“Thank you,” she said.
“I have to go back,” I told her.
“You do,” she sighed. “Your family will be wild. But you’ll come back?”
“She’ll have to, Mam,” Scully said, stepping over the gate and into the yard. “Every new moon. From now on. Forever and always and time without end.”
My heart skipped, just a little.
“You drank my mother’s fig-milk, Mally Crowal,” he said, shaking his head. “And after your mother telling you not to eat or drink with us.”
I curled my lip at him and then remembered he couldn’t see. So I pushed him instead. He danced sidewise.
“Don’t tell the girl that!” said Ma, slapping his arm. “Still,” she said, slapping my arm too, “you did feast somewhat, you know.”
Lovelypig had been trotting back-and-forth to the gate, butting and nipping at whoever was closest. She wanted to be off while there was still a full day ahead. I felt the new day on me too, like a fresh shift. Sweet and light, clean of the old dirt.
Dolyn came out and stuck his head into the water-bucket. When he lifted it, shrunken and dripping, he was changed too. He had the look of somebody who’d been sick a long time but had woken up feeling a little better. His eyes were steady in his head and he sat without fidgets a good long moment. His mother followed and poured the fig-milk for him. He took it from her without a look, and drank the lot. Then we went quiet up through the dusty children and their dogs, up to the Cross where all the Cronk ways meet and lead away.
Ma took my hands in hers and pulled me back to walk awhile together, away from the others.
“Frighted, Mally?” she said in low tones, hunting my face.
“No. But I’m scared,” I told her straight. “I’m scared of being frighted.”
“Well, you’ll just have to brave it then,” she said.
“I’m different down there,” I said. “I’m too frighted for braves.”
“What are you talking about now?” she asked. “You can’t brave things unless you are frighted.”
She looked at me like I might be a bit dim after all.
“What she means,” said the harewitch, falling back, “is if you weren’t frighted, it wouldn’t be a brave. You’d just do it.”
Ma shooed her away.
“I’ll be looking out for you, Mally Crowal,” she said, watching to make sure Elley Craig was gone. “And thank you for those two. They won’t thank you themselves. Harewitches aren’t known for manners.”
“But I didn’t do anything,” I told her. “Honest. It wasn’t me.”
“Bless you,” she said. “Witch-websters don’t have to do things. They just turn up and it all does itself. But–”
“What?” I said.
“They do have to turn up,” said Ma Slevin. “See?”
I nodded.
The morning Cronks were rolling away on all sides and full with the sound of small birds and faraway bells. Of a sudden it didn’t matter if these folk thought me a witch. The ways were many and open and I had this whole day to spend walking them. Scully Slevin knew blind which path to take and he took it with Lovelypig. They led, with Dolyn going next, keeping to the edges and snatching looks all about as he went. It was his habit to sneak, even out here in this wild place. His mother went after him. Close but not too close.
Then me.
The Cronk paths went sharp through the long grass, marking the many ways of going and coming. I turned my face full into the blazey upland rays and closed my eyes so I could see a moment like Scully. The sun sank into me until I was lit up inside. Then we walked. On the first path there was nothing higher than our heads. That was the Sky Road. The hills spread below us, with their night-fogs still clinging in hollows and dips. I went last.
Because I didn’t want to talk any more.
Because it really had been my fault.
It was like this.
Me and Dodi had loved to build little countries in the rockpools together. We made pebble-ways across the rock and planted weedplots and wortgardens for our nations to enjoy. The day the wiggynagh came, we’d finished our biggest country yet and all it needed was that line of sea-pansies to mark the edges of its holding. I was right set on having them.
The sea-pansies shift about like everything on the shore and I knew they’d be easier to find after dark, due to their moon-blooming habit. So I told Dodi we should get some early. Before moonset.
Dodi said No. That was too early. It would still be dark.
I told her if we didn’t go early, we’d miss them.
She said she wasn’t sure. Her parents told her not to go down there in the dark.
I told her it had to be dark or the pansies wouldn’t gleam.
