II

I wait for it—death. My own, fiery one.

Or perhaps it waits for me—tall, dark-wearing. Perhaps it stands beside the others who it has already called away—my mother, the MacDonalds, my big-bottomed mare. Their bodies are worms—but their souls are free, untied from their bones, and their souls are waiting for me. The realm, Cora called it—where we all go, one day. Our death is a door we must pass through, and it seemed a good thing by how she spoke of it. Calm, and good. Part of life—which it is.

But I was wrong to think it was calm. Or I was wrong to think it always happened that way. I was a child, with a child’s mind, and I thought all deaths were by lying down, closing our eyes, and a sigh. Only when I killed the pig and it squealed did I think it can hurt. Be bloody, and sad. That was an awful lesson I learnt. After it, I was wiser. Cora said my eyes turned a darker shade of grey.

It can hurt. Yes.

And I have seen more hurtful deaths than I’ve seen gentle ones. There was the nest which fell, and all those little feathered lives were licked up by the cats. In Hexham, a man was put in stocks and had stones thrown at him until he was dead—and for what? Not much, most likely. Also, there was Widow Finton, and I don’t know how she died, but it took a week to know that she was gone—they smelt the smell, and found her. A door we must pass through? I believe that part. I believe it, for I have seen souls lift up and move away. But not all deaths are peaceful. They are lucky, who get those.

We do not get them. Peaceful deaths.

Not us who have hag as a name.

Why should we? When they say we worship the Devil and eat dead babes? When we steal milk by wishing it? We have no easy ends. For my mother’s mother, they used the ducking stool. All the town was watching as she bobbed like a holey boat, and then sank under. I imagined it, in my infant days—out in the marshes with the frogs and swaying reeds. I crouched until my nose was in the water and I could not breathe, and I thought she died this way, and would it have been a simple death? A painless one? I doubted it. I coughed reeds up. Cora grabbed me, cursed me and plucked frogspawn from my hair.

Then there are the twirling deaths. Like the ones the Mossmen had. I saw these ones—how they put the rope on you like a crown that is too big, and your hands are double-tied. Like you are king, the crowds hiss or cheer. And then there is the bang, and maybe some go quickly but I’ve seen the heels drumming, and I’ve thought what sadness. What huge sadness there is, in the world.

And pricking. A dreadful word.

That is a fate they save only for us—for witch and whore. I’ve been afraid of the pricking men for all my life, for Cora was. She shook when she spoke of them. She made herself small, and hid. Part of a witch does not bleed, she whispered—so the church says. So men prod our women with metal pins, seeking it… I asked her how big? Are the pins? And she held out her hands, like this—like how fishermen do, when telling their tales.

A door, Cora said, that we must pass through.

Yes.

But not by painful ways. No death should be like that.

WITCH is a dying word, I know. I’ve known it as long as I’ve known my own name—witch will make you hunted, witch will shorten your days. And they hunted me, and hated me, and my life will be done by the month’s end, I am certain of that. They will rope me to barrels, and make me flame.

Fire. To cleanse me. To burn the demons out.

Outside, they gather wood. I hear them drag it through the snow, and the nails going in. Inside, I look at my skin. I see its scars and freckles. I feel my bones, and I roll the skin upon my knees so that the bones beneath them clunk—back and fro. I follow where my veins run along my arm and hands. I touch the tender places—inside my legs, my belly. The pink, wrinkled skin between my toes.

I am fretful, tonight. Afraid.

Tonight, I breathe too quickly. I walk up and down, up and down. I run my fist along the bars so that my knuckles hurt, and bleed—but the hurt says I am living, that my body still has blood in it and works like it should do. I talk to myself so my breath comes out—white, white—and when I sit, tucked up, I hold my feet very tightly and I rock myself like children do when they have plenty on their minds. I try to say hush now to me, to calm me, but it doesn’t work. For surely it hurts? Surely it is a pain beyond all knowing, and a slow death, too? And such a lonesome one. Fire…And when I think it, it makes me wrap my arms about me, and I wail. My wail has an echo. I hear the echo, and think poor, poor creature, to make such a sound—for it is a desperate, dying sound. It is the wail of such a mauled and mangled thing, with no hope left, no light. No friend.

I pull at my chains. Don’t let me die.

Don’t let it be by burning.

I rock back and forth like this.

STILL. I have a comfort. It is small, but I have it—I whisper it into cupped hands.

People live because of me.

They do. They live because I saved them—because I listened to my soul’s voice, to the song of my bones, the words of the world. I listened to my womb, my belly, my breasts. My instinct. The howling wolf in me. And I told them make for Appin! And go! Go! And they went. I watched them running in the snow, with their skirts hitched up, and their children strapped on tightly, and I thought yes—be safe. Live long lives.

There. It comforts me. It takes the fear away, and makes my breath slow down. When they tie me to the wood, I will say I have saved lives, and it will be a comfort and I will not mind the flames. For what if that’s the cost? My life for their lives? What if the world asks for that—for my small life, with its lonely hours, in return for the lives of three hundred, or more? I will pay it. If it means they are living, and if it means the stag still treads the slopes, and the herrings still flash themselves in the loch, in summer, and if it means the people still play their pipes and still tell their stories of Fionn and his dogs, and the Lord of the Isles, and if the heather still shakes in the wind, and if it means that he—him, him, with hair like how wet hillside is—is still living, and mending, then I will pay it. I will.

Does he live? I think he does. In my darkest hours I worry he is dead—but I think he lives. I see him by the sea. On his side, he has the poultice of horsetail and comfrey, and he unpeels it. He sees he is healing, smiles, thinks Corrag… He presses the poultice back on.

SEE? I am calm now. I can see his dark-red hair.

I must sleep. It partly seems a waste of final hours, of breath. But even as I think of life, and love, and the stag with his fine branches, I have Gormshuil in my head—how she said a man will come.

I think he comes tomorrow. My days grow less and less.

LET him come. Let him do his purpose, even if it hurts. Even if it’s pins, or his turn to say whore, or hag. For I am still living. Ones I love are still living, and so what pain can come to me? What is there to fear?

Lives mean far more than deaths ever do. It is what we remember—the life. Not how they died, but how warm and bright-eyed they were, and how they lived their lives.