Chapter Twenty-nine Choice #2
When at last the Bucka’s hard grip released her, Kensa stood in a clearing.
Beneath her shoes were mud and roots, curved into a gentle sloping bowl.
Around her was a cage of hawthorn, too thick to allow her exit.
It was akin to being trapped inside a giant bird’s nest, with no exit or entrance.
She did not think she was in Portscatho or its surrounds any more.
This place was different. It seemed to exist and not exist, in time or outside it.
And though she could not see it, the sea was loud.
A rushing, thunderous sound, pulling on the salt in her veins and stirring her pulse to beat in her ears.
Overhead came a rattling movement as slowly, slowly, slowly the trees peeled back to create a circular gap.
Through it, stars blinked softness to the sky.
Until they were blotted out. A shape, a scurrying, crab-like shape which belonged to the hag.
It spidered into the clearing and, with a sound like keening, the hawthorn mended itself.
Kensa was firmly trapped with the creature she had made and with the Bucka, who watched from the treeline, serene and almost disinterested, as though he had forgotten tonight’s happenings would kill them both.
‘Give me the blade,’ said the Bucka, ‘and all will be as it should.’
Kensa’s palm was damp with perspiration and her knuckles stiff with the gripping of it. ‘It’s important, isn’t it?’ Yes. Because it was power – her power. Now that she’d accepted her role as wise woman, as the Pact’s keeper, the bone-handled knife was more than a simple weapon or tool.
‘I can keep the hag trapped in here and protect the village,’ continued the Bucka. ‘Give the blade to me, Kensa, and submit.’
It was not the first time he had spoken her name, a name meaning first, though it was the first time she heard it.
‘Why not take it yourself?’ No sooner did Kensa ask the question than she learned its answer.
It was said in a whisper, as though the Old Ways, at last, had come to greet her.
‘You can’t, can you? Because now I know it’s mine, it can only be given, not stolen.
’ And she realised, then, that the only way to kill the hag, to stop all this, was by the blade she carried.
No, she would not give it to him. Because in the giving would be giving up.
Accepting that she was no longer a protector, a healer, that she had failed and that every bad word ever aimed her way – from herself and others – was right.
‘Kensa—’
‘No,’ she said. ‘No,’ again.
She would not bend to him.
Slowly, the hag slunk around the clearing’s sides, hooking her hands and feet onto the hawthorn, head turning round as though on an axle. Next came the arching back, as it readied itself to pounce.
Kensa raised the bone-handled knife.
She was ready.
The Bucka made a chiding noise with his tongue and, whip-quick, the hag pounced.
Kensa was not whip-quick, she was not even quick.
In her weariness, she threw herself sideways and the hag still caught her, its broken hands latching onto her leg.
She kicked out, aiming a heel squarely in the hag’s head, which snapped at an odd angle.
Enough to grant her freedom. Eerily, the hag took its hands to its skull and clicked it back into place.
The bowled clearing shrank with each passing breath.
Kensa could see no way through the hawthorn.
When her shoulders hit the spiked wood, it blinked and lashed out with a sharp beak.
Within the branches were hundreds upon hundreds of cormorants, their blue-green eyes regarding her with glassy indifference, their bodies dark enough to mistake for shadows.
When she listened, she could hear their growling calls, as menacing as distant thunder.
Kensa tried to hack her way out. She did not want to die, she did not want to die like this. Yet her blade was for cutting flesh, not hawthorn, and her blows only chipped her latticed prison. It was one thing to agree to meet her final moments, it was another to accept it.
Kensa pleaded, ‘Don’t do this, Isolde; please, don’t do this.’
Unalive and unending in her hunger, the hag came walking, crawling, bellying towards her. There was nothing left of Isolde to reply.
The hag leapt again and, as before, Kensa was not fast enough.
Its biting hands clawed into her hair and pulled her head back.
A puckered mouth went for her throat, as though to rip it free.
Kensa screamed and lashed out with the knife, almost cutting herself in the process.
Her back hit the ground and the hag began to pull, wrenching her along the ground by her hair.
Roots bruised her back and her scalp prickled in agony.
With a twist that burned her shoulders, Kensa swung her arm up.
She could not reach the hag. She could only reach herself.
Kensa hacked at her own muddied tresses and sheared off a good fistful.
Reddish tangles fell about her and it bought her time and mobility enough to get onto her feet.
It did nothing to deter the hag, who sprang onto Kensa’s chest, arms wrapping around her neck.
She couldn’t breathe and stumbled forwards, into the hawthorn’s spikes.
From the trees, the cormorants’ biting beaks found them both, distracting the hag enough to loosen its grip.
Kensa was free, coughing, her head pounding fit to burst.
‘We can both go,’ said the Bucka. He spoke from the treeline, he was the treeline, his eel-skin coat moulded into the wood, his form no form at all. ‘Together we can leave this place.’
‘I don’t want to,’ said Kensa.
‘You will,’ he promised.
Hawthorn shrank again around her, pushing her closer to the hag. She slashed out with the knife. It caught the hag’s wrist, leaving its hand swinging like the lid to a jewellery box, revealing a wet stump.
