Chapter Twenty-Five The Witch
Chapter Twenty-Five
The Witch
The archivists are too busy putting out fires to stick their noses into everyone’s business like they used to. Meet me at the printing press, and I’ll see what I can do.
Source: Letter from Jen Cranmer to Cora David
Her earliest memory was of books. They were piled on every surface: great leathery tomes, and spiral-bound, spidery, thin texts.
Sheaves of paper, held together with rope and a prayer, and gilt-edged hardbacks, gleaming like jewels under the austere lighting of the circular chamber.
The air smelled of something akin to dust, that she would swiftly come to associate with old books.
A man she’d later learn was an archivist cleared his throat and spoke to the older gentleman seated at the desk.
“Sir. What should she be named?”
The older gentleman’s thick eyebrows had drawn together. He was truly terribly old to her eyes, but his eyes were razor-sharp, and they peered at her like a thing he could dissect with a look alone.
“Step closer, girl,” he’d said.
The girl had stepped closer. The desk—and the man—loomed above her.
“I prefer specific, accurate categorization,” he said. “She needs no name but the one that denotes what she is.”
That was how she came to be known as the Witch.
Where are my family?
She asked, but no one listened. She was led to a room—in a high tower, cold, with a barred window open to moonlight—and told this would be her home. She wept that night, miserable in her bed. She could hear the distant screams and wails of ghostly children, long-dead prisoners.
She left one hand untucked from her blankets.
That night, something whispered at her bedside.
An adder, a shadowy creature of ink. It flicked its tongue, black as an oil spill, against her fingers.
Then it slithered away. She watched it go, wide-eyed, tears gone.
It left flowers on her sheets—little embroidered daisies.
The fire in the grate seemed somehow warmer and brighter.
The ghostly screams were silenced. Her friend was a snake, a creature of venom and cunning, but it had left her room somehow cheerier, and for that she’d be forever thankful.
The Witch grew up in the archives, in a fortress surrounded by a moat.
The water was the same reflective, shifting strangeness that filled the Thames, but sometimes when she peered into the water, it changed, rippling into pale fields of wildflowers.
No one but her seemed to notice this. She raised it once with Henry, an apprentice archivist, and he said, “There’s probably a tale about it somewhere. If you check the card catalogs under—”
“Never mind,” the Witch had said, and walked off without waiting for him to finish. She despised the card catalogs.
The Tower was the name of her home, though it was in truth not a single tower, but many structures bound together by many stories.
It was also, she learned, not really built for storing books.
The temperature was too variable, the stone too porous.
The screaming ghosts made it difficult to do the quiet, focused work the archivists preferred.
But the archives existed here because someone had decided that a prison was a better place for them than anywhere else.
The Witch understood she was as much an item and an asset as the books.
She was an incarnate, from a valuable tale that fed and preserved the Isle.
But something had gone wrong in her last life, as it had for so many others.
She had to be kept safe until she could fulfill her purpose.
Many other incarnates now lived in the Palace, where the Queen could watch over them and guide them. But not the Witch.
She cared for the books. She sat with the other apprentices and learned about how to treat leather, parchment, card, and thread. She fixed old books, and learned their quirks: their scent, their fragility, the temperature and humidity and atmosphere they required to flourish and survive.
She was not allowed to handle limni ink, as the other apprentices were. “That’s no business for an incarnate,” Aunt Meera told her mildly, when she protested being removed from those lessons. “It hurts your kind. And there will be other work you can do. Tend to your magic, Witch.”
It was Aunt Meera who had raised her. She’d impressed on the Witch the importance of being obedient and quiet. “The books do not like noise,” Meera had said. So the Witch had learned to walk swiftly, quietly through the archives, and learned not to argue when she was given orders.
Obedience or no obedience, she was too abrasive to make friends among the apprentices, and the Queen’s incarnates lived too far outside her orbit to become her allies.
That was fine with her. The Witch liked her own company well enough.
Besides, she didn’t fit among the other apprentices.
