Chapter Nineteen Spin a Wakening
Chapter Nineteen
Spin a Wakening
She could smell the night on him. Salt and time and cloud-washed starlight.
And something else, incense, perhaps. The Bucka wore his eel-skin coat and looked, Kensa could admit, quite regal.
He was not old, although he was not particularly young either.
A man who stood between seasons, but he was not a man, nothing close to a man.
Kensa’s speech was clumsy. ‘What do you want?’
‘You called for me.’
She glanced back to the empty third chair. ‘I didn’t mean to.’
Kensa did not ask how he knew; he knew everything.
If her senses had been dulled before, they were not now.
She was frozen in the doorway. Her hands were shaking, hidden in the folds of her skirts.
His face was hard as quartz, as though his bones pressed too firmly against his skin; against whatever could be called skin, for it bore little resemblance to the wrapping Kensa wore around her own skeleton.
His eyes were the worst part, unbearably bright in a way eyes should not be.
‘I wish to offer my condolences.’
‘Yes, I – I thank you,’ said Kensa.
The Bucka did not once break her stare. ‘Should I come in?’
‘No,’ she said quickly.
Because she remembered what he had promised her predecessor: I will not step over this threshold, not unless she bids me to and that day will come. When he clenched his jaw, a slow and subtle change in his expression, she knew he remembered it too.
Kensa lifted her chin. ‘You should go.’
How motionless he was. If ever he took breath, it seemed to be an afterthought. As though his towering form remembered it should at least try to mimic mortality: a wolf that can pass for a dog in low lighting, so long as he hides his teeth.
‘We are to be partners,’ said the Bucka, at last. ‘We must work together, as equals.’ He twisted his long fingers in the air, as though to gather it.
‘How strange to be tied to yet another.’ He drew his hand back and Kensa felt a tug in her chest, forcing her a step towards him, as though a physical rope was strung between them.
‘Each time the Pact is passed along, I can sense its change, as weak or as strong as she who carries it.’
The cut in her palm stung anew, as though salt was packed against it. Being near him worsened it. She could taste it – him – the sea, the brine. The Bucka was not harmless, the same way her father had not been harmless.
‘I have a lot to do,’ said Kensa.
‘Can you feel it?’
Yes: the Pact was an adder in her chest, hiding in the long grass of her ribs.
‘You need not do this alone,’ he assured her. ‘Many a woman has asked for my help, be they wise or no.’
Alone. Everyone would leave her, eventually, wouldn’t they? Her fists tightened. But not the Bucka, she realised. He couldn’t leave. They were bound together now. Theirs was a marriage of sorts.
He inclined his head in a respectful gesture. ‘I shall leave you to mourn—’
‘I don’t know what to do,’ she confessed.
‘Who could, in your position?’ Only then did the Father of Storms smile. ‘Remember, witchling, no one will trust you if you do not trust yourself.’
He was right. Portscatho had respected Isolde, even if they had not always liked her. Now she was gone and it was Kensa’s fault. A loud sob split her mouth and she turned away, into the kitchen’s gloom.
‘You have been very brave,’ said the Bucka, when her crying finally ceased. ‘Anyone else would snatch her from Death and return her to us, and who could blame them?’ At her confused look, he repeated himself, emphasising each word.
Her lips parted. ‘Can it be done?’
Now it was his turn to look bemused, as though she had asked a foolish question. ‘Did no one ever tell you?’
‘Isolde said that—’
‘You know as well as I that a wise woman does not always tell the truth.’
A pulse fluttered behind Kensa’s collarbone.
This was madness or sin or folly. There were stories.
Sailors lost at sea, saved by his grace.
Fishwives with empty hands, soon filled with his catch.
Barren nobility who bore children with teal-tone eyes, exactly the same as his own.
What’s more, while he was here, the cottage wasn’t as horribly quiet.
‘Come in,’ she said.
And he did.
The Father of Storms drifted inside with the ease of smoke.
The cottage knew him. From the grate came a fire which burped in greeting.
The bees, usually content to lump on the ceiling, spun a dizzy circle at his forehead like a burnt-gold halo.
Fox, who had finally decided to emerge from her hideaway, bounced up to the Bucka as though he was an old friend.
