Witch Hunt (Witch Finder 2) (13 page)

‘We can’t keep walking.’ She was shivering again, the borrowed warmth from the run fading as fast as it had come. ‘We’ll have to sleep in the woods.’

‘We’ll freeze!’

‘The tramps used to do it. We’ll make a shelter. Build a fire.’

‘How?’ He would not show himself for a coward and a weakling. But he was very close to despair. ‘We’ve got no matches, no tinderbox. How?’ He shut his eyes, pushing back the bleak thought of the match factory and the row after row after row of drying matches, the thousands upon thousands of boxes. Damn Knyvet. Damn him to hell and beyond, for what he’d driven them to.

‘C-come on.’ He felt Rosa’s hand in his, cold as ice, and they began to walk into the woods.

‘Here will do.’ Rosa looked around them. They had not found the barn or field-workers’ shelter she had been hoping for, but at least in this small copse the trees were dense-packed and the ground thick with leaves. The snow still fell, but not so thick, between the close-set branches. She set about unbuckling Brimstone’s saddle.

‘Make yourself useful,’ she said over her shoulder to Luke, standing helplessly, his hands by his side.

‘How?’

‘Get some sticks, some kindling.’

‘But we’ve got no—’

She gave him a look, and he turned and began searching on the forest floor for dry twigs and leaves. Rosa turned back Brimstone. Her fingers were too cold to work the buckles easily, but at last she had them loose and pulled first the blanket roll, and then the heavy, shiny saddle free. Brimstone gave a little snort as it came loose and made all the skin on his back twitch and shiver in the moonlight.

‘There you go.’ She spread his saddle blanket over him and stroked his warm mud-coloured nose. ‘Don’t freeze, darling Brimstone. You’re all we’ve got.’

She shivered as she said the words and Luke looked down at the pile of twigs.

‘What now?’ he asked. ‘I’ve heard tell that tramps can light a fire by just rubbing a stick, but I don’t think this wood’s dry enough for that. Why didn’t I pack my damn tinderbox?’

Rosa swallowed.

‘Let’s see what I’ve got left.’

‘What you’ve . . .?’ For a minute he didn’t understand, then he said, ‘Oh,’ and fell silent.

He said nothing as she crouched over the little pile, a piece of birch bark between her fingers, remembering, thinking of all the fires they had set as children in the woods and fields around Matchenham, roasting fish from the lake and eggs stolen from the hen coop, potatoes pulled from the kitchen garden when the gardener was at his own lunch, wild garlic from the stream bed. Alex had always sworn by dry grass, she by birch bark. But she had never had to do it without magic.

She knelt, feeling the cold strike though her clothes.

Come on, just a spark, just the smallest, smallest spark
 . . .

Nothing.

She pushed harder, her lips forming the different spells, the words to call heat, the words to call fire, the words to bring forth light from the darkness.

Nothing at all.

‘God!’ It burst out of her like a sob. ‘I never knew how much I relied on it!’

She turned, looking at Luke’s face, white in the darkness.

‘What can I do without magic? Nothing!
Nothing!
’

‘Don’t say that.’

‘It’s true! I was never taught any other way to take care of myself, any other way to live – I know nothing at all.’

She rubbed her hands over her face, feeling the emptiness inside, and the ruby ring scratched at her skin, drawing a bead of blood on her cheek. She put her finger to the cut, and looked at it in the moonlight. ‘And I hate this ring. I hate it. I hate
him
!’ She began to pull at it, dragging it up her finger, her teeth clenched against the pain, until at last she stopped in despair.

‘We’ll get it off,’ Luke said. There was something almost angry in his voice. ‘I promise. We’ll get the damn thing off.’

‘How?’

‘I don’t know.’ He took a step forward and then crouched beside her, putting his arm around her. ‘You’re shivering. Let’s sit for a bit, rest. Maybe with a bit of rest . . .’

