«And what, I wrote the whole thing in grapefruit juice, so nobody could read it unless you held it over a lamp or something? Come on, it doesn't matter now. Get your feet off your damn pillow and sit down.»
Marvyn obeyed warily, crouching rather than sitting next to her on the edge of the bed. They were silent together for a little while before he said, «You did that. With the letter. You wanted it not written so much, it just wasn't. That's what happened.»
«Oh, right," she said. «Me being the dynamite witch around here. I told you, it doesn't matter.»
«It matters.» She had grown so unused to seeing a two–eyed Marvyn that his expression seemed more than doubly earnest to her just then. He said, quite quietly, «You are the dynamite witch, Angie. He was after you, not me.»
This time she did not answer him. Marvyn said, «I was the bait. I do garbage bags and clarinets — okay, and I make ugly dolls walk around. What's he care about that? But he knew you'd come after me, so he held me there — back there in Thursday — until he could grab you. Only he didn't figure you could walk all the way home on your own, without any spells or anything. I know that's how it happened, Angie! That's how I know you're the real witch.»
«No," she said, raising her voice now. «No, I was just pissed–off, that's different. Never underestimate the power of a pissed–off woman, O Mighty One. But you … you went all the way back, on your own, and you grabbed him. You're going to be way stronger and better than he is, and he knows it. He just figured he'd get rid of the competition early on, while he had the chance. Not a generous guy, El Viejo.»
Marvyn's chubby face turned gray. «But I'm not like him! I don't want to be like him!» Both eyes suddenly filled with tears, and he clung to his sister as he had not done since his return. «It was horrible, Angie, it was so horrible. You were gone, and I was all alone, and I didn't know what to do, only I had to do something. And I remembered Milady, and I figured if he wasn't letting me come forward I'd go the other way, and I was so scared and mad I just walked and walked and walked in the dark, until I…» He was crying so hard that Angie could hardly make the words out. «I don't want to be a witch anymore, Angie, I don't want to! And I don't want you being a witch either…»
Angie held him and rocked him, as she had loved doing when he was three or four years old, and the cookies got scattered all over the bed. «It's all right," she told him, with one ear listening for their parents' car pulling into the garage. «Shh, shh, it's all right, it's over, we're safe, it's okay, shh. It's okay, we're not going to be witches, neither one of us.» She laid him down and pulled the covers back over him. «You go to sleep now.»
Marvyn looked up at her, and then at the wizards' wall beyond her shoulder. «I might take some of those down," he mumbled. «Maybe put some soccer players up for a while. The Brazilian team's really good.» He was just beginning to doze off in her arms, when suddenly he sat up again and said, «Angie? The baby?»
«What about the baby? I thought he made a beautiful baby, El Viejo. Mad as hell, but lovable.»
«It was bigger when we left," Marvyn said. Angie stared at him. «I looked back at it in that lady's lap, and it was already bigger than when I was carrying it. He's starting over, Angie, like Milady.»
«Better him than me," Angie said. «I hope he gets a kid brother this time, he's got it coming.» She heard the car, and then the sound of a key in the lock. She said, «Go to sleep, don't worry about it. After what we've been through, we can handle anything. The two of us. And without witchcraft. Whichever one of us it is — no witch stuff.»
Marvyn smiled drowsily. «Unless we really, really need it.»
Angie held out her hand and they slapped palms in formal agreement. She looked down at her fingers and said, " Ick! Blow your nose!»
But Marvyn was asleep.
Quarry
This story was born of my inability to stay away from the world I created as the back–drop for my personal favorite among my novels, The Innkeeper's Song. The immediate provocation came during a phone conversation, when the party of the second part asked me just how two of the characters from that novel — the wandering mercenary Soukyan and his shapeshifing fox companion — ever met. I had absolutely no idea, so I wrote «Quarry» to find out.
I never went back to my room that night. I knew I had an hour at most before they would have guards on the door. What was on my back, at my belt, and in my pockets was all I took — that, and all the tilgit the cook could scrape together and cram into my pouch. We had been friends since the day I arrived at that place, a scrawny, stubborn child, ready to die rather than ever admit my terror and my pain. «So," she said, as I burst into her kitchen. «Running you came to me, twenty years gone, blood all over you, and running you leave. Tell me nothing, just drink this.» I have no idea what was in that bottle she fetched from under her skirts and made me empty on the spot, but it kept me warm on my way all that night, and the tilgit —disgusting dried marshweed as it is — lasted me three days.
Looking back, I shiver to think how little I understood, not only the peril I was in, but the true extent of the power I fled. I did know better than to make for Sumildene, where a stranger stands out like a sailor in a convent; but if I had had the brains of a bedbug, I'd never have tried to cut through the marshes toward the Queen's Road. In the first place, that grand highway is laced with toll bridges, manned by toll collectors, every four or five miles; in the second, the Queen's Road is so well–banked and pruned and well–maintained that should you be caught out there by day–light, there's no cover, nowhere to run — no rutted smuggler's alley to duck into, not so much as a proper tree to climb. But I didn't know that then, among other things.
What I did understand, beyond doubt, was that they could not afford to let me leave. I do not say escape, because they would never have thought of it in such a way. To their minds, they had offered me their greatest honor, never before granted one so young, and I had not only rejected it, but lied in their clever, clever faces, accepting so humbly, falteringly telling them again and again of my bewildered gratitude, unworthy peasant that I was. And even then I did know that they were not deceived for a single moment, and they knew I knew, and blessed me, one after the other, to let me know. I dream that twilight chamber still — the tall chairs, the cold stone table, the tiny green tintan birds murmuring themselves to sleep in the vines outside the window, those smiling, wise, gentle eyes on me — and each time I wake between sweated sheets, my mouth wrenched with pleas for my life. Old as I am, and still.
If I were to leave, and it became known that I had done so, and without any retribution, others would go too, in time. Not very many — there were as yet only a few who shared my disquiet and my growing suspicions — but even one unpunished deserter was more than they could afford to tolerate.
I had no doubt at all that they would grieve my death. They were not unkind people, for monsters.
The cook hid me in the scullery, covering me with aprons and dish–rags. It was not yet full dark when I left, but she felt it risky for me to wait longer. When we said farewell, she shoved one of her paring knives into my belt, gave me a swift, light buffet on the ear, said, «So. On your way then," pushed me out of a hidden half–door into the dusk, and slapped it shut behind me. I felt lonelier in that moment, blinking around me with the crickets chirping and the breeze turning chill, and that great house filling half the evening sky, than I ever have again.
As I say, I made straight for the marshes, not only meaning to strike the Queen's Road, but confident that the boggy ground would hide my footprints. It might indeed have concealed them from the eyes of ordinary trackers, but not from those who were after me within another hour. I knew little of them, the Hunters, though over twenty years I had occasionally heard this whisper or that behind this or that slightly trembling hand. Just once, not long after I came to that place, I was sent to the woods to gather kindling, and there I did glimpse two small brown–clad persons in a tree. They must have seen me, but they moved neither foot nor finger, nor turned their heads, but kept sitting there like a pair of dull brown birds, half–curled, half–crouched, gazing back toward the great house, waiting for something, waiting for someone. I never saw them again, nor any like them; not until they came for me.