A Witch Alone (The Winter Witch Trilogy #3) (28 page)

‘I won’t do it.’

‘We could both be going to our deaths! Do you understand that?’

‘Yes!’ he shouted. His hands gripped my shoulders. ‘Yes, I understand – of course I understand. But
you
need to understand – how could I live with myself if I sailed away now, not knowing what happened to you? I tried to leave you once and it nearly killed me.’

‘But it
didn’t
kill you – did it? No one ever died from a broken heart. You cut yourself free once, Seth – you
can
do it again.’

‘Don’t ask me again,’ he said, his voice fierce. ‘Do you understand? And don’t you dare tell me what it was like for me to leave you. You don’t know what it was like. You have no idea.’

‘You left me!’ I cried. ‘Do you think that didn’t hurt?’

We stood for a moment, staring at each other in the biting wind. Then his face crumpled and I hugged him, hard enough to crush him, it felt like, my fingernails digging into the tough rubber of his sou’wester.

‘I’m sorry,’ he gasped, his voice hoarse. He pulled back and his fingers swept the wet, salt-draggled hair from my face. His eyes were filled with tears. ‘Why are we fighting?’

‘I don’t want you to die for me. Please turn back. You might have a chance.’

‘There’s no chance.’ Seth swept an arm out, gesturing to the vast grey waste of sea. ‘Look. I can’t sail back – it would take weeks, months, even with a working compass. Anyway, how would you get to shore without me? I’ve got no dinghy, you know.’

‘I could swim.’

‘Are you mad?’ He looked at me in disbelief. ‘You’d die!’

‘I wouldn’t die. That’s what this is all about.’ I closed my eyes, suddenly weary of the futility of it all. Of running, of waiting, of hiding. If my mother hadn’t succeeded in keeping my secret, how could I? ‘As long as I have witchcraft, I can’t die. That’s what my mother knew. That’s what she was trying to hide. That’s what the Ealdwitan knew – or at least some of them did.’

‘You can’t
die
?’ Seth’s face was blank with shock. ‘What does that even mean?’

‘I’ve no idea,’ I said tiredly. ‘I can age – clearly. And I can be very badly hurt, to the point of death. So maybe I’ll just carry on, horribly old, horribly crippled, until whatever spring feeds my witchcraft runs dry.’

‘And the people who’re bringing you here – is that what they want?’

‘I guess so. But I don’t know. I don’t know anything for sure.’

Seth only stared at me, his face white. And then there was a grinding, shushing crunch, and the boat ran gently on to a shingle beach.

Seth and I both turned, still in each other’s arms, and looked at the beach. My heart was beating like a drum and I felt Seth’s hand press over it, feeling my panic.

‘It’s OK,’ he whispered. But we both knew it was a lie.

In front of us was a black, shingle beach, studded with enormous rocks like teeth, and beyond that, tall black cliffs towering into the cloud. It was astonishingly beautiful – and the most barren place I had ever seen.

Seth lowered himself from the prow of the boat on to the black sand and then held out his arms. It looked horribly far from the deck to the beach and I stood for a moment, faltering on the deck.

‘All this – and you’re frightened to jump a few feet?’ he said.

I clenched my teeth.

‘I’m not frightened.’

Then I jumped. Seth steadied me on the sand and we looked around us.

‘What now?’ Seth asked. But before I could answer, a strange, hoarse cry rang out from further up the beach and we both whipped round, ready to face whatever was coming.

There was no one there. The beach stretched away, disappearing into the mist, empty of everything apart from rocks and breaking waves.

The sound came again – a low, resonant growl.

‘What is it?’ I whispered. ‘Where’s it coming from?’

Seth saw before I did and his laughter made an incongruous sound, echoing off the black cliffs.

‘It’s a walrus!’

He pointed and I saw it too, heaving itself off the rocks into the sea with that hoarse barking cry.

‘A walrus!’ I breathed.

We watched as first one, then another and another flopped into the water.

‘They are beautiful, are they not?’ A voice came from behind us, husky and cracked as if long unused. Seth and I wheeled round, the shingle hissing beneath our feet, and there, framed against the cliffs, was a woman.

Her hair was pitch-black and long, braided and coiled all over her head in intricate patterns, and her skin was very white – almost an eerie white. Bone-white, as if she hadn’t seen sunlight in many years.

