An Obstinate Witch

by E M Graham

  ‘A little light, perhaps?’ Trevor was almost jumping on the spot. ‘Come on, witches, make yourselves useful.’

  I heard the unzipping of Fergie’s satchel and rustled as she dug deep inside it, then a small flare of light. She held the smallest oak branch, not more than ten inches long with its end burning brightly. Trevor was already urging us forward.

  ‘Give me the light,’ Trevor said. ‘I can smell the way. Hurry, slowpoke, ye don’t need to put lipstick on.’

  ‘Shut up, goblin,’ Fergie muttered as she rooted through her bag till she found what she was looking for. She placed her satchel around her shoulder again, but I noted that she hid her hand from my view, and she met my eyes with an almost guilty glance. ‘What?’ she asked, around a mouthful of Mars bar.

  I shrugged and shook my head. I could not have eaten a morsel, my stomach was in such tight knots. We had actually crossed dimensions into the land of the Ice King – I was still stunned about this and trying to wrap my head around the fact. Hugh had told me this was practically an impossible feat, assumed I could never, ever do this on my own. He’d wanted to wait until the stars were in alignment or the political situation was auspicious or some such. If I’d waited for Hugh, we wouldn’t be here right now.

  Of course, Hugh’s way probably wouldn’t put anyone in danger. I closed my eyes against that idea. I was steeling myself for the battle to come, and there would be no Hugh to the rescue this time. He’d made that clear. Just when we had admitted to ourselves, and each other, that the attraction existed, and we were finally in a position to act on it. Just when...

  I had to turn my mind away from those thoughts. I had to think of what was happening here and now.

  Trevor had already started to leap forward through the rock passage, his long nose quivering as he found the route. It was strewn with boulders and large chunks of ice and very large ancient bones, so it wasn’t easy going. Fortunately for us, the oak branch was spelled to Fergie and if he got too far away from her, the light would dim. He was forced to wait for us and keep pace.

  The passageway was narrow and low, hewn from the bedrock of the mountain, perhaps by years of water action, or perhaps by living creatures. It was hard to tell in the light of the single flame bobbing with the goblin’s impatient dance through the tunnel.

  ‘Slow down a little,’ I told him. ‘I know we haven’t got much time, but I’m going to twist an ankle or worse at this speed. Then we’ll be even slower.’

  He did slow down again, just a little. I could hear Fergie rustling inside her bag again, and I envied her appetite, I couldn’t think of eating.

  I was beginning to sweat, as my heart raced and my stomach roiled. Was it a fever coming on?

  We weren’t alone in the tunnel system, either, judging from the sounds coming from our left and right, roars of fearsome beasts, and slithering, the rustling sound of scales on rock. Fergie and I held closer together against the rank smell coming from some of these passages.

  ‘What is this place?’ I whispered.

  ‘Smells like dragons,’ Trevor called back over his shoulder. ‘That’s what I’d use it for, if I was the Ice King. Sounds like them too.’

  There were many twists and turns in the tunnel, even as we steadily climbed up, and soon it began to branch out to the left and to the right. It was a maze, a labyrinth, the entire base of the mountain appeared to be honeycombed right through, but Trevor led us through them without hesitation, muttering under his breath as he did. He was like a beagle on a scent, if he had a tail it would be sticking straight out.

  Perhaps it was being underground and in a strange land, or perhaps it was the physical effect of interdimensional travel, but my stomach was roiling and nauseated. Fear was rising in me, and on its heels doubts were coming in fast and furious.

  The goblin was far too eager to reach the Court. What was Trevor’s game? Had I been a fool to trust him? Yet Margaret did... but maybe I was being naive in trusting her, too. Maybe this was an elaborate way of getting rid of me, leaving the playing field open for her without competition. Maybe all her talk of me being her protégé was just a load of bull, and she really was the evil witch of legend. Perhaps she was even planning to sell us to the Ice King, in return for God knew what favours that she would use to further her power in land of the Kin.

  21

  ‘STOP RIGHT HERE,’ I growled, reaching out and grabbing him by the scruff of his ragged shirt. His scrawny neck was exposed as he dangled in my hand, kicking and squealing, but I held fast. The torch in his hand wavered and flickered, yet he didn’t let it fall. ‘What are you not telling us?’

