Well, this sucked. And I still have two more loaves to go. But then I think of Jeck and Granny Weather and put the next loaf in the oven, the one with a ball of wax from the votive candle in it.
The memory I lose this time is of that mad night that Jilly and I bonded after I met her in the hallway of one of Butler U’s lecture halls, becoming more sisters than friends. And the cramps take me down again. If anything, they’re worse than the first attack.
It takes me a long time before I can summon up the courage to put the final loaf in, the one with dried corn kernels in the center. I lose the last time I saw my dad alive. I didn’t even mean to, it just popped into my head and then the cramps came and it was too late to get it back.
I end up lying on the floor of the kitchen for the full hour it takes the loaf to bake. I’m so weak when the timer goes off that I can barely get up to take the bread out of the oven. The only thing that gets me on my feet is the thought of having to go through this another time.
I have to sit for a couple of hours before I can do anything else. I drink some tea and nibble on soda crackers to settle my stomach, then finally pack away the loaves, what’s left of the candle and some matches in a knapsack. I sling the knapsack over my shoulder and stand in the doorway between the kitchen and the living room, which is about as between as I have the energy to do. There I undo the traveling knot, careful to keep my destination clear in my mind.
I expect some new bout of cramps or sickness, but all that happens is that I end up in the middle of the herb garden that lies on the other side of the path separating the fens from Granny Weather’s cottage. It’s dusk, the sun just setting.
“There’s spiders in that garden,” she told me before I left the bogles’ tower, “and their webs will keep you safe from the likes of little nightmares. Make your way there to work the spell.”
Luckily, I’m not afraid of spiders.
I stay in the middle of the cobwebby garden and put the knapsack on the dirt at my feet.
Work the spell.
I’m less than happy with this whole witchy business of Granny Weather’s, but there’s no turning back now. If I don’t go on, Jeck will die and everything I’ve already been through today will have been for nothing. It’s not like he can wake up and be safe back home. Though sometimes I wonder about the people I meet here in the dreamlands. Do they really originate here, or are they asleep and dreaming someplace else themselves? If Jeck is, he has no memory of it, but I know I can’t take that as gospel or anything. Lots of people don’t know they’re dreaming when they are.
I take out the candle and light it. It takes me a moment to remember which loaf goes first. The mouse hair one. I take it out of the knapsack and hold it up in both hands, facing west.
“Come,” I say, repeating the words that Granny Weather told me to use. “You of the wind. I have a gift for you.”
I say it three times, always facing west, but the last time, I kneel in the dirt. I don’t know what to expect, who or what will come. Maybe nothing. Maybe I already screwed up. Didn’t bake the loaf right. Used too many mouse hairs. Or not enough. Didn’t say the words right.
Then I hear it, the slow flap of wings. It comes from the west, borne on the last rays of the setting sun, an enormous owl. When it lands on the ground in front of me, I place the loaf by its talons.
“Is this gift freely given?” a voice says.
I’m not sure if I actually hear the owl speak, or if its words are simply forming in my mind. I look at the loaf and I think of what I had to go through to bake it. It wasn’t without cost to make, I think, but I suppose it is being freely given, so I nod.
The owl eats the bread far more quickly than I would have thought possible.
“I would return your kind gift with a favor,” it says, those big round eyes settling their gaze on me.
I clear my throat. “Urn. Granny Weather would like to get her cronebone back.”
I have no idea what this is, and Granny Weather wasn’t particularly forthcoming when I asked, but the owl seems to know exactly what I’m talking about.
“It shall be done.”
And then he’s gone, those enormous wings lifting it up into the air and away, deep into the fens. I listen to the fading whisper of them for a long moment before bringing out the second loaf, the one with the wax ball in it.
This one calls up a cloud of moths, thick as mist. Moths don’t eat bread so far as I know, but this is the fairy-tale world, so I suppose anything’s possible. The loaf certainly disappears quickly enough. I don’t ask them for a favor. Granny Weather told me to simply tell them where their murderers are.
“Moths are spirits of the uneasy dead,” she told me when I asked about that. “The ones that will come to you will be the ghosts of all of those that the bogles have led astray and drowned in the fens.”
When they fly off in the same direction as the owl, I bring out the last loaf. I wonder what the corn kernels will call up. Mouse for the owl. Candle for the moths. That makes sense. Maybe this’ll bring me chickens, I think. I realize I’m getting a little hysterical when that idea sets off a spate of giggling.
I catch my breath and go through the summoning for the third time.
By this point, I’m pretty much used to the unusual, but what shows up is right out of Looney Tunes. There’s a little outbuilding that stands in behind Granny Weather’s cottage. I don’t know what she uses it for. To keep her wood dry, maybe for storage. I didn’t realize it was a pet.
For that’s what comes in response to the third summoning, an animated hut, its wooden walls creaking and cracking as the hut shifts back and forth, walking on hen’s legs like in the story of Baba Yaga.
“Is this gift freely given?” it asks, like the others did, its high, cartoon voice ringing inside my head.
