1
Rhea darted into her hut, crossed in front of the guttering fire, then stood in the doorway to her tiny bedroom, swiping a hand through her hair in a distracted gesture. The bitch hadn't seen her outside the hut - she surely would have stopped caterwauling, or at least faltered in it if she had - and that was good, but the cursed hidey-hole had sealed itself up again, and that was bad. There was no time to open it again, either. Rhea hurried to the bed, knelt, and pushed the box far back into the shadows beneath.
Ay, that would do; until Susy Greengown was gone, it would do very well. Smiling on the right side of her mouth (the left was mostly frozen), Rhea got up, brushed her dress, and went to meet her second appointment of the night.
2
Behind her, the unlocked lid of the box clicked open. It came up less than an inch, but that was enough to allow a sliver of pulsing rose-colored light to shine out.
3
Susan Delgado stopped about forty yards from the witch's hut, the sweat chilling on her arms and the nape of her neck. Had she just spied an old woman (surely the one she had come to see) dart down that last bit of path leading from the top of the hill? She thought she had.
Don't stop singing - when an old lady hurries like that, she doesn't want to be seen. If you stop singing, she'll likely know she was.
For a moment Susan thought she'd stop anyway - that her memory would close up like a startled hand and deny her another verse of the old song which she had been singing since youngest childhood. But the next verse came to her, and she continued on (with feet as well as voice):
"Once my cares were far away,
Yes, once my cares were far away,
Now my love has gone from me
And misery is in my heart to stay."
A bad song for a night such as this, mayhap, but her heart went its own way without much interest in what her head thought or wanted; always had^ She was frightened to be out by moonlight, when werewolves were said to walk, she was frightened of her errand, and she was frightened by what that errand portended. Yet when she had gained the Great Road out of Hambry and her heart had demanded she run, she had run - under the light of the Kissing Moon and with her skirt held above her knees she had galloped like a pony, with her shadow galloping right beside her. For a mile or more she had run, until every muscle in her body tingled and the air she pulled down her throat tasted like some sweet heated liquid. And when she reached the upland track leading to this high sinister, she had sung. Because her heart demanded it. And, she supposed, it really hadn't been such a bad idea; if nothing else, it had kept the worst of her megrims away. Singing was good for that much, anyway.
Now she walked to the end of the path, singing the chorus of "Careless Love." As she stepped into the scant light which fell through the open door and onto the stoop, a harsh raincrow voice spoke from the shadows: "Stop yer howling, missy - it catches in my brains like a fishhook!"
Susan, who had been told all her life that she had a fair singing voice, a gift from her gramma, no doubt, fell silent at once, abashed. She stood on the stoop with her hands clasped in front of her apron. Beneath the apron she wore her second-best dress (she only had two). Beneath it, her heart was thumping very hard.
A cat - a hideous thing with two extra legs sticking out of its sides like toasting forks - came into the doorway first. It looked up at her, seemed to measure her, then screwed its face up in a look that was eerily human: contempt. It hissed at her, then flashed away into the night.
Well, good evening to you, too, Susan thought.
The old woman she had been sent to see stepped into the doorway.
She looked Susan up and down with that same expression of flat-eyed contempt, then stood back. "Come in. And mind ye clap the door tight. The wind has a way of blowin it open, as ye see!"
Susan stepped inside. She didn't want to close herself into this bad-smelling room with the old woman, but when there was no choice, hesitation was ever a fault. So her father had said, whether the matter under discussion was sums and subtractions or how to deal with boys at barn-dances when their hands became overly adventurous. She pulled the door firmly to, and heard it latch.
"And here y'are," the old woman said, and offered a grotesque smile of welcome. It was a smile guaranteed to make even a brave girl think of stories told in the nursery - Winter's tales of old women with snaggle teeth and bubbling cauldrons full of toad-green liquid. There was no cauldron over the fire in this room (nor was the fire itself much of a shake, in Susan's opinion), but the girl guessed there had been, betimes, and things in it of which it might be better not to think. That this woman was a real witch and not just an old lady posing as one was something Susan had felt sure of from the moment she had seen Rhea darting back inside her hut with the malformed cat at her heels. It was something you could almost smell, like the reeky aroma rising off the hag's skin.
"Yes," she said, smiling. She tried to make it a good one, bright and unafraid. "Here I am."
"And it's early y'are, my little sweeting. Early y'are! Hee!"
"I ran partway. The moon got into my blood, I suppose. That's what my da would have said."
The old woman's horrible smile widened into something that made Susan think of the way eels sometimes seemed to grin, after death and just before the pot. "Aye, but dead he is, dead these five years, Pat Delgado of the red hair and beard, the life mashed out of 'im by 'is own horse, aye, and went into the clearing at the end of the path with the music of his own snapping bones in his ears, so he did!"
