The Ice King (A Witch Ways Whisper) Read online

  “My dad says that monster pike is older than the castle and fair game.”

  Vanessa glared hard, trying not to blink so she could stare down Wilson Taylor. He bobbed about in front of her, his fists still making little soft jabs at her.

  “He is not going to kill that pike or any of the fish in my lake.” Vanessa threatened. “It isn’t allowed.”

  Punch punch punching pound. “ ‘Tis.”

  Vanessa growled and moved her arm out of the target zone. Wilson moved forward.

  “ ‘Tis, ‘Tis, ‘Tis.” punch punch PUNCH.

  *

  Her mother was grinning and not cross at all as they left the headmistress’s office and did not go back to class but instead, walked out through the playground, heading homeward.

  “So, how does it feel to punch someone then? Haven’t ever done that myself.” they were walking up through town towards Old Castle Road.

  “Crunchy.” Vanessa said after some thought. It had been annoying and frustrating too with Wilson crying and whining and the teacher, Miss Marlow, not listening to her reasons for hand to hand combat.

  “Why does everyone want to kill the monster pike?” Vanessa asked.

  “Not everyone. Just stupid people.”

  After today at school, Vanessa was beginning to see that stupid people seemed to outnumber other kinds of people.

  “Oh Good god.” Vanessa grumped and her mother laughed at the serious manner of her cursing.

  “Don’t worry about it sweetheart. It’s my job to keep them away. I’m the Gamekeeper. It isn’t a problem.”

  “You didn’t keep those men away yesterday. They threw the can in the lake.”

  Her mother looked very serious and stopped walking.

  “You saw what happened to the can?” her eyebrows were wiggled into question marks. Vanessa thought her mother looked prettiest with her wriggly eyebrows.

  “The lake threw it back.” she replied. Her mother nodded.

  “Precisely. Don’t worry about the monster pike, he can take care of himself.”

  But Vanessa did worry about the pike and about her mother having to confront stupid people who were, as far as Vanessa could assess, cruel bullies. She recalled too often the ugly and dangerous look on Stocky Mike’s face and that her mum had no one to help her in her job as Gamekeeper.

  “Are you done? Shall we go?” at the sound of her mother’s voice Vanessa flipped the encyclopaedia closed. It made a satisfying thomp which echoed around the round domed central room of the Castlebury library. Vanessa flapped shut the top of her schoolbag and picked up the library books from the table. She hurried to close up her notebook and catch her pen which was rolling off the table onto the floor.

  She had constructed a good plan and she would be able to put it into action on Saturday. She would be useful, helping her mother in her work and she would also, above everything else, be helping save the life of the monster pike from all comers.

  She had looked up Pike in the encyclopaedia, a book too heavy to sneak into her schoolbag. She already loved the pike, his mysterious lake existence and now, of course, his Latin name Esox Lucius. The books she had managed to borrow in secret were one on fishing and another on identifying freshwater fish. She needed her reference points so that she could take her measurements and make an accurate biological survey.

  She had sort of stolen the books because they were in her bag and not on the counter, with her other choices, being stamped. This was ok for two reasons; one; she needed them for the plan and two; she was going to return them, not keep them, hence she termed it secret borrowing. Not stealing. Not at all.

  Back at Cob Cottage Vanessa dropped her coat on the back of the kitchen chair and scooted down the short curved corridor. Round in shape, Vanessa’s bedroom was a small short tower of a place, nestling into the east side of the cottage. It was insulated with her bookcases made from curving branches of oak and alder with a long thin window set up in the wall just below the thatch. Although she could not see the lake she could see sky and treetops and the rookery. It was like living, Vanessa thought, in a small mud castle. She shut the gnarly oak door behind her and unloaded her school bag secrets. Yes, she felt confident of her plan to help her mother.

  She was busy over the next few days assembling things she needed for the fishing aspect of her plan: twine, wire, wool, string, which she wove and twisted. She made good progress because her mother was suddenly busy too, there had been several more fishermen sneaking to the lake and some traps that her mother had found in Havoc Wood that made her very angry indeed.

