Chapter 32 Dad's Chest

There were four pages in the folder, folded in half, written on both sides in pencil.

Dad never used ink. He said it blotted and you couldn't rub it out if you changed your mind. His pencil writing was big and square and pressed hard, the same as the farm accounts, only shakier, the way his hands were after that winter, the same as the labels on the seed jars in the shed. Some of the words were spelled wrong. He'd always spelled wrong. He never cared.

It was dated at the top. The winter I was nineteen. A week after that one time.

I read it out loud, in the end. I don't know why. Miss Quill hadn't asked me to. I think I just wanted somebody else to hear him.

* * *

Tobin.

If your reading this, you know. Either you've gone off with the cleaver and the barn has opened, or you've worked it out, which you would, your not stupid, you never were. Either way your angry with me. Thats fair. I would be.

I lied to you. Every day. I told you you were nothing special and I knew it wasnt true from the night you were nine and picked up your grandads cleaver and it bit you and took to you. I saw it take. I saw your eyes. Your grandad saw it too and he sat by the fire with you and didnt say anything for an hour and I knew what he was thinking because I was thinking it too.

I'll tell you why.

The Marsh men have kept this barn since before there was a barn. My grandad said nine of us. I dont know if thats right. Theres marks down the hole if you ever go down, and I think thats us, counting. Every one that kept it. There used to be others like us, he said. Families along the forest, each with their own hole and their own key. Most of them are gone. I dont know where.

The cleaver is our key. Its made out of the same stuff as the door. While its in the house the door stays shut, mostly, and whats left gets through we kill. Thats the job. Thats all it ever was. Stay home. Keep the key by the fire. Kill what comes up. Stamp twice so it knows were still here.

A boy who knows hes the strongest thing in the world doesnt stay home. I wouldnt have. Nor would you. So I told you you were nothing special, and you believed me, because I was your dad. Every day I said it I felt it in my teeth. I want you to know that. I want you to know I knew what I was doing to you and I did it anyway, and I am sorry, and I would do it again, and both of them are true.

* * *

I stopped there for a while. Miss Quill didn't say anything. She put her hand on my arm and left it there.

I went on.

* * *

About the lock. Theres a lock at the top of the hole where the drain starts. The key goes in it. You turn it and stamp. When its turned proper it holds forever, near enough. When its turned wrong, or turned in the cold, it only holds till spring and then you have to turn it again every winter and its not safe.

It was turned proper once. In my great great grandads time. A woman came from the Saltfens, past Hollowmere, and turned it with him, and it held ninety years. Then it slipped, the way they do, and went to a winter lock, and nobody knew how to set it proper again.

Your grandad wrote to her when he was young. She came. Same woman. Dont ask me how. She set it again and it held forty years, till the night you were nine. That was what came through the fence that night. The lock slipping. Its been a winter lock since, and Ive turned it every autumn on the quiet while you were asleep, and every spring its held, just, because the key was by the fire and you were killing whatever got through.

That winter, the one just gone, the thing with the angles. That was it nearly going. I couldnt get to the lock. It was coming up through it. I took the cleaver off the hook to get it to you because you were the only one that could use it and there wasnt time to wake you. I knew what itd do to my hands. Your grandad told me. A Marsh can carry it once, if he has to, if it matters enough. Once. Dont you ever let anybody do that for you, son. Not ever. Its not worth anybodys hands.

My hearts not right since. Healer says its the cold. Its not the cold.

* * *

I had to stop again. My voice had gone. Miss Quill had her other hand over her mouth.

There was one more page.

* * *

If the barn opens, Mag will write to the woman. I told Mag the name and where to send it, years ago. She doesnt know why. Dont be hard on Mag, she promised me on Hals grave and she meant it.

If the woman comes, do what she says. If she doesnt come, go to her. Take the key. Go to the Saltfens, past Hollowmere, and ask. Shes old and shes not kind and she doesnt like visitors but she keeps her word, mostly. Your grandad said shes the oldest thing in Aldmere that isnt down a hole.

Look after Mag. Look after Duchess, shes a cow but shes a good cow. Look after your mums tree.

You were never nothing special, son. You were the best thing I ever did. You and that tree.

Stamp twice. Hang it by the flue.

Dad.

* * *

The chapter was taken from the author's official publication without permission; reading where it is posted supports their work.

I folded the pages up and put them back in the folder, and put the folder on my knees, and sat there.

I'd been angry at him since the Guild steps. I'd run six days by cart with it sitting in my chest like a stone. And it had changed shape on the road, and it had changed shape again in the barn, and now it was gone. Not gone. It was something else. I didn't have a word for it. It sat in the same place the anger had and it was heavier and it didn't hurt as much.

He'd felt it in his teeth. Every day.

"Tobin," said Miss Quill quietly.

"Yeah."

"The woman. In the Saltfens. Past Hollowmere." Her voice was careful. "You know who that is."

I did. Fen had told me, in the inn by the waystation, the night after Gallow's Cut, with his hands round his pint. Six hundred. The record. Three hundred years old, and she lives out in the Saltfens, and nobody goes there.

"The Witch," I said.

"The Witch of Hollowmere," said Miss Quill. "Level six hundred. The highest level ever recorded." She took her hand off my arm and pushed her hair back. "And she has been to this farm twice. And turned that lock with her own hands."

"Grandad never said."

"No," said Miss Quill. "I don't imagine anyone in your family ever said anything."

I laughed. I didn't mean to. It came out of me sideways, short and wet. She looked at me, and then she laughed too, a little, and leaned her head against my shoulder.

We sat there on Dad's floor till the lamp burned down.

