Chapter Five Simran #2
“As if I’d leave you,” said Hari. “You sure we can’t risk the stagecoach?”
Simran shook her head.
“Then let’s start walking. It’s only what—four, five hours from here?” A grim smile. “It’ll give us lots of time to talk.”
The rain stopped after two hours, and for those two hours Hari said nothing as they walked. They sat on a fallen tree trunk together to recover, damp and miserable. There were some sheep ambling around ahead of them, apparently impervious to the cold.
Hari finally spoke.
“I heard a little what the man said. The one who attacked you. Not much, but now…” He shook his head. “I thought he was talking nonsense. But he wasn’t, was he? He was looking for you. He thinks you’re an incarnate.”
“He did say that,” Simran said, throat tight. “He was right. I am.”
“You’re not,” Hari said, as Simran stared fixedly at the sheep ambling on the road ahead of them. “You can’t be.”
“You had to be suspicious, at least. I’m a witch, Hari. Isn’t that a clue?”
“The Isle does strange things to everyone,” Hari said immediately. “And Lydia’s as Elsewhere-made as we are, and she’s a cunning woman.”
“She’s got the ink for it,” said Simran. It was true. Like most folk not born to a tale, Lydia had gained her magic by having the gift written into her skin by a scribe. She’d told Simran once that she considered her magic worth the death price.
“Incarnates have to be born here,” said Hari. “They’re Isle blood and Isle bred. Maybe if you had a parent from here, but Sim… you’re not from the Isle. You can’t be part of their stories.”
“I’m not making it up.”
“I didn’t think you were. I just think you’re wrong about this.” He sounded upset. “There has to be another reason.”
“Sometimes I see her,” Simran said, voice rough.
“My old self. The last lifetime the witch was called Isadora, and she told me what I am. That I’d been her, once, and another person before her.
Hundreds of lives, Hari, and I died in all of them.
” The wind rushed over them, tangling in Simran’s hair, biting and cold.
She shivered. “I wish it were just… a lie I told myself, or a curse on me. But I recognize other incarnates when I see them. I feel my tale. And now, witch hunters and archivists being after me is just more proof. I’m truly an incarnate, Hari.
I can’t lie anymore. I don’t know how, or why, but I am. ”
Silence. One of the sheep bleated, and Hari rubbed a hand roughly over his own face.
“How long have you known?” Hari asked.
“I knew when we came to the Isle,” said Simran.
“Before that I was just—myself. And then, when I was on the ship, and the sea was stormy, I…” She trailed off.
She couldn’t explain what she’d felt then.
How she’d been one person, one Simran before she’d entered the ship, and another when she’d left it.
It was as if the tale had snatched her up and changed the nature of her soul.
It didn’t matter anymore. Whatever she’d been before, she was the witch now, and Isadora was part of her.
“You’ve known the truth as long as you’ve known me? Sim. I’ve told you everything about me,” said Hari. “Everything in my life. Why did you keep this from me?”
“What was the point talking about it?”
“That’s such bullshit,” Hari said, but he didn’t sound angry, just disappointed. Of course that was infinitely worse. Simran felt two feet tall. “You know that. I know you know that. Things you don’t bring into the light, that you stick into the dark—they hurt you, Sim. You told me that once.”
“That doesn’t sound like me,” said Simran.
“A half bottle of whiskey turns you into a poet,” said Hari. “The transformation’s pretty impressive. Really. Be honest. Why didn’t you tell me?”
You would have loved me differently, Simran thought. Hari would understand if she said so. Of course Hari would understand. He knew what it was like to fear what being known, seen, would do to the strange, fraying bonds that make up friendship and family.
“I wanted to forget about it,” she said.
“If you’d known, I wouldn’t have been able to.
One day, sooner than I’d like, my tale’s going to kill me.
I think about that every day. But around you, I don’t.
It’s like it doesn’t matter. And once you know it all, I won’t be able to forget. I’ll see it in your eyes.”
“Kill you? Simran.” His voice went urgent. “What’s your tale? What is it called?”
“The Knight and the Witch,” said Simran.
He was silent for a long moment. Then he placed an arm around her, so tight she could barely breathe.
