Chapter 30
I feel…
I feel…
I feel but don’t feel the press of water in my lungs, my stomach, my throat.
I feel but don’t feel the strange weight of my soul as it scampers up and down the length of my body, and finally sits on my chest instead of floating up, of flying wherever souls are meant to go.
It takes a moment to examine itself – my self – a wispy thing, doll-like, pudgy.
No, it doesn’t bear too close an examination.
Instead, it – I – turns its attention to my corpse, cadaver, meat sack, shell, husk.
Canoe.
Floating. Lifted by the water, travelling loose-limbed and uncaring down the river.
Behind me, the village – twenty years of life around it – haunted by all those I’ve saved, called friends of one degree or another.
Loved them in my own way. Or tolerated them, but isn’t that love?
Not a one of them to be seen, except Kian Arnold and his open mouth.
And the god-hounds.
All five standing on the jetty, watching the witch go; watching their good work all done.
Their mission fulfilled. They’ve saved Berhta’s Forge.
They’ve left the place unprotected from whatever’s in the forest and stealing the children from this place.
What I wouldn’t give to get my hands on their flesh and bones, to remake them like clay, weaving pain into their core.
Soon enough, they’re gone; the river’s pace picks up and I’m speeding along, a little dead boat without a course, yet the waters are surprisingly gentle; I don’t bump against rocks or floating logs, almost like the navigation is carefully plotted.
I don’t know how long this continues, and at no point does my soul try to leave – perhaps fear of drowning, perhaps fear of flying, or perhaps simple curiosity. Or it just has nowhere to go.
I think of the tales of witches who’ve escaped, told to me by Fenna and the fosterlings she’s brought, by other Visiting Sisters who helped me; tales told because it’s important to give hope to those who flee.
You can run on fear alone, yet it burns through you, eats your reserves, but add hope to that and you can run forever.
The belief that you can be one of those who survives.
There was the girl long ago who summoned a daemon to carry her away from an unwanted marriage to a prince of Lodellan.
A woman who made herself so small she slipped beneath the door of a locked prison cell and made her way to freedom.
The young woman who even as the flames of the pyre rose towards her feet, redirected the river to drown the town and its citizens and dowse the fire.
Three old women who turned into swans and flew away from the rabble trying to arrest them.
Another who, with a flick of the wrist and a whispered word, turned a mob into lemmings and the lot of them scampered over a cliff.
And didn’t I escape? Didn’t I run from what I’d done, what I’d built?
Didn’t I flee across deserts and plains, mountains and seas?
Didn’t I survive a most dangerous voyage and claw back decades of a new life?
Didn’t I try to do better, be better? Didn’t I succeed until now? Didn’t I succeed until my luck ran out?
I think about Rhea and the baby and Tieve, all alone in the cottage, not knowing what’s happened to me.
Not knowing what’s to come. I think about Fenna in that filthy cellar, unwashed and broken, self-loathing at her betrayal, her shame a choking thing.
Yet I still can’t find it in me – not even dead, drowned and bobbing along like sea wrack – to blame her.
Or not too much. What they put her through, those men of god, that torment and torture.
I cannot guarantee I’d have kept my silence.
I cannot claim that I wouldn’t have sold the souls of any I’d ever held dear the moment they pulled the first fingernail from its bed or cut the first curse into the skin of my breast, made a window in my ribcage with their knives, taking the very canvas of me to add to their book coverings.
How long will she last? Will they drown her too or cut her throat or burn her or let her hang from hastily erected gallows on the green, staining the grass where children play with an unjust death?
With something Berhta’s Forge has never seen before?
A woman put to death as a witch. I was the first – will Fenna be the second?
Rhea the third? No. Rhea will be taken to Lodellan, her death must be a spectacle. Prince killer, assassin, witch.
Above me, all those leaves and branches, the canopy of trees with flashes of the plum-coloured blackness oozing across the sky.
I think about the other city, the one I fled, about the child I changed who was whisked away crying in the smoke and fire of that last night; about the high sorceress thrown onto a pyre with so many books from her library to make sure she burned a merry blaze; about the last of the loyal men-at-arms who marched me through the streets, many losing their lives to get me to the harbour.
Their expressions as they turned away from the dinghy that rowed me out to the ship…
no love for me, their duty done, the city falling to ruin…
Did any of them survive? To see a scarred princess returning to make a claim?
A gentle violence, now, done to my body by the water and my soul clutches at the wet bodice to stay in place; a set of rapids that I’m tossed down, until at last, I’m spat out into the Black Lake.
Here, I think, here is where I sink and rot.
Food for fish. And what of that wispy little soul, when its vessel is gone?
I float away from the agitated flow, into the smooth glassy black – so cold, so cold.
Bobbing and wheeling, moved in circles as if by another current altogether, spinning starfish-like, no volition.
Except something grabs my feet.
Grabs my ankles and I think I’m about to be eaten while my soul watches, too scared to do anything. Will it – I – be slurped in like some airy treat? Dessert?
Green-tinged hands, lightly scaled, long nails, grasp me and tow me down, down, a’down into the greeny-black depths and it feels like a second drowning. My soul, immortal, smoky, clinging to my chest like a terrified child as we descend.
* * *
How to describe that next journey?
Not just beneath the surface of the lake, not just the obsidian-dark water all around, the sense of its cold touch, almost oily, and not just the fading of the sky and trees as I was pulled deeper and deeper, but then gone entirely as I was dragged into drowned tunnels beneath the forest, beneath the earth, thick roots poking through, scratching at my body, at the skin and hair, the sodden fabric of my dress, but not making the way any slower for whatever was towing me along with a powerful stroke.
