At the top of the hill, the wind lifted her hair away from her ravaged face and brought her the moaning whisper of the thinny which had eaten its way into the far end of Eyebolt Canyon. It was a sound few cared for, she knew, but she herself loved it; to Rhea of the Coos, it sounded like a lullaby. Overhead rode the moon, the shadows on its bright skin sketching the faces of lovers kissing … if you believed the ordinary fools below, that was. The ordinary fools below saw a different face or set of faces in each full moon, but the hag knew there was only one—the face of the Demon. The face of death.
She herself, however, had never felt more alive.
“Oh, my beauty,” she whispered, and touched the lock with her gnarled fingers. A faint glimmer of red light showed between her bunched knuckles, and there was a click. Breathing hard, like a woman who has run a race, she put the box down and opened it.
Rose-colored light, dimmer than that thrown by the Kissing Moon but infinitely more beautiful, spilled out. It touched the ruined face hanging above the box, and for a moment made it the face of a young girl again.
Musty sniffed, head stretched forward, ears laid back, old eyes rimmed with that rose light. Rhea was instantly jealous.
“Get away, foolish, ’tis not for the likes of you!”
She swatted the cat. Musty shied back, hissing like a kettle, and stalked in
dudgeon to the hummock which marked the very tip of Coos Hill. There he sat, affecting disdain and licking one paw as the wind combed ceaselessly through his fur.
Within the box, peeping out of a velvet drawstring bag, was a glass globe. It was filled with that rosy light; it flowed in gentle pulses, like the beat of a satisfied heart.
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“Oh, my lovely one,” she murmured, lifting it out. She held it up before her; let its pulsing radiance run down her wrinkled face like rain. “Oh, ye live, so ye do!”
Suddenly the color within the globe darkened toward scarlet. She felt it thrum in her hands like an immensely powerful motor, and again she felt that amazing wetness between her legs, that tidal tug she believed had been left behind long ago.
Then the thrumming died, and the light in the globe seemed to furl up like petals.
Where it had been there was now a pinkish gloom . . . and three riders coming out of it. At first she thought it was the men who had brought her the globe—Jonas and the others. But no, these were younger, even younger than Depape, who was about twenty-five. The one on the left of the trio appeared to have a bird’s skull mounted on the pommel of his saddle—strange but true.
Then that one and the one on the right were gone, darkened away somehow by the power of the glass, leaving only the one in the middle. She took in the jeans and boots he wore, the flat-brimmed hat that hid the upper half of his face, the easy way he sat his horse, and her first alarmed thought was Gunslinger! Come east from the Inner Baronies, aye, perhaps from Gilead itself! But she did not have to see the upper half of the rider’s face to know he was little more than a child, and there were no guns on his hips. Yet she didn’t think the youth came unarmed. If only she could see a little better .. .
She brought the glass almost to the tip of her nose and whispered, “Closer, lovie!
Closer still!”
She didn’t know what to expect—nothing at all seemed most likely—but within the dark circle of the glass, the figure did come closer. Swum closer, almost, like a horse and rider underwater, and she saw there was a quiver of arrows on his back.
Before him, on the pommel of his saddle, was not a skull but a shortbow. And to the right side of the saddle, where a gunslinger might have carried a rifle in a scabbard, there was the feather-fluffed shaft of a lance. He was not one of the Old
People, his face had none of that look … yet she did not think he was of the Outer Arc, either.
“But who are ye, cully?” she breathed. “And how shall I know ye? Ye’ve got yer hat pulled down so far I can’t see your God-pounding eyes, so ye do! By yer horse, mayhap … or p’raps by yer … get away, Musty! Why do yer trouble me so? Arrrr!”
The cat had come back from its lookout point and was twining back and forth between her swollen old ankles, waowing up at her in a voice even more rusty than its purr. When the old woman kicked out at him, Musty dodged agilely away
. . . then immediately came back and started in again, looking up at her with moonstruck eyes and making those soft yowls.
Rhea kicked out at it again, this one just as ineffectual as the first one, then looked into the glass once more. The horse and its interesting young rider were gone. The rose light was gone, as well. It was now just a dead glass ball she held, its only light a reflection borrowed from the moon.
The wind gusted, pressing her dress against the ruination that was her body.
Musty, undaunted by the feeble kicks of his mistress, darted forward and began to twine about her ankles again, crying up at her the whole time.
“There, do ye see what you’ve done, ye nasty bag of fleas and disease? The light’s gone out of it, gone out just when I—”
Then she heard a sound from the cart track which led up to her hut, and understood why Musty had been acting out. It was singing she heard. It was the girl she heard. The girl was early.
Grimacing horribly—she loathed being caught by surprise, and the little miss down there would pay for doing it—she bent and put the glass back in its box. The inside was lined with padded silk, and the ball fit as neatly as the breakfast egg in His Lordship’s cup. And still from down the hill (the cursed wind was wrong or she would have heard it sooner), the sound of the girl singing, now closer than ever:
“Love, o love, o careless love.
Can’t you see what careless love has done?”
“I’ll give’ee careless love, ye virgin bitch,” the old woman said. She could smell the sour reek of sweat from under her arms, but that other moisture had dried up
again. “I’ll give ye payday for walking in early on old Rhea, so I will!”
She passed her fingers over the lock on the front of the box, but it wouldn’t fasten.
She supposed she had been overeager to have it open, and had broken something inside it when she used the touch. The eye and the motto seemed to mock her: i see who opens me. It could be put right, and in a jiffy, but right now even a jiffy was more than she had.
“Pestering cunt!” She whined, lifting her head briefly toward the approaching voice (almost here now, by the gods, and forty-five minutes before her time!).
Then she closed the lid of the box. It gave her a pang to do it, because the glass was coming to life again, filling with that rosy glow, but there was no time for looking or dreaming now. Later, perhaps, after the object of Thorin’s unseemly late-life prickishness had gone.
And you must restrain yourself from doing anything too awful to the girl, she cautioned herself. Remember she’s here because of him, and at least ain’t one of those green girls with a bun in the oven and a boyfriend acting reluctant about the cries o’ marriage. It’s Thorin ‘s doing, this one’s what he thinks about after his ugly old crow of a wife is asleep and he takes himself in his hand and commences the evening milking; it’s Thorin’s doing, he has the old law on his side, and he has power. Furthermore, what’s in that box is his man’s business, and if Jonas found out ye looked at it… that ye used it. ..
Aye, but no fear of that. And in the meantime, possession were nine-tenths of the law, were it not?
She hoisted the box under one arm, hoisted her skirts with her free hand, and ran back along the path to the hut. She could still run when she had to, aye, though few there were who’d believe it.
Musty ran at her heels, bounding along with his cloven tail held high and his extra legs flopping up and down in the moonlight.
CHAPTER
II
proving honesty
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.