‘Oh, an old woman who is specially brought over from the mainland. But she’s never seen the witch. She’s blind.’
‘Blind!’ I exclaimed.
‘Yes. If she wasn’t, she’d have to wear a blindfold, like Lieutenant Romus and anyone else who goes up there,’ said Serek. ‘Plus, the witch is made to wear a veil whenever there are any visitors. Remember, if your eyes were to meet hers, you’d turn to stone.’
‘So no one knows what she looks like?’ I said.
Serek shook his head. ‘No. And nobody wants to, either.’ He leaned forward. ‘I’ve heard that if she meets your eyes, she can burrow into your mind and read your dreams. And then she destroys you.’
‘I don’t really understand how that power can remain to her when she’s locked in the Tower,’ I said. ‘Isn’t it supposed to ward off all magic?’
‘It does,’ said Marcinek, ‘but I guess the bosses think it’s better to be safe than sorry. I tell you what, if I had to go up there, I’d make certain I was wearing a blindfold! And if ever you draw the short straw, Kasper, you’d better do the same thing!’
‘Ha! I’m neither a blind cleaner nor a bigwig, just a lowly kitchenhand,’ I retorted. ‘So there’s no chance of my going up to face the witch.’
‘And I would keep it that way,’ said Franz. ‘Now how about dealing those cards you’ve got in your hand?’
Despite her fearsome reputation, the witch seemed to eat and drink like anyone else, for her food was prepared in the kitchens and sent up the Tower by a contraption called a dumb waiter – a mechanical platform that went up a narrow elevator shaft from the cellar. I’d seen the food before it went up – and there were certainly no eyes of newts or toads’ legs or whatever you expect to see on a witch’s menu. No, the witch ate the food we ate, which is to say, big hearty stews and the occasional roast – nothing fancy. Our cook, Flamel, prided himself on his plain meals. ‘Food fit for soldiers,’ he’d declare, waving his spoon around. ‘And if your society ladies ever visit, they’ll have the same menu, no matter what!’ Franz and I would look at each other and stifle a desire to laugh. For what lady would ever visit the island, anyway?
Only once did anything trouble the even tenor of my days. I was crossing the courtyard on some errand when I happened to glance up at the single window of the Tower, and just for an instant I saw a blurred shadow move behind the dark, barred glass. My pulse quickened. I thought to look away, just in case the power of the witch’s glance could pierce through the glass. But I was much too curious. Look as I might, though, I could see nothing beyond the merest hint of a form, nothing more. Suddenly, I became conscious of an odd feeling in my throat – a thickening, a choking. Quickly, I looked away – and when I looked back, she was gone.
I told my friends about it that evening. ‘I feel stupid that I looked away so quickly,’ I confessed.
Franz laughed. ‘You’d have been stupid if you hadn’t looked away!’
‘You’d have been a lunatic,’ Serek chimed in.
‘No, you’d have been a statue,’ said Marcinek, ‘frozen there with your mouth wide open like a goldfish.’
They’d never seen anything at all at the window, not even a shadow, not even the faintest shadow of a shadow, and they intended to keep it that way. ‘Don’t look up there again,’ Franz advised me.
I nodded, but truth to tell, a part of me wished I’d seen more. I sneaked glances up at the window over the following weeks, but I never saw anything else. And in time, I forgot about it.
Three months into my time on the island, and it all felt normal to me. The island, the Tower, the unseen prisoner – it was my life now. I was homesick at times – I missed my parents, the village, my beloved woods, my old friends. But I had made new friends, and despite the pot-scrubbing and floor-washing, life on the island was much better than life in the recruits’ hall with that bully Gawel bellowing in my ears and having slops served up on tin plates. Flamel’s food might be plain but it was hearty and good, and we young guards were all treated fairly.
I wrote to my parents several times about life on the island, and they replied saying how pleased they were to hear I’d settled in well. They were proud of me, just as Commander Los had said they would be. They could hold their heads up high not only in Fish-the-Moon but in the market town nearby, because no one from our region had ever been chosen for the Tower Guard. I was by way of being a local hero now, they said. This made me happy, though I was honest enough to admit to them that I had started out as a lowly kitchenhand.
‘From little things, big things grow,’ my father had answered.
‘Take care of yourself, my dearest child,’ my mother had added. She still thought it was unsafe. I understood that from far away it could look like that. But from close by it was all so different. So reassuring. So normal.
Until the day it all changed.
Kasper
It was a day like any other. I’d finished my morning’s work in the kitchens and had lunch in the mess hall. Afterwards, my friends had preferred to stay inside and play cards, but I felt restless that day and in need of some air. I walked out of the soldiers’ quarters, past a couple of the officers’ houses, and then turned sharply down a path that led to the other side of the island, the side that faced not the mainland but the open sea. On one of my earlier wanders, I’d found a little sheltered beach where there were rock-pools in which sea urchins lurked. I was fond of the taste of sea urchins, and had a thought to collect some to cook up for a card-party snack the next day.
I was squatting by a big rockpool, scooping up one sea urchin after another, when all at once a sharp pain burst behind my eyes. Overbalancing, I hit my head on a rock and fell headfirst into the water. My eyes stinging, my lungs bursting, I thought I was going to die. And then, suddenly, I heard a voice – a girl crying, ‘Why? Why?’
Then another voice, which I recognised to be Commander Los, said, ‘I am sorry but it has to be. On the day of your eighteenth birthday, you must die. It’s the only way to keep our land safe.’
Spluttering, coughing, I managed to crawl out of the water and lie there gasping. I could feel a bruise forming on the side of my head where I’d hit the rock, and my throat was sore from swallowing salt water. The headache or whatever it was that had made me pass out so suddenly had gone. And yet the words remained, repeating themselves over and over in my head.
My heart thundered. I tried to tell myself it had been nothing other than a hallucination after hitting my head. But it hadn’t felt like a hallucination. It had felt utterly real.
What did it mean? Forgetting about the sea urchins, I hurried away from the rockpool and headed back to the comforting cluster of buildings. I meant to catch my friends before they returned to work to tell them what had happened. But they’d already left so I went back to the kitchens, which I found in an uproar.
‘Where have you been, Bator?’ shouted the chief kitchen hand, Lew, as I skulked in. ‘We’re loaded down with work, and you go sneaking off!’
‘What?’ It had been an ordinary day when I’d left.