The Ice King (The Witch Ways 0.5)(7)
“When did you do this?” she asked. Vanessa expected there might be some small hell to pay for her plan and was prepared for it.
“Today. I wanted to help… I thought if we put up a notice saying it had been caught and this is all the information about it and so no one need bother anymore and also saying PRIVATE because…”
She watched her mother look over the drawing and say nothing. Vanessa ran out of words. Her mother closed the book and put it into the schoolbag, out of the way.
“It’s very good.” was her comment as she moved into the kitchen. They went about their tasks in a strange silence, Vanessa unsure what to say. Her plan had seemed so certain and assured and now, after everything that had happened, it was a jumble in her head.
“Do not do this ever again.” her mother’s voice was cool and clear, like the water. It would have felt better to Vanessa if it had been a cross voice, angry words. This was much worse. They did not speak through dinner, passing bowls and plates without a word. The food should have tasted good, it was Vanessa’s favourite, macaroni cheese with broccoli. It tasted of mud.
Starlight sparkled the water of Pike Lake as Hettie Way, feeling chill in her black waxed raincoat, rowed out. She halted at a particular spot and the boat, far from drifting on the slight waves, stayed put, Hettie pulled up the oars and waited. The moon was only three quarters full but it would be enough.
After several minutes she reached her hand into the water, let the liquid chill her skin and pinch cold into her bones until she almost couldn’t bear the pain of it, her hand up to her wrist ringing with cold like a note. The note sounded out beneath the lake.
Esox Lucius rose up through the water, monstrous, and his teeth bit down so that his jaw and her fingers were interlocked and Hettie’s mind opened up. She could see her daughter walking away, the landscape was white with snow and very far to the north. The aurora borealis lit the sky with shimmering green and Vanessa was walking away, away, away. At the edge of this landscape Hettie Way saw a wolf, watching, waiting for her by a frozen lake, until the wind turned and with a yawn the wolf shucked his skin and, dressed now as his man self, walked back across the ice towards her.
After she took her hand from the water Hettie Way sat in the boat for a long time, her head bowed.
It was nearly dawn before she put the oars back into the rowlocks and rowed back to the jetty.
PART TWO
The Goose Fair
Lachlan Laidlaw: age 18
Lachlan Laidlaw would not be taking up an administrative post in the nearby city because he was destined, his mother said with something like a sneer, ‘For greater things.’ She did not have ambition, not since his father had died young and left them partly penniless. Mrs Laidlaw had turned the glasses over on the draining board and rattled the knives into the cutlery drawer. She was disappointed with her offspring, he was going to university, which, it seemed, was something like treason.
Lachlan liked the village where he had grown up. There was nothing wrong with it, except that it was small and it wasn’t Elsewhere. Now that he had an escape route, that his trunk was packed for his undergraduate studies at Oxbridge University, Lachlan found the place itched at him, from the peeling paint of the Post Office to the sawdust outside the waxy red step leading into the Stafford Bros Butchers shop.
His mother could not complain, he had, in fact, worked the last two summers with the Stafford brothers and been trained in butchery. He had enjoyed the task, the precision and the skill he’d acquired but his heart lay, as he insisted, Elsewhere.
Olivia Dashford was very beautiful, but in the way of a porcelain statue. She was delicate and shiny and the light shone through her because, as Lachlan had discovered, there was nothing much inside her. Her voice was a tinkling bell, except when crossed, at which point it became a snarling growl. Her eyes were soft with fluttering eyelashes except when crossed, when those same eyes stared out, hard as stones. She was manipulative and devious, willing to let Lachlan Laidlaw put his hand here, his mouth there, for as long as he would do what she wanted.
What she wanted to do today was go to the Goose Fair at Hedgeley. The last evening had been spent down under the willow on the river bank where Olivia had let Lachlan ‘go so far and no further’ inside the lacy confines of her underwear, borrowed from her sister; this meant that Lachlan was paying out the fare for the short bus ride. It also meant Lachlan was paying out for the admission fee to the Goose Fair, handing over more coins for drinks that were sticky and fizzing, for sweets that were also sticky and fizzing, for a ride on the Waltzer that left him feeling sick, head whizzing.
“Oh… A fortune teller…” Olivia took his hand “Don’t you want to know your fortune Lach?” Olivia’s lips brushed at his cheek, hinting at what his fortune might entail if he would just fork out a few more coins to consult the Fates. Lachlan looked at Olivia and then at the fortune teller’s tent. It was a raggedy affair, a sort of turreted tower in striped canvas that Lachlan thought might have been camped out in by Richard the Lionheart at some point in its history. A pennant flew from a carved finial at the top, a black wolf on a white ground.
“It’s nonsense.” Lachlan reasoned. “No one can read the future, Liv. It’s a con.”
“It’s fun.” her voice had that insistent tone and she squeezed his hand. Sometimes, in company with Olivia, Lachlan felt like a bullock being switched disobediently through a field. It was a brightly sunny day and he was feeling hot and out of sorts.