‘I changed my mind, I want to go back,’ said Kensa, for even though it seemed selfish, she could not stand to be here without them, without the others, without her sister, without Jack. ‘I don’t want to be alone when I—’
‘To be first is to be alone,’ said the Bucka sadly, head bowed forwards as though in prayer. ‘You realised as much on the shore when the Morgawr died.’
‘No.’
She wanted to hear Elowen’s call, feel Jack’s pull, even Mr Skewes’s scorn. Whenever she had been at a death bed, she had provided comfort and she wished it for herself now. Anything other than sacrifice, anything other than solitude.
‘A guv kolon, deus tre,’ she sang to herself.
Oh, sweet one, come homeward.
‘KENSA,’ came a distant shout, her sister’s, as though she had raised it.
There were hot flashes through the hawthorn, a sign that the fire had spread, a warning that it was coming closer. Kensa was dizzy. Perspiration sheened her skin.
‘Elowen, Elowen, Elowen—’
Come find me.
Again, the hawthorn began to tangle, thickening around her.
The larger the fear grew in Kensa, the more knotted the trees became.
She was tired and knew that Death never tires, and it reached for her now, almost welcome.
The slobbering hag, briefly deterred by its injury, began its predatory approach once more.
‘It will be easy, I promise,’ said the Bucka, as though to persuade her and himself. ‘Close your eyes and it will be over.’
Kensa’s feet struggled to grip the earth, for the Bucka moved it.
He used his sway over water to push the trees closer around her and even pulled on the water within Kensa’s blood.
An internal tug that channelled every ounce of terror he had ever summoned within her.
It stirred the shame she harboured and the same ill feelings he had used to manipulate her, to persuade her to summon this hag.
Kensa realised, then, that the Bucka was not all-powerful.
He was using her, even now, as he had always done.
Theirs was the Pact between Land and Sea.
If he was the latter, she was the former.
Here, with soil beneath them, he could do little unless he did it through her.
Why, he had never really touched her. She had done everything.
The Bucka was nothing more than a shade she lent power to.
‘I am more earth than he is,’ she said, to herself, to him, to the binding hedge.
And the Land – and its thorns – answered her. Gradually, the hawthorn began to recede, pulling away from her with a slow, steady progress.
‘Kensa,’ said the Bucka, in warning.
She put the blade to her forearm and summoned a banishment.
He came behind her now, his mass as hard as granite rock, as brutal as the cliffs which could dash a head in two.
Here came the tide, here came the hag, jaw clicking open – impossibly open – and broken teeth ready to bite.
The creature’s weight was blindingly heavy as it leapt, feet trying to find a hold on Kensa, hand grasping at her neck where the asrai had marked her, bending down to feast.
The Bucka remained rooted, standing over her, watching as the tearing began, a pain that Kensa heard first and felt second.
Even then, adrenalin kept the worst at bay as she collapsed.
Onto the Land, the Land which held her, knew her, and would not be cowed.
She was the wise woman – and her wisdom was fierce.
‘There you are,’ shouted the Weaver, whose torch swung in a fiery arc, slamming into the hag’s head, forcing the Bucka several paces away and catching Kensa’s face, though freeing her nonetheless.
There was more fire, too, as behind Elowen and her father and Jack and Pious, came the flames which took apart the landscape.
The hillside was ablaze, the sky bleached with an eerie light as cloud and ash merged.
It was a battle and then it was not, too difficult to track and happening too fast.
Pious and Elowen raised Kensa to her feet. She found she could not speak easily. Her throat was beating agony into her blood. ‘The Weaver—’
It was too late. Slurps and a lapping persistence came from the hag, who crouched over the sheep farmer.
‘No!’ Kensa threw herself forwards and, with her remaining strength, plunged the bone-handled knife into Isolde’s back.
Pushed it right through to where its bitter heart lay.
And she thought on her teacher, on the lessons she had imparted, on the love she had for the older woman, on every silly joke shared, now lost for ever.
This was what she had tried to escape. Grief.
Why did it hurt this much? To lose and have to keep going.
How could anyone ever bear to love with the loneliness that came after?
She missed her friend. Life was harder now.
Couldn’t it be as it was before? Or did she finally have to grow up?
Snot and tears and blood slicked Kensa’s hands.
It was enough, it was enough.
To have been wanted.
There was little resistance in Isolde’s flesh, which sank away under such a blow. A gentle noise, a hum in a wounded chest, sighed from the hag. Then, it crumpled, folding down and forwards, broken face sliding into roots and earth, unmoving.
It was done, Kensa could sense it. Whatever sinister intentions had kept the hag tethered to immortality were gone.
She had given the hag her rest, at last. The Weaver, too, was dying.
His neck lay open and blood poured freely, pooling around his head in a red circle.
Pious swore loudly, speaking words he had once thought to give Sir George hours prior.
Kensa knelt beside the sheep farmer, put her hands over his wound and knew it was useless.
She could not heal this. Instead, she sang and she cried and she sang and he died.
And with him went the Pact.