Chapter Five Mist from the Sea #2
Was it a summons? Sometimes she thought she’d dreamed her exchange with the Bucka. Only, she’d no head for wild imaginings and unruly gods. She rose, apprehensively, and moved towards the body of water. There she met the bone-handled knife.
It waited below the harbour’s waterline, submerged in sand.
Around it were silvery fish, which mistook the blade’s shine for their own shimmering bodies.
Kensa stared at it for longer than necessary.
It did not vanish. This was no trick. Her palms were clammy despite the morning chill.
She peeled off one mitten, then the next, and unhooked her shawl.
The fog rose around her, as though to shield her.
Kensa shucked off her dress, though she kept her undergarments on, body clenched against the air.
With a seal’s confidence, and her own gracelessness, she slid from the harbour wall and into the brine.
It closed around her. Icy, painful for it.
She clamped her mouth tightly against the impulse to open it, to cry out and draw in air.
Weightless, the sea’s buoyancy slowed her steady drop downwards.
At her side was the wall’s flaring base, pockmarked with winkles and limpets, ready to skin her knees if she wasn’t careful.
Kensa’s feet hit the sandy bed. It rose to meet her, billowing up, obscuring the—
Knife.
She could not see it. In desperation, Kensa plunged her fist down.
Let it cut her. She would risk losing a finger if in her mangled hands she held her fate.
Instinct, or a sea god’s intervention, pushed her grip through the water and there she met the witch’s blade.
Its handle was bleached white by salt, though its sharpness had not been dulled.
Kensa bent her legs, pushed up and propelled her head above the water, the bone-handled knife held high.
In the early light, its carvings shone, written in a script whose secrets had long since been lost, secrets now Kensa’s to learn.
She dressed quickly as the fog began to disperse. Her clothes stuck to her skin and her teeth clacked together. What did she care? Elation – no, pride – warmed her. At last, it would begin. At last, she would begin.
At the cottage she no longer considered as home, Kensa packed her belongings.
Three dresses (two simple smocks and her Sunday best) were curled into a small leather satchel once owned by her father.
Its leather interior smelled of tobacco and cloves.
Next were one or two treasured shells, a handkerchief embroidered with her initials, and the hagstone.
She left the knife until last. Set it on the window between the front door and the pallet where her sister lay, yet to leave the warm covers.
Elowen would not look at it. ‘You’re going, then?’
Kensa took her time with the buckle on the satchel, drawing out the action for as long as she could. ‘It seems like it.’
‘Will you come to visit?’
‘Maybe, I don’t know.’ She rearranged the handkerchief, unnecessarily. ‘I’ll be doing a lot. You know, important things wise women do.’ A long pause, then Kensa finally stowed the knife. ‘Unless you’ll need me?’
Elowen observed her, pale and wan as their – no her – bedsheets. ‘Your hair is wet.’
‘Should you take a turn, come fetch me,’ said Kensa finally, putting an end to their talk. She hesitated at the ladder that led towards her mother, who, along with Mr Skewes, had yet to rise.
‘I can tell her you’ve left,’ said Elowen.
There was a lengthy pause between the two siblings. It held much that was unsaid and would continue to be. Kensa ignored it, forcefully. Scraped her boots heavily on the floor, clattered loudly and gave no room for interruption. Even if it came, she would not hear it.
It never came.
She did not turn around as she left. Her life was ahead, not behind.
Her chest hammered with a heart too excited to still itself.
And wary, too, at leaving. In time with its rhythm, she threw her feet out of the door and her body followed, eager to go, to go and get gone, get away from a self she would never be again.
It was not until Kensa reached the long trail from the village that she remembered the strangeness Elowen had spoken that morning: ‘You will find it today.’ In some way, perhaps, the bone-handled knife returned to the youngest first. It had chosen her, through her strange and troublesome dreams, at least. This was not the first time her sister had dreamed on a future that had happened.
No one else needed to know that and she trusted no one else ever would.
Concern twisted in her chest for the younger woman she’d left behind.
Elowen.
Kensa walked harder until her ankles clashed together. Her hair was curled with seawater. Its coldness nipped her skin and she countered it with a brisker walk, head bowed against the wind. She kept the satchel on her right side, furthest from the sea, as though the water might take it back.
And she thought on what she’d miss, her heart aching, until what she’d miss came to find her.
Elowen’s hand grazed her sister’s wrist, then grabbed firmly.
Kensa was pulled to a panting halt, as her sister – exhausted from running – toppled them both up and over into a verge.
A hundred grass rivulets, the dull-white moths that slept in meadowsweet, sprang up around them.
The young women laughed, knees, elbows, hips damp with dew.
Together. The pair lay there a long while, faces turned to one another.
Everything and nothing had changed, yet the world seemed different somehow, as though it had decided something on their behalf.
‘I’ll miss you,’ said Kensa begrudgingly, rising to her feet.
‘I know,’ grinned Elowen, as she accepted a hand up.
Theirs was a brief embrace, stilted and awkward, with Kensa the first to break it. She didn’t want to cry and hated that she might and wouldn’t have anyone see it. Besides, it was ridiculous to be sad when this was what she wanted.
Beyond them, far from the sloping grass, the waves grew lamps at the tips and doused them on the shore. The weather was turning, clouds churning in warning.
‘You should get home,’ said Kensa. ‘It’ll rain soon.’
