Chapter Twenty-three The Hag #3
‘I’ll put on breakfast,’ said Kensa, eager to be clear of Jack’s disapproval.
Her feet took her to the kitchen door, until she recalled there would be no eggs for morning as there were no chickens left to lay them.
Oh. A soured mood brought her to nod at Isolde’s door.
‘Does she – it – need food, d’you think? ’
Jack frowned. He was a man who frowned often. This frown, however, was more pronounced than usual. ‘She’s been quiet.’
‘Um,’ said Elowen meaningfully.
After several long seconds, the other two caught up with her thinking.
Kensa swore loudly. She charged across the room and yanked the chair away from its place under the handle. When she opened the door, she found Isolde’s room without Isolde in it. The mess was there, pillows, filth and dead bees lying on the floor with their small bodies curled into themselves.
‘Kensa,’ said Jack, in warning.
She checked in the wardrobe. Nothing, only Isolde’s old clothes.
Next she pulled the covers away and looked under the bed.
There were bits there, too: old toenails, faeces and a small finger which the hag had left behind.
Feathers. Black ones, silken and sheening, as a water bird’s are wont to do.
And through the shadows on the bed’s other side were boots, familiar ones at that.
‘Kensa,’ said Jack again, with gruff urgency.
Only then did she straighten up. As she did so, her back tightened, vertebrae fusing together. How long had it been river-cold? Since when had the air been this tight in her lungs? She knew then, with certainty, who stood in the room with her.
‘Witchling,’ said the Bucka.
Kensa wrenched the bone-handled knife from her belt. ‘Where is she?’ There was a freshness to the space, an airy quality which brought her focus to the window. It was ajar, the rusted latch gone. Water lay around it and she had no doubt it would taste of salt.
‘You did this,’ she accused.
He did not need to confirm it. His expression told her enough.
There was an even stranger quality to him now, distant, here and not here.
The Bucka had taken something from her she’d never get back.
Worse than that, he was part of her. When she searched inside herself, the Pact was there, a subtle thread binding them.
Yet when she thought she’d feel satisfaction radiating from it, there was nothing, only a pitiable aching hollowness. She hated him even more.
Jack and Elowen stood in the doorway, their expressions matching thunder and not a little terror. Both looked to Kensa. She did not look back. How could she, while the Bucka was here? Under his wrath she was ridiculous and small and foolish – a fool made fool again.
Her voice stuck in her throat. ‘How long has she been gone?’
The Bucka gave her no answer and spoke instead on Kensa. ‘You would have been a fearsome woman to behold had you lived in my time.’
‘I am fearsome now,’ she whispered, though her knees pressed together under her skirts and their caps knocked in time.
‘Make your peace, for there will be none once the hag finishes her work,’ said the Bucka. ‘Let it be done, do not interfere.’
Kensa inched closer to the Father of Storms, around the bulky furniture that stood between them. ‘How could you do this to her? She invited you into her home, she—’
‘Isolde was as much a friend to me as she was to you.’
‘Is this how you treat your friends?’ Another step and Kensa rounded the bedpost, while the Bucka stood and watched and waited. How could he be this calm? Stand there and meet her eye. ‘Is this what you’d do to me, given the chance?’
‘If I had to,’ he said simply. He stood as tall as the baronet and held the same authority, as though built for it. If men like him were born to lead, she did not consider herself a woman who’d follow.
Kensa’s fury reached new heights. ‘Oh, so you had to?’ It did not matter that he was the Bucka, one who commanded tempests and dragged ships to the depths. Now he was simply another man who’d disappointed her.
Before she could act, Jack saw an opening.
He pushed out from the doorway and struck, curving a fist into the Bucka’s side.
Kensa’s mouth went slack with terror. Yet his hand went straight through, leaving an odd missing section behind.
Icy water ran across them, as though the miner’s son had merely punched a puddle’s surface.
Jack’s balance went, stolen by his own momentum.
