Chapter Seventeen The Balance Between Us
Chapter Seventeen
The Balance Between Us
One foot after the other. Shuffle, step, shuffle.
Due to the wise woman’s ragged pace, the journey back to Bohortha was a slow one.
An owl’s call bucked shrilly against the night, then was silent.
Even the waves paused to listen to Isolde’s fitful heaving, bile trickling up her throat, as they went on their way.
When the pair were halfway there, Kensa sensed another presence and saw, in the dull half-moon’s light, that Fox had come to corral them home.
Kensa’s stomach complained its emptiness.
She was bitterly hungry. Not only for food, but for sleep and reassurance.
Isolde barely spoke. Her feet were stones, dragging lines into the ground with each step.
Kensa was the only support keeping her upright.
When at last the pair reached the cottage, the younger woman’s arms had seized in the effort to support the elder’s weight.
Despite her exhaustion, from both Elowen’s care and the trudge home, Kensa was elated.
Her sister would recover. She could not think on anything else.
Fox darted inside and, with great difficulty, Isolde was manoeuvred through the parlour and onto her bed.
Kensa managed to ease the wise woman’s boots off, though the rest she left.
Even in the dim cottage, with no illuminance, her feet seemed a strange shade beneath her wool stockings and were frigid to the touch.
Kensa hesitated. ‘What – what can I do?’
Isolde rolled her head on her pillow, left, then right, leaving a film of grease.
‘I’ll get hot water,’ added Kensa hurriedly. ‘I’ll put a stew on, you need to—’
A horrid, strained laugh. Isolde inhaled heavily, and seemed in great pains to do so. Strange, that sound, how familiar it seemed. A low, rattling wet rasp. Elowen had been the same during their first hour in Portscatho.
‘Get us light, child,’ was the witch’s request. ‘I would have light for what happens next.’ Kensa’s brain was loose in her skull, as though it had lost its stem and now sloshed in its crucible.
With unsure movements, she woke the fire and reminded it as to its purpose.
Poker to grumbling coals, she kindled it anew, before finding stubby candles and lighting them one by one. At last, Isolde said, ‘Enough.’
The bedroom was a hushed glow. In its warmth, Kensa was able to study Isolde’s face.
It was almost beyond recognition. Her eyes were sunk in their burrows, while her cheeks dripped into jowls and her lips dragged at the mouth.
Her skin’s hue had lost its pallor, falling into a grey no living creature could sustain.
‘I’d been alone for a long, long time, frightened to be known and know another in turn,’ said Isolde, reaching out to touch the younger woman’s hair. ‘Now I wish I’d done it sooner.’
‘You need rest,’ said Kensa.
‘For an eternity I have put off dying and now it comes for me.’ A spread of brown sludge began to mark the sheets beneath the wise woman as her bowels shut down.
‘Ah, to think we could have made such mischief.’ One candle sputtered, sending shadow-ribbons up the walls and down again. ‘Hold my hand, would you?’
Isolde’s voice was so fragile that Kensa dared not cup it in her ears. ‘You’re frightening me.’ Her fingers, too, were thin and liable to crumble, as delicate as last year’s leaf litter. ‘What have you done?’
‘I did what you asked.’ Another breath, a wave receding over shingle.
‘I did what would be done.’ An owl cried in the distance once more, as though to call its lover home.
Fox dipped her head round the door, then bent her back into an arch and left.
‘The Old Ways are about sacrifice, remember? If one wishes to make a change in the world, for good or ill,’ continued Isolde, ‘one must give the world something in exchange – I would give this to you.’
Kensa extricated her palm, too-warm against her teacher’s too-cold. Her own feet prickled with pins and needles when she put her weight upon them. ‘I can’t do this alone.’
‘You’ll have to.’
‘How?’
Isolde croaked, ‘The same way everyone faces loss – they keep going, until eventually they find where they’re going to.’
This was not real. Kensa had come in, deposited the old woman on the settee and drifted off herself.
Her body told her different. There was a new burn mark on her knuckle and wax drying on her wrist, both aching.
She had been too hasty in lighting candle after candle after candle.
These were not the markers of a dream. There was no pain in a dream.
‘I don’t—’
‘You do understand.’ Isolde was dying. ‘You are as ready as you’ll ever be, as we ever are when it comes to this.
’ Her grasp went for the bone-handled knife and Kensa tried to quiet her, soothe her, only to be gripped tightly.
‘You must take it,’ she ordered, putting the sharp edge to Kensa’s hand and pressing down until blood ran.
Kensa tried to pull her hand away, yet Isolde’s grip was strong, possessed by another force.
‘You will take the Pact from me. You will take a wise woman’s curse and chain yourself to its rules, to the Land, to the shore that speaks to the Sea? ’
Next came the hilt, stained red from the fresh wound. The puckered edges around Kensa’s cut quivered, as though to mouth at the bone handle. She paused, stared into Isolde’s blackened eyes. She did not know what she was taking. She did not know what it meant to agree.
‘Yes,’ she answered.
Isolde’s hold slackened. There was no final word, no last confession, nothing bar a long, long, long exhale. Isolde was dead.
Kensa stood, unmoving, bent over the bedside, while blood seeped from the hand which held the knife.
One by one by one, the candles went out, or her consciousness faded, or both, it seemed. Kensa’s mind split open to a memory, to a dream, to her childhood—
There was a tall and fair lady at the last field’s centre, the reaping men around her. She was not alone, for beside her was a little girl with brazen hair. The lady knelt down and asked, gently, ‘Will you help me?’
Kensa remembered this day – it was harvest time. A few final wheat stems remained standing, their fat heads nodding in the low breeze. ‘Won’t it hurt her?’
It had been Old Sal who had told Kensa about the spirit who lay in the harvest at reaping.
She was maid and mother and crone. She was the sugar in the bees and their honey, the strength in the ivy and the gold in the fields.
As she looked down, she saw her father’s body, wheat growing through his eyes, nose, mouth.
Isolde was in the far distance with a scythe, flanked by wise women from times before.
‘Crying the Neck is a tradition,’ said the lady patiently. She was no stranger, though Kensa could not recall her name. How fair she was, how pale. ‘You see, the Land’s spirit waits in the last field for reaping and must be bundled into one fistful – a neck – to be slit.’
Slowly, she bent Kensa’s fingers around the standing wheat and closed her own fist around them. Through the stems – now suddenly taller than her, as thick as the curtain which separated her childhood bed from the kitchen – she saw her parents arguing.
‘You traded our family’s next child for a pebble?’ Derwa threw the hagstone on the ground, where it bounced across the flagstones, skidding to a halt within Kensa’s reach. She took it, warm in her hand. ‘No, this can’t be true, I won’t believe it, Alex.’
‘Calm yourself, love,’ said her father, sneering. ‘It’s not like you’ve let me rut between your thighs in months: I can’t give the Bucka what doesn’t exist. Unless … ’ He trailed off, breaching the space between them, running his thumb along Derwa’s jaw.
Kensa hid her face behind the curtain, heard a slap and her father’s jaded laugh. ‘Easy now, I know where I’m not wanted.’ His footfalls grew closer as he found Kensa in her bed, sat upright, holding the hagstone to her chest. He took it, gently, and placed a kiss to her forehead.
‘You’re my best girl, Kenny.’
In his eyes was a promise, that however many times he went away, he would always come home. And that little girl was still waiting, even now, for Alexander Rowe to return – for her father to come back to her.