Elowen nodded, brushed off her wrinkled smock, and turned back. She waved once as her shape receded and Kensa only thought to wave back when it was too late and her sister had turned away.
Although it was only an hour’s walk to Isolde’s cottage, it could have been another continent.
The furthest Kensa had ever travelled was Falmouth.
Once with her father and again with Mr Skewes.
She barely remembered the first visit. Shouts, fish rot, her father’s neck scruff and her own face tucked into his shoulder.
Later, when she was grown, Mr Skewes fell into an argument at the draper’s shop.
Elowen had soothed it, as she soothed everyone, and their mother’s embroidery was finally sold for a reasonable price.
The path to Bohortha was steep and slippery, the soil wet enough to slide underfoot.
Above, the sky began to darken, as though it had forgotten it meant to rain and was hastily arranging clouds about itself.
The bone-handled knife was a weight in her satchel, heavy and growing heavier, the strap biting into her skin.
By the time she reached the cottage, her legs were stiff and there was a mark on her shoulder, a bright red slash.
As a child she had found Isolde’s home a strange, forbidding place.
Now a woman – in her own mind, at least – Kensa saw it for what it was: damp.
Squat trees blocked the light, while slime clung to the mould that clung to the crumbling brickwork at the cottage’s lower levels.
It had a narrow door hemmed with odd symbols and geometric shapes that Kensa could not read.
She grimaced, swallowed around a knot at her throat, and pushed the door open.
Knocking was for strangers.
Knocking was for those without a bone-handled knife.
Bohortha had once been home to a manor house, built and then abandoned around the Restoration era.
Rocky clumps stood where walls had been.
Ivy claimed its remnants and had brought its beams down years ago.
No villagers ever reused the materials, believing the place carried ill luck: once unluckiness gets into stone, you’ll never get it out.
Bright-beaked choughs nested in the tangled vines, while brambles, thick where floor might have been, kept predators – human, mainly – out.
It sat on a cliff’s crest with a sea view to the south and rolling fields elsewhere.
Only the groundskeeper’s abode remained standing, which was now the wise woman’s cottage. And Kensa’s too, she supposed.
It was cooler here, as though the cottage kept to an older season. Bohortha seemed to cling to an old time, too. At any moment, a man in a ruffled collar and velvet doublet might ride his horse against the thorns to ask if she was for the rebels or the king.
Years ago, Kensa and her peers had invented stories about what could be inside the ramshackle building: a thousand adders knotted together to make a living tapestry, colours no mortal eye had ever seen; a silver chalice that sang whenever a sinner’s tongue touched its rim.
Instead, as Kensa eased open the groaning door, she discovered a mess.
Leather-bound books – which cost a year’s wage in these parts – were stacked in corners and sloped precariously against benches and lumps which might, centuries ago, have passed for cushions.
Tatty furniture sat in leggy tangles, their springs lost and coverings threadbare.
Beyond was a staircase reaching upwards, each step cluttered with more books.
Then there were the bookcases, the innumerable bookcases, which should have held those endless tomes, yet heaved with jars.
Anything that could be pickled, had been pickled.
Anything. Dried herbs ran from the ceiling in spidery lengths, while the pantry door lay off its hinges.
One or two large chests sat at inconvenient angles, promising a bruised knee or shin, should one’s concentration waver for even a moment.
And that was only the kitchen. At least there was a low fire in the grate, though it desperately needed feeding.
Beyond that chaotic space was a parlour, where live birds sat in cages, docile and slow with sleep. Three high-backed chairs fought one another for space, while flowers rotted in their vases and ash lay among the filthy floor rushes.
‘Isolde?’ There were no skulls watching from dim ledges, no bloodstains marking the walls, no horned monster with haired thighs perched upon a stool in the furthest corner, guarding a gateway to Hell.
Kensa would’ve happily faced the Devil at this point.
Anything other than dusty, filthy chaos. ‘Isolde!’
There was a scuffle from a downstairs room, a heaving sound and a loud curse. Slowly, the wise woman emerged from a narrow door off the parlour, licking the dryness from her lips.
‘Ah, s’you.’
‘I have come to begin my apprenticeship,’ said Kensa hurriedly, rummaging in the satchel for the bone-handled knife.
‘It can’t be time yet, can it?’ Isolde scratched herself and sniffed her fingers. ‘You’re barely twelve.’
‘Eighteen.’
‘That’s old enough, is it?’
Kensa opened her mouth, closed it again. ‘I shan’t wait no longer.’ She glanced to the bone-handled knife and then back to Isolde.
‘All right.’ A large yawn. ‘Get yourself settled and I’ll put the water on to heat.’ She thumbed above her head. ‘Your room’s upstairs.’
Rain finally began to fall, smudging trails down the dirtied windows and pushing Kensa firmly indoors.
Was this it? Her shoulders sat tight in their sockets.
This couldn’t be it. A wild impulse told her to leave, retreat backwards.
Where to? She didn’t know. Wherever she fled to, shame would follow.
No wise woman had ever turned down the role.
And if she did, who would take her place? Elowen. Who else?
Kensa took a bold step inside.
With her feet reluctantly over the threshold, her fate was set. Today, she was an apprentice. Tomorrow, she reasoned, she would be a cleaner. And not long after that, she would become a wise woman.
One who had work to do.