His knees hit the floor, arm sling forgotten and his wound splitting anew.
Despite it, he barely cried out, mouth clamping shut.
‘I knew your grandfather,’ said the Bucka to the miner’s son.
Slowly, his shape rippled and reformed to patch the gap Jack had made.
‘It was I who saved him when he stowed away on a ship which sank near Falmouth Bay. In his last moments, when he thought himself lost, he asked me to deliver him, and did I not deliver him?’
‘For a price,’ spat Jack.
‘He paid it gladly,’ said the Bucka. ‘Tell me, what price would you pay if I gave you what you crave most?’
Jack raised himself and swung again. ‘Bastard.’
Kensa let her instincts guide her. The bone-handled knife was heavy in her hand, as though it knew its purpose.
Her only wish was to get the Bucka far away from Jack.
Neither saw her approach. She closed her eyes and slashed forwards, wildly.
She hit her mark. Of course, she doubted she’d do any real damage to the immortal man, yet flesh gave beneath her blade and she gasped in triumph.
Only, it was not the Bucka whose skin tore beneath her.
Her lids split open to find the Bucka had moved, drifted from one space to another as easy as vapour.
Kensa had not hit the Father of Storms. Instead, she had sent her knife straight into Jack.
She stared, numbly. Blood pooled anew from his shirt, already stained from the night prior. There was a small fresh gash on his arm, bubbling crimson. It was on her hands, she could not put it back in, she tried, there was—
‘It appears I do not need a hag to break the Pact when you can do it for me,’ said the Bucka cruelly. ‘Your duty is to protect these people, is it not? And look at you, look what you’ve done, witchling.’
‘I didn’t mean to!’
‘You never do and yet it happens nonetheless, doesn’t it?’
‘Yes,’ said Kensa breathlessly. How could she deny it? Her eyes were wide, growing wider, as she stared at the wound she had made. ‘Jack.’ She reached for him and yet hated to touch him, to make it worse, to hurt the one person she—
‘I’m all right,’ said Jack, clasping his palm over the cut and pushing Kensa’s hands aside, ‘I’m all right, look, see, I’m all right, it’s nothing.’
Her shock came and went, quickly replaced with rage. ‘You!’
Lurking behind Jack’s shoulder was the Bucka, his entertainment flashing with his bleached-coral teeth.
Kensa sidestepped her friend and stood right against the Bucka’s chest. This time she kept her eyes open and her bone-handled knife found its mark.
It was as though the Land beneath them came to guide her strike.
And unlike Jack’s failed punch, the Bucka could not escape it.
His eel-skin coat tore, as did the skin of his chest, sundered from stomach to clavicle.
Kensa’s wrist shook with the effort, heels anchored to the flagstones, tendons flexing as she pulled free.
Confusion took the Bucka’s lips. He put a hand to his middle. There was no blood. Instead, his wound lay open and pale, as though the blood within him had already gone to tide. Slowly, he began to leak seawater.
‘I wish it were that easy,’ encouraging, desperate, mad, he said, ‘Come try again.’
‘Kensa,’ warned Elowen, poised in the doorway, her fear palpable.
The Bucka asked her, invited her, and she knew it would make no difference.
One cannot kill the sea as one cannot love the sea.
As she struck once more and met his cold flesh, the small leak released a torrent.
The Bucka split apart. From his heart came a wave, as tall as Kensa, which flooded her lungs and slammed her back against the wall.
It was relentless, fixing her to the hard stonework.
She would drown here, in him, a mile from the ocean.
When her body weakened and her ears lost their last sounds in rushing water, it receded.
She hit the floor, chest flattening against the ground and chin meeting a hard edge.
Kensa palmed up and onto her rear, to find the room’s furniture washed to one side, every surface dripping with salt.
Jack coughed his ire and Elowen shouted her distress. It did not seem to register in her mind, for the Bucka was gone and Isolde had escaped and there was nothing Kensa could do to fix it.