Seventh Son

CHAPTER 12

  Cat was unsure what to do next. She wanted to clean up the dishes, but did not know how to heat the water; besides, the clatter would disturb the sleepers on the bed. Her eye fell on the door beside the fireplace. The workshop! She might as well do some exploring; if nothing else, she could find the shorter route to the privy out back. The door was a plank door and, like the front door of the cottage, opened inwardly. In fact, it looked a lot like it had started life as another exterior door; the annex must have been an addition to the cottage at a later date.

  Cat found herself stepping down off a doorstep into a room nearly one and a half times the size of the cottage. It was lit by the window that looked out on the stone beehive-igloo. In the middle of the room stood a solid-looking table, its top covered with tightly stretched canvas stained a reddish brown. Along the wall to Cat’s left ran long shelves, filling the whole wall all the way up to the ceiling. All at once, she recognised the objects on the shelves, smelled that arts-and-crafts scent of clay, and the realisation clicked into place: Guy was a potter.

  Suddenly things made sense. He had been getting clay for his work from the pit when he injured himself. The brown pottery dishes in his and Ouska’s house were his own work. And the beehive thing—the beehive was where he fired the pots! Cat was quite proud of herself for recognising the kiln now. She’d seen pictures in reference books back at the library. Pottery: Dewey decimal call number 738. Cat had to make an effort to come up with the number. Thoughts of the library seemed very remote now. Was it really less than twenty-four hours since she had left Greenward Falls, had been plucked out of her placid ex-librarian’s existence and been hurled into this new world—this new, ancient world? This world in which a matter-of-fact woman read Cat’s mind, telling her she was a capable person and not ordinary, expecting her as a matter of course to nurse an injured man and take care of a small girl who had the strange gift of Knowing; this world where a man asked her to marry him in the night, then crushed her hand in the morning and cured it again an hour later, where a little girl with feathery red curls knew Cat’s name, fell asleep in her arms, and had firmly planted herself in Cat’s heart? Just twenty-four hours?!

  Cat turned around. To her left stood a tall cupboard, almost like a wardrobe, with its two wooden doors firmly closed. In the corner between that cupboard and the shelves full of unglazed pottery on the other wall was another deal door, with the bolt that latched it shot into place. Cat pulled back the bolt, opened the door, and stuck her head outside. As she had expected, the sight of the privy door met her on the left in the corner formed between the cottage itself and the workshop, which jutted out a bit further into the garden. Part One of Mission, accomplished: she had found the interior way to get to the privy. Beside the outhouse, attached to the back of the cottage, was a low, sloping roof covering a large pile of chopped firewood and a jumble of various equipment. Cat thought she could make out a hoe and a shovel; probably gardening tools.

  Latching the back door shut again, she stepped back into the workshop. On the other side of the door into the cottage was a fireplace, the twin of the one in the cottage on the other side of the wall. They must share the chimney, Cat thought. Beyond the fireplace, in the corner of the workshop, was the potter’s chief tool: the wheel. It was set into a wooden frame, about three feet high, four feet wide and long. A bench was mounted on one side, and a flat surface on the other side held various containers. A jar had some shaping tools sticking out of it, a bowl contained pieces of sponge and a strip of something that looked like leather, a bucket held muddy water, and another was half full of slurried clay blobs. In the middle was the wheel itself. The top was a metal disk, about a foot across, with small concentric grooves carved into it. It was attached by a straight shaft, two feet high, to another disk at the bottom. Was that called the flywheel? Cat thought she had heard that term mentioned. It looked for all the world like it was made of stone, granite even; nearly two-and-a-half feet across and at least six inches thick, it was probably horrendously heavy. Cat reached out a hand and gave the wheel an experimental push. It barely budged. She grabbed the edge of the top disk with both hands, like a steering wheel, and tried to make it spin—gently at first, then when it wouldn’t move, she finally twisted as hard as she could. Lazily the wheel spun into motion, slowly turning around, and around, and around, and around… Cat nearly got dizzy from looking at the smoothly, silently spinning wheel head. I wonder how long it’ll keep doing that, she thought.

  Turning away from the motion of the wheel, Cat explored the rest of the workshop. On the two walls that formed the outer corner of the building (the water pump was on the outside of one of them, Cat thought), more shelving was mounted, much of it open slat work. It held partially finished pieces; some were cups without handles and lids without knobs which looked like they were drying from the edges in. Cat wondered if they were supposed to do that or if Guy had meant to get back to them as soon as he came back with the clay he had been fetching. There were some nondescript shapes concealed under pieces of oilcloth, probably meant to be protected from the fate of the prematurely drying cups and lids, and then quite a number of finished dishes, drying slowly as the air circulated around them.

  The wheel still kept spinning behind Cat, lazily circling around, and around, ever more slowly. One more thing Cat hadn’t explored: she wanted to see what was in that cupboard. It was a tall piece of furniture, probably seven feet high, and about five feet wide. The doors had shallow designs carved into them: swooping S-curves, with one door mirroring the image on the other. The knobs were fastened in the middle and carved out of the same light wood as the rest of the cupboard. Red-brown stains on the handles and the doors showed that the cupboard had been opened more than once with clay-smeared hands; the right knob had a clear print of a thumb and three fingers on it.

  Cat experimentally pulled on the doorknob. To her surprise, the doors swung open easily, with a soft creak, revealing an inside filled with finished pottery dishes. A great lot of it was glazed in the brown that she had already seen on the pieces in Guy’s and Ouska’s kitchen, but some were of an interesting, mossy green, and a few even had a bluish sheen. Curious pierced-hole patterns ran through several of the pieces, some in neat, even rows like perforations, others randomly scattered over the surface. Cat thought the pots might have been meant for wind lights, except that at least one of them was obviously a milk jug like the one in the cottage, and another was a tea cup, with the holes right in the bottom. She wondered what the purpose of it was, what Guy had been thinking when he made those pieces. They were beautiful, but the holes seemed quite odd.

  Cat squatted down to see the dishes on the lower shelves. A thin layer of dust was covering them, as if they had been put there some time ago and not handled since. The lowest shelf, on the bottom of the cupboard, held some attractive cups in the moss-green glaze, the shapes slightly uneven. Cat took one out and wiped the dust off it; it felt cool and pleasant in her hand. Behind it she spotted a squat shape. She thought it looked like the round-bellied teapot Ouska had in her kitchen, which Cat had liked a lot, so she reached in, found a handle to take hold of, and carefully pulled it out.

  Something came with it, making a soft metallic clinking noise against the ceramic of the pot. A short silver chain was caught on a small decorative protrusion on the spout of the teapot. It was tarnished black with age and tangled around itself. Cat put the teapot on the plank floor of the workshop and cautiously tried to detach the chain from its spout. When it came free, Cat saw that it was not only tarnished, but several of the fine links were bent, as if someone had tried to tear or crush the chain. In the middle of the chain, barely attached by a half-open wire ring, hung a broken pendant.

  It had been a bird, a delicate small bird in flight. The black tarnish obscured the fine detail of the filigree, but Cat could make out the bird’s head, could see how its tiny beak had been open in a cheerful song as it flew. The ring was attached to its back, between the spread wings,
but now all that was left was one wing of the bird and its head. Someone had savagely snapped the delicate pendant in half.