5.1 The Shetland Witch, or, Atropos Wants Her Shears Back

‘What are we going to do with her?’ Hazel hissed at Ishabel. The stranger’s head was drooping; she was almost asleep at the table.

‘Could you make up the bed? The sheets and things are in the wardrobe in the spare room.’

Ishabel sounded weary but unperturbed. Hazel hurried to the spare room beside the bathroom and busied herself sorting duvet covers and pillowcases. It was well past ten o’clock now, and she could hear the rain again outside.

Perhaps they could ... But Hazel stopped herself from thinking about that. Instead, she thought very hard about how the sheet should be tucked in. She had seen proper power tonight and was not going to make any assumptions about who could or could not hear inside her head.

Atropos. Odd name. Something from the Greek myths. She would look it up in a minute. She folded two towels on the bed.

As if summoned, Maggie looked into the room and nodded. ‘Very nice. We’re bringing her in now.’

Hazel scuttled out of the way and stood at the further end of the hallway. Avril and Maggie brought Atropos through from the kitchen, supporting her and propelling her. Her angry eyes looked scared. Ishabel followed and closed the door. A few minutes passed, then it opened again and Avril came out grinning.

‘Ishabel wants the old chamber pot,’ she announced.

‘Wow, I’d not thought of that,’ Hazel said. ‘If she’s as old as she looks, the bathroom will be totally inexplicable to her.’

‘Is it not that pot with the big Christmas cactus in, in the living room? A sort of squat white china thing with handles?’ Avril walked into the room beside the kitchen. ‘Thought so. My mum’s is exactly the same. I’ll put the plant on the draining board.’ She took the pot to the kitchen to wash it out, and then went back to the spare room, and handed it in through the door. Hazel heard a stream of murmured words from Ishabel, but nothing yet from the stranger.

Maggie was the next one to come out. She dropped two damp towels on the kitchen floor and sat down with a thump at the table, looking stunned. ‘I’ve just helped to put a mythic creature to bed. Hazel, pass me a glass and the whisky. I need a drink.’

When Ishabel closed the spare room door the catch snicked home in a particularly firm way, Hazel noticed.

‘Is she asleep?’ Maggie asked.

‘More or less. She’s restless, but she’s grey-faced with exhaustion. She’ll be fine,’ Ishabel left the kitchen door ajar.

‘I’ve had a whisky.’

‘I’m beyond that. Tea, please, Hazel.’ Ishabel sat down at the table, looking thoughtful. ‘Avril: what was she like, in your car? How did she react to our technology?’

Avril seemed to have lost her earlier anger. Hazel hoped that she had also forgotten her threats about leaving. ‘I had to put her in, do the seat belt for her, the whole lot. She was like a really cranky granny not going to show me that she was terrified and had na idea what a car was.’

‘So she can adapt, and doesn’t necessarily attack things if she doesna understand them. Good.’ Ishabel accepted her tea from Hazel. ‘Thank you. We know who she is. Atropos is a Fate, but what, exactly, is a Fate, in our time?’

The witches sat talking in the kitchen, Hazel and Avril looking things up on their phones to show the others. They had some more tea, and Ishabel got out the fruit cake.

‘But why does it matter what she is?’ Hazel asked, finally. ‘I dinnae understand. She’s clearly packed full of power: is that not enough?’

‘I want to know the limits of her power, and a name for her kind would be helpful,’ Ishabel said mildly. ‘But there’s so little written down that it’s probably all a bit academic. In her own time, there was na writing. She’s pre-Homeric – pre-everything, really. So anything we know about her derives from later writers making stuff up, for their own purposes. That’s as accurate as we’re going to get.’

‘But if she’s not a goddess,’ Hazel persisted, ‘what is she? Nothing that we’ve looked up says that a Fate is a goddess, or a Titan, or a nymph. Certainly not a dryad. There’s not much else for her to be, in her tradition.’

‘A Daughter of Zeus? Isn’t that enough?’ Maggie said helplessly. ‘Here! On our islands! A Greek legend walking among us.’

‘She’s the daughter of gods, certainly, but there’s something much bigger in her. Definitely elemental.’ Ishabel was peering at images on Hazel’s phone. ‘I should look at these again tomorrow on a bigger screen.’

‘I’ll send you the link.’

‘Her magic felt elemental to me.’ Avril said. ‘It was like being ironed out flat, or being dragged on a rope. Absolutely nothing could stop her. I da’ want anything more to do with her.’

‘We might not have a choice. She’s unpredictable, and inexorable,’ Ishabel said. ‘She has inevitability about her. If she’s a Fate, what she does is meant to happen, and we can’t possibly affect that. All we can do is keep out of her way, and keep the way ahead of her clear.’

‘And the folk,’ Maggie said. ‘She’s going to cause chaos here if we’re not on the ball about this. Can you imagine her killing and destroying her way across the islands, when we don’t ken what she even wants?’

Avril’s voice was rising. ‘And folk seeing her! And seeing us trying to stop her! This is going to be impossible to hide. Mind those ghost fishermen –?‘

Hazel interrupted her. ‘No, no. She can’t kill people at will. That’s her whole point. She’s a Fate. That bit from, hang on,’ and she looked through the tabs on her phone screen again and tapped on the page she wanted. ‘Here. It says she only kills those who are meant to die at that moment. So it has to work the other way too. She’s not going to be like some super-villain murdering her way across New York while we’re waiting for Wonder Woman to stop her.’

‘Atropos might not be interested in listening to a superhero,’ Maggie suggested drily.

‘No, but she won’t be super-destructive,’ Hazel said. ‘She can’t be. It’s not her nature. I mean, I bet she can be destructive. We know she’s got power. But I don’t think destroying is what she’s about.’

Then Maggie returned to the question they had not been able to answer. ‘So, what is she here for?’

Episode 5.2 will follow.

The Shetland Witch © Kate Macdonald 2024.

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