‘I’m scared, Luke.’ She heard the crack in her own voice and hated the weakness.
I will not cry. I will not
. ‘If I don’t have magic – what am I?’

‘You’re still you.’ He got up, and for a minute Rosa thought he was going to leave, but he only moved across the clearing to where she’d left the saddle and began unwrapping the rolled-up blanket. The long, wicked knife flashed in the darkness and she heard the iron gag chink against the bottle as they slid to the forest floor. She felt her heart beat faster in spite of herself.
This is Luke
, she told herself.
Luke
.
He is not one of them
.

But he came back with only the thin blanket and wrapped it around her shoulders. Behind them Brimstone gave a great sigh and heaved himself awkwardly to the forest floor, his head on the ground, and Luke and Rosa sat, leaning against his warm back, side by side, the ache spreading through their tired limbs.

After a few minutes she reached out and put her arm around him.

He went quite stiff and still for a moment, just long enough for her to think better of it, to consider pulling back, and to wonder how she could do it without looking like a fool. But then he put his own arm around her shoulders, pulling her close into his side, so close that she could feel the movement of his chest as he breathed. She sat in silence, thinking how strange it was, how wrong by all society’s codes and rules. They were not related. They were not married. They were not even of the same class. And yet his arm around her shoulders and the furrows of his ribs beneath her palm both felt completely right.

‘Luke . . .’ She took a breath, feeling his arm rise and fall with the rise and fall of her shoulders. ‘What made you join them – the Brotherhood, I mean? Who are they?’

There was silence again, backed by the sigh of the woods and the patter of snowfall, until she began to wonder if he would answer her at all. Then he sighed.

‘D’you remember, I told you I was a coward, earlier today?’

She nodded in the darkness, knowing he would feel the movement.

‘Well, this is how I know: when I was a child my parents were killed – by a witch.’

Rosa let out a small sound. She had not meant to speak, but she could not help it. It was not quite a cry, but something smaller, more ashamed. She put her free hand over her mouth and waited for him to continue.

‘He came to our house in the night. My mother woke me up and I hid beneath the settle while he butchered them. Their blood ran down the walls and pooled where I was lying.’

Rosa pressed her hand harder across her mouth, stifling the sob that was trying to rise up and choke her.

‘And I did nothing. I just lay and listened as they died.’

For a moment she didn’t trust herself to speak. She pressed her knuckles against her mouth, breathing through her nose and swallowing hard. Then she spoke, trying to keep her voice steady.

‘Luke, you were a
child
. What could you have done against a full-grown witch?’

‘I could have looked,’ he said, very quietly. ‘I know I could never have stopped it. But I could’ve looked and seen the man who did it. But I did nothing. I just watched his cane rolling across the floor towards me. I see it still when I shut my eyes at night; black with a silver snake, eating its own tail, rolling, rolling closer, and the hand, groping for it, ready to touch my leg. And I did nothing. I just closed my eyes and prayed.’

‘Oh my God.’ She shut her eyes, trying to shut out the picture that rose in front of her in the darkness: a terrified child, a killer, a couple dying in each other’s arms.

‘I’ve waited fifteen years to avenge my parents’ death.’ His voice was all the more terrifying for being so flat and soft. ‘And I thought the Malleus was the answer. I passed the test of fire and the test of the knife. And the last test was to kill a witch. Kill
you
. Do what I’d been waiting to do all these years. And I failed. I was too much of a coward.’

‘You were
not
.’ Her voice shook. It meant so much that he believed her. ‘
Listen
to me, you showed me mercy. That was not the act of a coward. A coward would have killed me as I lay there dying, and gone back with the news to the Brothers.’

He said nothing. She wasn’t sure if he was even listening.

‘Luke.’ She twisted against him, pulling her arm out from behind his back, and took his face in her cold fingers, turning it to look at her in the dark, trying to read his expression. ‘Luke, do you hear me? You are not a coward. My God, you – you . . .’

She stopped, the words deserting her.

