He stepped away from the table and drew in a deep breath.
“No,” he repeated, “we hain’t out uv the woods. . . .”
Sarah slid a chair beneath the cunning man. He settled into it heavily, straining Ellie’s jury-rigged repairs. What was there hed teeth, en it hed took a bite whilst he scouted hit out.
“What is it?” Ellie asked, looking from the box to the door as if undecided as to whence the danger could be expected. “What is it thet you see?”
Old Nathan rubbed his right biceps with his left hand, then raised his arm to put the jackknife away. There wasn’t any wonder about the knife. Its blades were good steel, with a working edge on the larger one and on the smaller a wire edge that could serve as a razor at need.
The wonder of the place where Old Nathan kept the knife was another question, but it was a question to which the cunning man himself had no answer. It was like all the rest of his art, a pattern of things known but not studied; the way a clockwork toy moves without understanding in its spring.
And if the toy should cease to move, the spring would be none the wiser for that result either. . . .
Old Nathan sighed and ran a fingertip across the interior of the box. The wood felt as it should: vaguely warm because the cunning man’s flesh was cold, and slightly rough because the board had been planed smooth but not polished.
“He found hit et the shurrif’s sale,” Ellie murmured, not so much to inform as to fill the silence in which she and Sarah Ransden stood with Old Nathan stepped along the pathways of his mind, open-eyed but unseeing. “I was a fool t’ take him thar. The Neills was evil on the best day uv thar lives.”
“They was evil,” Sarah said grimly. “But Chance Ransden had Satan hisse’f livin’ in his skull, en I know thet t’ my cost.”
“Earth ‘n air . . .” the cunning man murmured.
He blinked, then shook himself fully alert. His eyeballs felt as though someone had ground sand into them. He rubbed them cautiously. There were risks going into a waking trance with his eyes open. One day the lids would stick that way and he would be blind as a mole; but it hadn’t happened yet. . . .
The cabin door opened and closed; Sarah had gone out. Old Nathan looked at the panel, confused and still uncertain. He had dropped back into reality as though it were an icy pond.
Ellie threw another stick of wood onto the hearth. The billet looked chewed off rather than chopped. The axe had gone the way of the Ransden’s cattle and seedcorn. The girl was reduced to cutting logs with the handaxe she had concealed in her mulch pile to keep it from being traded for liquor as well.
“Fire and water?” she offered to prompt the cunning man to say more.
“Did I speak?” Old Nathan asked in surprise. “Reckon I did. . . .”
Sarah came back inside. She carried the kitchen knife she had used as a trowel and a cupful of dirt gathered into her lifted dress. She spilled the soil onto the table near the little box. “There’s snow mixed in along with this,” she said. “Or I reckon there’s water in the jug by the fire.”
Old Nathan looked from the older woman to the young one. Most folk he worked magic for, they were afraid of what he did and the fellow who did it besides. This pair was rock steady. Their minds moved faster than the cunning man was consciously able to go; and if they were afraid, it was nowhere he could see by looking deep into their eyes.
On the cabin eaves, chickadees cracked seeds and remarked cheerfully about the sunlight.
Mebbe the wimmen ‘ud be afeerd if they knew more; but mebbe livin’ with the Ransden men hed burnt all the fear outen thim already.
Ellie rose from the hearth with a long feather of hickory, lighted at one end. It burned back along the grain of the wood with a coiled pigtail of black waste above the flame. “This do ye fer fire?” she said as she offered the miniature torch.