I wake when I do not expect to, coughing, lungs aching, and my skin feels unbearably hot. The ground beneath me is hard but the cold of it is welcome; above is a black sky from which falls a mix of cinders and snow. I turn my head to the side and see my own red hair: with the mourning ring gone into the flames my camouflage is no more. Eli Bligh is staring at me like he’s never seen the like.
I say his name, rough and low in a dry throat. He doesn’t respond. I say it again, louder. ‘Eli.’
‘Who are you? Where’s Asher?’ He looks towards the pyre of the surgery, gaze desperate. He’s a man who thinks he saved the wrong woman; that Asher Todd is turning into embers and ash in that little building. He’s not entirely wrong.
‘It’s me,’ I say. ‘I’m Asher Todd.’
‘You’re not. I don’t know who you are. Asher Todd’s got dark hair and dark eyes, a gentle face…’
But he’s staring at me properly now and experiencing, I think, the same moment that Archie did when he first saw me with a changed face. That moment of some sort of recognition when you realise that all is not as it seems, that a concentrated gaze will show more than a cursory glance. That somewhere in the architecture of features there is a familiarity.
‘I know, Eli Bligh, that you sometimes go on two feet, sometimes on four. How many can say that? I know every mark on your body, but perhaps I’ll spare us both your blushes. I know the scar I put there. I know your blood runs from the mother wolf.’
‘How?’ He gestures to his own features as if they’re the ones in question.
‘By ways and means, Eli Bligh, that you don’t need to know.’ I sit up, slowly, sighing as my ribs ache – as everything aches. ‘You shouldn’t be here. I sent you away, saw you ride off.’
‘And I turned around again as soon as I spoke with Zaria.’
‘Disobedient. Coming to the rescue. You should be on your way to St Dane’s.’ While I become nothing more than particles on the winter wind.
‘If I’d known it would displease you so, I’d have taken more time.’
We look at each other, burst out laughing for all it’s no laughing matter.
He comes to kneel beside me, touches my face, pushes back the red knots of hair, runs a finger down the bruises left by Leonora’s attack those days ago.
‘You should not have brought me forth.’ I wipe at the smears of soot on his chest. ‘I cannot remain here, Eli Bligh.’
‘You can’t leave me.’
‘Oh, didn’t your aunt say I’d hurt you?’ Our foreheads meet, then lips. I pull away. ‘Tell them I died. Tell them Luther killed Leonora. That’s the truth or the best of it. Tell them I burned with Luther in there – they’ll be hard pressed to find even him when that heat’s done. No one knows this face, not on me.’ Burdon might. Tib might. All the more reason to leave now. ‘For all intents and purposes Miss Todd is gone.’
‘What’s your name? Tell me that at least.’
‘What I told you. That much is right, after all.’
He picks at pieces of frosted grass. ‘Where will you go?’
I think of Whitebarrow. I think of the Witches waiting beneath the university. I think of the house Archie left behind. He had no family; it will still be waiting. I lived there for nigh on two years, no one will think it strange if I return and take up residence once more. I will tell anyone who asks that I’m waiting for him to come home. I’m its custodian. Stay there for a year until I know what more I want to do. Until I can settle on a direction. In Leonora’s rooms there’s a legion of jewellery she left behind. Any number of pieces could keep me for years. Sell them, invest the money, buy a little store somewhere, make medicines, help. Live. Do something for myself.
Or stay?
Move into the Tarn with my new face, take a new name, be their doctor. Share Eli’s bed. Watch the Morwood children grow though they’ll never know who I was. What I did. What I might have done. How I put them at risk. How I saved them.
Would it be so much to ask? A quiet life lived only for myself.
And what of Eli, who knows both my faces but cannot know everything I’ve done. I’m not ready to trust anyone with that – cannot imagine that I will ever be. And would I want him to know everything? Anything more? And if I am with him will he be content not to ask? I doubt it. Perhaps it will lie quiet between us for a year or two, perhaps more, but eventually his questions will begin and I will refuse to tell (I think he knows this too), and it will become bitter fruit.
‘Where will you go?’ he asks again.
‘I don’t know,’ I say.
‘Stay.’
I don’t answer. He holds me.
We go to the manor. We wash the dirt and soot and blood from each other. We make love in my bed, then I tell him he must go and collect Tib and the children from the Lewises, bring them home. I write a letter to Jessamine at St Dane’s telling her the house is safe and she must return and care for her little ones.
When daylight is breaking and Eli is gone, I dress. I go to Leonora’s suite and pocket ten necklaces, five bracelets and eight rings. From the lockbox in Luther’s office I take a pouch filled with gold coins; the Witches’ bounty won’t last forever and this is the only inheritance I’m ever likely to receive from Morwood. I gather my already packed carpet bag and satchel and then I go to the stables.
I saddle Luther’s new black stallion. I lash my bag down, then I mount. I’ve got a full day and can get quite far away, even staying off the beaten paths. It will be a long trip to Whitebarrow, but I cannot get the idea of the Witches out of my mind, and all they might have to teach me – if only I can find my way back to them. Surely I can find the path one more time?
I will tell Mater Hardgrace what happened to her poor niece, and I will lie and tell her that justice was done.
Eli won’t be surprised when he returns and finds me gone, I think. But he knows my true face; if he chooses to seek me – his wolf’s wife – he will know me when he sees me. He might sniff me out in the city of my birth. Or he might remain here where he can stalk on two legs or four as it pleases him.
I urge the horse to a trot and we take the winding driveway up the incline, into the woods, towards where the great black metal gates of Morwood spill out onto the road and back to the wide, wide world.