The nervous smile slipped from Susan's face as if slapped away. She felt tears, always close at the mere mention of her da's name, bum at the back of her eyes. But she would not let them fall. Not in this heartless old crow's sight, she wouldn't.
"Let our business be quick and be done," she said in a dry voice that was far from her usual one; that voice was usually cheery and merry and ready for fun. But she was Pat Delgado's child, daughter of the best drover ever to work the Western Drop, and she remembered his face very well; she could rise to a stronger nature if required, as it now clearly was. The old woman had meant to reach out and scratch as deep as she could, and the more she saw that her efforts were succeeding, the more she would redouble them.
The hag, meanwhile, was watching Susan shrewdly, her bunch-knuckled hands planted on her hips while her cat twined around her ankles. Her eyes were rheumy, but Susan saw enough of them to realize they were the same gray-green shade as the cat's eyes, and to wonder what sort of fell magic that might be. She felt an urge - a strong one - to drop her eyes, and would not. It was all right to feel fear, but sometimes a very bad idea to show it.
"You look at me pert, missy," Rhea said at last. Her smile was dissolving slowly into a petulant frown.
"Nay, old mother," Susan replied evenly. "Only as one who wishes to do the business she came for and be gone. I have come here at the wish of My Lord Mayor of Mejis, and at that of my Aunt Cordelia, sister of my father. My dear father, of whom I would hear no ill spoken."
"I speak as I do," the old woman said. The words were dismissive, yet there was a trace of fawning servility in the hag's voice. Susan set no importance on that; it was a tone such a thing as this had probably adopted her whole life, and came as automatically as breath. "I've lived alone a long time, with no mistress but myself, and once it begins, my tongue goes where it will."
"Then sometimes it might be best not to let it begin at all."
The old woman's eyes flashed uglily. "Curb your own, stripling girl, lest you find it dead in your mouth, where it will rot and make the Mayor think twice about kissing you when he smells its stink, aye, even under such a moon as this!"
Susan's heart filled with misery and bewilderment. She'd come up here intent on only one thing: getting the business done as quickly as possible, a barely explained rite that was apt to be painful and sure to be shameful. Now this old woman was looking at her with flat and naked hatred. How could things have gone wrong with such suddenness? Or was it always this way with witches?
"We have begun badly, mistress - can we start over?" Susan asked suddenly, and held out her hand.
The hag looked startled, although she did reach out and make brief contact, the wrinkled tips of her fingers touching the short-nailed lingers of the sixteen-year-old girl who stood before her with her clear-skinned face shining and her long hair braided down her back. Susan had to make a real effort not to grimace at the touch, brief as it was. The old woman's fingers were as chilly as those of a corpse, but Susan had touched chilly fingers before ("Cold hands, warm heart," Aunt Cord sometimes said). The real unpleasantness was in the texture, the feel of cold flesh spongy and loose on the bones, as if the woman to whom they were attached had drowned and lain long in some pool.
"Nay, nay, there's no starting over," the old woman said, "yet may-hap we'll go on better than we've begun. Ye've a powerful friend in the Mayor, and I'd not have him for my enemy."
She's honest, at least, Susan thought, then had to laugh at herself. This woman would be honest only when she absolutely had to be; left to her own devices and desires, she'd lie about everything - the weather, the crops, the flights of birds come Reaping.
"Ye came before I expected ye, and it's put me out of temper, so it has. Have ye brought me something, missy? Ye have, I'll warrant!" Her eyes were glittering once more, this time not with anger.
Susan reached beneath her apron (so stupid, wearing an apron for an errand on the backside of nowhere, but it was what custom demanded) and into her pocket. There, tied to a string so it could not be easily lost (by young girls suddenly moved to run in the moonlight, perchance), was a cloth bag. Susan broke the binding string and brought the bag out. She put it in the outstretched hand before her, the palm so worn that the lines marking it were now little more than ghosts. She was careful not to touch Rhea again ... although the old woman would be touching her again, and soon.
"Is it the sound o' the wind makes ye shiver?" Rhea asked, although Susan could tell her mind was mostly fixed on the little bag; her fingers were busy tugging out the knot in the drawstring.
"Yes, the wind."
"And so it should. 'Tis the voices of the dead you hear in the wind, and when they scream so, 'tis because they regret - ah!"