All I can do is nod.
It stands there, its windows looking like eyes, gaze locked on me. Finally I get up from where I’m kneeling and toss the loaf in through its open door. There’s a weird chewing sound, then a small burp. I don’t know whether to laugh or run.
“I would return your kind gift with a favor,” it tells me.
The voice kills me. The chicken legs are bad enough, but the voice makes me feel like any minute the herbs and vegetables around me are going to pull out of the ground and start up some song and dance routine.
“Granny Weather would like her skycloak,” I manage to reply.
“It hangs inside the door of her cottage.”
Again there’s this long pause. Then I realize that I’m supposed to go fetch the cloak. It’s the only piece of clothing hanging there and seems to weigh next to nothing when I take it off the hook. I feel like I’m walking on air as I return to the herb garden, holding the cloak against my chest.
The hut’s back on the ground now, like it’s just a normal outbuilding. I guess the chicken legs are folded under it, out of sight. I approach its door cautiously and start to toss the cloak inside, but the cartoon voice stops me.
“The cloak should not touch the ground,” the hut tells me. “Better that you carry it.”
No way, I think. I’m not getting inside that thing. I can still remember the chewing sound after I tossed the loaf of bread in.
“Why do you hesitate?” it asks.
“I have this thing about stepping inside a stranger’s mouth,” I say.
Cartoon laughter rings in my head. The hut gives a kind of shrug. There’s a creak in the wood. A cedar shingle falls off the roof.
“Then Granny Weather will have to do without her skycloak,” it says. “She won’t be pleased.”
I think about what Kerry said about getting on the wrong side of a goodwife’s temper, and sigh. Gingerly I step over the threshold. There’s nothing inside. Plain wooden boards on the floor, no furnishings except for a ratty old club chair that looks like it was rescued from a dump, lopsided, the stuffing coming out of the sides.
“Sit,” the hut tells me.
I don’t think
so.
But then the hut lurches onto its chicken legs and I go sliding across the room. I only just keep my balance and make it to the chair where I sit with the cloak bundled up on my lap. The chair doesn’t move as the hut heads into the fens with a staggering walk, but it feels like my stomach does.
Oddly, I don’t get sick.
Well, I tell myself. At least I don’t have to find my own way back to the bogles’ tower.
There seems to be a heavy mist around the tower as we approach. It’s not until we’re really close that I see it’s not mist but a huge cloud of the white moths. Bogles are running everywhere in a panic, batting at the things with their weird extra-jointed fingers. There’s already a carpet of downed moths on the wet ground, but there are so many in the air that it doesn’t seem to make much difference. The moths swarm over the bogles, covering every inch of their black, oily skin, suffocating the nasty little buggers. The bogles’ only defense is to submerge into the fen water, but as soon as they come up for air, the moths are waiting for them, flying into their pug noses and mouths.
Poetic justice, I guess, considering that the moths are the ghosts of the drowned victims of the bogles.
Jeck’s brothers are out in the middle of this strange melee, but the moths don’t seem interested in them. The brothers are trying to help the bogles, but they’re not having much luck. Then one of them gives a cry. I look, just in time to see the owl drop out of the sky and tear something from around his neck. The owl rises up again, chased by six blackbirds. From its talons dangles what looks like a necklace. A little bone on a leather thong. I remember seeing it before, when they first captured us. Now I realize it must be Granny Weather’s cronebone.
The blackbirds are quick, but they’re like gnats compared to the owl. It bulls through them, scattering birds in a cloud of black feathers, dropping to a small window in the tower that’s just above ground level. The owl slips the necklace through the bars, then flies away to a perch on a nearby tree, its job done, I guess. The blackbirds hover for a long moment. Then, screaming, they take flight.
No sooner do they go, than the tower cracks in two like a walnut, the great sides crashing down into the fens to send up tidal waves of stagnant water in which bob dead and drowning bogles. I see Jeck and Granny Weather, standing in the wreckage, unharmed. Granny Weather has her arms raised above her head, her eyes glittering with an inner fire.
The hut lurches forward until it’s standing above the cracked ruin of the tower. Granny Weather’s fiery gaze locks with my own.
“Give me the cloak,” she says.
I toss it down.
She whips it over her shoulders and a great wind comes shrieking out of nowhere, lifting her into the sky. Seconds later, she’s gone, in pursuit of the blackbirds.
I don’t wait for the hut to kneel on its chicken legs. I jump down from the doorway. I look back up at my weird mount for a moment and tell it thanks before I run over to Jeck. Holding him, I offer up thanks to the moths and owl as well for the fact that he’s still alive. Jeck gives me an odd look. I guess even in this fairy-tale world people don’t really talk to walking huts and animals all that much.
By the time we’ve finished hugging, I realize that the hut’s gone. I turn to see that it’s almost out of sight, lurching its way back across the fens to Granny Weather’s cottage. There are dead bogles everywhere, scattered on the little island and amidst the ruins of the tower, tangled up in the reeds, floating in the water. I look at their faces, wondering if Serth is among them. The white moths are dispersing; the owl’s already gone. There’s just us and the dead and it’s all so horribly depressing.
