Kissing the Witch by Emma Donoghue Read Free Book Online Page A

went, bringing limp rabbits
from her traps and the odd handful of berries. We didn’t talk much, she and I. Often a whole day would go by with no need for naming things.
    But the time I first bled I had a nightmare of the hunt. The wood was full of men who were also stags and also the dogs that chased them. My hair was caught in a tangle of hedge, my clothes
shredded by the thorns. There was no safety. There was no cover. There was no door to the tower, when in my dream I stumbled through the thorn-bushes and found it at last, clubbing my fists on the
stone walls to be let in. I woke only when the woman came upstairs, pulled my hands from the stones, and took me in her arms as she had never done before. She held me till I slept, whispering in my
ear all the names of the herbs.
    The next day the trees were no friends of mine. They slouched on the edge of our clearing, wrapping their arms round themselves and hissing in the wind. I stood in the door of the hut and shook,
in spite of my coat of rabbit skins. Even my hair, wound round and round my shoulders, couldn’t keep me warm.
    By the time the woman came back from her plot of beans and potatoes, I had climbed up the narrow stone steps and sat by the window. Even if I’d had my sight, the woman always said there
was nothing but treetops to see. I shook my hair off my shoulders now; it slid over the dusty sill.
    The woman climbed up and stood behind me. I could tell her heavy step on the stone, the smell of sheep’s wool on her back, wild garlic on her fingertips. I told her, I’m afraid of
the forest.
    But the forest is what we eat, she said. What we wear. What we burn.
    I told her, I can’t rest for fear of the wind and the wolves and the hunting horn.
    Do you think I’d let you be hurt? she asked. Trust my ears to hear the horn, and my fire to scare the wolves, and my arms to keep out the wind.
    But I trusted nothing but stone. Block up the window below me, I begged her, and the window below that, and all the windows there are except this one.
    Though she must have thought me mad, she did it. Every night now I slept safe by the highest window among the tossing leaves. The woman preferred her heap of furs at the bottom of the tower; she
had no taste for heights.
    The door at the foot of the tower could still open, but why would I climb down, when the woman brought me anything I needed? Sometimes to save her legs I leaned out of the window and let down a
basket on a rope I had woven of old rags; she said my stray hairs, knotted into it, glinted like gold thread.
    I sat in the high room and chopped radishes, singing to amuse myself. I sang of the moon and a prince and a ring. The woman called up from where she was skinning a fox. Where did you hear of
such things?
    In the stories.
    What stories? she said. I never told you such stories. Who’s been telling you stories?
    I must have heard them in the time before.
    She said, You have never even seen a man.
    No, I answered, but I can imagine.
    I could hear the weight of her feet stomping into the woods, and I sang on.
    Sprinkle him with lavender
    Gird his throat with gold
    For her royal lover rides to see her
    On his charger so bold
    Crude rhymes, but they pleased me, as I let the chopping knife drop and set to loosening and combing and replaiting my hair.
    And then like an answer to my songs he came. It was late one night, the time when I felt least the gap between sight and lack of sight. At the end of the verse a voice came up from the forest
floor. Who is it who sings so beautifully? it asked. Come to the window that I may see your face.
    I sat like stone. By the time I dragged my feet to the window and called down, there was no answer. But still I felt that I was being watched, so I shrank back into my room.
    When at first light the woman climbed up with berries for my breakfast, I asked had she slept sound through all the noise of the wolves. She hadn’t heard a thing.
    The next night I was ready for