Wolfsangel

46

Saitada sat in a shaft of light that cut through from a finger-width opening in the side of the upper cave. She watched her image looking back from the blade of the sword.

She was much older. How much? She didn’t know. The unburned side of her face was not pretty any more: her skin was tight on her bones, pale from lack of light, dirty and cut.

Saitada had been a long time in the dark. The witch caves were endless and deep. She had not known at first that her boys had been taken and had remained underground, trawling the blackness with her fingertips, reaching for a hand, the brush of some hair, listening for the cries of her children in the dark, living off the water of streams and food she could beg from the witches’ servants.

For years, Saitada hadn’t known why her children had been taken. But crawling through blind chimneys, emerging from dripping sumps of rock where her mouth had stolen the inch of air between the water and the tunnel ceiling, taking candles from the boy servants and watching the light struggle against the deep dark, she listened and she learned. The witches, who from their lowest caves could hear a hare’s breath on the mountainside, to whom the rock and the ice of the Troll Wall were just a veil through which they saw from sea to sea, did not notice her, and she did not know to think that odd.

The older witches of course did not speak, and the boys knew only that they needed to fear and to serve them. Neither yielded any information about what had happened to Saitada’s children. The girls, however, initiates new to the dark, shivered and trembled and clung to what they had been. Saitada came to them, sat with them, hugged them and calmed them, though she never thought to say anything. The girls needed to talk, to confess their fears as they would have to their mothers. They told her, among other things, of the threat that was coming, of the deaths and the terror of death. They told her too about two boys who would become one wolf to kill the murderous god. One boy’s body would host the spirit of the wolf, the other would be his food, giving his brother the strength he needed. The witch queen had taken the boys and only one would live. Saitada never found it strange that she could understand the girls’ language. She only knew that her babies had gone.

They were always in her mind, their memory like a tumour that ate everything else she had seen, everything she had been. After years alone she was not a person, just a love and a hate encased in flesh — cherishing the thought of her children, loathing the witch queen who had taken them — watching death begin to creep through the caves.

The girls had all died when Saitada’s grief was at its height. She had gone to the deep dark, where she had thought she would die, when five of them were dead, and emerged to find none alive. The boys were all dead too. From one she had taken tinder and lit a candle. She had no idea why she had come back — her own motivations were now a mystery to her — but in a week her purpose became clear. She had come back to watch the witch queen kill her sisters.

Some went in their sleep; some were strangled and some burned. The majority would have died from neglect, with no boys to tend them, but Saitada brought them food from the sacrifices. It wasn’t kindness. She saw the distress the murders caused the witch queen and didn’t want starvation or thirst to spare her a single one. Saitada saw how the deaths drove the queen on to madness and she sought to guide her hand, leaving rope or tinder, stakes or, once, a long pin that she found in some cloth left as a sacrifice. The queen quickly put Saitada’s gifts to use.

Saitada watched for the arrival of the god the girls had talked about but saw nothing. Rock, pool and stream remained the same in the yellow light of a candle stub; the torpid air and dripping damp didn’t change when the flame was spent.

When the witches were all dead, she tried to kill the witch queen herself. She could not go through with it. Twice she pulled the queen from the Pools of the Dead by a rope at her neck; once she took a little knife, pressed it to her breast but then drew back. Were the runes protecting the witch queen? Even Saitada could sense them now, chiming and splashing and fizzing in the blackness as the witch endured her daily sufferings by water and cold. Frustration began to overwhelm Saitada and she spent a long time trying to think how she could strike her enemy down. But every time she moved against her she faltered.

She found his sword in the lowest caves — it thumped against her knee as she stumbled on the uneven floor. She knew what it was the instant she held it — the slim curve in the jewelled scabbard, the keenness of the blade when it was drawn.

He could kill the witch. He could kill anyone. Saitada knew only one thing about him — his name. Authun. It was enough. She took the sword and went up towards the light.