Chapter Twenty-nine Choice
Chapter Twenty-nine
Choice
In the sheepcote, Mr Skewes bent forwards on his knees, heaving into the thick straw. He seemed thin. He seemed his age. It was hard to hate another person whose failings were worn so openly. Elowen swung her legs forwards, kicking through the dry grass, to where Kensa stood.
‘I thought you wouldn’t come,’ she said, then wrapped her arms around her sister.
Kensa could not speak. She had thought the same and yet, here she was, holding Elowen as tightly as she could.
‘I am sorry,’ said Kensa.
‘No, you came,’ said Elowen, tearful. ‘That’s what matters.’
The raging heat – a burning wall inching ever closer – mixed with the night’s warmth, pushed sweat down Kensa’s neck and between her breasts. Her dress, the same one she had worn to the funeral, stuck to her body uncomfortably. No darning would save it, no wash either.
‘I can never make amends,’ said Kensa, as she pulled back.
With sure movements, she grasped Elowen’s hand and pushed the bone-handled knife into her sister’s palm.
She wanted it gone. She wanted the guilt taken from her.
‘This should be yours, it should have always been yours.’ Confusion marked the fairer girl’s face, until Kensa continued, ‘You are the wise woman here. This role should have gone to you, not to me.’ And then a sob. ‘I can’t do this, I can’t.’
Elowen did not take the knife. Instead, her fingers remained slack and Kensa could not loosen her own grasp, lest the blade fall and be lost between them.
‘That’s not true,’ said Elowen.
‘It is true,’ urged Kensa. ‘You found the Morgawr. Isolde meant to choose you, she would have done, if—’
‘I don’t want to be a wise woman.’ Elowen frowned the same way their mother frowned, a thin line pleating her brows together in a pattern which would form a permanent crease with age, should they live beyond this night.
‘I’ve never been well, I could not have coped with the responsibility.
Besides, I don’t – and never will – want it. ’
Kensa didn’t understand and told her as much.
Elowen shook her head. ‘How could I heal people when I can’t even heal myself?’
‘You would have managed,’ said Kensa.
‘I didn’t want to and I don’t want to, that’s the point. You think I want to prepare salves and pierce boils? I’d much rather you do those horrible things, especially after how mean you’ve been to me,’ said Elowen drily. ‘Tell me, right now, do you want to be our wise woman?’
Kensa did not give her answer right away, though it came readily to her mouth, waiting to be spoken. It was hard to want, it was hard to admit to herself that, ‘Yes,’ she wished this was her calling, as though confessing the truth would deprive her of it.
‘Then you are, don’t you see?’ Elowen brushed the silly tears from Kensa’s cheeks. ‘There is no fate we don’t choose, for the most part. I refuse to believe otherwise and I refuse to take that knife.’
‘You’re good at this,’ said Kensa, sniffling, though she was not yet convinced.
‘Besides,’ said Elowen, ‘you’re not telling me anything Isolde didn’t know.
’ At her sister’s confusion, the younger girl continued, ‘We spoke on it, on what had taken place. She never asked me to be a wise woman and I wouldn’t have accepted if she had.
’ Elowen grinned. ‘She was a clever old bag and chose you for a reason, Kensa. It’s about time you chose yourself. ’
‘I … ’ At last, the new wise woman of Portscatho closed her own hands firmly around the bone-handled knife. Not all Elowen’s words had met their mark, though many had. The others would need to be thought on, turned over and polished as pebbles in her mind, if any future for thinking was possible.
‘I love you,’ said Kensa. ‘Even when I hated you, I loved you.’
‘I know that.’ Elowen smiled. ‘You’re mine – we’re each other’s.’
The smoke grew stronger, stinging their eyes. A small distance away, Mr Skewes was hurriedly scooping through the straw in an attempt to find his lost blade. Kensa’s eyes hardened when she looked at him.
Fire caught the sheepcote’s roof and licked at the ground beneath them.
Kensa, Elowen and Mr Skewes, who had finally retrieved his Coast Guard’s talisman, were pushed out into the open by the burning mass.
True to his word, the Weaver had pulled stone aside and freed Jack and Pious from the collapsed hut, though the latter was unsteady on his feet and his hair darkened with blood.
Kensa scanned Jack’s form with a fierce intensity.
