Chapter Twelve Come the Storm #3
‘I don’t know nought about that woman or the bees, though I recall Mr Aldridge weren’t himself at the May Day festival,’ Kensa offered, setting her bowl aside.
‘He weren’t talking to no one, he was sitting by himself in the stream, laughing, speaking oddness, till he suddenly came to his wits again. ’
Rather than mend the rift, the new knowledge only made Isolde’s temper worse.
‘And you didn’t see fit to tell me?’ Her spoon clattered from her grasp and onto the table.
Behind her, the cooking pot’s lid rattled, while mounting steam pressed its wetness against the windows.
Mr Aldridge’s bees, still present in the cottage, found another room to congregate in.
‘I didn’t think it was important!’ Kensa snarled, hacking bread from a tinned loaf and using the same knife to stab at the butter. ‘I am not a child to be ordered around. I am to be a healer and shall be treated as such.’
‘Will you now?’
‘Yes, I bloody will.’
Isolde lost the tension in her limbs. With a huff, she sank forwards, over the table, and cradled her head in her hands.
‘You’re a foolish girl, Kensa.’ It was not said with malice.
She looked old. Quite suddenly, dangerously ancient, the animation gone from her features, until they were slack and runny as egg.
‘Are you all right, Isolde?’
‘I was old even when the manor house was pulled down. I have seen much and now it seems I cannot see anything else.’ She held her palms up. ‘Threads I used to hold have fled from my fingers.’
‘I can help,’ said Kensa earnestly.
‘I know – and you do,’ said Isolde.
‘It’s tiredness, only that. After a good night’s sleep you’ll be fine again.’ A strange expression gathered on the older woman’s face, bidding Kensa to ask, ‘Did I say the wrong thing?’
‘You’re to stay in your room tonight, you hear me?’
‘What for? I didn’t do—’
‘You’re not in trouble.’ Isolde spoke quietly, as gently as she would to the chickens when she came to put them to bed.
She cast a meaningful look to the third chair in the parlour.
Only then did Kensa see it was empty and cleared of rubbish.
‘It’s nothing you’ve done wrong; it’s only my own oversight and a conversation I must have. ’
It was unsettling to hear Isolde talk on making mistakes. Surely, she knew everything, could do anything? She was a witch and witches did not make errors. Did they?
‘I don’t understand.’
‘When I ask you to remain upstairs, Kensa, it is because I am expecting … ’ Isolde reached around her teeth for the word and chose, ‘ … company.’
No one had ever visited the cottage outside the Wednesday hours. Even young Jack came on that midweek day, in between the sun’s rising and setting.
‘Am I to know who?’
The wise woman closed her eyes and shook her head. ‘Let me hold this knowledge for us both, while I still can.’ Isolde ladled further pheasant stew into their bowls and reached for a third: the latter intended for a visitor she would not name.
Midnight was as thick as cream when Kensa awoke to voices downstairs.
The late air was different. Heavy and heaped with musk, akin to storm-weather, though the skies were silent.
Here was a scent Kensa had met before, yet the memory was slow to reach her.
It ran as minnows through her fingers, flashing silver to mock her folly.
Isolde’s crackling laugh was easy to discern.
It leapt from the parlour and into Kensa’s room.
The secondary voice, belonging to whomever had gifted the woman her amusement, was also familiar.
It carried a depth, a weight, as stone pulled over stone: a man’s voice.
She could not sleep through it.
Kensa had the notion, a thought as purposeful as a seed planted – unfurling – that she was not meant to.
Fox had made herself a nest on the bed’s far end, head resting on her tail. A slight yawn revealed her needle-bone teeth. At least the vixen could settle back to sleep. Kensa, in comparison, was alert.
Possibilities bounced through her mind. If the old woman had a suitor, then who was Kensa to listen and spy and judge? Besides, she had no desire to listen to that particular activity. She blanched upon remembering the innumerable sordid items she had found upon first tidying Isolde’s cottage.
‘You needn’t be so prudish, they’re fertility charms,’ had been the old woman’s explanation. Kensa only half-believed her.
As for this man who had come to call, he sounded far younger than Isolde.
And his voice, well, it was easy to listen to.
The small dark hairs on her arms began to rise and her body moved with them.
With a mouse’s caution, Kensa set her feet upon the floorboards and tested them.
The house did not betray her. Slowly, she ventured into the hallway and sank onto the stair’s highest step, the better to listen.
