcoming him home.
I had found them after all, my previous companions.
I watched the Witch grow cold and hard and lonely. I watched weeks pass where she didn’t speak a word. Months where she saw no living thing.
Piece by piece, she lost herself.
Better to be a monster that didn’t care about the people snuffed out, than a frightened girl trapped in a responsibility no one had taught her how to bear.
The Witch’s family died, one by one. Unknown half-siblings, and cousins, and aunts. Her nieces and nephews died in turn, and their children, and their children, until the threads of anything like family or home were dust, remembered by no one but her. With every death, she died too. If there was no one else to bear witness, had those memories of her family ever been real?
Her legend swallowed the truth, but who was to say what was truth any more. She was the monstrous witch on the high hill, the beast in the castle that spirited away one man each generation.
The final letter came, the one I had seen her read: banded in black, bringing the news that her line had died out. She was completely alone on this earth.
I saw it all like the pages of a book closed firm together, each small tragedy nestled up against the next until I lived it with her. I had loved her, whether she wanted me to or not; that was our tragedy. I loved her so much I went willingly to the wheel.
Something snagged. Some ripple of confusion.
The pages pulled apart as the curse buckled.
Spin alone until the end of time.
