Chapter Twenty Eyes of Wool
Chapter Twenty
Eyes of Wool
Towan Beach was the same as it had been on April’s full moon and the marking of spring.
That night whereupon two women, young and old, had shed their skins and swum from land to sea to sky.
Trapped within the workings of a spell, not everything was as Kensa remembered.
The pair faced one another across a sandy expanse.
It was dark and the wind howled and the seas churned and Isolde’s mouth was wide and open.
She wore her nightdress, then she wore nothing, then she wore the Bucka’s eel-skin coat, her visage changing with every blink.
Kensa’s feet were bare on the sand. Isolde’s dress, the one she had put on to complete the ritual, hung against her frame and bowled outwards through her legs when the storm caught it.
To her left, the sea was no more a sea, the sea was the colour of Elowen’s hair, the sea was Elowen’s hair, and a song came from it – a high crystalline lament for home.
Rain, as hard as the bone-handled knife, slashed against Kensa’s cheeks.
She ran forwards, reaching for the wise woman.
Their bodies connected and she buried her head in Isolde’s shoulder.
She was here and solid and alive, wherever here was.
It seemed real, it felt real, though its edges were shiny and blurred.
Kensa wept, apologised over and over, until the wise woman pushed her back, thumbs to her clavicles.
It hurt and was a good hurt, because Isolde gave it to her.
‘Do not do this,’ said the wise woman, her voice frayed and distant. ‘End it now.’
‘I can’t.’
Even if she wanted to, it was too late. She could sense it. Whatever had woven itself around them was tied too tightly for her to unravel. Horribly, Kensa did not want it to. She was with Isolde. It was working, she would make it work and never need be on her own.
Ever since her father died, ever since her mother had birthed another daughter – a better one – ever since she could put a name to the tightness in her chest, she had been alone.
A smuggler’s dregs with a noose waiting, a belligerent child who courted trouble, a little girl who carried a man’s indignant rage.
Until she had stolen her sister’s fate and became a wise woman’s apprentice.
This was not her life to live, but she would take it, steal it for herself.
Tangled thoughts poured forwards, unspooling from her mouth, nostrils and ears, as black as fog. They surged from Kensa’s body and flew at Isolde’s, forcing entry. A choking, binding mass, which wrapped itself around the old woman with smoke and sulphurous hands.
Kensa shouted, ‘No!’ Her heart cried, Stay. No one else would leave her. She would not let them. Ever.
Isolde’s head rocked back as though to scream. No sound came. Only the sea’s heaving as its hairs rose along the beach, while the sky fell in scales around them.
In a single blink, the downstairs room and the cottage returned.
‘Stay in the circle,’ warned the Bucka.
Kensa was on the ground. Her palms flat on the boards, knees grating against the wood grain.
She began to heave. She vomited seawater.
She vomited earth. Aimed it down her dress and skirts, rather than smudge the barrier she knelt inside.
The candles lowered themselves to their smallest glow.
Another thing was here. Its name was Death.
It pressed against the light and held its warmth at bay.
Kensa fought the white spots eating at her vision and raised her head.
There she saw the Weaver’s ewe.
In the room’s pitch was the dead sheep, reanimated.
Its glassy eyes reflected the body on the bed and the Bucka’s towering shape, kept there and removed from the indistinct darkness Kensa now occupied.
There was nothing else around her. Only the sheep and the circle she stood in.
If she left it, she would die. She knew this without asking.
‘Hello,’ said Kensa.
Because it seemed polite to greet Death.
The sheep’s mouth opened, as though it would speak.
From the creases where the sheep’s jaw hinged came a tearing sound.
The sheep’s mouth began to widen further, separate, its body peeling apart to reveal another mouth, the Morgawr’s mouth.
Its sea-monster shape filled the space as its mouth began to open, as though it would speak.
From the creases where the Morgawr’s jaw hinged came a tearing sound—
A dozen mouths inside mouths inside mouths ripped themselves into the world: beaks and jowls and tearing flesh. Throughout it, Kensa screamed. Until she felt her own mouth begin to split at the corners.
