Yellowcake (6 page)
I set myself to eating the cake, as the soonest-spoiling and the longest-eating. These were rich foods; I must eke them out, for who was to say that I was
not
in my own world, and missed from court, and parties sent out after me? It would not take Lewin Hawk long to track me to the tower, and thence to this place. I might be several days waiting, but all might not be lost, if there were a party of men against the witch.
The witch. The remains of her spell shuddered in my blood.
Ah, but I heard you.
I shook off the memory of her voice, her cold-white face. Death alone in prison I preferred to the thought of facing her again.
My fingers paused in their crumb-gathering. They remembered—my whole hands remembered—holding the chopped end of my love’s hair. A poor job the witch had made of it, all steps and jags and hackings. She had not snipped, composed, in cold revenge, but gone at it in a rage, unthinking of the consequences in her surprise. She had not heard me at all—she had known nothing of me and suspected nothing; whatever gift or keepsake she had found, whatever word my love had dropped, unwitting, that had betrayed us, had precipitated that act of violence on the girl—there was no forethought in it at all. Everything the witch said—I put aside my cloth full of crumbs on the stone—was some sort of lie.
The hair-bracelet glowed there, gathering and warming what little light there was. I picked it up, and in doing so loosed the hair-end I had tucked into the band after binding it. It sprang out and unwound three loops of the binding, with so much more energy than I would have credited the silky stuff that I gave it my full attention.
I held the bracelet flat on my palm. As if shyly now, the hair continued its unwinding twirl; then, when it apprehended that I was not afraid, with more confidence it drew itself away, freeing the loops entirely and—this startled me a little, but with wonder rather than fear, and I had no wish for it to cease—shook itself into a loose spiral of moving gold. The end of it sat up like a serpent’s head above its coil, seeming to regard me.
‘Go on, then,’ I said, for the sight of this movement and life had warmed me to hope.
In answer, the hair-strand made a most elegant leap from my palm. Its head stayed erect, but the coils fell to the filthy floor, and then the very tip flew at the lock of my prison door, and entered there the keyhole, taking after it a certain length of the gold. Within the chambers and workings it laboured a while, until a muffled clank sounded and the door loosened in the frame. The hair passed out the other side of the lock, its closer end lashing to follow, bright as an arc of water caught by sunlight.
I upped and went after it, out of my gaol-room. The hair kept close to grounds and corners. If it had not clearly been my love’s and my ally, I might have found quite sinister this line of light clinging and slithering ahead. Up the stairs we went, and around the square corner, and on. By the time I reached the upper door after it, the strand in its delicacy and enchantment had passed beyond it and lifted the weighty beam that made for a latch.
It led me through all the castle’s ways. Quickly, but never too fast, it preceded me, soundless and shining along cold hall and dank corridor, dog-legged up stair and down. At one place it leaped up, and noosed itself around my knees and drew me to the wall among the shadows, while across the doorway ahead of us strode the tall black-clad figure of the witch, her own iron-grey hair plaited in a crown about her head, her face coldly preoccupied. She walked on without hesitating, quite unaware of me and my guide. So much for her having felt my presence before.
We came to a tower door, which the golden strand negotiated with the same strength and intelligence as it had overcome other obstacles. Firmly it closed and locked the door behind us—I heard its smooth machinations within the lock as I waited on the darkened steps—and then by its faint light I walked up and around a dizzying long way, its golden zigzag fast to the wall corner beside my climbing feet.
We passed several doors, but the one where the hair-strand broke from its zigzagging and leaped to the lock had life behind it, in the form of my love’s weeping. I pressed my hands against the wood as the magic worked in the lock, and then the door gave and there I was, released into a room even dimmer and narrower and poorer-furnished than had housed her before, with my poor shorn girl a-weeping on no more than a lumpy palliasse, and none too fresh-looking at that, along one wall.
‘Come now,’ I said, kneeling by her. ‘Come, come. What can tears achieve, my dearest?’
I only glimpsed her tear-aglow face for a moment. Unburdened by her great hair, she flung herself up to me, weeping afresh and exclaiming into my neck. I lifted her—I
could
lift her now, without that rope restraining her to the ground—and carried her lightness to the arrow-slit window, and held her there for several moments of glorying, in my freedom from the witch’s penning below, in the sweetness and slenderness and live weeping warmth of my love’s embrace.
‘We must away, though,’ I said to her eventually.
‘Away?’ she said. ‘But how? How indeed came you here? Followed us on Goosestep? Oh, but I looked for you as we rode away—until she slapped me and told me keep my face forward.’
‘By spell and by sorcery I came,’ I said. ‘And not all that witch’s. We have a friend, my sweet. We have many friends in this castle, many strands of friends.’
