Chapter 8
‘Be careful,’ I say, trying to keep a sharp tone from my voice. Perhaps my mask dulls it; any road, the expression in her eyes doesn’t change, remains focused on what we’re doing.
I’ve never done this with help before. Never done it with a witness either, never tried to teach someone else to do this brand of magic.
None of my other fosterlings have been here at the right time; they’ve only been with me in the cold months when the last of this work gets turned to kindling.
I might have refused to explain it all to her, to this girl who’s trying her best – admittedly not something I’d thought to see – I might have kept it all a secret, working out in the barn on my own and bolting doors, spinning wards across them, but then what’s the likelihood of her not snooping around?
Gods know I would – they tell us curiosity kills the cat, but a smart woman knows that knowledge is her best defence.
She’s clever and questing. Oft-times, our more annoying quality is also our best, so I may grumble at her questioning, but I’m also pleased by it.
I wonder if any of my teachers thought the same of me?
So, I’m instructing her as best I can; the others were fit for only small magics.
When I asked her what she knew, her reply was shame-faced: ‘I have no spells. I’ve never learned anything like that.
Just the fire – it’s mine. It comes with my temper, with my fear, but only if I concentrate. I can’t make anything else happen.’
Untrained then. ‘No matter – everyone’s different on the witch’s scale. I can teach you spell craft, things that’ll be useful in your days to come.’
‘Thank you, Mehrab.’ And for the first time she sounded shy.
I tell her that with a power like hers, witch-fire that she might draw on all day, she could try a Briar Witch trick and begin each morning with a small bloodletting, paying the red price ahead of time.
It doesn’t really make sense for my kind of magic, but for hers it should make things easier.
Faster. Especially if she’s needing to defend herself.
The sapling, after its week in the drying room, has been anointed with a peculiar mix of powders and a little oil to make the wood more absorbent (which surely seems counterintuitive).
When it goes into the bath, I need it to soak in as much of the vile liquid as possible – but also not to take on its stench.
Hence, the oil is aromatic, strongly so.
‘Ouch!’
‘What?’
‘Splinter,’ Rhea grumbles, but she’s smart enough not to drop her end of the sapling – it’s become unreasonably heavy, which is the weird way of things – and keeps moving with the peculiar gait of someone terrified of dropping a precious burden. Her backward steps are precise, measured.
When we’re next to the bath, I say, ‘Don’t just toss it in. That’s only going to make the liquid splash up, and we don’t want that on your skin or your newly made dress. Or on my skin for that matter.’
Neither of us is an especially able seamstress but armed with that knowledge we were very attentive to the task and seams were double stitched for strength.
The frock will win no prizes at a fair, yet it does what it’s supposed to, which is ward off nakedness and she says it’s comfortable.
There’s another dress pinned for cutting out too, and an old dress of mine, long unworn, to be repurposed into trews for her, but by consensus it was decided we both needed a rest before tackling those.
Time for the needle- and pin-holes in our fingers to heal.
Slowly we lower the sapling into the broth, which burbles and bubbles. I step away quickly because experience has taught that those burbles and bubbles can send liquid flying, and Rhea has learned to listen to me on this subject at least.
‘And you said no one taught you this?’
‘No one,’ I say, surprised to sound nervous; I’ve never spoken of it before.
‘Not every woman’s a witch and not every witch is a spells-woman.
Some work by ritual and wish, the small magics of hen- and hedgewives.
Some have greater talent, can produce larger effects.
Some have a gift – like yours with fire – and that’s all they ever work with. ’
‘Do you have a gift?’
I ignore the question. ‘Some simply use what’s written in a tried-and-true book, passed down, never experimenting.
Some are committed to their own workings.
Some of us navigate by trial and error.’ And ambition.
‘A constant process of experimentation, trying to further our abilities to match our imagination.’ I clear my throat, putting something into words for the first time: ‘I’d always been interested in how things become other things, how flesh and substance might be manipulated.
So, I pondered what I wanted, what was of most use to me.