My certainty I was going to be a meal, but the longer the journey continued, the less certain I became.
What kind of creature keeps its larder so far from its hunting grounds?
The end, when it comes, is unexpected. Suddenly, we’re out of the tunnels and it’s up and up and up until I shoot from the water, high, high, high, then down again to slam onto a grassy bank, narrowly avoiding the branches of a sprawling juniper tree.
If I were alive, that would hurt. If I were alive, I’d have let out a scream to rival Kian Arnold’s when I fixed his broken leg.
As it is, my soul squeaks loud and long.
But I’m not alive, am I? What even am I, but a soul clinging to a body turned very cold very quickly.
A soul that should have gone by now, wherever it is such things go.
But my soul, resolutely not going anywhere, loosens its determined grip on my corpse, and looks around, sightless, eyeless, but somehow seeing.
In the water – a decent-sized pond – not so far from this grassy bank, is what looks like a woman.
Long green hair woven with waterweed, slanting pebble-dark eyes that stretch from either side of a narrow, thin-nostrilled nose and back towards her temples, skin scaled and with a luminescent green tinge.
Sharp teeth in her gappy smile that widens – somehow, she realises my soul can see her.
Those eyes see more than what’s easily perceivable, more than the prey swimming in the lake where she lives.
Not a mer, for they’re generally sea-born and bred, seldom taking to fresh water unless for a very good reason – mostly revenge-related according to the old tales.
Not a rusalky, either; long-haired maidens, murdered and refusing to move on, becoming something else instead – but they sing, siren-like, in a river far to the south, around the port-city of Bellsholm.
So this one, perhaps, is a mari-morgan; similar, but they sometimes go on two legs, taking mortal lovers, other times by tail.
While mer can only gain legs at great cost and favours purchased from the sea hags who tally such things, the mari-morgan can do it at will, and some say they can possess a body if the whim takes them. Not mine, apparently.
‘Can’t speak, can you?’ The voice fair gurgles, tripping from her lips like a waterfall. ‘Can’t nod either. Never mind.’
She swims closer to where I lie, rears out of the water, straight up, then flops her top half onto the grass an arm’s length away.
A scaly hand with long sharp nails reaches out and winds itself into my wet greying curls; not to pull them or tear them out, but merely to rearrange them as if my appearance might be improved by the gesture.
Then she gives the most phenomenal shout – it sounds like a name if all the leaves in the forest sighed at once.
How she gets her ichthyoid mouth around such a noise is beyond me – but then again, I’m a dead witch with a soggy soul clinging to me, witnessing all that’s going on, so my definition of “possible” might be too narrow.
Around us, a grove with no trace of winter, vibrant colours, trees and shrubs and flowers and vines, many I can’t even recognise, and a warm breeze that smells like jasmine and rose.
Anyone would think my expression was one of shock from the way she gentles me, pats my shoulder. ‘There, there. It’s all right. She comes when she’s called. Well, mostly.’
She pats the rest of my hair away from my face, out of my eyes, off my forehead and cheeks; she pushes my slack bottom jaw back up, trying to mend my smile so I look less like a dullard. She frowns as the jaw flops, my mouth lolling open again. So much for that.
‘What a waste they made of you. Such beauty a woman has when her autumn’s upon her.
Silver beginning in the temples, lines of laughter and pain to show the life she’s lived, carrying a little more fat to help through hard times – and oh, that temper!
Funny, isn’t it, how cares fall away with so many memories you didn’t need?
But the lessons, oh the lessons stick – and you’ve no patience for any who try to make you do what you don’t want to, and you can pick a liar like a rotten berry!
’ Another grin, wider and wider, and she speaks like a mortal creature, so I wonder if she spent time among us, learning how we are, or if she loved a human woman once.
Her amusement seems genuine, delighted; her fondness true.
‘What a waste,’ she repeats mournfully. ‘I saw you that night, by my lake, felt you jump in to get away from it. That shadowy thing and his horse of bone and blight. You were in there a long time and I can’t say I blame you – I warmed the water, did you notice?
Didn’t want you catching your death – such fragile things you are.
Every time you’ve come and used my lake for your visions, spilling your blood into the water – is it any wonder I felt your death in that mill pond? All that blood you’ve given me…’
She laughs again, looks sly. ‘And that man of yours! That big man in the clearing by the river, on the night of the harvest moon. Him all over you and in you, god-like one might say, and you enjoying him right back.’
And if I had a pulse, any blood circulating around my body, I’d blush so fiercely at the thought of being watched that night.
I think about Faolan, wonder where he was when they took me, wonder if he hid away, too scared to be associated with a witch even as his neighbours bore witness against me.
The heart in me, dead and cold, seems to ache but perhaps that’s just a memory, a fantasy, a phantom feeling. Where was he?
If I could, I’d cry for self-pity. If I could, I’d scream and swear for rage.
If I could, I’d march back to Berhta’s Forge and take my revenge on the god-hounds, whip them until their blood soaked the green or better yet, the fields of my holding to make them so rich and red they’d never need to lie fallow again, an inheritance for Rhea and the baby.
But I can’t. I’m trapped here, neither able to haunt nor go beneath nor find a better place to be.
The mari-morgan’s hand on my shoulder tightens. ‘Ah. Be patient, my friend. She comes.’