Page 52 of The Snow Witch

But…

He couldn’t leave her there! Just a spectacle for everyone to see, her makeshift grave marked by a solitary, straggling thorn tree.

Emory’s gaze traced the line of the rushing Burn. It reminded him of her. She was always moving, never still; her wild ways had exhausted him at times – she never rested.

No. She was not to stay here, in this pile of silent, unmoving ash.

He knew what he had to do.

Taking a deep breath and praying to anyone who might listen, he began to dig with his hands, down beneath the covering of snow and the rough, cold earth. Plunging his hand into the depths, he felt ash, some sort of substance crumbling beneath his fingers.

Swallowing down bile, he took a handful of it – of her. It was still hot, it burned his hand, but he did not care. His fist grazed something as he lifted it from the hellish pile of ash, cutting a line into his flesh. The blade of her dagger.

Disconnected from it all somehow, watching the blood trickle down his hand, he stood up and walked to the Burn. He threw the ashes into it, watched as the water swept them away, tossing them downstream, where they danced and whirled. They’d rush past her house, through that damn village where nobody cared and everybody lied, flowing eventually into the River South Tyne. He returned to the smouldering pile of ash and did it again. And again. And again.

He did it until there was no more ash he could take, until his mind was so far removed from reality that he had stopped knowing what he was doing. He just wanted her gone; wanted her away from that place!

Then he knelt down and dipped his hands in the Burn, washing the ash and the blood away, seeing the red trickle into the water, binding him to Meggie forever. He took the dagger and held it in his hands, staring at it, then he washed that too. It should have been blackened by the flames, twisted and warped and destroyed.

But it was not.

And when he brought it out of the Dene Burn, he imagined that it glowed with renewed energy.

‘I swear on this dagger, and on Meg’s soul and our child’s spirit and on my life, that I will find out who has done this,’ Emory said. ‘And as God, Coventina and any Pagan gods who still roam this cursed area are my witnesses, I will have my revenge.’

For Meg.

33

NOW

Later that morning, Violet had her phone out ready to call Jake, to give it another go and see if he had dug himself out of the site yet. The intention really was there – the phone was in her hand, the call screen open. But perhaps the mistake she made was to try to make the call from her room. From the room that had a perfect view, right down the gentle, snow-covered slopes, to Coventina’s Well.

That image of the dagger was bugging her. She’d maybe have another look, now it was daylight. It still seemed quiet out there, and she knew she hadn’t been imagining it. It was real. She had to go back and look.

She pulled on her pink padded jacket and stuffed her phone in the pocket. She’d go to the Well, right now, and have a proper check around.

It was still that time of the morning where it was eerie – she’d chosen to drive down to Brocolitia, justifying it by telling herself it was a really good idea to go straight to Jake afterwards, and not really that it was psychologically for a quick getaway if she wanted it. Running up from the Well to the safety of her car was not, it seemed, as bad as running all the way back up the guest house if things got too spooky down there.

Violet’s car was the only one in the car park, the only tyre tracks were hers as she pulled in by the wall. She heard a few cars drive past on the main road, the rumble of a truck or two, but once she was in that dip by Coventina’s Well, it was all quiet and all she could hear was her own heart pounding in her chest.

Jake would be horrified if he knew she was down here again on her own, worrying that she’d slip. But she intended to be super careful, and had her trusty walking poles with her. They’d be good for balancing with as well as poking the snow with.

She crossed Meggie’s Dene Burn, the sound of it louder than she had thought it would be, hypnotic almost, the misty haze from earlier still lingering. But she kept going, refusing to stand on the little crossing and look along the Burn. Something came back to her about how bridges were deemed as haunted, liminal spaces in folklore, literally where humans bridged the gap between life and death, and she shuddered. It did indeed seem that this morning, crossing that Burn, she entered a different world.

All was silent as she approached the Well, and she took a deep breath as she planted both feet firmly in the packed snow. Walking pole at the ready, she stretched out once more to prod at the area where she thought she’d seen the dagger but, try as she might not to look, the pool of water caught her attention, and she found herself drawn to it all over again.

A strange energy wrapped around her, and she knew that she needed to look. She was convinced the spirit of that Well – Coventina – was there in those quiet moments, and Violet found herself praying to the goddess that she wouldn’t show her any more Witch Trials. She held her breath as she stared into the water.

Her heart skipped a beat as she saw Meggie’s face staring back at her again – or was it Meggie? The face that looked back seemed a lot more ethereal than it had before and Violet frowned as it rippled in and out of focus, the breeze tickling the top of the water. The woman’s eyes weren’t grey, like Violet’s and Meggie’s were; they were sky blue. The hair was not white blonde, but golden, and Violet was captivated as she watched those irises swirl and change like so many clouds.

She had the oddest feeling she was seeing the embodiment of the snow goddess in that pool.

Then the image changed, and it was the cottage again: Meg’s cottage. But as it had been in her vision, not as it had been in reality when she’d seen the rough annexe on it, and the mud floor. And she saw a woman kneeling before a flagstone, moving it to the side and peering at what lay beneath, her long, white-blonde hair falling past her face, obscuring it from sight.

But the most heart-wrenching thing was that the woman was naked, and Violet could clearly see the fact that she was pregnant. Five, six months at the most, she reckoned. Violet had made a habit these last few weeks of researching everything she could find out about pregnancy, and had scrolled through numerous pages of women at various stages of it. She considered herself something of an expert on baby bumps now, imagining what she might look like as the weeks progressed. She couldn’t help putting herself in Meg’s position; in fact, as the woman turned to look over her right shoulder, Violet inhaled sharply. It was genuinely as if she was looking in a mirror and seeing herself there.

Her hand found her lower abdomen, and she rested it there, understanding, perhaps, that this was real, and she was going to have a child soon. A flutter of excitement or anxiety, she wasn’t sure which, shivered through her body. She was having a baby! With Jake!