Open Fire - Winner

It was on St Swithin’s day that I first came to visit the witch. Outside the weather was fine, and so it followed that the next forty days would be fine too, but still the fire in the hearth roared. There was nothing in the pot besides water.
‘You brought it?’ asked a voice.
‘Yes,’ I said, turning to see the owner of the voice appear beside me. It was a woman, worn and weathered, but I could sense a force burning within her. She was the witch, of course.
‘Well,’ she said. ‘Add it to the pot then.’
I threw the laurel branches that I had been holding into the bubbling water.
‘How does it work?’ I asked, looking down at the blanching leaves.
‘When we have all of the ingredients, then we will see.’
‘What if we are too late?’ I asked, but the witch had already gone. I looked back into the pot. Come back in the autumn, the flames said to me.
That summer, our Molly went to town and came back with a sickness. She lasted two weeks before she died, and then, with Sarah married, I was the only one left. I spent two months out on the fields, and then once the last of the harvest was in, I rode to Castlebreak on the horse that Henry had left me.
I found the witch outside, trying to dig a hole with a stick.
‘I could bring you a spade,’ I suggested after I’d dismounted.
She glanced up at me and then looked back down at her hole. I opened up my bags.
‘Here - I brought the barley,’ I said, showing her.
‘Well,’ she said.
‘I could help you with your garden,’ I said. ‘I am stronger than I look.’
She walked straight past me and into the cottage. I followed her inside.
She and I sat side by side, watching the broth bubble.
‘Did anybody ever tell you about Udd the Deepminded?’ she asked me. I shook my head and then, to my surprise, she began to tell the story. Her register grew darker and richer, and her words were laden with meaning. It was warm, there in that little room by the hearth, and it was hard to believe that what she was recounting wasn’t somebody else’s memory but her own.
‘My problems must seem small to you,’ I said, when she was done and I was occupied cleaning an old wound on her leg. ‘How long have you been alive?’
‘Long enough.’
‘Have you ever thought about being anything other than a witch?’
‘I wasn’t a witch, once. I was a girl like you.’
‘And then what happened?’
‘I drank a potion.’
It was dark by the time that I got up to leave. When I stepped outside, I couldn’t see the horse, and my first thought, bizarrely, was that the witch had killed it. And then I saw it, down by the lane.
‘Don’t you think that if he’d loved you, he would have taken you with him?’ a voice said. I turned back, but the witch had turned into the wind.
I spent Yule with Jonty and his family. They roasted a hog and Jonty’s father did his one-legged jig and I laughed so hard that I forgot that I was there in Molly’s place. It was good to be amongst good people. They had mistletoe above their front door and on Twelfth Night I let Jonty kiss me. He still loved Molly and I was promised to Henry, but Molly was dead and Henry was away and neither of us were fool enough to turn down a good thing. That night, we lay together on the furs beside the remains of the fire.
‘Do you wonder what it’s like?’ he asked me, stroking the space just above my hip bone, and I knew that he meant Vinland.
‘Of course,’ I told him.
‘Molly always wanted to go.’
He shared my pain, for she was to have shared his life.
‘I’ve been seeing the witch,’ I told him. ‘About Henry.’
‘The one on the hill?’
‘Yes, up at Castlebreak. I’ve asked her to cast a spell for his safe return.’
‘What has she told you?’
‘That we have to wait until the potion is ready.’
There was silence as Jonty reflected on this.
‘Can she bring back the dead?’ he said, after a while.
‘No. That she can’t do.’
I returned to Castlebreak as soon as enough of the snow had melted to allow me to ride up the winding hillside road. I had been worried about the witch, concerned that she might not have had enough in the stores to see her through the worst of the winter, but she was still there.
‘You have been with another,’ she said when I found her this time packing mud onto the side of the cottage, where the stones were falling from the wall.
‘I’ve brought the mistletoe. Shall I add it to the pot?’
Inside, she came to watch me stir with the spoon.
‘You’ve not been going to church,’ she said.
‘I’ve turned heathen. Your leg looks much worse.’
‘We are all of us dying.’
‘Some more quickly than others. Let me help you clean it up– do you have brandy?’
‘Only for drinking.’
We refilled our glasses until half the bottle had been drunk.
‘It is a wrong thing, to marry someone you don’t love,’ she said to me.
‘You don’t understand.’
‘I understand that men usually take their betrothed with them when they journey to a new world.’
‘Then you will understand that it is usual for men to care for unmarried sisters, but my brothers are dead and, without Henry, I have no prospects.’
‘You have other men.’
‘That is a different thing.’
‘I think that you don’t really want to be married.’
I was feeling hot, despite the fire being more subdued than previously and there still being snow on the ground outside. I reminded myself that her leg must be causing her pain.
‘I should be going,’ I told her. ‘I’ll be back at Easter, one final time.’
‘The potion only guarantees his safe passage. It can’t make him return.’
‘He will return, and I do love him. You are a wise woman, but you are a witch in a cottage on the hill by the forest. There are things that you don’t understand.’
As I prepared to mount the horse, I could hear her muttering.
‘A hussy. It’s a hussy who takes his horse and her sister’s man. A girl who knows nothing of the world who thinks that she can teach me a single thing.’
For just a moment, I thought that she was talking to me.
I returned on Psalm Sunday, my saddle bags filled with blossom. The witch wasn’t in the garden. It was my final visit, the final ingredient, but when I entered the cottage, I found no witch, the fire stone cold. Eventually I found her in the bedroom. She had been dead for weeks.
I found the witch’s son at the beach. He didn’t cry in the way that I had when Molly died, but he followed me up to Castlebreak.
‘She’d been growing weaker for months,’ he told me as we stood over her dead body. ‘She had been brewing a potion to cure herself, but she must have run out of time.’
A feeling of dread came over me.
‘Was it a potion of laurel and barley and mistletoe?’
‘Yes – she was just waiting on the blossom. If only she could have lasted a few more weeks.’
I left the bedroom with the dead witch in it and went to the pot in the main room. I bent down and lit the fire, better than she’d ever believed me capable of.
The witch’s potion had been my last hope. I’d known for some time that if Henry was going to return, he would have done so by now. If the witch had been truthful, then her potion might not have made any difference at all. As it happened, she hadn’t been truthful and still this brew was little more than a disgusting stew. I wondered if she’d died still having hopes and fears. I wondered if she’d ever realised that she hadn’t needed to lie to me to get me to procure her ingredients; I would have done it anyway.
The flames took hold more vigorously, I stood and watched them, and then when the liquid was bubbling, poured in the blossom. It was just my imagination, but I could hear her laboured breath.
Henry wasn’t coming back. Jonty had gone away to try his luck in the town. They told me that it was the start of a new century, but I didn’t believe them. Tell me, I implored them,
tell me the person who has been keeping count. And if it is a new century, why are all our problems age old?
What does the potion do, I wondered. Did it cure a witch? Did it make a witch?
‘What did you need my mother’s help for, anyway?’ the witch’s son asked, appearing in the doorway to the bedroom.
‘Oh,’ I said. ‘I was just a friend of hers. I never asked for anything.’
‘I’m going to get the undertaker.’
‘I’ll be here.’
He closed the door behind him as he left. I wondered if witches ever truly died, or if they just changed form, if perhaps at that very moment she could be the smoke coming off the fire, the grain of the wood of the trees. Perhaps she hadn’t misled me, or maybe at that moment, a ship could be arriving into port, laden with wood and fuel and men.
Before me, the potion was growing darker.
I lifted the glass, and I drank.