‘Lowarn,’ he called her.
Fox chirped back, paws bouncing and tapping. The name he gave her was the Cornish word for a fox. It irked Kensa to learn the two were familiar; how the land and its creatures seemed to want him more than her, even though he was a tide-trapped being and she the soil-bound thing.
If Kensa had been numb and tired prior to the Bucka’s appearance, she was awake now. ‘Go on, away,’ she said to the fox, who dipped her head and skulked behind Kensa’s legs.
When the Bucka sat down, he did so smoothly.
His clothes folded neatly and battishly around him.
The room’s temperature dropped, to match his.
He sat up straight, aligned with the high-backed chair.
Those eyes – oddly, oddly blue – were fixed on the fire, which grew and warped and danced with salt-licked shades, as though driftwood sparked upon it.
Kensa, in comparison, could not settle. She gripped the side of the seat usually taken by Isolde.
The bees settled against the back of the Bucka’s chair, while Fox watched him from beneath Kensa’s feet, ears pricked.
Slowly, the Bucka shifted to meet the young woman’s gaze once more, brutal and piercing.
He made her wait. Observed her, as though to take her measure. ‘This is a noble feat you consider, truly, yet it is not easy.’
‘I can try,’ said Kensa earnestly.
Once again, a thump, thump, thump sounded from the bookcase.
Fox bellied herself away, while the bees tipped to the kitchen window, as though to turn its latch themselves and escape.
Even the fire quietened. When the Bad Books skittered into the room, they did so in a jerky motion.
Pages clapping – open, closed, open – on the floor one moment and in the Bucka’s hand the next, on Kensa’s lap, then the floor, hand, lap.
She blinked, one stopped, fell open on her thighs and revealed itself.
‘If you are to do this, it must be done soon,’ said the Bucka. ‘The door between life and death is a narrow one. Once she fully passes through, no will – however strong – shall force her back.’
Inside the Bad Books were drawings, interlocking circles, skulls, wild words in languages Kensa could not speak. If this was an old tongue, it was too old for her knowing. Hopelessness engulfed her. ‘I cannot translate this,’ she sighed.
‘I can do it for you,’ said the Bucka.
It was reassuring: how he spoke, gently, as though to a cherished one.
The hairs on Kensa’s arms stood up. Somewhere, she knew this was wrong.
Yet, now the thought was lodged in her mind, she could think on nothing else.
And if time was running short, as the Bucka described, she had not a moment to lose.
Curiously, she didn’t want to lose him, either, to disappoint him or turn him away.
Though the Bucka was ancient and terrible, he was here and hers and he understood her, or claimed to.
Her dry voice clicked on her tongue as she said to the Father of Storms, ‘Please, help me, show me what to do.’
The Bucka was firm and detailed in his instruction.
Kensa stripped the dead woman’s body and bathed her, before cladding her in a white nightdress, wrestled over cold limbs.
She then put Isolde’s clothes on herself.
The material dragged at the young healer’s body, shushing on the floor and gathering muck about the skirts.
Next, herbs and bread and milk were sent to bubble and blacken over the fire.
Their foul smell filled the cottage and the walls began to sweat.
Kensa was glad she had not eaten, despite the hole in her stomach.
When the tincture was complete and ground together in a big cauldron, Kensa used it to draw a circle on the floor in Isolde’s room, big enough to fit herself inside.
A spoonful was kept behind, for her to eat.
It stank. Kensa took a deep breath and rammed it into her mouth.
Her gut roiled against it. She heaved, kept it down, before she rubbed soil into her wrists and temples.
‘Consider those qualities Isolde had and carry them tight within your chest,’ said the Bucka. ‘Remember who she was, how she spoke, what she liked or disliked.’
Kensa recalled the woman’s bossy, mean and secretive qualities.
Her penchant for a pipe after dinner and how she gossiped about her old lovers after too much sherry.
Then, without meaning to, Kensa considered her own troubles: anxiety and fear and desperate, maddening want.
No matter what, she did not want to be alone. And now she needn’t be.
The Bucka did not interfere, for it was not his place to. Kensa did not mind. The more difficult the work became, the better she felt. Exhaustion numbed her, distanced her from her own actions.
