Anyone watching Tabitha just then – say, from an uncomfortable kneeling position in the grasses a little distance away from the river – would have been quite surprised at all of this. They would have been alarmed to see her slip fully clothed into the river, and worried that she stayed under the water for just a little longer than they were comfortable with. They would have been immensely relieved to see her surface again, thankful that she hadn't been swept away. It would have solidified their suspicion that this girl was indeed rather odd.
But even knowing this, they never would have guessed that this strange girl was about to change everything forever.
3
CHAPTER THREE
Tabitha walked back to the village with her hair dripping and the river water running in rivulets down her neck and back. Her clothes were still sopping wet, and slapped uncomfortably against the backs of her legs as she walked. She looked a fright, but the villagers were more than used to seeing her looking more river than girl.
Tabitha's village was a tiny, tucked-away place that teetered on the edge of the water like a fledgling bird afraid to take flight. Like most of the settlements remaining in Bretan, it had been built up around the ruins of buildings that had stood here long ago, and was now a strange cluster of homes built up against crumbling brick walls, finished with wood and mud, with grasses and plants growing everywhere in amongst them. There was no longer any indication of where streets might have once been, since only the oldest and most carefully constructed brick buildings had very much left of them after centuries of being unable to maintain them properly. The rest of the buildings which must once have stood here had now vanished completely, reclaimed by the earth. Try as they might, the villagers could not coax the river plants into holding back when they reached the village, so the grasses grew long and wild right up to and even into some people's houses.
But they were used to it by now, and the villagers were proud of the place that they called home. They loved their river, and they didn't really mind that occasionally they had to surrender a corner of a room to the grasses for a summer. And they were immensely proud of the remnants of walls and chimneys which still remained intact. It was proof, as far as they were concerned, that the village had been here for a very long time, and that it had always withstood everything that had been thrown at it. This was where they had always been, and this was where they always would be.
Tabitha paused when she reached the house at the edge of the village – if you could call it the edge, since the village disintegrated outwards, much like the land into the water in this part of the country. But she had always thought of this house as marking the edge. It was one of the outermost buildings before you left the village behind entirely, and had been built against what Tabitha's father had told her was the oldest wall left standing in the village. It was where Tabitha had lived with her parents before they'd died; and even before the three of them had lived here, Tabitha's family had always been here, she was told.
Her father had always proudly told Tabitha that you could go as far back through the ages of Bretan as you liked – right back through the Digital Age, the Steel Age, the Modern Age – right back to before even the earliest recorded history, which Tabitha's mother said had been called the Dark Ages. You could go back to the very beginning, and you would still find their ancestors living not more than a few miles up and down the river.
“This place is in your blood, Tabitha,” he would tell her wisely. “You taste your blood and you'll see that it's salty. That's the river running through you. We've been here since the beginning.”
Her father had never quite been able to explain what he had meant by this – “the beginning of what?” Tabitha would press him – but in spite of this, he had been adamant that he was right.
And although Tabitha's father wasn't basing this on very much more than old family stories that had been passed down through the generations, as it happened he was quite right. Their family had been particularly adept at keeping themselves to themselves, at not causing too much trouble or looking too far beyond their little stretch of riverside. They had drifted through the history of Bretan as farmers and fishermen who stayed well out of sight of the great kings and queens of old, through the days when the river had led up to a flourishing and wealthy port, to when smugglers had brought goods into the old town upriver, to when the port had closed and the area had drifted back into obscurity. And when technology had failed and the digital world had come to an end, it had impacted Tabitha's ancestors less than the rest of Bretan, since they had been so distant from the rest of the world to begin with. While others panicked, towns were looted, and people starved for their inability to reconnect with the land, Tabitha's family in the village had simply carried on in just the way they always had done, out of sight and eventually out of mind. They remained the simple fisherman they had been from the start, and so they survived.
Tabitha had loved hearing those stories from her father, and she felt tears welling up in her eyes as she remembered them now. Had it really been a year since he passed away? She lay a hand on the side of the old house, gently running her fingers over the carvings around the doorframe. She hadn't been able to bring herself to go back inside – but she promised herself that one day she would. One day.
Tabitha shook her head, and sternly pulled herself together. It wouldn't do to dwell on things, she told herself again. She just needed to put it out of mind. So she dragged herself away from the pull of the house, and wandered back towards her grandmother's house at the other end of the village, where she lived now.
The evening was warm and so many of the villagers were sat outside, enjoying the blessing of the warmth so late into the year. Tabitha smiled and nodded to them as she went, pretending not to notice when they shook their heads at her dripping hair. Some of them were more dismissive than others, but there were also those who treated her better, and Tabitha happily stopped to talk to those few.
“Evening, Adal,” she greeted one of the men on her way home.
Adal was beating a carpet outside the front door, but he stopped to smile affectionately at Tabitha. One of the oldest men in the village, he gave little concern for what the rest of the village thought and always treated Tabitha kindly. But his smile faded as his partner Mason emerged from the house and looked severely at her sodden clothes.