“Oh, Sim,” he said. “Oh, sweetheart. I’m sorry.”
Her heart ached. She felt sick. This was exactly why she’d never told her parents the truth—to spare them this. To spare herself.
Gently, she pulled away. “See,” she said, brushing her knuckles against his cheek. “What’s the point of both of us being sad? Now we’re miserable together.” She looked out at the gray horizon. “Let’s get moving again.”
Hari stood up, boots squelching.
“You’ve got some terrible luck,” he said.
“Absolutely awful,” she agreed.
“It’s, uh, not the same,” he started. “But my luck isn’t so good either.”
“In what way?”
“I think I’ve walked into a cowpat,” he said.
She looked back at him, and his defeated expression, and burst into laughter.
Gore was a lot of things, depending on who you asked.
A hundred, a county, a part of London, absolutely not part of London.
It was partly farmland, rolling fields and yellow carpets of wheat.
It was also a set of factories snagged between the farms, tales of industry and nature messily entangled.
And it was the town where her parents lived, of course.
Family came in so many shapes, and Simran had grown used to thinking of family as her folk in London. Her father sent her letters, and Simran sent money back when she could, but she didn’t visit if she could avoid it. When she’d left at seventeen, she’d told herself to never look back.
She had, of course. And she’d seen what she saw now: a paved, quaint street lined with homes.
Little shops with colorful canvas awnings, hanging baskets of flowers arranged over their large windows.
The sweet shop her parents owned was shut, but the window display was still piled high with silver trays of treats.
Above it was an apartment with sunlight reflecting on a single window.
Simran knew when you stood in that kitchen you could still smell the sugar-scent rising from below.
Every time she came home—and somehow this was still home, and always would be—the smell struck her like a new thing, and she was a girl again: ten years old and still unsteady from their sea journey, salt on her cheeks, not even knowing her own name.
Her hair in looped braids, a crown against her skull.
She could vaguely remember feeling sick for a home that was slipping out of her skull like ink in water, smeared out of shape.
What she could remember far more clearly was how tenderly her parents had tucked her in the first night in their new home, when she’d lain between them in an unfamiliar bed, the burnt toffee of sugar in her lungs.
She remembered how glad she’d been to be safe together. A family.
She stared up at the kitchen window. The curtains were open.
“We could go in together,” Hari said.
Simran shook her head.
“Something’s after me. I can’t risk them by going in.”
Hari did her the kindness of not pointing out that she was just making excuses. She always made excuses.
Her father would welcome her. She could see him in her mind’s eye, sitting at the kitchen table by the window under weak sunlight, laboriously writing a letter in a language that still didn’t come easily to him.
But traveling from Elsewhere had taken any other words from him.
That was the price of crossing the silver sea.
Letters every week. He loved her.
Simran swallowed.
“I’m going to check on Bess. You… you can check on my parents. They’ll be happy to see you.”
“I should come with you to see Bess,” Hari protested.
“If he’s done something to her, I’ll deal with it on my own,” said Simran. “It’s better that way.”
Hari frowned.
“I know I’ve got no magic, that I’m not a fighter, but I did pretty good with the witch hunters, didn’t I?”
“Bess is magic business,” Simran said. “She always has been. We agreed. Magic and scribing’s up to me.”
He nodded slowly, but he didn’t look convinced.
“Look, Hari, I’m really glad you’re with me.
These last two days have been supremely shit.
” Her voice cracked a little. Hell, what she’d give for a nap.
She couldn’t stand this level of emotional rawness.
“I couldn’t do much without you. You being here when I get back…
That’ll be a relief. Just—don’t tell my parents I’m here.
Say you’ve come for a visit without me.”
Hari gave her a skeptical look. “Do you want me to say hello from you?”
“Of course. Give them my love.”
She watched him walk up to the shop. She watched the window for a moment longer. Then she wrenched herself away, and turned and walked to the woods.
When Simran was twelve, she walked alone into the woods for the first time.
At school, other children had been gossiping about an evil witch hiding out there. You know the tale! Old Mad Bess axes her husband to death, and his ghost haunts the woodland. If you creep into the wood you’ll hear him screaming. And if you get too close—bam!—she’ll get you with her axe too!