  ‘Let me go!’ he squeaked. ‘I don’t know what you’re on about.’ He tried one last mighty boot to my knee, but I straightened my arm. He couldn’t reach me.

  ‘There’s something off about this! Have you been here before?’ I asked him, looking over at Fergie. ‘Why didn’t you tell us this? What is going on here? What have you and Margaret got planned?’

  ‘You’re mad!’ He sputtered, the spit reaching my cheek even from this distance. I shook him hard.

  ‘Tell us,’ I commanded. ‘Now. You’re taking these tunnels like you grew up in them.’

  The goblin fought like a frenzied cat but I wasn’t letting him go.

  ‘I’ve never been here! I’ve got a nose, I can smell the way up. My nose works properly, not like your inferior little buttons. Margaret let me come because how else were you going to find the way in?’

  And he could be speaking the truth. My mind and body were in such turmoil that I couldn’t think straight. I shook my head to clear it. My hand let go of him and he landed with a satisfyingly hard thump.

  ‘Ow!’ He stood up and rubbed his rump. ‘Ye couldn’t find the entrance to the mountain,’ he began, furious. ‘Ye couldn’t smell the path in like I could. You need me, that’s why I came. If it wasn’t for me, you’d still be waddling around at the foot of the mountain. Ye’re too stupid...’

  ‘Shut up already!’ I cut off his insults and blocked his way up the passage. ‘So, yes, you might be right, we needed some assistance. But what are you getting out of it?’

  He blinked up at me, his jaw half open.

  ‘You wouldn’t be helping if it wasn’t worth it to you,’ I reiterated. ‘So, why? What’s in it for you?’

  Now I’d said the words, I couldn’t believe I hadn’t demanded the answer to this before. Even from my short acquaintance with the goblin, I knew he’d never do anything as a favor for another creature. He always had an angle, some way of profiting from anything that smacked of a kind gesture.

  What the hell had I been thinking, back in Scotland, as I allowed Margaret to sweep us up in her plans, and had gone along with it without a backwards glance? Even to the point of mixing up Fergie in this, perhaps endangering her life. My friend, who had vowed never to get mixed up with Kin again, forswearing her future.

  What had I done? I could almost taste the vomit in the back of my throat.

  He glanced up the passage. ‘We haven’t got much time.’ His voice was a thin reed against the stone walls. ‘Margaret said you only have a couple of hours before the power starts to wane, and you might be stuck here for a long time.’

  ‘I’m prepared for that,’ I replied, calmly now, even though my nerves had been building and the tension was knotting my guts the whole time we’d been in this dimension. At this point, I was even prepared to leave again without my mother, for my stomach was roiling and I had a very bad feeling that something nasty was brewing. Was it foreboding? I didn’t know, but I wasn’t going to take any chances. All I knew was that something was terribly wrong. ‘Answer my question. What is she giving you, what did she promise you?’

  He sighed and hung his head. ‘It’s my chance to travel and see the world.’ He rolled his weird goblin eyes, first left to Fergie, and then over to me. ‘That’s why I’m here with you,’ he wheedled. ‘Margaret knew you two would never make it thr
ough the maze. I’m here to make sure you get to your destination, and I get to travel to a land that I’d never see, elsewise.’

  In a strange little goblin way, that made sense. His kind had a rotten place in life, the runts of the super natural beings. They had no magic, they were forced to dwell at the bottom of the heap in social terms. And with their distinct physical appearance, goblins couldn’t even disguise what they were. They were born to be pathetic, to live in poverty and sewers. No one would ever choose the goblin’s lot in life, and perhaps their circumstances turned them into the nasty spiteful creatures that they invariably were.

  One could almost, if one was a good person, feel sorry for the goblin.

  Perhaps he could see all these thoughts on my face, for when he spoke again, his voice was victorious. ‘Never you mind what I’m getting out of the deal,’ he hissed. ‘I’m getting my heart’s desire.’

  ‘What, a matching purse for the boots?’ Fergie sneered. Having lived alongside his kind all her life, she wasn’t sharing my tender sentiments. She was also looking a little green around the gills, too. The transportation between dimensions must have this effect on humans.

