The Bramblejack

Scrat woke before the others and lay listening. The rafters strained. The chimney drew cold air down into the kitchen. Fred turned in the next bed hard enough to shake the floor. From downstairs came the soft thud of a cupboard, which meant Nan was up. He went down in his nightshirt and found her at the table with the clay dish in her hands. She wiped it the way she did every morning, rubbing away the dried remains of yesterday’s offering, and then setting it beside the hearthstone. Then she looked at Scrat, and past him towards the corner where the dresser met the wall.

The Bramblejack stood there, watching.

It was no bigger than a child of three, though it had never been a child. Its skin was grey, and its hands hung past its knees, the fingers awkwardly long and thrice-jointed. Its eyes were black from edge to edge without iris or white, and they peered out from below a head of pale, wispy hair. Something passed between Nan and the creature. An understanding.

“Sit down, love. Eat.”

Scrat climbed onto his chair. He liked the kitchen before anyone else came down, when it was just Nan, the fire, and the Bramblejack in his corner.

Maggie came in while the porridge bubbled, carrying the broom that hung beside the pantry and was used for nothing except the front step. She crossed the kitchen without letting the bristles touch the floor and went out into the early dark. Scrat heard the first slow scrape of the sweep begin. Outward. Always outward. He had once asked Nan why, and Nan had taken his face in both hands and told him that some things were done because they must be done and the reason was in the doing, not in the knowing.

Jonah came down. Before he sat, he crossed to the back door, tested the latch, and left the iron bolt untouched, satisfying himself that it had not been drawn. Fred duly appeared, grunted at Nan, took his place, and ate.

When only a little food remained in Scrat’s bowl, he carried it to the hearth and scraped it into the dish. The Bramblejack’s black eyes followed the spoon. It spoke not a word.

“Jack, I left extra,” Scrat whispered. Nobody heard.

༺ ❦ ༻

Fred caught him in the passage after the noon meal, blocking the way with one shoulder against the wall. “Watching the corners again, Scratty?”

Scrat did not answer. He hated that nickname.

“You are the strangest creature in this house, little brother.” He put a hand against Scrat’s chest and shoved. It was not a hard shove, but it should have sent the boy against the wall. Instead, Fred lurched backwards as though something had struck him in return with double the force. His heels caught the firewood, and he went down among it, scattering logs across the flagstones. Fred stared at his brother from the floor, mouth open and no sound coming out. Then he gathered up the wood and left, vowing to himself never again to look at, or shove, his brother.

The Bramblejack appeared where Fred had fallen, and chuckled. Scrat chuckled along with it.

Later, when the kitchen was empty except for the two of them, Nan sat beside Scrat on the bottom stair. She rested her hand on his head.

“Fred pushed me,” Scrat said.

“I know.”

“Jack pushed him back.”

Nan’s hand became still. She looked down the passage toward the shadow beneath the stairs, where the Bramblejack now sat, and Scrat knew she also saw him the way he saw him, and that she had been seeing him longer than anyone in the family realised.

“Keep your eyes open, love,” she said.

“For Jack?”

Nan removed her hand. “For everything.”

She went back to the kitchen, leaving Scrat on the stair with the Bramblejack watching from the dark beneath the steps.

❧ ─────────────── ❦ ─────────────── ❧

The wizard arrived in the late afternoon. Scrat heard the knock from the passage and reached the kitchen before anyone else but stayed back from the door.

The man outside was tall and grey. He carried a blackwood staff bound near the head with silver, and beneath his travelling cloak his clothes were worked at the cuff and collar with small stitched runework that Scrat could not read. A broad hat drooped over his brow, softened by weather but unmistakable. At his hip hung a short wand in a leather sheath, the handle pale and ribbed. He asked for shelter, and his voice filled the doorway the way a draught fills a room. Jonah looked at Maggie, who gave the smallest nod. The man came inside and introduced himself as Khileus of Pryth. The name meant nothing to anyone in the kitchen, but the way he spoke it suggested it should.