She watched me smile, wiping tear-stripes from her lovely cheek. That friend of mine, I saw, had come to her unnoticed, and lay loose around her neck, drops of salt sorrow in its strands here and there like smooth-tumbled crystals in a cunning necklace.
I kissed her and stood her on her feet, and took her slim hand. Her freed hair sprang and swung in curls about her head and shoulders, lovelier than ever.
‘Let us go,’ I said.
‘She will prevent us, surely?’ But she followed me out the door and down the stair.
‘She will try, I am sure.’
I led my lady down, into the body of the castle. Now I knew my own way, and I took us to the place where I had last seen the witch.
Gently I covered my love’s mouth and whispered to her necklet: ‘Go, friend: find the witch and assemble your sisters against her.’
‘Hush,’ I told my love’s terror, and I held her hands down as the hair-strand unwhipped from around her neck and snaked away.
‘But what—?’
‘Follow,’ I said, and took her hand, and we ran swiftly and silently after the swift silent streak of magic that lately had been part of her.
It ran too swiftly for us in the end, out of our sight, but that hardly mattered, for ‘What?’ and ‘No!’ the witch cried distantly, and then ‘No, never!’ and then her screams, enraged beyond words and then fearful, then desperate from her struggles, led us on.
A golden light played against the wall, opposite the room she fought in. I stepped into that light, and drew my love after me into it, and held her to me with both arms, that she should see her tormenter overcome.
The room was a storm of golden hair. Through the beat and fog of it I saw the wooden beams of the witch’s loom, on which she had been winding my love’s hair as warp, and from which those threads now flailed and loosened. For the rest, for the hairs that had lain about the room in withy-baskets, they were up and about the woman, and those that could not reach her flew and fretted in the airs around, as their sisters bound the old horror in a golden shroud, as they masked her bony face and gaping mouth in shining gold, as they spun and cabled themselves and noosed her evil neck, and tightened, tightening her to silence, trapping the dead breath inside her and shutting the live air out. And the tighter they grew, the limper and quieter fell the witch, until she was nothing but a golden rag, laid to the flags on strands flung down like rushes, and rained upon, snowed upon, covered and blurred by falling strands of my love’s hair, swathes of the golden magic, of the power we had made together out of nothing more than our affections and our selves.
We rode home together, my love astride Goosestep, myself on the leery black, tamed by a harness of hair. We had buried the witch behind us, with stones on her head and heart and a golden net about her to keep her in the ground forever. Several strands we had kept aside, for the purposes of leading us to my father’s castle from this outland, and keeping us from danger along the way. The remainder of the hair had plaited and put itself away in the baskets, and these our horses bore as panniers.
Side by side we travelled, and if the forest ways grew narrow I fell back, so that my love should have the assurance of her sisters running ahead and her betrothed riding behind, as she went through strange country towards her new home, the hair that was left to her light upon her shoulders, soft beside her sun-kissed cheeks, and borne up and flying like so many guardian birds or butterflies, on any breeze happening by.
Well, in the town where these two beautiful daughters lived there was a fascinator, name of Gallantine.
He was neither young nor handsome, but he had no wife and he was as interested as any of the young men were in getting one of the girls—if not the rich elder girl, the more beautiful younger one. Whichever he won, he would be an object of other men’s envy—and even magic-men are not immune to wanting that.
Gallantine did all the things that those young men were trying. First he put himself regularly in the young women’s way, happening by outside their house just as they crossed from door to carriage, or arriving at the edge of the path as they made their daily park promenade. Tall and thin in his dark suit, he lifted his dark hat and lowered his gaze to their lovely feet as they passed.
On one of these occasions, seeing that the mamma’s carry-dog was suffering some kind of skin affliction, he struck up a conversation with her, professing more interest than he truly felt in the care of such animals. Afterwards he sent her a pot of a cream to apply to the dog’s skin. He had magicked the cream both to cure the lesions and to engender tenderness towards himself in any person who touched it. Which ended with my lady’s chambermaid developing quite a crush on him, while Mamma herself, who almost always wore gloves when carrying the dog, came no closer than being able to abide having Gallantine near, where before she had felt a natural repugnance towards his self-conscious bearing, his funereal clothes and his conspicuous lack of associates or friends. The two beautiful daughters, who thoroughly disliked the dog, no more noticed him than they noticed iron fenceposts or singular grass blades among the many.
Gallantine was thus driven to exert his powers more forcefully to impress himself upon the young ladies. By various subtle hand-wavings he managed an invitation to one of the mamma’s afternoons, and to hold the girls’ admirers at bay long enough to engage, first the older then the younger in several minutes ‘conversation’, during which each responded most politely to his observations on the weather, the present company and the pleasantness of walking in parks.