  ‘What treachery is in the works?’ I hated to ask the question out loud, for then Fergie would know the doubts that were forming in my mind, the fears that I’d led her into danger. Led? No, I’d forced her to come along, she hadn’t had a choice. And all for my own selfish desires. We were in a strange land, another dimension, and I had no assurance we were ever going to get out.

  ‘There’s no treachery!’ He opened his eyes in a parody of amazed innocence. ‘None at all. What do you take me for? Now let’s get going, time’s wasting.’

  Trevor set his rubbery lips tightly together and wouldn’t say another word as he glared at us.

  This wasn’t getting us anywhere. And at this point, what choice did we have but to follow through? I would never be able to lead us out of the labyrinth and back to the ice field. I’d tried to remember each of the twists and turns, but couldn’t keep them all in my head.

  The goblin led us at a slower pace now, turning back every now and then to smile insincerely at us. In the light of the oak branch, it looked more like a sneer.

  I could hear Fergie rustling the chocolate wrappers behind me as we made our way. Stress eating, I knew, and my heart went out to her, but I also thought it couldn’t be doing her nausea any good.

  We went on, always climbing, until suddenly Trevor stopped, and held his arm out. ‘We’re here,’ he whispered. His eyes shone with a secret excitement, as if he’d found the pot of gold at the end of a rainbow he’d been chasing all his life. That’s when I knew for certain he was on nobody’s side but Trevor’s.

  ‘Douse the light,’ I advised Fergie, and took the branch out of the goblin’s hand. He didn’t even notice my action, his fingers letting the branch go. Ahead of us, the tunnel’s end glowed with a pale white light.

  Now that we had arrived, I scrabbled in my mind for a plan of attack. Despite having had lots of notice, I hadn’t thought this far ahead, being too caught in the worries of getting us all back. Remembering the glimpses I’d seen of the throne room back those months ago by the broch where the Stone had lain hidden, I knew the Ice King would probably be sitting on the dais, surrounded by his henchmen, the trollish looking creatures armored in bones and leather. We would not be able to fight them, not the two of us, and I couldn’t count on the goblin’s assistance. No, it would have to be a battle of wits.

  I could picture the Great Hall from my previous ‘visits’, when I’d held Mom’s talisman and stood by the broch and could travel there through my mind. My mother had been down in a corner of the large room, in a sort of kitchen area, bent over a basin or the fireplace. The hall itself was a room of glittering ice, yet colourful, the walls and ceiling reflecting the burning torches through prisms of rainbow colours all around, with the Ice King himself sitting on the throne of ancient bones. Frost covered his beard and the pelts he wore – or were these his own body fur? It had been hard to make out. I’d even been able to smell the burning pine sap, everything about the space had been so vivid. I had spoken to my mother, although she hadn’t been able to see me. We must be so close to her now.

  Despite the increasingly sick feelings in my stomach, I couldn’t help but allow my excitement to grow. I was going to see my mother again after ten long years apart, really see her this time, I was going to hold her in my arms and be held by her. Marian, my Normal mother, who’d had no business being mixed up in the Kin’s politics, being a pawn in Dad’s wife’s little games, or so I believed. Cate. It had to be her who caused all this, born of an unspeakable jealousy for my Dad’s love, and I hated Cate more than I could say at that moment.

  But Mom. So close that I could cry, yet I couldn’t allow myself the luxury for there would be time for all that later. I hoped.

  ‘We need to sneak in,’ I whispered to the other two as I led us to the entrance, keeping to the sides of the hewn rock walls. It was noticeably colder up here, away from the dragon dens.

  ‘Ah God, I think I’m going to be sick,’ Fergie said and indeed, she looked even greener than before in the shadows in the tunnel.

  ‘Not long now,’ I said for encouragement, more bravely than I felt. ‘We’ll be back home before we know it.’

  ‘Oh yes? You think you’re going ‘home’ after this escapade?’ The words burst out of the goblin’s mouth as if he could no longer contain them, and he didn’t bother to keep his sneering voice down. ‘I overheard what your Kin boyfriend said to you, in the bushes. Ye’re totally screwed, you and the ginger slag. There is no going home for you after this!’

