Chapter Twenty-eight Like Father, Like Daughter #2
The whip-quick flames were too bright to look at, red and angry, while the smoke was bitter on Kensa’s tongue.
Stones toppled, bellied inwards. Wooden beams snapped and burning thatch rained down onto the six standing inside the hut.
Jack heaved the bar from the door and pushed Elowen through first, Mr Skewes following with the Weaver, and Kensa not far behind.
With an aching groan, the hut collapsed.
Stonework tumbled down. Rubble caught her back and almost sent her prone.
A scream – Kensa’s own, she realised – for not everyone had got out.
‘Jack!’ She couldn’t lose him. He was the only thing she had left, the one thing in her life that felt like hers. Hoarse, smoke reaching into her lungs, she called to him. ‘Jack?’
Elowen tried to take her wrist. Kensa yanked it free.
Her bruised hands were on the fallen masonry.
She began to dig and heave stone away, muscles straining, mouth cracked and dry with dread.
Her own pants deafened her. No reply met her calls.
Jack, Jack, Jack. She could not relent, she would not stop until she knew if he was alive – or dead.
‘Come on,’ snapped Mr Skewes, wrenching Elowen to the shelter offered by the sheepcote. It was only the Weaver who stayed behind. None could say where the hag was. Under the debris, perhaps? With her Jack—
‘Stop,’ said the Weaver, and he must have called it a hundred times and Kensa not heard him. He closed his fingers over hers and paused them. ‘If the remaining stone falls, it’ll kill them – if they’re not already … well … ’
Kensa shook her head. Yet her actions stilled. ‘Jack,’ she repeated, and he answered, finally, muffled, at a bulge in the broken hut’s edge.
‘Kensa.’ A heaving, ragged cough. ‘I’m here, we’re all right,’ he added unconvincingly. ‘It’s only caved on one side and we’re alive, though we’re trapped and the hag’s gone.’
‘Is Pious—’
‘He’s breathing,’ said Jack.
‘I can get them out,’ said the Weaver, pushing Kensa aside. ‘I made this home and I can unmake it.’
Fire spiralled across the heaped thatch, which had fallen and folded as ungainly as an unmade bed. Charred air coiled from its growing mass and thickened, flying as cormorants across her body with the same menace as the ever-circling birds above.
Behind her, Kensa heard a cry. It came from Mr Skewes.
‘Good,’ she said and hated herself for it.
‘Good,’ again, because it was not good and she was not good and what she’d said in the hut was true.
She had no right to be a wise woman. This was a role she had stolen and Portscatho – and Cornwall with it – would suffer.
Yes, she was her father’s daughter and, yes, she was as much a thief and a killer as he was. Now she could finally admit it.
A flame caught her dress. It dallied at the black hem and began to raise it.
She did not put it out. Kensa sensed the hag’s presence as she might her own pulse.
She had made this creature, had she not?
Poured herself – the worst parts she carried – into it.
In her attempts to stave off grief, she had crafted a monster that knew her better than anyone.
Perhaps that was why it went after Mr Skewes.
At the sheepcote’s entrance, the hag paused, its black and bird-like eyes meeting Kensa’s, waiting, as though for instruction.
Do it, she thought and stole the impulse back in a second, but a second was all it took.
Isolde crawled inside. Kensa could not speak.
Her feet were rooted to the ground, while her back was warmed by the blazing night and her own slow burning.
There was another witness to her failings.
He stood behind one hawthorn bank and watched this take place.
His eyes, of course, were teal. Glowing sparks rose around him, while smoke encircled his wrists and slid along his jaw.
She expected him to be grinning through the ashes, yet he seemed as lost and vacant as she was.
Inside the sheepcote, a man was fighting for his life and Kensa could only listen as the Bucka listened.
If the Pact was to break tonight, would this be the death to do it?
She wanted to scream. Instead, it was her sister who did.
Elowen.
To think Kensa had lost her own father and here she was about to take another’s.
‘Not like this,’ she said to herself, to the Bucka. ‘Not like this.’
That low fire on her clothes dampened. Was it her own will that had done it? She did not know, for the Old Ways worked in balance and she was only unbalance now.
In the sheepcote, Elowen hid behind Mr Skewes, whose dagger was lost. Beneath their feet, straw was shaped in lumps and blotched with blood.
There was a deep cut along Mr Skewes’s face and chest, which bled freely.
As for the hag, she was low to the ground, crouched as a dog, legs poised and bent and ready.
Kensa had no weapon to throw. And then she did, she always did.
Kensa reached into her pocket for the hagstone she kept there, the one which belonged to her father.
If she threw it now, she’d never find it again.
There were some things worth losing. She hurled it, hitting the hag’s head at the same time as it leapt forwards.
The blow knocked her off course, sending her tumbling into the straw, the small holey pebble lost with her.
Slowly, the hag palmed itself to standing and turned to face Kensa, who withdrew the bone-handled knife.
When the hag’s eyes rested upon it, there was a shiver, a trembling which gripped the creature and spread from knuckle to tailbone.
Fear. Hadn’t the hag done this earlier at Trewense Manor and the cottage, coiling into itself and away from the knife?
Kensa considered the cormorants, who had tried to pluck this very blade from her belt when she rode with Pious.
There had to be a reason.
The hag retreated, circling Kensa and bounding out the door, into the darkness.
No shot had truly harmed the ever-walking creature.
Perhaps the bone-handled knife would stop it where nothing else had.
Only, how could the weapon succeed in Kensa’s hand when it belonged to another?
This duty and this right and this role was Elowen’s, and Kensa never should have taken it.
If there was a time to right a wrong, to give another her destiny, it was now.