Witches: Wicked, Wild & Wonderful (21 page)

There are always unwanted kittens.

The boy from whom I got the kitten suggested I choose one of a different color, in case she wanted to separate the memory of her old pet from her new one. He had eyes like my daughter’s but lighter, like cornflowers. He refused to look at me any longer than he must. I chose a ginger kitten, with clever eyes and unruly fur.

When the water and mud became very deep on my return journey, I held the kitten over my head. I treated my daughter’s gift as carefully as I would have treated her.

I climbed back into the tower with difficulty, the kitten dangling from my mouth the way its own mother might have carried it. And so, with my clothes full of mud and my mouth full of fur, I spilled into the second floor. I coiled the rope and hid it under the box of brambles I keep for firewood. I scrubbed myself and my clothes. And I said nothing of my journey.

“But where did he come from?” she asked, when I gave her the kitten. One finger tapped the scarred table just ahead of two determined, orange paws.

“We are like the stories,” I said, smiling. “We are the only good in the world, and the world appreciates it. It provides for us. He came up in my fishing net.”

The next day, my daughter sang again. It was a sad song, an ode to Utney, but beautiful nonetheless. It was the final clue needed by that little blue-eyed bastard to track us. I had made the mistake of mentioning I had a daughter “about your age” who’d lost her cat—and now, of course, he wanted to rut.

I was drying tomatoes and grapes on the balcony, waving a broom at gulls that dared swoop too close, when my daughter’s song stopped mid-note.

“Have you named your kitten?” the lusting cur called. The mud I’d tracked through the dry streets of town must have led him to the marsh, his eyes must have led him to the tower, and now his ears had led him to lounge beneath her window.

I imagined him clambering into our world and ripping the lovingly sewn dress from my daughter’s nubile form; stabbing her innocence with thrusts of his pimply, adolescent body, tossing her aside, bruised and soaked in seed and sweat and shame. It was why I was there, why I would always be there: so the world couldn’t happen to her the way it had happened to me.

To her credit, my daughter didn’t speak to the scum—she ran to me, and I met her on the ladder, her forget-me-nots staring wild. “Mother, there’s a boy outside!” she said.

“I heard him,” I said. “He’s after your hair.”

“He only asked about my kitten—”

“Quiet! Take Sunshine to the kitchen and stay there until I come for you.”

I had never raised my voice to her, and she began to cry. It couldn’t be helped; I could soothe her feelings later, after I’d removed the threat.

“I only wanted to look at her,” he gasped, drooling and coughing as I pulled the knife free. Scarlet life fountained into the morass of human waste that marked the northern face of the tower. This year, the winter storms could feed on his blood with our refuse.

I placed him with the harpsichord builder and the glaziers, but I hated him too much to leave him buried in peace. I hacked apart his body and spread it for the eager gulls. I kept his eyes, because of his final lie.
You’ll look at the inside of a cupboard,
I thought.

When I’d finished bathing away the traces of my ordeal, I descended to the kitchen. My daughter crouched by the hearth, red-eyed and nervously stroking Sunshine.

At the time I thought she hadn’t seen what transpired, what her mother had done.

But sometimes I wonder.

My daughter’s sixteenth birthday arrived in the hottest days of summer. When I revealed the attic, the fifth floor of the tower, I expected one of her questions, but not the others.

Windows ringed the room as with the third floor library, every one of them wrought in fantastic rainbows of color. Light streamed in, rays of blue like her eyes, gold like her hair, orange like her growing kitten. The scenes in the windows would have cost me more than I could afford if I had paid the glaziers instead of putting them to rest by the driftwood. Fairies and unicorns, noblemen on a fox hunt, a castle haloed in a striking sunset . . . these I’d commissioned for my daughter. It was a room fit to live a life in.

“Is this—just for me?” she asked. Her eyes shone with the realization of how much I loved her.

“Yes,” I said.

And then she ruined it, tore this precious moment apart by asking me if, for her birthday, she could go out into the marsh—into the squelching mud, where we fished only in the turbulent winter to avoid ingesting our own refuse, where frogs and mosquitoes filled stagnant pools with their slimy spawn.

