Chapter Twenty-three The Hag
Chapter Twenty-three
The Hag
‘What in God’s name are you doing here?’ Branok directed the question and his simmering fury to Kensa, the eldest. ‘There’s none allowed in the mine’s lower recesses. You’re lucky we heard you.’ His glower was so like Jack’s. ‘How did you get in?’
‘I … ’ Kensa trailed off. What could she say to the miners crowded around them? She met her sister’s eyes in the gloom, bloodshot and wide. If she was to be their wise woman, she wouldn’t show weakness here. Murmurs ran along the copper-rich walls, melding into the mineral veins and damp hollows.
Branok, ever astute, sent an order over his shoulder. ‘Get to work!’
Swiftly, though with dissenting talk, his men did as they were told.
‘Where’s Jack?’ Kensa’s wits restored themselves enough to notice his absence. Seeing him would help, somehow, she was sure of it. Even if he was cross with her.
‘Is he not with you?’ Branok’s nostrils flared. ‘I sent him to the cottage not an hour ago after you did not answer his earlier call. I thought it better he be among others who cared for his aunt, rather than pushing himself to exhaustion here.’
In her selfish actions, Kensa had forgotten she was not the only one who’d loved Isolde. What’s more, Jack had a far greater claim to her loss. Slowly, her mind distant within her own self, she pieced together what Branok’s words meant. Her stomach leapt to her mouth.
Elowen, as always, was faster to understand. ‘We have to go!’
Kensa pushed past Branok, drawing her sister behind her.
Lanterns threatened to catch her scalp and picks swung to avoid her, as she fled through the tunnel and dodged miners’ bodies.
It was high tide and the lower entrance was no longer accessible, forcing them higher, through the rat’s maze in the cliff side.
Eventually, a ladder led them up and into what remained of the day’s light.
A booming voice carried to her, over the brittle grassland, which she knew to be Branok’s.
Kensa had no time to tell him and he gave them no chase.
Bohortha was close, a short way along the hills.
In the distance was Portscatho, hidden behind the coast’s bend.
It didn’t matter if the Bucka had tricked her; she’d let him.
And now Jack was in danger. In her frenzied run, Kensa barely noticed the sunset, which looked as though the sky’s forge had poured molten metal from cloud to sea.
The cut on Elowen’s forehead bled anew, painting a stripe down to her collar. Her weakness slowed her, legs seizing. It was no more than a mile, though it may as well have been several to the youngest sibling. In the sea she’d soared, on land she struggled.
‘I’ll go ahead,’ called Kensa.
She did not wait for a reply.
Her body arrowed forward, bootless feet barely sensible to the stones that jabbed her. A stitch buried into her side, though she did not relent. She had to save Jack. If the Pact was going to break, it would not be through his loss. She wouldn’t allow it.
The nettles did not sting her – or if they did, she did not know it – as Kensa crashed through the front garden and into the cottage.
Jack. He was pinned to the parlour floor.
His arms locked as he pushed back the rotten body craning over him – the hag – a keening, drooling creature, whose maw bent towards Jack’s neck.
Blood soaked him, but he was alive, thank God, alive.
Around him was chaos: the shell table cracked, glassware in pieces, a single Bad Book twitching against its broken spine and lying in a puddle of its pages.
In his struggle, Jack did not notice her.
Did not see Kensa. Until she barrelled into them both.
She knocked Isolde to the side and fell down with her, against her.
‘Rope,’ wheezed Elowen from the garden path. ‘Tie it up.’
A broken canine scraped Kensa’s temple, while a gargling liquid dripped into her ear as Isolde – or the woman who had been Isolde – snapped at her.
The hag’s features were sunken as Farmer Hayle’s rotten turnips, breath putrid and gums shrivelled with fly and maggot.
Kensa shielded her face with a forearm. Her free hand went to her belt.
She pulled the bone-handled blade loose.
As soon as it left the sheath, the hag shrank back, knees bending crablike, freeing Kensa.
‘Don’t hurt her,’ said Jack, a desperate shout.
Kensa waved the steel closer to the hag and received a clawing swipe for her efforts.
Beetled eyes watched her from behind a stringy lump which once was hair.
‘Isolde,’ she tried. ‘Speak to me.’ Nothing, not a flicker of awareness.
Kensa inched forwards, brandishing the weapon, using it to corral the hag backwards.