Luke looked away, over her shoulder. His lips were pressed shut and she knew he would say no more.

Damn him. Damn his silence. How could you argue with a man who said nothing, with someone who hid everything inside?

For a moment she almost longed for Alexis, who blurted out the first thing that came into his head, whether that got him laughed at or punched. But Luke – she had never known what he thought beneath that quiet, unsmiling face.

She thought of that soft deep dimple that came and went so quick she had to remind herself that it had really been there.

‘I wish you’d smile,’ she said, knowing it came out of the blue, that she sounded crazy. Luke said nothing. Then he sighed.

‘I don’t have much to smile about at the moment.’

L
uke was very cold. He was lying on the hard stone floor of his parents’ cottage, beneath the settle, the cold stone striking through his thin shirt. It was the old bad dream – his parents were dead again for the hundredth time, perhaps the thousandth time. And just like all the other times before, he could do nothing. Nothing but wait.

The pool of blood came nearer and nearer. And he waited, for the clatter of the ebony cane, and the creep, creep of the black-gloved hand searching for it.

But it didn’t come. Instead the blood carried on lapping, and rising, and suddenly he realized he was wet, floating, up to his chest in a stream of gore, struggling to keep his footing. He tried to reach out for something to steady himself, but his hands were full of Rosa’s limp dying body. He stumbled for the bank, through the river of blood, and her breath rattled in her throat, a stream of gore running from her mouth. And he realized that the river had been coming from her all along, that it was her life blood running away, threatening to drown them both.

In the red swirl he saw the snake’s-head cane – Sebastian’s cane – bobbing away on the tide of blood, far out of reach, and he loosed one hand from Rosa, reaching, reaching after it . . . but it was gone, and he needed both his hands to clutch at the riverbank, dragging Rosa’s heavy blood-soaked body up the muddy shore.

‘Rosa,’ he tried to say. ‘Rosa, you can stop this!’

But his voice was swallowed up in the roar of the river and the dying rattle of Rosa’s breath.

He grabbed her, shaking her, shaking her furiously.

‘You’re not to die! Hear me? You’re not to die!’

And then suddenly, cutting through the dream like a silver sharp knife, he heard a voice.

‘Well, well, well. What do we have here?’

Luke woke abruptly, so fast that it took a moment for him to disentangle reality from the dream. There was no river; the roar in his ears was only his own blood and the frantic beating of his heart. But the cold – that was real. A thin veil of snow had fallen in the night and his cheek was burning with the chill of it. When he tried to open his eyes there were snowflakes on his lashes and his hand was frozen. The weight of Rosa’s body in his arms was real too. Her sleeping form was curled against him, her spine firm against his chest, his arms holding her hard, trying to keep them both warm. His coat was open, wrapped around them both, and the thin threadbare blanket was spread across them and as much of Brimstone’s rump as it could reach.

But the voice . . . Was the voice real?

For a moment he could not tell. Then it came again.

‘Take your hands off her, you filthy outwith.’

There was a flare of magic, bright in the darkness of the wood, and Luke found himself suddenly snatched upwards and away from Rosa, so fast that he barely knew what was happening. The wind whipped past his cheek and then he was hanging in mid-air, pinned there by some unseen magic that gripped him almost too tight to breathe. There was a six-foot drop beneath him, to the forest floor.

Below him Brimstone scrambled up, snorting with alarm.

‘Put me down!’ Luke gasped. ‘Who are you?’

‘Put you down?’ The figure stepped into the pool of moonlight, his orange hair dimmed to a washed-out yellow in the pale light. It was Alexis. ‘And have you punch me like the great ham-fisted oaf you are? Not on your life. Do you think I’m stupid?’

Get up, Rosa!
Luke willed her.
Wake up!

‘Well, you can’t be as stupid as you look,’ he croaked, in a half-gasp. ‘No one could manage that and keep breathing.’

For a second the unseen hand tightened on his throat and he gave a strangled choke – and then Alexis gave a careless, brittle laugh.