“You been in the river again Tabitha?” he asked. “Most of the other children aren't doing that anymore.”
“We're hardly children anymore, Mason!” Tabitha tried to smile.
“Still,” he said, taking the carpet from Adal and shaking it out again. “You want to make sure you don't damage those clothes with making them wet like that.”
“Leave her be, Mason,” Adal said firmly, taking the carpet back and giving Tabitha a kind, understanding smile. “She's happy enough just as she is, and she's not doing any harm to anyone else.”
“I'll dry them out as soon as I'm home,” Tabitha promised.
“You oughter take more care,” Mason said gruffly.
Tabitha nodded.
“Say hello to Ondine for us?” Adal said, steering Mason firmly back into the house.
Tabitha's grandmother was certainly considered even more of an oddball than Tabitha, but the villagers were far more tolerant of Ondine. She recommended herbal remedies for the sick and the injured, could forecast the weather for the coming season, and had a way with animals that could be helpful to those in the village who kept livestock; if she needed to spend time in the river to keep doing those things, then so be it. Tabitha, who spent the same time in the river but far less time helping out the village, did not get the same exemption for her peculiarities.
Tabitha waved goodbye to Adal and made to carry on home, but before she had gone very much farther a high voice cut through the air.
“You do know Adal thinks just the same as Mason really, don't you?”
Tabitha halted, and made herself take a deep breath.
A little way ah
ead of her, a young girl with long, sandy hair and a pinched expression strode out from behind one of the other houses, her arms crossed. A pair of other girls trooped out after her, imitating her walk and her posture, and stopped just behind her.
“Hello, Brigit,” Tabitha said wearily.
“Adal's just more polite than Mason,” Brigit continued without greeting her in exchange, “but what Mason said was true. It's not right that you don't care about looking after those clothes.”
She prowled closer, the other girls still following in her shadow.
“We saw you talking to the river earlier,” Brigit hissed in Tabitha's ear. “It's not normal.”
Brigit lived a little way out of the village, in the remains of what must have once been a great mansion house. Her family kept cows, and so Tabitha had to maintain a modicum of civility in order to ensure that much-needed milk could be assured for herself and her grandmother over the winter months; likewise, Brigit's family were required to maintain some politeness towards Tabitha and her grandmother, whose encyclopaedic knowledge of animals and herb lore meant that she was often called upon if any of the cows fell sick. But the two girls were finding this enforced civility increasingly difficult. Their mothers had never managed to establish any kind of friendship, and their mutual dislike seemed to have been passed down to Tabitha and Brigit, too.
“What's it to you, Brigit?” Tabitha said calmly. “I'm not bothering you.”
“It's bothering all of us,” Brigit said coldly.
Tabitha took another deep breath and tried to walk on, but Brigit stepped back into her path. Tabitha scowled at her. Brigit was so slender, Tabitha thought savagely, she couldn't possibly be any use on the dairy. You needed strength to work with cows. And if she wasn't any help on the dairy, then what use was she to anyone at all? She certainly only seemed to make Tabitha's life more difficult.
“Get out of the way, Brigit.”
“Are you going to make me?” Brigit laughed. “You know who'll be in trouble if you do.” She tossed her sheet of hair and smiled prettily. “You're already in trouble over what happened last week.”
“I don't care,” Tabitha said, although a flush came to her cheeks. “It was your own fault.”
“But who do you think people will believe, if I tell them you pushed me?”
“I won't lose my temper with you again, Brigit,” Tabitha snapped. She moved to walk around Brigit, but the girl stepped to one side to block her path again.
“You know you bring it on yourself,” Brigit taunted her. “If you will keep up with this river-daughter charade. You just can't accept that you're nothing special. Talk to the river all you like – it's not talking back to you. No one believes your stories anymore.”
Tabitha turned around, and began walking swiftly in the other direction. She would go down to the riverside and walk back past the moorings, where the fisherfolk would be coming back in at this time and Brigit wouldn't have the courage to say these things to her. And no matter what she said, Tabitha would not lose her temper. Even if Brigit was right that the river had gone quiet for her just recently.
“You're just the same as you always have been, Tabitha,” Brigit called after her.
Tabitha kept walking. It didn't matter what Brigit said. She was just a nuisance who had to be tolerated.
“Ever since you were a child, you always were convinced that you were better than everyone else.” Brigit was almost shouting now. “I don't know who was worse for you in that respect – your foreign mother, or your hag grandmother.”
Although Tabitha felt her fists clench, still she made herself keep walking. She couldn't afford to rise to Brigit's taunts again. She had been in so much trouble for pushing her into the river last week.