Did she recognise it? Whatever the reason, whether its memory was painful or it tapped into the Old Ways and their terrible might, it brought discomfort to the creature.
At least, enough to ward her off. As soon as the hag’s bare, broken feet crossed the threshold to her room, Jack slammed the door on her.
He swiftly put a chair under the handle, jamming it and securing the hag inside.
Jack’s heavy panting betrayed his pain, his shock.
Kensa reached for him.
His snarl was her answer. ‘What have you done?’ She flinched at his tone.
‘We should have left a note,’ said Elowen, breathless as she entered the cottage. ‘One telling you not to open the door under any circumstance.’ The overseer’s son levelled her with a hard look usually reserved for the eldest sister.
Kensa’s voice was unusually small as it left her. ‘Jack—’
‘No,’ he replied, swinging his attention back to her.
‘I hoped I could fix it myself,’ she confessed, ‘and you’d never have found out.
’ She raised her chin and truly looked at him, to see the gash on his shoulder.
Its slim-sickle shape was the fit of Isolde’s gaping mouth and ran fast with blood.
A healer’s instincts kicked in and her hands moved automatically to his injury.
He pulled back, yet the movement brought a pained gasp from him. Only then did he relent, allowing her to assess him, though he made it clear he was not happy about it.
‘Good, it’s not too deep.’
‘It doesn’t hurt much,’ said Jack.
Kensa’s mouth thinned. ‘Don’t lie to a wise woman.’
‘It hurts a lot.’
‘I’ll need to clean and bind it or else it won’t heal.’
It was a simple act to wash his neck and put a sling together using an old skirt, as gentle as she could be.
Kensa’s mind shifted back to what she had been taught, a healer’s actions, careful and precise, even though it was Jack beneath her fingers.
If she thought about it too much, she knew she’d never stop thinking about it.
Him, neck laid bare to her, shirt falling open to show the warm brown skin beneath.
A more complicated task lay ahead. It was Elowen, practical as ever, who broached it first. ‘What do we do with Isolde?’
Kensa’s stomach dropped into her shoes. ‘I can’t think.’
‘We fix her,’ said Jack, pallor faded from the blood he’d lost.
‘Is there even a “her” any more? Although that may be Isolde’s body, she’s not in it,’ said Elowen. ‘Or if she is, she won’t listen to us.’ She relayed what the Bucka had told them. Jack’s expression was stone, if stone had anger.
Shame had Kensa’s bearings falter, the room growing small for a moment as she looked at him.
‘You hate me,’ she said dully. ‘Don’t you?
’ When had she taken a seat? There was suddenly a cushioned chair at her back – one she did not remember slumping into – and Jack’s hand on her arm, which he hastily removed.
‘You need to rest,’ he said, unreadable. ‘We’ll take turns watching her.’
She had to explain. He couldn’t hate her if she explained. And if he did, she could explain again. Reason and argue and pester until he relented. ‘Jack—’
‘No,’ a pause, then repeated, firmly, ‘No.’
There was no retort. Nothing she could say, even if she had all the words known to every scribe who’d ever lived. Nothing that would make him forgive her.
‘I think I will sleep,’ she said eventually. It was better than staying with him and his unwillingness to meet her eye. And confronting the realisation that she’d lost him – it – them.
No sooner had Kensa spoken than she found herself in her bed, the movements which brought her there lost in a dizzy haze. In the quiet that precedes hard slumber, she heard Elowen speak from the parlour.
‘You handled her well,’ she said to Jack. ‘There’s few who can get her to see sense when she’s off on her nonsense.’
‘I know,’ he replied, slow and strained. ‘She must be tired.’
Were it not for the truth in their words and her own exhaustion, Kensa would have flung off the covers and marched downstairs to spite them, herself included. Make it right, somehow. Or worse, no doubt. Instead, she slept.
Kensa carried her dreams into waking: cormorants and wheat fields and a Jack with blue eyes who hated and loved her in turns.
It was night still. Fox had finally deemed it safe enough to return and slept at her feet, curled nose to tail.
A full bladder and a dry mouth told her she had taken enough hours’ rest. Grogginess dipped her head below her shoulders, chin to sternum.
When the bleariness subsided enough to let her move, she filled her chamber pot and then thought on filling her belly.
There had to be enough ingredients in the pantry to rustle a small meal together.