They were archivists in training, and their duty was to protect and tend to tales, to curate them and hone them and, most importantly of all, keep them alive. The Witch was a tale.
One day she would meet her knight, and enthrall them; and then they would love one another, and die. She’d been taught her story early. She knew what was expected of her. It didn’t frighten her. It was, as she’d been told all her life, her purpose as an incarnate.
She was alone, as she was often alone. She stood at a work table in the basement of the White Tower, with a spool of thread in her hand, threading a thick needle.
The book she was trying to save was not special in any magical sense, but it was old and it was rare, and that was enough.
There was a unicorn on its cover, painted in licks of rose and ivory.
The unicorn was torn in two, but she’d do what she could to hide the scar of it.
It came from nowhere: Something rushed through her, an ink-knowing, a tug in her chest.
The Witch had never felt anything like it, and decided she did not want to. She ignored it and attempted to steady her hands.
A dark shape flickered at the corner of her vision.
She had never told anyone about the adder-creature, the little ink animal that so often seemed to slither its way about her room.
More often than not, it turned itself into a raven so it could travel unnoticed throughout the Tower.
Sometimes it took other forms: five little ink mice, curled up in one of her spare shoes; an ink-made pigeon, egglike in sleep with its neck tucked into its feathered body, sunning itself on her narrow window.
Today, it was a skittering rat, its tail a thin ink brush whipping against the ground.
Its snout was raised. It was looking at her expectantly.
She should have ignored it. Instead, she lowered the needle and thread, and turned toward it.
The rat scampered to the door and wriggled through a minuscule crack in the doorframe.
The Witch, unable to do the same, opened the door and shut it quietly behind her.
It creaked—all doors here creaked—but she knew the best way to muffle them.
That was what a lifetime in the Tower had done for her.
The ink rat led her down familiar corridors… and then swiftly outside the White Tower. It led her to one plain stone wall of the White Tower and, with one of its strange little tricks, summoned a door in the stone.
She stopped in her tracks. She stared at the door.
“Adder,” she said firmly. “I cannot go in there.”
She had called the ink creature Adder ever since their first meeting, and it answered to it.
It turned toward her as she spoke now, blinking its beady ink-black eyes.
It did not argue. It could not: It was always animal, and it had no capacity to speak.
But it bounced about on the floor pointedly, squeaking, then transformed itself into a snake and wormed its way under the wooden door.
The Witch was obedient, and well-behaved—but even she had her limits, and Adder was often the creature to test them.
She reasoned that she was supervising it, or perhaps protecting it from itself.
She pushed the door open and followed it up the stairs it had just made.
Up and up she went, until she emerged in an unfamiliar room.
Inside was a vast room of shelves and work tables. There was a glass window—motes of dust shone in its glowing, stained glass panes. She peered out briefly. She was high up in the tower, on a floor she was forbidden to enter.
She cursed internally, but she did not leave. Curiosity had her now.
Three books lay neatly piled at the corner of the nearest table. One, frayed almost beyond repair, lay at the center. She walked slowly toward them.
She felt heat in her veins—a warning, a clear note. She could not touch these books.
The books were incarnate books—canonical texts, imbued with the power of the tales they held.
This was not a place where she was meant to be.
But she could not resist drawing closer.
Adder was circling a leg of the desk, urging her forward.
(There were tales, she thought, of snakes as temptation and also snakes as symbols of old magic, of protection.
Which one was this?) As if in a trance, she drew close to the table and looked down at the book.
The pages were so ripped they had been glued into shape, each torn piece like a facet of broken pottery. Some of the words were lost, blurred where they’d torn. But she could read the title.
The Knight and the Witch—
Her tale. This was her tale. Something in her chest cracked open. She was on the edge of a great knowledge, on the edge of knowing something about herself, something huge that would change her life entirely.
She froze, resisting the feeling. It tugged at her, a fierce gravity, and she rooted herself to the spot and resisted. Her heart wanted to soar, but her body was in this room, in this place, with a broken book under her hovering fingertips, and her feet steady on the dusty floor.
