The Ice King (The Witch Ways 0.5)(30)
Hettie was waiting for her daughter to tell her the tale. She waited. She waited. Even the news of the baby did not prompt the telling.
So Hettie decided to take action.
The bath made a wonderful waterfall sound that seemed to be a result of the strange acoustics of the curvaceous walls of the bathroom. The space was small and yet sounded vast. Hettie let the water run hot for several moments. She took her time lighting the candles in the window recess and the various small nooks and crannies set into the walls themselves. The room began to glow and steam.
“You having a bath?” Vanessa stood in the doorway. She was showing now, her belly rounded out, still with four months to go. She was looking tired, circles had darkened beneath her eyes and her skin was paler than it had ever been. Ghostlike. Hettie blacked the word out of her mind.
“Nope. You are.” she rose as Vanessa entered the room “It won’t take long to fill. I’ll fetch your robe and the towels…and that bath stuff you like…” Hettie busied herself in the small hallway, pulling towels from the honeyed oak of the linen press, lifting Vanessa’s robe from the hook on her door. The bath oil was in a bag on the little chest of drawers, a little treat that she had brought back from the chemist in Castlebury yesterday.
With Vanessa settled, the water running, the scent of the bath oil drifting through the cottage Hettie stepped back into the kitchen, through the arch.
The compass was on the coffee table, perched on one of the much folded maps that Vanessa’s mind toured over again and again.
Hettie Way knew what a compass was, of course, but it was her long held opinion that if you needed a compass to find your path you deserved to be lost. The glass above the face was cracked where, during the research centre disaster, it had saved Vanessa from being impaled by falling metalwork. Hettie Way understood that this small round of metal and enamel marked with letters was a talisman, an artefact, but she was uncertain whether it was for good or ill and there was a great deal at stake.
Her hand reached for the compass. So small. So inconsequential. They’d bought it at the outdoors shop on Laundry Lane. Hettie knew that did not make the difference, events imbued the talismans, they were ordinary until some event lent them power. She reached and stopped as the compass’s energy reached back, a fierce prickling, like electricity, sharp and cold. Warned, she turned her attention to the notebooks. The oldest looking one with a black cloth cover, foxed at the edges and water stained, was lying open, face down on the arm of the chair. She reached and was warned once more, the bright prickling feeling like frost in her fingertips.
That night, as on all the others, Vanessa did not sleep well. Hettie was woken as Vanessa got up and left her room. There were not the usual bathroom sounds and so Hettie listened harder, heard the doors to the porch open, the creak of the deckboards outside.
She pulled on her black waxed raincoat and stepped out through the kitchen door. As Hettie made her way around the side of the cottage, she could see Vanessa walking down towards the water, her bare feet not bothered by the stones. Hettie watched, careful to remain out of sight. Her daughter stood as though asleep, the breeze rose and Hettie took in a scent that she was not used to, the hint of snow and of smokey honey. As she watched the water grew steely grey beneath the night sky, a thin light glimmered from its surface and a different sound lifted out of the water, discordant, offkey. The hair on the back of her neck rose and she folded herself deeper into her coat. The water’s edge was stiffening into thin shards of ice that could not hold their shape, the lake water lapped and sipped them to liquid. After a few moments Vanessa turned back into the house.
In the morning there was no breakfast. Vanessa awoke from her troubled sleep and after dressing she headed into the living room to take up her seat and her studies. Her mother barred her way.
“You are my daughter. My family.” Hettie spoke, her voice too quiet, sounding strained. She took in two or three deep breaths, as if she was considering her actions, before speaking again.
“Understand. I would not do this normally. Know. I do not do this lightly.” Hettie was struggling with emotion, her eyes searching her daughter’s face. “But today it must be done.” Vanessa felt the burning heat from her mother, the spell was being cast and she let it warm her.
“You have found your way here, there is time enough to tell me…” Hettie’s voice was altered as it reached Vanessa’s ears, deeper, commanding and she could not stop herself from talking, of bark and lichen, blood and ice, of maps and paths and the route to Far North.
It was a full moon, of course, when the baby, a girl, was born. They had not argued about where Vanessa was going to give birth, Hettie thought she might have argued for the science and safety of the hospital at Castlebury but Vanessa wanted to be home.
“Not want to be. Must be.” Vanessa said and knew her mother would understand. That was a difference since her homecoming, Vanessa had a new angle on her mother and their relationship. She saw Pike Lake with different, wider angled eyes and was more careful about the paths she took in Havoc Wood.
Right now however, there was a pressing need to get down to the lake shore, to the flat rock.
“The lake…by the lake…got to be there…” Vanessa took her breaths, deep and regulated and not the slightest bit of use against the deep and rolling tidal wave of pain.
“You do what you must…I’ll follow…” Hettie felt her daughter crush her hand as she rode out the newly powerful contractions. She had been afraid before, at the beginning, but now, with the contractions really strong, Vanessa changed mental gears, she was, Hettie understood, locking into the practical biology of childbirth to distract herself.