‘Come now, witchling,’ came the Bucka’s voice. ‘Do not get distracted.’
It would be easy to leave the circle. She could not be alone if she was dead.
How tempting it was. And cold, though not a bad cold.
The endless mouthing creature split again into the sheep.
Kensa could smell the ewe’s wool, see its eyes – whole and rotten and pitted at the same time, multiple realities which stared and stared and stared at her.
There was a strange power in it: to choose your time of dying.
Why not make it now? Everything she worried about or had done wrong would no longer exist, because she would not exist. That would be nice, wouldn’t it?
‘Kensa,’ said the Bucka, stern and with urgency.
She was in the room again. Where had the sheep gone?
The Father of Storms sank to his knees outside the circle and levelled his face to meet Kensa’s.
It was a strange sight to see the Bucka, a sea god, the most dangerous creature she’d ever met, crouched earnestly beside a dirty village girl in a dank cottage room.
‘You seem worried,’ said Kensa sleepily.
If she closed her eyes, the current would take her: woollen and bleatless.
‘You cannot stop,’ said the Bucka, and he looked concerned, afraid for her.
She smiled sadly, reassuringly, and he smiled back. He seemed almost human, then. Boyish. How old had he been when this was done to him? When was he made the Father of Storms? She’d never thought to ask. Yet his was a fleeting expression, quickly concealed, as the Bucka rose to full height.
‘Death will take your soul if you allow it,’ he said, to himself, to her. ‘What’s left behind will be a husk and the woman you are now shall never see the morrow.’
Kensa nodded, though she barely understood. ‘I want to go home.’ She did not know which home she meant.
The Bucka swallowed, lips twisting, then pulled straight.
From the other room, the Bad Books came.
They pounded against the boards, the windows – shining day, swallowing night, shining day – as the end came.
Those vengeful tomes toppled into one another, swirling about the pair, passing straight through the Bucka and clipping Kensa’s elbows.
A tunnel formed around her, the Bad Books as swift bats.
From their pages came shouts and cries and weeping sounds: voices lost to time yet no less angry for it.
‘Speak as I speak,’ said the Bucka insistently, calling over them. ‘I will guide you.’
A cold sweat threatened to break the circle she had drawn as Kensa forced herself to stand.
It hurt, everything hurt. When she repeated the Bucka’s chants, it was with a croaky shout.
She did not understand it. One or two words caught in her mind as hooks, as though she should have known and feared them, yet nothing stayed.
Through him, she was plunged into the Old Ways.
The ground trembled, as though to shake her from it.
This was power. No sooner did she acknowledge it than it was ripped from under her.
A rushing in her ears, like a snapping of fine threads, and a jolt to her sternum, which plucked at her final shreds of consciousness.
Fleetingly, she thought she heard the Bucka speak down their Pact – I will not ask your forgiveness – yet there was nothing to forgive, she tried to tell him, only gratitude that he would help her.
Her mind strayed to Elowen, prayed she would be well if Isolde returned, that the exchange made in her mother’s home would stand against this dark magic.
When at last the spell was done, Kensa did not leave the circle.
Exhaustion pinned her down, curled her tight into a helix.
When had she fallen? Every candle was low in its cradle and sputtered its end.
The Bucka was gone. Quiet, bar her own laboured breathing.
And no other’s to match hers; hers the only lungs working.
The Bad Books lay where they had fallen, spent and twitching silently.
‘Isolde?’ Kensa’s mouth was rank and soil scratched at her teeth. ‘Isolde?’
It took the apprentice two attempts to rise to her feet and tumble forwards, hands reaching for the bedpost. She could barely stay upright.
Even the weight of her own hair on her scalp was too much.
Before her lay the wise woman, as she had been prior to the ritual beginning.
Nothing had changed. There were the same cold sheets, run brown with stains, and a body that had not moved an inch.
She had failed. Kensa’s eyelids dragged shut. She felt nothing.
Tomorrow. She would know what to do tomorrow. Now, she could only sleep and wait for the sadness to come. With no strength to carry her elsewhere, she collapsed onto the dirtied bed and lay beside the only friend she’d ever had and had no more.