The Ice King (The Witch Ways 0.5)
Helen Slavin
PART ONE
Pike Lake
Vanessa Way: age 10
Cob Cottage sat on the rough grass by the shore of Pike Lake. The building, long, low and curved like a sleeping fox, was older than anyone could remember and every scrap that contributed to its walls had been picked up from the land within Havoc Wood. The earth it was moulded from, pebbles, sand and loam dug and scraped from the shoreline; the wood that lent bones to the structure was a skeleton of Havoc elm and oak; lake water, clear and cold had emulsified the mud with grasses, and fox fur and horse hair to strengthen. Even the glass for the vast round picture window had been blasted out of the sand on the shoreline.
Hettie Way, Gamekeeper, returning from her afternoon patrol, looked up, glimpsed the higgledy piggledy thatched cone shapes that made up the roofline of her home and turned left. It was not long before she was stepping out from the trees at the eastern side of the house, feeling the soft tussocky grass beneath her feet, before the soft clump of her footsteps on the weathered wooden porch. She stepped in through the double doors which creaked open for her.
Inside, the cottage was warmed by the sunlight that fell through the kitchen skylights. Hettie reached for a glass and filled it with water from the curled brass tap and drank it looking out through the back window to where the garden was looking productive and fecund. Hettie and her daughter had been working out there for most of the weekend, weaving themselves in and out of the plot where plants and herbs and vegetables crowded in together, to shelter, help and protect each other.
Hettie sipped the water. It was cool and clear, pumped from the stream that rolled out of Havoc Wood. She took in a deep breath, the comforting scent of the cottage, of tilled earth and birds’ nests today. The low afternoon sun was starting to burnish the ochre colouring of the curving walls. Hettie watched the shadows of the leaves play on the scrubbed planks of the floor and felt settled. She shrugged deeper into the shelter of her black waxed raincoat, time to go to meet the school bus with its cargo of her greatest treasure.
Hettie Way’s daughter, Vanessa, would be eleven in a few months and was a serious girl whose head was always in a book. When they travelled into Castlebury for the big Saturday Market they would always make a stop at Comfort & Co, a vast teetering palace of books hidden inside a skinny and rather ramshackle sandstone and redbrick building off Mount Street. Hettie was more than content to allow a couple of hours for them both to wander the three storeys packed ceiling high with shelves and drift among the heavy dark tables piled deep with volumes. These were the new books but, down in the basement were the old and secondhand books, more yellowed and dishevelled than their upstairs counterparts.
As a small child, although she was not so very tall now, Vanessa had loved fairytales and story books but, school had lit some extra spark inside her and now she devoured science and drank in facts.
“I know a lot about plants and fish and animals and I could help you. I could do small errandy things for you. I could help. ” Vanessa was not whining, which made her scarier in fact. Whining, Hettie thought, she could deal with but Vanessa only dealt out logic. They stood in the kitchen at Cob Cottage and Hettie looked at the determination in her daughter’s face.
“The Lake is dangerous. The jobs I must do as Gamekeeper are sometimes dangerous. We have talked about this before.” Hettie smiled but Vanessa was not convinced.
“I am old enough. I’m going to secondary school in September. And if things are dangerous then there should be two of us. I could run for help.”
Hettie relented a little. She was not expecting trouble today so what harm could be done? She considered it might be better to take Vanessa this time so that the Lake was not so temptingly forbidden. It occurred to her to make the patrol today as boring as possible, so boring that Vanessa would not wish to come along again.
Another part of Hettie Way understood that a turning point was being reached in their life at Pike Lake. Vanessa was of an age, the lake and its environment would be a test and Hettie would know, one way or another, where her daughter’s future might lie. This part of Hettie Way had spoken out before, waking her at night in a sweat and having to be patient, knowing that the turning points were always reached, however much you walked away from them.
As they walked beside the lake, Vanessa’s little black notebook drew Hettie’s gaze. Vanessa took it out now and again and made a note or pinched a seedpod or leaf or flowerhead off and folded it into a page.
“These are umbelliferous…” Vanessa tilted the flowerhead of the hogweed towards her “I like the way all the tiny flowers make up one big flower…see….” Hettie did see, she remembered, that the flower was a vast constellation of tinier flowers, because Vanessa pointed it out. She had not realised how blinded she’d been, focusing on the Lake and her work and not stopping to look at the hogweed in too long a time.
“But they are poisonous too….” Vanessa warned “…the sap of it is if it gets on you…so you just have to be careful…” she stared into the flowers and Hettie was overcome for a moment, had to reach out and smooth at the soft lustrousness of her daughter’s chocolatey red hair.
“Yes, you just must…” she intoned, only just able to push the words out, there were moments when the small, infinitely burning coal of love she felt for her daughter had a burst of fire that crumbled hot embers into her chest.