But she stood now, in the cloud-dimmed light, and she smiled. Her lips were almost as pale as her face, but her gums beneath were red and her eyes were red-rimmed too.

She spoke again, saying something in Russian and then smiled wider, showing her red mouth, and said, ‘Welcome,’ in a Russian accent. ‘Ah-na.’ She said my name slowly, making two words of it, letting her tongue dwell caressingly on each.

‘Who are you?’ I said, my voice a whisper above the sound of the waves on the beach. I swallowed and tried again, louder. ‘Who are you?’

‘My name is Tatiana.’ She turned and nodded courteously at Seth. ‘And you must be the man, Seth. You are welcome too, though you will be the first – how is it?
Cuzestranec
,’ she said slowly. ‘One not of our kind.’

‘Outwith,’ I said uneasily.

‘Yes. You will be the first outwith to enter our kingdom. Come. Will you take bread and salt with us?’

I looked at Seth and he shrugged. Did we have a choice?

The woman turned without waiting for an answer and began to clamber up the cliff, moving at inhuman speed between the sharp black splinters of rock.

I took Seth’s hand and we followed.

We walked, following the witch across rocks, and then into forest. Her feet were bare, but she didn’t seem to feel the stones, or the pine needles, or the cold.

For the first few miles Seth and I kept up, but as the distance wore on we both began to struggle. Seth was limping badly, his face tight with pain. He’d forgotten his crutch and, at last, when we passed a long-fallen branch in the forest, he stopped.

‘I can’t keep walking on this leg,’ he said shortly, his words clipped with the pain and the effort of speaking. ‘I shouldn’t have left my crutch on the boat. Hey, wait!’ he yelled into the forest after the witch’s disappearing shadow.

The witch stopped. She didn’t return, but I could see her shadowy form far up among the trees, watching us. Seth pulled a penknife out of his pocket and began stripping away the leaves and twigs from the branch. At the top it divided into a fork and he whittled it out to make a curve. When he tried it, it fitted under his armpit. He made a face.

‘Not very comfortable, but it’s better than nothing.’

‘Come,’ the witch called urgently. ‘It grows dark.’

I looked up, through the tall slender pines, stretching to the sky. It was hard to tell beneath their shadow – only a dim grey light filtered between the needles, the sky almost completely obscured by an intricate pattern of branches that disappeared into the cloud. But it had grown darker since we entered the forest and, as the witch began to walk again, I heard the far-off howl of a wolf, and felt Seth shudder beside me. I squeezed his free hand.

‘Are you OK?’ I whispered. Seth said nothing; he gave a sharp nod. But I knew from his face and from the shortness of his breath that he was in pain.

On we walked. The ground seemed to be rising and soon we were in thick cloud, hardly able to see the shape of the witch in front of us. She’d become just a dark wisp, shifting from tree to tree. Beside me Seth stumbled, grabbing at my arm to save himself. He made an involuntary sound of pain as he recovered his balance and my heart wrenched.

‘Please,’ I said urgently, ‘let me try to heal it.’

He shook his head, a single movement, no words.

‘Then can I at least help with the pain? I could do that—’

But he cut me off:

‘No.’

‘Come!’ the witch shouted impatiently. At the sound of her voice the wolves howled again, the sound echoing mournfully through the cloud-wreathed trees. There were more of them now – different notes baying in harsh symphony with each other.

‘Come on.’ Seth gritted his teeth and began to walk again. ‘I don’t want to end up as wolf meat.’

The hours wore on and the forest grew darker, and darker, until at last it was full dark. It was colder too. The shrouding cloud did not lift, but now it was more like an ice mist and our breath made white ghosts in front of us, dispersing into the frozen fog. There was frost on the ground and my feet slipped on icy branches. But the witch ahead of us never broke stride, though she turned occasionally, exhorting us to ‘Come!’ over her shoulder in a voice that crackled with urgency.

I found myself wondering bitterly why they could pull us all this way in Seth’s boat and yet these last few miles had to be so hard. Beside me I could hear Seth’s breath, hear each hoarse involuntary whimper as he set his foot to the ground and the pain stabbed again and again.

At last I couldn’t bear it any longer.

‘Stop!’ I cried out to the witch. ‘Please stop! You’re killing him.’

To my surprise she did stop and turned, her face glimmering bone-white in the darkness.

‘Yes, we stop,’ she said. ‘We are here.’

I looked around us. There was nothing – nothing but the rough pine trunks and the cold, wreathing cloud.