The knot gave. She loosened the drawstring and tumbled two gold coins into her hand. They were unevenly milled and crude - no one had made such for generations - but they were heavy, and the eagles engraved upon them had a certain power. Rhea lifted one to her mouth, pulled back her lips to reveal a few gruesome teeth, and bit down. The hag looked at the faint indentations her teeth had left in the gold. For several seconds she gazed, rapt, then closed her fingers over them tightly.
While Rhea's attention was distracted by the coins, Susan happened to look through the open door to her left and into what she assumed was the witch's bedchamber. And here she saw an odd and disquieting thing: a light under the bed. A pink, pulsing light. It seemed to be coming from some kind of box, although she could not quite ...
The witch looked up, and Susan hastily moved her eyes to a comer of the room, where a net containing three or four strange white fruits hung from a hook. Then, as the old woman moved and her huge shadow danced ponderously away from that part of the wall, Susan saw they were not fruits at air, but skulls. She felt a sickish drop in her stomach.
"The fire needs building up, missy. Go round to the side of the house and bring back an armload of wood. Good-sized sticks are what's wanted, and never mind whining ye can't lug 'em. Ye're of a strappin good size, so ye are!"
Susan, who had quit whining about chores around the time she had quit pissing into her clouts, said nothing . . . although it did cross her mind to ask Rhea if everyone who brought her gold was invited to lug her wood. In truth, she didn't mind; the air outside would taste like wine after the stench of the hut.
She had almost reached the door when her foot struck something hot and yielding. The cat yowled. Susan stumbled and almost fell. From behind her, the old woman issued a series of gasping, choking sounds which Susan eventually recognized as laughter.
"Watch Musty, my little sweet one! Tricksy, he is! And tripsy as well, betimes, so he is! Hee!" And off she went, in another gale.
The cat looked up at Susan, its ears laid back, its gray-green eyes wide. It hissed at her. And Susan, unaware she was going to do it until it was done, hissed back. Like its expression of contempt, Musty's look of surprise was eerily - and, in this case, comically - human. It turned and fled for Rhea's bedroom, its split tail lashing. Susan opened the door and went outside to get the wood. Already she felt as if she had been here a thousand years, and that it might be a thousand more before she could go home.
4
The air was as sweet as she had hoped, perhaps even sweeter, and for a moment she only stood on the stoop, breathing it in, trying to cleanse her lungs . . . and her mind.
After five good breaths, she got herself in motion. Around the side of the house she went... but it was the wrong side, it seemed, for there was no woodpile here. There was a narrow excuse for a window, however, half-buried in some tough and unlovely creeper. It was toward the back of the hut, and must look in on the old woman's sleeping closet.
Don't look in there, whatever she's got under her bed isn't your business, and if she were to catch you. . .
She went to the window despite these admonitions, and peeked in.
It was unlikely that Rhea would have seen Susan's face through the dense overgrowth of pig ivy even if the old besom had been looking in that direction, and she wasn't. She was on her knees, the drawstring bag caught in her teeth, reaching under the bed.
She brought out a box and opened its lid, which was already ajar. Her face was flooded with soft pink radiance, and Susan gasped. For one moment it was the face of a young girl - but one filled with cruelty as well as youth, the face of a self-willed child determined to learn all the wrong things for all the wrong reasons. The face of the girl this hag once had been, mayhap. The light appeared to be coming from some sort of glass ball.
The old woman looked at it for several moments, her eyes wide and fascinated. Her lips moved as if she were speaking to it or perhaps even singing to it; the little bag Susan had brought from town, its string still clamped in the hag's mouth, bobbed up and down as she spoke. Then, with what appeared to be great effort of will, she closed the box, cutting off the rosy light. Susan found herself relieved - there was something about it she didn't like.
The old woman cupped one hand over the silver lock in the middle of the lid, and a brief scarlet light spiked out from between her fingers. All this with the drawstring bag still hanging from her mouth. Then she put the box on the bed, knelt, and began running her hands over the dirt just beneath the bed's edge. Although she touched only with her palms, lines appeared as if she had used a drawing tool. These lines darkened, becoming what looked like grooves.
The wood, Susan! Gel the wood before she wakes up to how long you've been gone! For your father's sake!
Susan pulled the skirtof her dress all the way up to her waist - she did not want the old woman to see dirt or leaves on her clothing when she came back inside, did not want to answer the questions the sight of such smuts might provoke - and crawled beneath the window with her white cotton drawers flashing in the moonlight. Once she was past, she got to her feet again and hurried quietly around to the far side of the hut. Here she found the woodpile under an old, moldy-smelling hide. She took half a dozen good-sized chunks and walked back toward the front of the house with them in her arms.
When she entered, turning sideways to get her load through the doorway without dropping any, the old woman was back in the main room, staring moodily into the fireplace, where there was now little more than embers; Of the drawstring bag there was no sign.