Jonah offered the man a seat with a deference that Scrat had never seen his father show anyone. Maggie studied the wizard as she hung his wet cloak by the fire, her expression giving nothing away.

The Bramblejack had come to the foot of the stairs. It was closer to the centre of the room than Scrat had ever seen it, its black eyes fixed on the wizard’s staff, its long fingers curling and uncurling at its sides.

At supper Khileus spoke about his travels, about mended charms and villages he had put right. Fred listened with his mouth open, while Jonah asked question after question. Nan sat at the end of the table and said nothing, only watching the wizard as though weighing an adversary. At length, Maggie scraped the last of her food onto the clay dish beside the hearth, as usual.

Khileus halted mid-sentence. His eyes followed her hand to the hearthstone, moved to the back door where the iron bolt sat unused, then to the pantry where the broom hung on its pegs.

“What is that for?” he asked.

Jonah explained, badly, the way we often explain something we have never needed to justify before. Food goes in the dish. The door stays unbolted. The step is swept before dawn.

“Outward,” Scrat said, and Khileus looked at him. “Always outward.”

The wizard leaned back. “And why would that be?”

Nobody answered.

“A compact,” Khileus declared. “A domestic one, most likely. Old household work, formalised into repetition long after the original meaning was forgotten.” He said it the way an entomologist might identify the species of a dead insect he has found beneath his boot.

Nan’s chair struck the floor, and Maggie flinched. She had risen so fast that it went backwards and hit the flagstones with a crack that silenced the room. “Mam?” Maggie said.

Nan picked up her bowl. “I am tired.”

Khileus turned to her with a courtesy that failed to conceal his amusement. “I meant no offence, old woman.”

“No,” Nan said. “I expect not.” Then she left.

Khileus resumed. He told them that such arrangements were common in older settlements, bargains made when people lacked better protections. He said the practices were not foolish, using the word “understandable.” He could remove the obligation entirely, he claimed. Whatever remained of the old arrangement would be contained, and they would not need to keep feeding something that, in his professional estimation, had long since stopped requiring food.

“We have always kept…” Jonah began, and Khileus looked at him, just looked, and the sentence died as Jonah’s confidence withered under his gaze. Maggie was upset. She had been taught since birth that the ritual was sacred, yet now she stood in her own kitchen and let this stranger tell her it was nothing, because his power was visible and hers was not.

Fred said, cheerfully, “When can you start?”

“Tomorrow,” said Khileus, and behind the wizard’s chair the Bramblejack faded, as the fire shrank to embers.

❧ ─────────────── ❦ ─────────────── ❧

Khileus began after breakfast the next morning.

The first thing he did was draw the iron bolt across the back door. “There is no need for this door to remain open,” the wizard said. He spoke to the room, not to the family, as though they were entirely incidental to the work. He lifted the clay dish from beside the hearthstone and turned it in his hands, examining the cracks and the crazing of the glaze from years of offerings. Then he placed it inside the cupboard among the ordinary crockery.

Jonah tried again. “My mother will…”

“Your mother is a woman of strong feeling,” Khileus interjected. “Strong feeling is admirable. But it is not knowledge, and knowledge is what protects a household.”

Maggie stared at the cupboard. Fury rose behind her face, so hot and so helpless that it had nowhere to go except inward. She knew what the wizard was doing, and she knew it was wrong. Scrat didn’t like it either. Watching this sorcerer diminish his mother in her own home woke something in him. It came from the part of Scrat that felt the creature, rising up through his body and inhabiting his eyes. The room looked different afterwards. Everything was sharper and colder, and Scrat could see what lay beneath every surface.

Khileus unpacked his tools. Chalk, thread, small objects of glass and iron arranged in careful order. He began to mark the lintels and windows with signs that had shapes and formulae, speaking as he worked, and frequently touching two fingers to the silver binding of his staff. Fred followed him between rooms with open admiration.