She had followed Adder here, yes. But she would not do something that placed her incarnate tale at risk. Looking at it now, fragile as frayed cloth, a torn and precious thing beneath her fingertips… she could not harm it. She had a duty not to harm it.
She pushed the vast feeling away.
Oh, you stupid girl, a voice said in her skull. Look at me!
She stumbled back, knocking over a stack of books in the process. She leaned down and hurriedly piled them back up, biting her tongue to hold back curses.
No one came running. She was alone. No one would know the foolish thing she’d done.
Thank fuck.
She left the room, softly closing the door to the secret staircase behind her. She hurried back to the workroom she’d abandoned, not worrying if Adder was following her or not. Adder could take care of itself.
In a single narrow turret of the Salt Tower, the Witch had built her demesne.
Her grotto, her place of safety, and her place of magic.
The window was narrow, built small to keep out the cold, only wide enough for an arrow.
Her room had been home to other folk before her—prisoners perhaps.
The walls were covered in scratched drawings: names and horoscopes, and one depiction of a moon over mountains that she was particularly fond of.
Her grotto was also full of mirrors. She’d been given her first when she’d joined the archives as a girl: a gilt-edged thing, made of beaten silver instead of reflective glass, so that when she peered into it she did not see herself exactly as she was, but like her reflection was trapped in a moonlight-drenched dream, turned soft and strange by the pearly light.
More had joined it since then, each unique and strange, and suited to her kind of magic.
She went to her room now, not quite running up the stairs, but not quite walking either. She wanted the safety of her own domain, and the privacy, so she could make sense of what she had just experienced.
It was not to be, alas. A knight in his forties, the Queen’s rose stitched in relief on his heraldry, stood in her room, examining a palm mirror with his brow furrowed. He turned as she approached, and bowed.
“Lady Witch,” he said.
She’d seen that face before, among the flock of knights who carried limni ink to the archives—and once or twice when she’d attended the Queen’s court and danced at one of her many lustrous and dull banquets or balls.
“Sir Edmund,” the Witch replied coolly. “What are you doing in my bedroom?”
“I have been sent to guard you,” he said, with a stiff bow. He looked like he’d smelled something awful. His nose was wrinkled, his forehead squeezed into a frown. He did not want to be here. He cleared his throat. “I thought—”
She didn’t wait to hear what he’d thought. She whirled on her heel and walked back down the stairs.
She headed straight for Archivist Sharma’s office in the Lanthorn Tower. She rapped the door smartly, then went straight in, as she always did—and stopped dead, as she faced a room of people.
She’d walked into a situation she would have done her best to avoid, if she’d been aware of it. Archivists and a member of the Queen’s court stared back at her.
“Witch,” Aunt Meera said, after a beat. Her one eye behind its monocle prism glittered strangely, faceted—her other, brown and severe, looked at the Witch with frozen judgment. “What are you doing here?”
“There was a knight in my chambers,” said the Witch. “I only wondered if something was amiss, Archivist Sharma.”
She was never Aunt Meera in company, and this was certainly company: senior archivists based in the Queen’s own household, and a member of her privy council, her Spymaster, severe-eyed and silver-haired with an oddly youthful albeit sharp face.
“Nothing is amiss,” said Meera. “You merely require better protection. Unless there is something else you’ve come to tell me?”
She said it in the indulgent tone of an adult with a wayward child, as she often spoke to the Witch. She did not know that something actually was amiss.
“No,” said the Witch. “Nothing else.”
“Then you may go.”
The Witch nodded to the archivists, then left.
“Send Sir Edmund to us, Witch,” Meera called after her. “If he’s made it to your quarters first instead of my office, then he clearly requires further guidance—and a map.”
The Witch murmured her understanding, and kept walking.
Something was amiss in the Tower, in the Witch’s own skin, and in London. Until the Witch knew more, she would bide her time.