* * *

In the morning I took Mag's pony back down to her cottage. She'd lent him to us for hauling the timber while the barn was being done, and he hated me cordially. I'd meant to ride him. Well. I walked. He rode. I led him on a long rope from fifty paces off and he came along behind with his ears flat, because the alternative was being left behind, and he hated that more.

Mag was on her veranda with her pipe and a blanket and one of the Countess's bottles, which she was drinking at a rate of about a thimble a day, to make it last.

"You've read it, then," she said, before I'd got to the step.

"How'd you know?"

"It's on your face." She puffed. "Aldous told me there was a letter. In the chest. He said you'd find it when you knew, and not before, because you'd never go in that chest before. He was right, wasn't he."

"He was right."

"He usually was. Bloody annoying." She held out her hand, and I gave her the folder, and she didn't open it. She held it on her lap, with both hands flat on top of it, for a long while, the way you would hold a warm loaf. Then she gave it back.

"I wrote to her," she said. "The week you left. When I heard the knocks. Like he told me. A name and a place, that's all he gave me, years ago. He said if it ever opened, write. She'll come." Mag looked out at the white paddocks. "She hasn't come."

"Who was it, Mag? The name?"

"Morwen," said Mag. "Just Morwen. Out in the salt country, past the lake." She glanced at me sideways. "I didn't know who it was. Not till Bram told me, after. What's out past Hollowmere. Who lives there." She sucked her pipe. "If I'd known, I'd have written a nicer letter."

"What did you write?"

"Barn's open. Come now. Mag Penhallow, Thornfell." She shrugged. "It's what he told me to write."

"She hasn't answered."

"No," said Mag. "Eight weeks. Not a word. Not a bird, not a rider, not a bloody note." She knocked her pipe out on the rail. "So you'll have to go to her. Like he said."

"In winter?"

"Before the thaw, boy," said Mag. "Unless you want to do this every spring for the rest of your life." She pointed her pipe at me. "And take her a bottle. A good one. Not one of mine. A woman that old's had every insult there is, but she'll not have had many presents."

* * *

That night, round the kitchen table, I told them all.

Not the whole letter. That was mine, and Dad's. But the parts that mattered. The keys, and the families, and the lock turned proper and turned wrong. The woman from the Saltfens. Morwen.

The Witch of Hollowmere.

There was a silence when I said it.

"Three hundred years old," said Lys slowly.

"Level six hundred," said Miss Quill.

"I have met her," said the Countess, from the fire. Everybody turned round. She was looking into the flames with her book closed on her lap. "Once. A hundred and twenty years ago, near enough. At a ball. She arrived uninvited, stayed eleven minutes, insulted the host, turned the punch into eels, and left." She paused. "It was the best ball I've ever been to."

"Eels?" said Brakka.

"Eels. In the punch bowl. Live ones. The host's wife fainted into them."

Brakka nodded slowly. She looked deeply impressed.

"Will she help?"

"She'll do," said the Countess, "whatever she likes. That's rather the point of her."

Miss Quill had the map out. Not Kell's map, a big one of the whole kingdom. She put her finger on Marsh Hold, then ran it south and west, a long way, across the bottom corner of the map to a place where the land went into blue and grey patches with no roads at all.

"The Saltfens," she said. "Three weeks, on good roads. There are no good roads past Hollowmere." She looked up. "Five weeks, perhaps. In winter."

"And back," said Lys. "Ten weeks. Seventy days." She did the sum. "We have a hundred and ten."

"And the other six locks," said Miss Quill. "Kell's six. We don't know who turned them, or how, or how long they'll last. If they're like this one, they'll go at the thaw." She tapped the map. "If they're worse, they'll go sooner."

From the window, where she was leaning in, Wrenna made a small noise.

"The one to the north," she said. "Two days. I can feel it from here. It's colder than ours. Thinner." She pulled a face. "It doesn't feel like a proper lock at all. It feels like someone's tied it shut with string."

Lys looked at Kell's map. She put her finger on the red circle two days north of Marsh Hold.

"Holding of the widow Strand," she read. "Underbarn confirmed. Occupant deceased."

Nobody said anything.

"Right," I said. "We'll go and look at the Strand place first."

The Countess closed her book.

"I'm coming," she said.

Everybody turned and looked at her again.

"At night," she said. "Naturally. And purely to observe." She looked at me, and away. "Somebody should keep watch while you sleep. And I don't sleep."

* * *

Lys was on the back step when I went out to check the stock last thing. She had a blanket round her shoulders and a letter in her hand, and she'd been crying. She stopped when she heard the door, and wiped her face with the blanket, fast.

"Sorry," she said. "I'll go in."

"You're all right." I sat down on the step beside her. It was cold enough to make your teeth ache. Up on the barn roof, Wrenna was a dull red glow against the stars.

Lys held the letter out. It was on thick palace paper, folded small, with the royal seal broken.

"From my father," she said. "It came with the others today. I read it at breakfast and then I put it in my pocket and I haven't been able to look at it since." She smoothed it on her knee. "It's three lines. It's about the commission. The appointments. Dull things." She stopped. "And then at the bottom, in his own hand, not the secretary's, it says: Well done, Lysandra."

I didn't say anything.

"Twenty-three years," said Lys. "He's never said it. Not once. Not to me. My sisters, yes. Never me." She laughed, short and cracked. "And I'm sitting on a farm step in the cold, crying over three words, like a child. Because a farmer read a letter from his dead father tonight, and I sat at that table and thought, at least yours said it. At least yours said it in the end."

"Mine said it in a box under the bed," I said. "It took him seven years to get round to it."

She turned her head and studied me. Then she laughed again, properly this time, and wiped her eyes.

"Fathers," she said.

"Fathers," I agreed.

She leaned her shoulder against mine. We sat there until the cold got into our feet, watching Wrenna watch the stars.