  ‘What is all this, then, is it true, Dara? Is he telling the truth?’ Her face was pale, each freckle standing out in the dim light from the hall.

  I darted a glance at Fergie, then back at Trevor. ‘Don’t be silly, he’s just a stupid goblin. He’s only trying to make trouble.’

  To avoid having to answer any more questions from her, questions that I didn’t want to answer honestly, I sidled up to the edge of the tunnel’s rock wall to peer around the corner, and there it was, just as it had been in my visions or whatever they had been on Scarp, but in the reality, the chamber’s grandeur was even more terrible and beautiful. The firelight glinted off the sharp edges of the ice crystals hanging from the high ceiling, the razor thin sheets casting their arcs of colour high above my head and I could hear at the very edge of my senses the vibrations of the crystalline structures, the music of the frozen spheres. Being here in the very room, I could now see the cruelty and greed etched into the face of the Ice King, the not quite human and not quite beast of his nature, this awesome visage as raw as winter and as cold as the Arctic seas. He guffawed roughly at a word from his companions, the trollish figures dressed in animal skins and filthy felt, obsidian knives flashing at their belts.

  I poked my head out further to see into the corner, and there was my mother, still slaving over the cooking fire. From here, I could now see why she’d always been in the same spot, every time I had the visions of her. A thin silver chain was wrapped around her middle, attached to a large thin bone, perhaps a whale rib, hanging from the wall. She was captive, as she must have been for all those years.

  And then my heart dropped, for one of the beasts moved to reach across the table and I spotted Willem seated at the right hand side of the king himself. Willem, the failed sorcerer who’d been the cause of my downfall. He was watching me quietly amid the rough jocularity of the troop, his pale eyes touched with amusement at my shock, and he lifted a horn drinking vessel and had the gall to wink at me.

  THIS IS WHAT IS MEANT TO SEE RED, I realized afterwards. All coherent thought left my mind at the moment I saw Willem, all memory of the reason we were here in this Godforsaken land, all thoughts of rescuing my mother gone at the sight of the weasel-like face of the sorcerer.

  I was about to leap out of my hiding place, my fingers cur
led ready to scratch his eyes out, to wipe that horrid grin off his face. He was the cause of my downfall, after all, the sorcerer who had tried to use me, to ruin my life. I was set to jump at him when Trevor strode out into full view of the hall’s occupants. He pranced into the hall, like a debutante going to the season’s first ball.

  ‘Trevor, no!’ I must have spoken loudly for the conversation paused and everyone stopped their merriment. A hundred pairs of eyes were now on us. So much for a surprise attack.

  For a moment, the only sound was Fergie retching in the corner.

  He held his head high, then swept off his cap and bowed low in the presence of the Ice King.

  ‘You Majesty,’ he said almost breathless. His hands played with the dusty fabric of his hat, quivering with anticipation. ‘Willem,’ he added, and beamed to them both. ‘As promised, I have brought the witch. You may settle up.’ He glanced back at me, his eyes bright with greed.

  ‘Trevor?’ I could not believe what I was hearing, the depth of his betrayal. I had suspected something from him, known he had some ulterior motive, not to this extent. I had given him cake, and those fine red boots, and companionship, and yet, he had had only one aim in mind. He’d led me here, I could see it now, while working with Willem.

  ‘What is this then?’ The Ice King roared from his throne of antlers as he stood. The chamber rang with his anger, his voice was deep and menacing and thundered through the hall, causing the very rock walls to tremble. ‘This is not Auld Meg, just a stripling, a whelp! Sorcerer, you have reneged on your promise. You try to cheat me!’

  The beast on his left glowered down at us, the tusks at the side of his face gleamed fearsomely in the torchlight.

  ‘Dara?’ Amidst it all I heard the whisper from the corner.

  ‘No, sire, this witch is a much better fit for you,’ Willem smirked confidently and patted the king on his arm. ‘This one has touched the Crystal Charm Stone also, and is still young enough to be formed to your purposes. A half-ling, she will not be missed from the Kin – indeed, you do them a favour by keeping her here. This is an unwanted one, no wealth or connections, nothing to cause the Kin to get up in arms against you. And yet the power flows in her veins, can you not smell the sweetness of her fresh blood?’