His temple was scuffed with mud, the knee on his trousers ripped through and stained, yet he could walk.
On the sloping meadow in which they stood, bound with speedwell and sea thrift, was a crouched shape: the hag.
In its claws was an unlucky cormorant, the bird’s neck broken and its body victim to the monster’s appetite.
‘We can shelter here,’ said Jack, heaving Pious along with the Weaver’s help, as their small band fled to a gap in the hawthorn.
The copse tunnelled around a path, a small channel cupped by thorns, which acted as a shield.
Upon stepping inside it, Kensa could’ve been in the Morgawr’s throat with how constricting it was.
Its branches were thick with foliage and flower, their colours turned amber in the fire-lit night.
No large animal could easily get through and, should the hag wish to pursue them, theirs would be the higher ground.
Jack had a burning wooden beam in one hand, while the Weaver held Pious’s stolen pistol.
Kensa had a firm grip on her knife and Mr Skewes held aloft his own, for as much use as it was.
At first, the hag went straight for them, only to be repelled by the flaming torch.
It tried again and reeled back, screamed, its remaining hair catching and burning out, too damp to set aflame.
And then it vanished, scuttling away into the dark-not-dark, lit by the burning flames which had begun to creep towards their shelter.
A rustling, quiet at first, then clatteringly loud, shook the hawthorn.
‘It’s above us,’ murmured Pious, who held one gnarled branch for support. ‘It’s coming.’
The Weaver’s expression was a solid one. ‘Let it,’ he growled. ‘I’ll see it dead.’
Kensa surveyed the bone-handled knife. It no longer seemed an ungainly weight in her palm. Instead, it had become an extension of her. One she had finally accepted.
Jack pushed his way towards her and used his bulk to shelter her from the shaking canopy above.
She wanted to kiss him. She knew she’d never get the chance.
How many people would die here, tonight, if she let them?
Although the Pact would break with one life, Kensa was certain the hag would take far more than that until it was finally laid to rest. In the blade’s shine she saw her own tired reflection and a truth she had known for hours now.
Whatever need be done, she would do alone.
She would risk no one else. Of course, they – the others – would not let her.
The gallant Jack, the clever curate, even the skittish Mr Skewes, and especially not the bright, beautiful Elowen, would ever see her come to harm.
At once, the hag’s clawing hand slashed down to scrape Mr Skewes’s eye, eliciting a scream. No sooner did the hag strike than she disappeared in a shake of hawthorn. None could see where she – it – watched and waited.
In the tumult that followed, Kensa placed herself apart, further down the spiky tunnel. With her resolution came a strange unanchored sensation. She took one, last final look at Jack – cast in golden light, standing between her and the hell she’d wrought – and called to another.
‘Gerent,’ she said, using a name she had once heard her mentor speak, using the name she had seen engraved on the plaque at the old manor, using a dead name which held power.
She summoned him and he was summoned.
A pale hand, cold as sea, extended from the thick hawthorn at her side. Behind it was the Bucka, who beckoned her through a parting of thorns.
‘No one need pay for your folly,’ he said gently. ‘No one but you.’
The Father of Storms towered over her. Thin branches cast shadows against his colourless face, appearing as cracks in his visage. Her own breath flew up as vapour, despite the heat, purely from her nearness to him.
Kensa nodded, frightened, yet determined.
‘If you die,’ he explained, ‘the others need not.’
‘Are you lying to me?’
‘Isolde will take no one else if she takes you, I will ensure it.’
Kensa swayed towards him, to that enigmatic figure in an eel-skin coat.
A man who had plagued her dreams and glittered her nightmares.
Whose legend had scared her as a child and whose presence now marked her as grown.
There were shouts near by, her companions’ attention elsewhere, far from her and better for it.
‘You are the wise woman, are you not? Sacrifice is your nature,’ said the Bucka earnestly. ‘Come with me.’
It was too easy a choice.
Kensa put her hand into his and was pulled through the hawthorn, which parted for her and her alone.
Branches caught on her hair and her dress and her skin, though the scratches it left were shallow, the trees reluctant to pain her when there was further pain to come.
Kensa feared that should she release the Bucka’s hand, she would be trapped in a thorny cell for ever, held within the trees until she became them.
She heard her sister call her name, voices reaching through the clawing folds, then silence, as the branches closed behind her, as impenetrable as any barricade.