Page 43 of The Snow Witch

‘Another low cloud. Almost like Coventina is hiding her secrets. How perfect,’ she said. And she let herself outside, grabbing a couple of walking poles that the guest house allowed people to borrow, as she went out. The cold air caught her breath as she began to trudge through the snow to the dip in the hillside.

As she approached, she saw that the mist was rising from the Burn itself, a white haze snaking down towards Newbrough, with some fog appearing to be settled right on top of the pool the Burn sprung from. Utterly magical, really. And this was why she loved being outside and alone in the early morning. There was nobody around and nobody to bother her, and she let her mind drift like the snowflakes that fell silently and steadily around her.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Violet’s thoughts strayed to the dagger she’d imagined lying beside the Well on her first day.

It had to have been there, didn’t it? Or was she genuinely seeing things? She was still baffled by what had happened at Meg’s cottage. Was the dagger another element of that? Some distorted reality?

It was no good.

She was starting to overthink and that was not what this peaceful walk to the Well was supposed to be about. It was supposed to ground her, give her some harmony in her head and let her feel at one with the space around her.

And so, Violet found herself on the grass next to Coventina’s Well, standing probably too close to it again; the walking poles were rammed in the snow and she was clinging onto them firmly, just to give herself a little extra purchase as she peered around the area where she thought she’d seen the dagger.

It was stupid, really. It was even more snowy than it had been the first time she was there, and she was inside a misty cloud, so if the dagger was still around, it was practically guaranteed to be invisible this morning.

Violet stood back. Realistically, she wasn’t going to find it here today, was she? But thinking about Ollie and what he’d seen, she found herself, reluctantly almost, leaning forwards again. At this early hour, the surface of the Well was dark and fathomless, reflecting the pre-dawn sky. But it was also as still as glass. She could hear the rushing of the Burn to her right as the stream ran down towards Newbrough, swollen with the melt-off from the snow, and the wind tickled her cheek as it whipped into a whirlwind around her, lifting her fair hair into tendrils around her face. She leant forwards some more, her heart pounding, even as she clutched the walking poles more securely, and finally, she could see herself reflected in the pool – just like Ollie had.

But it was her – Violet. Nothing unusual about the reflection at all.

Another whirlwind wrapped around her and rippled the surface of the water. And, in the depths of the sacred pool, she saw another scene taking place. Something that couldn’t possibly be reflected from Violet’s time in the twenty-first century.

A tall man in a black, swirling cloak was holding some sort of staff up to a woman, right in front of her at eye level. The woman had long, white-blonde hair which was blowing across her face, then a man held her shift up, exposing the bottom half of the woman’s body.

‘Oh God!’ Violet leant closer. What the hell was going on?

Then the man stabbed the staff into the woman’s naked thigh.

‘It’s a witch trial!’ Violet was horrified. She was watching a witch trial in real time – almost as if it was a movie reel scrolling through with no sound. It had to be Meggie; it just had to be.

The man dropped the woman’s shift, and she shook the hair out of her face; and Violet almost choked. She now understood what Ollie had felt when he said he felt like he was looking in a mirror. Meggie looked just like Violet did – the same hair, the same shaped face, the same eyes. It was, she was convinced, the same woman she had seen at the cottage in Newbrough.

Violet squeezed her eyes shut. Surely, she was hallucinating. She opened her eyes and the scene had changed. Instead of seeing Meggie and that awful, awful man, she saw a fair-haired man sitting on a horse, watching the spectacle.

And the man looked just like Ollie – apart from Ollie had never, when he’d been in Violet’s company at least, looked so arrogant and so cruel. It would not be a huge stretch of the imagination to assume he was the Milburn character that Ollie was related to. He actually looked pleased with himself – as if this was all his doing and his reward was to watch it play out.

‘No.’ Violet blinked and the scene changed again. The woman who looked like Violet was being dragged away and the man raised the staff again. Violet couldn’t stand to see any more.

‘Oh God, just make it stop,’ she yelled.

Instinctively, she reached out her hand to Meggie. Meggie’s grey eyes met Violet’s now and they widened; she looked a desperate mix of grateful and terrified.

‘I want to help you,’ said Violet, ‘I really do—’ Her hands touched the icy water and her fingers dipped into it, sending gentle ripples to the edges of the pool.

And Meg’s hand almost, almost touched hers, the fingertips grazing, just as Violet heard a voice echoing through the valley.

‘Blessed Coventina!’ cried a voice she knew was Meggie’s ‘You came to save me, Merciful goddess, prove to these men I am not the witch they fear me to be.’

Then the Witch Pricker bellowed, ‘Demon! The witch has summoned a demon. Get thee back to Hell.’

Violet saw him raise the staff in the air and grasp it with both hands. She shouted out, but that, it seemed, was the point where her mind finally seemed to want to reconnect to the real world and the pictures in Coventina’s Well disappeared.

As she came back to normality, her heart thumping and her mind a mess, she could still hear that man’s voice.

Violet sobbed and tore her gaze away from the Well, forcing herself to clamber up the slope to higher ground, away from that way too creepy area. It had been a mistake to come here. It really had. She hadn’t found the dagger, but she’d stumbled on a whole lot more weird than she had wanted to engage with.

And she’d witnessed a fucking witch trial, which was a whole other level of immersive research. And she didn’t like it.

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