  “Do people want to catch the animals for food?” Vanessa asked as they ate bacon sandwiches on the front porch on Friday night. Her mother laughed.

  “Ha. No sweetheart. They want to catch them because they can. They won’t eat a fox or a falcon. They do it to be cruel and feel powerful.” she kissed Vanessa’s forehead and her mother’s gaze drifted out across Havoc Wood. “They don’t understand, there’s nothing more cruel and more powerful than this wood.”

  *

  It was cold on Saturday. After breakfast her mother wrapped up in her old black waxed raincoat and pulled on her battered boots ready for her usual Patrol.

  “There’s sandwich stuff in the fridge.” she was giving instruction. “I won’t be late. If you get bothered or need me, just light the lantern on the porch…ok?”

  “Can’t I come with you?” today Vanessa had no wish to go with her mother but she wanted to make it seem like a normal day, one in which she would read books and do homework and whinge about missing out on Patrol.

  “No sweetheart. Not today. Another one, ok?” they hugged and Hettie headed off towards the North of the wood.

  Vanessa had stashed her equipment in a small canvas rucksack under the porch, now she simply collected it and started her own short trek to the particular curve of the lake where she thought her plan would work best.

  At the shoreline she placed her notebook on a big round rock and glanced over the instructions she’d written down for herself. She had them memorised from reading and re-reading and rewriting them, but it settled her mind to read the words and feel the notebook paper under her tracing finger. She had made a fishing net from twine, string and wire and it was woven around a wide plastic ring she’d taken out of the frame of her washing basket.

  So, prepared, she fished.

  A few hours drifted by slowly. It was pleasant on the bank and Vanessa had found a smooth stone worn down into a bowl and was sitting in that feeling the coolness of it. She had tried reading a book but there was something about the lake today, it was almost like an electricity, that distracted her. She found her gaze drawn to the glassy grey surface where she could see the perfect reflection of the crowds of jackdaws and rooks taking off from the trees on the opposite shore, the image as clear as if she was looking down into a reversed world. She thought of the cities of birds above her, the nuthatches and treecreepers. Somewhere a woodpecker was knocking. There must be, she thought, yet another world still, in the water.

  There was a rippling plash. Vanessa looked up, her binoculars lifted to check out the disturbance in the water. Was that a fin? She jumped down from her stone and took a step closer to the water, scanning with the binoculars. The clouds had thickened and so where Vanessa now stood was darker and more shadowed, the trees leaning in closer. The water looked silken, the ripples rolled towards her and she was tempted to take off her shoes. Her mother gave strict instruction at all times; she was never to go swimming in the lake. They had rowed out in the boat but not ever, not once, even so much as dipped a toe in the steely grey water.

  It could not hurt to paddle today, could it? Yes. She would get into trouble. She thought of the prickle of heat she’d felt from her mother when the gull attacked and it seemed like a warning. Vanessa’s mind ticked. She reached into her bag for a jam jar that she had filled with her mother’s homebrewed blackberry squash and, unfastening the lid, drank the squash.

  Perhaps
there was a way to examine the water without actually getting into it. Vanessa, sitting on her stone above the lake, watched the water. Looked at the empty jar. Of course. That was what she could do. In her pencil case she had a little stash of litmus paper from school. Acid. Alkaline. PH.

  There was no way she could fill the jar from the shore without getting her feet a little bit wet but the taboo placed on the lake prickled at her so she climbed quickly back up onto the bowled stone and lay down flat. Yes. Look. If she just reached her arm down like this the jar would…yes… As she was contorting her small frame across the front edge of the stone there was another, heavier splot. Vanessa looked out across the water. From her stony perch she could see, just beneath the surface, a long dark shadow, a flick of fin. A waterboatman was paddling his legs across the lake until, with a glint of sunlight, the insect was gone, vanished into the dimple of water where the pike’s mouth had snapped at its small feast.

