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 skirt of 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.