‘Where?’ I said. I could hear the panic in my voice. Why had she brought us all this way, to the dark empty heart of the forest? The wolves howled and it sounded like they were echoing my plea, ‘Where?’

‘We descend,’ said the witch. She pointed.

I looked in the direction of her finger but could see nothing – then the mist cleared a little and in front of us gaped a narrow muddy track, disappearing into the earth. Its mud walls were fortified with felled tree trunks, holding back the soil. And in the centre was a dark opening, a black mouth in the cold, wet mud. A cold breath exhaled from the opening and it smelled of blood.

Bile rose in my throat – and if it hadn’t been for Seth I would have run, no matter how stupid it was, no matter that the forest was black and the place lonely, and the wolves howling all around. I would have run a hundred miles in the dark and the snow, with the wolves at my heels, rather than enter that place.

But Seth couldn’t run. He couldn’t even walk another mile. His breath hissed between his teeth and his hand in mine was cold and clammy with pain.

I’d brought him here. I couldn’t leave him.

‘Go,’ said the witch. Her voice was sharp now. There was no hint of invitation any more. ‘Descend.’

When we didn’t move, she put a cold hand in the small of my back and pushed, and I stumbled forwards on to the rutted muddy track, towards the blackness below.

W
e walked into the darkness, Seth and I in front, the witch following. As the tunnel began to descend I heard a sound from behind us and turned around. The mouth of the tunnel had closed, its jaws shutting all but silently. All of a sudden we were in the complete, velvet blackness of the earth.

‘Where are we?’ Seth asked in a whisper. It echoed long, as if there were miles of tunnels in front of and beneath us, each reflecting back his voice.

‘In the mines.’ The witch’s voice came from behind us. ‘A gulag named Kalya. You have heard, in your country, of the gulag?’

I nodded, forgetting we were in the darkness.

‘We were exiled, sentenced to be worked to death like the rest of the enemies of the state. But they underestimated our power. They confined us here together – and together, weak as we were, we rose up against our gaolers. We extinguished the lights, and without their sight they were helpless, and so we fell upon them in the dark.’

‘What did you do to them?’ I whispered. ‘And the other prisoners, the outwith, what happened to them?’

‘Nothing was wasted,’ the witch said. ‘And afterwards there was nothing for us above but death and persecution. So we sealed ourselves in the earth to wait for better times. Now, perhaps, these times have come. It is time for us to return to the surface, to make Russia ours again.’

‘How did you live all those years down here?’

‘Cruelly,’ said the witch; her voice sounded as if she was smiling in the darkness. ‘With suffering. But suffering makes you strong, little Ah-na. It is like fire; if you can survive it, you come out tempered, hard as clay baked in the kiln, or steel from the furnace. We have been tempered by the fire of our suffering.’

Suffering, suffering, suffering
 … The sound echoed back at us from the tunnels, hissing and sibilant.

‘Come,’ said the witch. ‘Walk.’

I felt her hand again, hard and cold between my shoulder blades, and I stumbled.

‘But I can’t see. How can you see in this dark?’

‘There is no need for
us
to see,’ she said scornfully. ‘But at first we used our magic to light the paths. So … if you must…’

I held out my hand and the whiteish glow illuminated the walls. Beside me I could see Seth’s face, his eyes huge and black. And behind us the beautiful, skull-white face of the witch. Tunnels led down and outwards – four, five branching off, maybe more. The witch pointed to one and said, ‘Go. Bread and salt awaits.’

I glanced at Seth and together we began to walk.

As we descended the floor changed from mud to rock. The walls were stone too, marked with the chips from a thousand picks. In places there were veins of strange crystals and in others the rock glowed with a phosphorescent light, picking up the glow of my witchlight and reflecting it back.

At last we came into a vast echoing chamber, huge, like a cathedral. I let the light flare up, holding my hand up above my head like a torch – but it barely pricked the immensity of the place. I caught sight of the tips of stalactites, the wetness glinting, but the roof itself arched into shadow.

In the centre of the room were a dozen or so large stones, each about knee-height, arranged in a circle around a pile of charred bones. Around the bones was arranged an elaborate ring of smaller stones in intricate, geometric patterns; some of them pebbles; others huge lumps of crystal; or half-split geodes, the jewel-like centres glittering in the witchlight. It looked like the set-up for a macabre camp-fire.