"Took; you long enough, missy," Rhea said. She continued to look into the fireplace, as if Susan were of no account... but one foot tapped below the dirty hem of her dress, and her eyebrows were drawn together.
Susan crossed the room, peering over the load of wood in her arms as well as she could while she walked. It wouldn't surprise her a bit to spy the cat lurking near, hoping to trip her up. "I saw a spider," she said. "I flapped my apron at it to make it run away. I hate the look of them, so I do."
"Ye'll see something ye like the look of even less, soon enough," Rhea said, grinning her peculiar one-sided grin. "Out of old Thorin's nightshirt it'll come, stiff as a stick and as red as rhubarb! Hee! Hold a minute, girl; ye gods, ye've brought enough for a Fair-Day bonfire."
Rhea took two fat logs from Susan's pile and tossed them indifferently onto the coals. Embers spiraled up the dark and faintly roaring shaft of the chimney. There, ye've scattered what's left of yer fire, ye silly old thing, and will likely have to rekindle the whole mess, Susan thought. Then Rhea reached into the fireplace with one splayed hand, spoke a guttural word, and the logs blazed up as if soaked in oil.
"Put the rest over there," she said, pointing at the woodbox. "And mind ye not be a scatterbark, missy."
What, and dirty all this neat? Susan thought. She bit the insides of her cheeks to kill the smile that wanted to rise on her mouth.
Rhea might have sensed it, however; when Susan straightened again, the old woman was looking at her with a dour, knowing expression.
"All right, mistress, let's do our business and have it done. Do ye know why you're here?"
"I am here at Mayor Thorin's wish," Susan repeated, knowing that was no real answer. She was frightened now - more frightened than when she had looked through the window and seen the old woman crooning to the glass ball. "His wife has come barren to the end of her courses. He wishes to have a son before he is also unable to - "
"Pish-tush, spare me the codswallop and pretty words. He wants tits and arse that don't squish in his hands and a box that'll grip what he pushes. If he's still man enough to push it, that is. If a son come of it, aye, fine, he'll give it over to ye to keep and raise until it's old enough to school, and after that ye'll see it no more. If it's a daughter, he'll likely take it from ye and give it to his new man, the one with the girl's hair and the limp, to drown in the nearest cattle-wallow."
Susan stared at her, shocked out of all measure.
The old woman saw the look and laughed. "Don't like the sound of the truth, do yer? Few do, missy. But that's neither here nor there; yer auntie was ever a trig one, and she'll have done all right out of Thorin and Thorin's treasury. What gold you see of it's none o' mine . . . and won't be none o' yours, either, if you don't watch sharp! Hee! Take off that dress!"
Iwon't was what rose to her lips, but what then? To be turned out of this hut (and to be turned out pretty much as she had come, and not as a lizard or a hopping toad would probably be the best luck she could hope for) and sent west as she was now, without even the two gold coins she'd brought up here? And that was only the small half of it. The large was that she had given her word. At first she had resisted, but when Aunt Cord had invoked her father's name, she had given in. As she always did. Really, she had no choice.'' And when there was no choice, hesitation was ever a fault.
She brushed the front of her apron, to which small bits of bark now clung, then untied it and took it off. She folded it, laid it on a small, grimy hassock near the hearth, and unbuttoned her dress to the waist. She shivered it from her shoulders, and stepped out. She folded it and laid it atop the apron, trying not to mind the greedy way Rhea of Coos was staring at her in the firelight. The cat came sashaying across the floor, grotesque extra legs hobbling, and sat at Rhea's feet. Outside, the wind gusted. It was warm on the hearth but Susan was cold just the same, as if that wind had gotten inside her, somehow.
"Hurry, girl, for yer father's sake!"
Susan pulled her shift over her head, folded it atop the dress, then stood in only her drawers, with her arms folded over her bosom. The fire painted warm orange highlights along her thighs; black circles of shadow in the tender folds behind her knees.
"And still she's not nekkid!" the old crow laughed. "Ain't we lah-di-dah! Aye, we are, very fine! Take off those drawers, mistress, and stand as ye slid from yer mother! Although ye had not so many goodies as to interest the likes of Hart Thorin then, did ye? Hee!"
Feeling caught in a nightmare, Susan did as she was bid. With her mound and bush uncovered, her crossed arms seemed foolish. She lowered them to her sides.
"Ah, no wonder he wants ye!" the old woman said." 'Tis beautiful ye are, and true! Is she not, Musty?"
The cat waowed.
"There's dirt on yer knees," Rhea said suddenly. "How came it there?" \