Yellowcake - Margo Lanagan [11]
A stone shelf ran low along one side of my cell, that might be seat or bed or place of torture—old shackles lay there, open, chained to the wall-stone. I went to it and experimented sitting; pains bloomed along my thighs and up my back, like lamps igniting blue and red. I drew my knees to my chest to explore the pains and stretch the muscles around them, maybe to ease them, and then I sat, a tiny cloud of breath and beating pulse in the lifelessness.
I still had my satchel at my belt; the witch had left me that, so little did she think of me. The comb inside was broken; the garnet once the centre of a full-blown garnet rose tumbled loose in the satchel-bottom, but this I thought was only from general rough treatment, not ill-will of the witch. The food—that was what would be of use to me. I put aside the comb-parts and the garnet, and the hair-bracelet and the lace, which was now stained with the grease through the cured-salmon cloth, and I took out the foods that had only been for my love to taste and sample, not to sustain her—witch-bread and witch-meat did that. The fish was squashed but not spoiled; the cake was gone to crumbs in its cloth; the stone-fruits I had brought green so as to leave them with my love to ripen in my absence, and give her pleasure of me though I could not deliver it day by day, and they were still green, by magic or by lack of time.
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