‘You can eat,’ she said, watching me lick a bowl clean. ‘Well, the more you help out, the more food there is.’
And I did help. She chopped wood, I bundled sticks. She kneaded bread, I greased the tin. She rolled pastry for me to squish frills around raven pies and apple tarts. The small house was jammed with mouth-watering smells. Sometimes I thought about my mother, then the witch laid out a tray of parkin. The sugary crust glistened, coating my fingertips in sticky gold. I ate until only my stomach ached.
Winter crumpled to spring, spring opened into summer. It was hot, the shhh splash of water washed my ears. I followed the witch with her pail. She held up one hand and took a knife from her boot.
‘You can’t go any further,’ she said, carving a star onto an oak tree.
‘Why not?’
‘Too dangerous. There’s a cliff where the water falls into a pond. Children who stray there are never seen again.’
‘What happens to them?’
‘No one’s survived to tell. Some say they fall. They say the pond is the devil’s mouth — chews you up.’
She chomped, showing several teeth.
The star carved into the oak wept sap. I waited for her to weave back through the trees, bent over the bucket, water sloshing on the grass.
‘Don’t just stand there, lass, give me a hand.’
The snap of a stick, the rusty gate. Who’s that? Sometimes someone came to the house. Occasionally, they made it to the door, braving it past the stone cat and bird sleeping on the path. The witch got out the eggs and a jar full of crow feathers. She cracked shells to tell people their future, set fire to a feather and said, ‘Your husband will not fly far from home.’ Mostly, people came to cure a cough, make someone love them, or help them get to sleep. She crushed herbs into honey in a jar and accepted bags of flour and balls of twine from women with their worries packed into the bags under their eyes.
‘Was that a spell?’ I asked when they left.
‘If a spell is making someone sleep easier and I get what I need for doing it…’ the witch said, whisking the fortune-telling eggs into omelette. ‘Now, pass me the pepper.’
She smiled, putting her cackle back on the shelf with the feather jar. It didn’t always stay there long. When a visitor told us about raised taxes, illness or failed crops in the village she got ready for business.
‘Looks like we’ll be run off our feet, lass,’ she said, stitching chicken legs to a wild boar and letting it spit over the fire. She boiled sugar with blackberries, dipped in sweetbreads and left them to dry. I stuck little stalks into the tops. When the sugary purple coating was dry, I rubbed in the flour. I’d offer the purple fruit to our guests and watch their eyes grow, wide with amazement at the ‘plum’ that tasted of meat.
‘“That witch has a tree that grows meat,” they’ll say. “She curses chickens into hideous beasts!”’ she laughed. ‘They’ll be piddling themselves all the way home!’
‘Why’s that a good thing?’ I asked.
‘You’re too young to know.’
With each year that passed, I learned a little more. She told me the benefits of each herb, and how to cure a rabbit skin, but nothing about herself.
‘Were you always a witch?’ I asked. ‘When you were little, did you roll down hills and get grass in your hair? Were you like me?’
‘I was never little,’ she said, laying a cold hand on my fever. She folded a wet cloth onto my head, smoothing away sticky strands of hair. I shivered under a deerskin, soup-filled and sick. I patted her hand. She pulled away like it stung.
‘Sooner you’re better, sooner you start pulling your weight around here,’ she said.
Her scowl was too late. I’d already seen something that on a pretty lady would have looked like kindness. Over the years, I saw it sometimes, a glimpse of worry, amusement or pride at something I did. There, on her face, then snatched away.
The year I turned fourteen, I was sure I’d imagined it. The woman wasn’t kind. One day at a time, she was turning me from a girl into a witch. And I hated it. Everyone knew what happened to witches. Warts and moles sometimes came to the house attached to women afraid of someone getting the wrong idea. The witch poked warts with a flame, and they let her, less scared of the pain than what could happen otherwise. Yet still she talked about me the way she did.
‘Don’t look directly at the lass, she might give you the evil eye. When she was a baby she flew out of her crib. The devil’s playmate, born on a full moon.’
I looked down, cheeks burning. No one would look me in the eye.
‘Careful. If she doesn’t like the look of you, she’ll turn you stone,’ the witch said.
The stammering boy who came for a love spell dropped his smile and raced down the path past the stone birds, cats and clothes.
‘Why did you say that?’ I asked.
‘He’ll be running home telling stories,’ she grinned. ‘“Sin ugly,” he’ll say. “If you touch that lass, she’ll petrify your hand.”’
I gave her the sort of look people supposed would turn them to stone. As soon as spring came I’d run away.
Orange leaves were frosted to the grass. A slight woman crunched to the door in a rustling skirt. I looked out. Mother! Mother was coming to take me home, after all these years, just when I most wanted to go. The woman knocked, I ran, a half-limp, half-run. She was young, ash-blond wisps of hair frayed out of her bonnet like smoke. I could hardly recall my mother, but this wasn’t her. This woman was barely more than a girl. She held an infant in her arms.
‘Will you help me?’ she said. ‘Look.’ She unwrapped the infant’s sheet and held up his arm. Six fingers curled on one hand.
‘Can you do something?’ she said.
Even for a visitor, the old woman didn’t get out her cackle and hiss. Extending a finger, she stroked a small bump of bone on the baby’s forehead and sighed. She looked more woman than witch.
‘It’s a third eye! Fix him,’ the young woman said, ‘please.’
‘There’s nothing I can do.’
‘You take him, then. I can’t keep him like this. People will…’
She pushed the baby towards the witch. The witch folded her arms, not taking a thing.
‘You’re his mother,’ she said. ‘You need to do right by him.’
The woman cried then nodded. Holding the infant, she left with a whisper. ‘It’ll be alright, I know I can make everything be alright somehow.’
We found the bundle out in the woods. The white sheet stuck hard to the frost, the witch peeled it off the ground with a crack.
‘Not a pick on him,’ she said, holding the infant in her wrinkled hands.
‘Shall we bury him?’ I asked.
She shook her head, the way she did when we found the dead feral cat. And like the cat, she walked away now, towards the sound of the water, cradling the cold baby in her arms.
‘Get on with the kindling, lass,’ she said.
She weaved past the tree I was forbidden from straying beyond. I stroked the moss on the star carved into the bark and followed as quietly as I could.
The water hissed, throwing itself over the precipice, hammering the rocks in the pool. The witch placed the infant in the pool. I moved closer, my rabbit-skin feet crushing frosty leaves. She turned sharply, listening, always listening for footsteps. She saw me approach and didn’t say a word.
I stood beside her, looking up at the waterfall. The ivy on the rocks was green where no water touched it. Further down, splashed by falling water, it was white. Dandelions clung to holes in the cliff face, their flowers pale as bones.
‘It’s the water; something in the ground makes everything it touches turn to stone,’ she said, dipping a hand in the water and looking at her wet palm. No different to any other woman’s hand, just older. ‘It takes time, drop upon drop, year after year.’