I talked and talked. I could always talk her into things. My words went into her and in the end she said all right.
And it happened just like they said it would.
I shouldn’t have hid in the weed. I should have run for help. I should have thrown rocks at their yellow heads. Or shellgrit in their ice-hag eyes. Or something. Anything. I shouldn’t have just stopped there swaddled in the rockweed under that ledge while they dragged Dodi away from her home and her folk – and from me.
I was heartbroke they’d taken her.
But.
I was glad it hadn’t been me.
Sometimes, when the heartbreak and the gladness came at once and I didn’t know what to feel, what to think, I wished it had been me. But that was easy to wish, really. Because in the end it wasn’t. I was still safe here in Market-Shipton.
It was my fault.
The sea is wilder than the land and fuller with monsters, and I knew it. On the day the wiggynagh took Dodi, we’d turned our backs on the waters to look at the sea-hare. It made the sea angry.
And not only that.
I’d whistled on the shore and insulted the wind. The wind that carried the snakeboat. Afterwards, I tried whistling the boat back. I whistled and whistled up-and-down the Sands. I whistled until my lips cramped and my jawbone sang. But the wind kept blowing and the boat kept sailing away.
So I ran to Mam. I didn’t know what I was going to say. I looked up into her face. I opened my mouth.
“Dodi’s gone,” I said, and that’s all I said.
My words were gone away with Dodi. I didn’t talk for a long time. After I told Mam, everybody came and there was a hunt.
All that day. And then all that night. With torches. The town scoured the caves and the Backdunes, the saltmarsh and the Barnacle Fields, but she wasn’t there, and there was no body, no bones, nothing. The hours went by and then the days and I wanted to tell, but I couldn’t. I was too scared.
And the days turned to weeks and of a sudden it was a secret.
The council decided she’d been taken on the drags and we were to pray for her, and that was that. It was over. Mr and Mrs Caillet hunted a few months longer and then even they gave up. Afterwards it was like that secret was all I had. All I had left of Dodi. We could be together in my mind, together in the secret of what happened. Just me and her.
And I doted on each tear. Somehow they made me not so lonely for her. I haunted our stoneway countries for as long as they withstood the storm and tide but as summer turned to fall, the paths rolled apart, the wortplots dried-up, and the shell-houses were washed away. There was no stopping the sea or baffling the wind.
I had dreams about Dodi coming home. In the dreams she was coming across the waters on her own brown feet. Glowing. Waving. But when she was about to make landfall, the sea would start boiling. It would rise in a towering, fizzing wall and then the fizzing would settle. And then I would see the water-wall had trapped a school of merrows, and they were darting mad as eels and showing their razor-teeth. And sea-Trows were hurling themselves at me through the water and it was only fear of the air that kept them inside. And there were whalefish crashing and sea-serpents coiling in this greenglass wall. All of it. All waiting for me to try and reach Dodi. And plainly I c
ouldn’t.
In my dreams she always had to go back. Go away. Again.
So then I sat by our wrecked countries and missed and wanted Dodi. It’s all I did. I had to be fetched back home every night by my sisters.
My family thought I was upset about Dodi going missing and needed time to get better. But it was more. After Dodi I felt like everybody I loved was faraway from me. Just a heartbeat off dying. Just a gull-call off going away.
I didn’t want to go home and see their faces. They reminded me. When I looked into Mam’s eyes all I could see was the snakeboat.
It was only Breesh Dunnal who got me to let it be.
I was up at the sea-cave hiding from everybody. I was pressed into the stone, crying there as I did every lonely evening. That’s when she came.
I laid my hot head against the cool rockwall.
There was a shadow in the stone that looked just like a girl. There was a dab of light that looked just like a face. A pair of shady eyeholes with green slimewort smearing them. A rock-hollow mouth with a smiling set to it.
I sobbed.
“Ssssh,” said a voice from the rock.
And then she was there. Tall and burly. With a silver star deep in each green eye.
“Come,” she said, taking my hand.
