Yellowcake - Margo Lanagan [12]
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