I tested various techniques, crafted and adapted spells until something worked the way I wanted it to. ’
It sounds so simple, so normal. No hint of what drove the urge. Or of the things that went awry.
‘Do you do that often? Experiment?’
‘Less nowadays.’ Nothing to prove, now.
‘What’s the greatest thing you ever did?’ Her eyes are shining like a child’s hearing a story.
I grunt, lie. ‘This. I thought one day how useful it would be to have someone around to help with the heavier work. I didn’t always have fosterlings, and they weren’t always up to the hard labour of hauling and lifting.
I didn’t want to take on a lad because lads become men and cannot be trusted.
’ I shrug. ‘So, I began playing with this – there are spells in other books, other grimoires, there are things that are a little bit of this. I just… joined them together.’
‘Did it work the first time?’
‘No, it did not. A grand failure, an explosion, very messy.’ I hold the hair away from the left side of my neck, show her the scar from a jagged piece of flying plank.
‘Had to rebuild the barn – which is, not coincidentally, why I now do this work outside – but it taught me things. And I had the chance to design a structure that met my needs better, isn’t as simple as most of them are. ’
‘The drying room?’
‘The drying room.’
‘What’s next? More stirring?’
‘More stirring. Off you go.’
* * *
The next few weeks drift by, broken up by stirring shifts, and lessons in enspelling shoes and cloaks for decreased visibility so one might pass safely by a threat, or sneak somewhere one isn’t meant to be.
I’ve given her one of my unused journals so she may begin her first grimoire, and set her books to read and learn from (honestly, I don’t have the patience to begin at the beginning).
She asks me questions when she fails at a task and I talk her through what went wrong – all failure teaches something, and humility is valuable for a witch to learn; without it, you might think yourself a god, and that way lies madness.
We’ve settled into a comfortable routine.
During the day, we attend to the sapling and then hunt up the plants and fungi on Reynald’s list; sometimes she helps mix philtres or grind and combine dry ingredients to stock my own stores and staples.
In the evenings, one of us will try to pry details of the other’s past; it’s become a game of sorts.
Only little things have been extracted, nothing of import.
The only disruption to life has been the discovering of offerings on the doorstep, every few days for the past fortnight.
Sometimes berries and other forest fruits, sometimes roots dug from deep in the woods, vegetables I do not grow and sprays of herbs and leaves; a few hares, a brace of partridges, a fat duck. Nothing out of the ordinary except at no point have we ever seen who left them.
No knock on the door, no one to say, ‘Thank you for what you’ve done’ or ‘I would like to buy a service’; no note.
Just waking in the morning and finding a benefaction on the stoop as if it’s an altar.
I’ve told Rhea not to eat any of it – not yet, not until whoever is bringing it presents themselves too, and makes a request – because eating implies an acceptance of a bargain, the details of which we are not aware.
So, everything’s been piled into baskets in the coolness of the cellar, waiting.
I wasn’t too worried, at first, because the wards around my holding were intact. I’d checked them after being caught in that spiderweb of a trap, and I walked the boundary every few days to make sure they remained thus. So, nothing that wasn’t meant to be there could come to my threshold.
No, I wasn’t too worried until today and the appearance of a parcel wrapped in what looks like old shroud-cloth, greyed and not-quite crumbling.
I don’t bring it inside, but crouch at the stoop (knees protesting) and unwrap a corner, just enough to glimpse what lies within – smooth pale skin, neat cuts at the joints, no odour of decay or not yet at least. Or not detectable. And its inner wrapping of red wool.
‘Rhea!’ She comes when called. ‘Get the baskets from the cellar, quick as you can.’
I tap my pocket, make sure the tinderbox is there as ever.
A hunter, perhaps, might leave something after an especially good hunt, a particularly large buck or bear, even one of the bigger wolves (though they are stringy and the food of the desperate).
It’s springtime and animals are plentiful, largesse can be borne.
But a hunter would be unlikely to wrap his gift in shroud-cloth and a red woollen cloak. Or an ordinary hunter at any rate.
Tenderly I rewrap the thing, but only after Rhea’s gasp tells me she’s seen the meat too – haunch?