“Please,” I said, because I was scared.
“Look,” she whispered, pointing.
And she showed me the stonechamber.
And she showed me the blossom-animals thick on the walls.
“See,” she said, and I did.
And then she showed me the scaaney bowl. It took my mind right off Dodi. Later she told the first Lady stories.
Her Lady was all over the island in those days. She raced seals and she beat them every time. She drew Wifeseekers out of the rockpools with her own long, long hanging hair and then choked them with it. When Howlers tore at the seashore, she came at them in such a din they held their big flat hands tight over their bleeding ears and scarpered. And then there was the Lady bringing a whole army of Crossbones undone. She fed them bone-by-bone to her dogs.
And slow, slow, Dodi shifted into the Backdunes of my heart.
And slow, slow, she was covered in travelling sand and stories.
And then it was all Breesh Dunnal.
Breesh and me, always.
Secret.
But I still had the dreams. Only now I never saw Dodi. I only saw the wall of clear water rising to the sky and full with the sea-monsters, reaching. Waiting. Frightful.
Me and Dolyn and the others walked all afternoon. Long-shadows fell and the gusts rose. Just as we turned from the Downward onto the Thwartway, Scully Slevin turned to Dolyn and asked him what he would do now. Now he was going back into the Father’s place. Dolyn shrugged. He was getting more dragfooted the closer we came to town.
“Will you fast on him again?” I asked.
Dolyn slowed to a shuffle. We were getting to the place where he beat the boy.
“He’ll never stop,” said Dolyn. “He’ll keep on at me.”
The Father’s wide, rightful face rose between us and I knew he was right. It wasn’t in any Prior to let people be. I put my hand to Dolyn’s shoulder.
“But I can’t fast on him forever,” he said.
“I’m sorry for your trouble, Dolyn,” I told him.
It was the truth even if he had killed somebody.
In the late afternoon we stopped on the Upward, above Market-Shipton. The town didn’t look like itself. It was smaller than I’d thought and pale from up here. It was just a small pale place held fast in the wing of the shore. At least, it looked fast. From the high path I could see some of the town’s hard edges had already gone.
There were bits of town to the right where nobody lived any more.
There were old paths under the sea that only led to deepwater now. And there was all that crumbled stone, lying about the chapel and monkhouse. Those stones used to be altars and hearths. Now they were the ground. I wondered if folk would walk over our wallsteads one day and not even know.
Michael-Archangel rang out. It pealed out along the valley and up the hills to us. At its first chime, Dolyn’s face got the twitches. On the second, he shook his head like a cow with flies. On the third, he covered his ears.
“You didn’t beat him to death, you know,” said Scully then, plucking at the fiddleneck in runs.
“What?” said Dolyn, reaching out and stopping the fiddle.
“It was only half to death,” Scully Slevin said, quiet. Careless.
Like it was nothing.
“He drowned up the moaney,” Scully said. “Later. In the skybog pools.”
Dolyn turned to me with a new face blazing on him. And it was ringing there clear as the bells. Hope.
I was used to him cursing, clouting, running, sneaking. Even crying and starving. He could’ve carried on like that until the world was swallowed up and I wouldn’t have been surprised. But now he stood there with this bright hope on him, and it made me feel shifted somehow, like the whole world was changed. Then he damped and waited edgy and fretful.
Like Scully might take it back.
“So you can stop skiting about it,” Scully told him. “Hardman. You didn’t even kill him.”
Michael-Archangel rang out his chimes. The Little Brothers would be gathering in the chapel. Their old enemy was waiting on them and they had plans to make, arms to gather, prayers and mortifications to take right up to the fight. Dolyn Craig stopped still, still as Midwoodpool.
I saw his rat-face take on the look of his mother the hare; ice over flames.
Michael-Archangel chimed once more.
He was gone before the echo.
He was away through the grass, long shanks loping, sprawly feet leaping. Of a sudden, the great knots of his knees made sense. The harewitch chased him off, throwing pebbles after him, saying Yes, go on; get out of Here.