  Vanessa paused. Her heart was beating fast. She was so very, very close. Now the shadows of the clouds were playing tricks. Was that the pike? That. There? If she just shifted a little bit…further…and if she just angled her shoulder. She watched as a little puddle of water gushed into the jar. Vanessa pulled her arm back, shunted down into the bowl of the stone to look. The water was a soft brownish colour, and there were tiny splashes of green and the flimsy miniature form of a baby fish. There was a word for small baby fish but she couldn’t think of it, she looked at his tiny body, he looked made of glass. What was the word for baby fish? Once more, a deep ploshing sound caught at her. She looked up to see a single rolling ripple expanding out from just below the stone. Speckled. Green. Something skulked. Vanessa sat back.

  She wasn’t scared. No, not at all. She was scientific. She opened her black notebook and made a drawing of the tiny fish, listed information about the water, the colour, the smell. She sniffed at the jam jar. It was confusing because it still had a whiff of blackberry squash. Vanessa put her book down and shifted herself once more into jar-filling pose. Her arm reached downwards, downwards making an arc, exactly like swimming.

  The water was deliciously cold on her fingers and, as she fell from the bowled stone the water was cool and clear against her face, her eyes blurring as her feet kicked against it and she sank deeper and the water closed over her. Blinking, she could see beneath the water, to where her hands, reaching down, still holding the jam jar, were distorted and interesting looking. A shoal of small fish, ‘fry’, she found the word at last, flittered around her legs and they were so pretty, these baby fish in their lake world with their red fins. Were they tench? Or was it roach? She rolled and yawed in the water but she would not catch them. She should look them up but not now, later, much later, because there was so much more water to fall down into and look how the weed waved and beckoned and ravelled her up.

  She was sinking deeper still. She was level now almost with the end of her fishing line, could see above her where the float that bobbed on the surface, where now, suddenly the fishing line, balanced on its forked stick jaggered downward. In that moment Vanessa realised what had happened, where she was, that there was no breath to be taken down here. Her body, panicked, twisted around, trying to find which way was up but there was no up, only down. Vanessa opened her mouth, bubbles carried her cry to the surface where there was no one to hear. Her arms flailed, her feet kicked but there was nothing to hang onto or kick against. Or was there? From below her a deep sound rose, water shifted and coursed, the current pulling her down towards it. Vanessa looked into the blackness, saw the flex and curve of the flanks of the monster pike.

  The pike loomed out of the shadows of the water, dense, muscular, arcing as it slid beneath her, shored her up. She felt the impact, her drift halted as the body of the pike turned and glided beneath her, carrying her and she forgot about breathing, about air. Her net, she saw, looked different down here, the knots and twists were tighter and more organised, the way they had seemed in her head as she was making it, rather than the way it had turned out; slightly matted and knotty. The pike nosed into it, its eye looking out at her from the hatching lines of twine. She looked into the eye, curious. It was like a miniature globe. Her hand reached out to touch the pike’s skin, speckled, green and bronze and black, she noted the colours. Esox Lucius, she reminded herself and, as the words came into her head the pike’s long head turned slightly, his teeth sinking into her skin like pins. It didn’t hurt. He held her up close to the orb of his eye so she could look into it. Observe. It was odd, instead of a pupil or an iris she saw a landscape, and the sky was blue cold and the snow was deep white and oh…she was there, walking, walking, walking in the snowglobe of the pike’s eye, and the sky within it was darkening and lights flickered and blurred above her head. Aurora. The word swam into the fluid of Vanessa’s head. Borealis. What was that? Watching? Waiting? There at the farthest reach? A wolf? Vanessa breathed in the cold of the lake, it cleaned her lungs, made her chest feel free. The pike’s teeth held her as they rose to the surface and as he flipped and dived so Vanessa gasped and, feet kicking, reached and found the algaed stones beneath her, the pike’s dive creating a wave that pushed her swiftly to the shore.

  She ought to have been afraid, that she had been careless and fallen in, that she might have drowned, but Vanessa understood there was no time for that. Where she had been underwater and out of her element, now the Pike had beached himself beside her and was out of his.