The Bramblejack stood at the centre of the kitchen now, watching.

Scrat crossed the kitchen and took hold of the wizard’s wrist. “Jack says put it back.”

Khileus looked down at the boy’s hand on his arm. “Let go.”

“Jack says put it back.”

Khileus tried to free his wrist and could not. Scrat was not especially strong, but what now lived behind his grip had nothing to do with a child’s strength. The wizard felt it enter through his skin, travel up his arm and settle into the shoulder joint. He wrenched free. His hand was numb from the wrist to the fingertips. He flexed the fingers, and they responded badly, as though the signals between his will and his flesh had to travel a greater distance than before.

“What did you do?” Khileus said.

Scrat looked at him with a changed face. His eyes met the wizard’s with the same black, unblinking attention that the Bramblejack turned upon the world, as though the boy and the creature had drawn closer together and the boundary between them had begun to fade.

“I did nothing,” Scrat said. “Jack did.”

Khileus went back to his wards, but his hand would not stop trembling, and when he drew a binding sign above the passage door, the line came out crooked. He drew it again. Crooked again. The chalk snapped in his fingers because his grip had changed. Whatever had entered through the boy’s touch had settled into the small bones of his hand and meant to stay.

In the passage behind him, the Bramblejack stood with teeth bared, long fingers spread wide, and shadows pooling at his feet.

❧ ─────────────── ❦ ─────────────── ❧

By afternoon, both of the wizard’s hands were shaking. He hid the left in his cloak, but the right held the wand, and the tremor showed every time he raised it. His fire spell produced a weak flare that spat and died before it reached the kindling. He tried again, and the wand sparked sideways, laying a line of heat scored across the back of his hand. The welt that rose was black at the edges. His own magic had turned on him, and he stared in disbelief at the wound.

The house grew colder through the afternoon. Warmth was being withdrawn from one room at a time. Jonah built up the fire, and it sank within minutes. Maggie moved through the kitchen in silence, refusing to look at anyone, and Fred had gone deathly quiet. Whatever thrill the morning had given him had drained away around the time the second ward cracked straight through its centre and crumbled to powder on the sill.

Scrat sat at the kitchen table. He had been sitting there for a long time, and Maggie noticed. She put her hand on his shoulder and said his name.

Scrat turned his face very slowly towards her.

Maggie pulled her hand back the way Khileus had pulled his hand from the boy’s hair, with the same startled recoil, the same flash of revulsion. Her son looked at her, but something different looked back. His pupils had grown so wide and dark that the iris around them had almost vanished, and his face held a stillness that did not belong to a child. It belonged to the corner of the kitchen. It belonged to the space beneath the stairs.

“Scrat?”

“I am here, Mam.”

But the voice that answered was too level, too certain, and it came from somewhere deep. Maggie stepped back, pressing her hand to her mouth. The ritual was breached, and she understood that consequence now visited their home.

༺ ❦ ༻

Khileus found Scrat near the hearth as darkness fell. “You have been following me,” he said.

“No, Jack has.”

Khileus stepped towards the boy. His foot moved, but his body did not follow. He strained forward, and the air refused him, not as a wall refuses, but as the ground itself might, with an authority so total that pushing against it felt like pushing against the foundations of the house. Something deep in his left shoulder gave way, as a tendon tore inside the joint, and he cried out.

The Bramblejack stood beside Scrat. It was no larger than before, but the room had become too small for what he was. The shadows around his feet had thickened into pools of absolute black, and his face was a vision of fury, twisted and terrible. Nothing like the mild companion who had stood in corners and watched the morning pass. His mouth was open, and behind his lips were vicious-looking teeth, fine and dark, like thorns. His hands were spread, and the fingers bent at angles that no living hand could hold.

The air shook, and the windows rattled in their frames. The bolt on the back door shuddered in its housing as though something were trying to wrench it loose.