He ran like there was only running. Running like it was the world that ran and him that stopped still as it flew by. I didn’t know if Dolyn Craig would be happy. I didn’t know if he’d even be content. But he’d be free. And that was almost the same thing.
There’s no telling how farback you have to go to find the start of stories. They lead backward forever, one into another; all the stories of killing and dying, trusting and betraying, of birth and faith and devils and friendship. There’s no telling how farback the first blood was drawn, the first tears shed, the first friend betrayed. But looking down on the town, with Dolyn scarpering and Scully fiddling his rags of tunes, I got the feeling that it was all meant to be happening just like this.
That it couldn’t have happened any other way, all things considered.
“How could you though?” I asked the harewitch as we watched Dolyn away over the rim of the hill. “How did you stand it?”
“What?” she said.
“You know,” I said soft as snow. I didn’t want her to bolt before she told.
“How could you leave him? Just like that?”
“I didn’t leave him,” she said. “Not just like that.”
“But you let them take him. You abandoned him,” I said.
“Don’t be babyish. I never abandoned him,” she said. “I left him to his father.”
“The Father,” I said.
“What?” she said.
“You mean the Father,” I said.
The harewitch looked at me a long time like she was guessing my weight.
“I mean what I say,” she said at last.
Chapter Twenty-two
Witch-webster
WHETHER YOU LIKE IT or not the world keeps changing its face. High dunes shift nightly. Yesterday’s edge can be tomorrow’s middle; whatever is inside one day can be outside the next. And the other way round. The world just does it, and keeps doing it. Like it’s nothing.
Like the tides.
It’s not personal.
After me and Lovelypig got back to Market-Shipton, I went running through the greenplots
and along the dimming lanes. I ran the Seaway on one breath. I made three steps of my usual nine. Lovelypig skidded to keep up. I slipped in the slime and scales down at the fishwives’ stones, and ducked under the nets hung shroudy by the breakwater. Onto the Sands, under the shadow of the cliff face.
Running. Across the stoneway. Kicking at the crabs.
Running. Across the threshold pools. My face shining in the rockpools. A white face stretched tight over sharp bones and my braid coming undone, streaming out behind.
Running. With the wind at my back. Straight into the sea-cave.
She wasn’t there.
Inside, our stonechamber was gone. Its walls moved in tiny pale stalks and cups. The blossom-animals’ offspring had moved in. The faerylace was gone. And on the ledge the scaaney bowl was washed away. All the stone bowls were.
It was a regular sea-cave now.
Just stone and water.
I sat at the threshold. Lovely leaned on me, full with contented sighs. She was glad Breesh was gone, but I didn’t hold it against her. I curled her tail round my thumb. There was a scabby noil where it met her body. I picked at the scab. A dirty thread was wrapped tight round the base of her tail, cutting in, making a wound. I picked at it.
A long, long thread unwound from Lovely’s tail; a silvergrey thread of hair.
Outside, on the stoneway, the rockpools warmed in the morning sun. The wortweed thickened and water greened. Spindlestone’s fallen whorl covered the hole where I’d hidden and listened to Dodi Caillet being taken away. The whorl was already growing its own crop of witchweed.
Mr Cooley was right.
Everything that exists, dies. And everything leaves its leftovers for those left behind. Even folk who aren’t quite real. Because when Breesh Dunnal went, she didn’t go entirely. I’m not saying she was a scaan or anything, but when I lay myself down in our bed, she lays down too. When I listen to the sea, she listens with me. When I sit to the loom, she sits with me.
And she left me this ghostheart, strong, strong, to line my own.
Now the beat of my heart in the night is fortified by Breesh Dunnal. It’s a close-woven web, the warp tight but not too tight. I stay awake just to feel it beating; there are no slipstitches or noils, no misses or hanging threads. Her heart and mine are a snug fit. I put my hand flat to my chest and feel them beating together.
Secrets of Carrick: Ghostheart Page 16