‘Blood,’ said the Bucka.
‘Whose?’
‘Any, we only need a cupful.’ He gestured idly with one hand. ‘Take it from the chickens.’
‘No,’ said Kensa, appalled. ‘I’ll use my own.’
The Bucka raised his fair eyebrows. Beside him, the fire burned with odd shapes and rumbled, as though it spoke.
Kensa was too busy to listen, for it did not speak to her.
Although the cottage was alive with strangeness, she felt like the strangest thing in it.
That she did not know herself in all she did, for she did as the Bucka bade her.
Kensa lit the candles once again. She wanted their light to banish the growing unease within her belly.
Then wine, mixed with hemlock, nightshade and poppy tears in a silver goblet.
Kensa found the ingredients in the pantry and ran a nail along their labels, each handwritten by Isolde.
Many vials were down to their last dried remnants.
She would have to forage for replacements when she’d brought the wise woman back.
They could do it together. Yes, why not?
Summer was coming and the harvest would follow: their larder would be stocked with ripeness and goodness. Wouldn’t that make Isolde happy?
Kensa did not recall moving from the kitchen to the downstairs bedroom.
It was hard to process each action from one to the next.
Using the bone-handled knife, she ran a line along her forearm and, as the Bad Books told her, beaded drops around Isolde’s immovable body.
A rotten smell emanated from the bedsheets.
It made Kensa work quicker. The last task was the worst. Kensa filled a pot with earth and placed it unsteadily on the pillow next to Isolde’s body.
Kensa hesitated. She did not want to touch it.
A few hours prior would have been no matter.
Now, decay had set in. She wanted it gone: the body, the smell, the rattle the Bad Books made whenever she passed them, pages whispering their venomous encouragement.
However, she wanted to be rid of loss more.
Haltingly, she opened Isolde’s mouth to find a lolling and yellow tongue.
Suddenly, she was a child again, a little girl climbing into the Morgawr’s maw.
With the trowel, Kensa packed Isolde’s mouth with mud.
Grit spilled over the sides and caught on the dead woman’s chin hairs.
Isolde would be cross when she woke up. But she would wake up.
That was the point. Several insects crawled between the body’s muddy teeth.
Kensa swallowed bile and wiped her hands on her skirts, until she remembered whose skirts she was wearing; her hands came away fouler than before.
Never mind, it was done. She had done it. ‘Is that it?’
The Bucka unfurled from his seat and stepped into the room with one movement, when it should have taken him ten.
He looked bigger, somehow, coat fanned as though caught in water.
Outside, no creatures cried the late hour and no scurries stirred the undergrowth.
Inside, there was a charge. Energy, like the ocean’s pull, tugged at Kensa’s knees.
She took her place in the crudely drawn circle and held the spiced wine mixture in her hands.
‘Wait,’ said Kensa, remembering. ‘Balance.’
The Bucka did not move. Had she spoken? Or did he pretend not to hear her?
‘There has to be a balance, doesn’t there? What’s asked of the Old Ways demands payment,’ she said, recalling her lessons. ‘What is it?’
‘This is Death Magic,’ said the Bucka offhandedly.
‘Unlike the craft you’ve known before, the payment is not given prior to the spell’s working, it is taken after and not for your choosing.
’ As usual, his tone was level and calm.
It soothed her. Because he was in control and there was nought to worry about. And so she didn’t, too tired to care.
‘Drink,’ commanded the Bucka.
He was closer now, though he never stepped inside the circle.
Kensa was not sure he could, even if he wanted to.
She put the cup to her lips. Her teeth chattered against it.
The warm mixture flooded her mouth. It tasted earthen and sweet and terrible, as though she had bitten through the blackened sky and found a worse darkness beneath it.
Every candle in the room began to shout.
Flames growled high into the air, marking the walls and ceiling.
Their heat pressed against Kensa’s back.
She could smell burning cloth and hair and skin: her own.
The wax melted quickly. It ran from the shelves and tables around her, rooting across the floorboards, almost touching the circle she stood inside. It was too bright.
Kensa dropped the cup and shielded her eyes. ‘Bucka?’
He was gone.
And the whole room was on fire.
And the whole room was not there.
And the whole room was a beach.