Chapter 8
Miriam left the orchard furious, delighted, hungry.
She had exhausted herself. Her magic was always more difficult to call on beneath clouds—the darkness was weaker, more nebulous. Now she had spent so much of her strength, she would need to trade for more power, or else she would start to fade.
Miriam was growing sick of Ipswich, but it was the largest settlement in the area, and thus the greatest store of souls.
Making her way toward the town, she flew into a murmuration of starlings to scatter them, taking vindictive pleasure in their shrieks of fear.
She remembered Cybil trembling in her arms, recalled her scream as Miriam had appeared before her.
The girl wore fear so prettily, but she was even more lovely when she was angry; it would almost be a shame to rob the world of something so beautiful.
Almost.
Miriam was immortal, but that did not mean she was patient.
She was accustomed to getting what she wanted.
Cybil would not come to her willingly; this was a novel problem to Miriam, in centuries of hunts, but not one that was insurmountable.
Miriam would have to find a method of forcing her.
It could never be as simple as taking control of her body and signing the contract in her stead: a soul had to be given willingly.
It was one of the few limitations Miriam had discovered over the course of her existence.
Besides, Cybil’s soul was too strong for such tricks. She would simply spit the shadows out.
Miriam would have to attempt something new. For now, she required a meal, especially after that display of power with the apple-tree branch. She alighted atop the town gates, scattering another group of crows who were picking at the corpses dangling there.
As she peered down at the path, she saw a man with a black hat—a man she recognised. The witchfinder, Henry Martingale. Curious, she took flight to follow him.
Although it was late, the streets remained crowded.
And people clearly recognised Martingale; they were either staying well out of his way or swarming about him like flies on a dish of blood, begging for help or offering him tips.
‘My wife’s mother is a witch,’ said one man.
‘I swear it—she cursed me, and a blister formed—’ But Martingale ignored him entirely, walking further into the town.
Then a familiar voice came. ‘Master Martingale! Master Martingale!’
It was poor Peter Oswyn, elbowing his way through the crowd. His eyes were small, with dark bags beneath them, skin sallow with exhaustion. He was not yet recovered, clearly, from his ordeal.
Martingale made to push him aside.
‘Please, sir,’ Oswyn whimpered. ‘I’ve been bewitched.’
Martingale snarled, ‘As has half of Ipswich, boy. Now move along.’
‘But—’
‘Move.’
‘’Twas Cybil Harding,’ Oswyn blurted. ‘She’s a witch.
I know it to be true, sir. I had heard the rumours that she was cursed, but I was a fool, blinded by lust. And I met with her here today, but then…
I had no control of myself, I was her puppet.
Others saw it—I was possessed. I cannot remember it clearly, but when I woke up, she was gone, and—and—I had this. ’
He pointed to his right eye. Its pupil was swollen wide, double the size of his left, shadows drowning out the blue.
Martingale paused. ‘Cybil Harding,’ he said, and his lips thinned. ‘I know of her. I have heard much of her family.’
Miriam searched his mind, and she found embarrassment, resentment: a flicker of Cybil’s face, her supercilious expression as she ridiculed him on All Hallows’ Eve.
Miriam had not experienced enough of this place to know what they did to witches, but she could guess. Rope or fire, water or blood: it did not matter. Either way, it was a fate any woman would be desperate to escape. Desperate enough, in fact, to trade anything for their liberty.
Grinning, Miriam returned to the shadows.
Cybil could not sleep.
Six days had passed since Ipswich, since she had seen Richter in the orchard.
Since then, each time she closed her eyes, she smelt rotting apples and heard the thrum of the rain.
An incomprehensible panic seized her without trigger, and her dreams were shockingly vivid.
The previous evening, she had even taken a drop of her mother’s mandrake tincture to try to find some respite—but her sleep that night had been so deep and consuming that when she woke up, she felt curiously convinced that, for a moment, she had been dead.
But without the tincture, it now seemed she could not sleep at all.
Over the course of the week, winter had continued its slow invasion of Suffolk: at night, the windows rattled with frozen wind; the rooms remained cold despite Cybil lighting every fire and wrapping herself in furs.