That night the hearth went dead. The embers turned to powder, the ash went instantly cold, and the kitchen became darker than night.

❧ ─────────────── ❦ ─────────────── ❧

Khileus fell to his knees.

The wizard knelt before the black grate with his wand in his ruined hand. He whispered words that had once called fire from the air, but nothing answered.

The Bramblejack stood behind him, teeth bared, his black eyes empty of everything except judgement.

“Put it back,” Scrat said from the doorway.

The wizard did not turn. “Go to your bed.”

“You cannot light it.” Scrat’s voice carried across the kitchen without rising. “You will never light it the way you could before. Not here, or anywhere else.”

Khileus turned and recognised that something else stared out through the boy’s face. Something far older than the house. More terrifying than fire.

“I am Scrat. You are in our house. And you have broken what keeps it.”

Nan came down the stairs at last. She stood at the foot of the stairs in her nightgown, her hair loose, and nothing frail about her now. She was what she had always been. A cunning woman of the old kind, a keeper of promises that predated every text in every library the wizard had ever walked through.

“You knew,” Khileus said.

“We kept the ritual because it was agreed. Not because we understood it. Because we honoured it.” Her voice dropped. “And you walked in here, full of assurance, waving chalk and bottles and told us we were fools.”

“Attend the bolt!” she said.

Khileus rose. He crossed to the back door and drew it back. The iron screamed against the housing as though it had rusted fast in a single day. Khileus continued without any prompting. He found the dish in the cupboard and placed it on the hearthstone. Scrat filled it from his own plate. Cold food, scraped together.

The Bramblejack seemed to calm.

Then the broom. Khileus took it from the pegs, went outside, and stood on the step, but he could not begin. A man who had mastered the formulae of power stood in the dark holding a kitchen broom and could not reproduce the simplest motion that an untrained woman performed every morning of her life.

“Wake Maggie,” Nan said.

Maggie came down in her shawl. She saw the wizard in the doorway with the broom and stopped. Everything she had swallowed since his arrival passed across her face at once. She took the broom from his hands, went outside, and swept. Outward. Always outward. The spiral moved across the step as it always had, and the house seemed to sigh around it.

When she finished, Khileus raised his wand. His hand shook. He whispered, and a flame appeared at the tip, weak and unsteady. It crawled towards the kindling, caught and held, barely. He bowed his head. The fire was back. But it was not his fire. It was smaller and slower. His hand would never be steady again. The welt had sunk into his skin, and the tremor had settled into his bones, and the Bramblejack’s mark would remain there for the rest of his life.

༺ ❦ ༻

Khileus left after breakfast. At the door he stopped beside Scrat and looked at him for a long time. Scrat looked back. His face had not returned to what it had been, and Maggie, watching from the stove, knew her boy had been changed by what passed through him.

The wizard walked up the lane with his staff in his good hand and his ruined hand pressed against his side. Scrat watched until the hedge took him. Then he went back to the kitchen.

Fred sat at the table, quiet. Jonah cut bread. Maggie stood at the stove with her back to the room. Nan sat in her chair by the hearth, both hands around her cup. Scrat scraped the last of his porridge into the clay dish.

The Bramblejack stood in the corner where the dresser met the wall. Small, old and watchful. His black eyes rested on Scrat with something that was neither love nor ownership. Perhaps it was pride. Scrat looked toward it, and the Bramblejack nodded.

Scrat’s eyes became completely black, and he began beating a steady rhythm on the table. Thud. Thud. Thud. The voice that rose spoke to the beat.

Scrape the plate, unbolt the door,

Sweep out a circle across the yard floor,

Dark, hidden watchers will measure your lack,

Don’t tempt the wrath of the Bramblejack

Everyone looked on, astonished. But then each of them, in turn, joined the chant. None were in control as they beat the table and said the rhyme.

Except Nan.

She sat by the hearth and looked at Jack, and they both chuckled.