  She took up her notebook, shivered as she worked quickly, her clothes and hair and skin dripping droplets of water that puddled onto the pike’s skin. The colours were different on land, made of earth, so unlike Beneath where they had been made of water. She measured him quickly, marking on paper, drawing quickly the patterns of his skin, the shape of his head. Counted the number of his teeth and the shape of them as he opened his mouth and let her fingers touch his jawbone, understanding how it locked here, unlocked there. His eyes were black and greeny liquid now, no longer holding an image of herself walking with an aurora above her. Those eyes watched her studiously and Vanessa knew, she was being measured, drawn and memorised too.

  It was mere moments, she had recorded the breaths that his gaping mouth had taken, before she finished and with a touch of his side she pushed at Esox Lucius and with a sudden powering movement he slithered back into the water. The surface closed over his spine leaving ripples rolling inward, sealing.

  Vanessa sat for a long time watching the water, a breeze blew her dry, flapped a little at her notebook. She thought of the pike, of the gull, of the heat from her mother. There is nothing more cruel and powerful than this wood, her mother’s words echoed in her head. She felt the stone beneath her, the warmth it held from the sun. She was uncertain now about what strange results her experiment at Pike Lake had shown her.

  She took up her pencil and began to draw in a way she’d never drawn before, as if the pencil knew what was hidden inside its core and could guide her hand to extract it.

  *

  They were setting the table for dinner and her mother lifted Vanessa’s bag to move it onto the sofa. As she did so the flap opened and Vanessa’s notebook not only slid out onto the floor, but opened itself up to the double page she had taken to draw the pike. Her mother looked at it for a moment, read the caption ‘ESOX LUCIUS’.

  “When did you do this?” she asked. Vanessa expected there might be some small hell to pay for her plan and was prepared for it.

  “Today. I wanted to help… I thought if we put up a notice saying it had been caught and this is all the information about it and so no one need bother anymore and also saying PRIVATE because…”

  She watched her mother look over the drawing and say nothing. Vanessa ran out of words. Her mother closed the book and put it into the schoolbag, out of the way.

  “It’s very good.” was her comment as she moved into the kitchen. They went about their tasks in a strange silence, Vanessa unsure what to say. Her plan had seemed so certain and assured and now,
after everything that had happened, it was a jumble in her head.

  “Do not do this ever again.” her mother’s voice was cool and clear, like the water. It would have felt better to Vanessa if it had been a cross voice, angry words. This was much worse. They did not speak through dinner, passing bowls and plates without a word. The food should have tasted good, it was Vanessa’s favourite, macaroni cheese with broccoli. It tasted of mud.

  Starlight sparkled the water of Pike Lake as Hettie Way, feeling chill in her black waxed raincoat, rowed out. She halted at a particular spot and the boat, far from drifting on the slight waves, stayed put, Hettie pulled up the oars and waited. The moon was only three quarters full but it would be enough.

  After several minutes she reached her hand into the water, let the liquid chill her skin and pinch cold into her bones until she almost couldn’t bear the pain of it, her hand up to her wrist ringing with cold like a note. The note sounded out beneath the lake.

  Esox Lucius rose up through the water, monstrous, and his teeth bit down so that his jaw and her fingers were interlocked and Hettie’s mind opened up. She could see her daughter walking away, the landscape was white with snow and very far to the north. The aurora borealis lit the sky with shimmering green and Vanessa was walking away, away, away. At the edge of this landscape Hettie Way saw a wolf, watching, waiting for her by a frozen lake, until the wind turned and with a yawn the wolf shucked his skin and, dressed now as his man self, walked back across the ice towards her.

  After she took her hand from the water Hettie Way sat in the boat for a long time, her head bowed.

  It was nearly dawn before she put the oars back into the rowlocks and rowed back to the jetty.

  PART TWO

  The Goose Fair

  Lachlan Laidlaw: age 18

  Lachlan Laidlaw would not be taking up an administrative post in the nearby city because he was destined, his mother said with something like a sneer, ‘For greater things.’ She did not have ambition, not since his father had died young and left them partly penniless. Mrs Laidlaw had turned the glasses over on the draining board and rattled the knives into the cutlery drawer. She was disappointed with her offspring, he was going to university, which, it seemed, was something like treason.