On Sunday, the chill was such that she gave up on rest entirely, and so she wandered the Hall, attempting to busy herself by taking note of any minute flaw she could find: here, a hairline crack in a windowpane, illuminated like a scar by her candle; here, some paint upon a hunting mural, flecked and faded; and here, a mysterious stain on a rug mayhap left by one of her father’s more adventurous rituals, rust-coloured and shaped like a Hebrew letter.
Cybil noted all of these on a list in her meticulous hand, taking comfort in the procession of words and predicted costs for resolution.
The better the records she kept now, the easier it would be for her to hand the reins of the Hall to her mother and leave for Court.
In one room, long enough shut up that the door shrieked like a hawk when it opened, Cybil found—differentiated by the moonlight—a trio of person-shaped shadows sitting about a dust-covered table, gesticulating to one another as if playing cards.
As she entered, one of them motioned for her to sit with them.
She was too exhausted even to fear them. Eyes stinging, the flame of her candle blurred, she said, ‘Shoo,’ and flapped her hand about.
They did not move.
‘Shoo,’ she repeated. ‘This is my home, and you are not welcome here. You must leave. If you do not, I shall…’ She recalled something she had read in her father’s grimoire. ‘Salt. I shall salt you like slugs, quite happily.’
The shadows shifted nervously in their chairs. Then, slowly—reluctantly—they faded away, leaving only the thin grey moonlight behind.
Triumphant, Cybil returned smiling to her rooms. But once she was in bed, the pleasure of this victory soon passed. Sleep continued to elude her, and she was left with familiar frustration.
After hours of restlessness, her thoughts turned, inevitably, to the orchard: Cybil recalled Richter’s gaze on her throat, on her face, the manner in which she had called her lovely and bared her teeth as if she would bite her.
And despite the lingering fear, the anxiety, Cybil found herself overcome with an almost painful rush of arousal.
Attraction of this intensity was alien to her.
Cybil felt ashamed of herself, disgusted, even—but for a moment, she allowed herself to imagine that Richter had kissed her, after all.
She pictured her biting her lip hard enough to make it bleed, pulling her hair until Cybil was gasping, pushing her against the trunk of the tree.
Cybil felt as if her blood had gone molten, and her hand drifted between her legs.
She pressed her fingers against herself, trembling, imagining Richter’s hand instead of her own.
The fantasy was so clear in her mind she could almost hear that dark voice saying, My dear, if this was what you wanted, you need only have asked—
Cybil pulled her hand away and sat up, horrified. There was movement on the windowsill outside; as she turned to look, a bird took off and flew away.
Admonishing herself, Cybil got up from the bed and pulled on a robe. There was little use in trying to sleep now. She went to relight her candle, and then she cradled it in her palms, leaning her face towards the flame, feeling the heat dance across her cheeks.
Someone knocked three times on her bedroom door. Her fingers tightened around the candle.
‘Hello?’ she called. The only response was another threefold knock. It was slow, almost teasing, with the same precise rhythm of a ticking clock.
Aggravated, Cybil crossed to the door, pulling it violently open.
But there was no one there. The hallway was empty. She turned back to her room, stretching out her candle to illuminate the space. There was something scarlet on her pillow: a red carnation, petals unfurled.
‘Absolutely not,’ Cybil said. ‘Go away.’
The knocking came again, this time more distant.
Cybil returned to the corridor, and she followed the sound towards the far staircase, the one that led up to the roof.
Her candle gilded her face with light. As she ascended the steps, the flame dimmed and brightened with her movements like a heartbeat.
She stopped at the hatch. It led to the roof, which was flat and balustraded, to allow people to walk it and enjoy the view.
She and her mother had oft taken the air there when she was small and it was summer, the green carpet of the Suffolk countryside unrolling before them—but Cybil was not small now, and it was no longer summer, and it was not her mother waiting for her on the other side.
‘Richter,’ Cybil said. ‘I know you are here. I asked you to leave this place.’
There was a pause—then another, deliberate knock against the hatch.
Cybil hissed a breath through her teeth, caught between annoyance and fear. She shoved the hatch open and emerged into the night air.