Yellowcake - Margo Lanagan [10]
I could not take all the hair, and I could not leave. I sat up and dashed the last cold tears from my eyes, and of one of the several strands caught in my fingers I chose the strongest and brightest. Back through the labyrinth and tangle I followed it; I found one end, and from there looped it loose around three fingers, and wound it up, the full length, becoming a brighter and a solider ribbon, knuckle to knuckle, fattening, gleaming, scented with her loveliness.
When I had all of the strand, I bound it into itself and tucked it, narrow and bright as a bracelet made to the measure of her small wrist, into my belt-satchel with all the gifts I had brought her: the foods from the palace, a piece of fine lace I had bought her at market, the jewelled comb.
‘Well, this is pretty.’ The voice was cold and clear as October mornings.
I sprang to my feet. ‘I did not hear you.’
‘Ah, but I heard you.’
Never had there been a crueller contrast than the sunlit spillage about my feet with the tall woman in the edge of the shadowed wood, white-faced above her black riding-garb, her hand like a knot of bones in her stallion’s reins, himself night-black and leering.
‘I heard you long ago,’ she said, ‘when first you threatened to besmirch my lily. I heard you scrambling and your fondling fingers. I knew exactly and from the beginning what you sought. And that is all that matters: that you should not have it.’
‘Why not?’ said I. ‘Why should I not have her, as my wedded wife? I am a prince, one day to be king of all lands east of here. Am I not man enough to husband her?’
She had been surveying the hair, but she looked up at me, and gave a faint snort. ‘That girl is part of such machinations, boy, your courtly politics are but a May dance, but a nodding daffy-dilly, beside them. Tut-tut! Such a mess you have made.’ She shook her head over the hair again. ‘It will be much less easy to bear away now.’
In the instant I glanced down at the hair myself, she was dismounted and at me. In three strides only she covered that impossible distance—I counted them even as they took no time at all. She pressed some rasping cloth or spell to my nose and mouth, that caught in my throat and closed it; she was muttering in my ear her witch-language; she was strong, all iron and leather. But I barely had time to realise I could not fight her before I was gone insensible.
I woke immured in stone, behind an iron-barred door. I had been installed here who knew how long ago; who knew how long the witch’s spell had lasted? But all my limbs had forgotten themselves, so long had I lain. I could not tell how they were disposed. But as I woke, as I became myself again, a thread of voice sounded in my memory, a strand of sweetness, whispering: Everything she says is some variety of lying. The trick—I found my arms and pushed myself to sitting on the gritty flagstones—the trick is to look to the side of what she says, and find the truth there.
I was not in the round tower, but a larger place of stone. Poor light, inlet by not much more than arrow-slits, showed me a stairway leading up, turning a square corner and continuing. Was this the witch’s castle? Did she prowl above? Or was this only the place she left her captives, to rot as they might, to scream at the deaf stone, the unheeding forest outside—or the sea, or the mountain steeps? Who could tell?
‘Am I imprisoned alone?’ I called, and no one answered. I crawled to the bars and knelt there listening, but there was no breath or cough or shifting of other persons. Silence poured thick into my ears, such nothingness as might still the very blood, if listened to for too long.
I pulled myself to standing; I was bruised but not in any way broken. I had been flung, perhaps, over her stallion’s haunches, and carried sack-like some considerable way. For days, for months, who knew? Who knew I was not in some other time entirely, in some other enchanted place from which I might never return to my own palace, with its own cells that seemed from here such amiable places, the guards with their