Where I buried the unworthy criminals who would have prevented her paradise.

My ultimate gift wasn’t enough for her.

The finality of my answer cracked her belief in my love, and I watched trust bleed out of an innocent heart. I retreated to the kitchen.

Loudly, she wept above in an ocean of colored light, nestled in folds of her silken hair; quietly, I wept below on a hard stool, clutching a jar containing two withered eyes. I stared at those unseeing lumps of flesh and directed my hate at them. The eyes, and the world.

It thirsted for my daughter, but I wouldn’t let it hurt her.

I take some responsibility for leading Cornflower to the tower, but not Dirt. That foul tom came of his own volition.

I could barely hear my daughter singing, from where I cut shallots in the kitchen, and when she stopped I assumed she was napping again. She’d been sullen those last few weeks, curled in the window seat or reading on her new bed, a hammock strung from the exposed rafters.

I happened to run out of rosemary. I climbed to the balcony, intending to cut some, but at the sound of a male voice, I froze. He was pleading, but I couldn’t hear the words clearly. I edged onto the balcony and crouched while I strained to hear their conversation.

“But don’t you want my hair?” she asked, doubtful.

The boy laughed, a muddy jackal baying for her blood, but of course she didn’t know. “I’ve got my own, lass. Whyever should I want more?”

“Well, it’s golden, and there’s an awful lot of it,” my daughter said. “Mother says you’d find it valuable.”

She must have shown him; he whistled. “Wowee, miss! I could just about climb up on that!”

“You mustn’t climb up! Mother would be furious.”

“I shall visit again tonight, then, when she sleeps,” the arrogant little cockerel promised.

I stomped up the ladder, my anger echoing through the wooden boards of the third floor, the fourth, and then pounding via my fist into the trapdoor of the fifth.

“Daughter!” I called.

Some whispers and a short commotion of bare feet later, she pulled the trapdoor open.

“Are you talking to someone?” I asked.

“No,” she quavered. The lie was a fly in cream, piss on snow. Abominable.

I glanced out the window, but the rat had gone. For a moment, I couldn’t even breathe, and then I lost my temper. I screamed at her, spit flecking her terrified face, until I collapsed in sobs.

I didn’t beat her. I never beat her. She only tripped on her own hair as she backed away from me, and split her brow upon the corner of a table.

My daughter, my perfect, precious, innocent daughter. I made her promise never to speak with strangers again.

“They lie, poppet,” I said, smoothing her hair. Tears coursed down both of our cheeks, hot and salty like the stagnant marsh beyond our tower walls. “And their sins are contagious. See how you lied to me today? You’ve never lied to me before,” I said, hoping it was true, sure it was true. “And look what’s happened now.”

“I’m sorry, Mother,” she said, and we embraced, my gnarled, fire-scarred claws stroking her golden silk, her soft hands petting my misshapen baldness.

I was waiting there that night when the boy I thought of as Dirt came back. He never saw me. In the night, I was sure my daughter also was blind to my knife slitting his gullet or scooping out his eyes.

But sometimes, I wonder.

I didn’t find out about the third boy until early autumn, when the birds flew away from the marsh and the brambles lost their leaves. My hearing’s not what it was and I was prone, especially in the cooling weather, to impromptu naps in my chair by the fire.

One gray morning, while my daughter was safely tucked away in her room, I’d taken my collection from the very back of the bottom cupboard. I met their stupid gazes with smug satisfaction. Insipid blue, conniving brown.

But she was mine again. She adored her cat, perhaps not so much as she’d once adored Utney; she played all her instruments, not just the lyre, and her own voice soared in accompaniment; and she helped me with enthusiasm in the kitchen and garden. Every afternoon we had tea together in the kitchen before she climbed the ladders to the music room while I napped.

I noticed a darkness in her, a hesitance to believe what I said until she’d thought it over, but this I suspected would fade with the removed influence of the village vermin. Her songs, after all, now praised the sun rather than the storm, explored questions of joy and not despair. My favorite was a ballad detailing the playful love of the sleek otters we sometimes glimpsed from our windows.