‘I have seen the markers, the rising mists and the dead-waves coming,’ claimed the visitor. Next, the sound of a cork’s whine as it’s released from its neck. What followed was a glugging noise, spirits poured from a bottle. ‘You should have done this sooner.’
‘I did it when she was ready.’
‘I am too ancient to be lied to,’ he said.
‘You called her when you were ready, Isolde.’ A gap in speech, glass drained, a tap as it is put upon a table.
Kensa could guess which: the one with a shell top, beside the high-backed chair neither she nor Isolde ever sat on.
‘You should test her, to make sure she’s what you require. ’
‘Perhaps.’
Then the third chair was the Bucka’s chair, Kensa realised with a strained gasp. That was how she knew his voice, it was his – the Bucka’s – voice.
‘If you don’t, I fear there won’t be enough time to train her for what’s ahead.’
‘Fear? We both know you fear nothing, old friend,’ was Isolde’s reply. ‘She’s a resourceful one and many healers have scraped out their path alone, exactly as I did.’
‘And look at the good it did you.’
He shouldn’t be here. He was hard and cruel and so abominably wrong. If she was braver, if she was better, she would march downstairs and command him to leave. Yet she did not feel brave in that moment; she felt small and pebbled, buffeted by the waves of him.
‘I can feel the earth pushing back,’ said Isolde, ‘telling me what needs to happen, warning me that I have a choice to make and I cannot be selfish with it. As it stands, the Pact is fragile and she needs to be strong to carry it – and be carried by others.’
‘You fear she’s too weak to be its keeper?’ The Bucka released a long exhale. ‘From what I have seen, she is a surprising one. I do not think your fears unfounded, yet if the Morgawr chose her, then it did so for a reason and you cannot go against her wishes.’
No laughter followed this time, only a waiting silence.
Kensa’s whole body tensed. What the Bucka said was a lie.
He knew the Morgawr had not chosen her. On the morning they’d met he’d isolated her untruths and fished inside her mind for others.
Now he told Isolde differently, reassuring her – why?
Her confusion mixed with a strange, unwelcome gratitude.
She never wished to owe the Bucka anything, let alone that.
Yet he had kept her secret. He had done that for her.
Kensa leaned forwards, longing to see his face, as though it could tell her more, and the cottage forgot its promise to hide her movements.
Creak, it whispered.
‘Should anything befall you, I could instruct her in all she’s ignorant of,’ said the Bucka slyly. ‘I’d drape her in pearls and crown her in coral and be master to a most obedient servant.’
Kensa held her breath. He knew she listened. Goaded her, mocked her, his witchling.
‘Never.’ Furniture scraped on the parlour’s floor, almost burying Isolde’s next words. ‘Do not come here again,’ she said. ‘Swear to me, now, you will never set a foot in this house while she lives here?’
An unsettling pull had the cottage constrict.
It caught the breath in Kensa’s throat and rattled the Bad Books in their cabinet.
What followed was danger, akin to a misstep on a high cliff, a fall to which there would be no end.
Kensa was afraid. Here was power she did not yet understand – and it raged.
‘Do not bind me to your tricks,’ said the Bucka. ‘I will not be chained again by one such as you.’ He sounded as calm as ice underfoot, in that long, slow moment before it splits.
When the old woman spoke in reply, she did so with an authority Kensa had never heard her use, as though she spoke with many voices, not one. ‘You will do as I command, Gerent.’
‘Hah, invoke a dead name, will you?’ Here was his laugh, all mockery now. ‘You’re lucky I remember it.’
‘I am the wise woman on this shore,’ said Isolde, ‘I am the Land to which the tide bows – and you will bow to me.’
‘For the moment.’ Tension fled, as quickly as it had come. ‘Fine, I shall not step over this threshold, not unless she bids me to, and that day will come.’
‘Not while I live.’
A hum, an agreement or the impression of one.
Deliberate, hard footsteps sang through the kitchen.
A long shadow paused at the staircase’s end, cast by a shape Kensa could not fully see.
Even when she dipped her head downstairs to view the man, the creature, the sea god who had cast it, who had exchanged such hard words with the witch – sensing he watched her, sensing he waited – she saw nothing.
And she did not even hear the door click shut to mark his exit.
Trailing behind him, an unwanted gift, was the scent of salt and time and cloud-washed starlight.
And something else, incense, perhaps. Kensa wondered how he lived when he was not on land, where he went and what he did when not salt-bound and sea-tied.
When sleep finally came, her dreams were his threats – a coral crown and pearls enough to drown in.