No, shoulder. I cannot bear to look any longer – then carry it to the far border of the eastern field, to the clear land between my holding and the tree line.
I ignore Rhea’s questions and she stops asking.
At the circle of cindery earth where I burn rubbish, we tumble the fruits and vegetables, the game, from the baskets, and on top I place the shroud-cloth-covered bundle.
Break branches and twigs from a fallen tree and build the framework for a fire.
When that’s done, I set it all alight. The blaze is good and hungry, the flames orange-blue.
Rhea pipes up again. ‘Was this why you wouldn’t eat anything that was left for us?’
I nod. ‘Imagine how we’d feel if we had, then this arrived? If, in our acceptance of the offering was an implicit acceptance of a bargain? Waiting made it show its hand.’
‘It was the child, yes? Ari?’
‘I think so. Unless another’s gone missing, wearing a red cloak.’
‘How will you tell her parents?’
I pause, considering. ‘I won’t.’
‘Why not? They deserve to know—’
‘I’ve already had to tell them their child is dead.
To tell them now that part of her has been left on my doorstep?
That she’s being proffered like a sweetmeat?
To have them question why something felt it could do such a thing?
Worse, to have them think it’s a gesture another thought I might welcome?
’ I shake my head. ‘Rhea, you’ll learn that sometimes it’s safer not to admit everything. ’
‘But—’
‘What will it profit them to know their child was carved up? Bad enough they might imagine her torn by an animal, her bones lying in some lair or den, her flesh gone to feed young. But for me to appear and say, “Here she is, or part of her – look how tidy these cuts are!” That would be torture, Rhea, a torment.’ I push out a breath, exasperated.
‘I’ve lived here for twenty years and I can tell you that the villagers, my neighbours, still don’t trust me, not really.
They come for aid, I’ve saved them and their children many times over, but there’s still a tiny doubt in the back of their minds; they still fear that I will someday turn and do them ill.
Good witch, bad witch, it doesn’t matter.
I remain witch and that terrifies them.’
She’s silent, struggling. The girl will not survive if she doesn’t learn to lie or at least dissemble a little more readily. Finally, she says, ‘Why burn it all? Out here?’
‘This is an unequivocal no. No to the offering, no to the bargain, no to the trap laid in the guise of generosity. Showing that we’d rather turn it to ash than accept.’
I scan the trees, the shadows and shades between their trunks, the chinks in the undergrowth, looking for eyes that watch.
A surge of rage – that feral, primal rage – takes hold once more and I shout ‘No!’ at the forest. Birds, disturbed, fly up from the branches, a storm of indignation speckling the bright sky.
I stare a few more moments, daring whatever is out there to step forward, show itself in the light and declare its intentions.
Nothing happens, except some of the more stubborn birds resettle on their perches, reproachful caws and squawks ringing in the air.
I wait until the fire burns down, until everything is glowing coals and wafting ash, then send Rhea for a bucket of water to dampen the last of the heat.
The smell is terrible. Corrupted. Not a sweet savour at all.
I gather up the emptied baskets, link my arm with Rhea’s and walk her back towards the cottage.
I don’t hurry, don’t want to show any sign of weakness or panic or fear.
‘Be watchful and wary, Rhea. Don’t go anywhere on your own, or at least not without a weapon.
’ I remember the girl’s fire at her fingertips, think she’ll probably be fine, but this evening I’ll make talismans for pockets, perhaps sew some dried sage and lavender into hems and collars.
‘If you see anything, hear anything, tell me immediately. And don’t mention what happened today, not to anyone. ’
‘What if there are any more offerings?’
Slowly, I shake my head. ‘I don’t think there will be. Not after that.’
‘How will it know? Is it watching us?’
‘Might be. Or other things are and they’ll tell it.’
‘And what is it?’
‘Your guess is as good as mine at the moment.’ One last defiant look past the boundary, to the forest, and I think, I’ve faced worse. I’ve been worse. ‘Come, inside now.’
But I don’t mention to Rhea that whatever it is has somehow come past my wards.