As Brigit and her cruel words disappeared behind her, Tabitha found herself wishing for the first time in a long while that she had learnt more about her mother before she died. Tabitha had been very young when she was lost to the sea. She knew that her mother hadn't been from these parts originally, but it had always frustrated Tabitha that no one seemed to be able to tell her where her mother had come from. As far as Tabitha could tell, her mother had simply arrived one day, met her father, and then that had been that. No one had ever questioned what life she might have led before coming to the village. And although Tabitha could well believe that the villagers would simply be uninterested in anything that might have happened to her mother outside of the village, it still struck her as odd that not even her father or her grandmother was able to say where her mother had come from. It seemed very strange to Tabitha, who knew who she was entirely because of the place she lived in, that her mother would never have spoken about where she was from. It was so frustrating to know that this would always remain a mystery.
Tabitha finally arrived home to find her grandmother in the middle of organised chaos in the kitchen, and she sagged tiredly in the doorway as she took in the scene before her. Her grandmother's house always looked chaotic to a greater or lesser extent, with the flora and fauna of the riverside particularly keen to encroach on this particular household – but even by its usual standards, this was chaotic. Tabitha suddenly felt even more tired than she had done before.
Her grandmother was flitting from surface to surface, between foods that were being salted or pickled or boiled down to sticky, sweet jam in preparation for the colder months ahead. Every surface was covered. On the windowsill, a line of gulls watched expectantly from above some marrows curing in the sun as Ondine split and salted the fish, hoping that she might share some of her catch with them. Well, Tabitha's catch; her grandmother rarely went out fishing these days. A fox slunk in past Tabitha, making her jump as the fur brushed against her bare legs, and it gave her a look of disgust as the water still dripping from her thick hair dampened its fur.
“Well are you just going to stand there, or are you going to help?” Ondine didn't pause with what she was doing, but threw a cloth in Tabitha's direction to dry her wet hair.
Tabitha didn't move quickly enough, and it slapped against her shoulder before dropping to the floor. Cross, she bent down to retrieve it and then rubbed frantically at her shoulder-length dark hair, suddenly irritated by the cold drips running down the back of her neck. She was sure they hadn't been quite so cold a moment ago, and wondered whether this was her grandmother's doing. The river might have stopped talking to Tabitha, but she was sure it hadn't stopped speaking to Ondine, who wouldn't think twice about making her granddaughter shiver if she thought she was being lazy.
“You only have to ask,” Tabitha said fractiously. “I'm just going to change into something dry, and then of course I'll come back and help.”
Tabitha returned a moment later, rolled up her sleeves, and began attacking the remaining food laid out around the kitchen. She tidied away some of the ingredients littering the worktops that were no longer needed, and then began to roughly chop some beetroot that were still waiting to be prepared.
“How was the water today?” Ondine asked.
“Cold,” Tabitha replied shortly, still irritated that she had been snapped at when she'd arrived home, and frustrated all over again to think that the river was talking to her grandmother but not to her. She wondered whether her grandmother had asked the question on purpose.
Ondine didn't push Tabitha again but tactfully left her to her chopping, not hassling her to speak if she didn't want to. Tabitha lost herself in the rise and fall of the knife for a while, finding it quite therapeutic to aggressively bring it down on the vegetables. As she took out some of her frustration on the beetroot, Tabitha began to feel guilty for being so irritable with Ondine. It wasn't her grandmother's fault that any of this was happening. Tabitha suddenly put the knife down and rubbed her eyes.
She felt her grandmother put a calloused hand on her arm.
“How long since you last slept properly, Tab?” Ondine asked gently.
Tabitha wasn't the slightest bit surprised that her grandmother had known immediately what
was wrong. It should have been annoying, how easily her grandmother could read her. But somehow it wasn't. There had always been something about the two of them, which they shared and the rest of the village didn't – which even Tabitha's parents hadn't understood. It was something about the river, and the way in which the two of them seemed more closely connected to the water than the village itself, which differentiated them from everyone else. Her grandmother understood her.
“Three days now,” Tabitha said without taking her hands from her eyes. It was a relief, actually, to have someone who could always ask exactly the right question.
Ondine led her through to the next room and settled her in a chair. She began rummaging through a chest of herbs and plants and stranger things – river mud that had been collected from under the full moon at low tide, lines of red string, and pinches of salt.
“I don't really know what's brought it on,” Tabitha said while her grandmother sorted through the chest. She wasn't sure why, but she had been hesitant to tell her about the dream about the knife. It just seemed so... childish. She hadn't complained about nightmares since she was a little girl. But even if it was embarrassing, she supposed it was the reason why she wasn't sleeping. And now that she'd started talking, she really did want to tell someone what was wrong – someone who could speak back to her.
“I've been having some... bad dreams,” she settled on eventually.
“What kind of dreams?”
“Well,” Tabitha began hesitantly, “they're a little gruesome.”
Ondine didn't react to this, but began packing various items from the chest into a wooden bowl.
“Go on,” she said gruffly as Tabitha dithered.
“Every night it's the same,” Tabitha continued. “The river has dried up, and there are these deep cracks in the riverbed. So I go down to take a look at them, to try and see what they are, but when I do a shadow falls over me. And when I look up, all I can see is a dark figure slashing my throat with this shining silver knife... and then I wake up.”
The River Witch Page 2