Rain crawled in from the bay, soaked my tired garden and sluiced dust off of the window panes. It rejuvenated everything but my badly healed bones. It wasn’t enough for the townsmen to thrust me into the fire—I was beaten first and bent over a horse trough for their whims. I’ve always taken the potent marsh skullcap with my tea to dull the pain brought on by inclement weather, but when I uncorked the jar, I found it very low.

Suddenly I understood my daughter’s love songs and my frequent naps.

She
made my tea.

I switched our cups that day.

I thought the boy would use the balcony. It was closest to the ground, and the railings provided an anchor for rope. I confirmed it by checking the pumpkin vines where they hung down in a cascade of leafy tendrils. Some of the leaves were bruised.

“I’ll save you,” I said, to my daughter, or the pumpkins, or myself.

A search of her room turned up no rope, so the boy would have it. Sure enough, he tossed a coil up, and I bent over and knotted it for him, my twisted face hidden behind the yellowed tomato plants and pea trellis.

He spewed lies between breaths as he climbed.

“My father says he’ll help build a cottage for us just north of the farm. It won’t be as beautiful as your room here—”

That part was true, at least.

“—but we’ll be happy. And I asked because you said, but I already knew he’d let you bring Sunshine.”

His face popped up over the stone rail, and I stabbed him in the throat.

Hadn’t the boy I loved once made those same promises? And hadn’t he blamed me when I could save one of his young brothers from the fever but not the other? Hadn’t his mother then spit in my eyes and accused me of murder, of witchcraft?

He dribbled blood from the cut, a mere finger’s width that leaked as he coughed and swallowed and coughed again. It was nothing then to stomp on the fingers of one hand while I stabbed the other. The lying bastard tumbled down. One of his legs snapped at the wrong angle. Unfortunately, the soft peat saved him from further injury.

Rain stung my scarred head as I dangled over the edge, lowering myself down the rope with even more difficulty than last time. My bones ached, my arms trembled with the effort, but at last my feet sank into the mud.

“Monster,” he rasped, and when he coughed, he sprayed red at me from his wound. “You beat her, cage her. Ellis said.”

Ellis must have been Dirt’s name. That was how this green-eyed turd had come to stalk my daughter—his rat friend’s word.

I howled like an animal, and it crumbled into the words, “I love her!”

“No, I love her. You’re a witch,” he croaked.

He hit me as I crawled onto him, but I didn’t feel it, and his wounds weakened him. I knelt astride his chest, pinning his arms down with my knees.

And this time, with one fist wrapped in his black hair, I cut out his eyes before I killed him.

I dragged his worthless corpse to the log in the marsh.

I cleaned up and started supper.

And my daughter woke in her chair.

“What time is it?” she asked, stretching.

“It’s nearly supper. You’ve tired yourself playing the flute,” I chided. “Perhaps you should go back to the cello for a few days—you won’t have to hold it in the air.”

She held her breath as she realized the boy had come calling while she slept. Her innocence was only too plain. She supposed she could hide the truth from me.

I thought with great hubris that because she couldn’t hide, she also couldn’t seek.

For days my daughter still sang love songs, but they became increasingly forlorn. They were no longer of happily-ever-afters, but of unrequited love. The October rain drove me to a drowsy state, all aches and naps and mourning for the sunshine, but not my daughter. A song would no sooner begin than she would change her mind; she would sometimes skip supper because it wasn’t to her liking.

Finally, her mood roused her to clean the tower. She started in her room, shining every individual windowpane, dusting the rafters, sweeping away fallen grit while Sunshine pounced at the broom. She oiled the instruments of the music room, categorized and then alphabetized the library. She scrubbed the tub and covered the garden in compost. Then she started in on the kitchen.

While I snored in my chair, she found my collection. I didn’t see it, but I can imagine. She would have been repulsed but curious at the blue eyes. She’d never seen a mirror, but I’d told her what color hers were. The brown ones might have given her a clue. And when she found the green ones, she woke me with her screams.

“You killed him! You beast, you killed him!”

I started in my chair, my eyes scanning the room for the intruder before I realized my hysterical daughter was shouting at me. She dropped the glass jar, but she was only kneeling, so it didn’t shatter; instead, it simply rolled across the flagstones, the eyeballs searching for her as the jar spun.