Page 5 of The Queen’s Witch

She spoke slowly. “Ye did not ask me who haunts and torments your grandmother. Ye do not even know who ye seek to battle.”

“I thought only of . . . who is it? Who is this Joan that so hates Grandmother?”

Mother Redcap hesitated. Cold slid down my spine, and my hand trembled. Whatever she said next, I already sensed, would be terrible. But I must know.

“Who, Mother Redcap? Who is this Joan? Is she . . .” I could not finish.

“She was your mother. Now be ye still certain ye wish to know more?”

2

Tydd Saint Stephen

If Mother Redcap had sought to change my mind with her revelation, she had failed. “Tell me,” I demanded. “Tell me all. Why would my mother torture her mother? Why did Grandmother never tell me any of this? She said my mother died in childbirth!”

“Frances lied. She did not want ye to know the truth. I thought she was wrong and told her so. But ye be her grandchild, and I merely cousin to both of ye.”

Even in grief, even in anger, I recognized Grandmother’s desire to protect me, Mother Redcap’s desire to harden me to hard truths. It had been a rope pull between them my whole childhood. But for Grandmother to oppose Mother Redcap’s wish, to defy her thrice-braided cousin—that was as singular as Mother Redcap’s compliance with the lie.

But to deceive me about my mother . . . why? Even as I said, “I do not understand,” dread washed over me. Nothing was as I had believed, but my dread was more than reaction: It was presentiment. Even as a child I’d had presentiments; Grandmother had said it was proof of my natural ability. But always they had been of minor accidents: a cup of ale about to fall from a table, a stumble over a tree root barely avoided. This was different. Dread of what Mother Redcap would say tightened my throat, making it difficult to breathe.

She said, “No, ye do not understand. First ye must know more of yer grandmother’s life.”

I managed to choke out, “Know what?” I had never questioned Grandmother about her past, assuming, as children do, that she existed mostly in relation to myself. I had never even asked her about being lame. Now to my dread was added shame.

Mother Redcap studied my face, and I saw the moment she decided to proceed. “I have lived my whole life in Norfolk, but yer grandmother did not. Frances be born in Lincolnshire, on the other side of the Fens. She be the only child of parents who died of the Sweat when she be a very young maid. Frances went to work in a great manor house, and the mistress took a fancy to her. There Frances learned to speak like her betters, as she taught ye to do.”

I knew this; other girls in Tydd Saint Stephen mocked my speech. Mark tried to copy it, when he remembered. “Mother Redcap—”

“Patience, child. There be more. In time, Frances married Ned—more about him anon. She birthed Joan. Ned died when Joan was but a child, and Frances carried on alone. I visited her a handful of times, usually at Beltane, until I became too old and infirm for easy travel. Joan worried me. But I had not seen Frances nor Joan for many years, until seventeen years ago Frances crept into Tydd Saint Stephen, terrified and cruelly injured, carrying a baby. She begged for sanctuary but did not want to tell me what had happened. She did not need to. I discovered it in the same manner as ye will now. Stand back, Alysoun—no, farther away, where ye be safe.”

Safe? From what? I obeyed, but I eyed Mother Redcap as I dragged the settle to the far wall and stood in front of it, a shield between Grandmother’s body and whatever was going to happen next. My throat tightened further, and I clasped my hands so tightly together that the nails of my right hand cut into the palm of my left.

Mother Redcap chanted. The stone floor began to shine. The air in the cottage turned cold. The shine solidified into a pool of what looked like impossibly smooth ice, where a moment ago there had been no water. Slowly, pictures formed, emerging like shadowy fish rising from the depths. Then, abruptly, the images were neither shadowy nor flat on the ice. They rose all around me, and I was both standing beside the settle and inside the image as it moved, silent but solid as rock. I tried to back away but could neither move nor speak, an imprisoned witness.

Each image dissolved into the next:

Grandmother, unmistakably she although young and whole, smiling down at a babe at her breast.

A wasted man howling on a bed. The image had no sounds, but his sunken eyes radiated fury and I read on his lips a single word over and over: Betrayed, betrayed, betrayed.

Grandmother and a tiny girl, both draped in black, at a graveside.

The child, now a young maid, roasting a cat alive, laughing as it writhed in pain. Grandmother rushing in and the girl—my mother—grinning at her.

Joan striking Grandmother and stalking out of a cottage. Grandmother weeping.

Grandmother, older, opening the door to a haggard Joan carrying a fair-haired baby. She shoved the bundle into Grandmother’s arms and staggered toward the warmth of the hearth.

Joan, screaming at a man with my fair curls, green eyes, too-long nose. He struck her across the mouth and she fell, but her eyes shone with a steady and cold determination that, had I been able to move, would have made me shudder.

And then, abruptly, a violent storm at sea where a moment ago had been neither clouds nor winds. Men rushed around the deck of a fishing vessel, waves engulfing the deck, until the boat broke apart and sank, the entire crew drowning in icy waters. My father among them.

Grandmother facing Joan, mouthing words I could not hear. Joan casually stretched out her hand, and my grandmother collapsed, mouth open in a silent scream, a bone in her left leg thrusting through the flesh in a pool of blood and pain.

One final image: Grandmother, leg bound to a board, one hand clutching a stout stick and the other balancing a baby on her hip. She staggered through marshland, fell, and in falling, twisted her body to cushion me. Then she rose again and, gaunt and weeping, pushed on.

Then all of it—figures, unnatural ice, magick—vanished as abruptly as it had been conjured. Mother Redcap gasped for breath; the spell had cost her much. When she could speak, it came in a whisper. “Frances . . . came to me . . . nearly . . . dead. She—”