They’d shrieked, all daring each other, all claiming they’d do it.
Simran had said nothing to them. She hadn’t even told Hari.
She’d packed a cheese sandwich and walked toward the forest. She’d slipped between the trees and walked until she was thoroughly lost—walked until she found a dilapidated house in a clearing, and a woman in front of it, leaning against an axe embedded in the stump of a tree.
The woman smelled like wildflowers and herbs.
Rosemary and sage infused the air as Simran walked closer, bold as brass.
The woman’s dress was white cotton and weeds.
Roots were tangled in her knotted brown hair.
To Simran’s childish eyes she was terribly old—but adult Simran guessed that Bess had only been in her early twenties, freshly grasped by her tale and flung into the woods where she’d live, murder, turn to madness, and perish at its whims.
“You’re Bess,” Simran said.
“I am indeed,” the woman said, watching Simran with beady eyes.
“You killed your husband and now you kill interlopers.” Simran shifted on her feet and raised her chin. “You can try and kill me, but I run very fast and that axe is buried deep.”
The woman laughed, a quavering sound.
“You cannot run faster than a tale,” she said.
“But it’s no matter, dearie. I have no interest in axing you.
The death of my husband is what my tale hungers for, and I haven’t even wed him yet in this life.
He still lives in Spellthorne, waiting in terror for our tale to bring him to my door. You’re safe here.”
“Are you a witch?” Simran asked.
“I am,” said Bess. “And mad, by the crude standards of a tale. But for now I am just an incarnate waiting for her tale to begin. Just like you.”
Simran took a step closer. This was what she’d been looking for. Someone who would see her.
“Am I?”
“Are you what?”
“An incarnate.”
The woman threw her head back and laughed.
“Of course you are, child. I knew you’d come here eventually. I felt you. Didn’t you feel me?”
“I don’t want to be one,” Simran said thinly. “Is there a way not to be?”
The woman drifted from the tree stump toward Simran.
“Oh, dearie,” she said tenderly, taking Simran’s hands in her own. “You need not be afraid. What you are is an honor. There are parts of the Isle that exist because of you.”
“What exists because of me?” Simran asked.
“I don’t know, do I? I know my tale is a small, sweet one.
Just large enough to feed these woods, and keep the deer dancing.
” She kneeled. “The woods shall eat me,” said Bess.
“I am the bone porridge that gives them life, aren’t I?
I shall be a haggard witch, terrorizing unwary travelers, and then I will die.
And then I’ll be reborn again, I suppose, to sharpen my axe and kill another poor man.
That’s the normal way of things. What else do you want to know? ”
“Are you happy?” Simran asked. “To be an incarnate?”
A shadow passed across Bess’s face. She smiled.
“Well,” she said. “Of course. I’m as happy as you are. What else?”
Simran took a deep breath.
“I want to learn how to be a witch,” she said.
The woodland around her, now, was silent.
She was dressed for a tale of fields and sheep, countryside inns and the gentle pleasures of a green and simple land.
Dressing for the kind of tale you were walking into was respectful, everyone on the Isle knew it.
The mud on her clothes was a start, but as she walked she unwound the bun of her hair, purposefully mussing it into tangles.
Some witches were for cursing cities; for hooded cloaks under lamplight.
And some were for the woods, where wildness shaped them.
For a little while, she had to be a witch of the woods.
Around her the blackthorn trees were white-blossomed and spindle sharp. That was their nature. There was a faint scent of sage and rosemary in the air. She walked to Bess’s cottage. There were no lights in the windows. The birds were silent.
“I know you’re here,” she said, voice hoarse. “Show yourself. Bess! Answer me!”
No answer. She walked forward warily, each step measured. Her boot hit something solid in the ground.
An axe lay half-buried in the soil. Bess’s axe.
The trees groaned, and Simran turned. A forked path lay ahead of her. One winding toward light, and one wending its way deep into the woodland darkness.
Come, the woodland beckoned. Come to me.
She hefted up the axe, in all its terrible weight. Gritted her teeth, and walked deeper into the woods.