“Let’s go home,” I say.
Jeck shakes his head. “Not just yet. We need to see how it ends.”
I look at the carnage around us, but I realize he doesn’t mean this. He means his brothers. Or maybe what’s going to happen to us.
So we start slogging our way back to Granny Weather’s cottage.
“What exactly is a cronebone?” I ask him as we push our way through the sedge and weeds. I’ve already figured out what a sky-cloak is from how Granny Weather took off into the air once she had it.
He nods. “Among the old goodwives, it was a way to keep their power safe from those who meant them ill. They would cut off a finger or a toe and invest the bone with their magic.”
“That’s too gross.”
“It gets worse,” he adds. “The younger they were when they did it, the more powerful the bone became. The story is that Granny Weather was three years old when she cut off her own toe to make hers.”
“She did it to herself?”
“They have to do it themselves. But imagine being that young and knowing so clearly what you wanted. And being willing to do such a thing to gain it.” He looks at me and picks something out of my hair. A twig. An errant leaf. “That’s why you have to be so careful in your dealings with her. She is utterly focused and does nothing unless she can benefit from it.”
“But she helped me rescue the moon,” I say.
“Yes, but she requires the moon’s light for some of her magics.” He glances my way again, but his gaze slides away from mine. “I’m just saying to be careful around her and think before you speak.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
He gets a pained look and only shakes his head. I get the awful premonition that something really bad is going to happen.
That’s another thing I hate about the fairy-tale world. Everything’s oblique and anything important can only be approached in riddles. So now I know something’s going to happen when we see Granny Weather again, but Jeck can’t tell me what, because it’s something I have to deal with without coaching or we’ll have already lost.
The only thing I can know for sure is that it’ll be dangerous.
Granny Weather’s waiting for us by her cottage. She’s disheveled and there’s a wild light in her eyes. Hanging from her belt are six dead blackbirds. I glance at Jeck, but although he seems tense, I don’t think it has anything to do with the fate of his brothers.
Think before I speak, he told me. I also know about the old reporter’s trick, how if you keep silent the other person will feel obliged to fill that silence with something, but I have a couple of questions that are nagging at me.
“Why did the candle have to be stolen?” I ask.
Granny weather shrugs. “Unlike the Christ man himself, the churches aren’t as free with his magics.”
“So the magic had to be stolen?”
She nods. I wonder what she’d think if she knew that I replaced the candle I stole with a new one that I’d paid for. It didn’t seem to hurt the magic.
“And the last time I was here,” I go on. “Why did you need me to rescue the moon? It seems to me you could have just done it yourself.”
“The moon can be a fickle mistress,” Granny Weather says. “It needed someone of her own bloodline to pull her free.”
So we’re back to faerie blood and Jilly’s assertion that the moon was really my mother, straying into the waking world long enough to give birth to me before the fairy-tale world called her back again. I remember the face of the moon woman, sleeping there under the fen water. She had my face. But I still don’t buy it. Maybe things like that can happen in the dreamlands, but not in the waking world.
“Still, we’re not here to talk of old business,” Granny Weather says. “I am in your debt for your rescuing of me today, and I always pay my debts. What would you ask of me?”
I feel Jeck stiffen at my side, but I don’t need a warning here. I’ve already been through this the last time, when his brothers promised me anything in exchange for letting the moon drown. The one thing you don’t do in the fairy-tale world is serve yourself. There’s some moral code underlying the structure of the world, just like there is in fairy tales, and a sure way to get yourself in trouble here is to be greedy.
“Think of it as a gift,” I tell her. “Freely given.”
T
here’s a long moment of silence.
Granny Weather smiles and I can’t tell if she’s hiding her annoyance, or if it’s that I’ve managed to earn her respect.
“Don’t come back till the next time,” she says.
No sooner does she speak the last word, than we’re back in our apartment in Mabon once more. The only reminder of where we’ve been is the stink of the fens that rises from our clothes.
I look at Jeck. “So what just happened?”
“You put yourself on equal terms with her,” he said. “Because you asked for nothing in return, she’s now duty-bound to leave you and anyone under your protection untouched by her magics.”
“And if we hadn’t?”
“We’d be hanging from her belt along with my brothers.”
“So it was a good thing.”
“A very good thing,” he says with a smile
I take his hand. “Come on,” I tell him. “We need a long, hot shower.”
Jilly loves these stories about the dreamlands. We’re sitting on the old sofa out on my balcony, sharing a bottle of wine while I tell her this latest one. The window’s open behind us and the nouveau flamenco playing on the stereo inside is drifting out to us. Because Jilly is here, the old mangy stray torn who lives in the alley below has actually come up onto the balcony by way of the fire escape and is letting Jilly pat him. I’ve been feeding him for months, but though he eats the kibbles I put out for him, we don’t actually have a relationship beyond that. But then I’m not Jilly. Strays naturally gravitate to her.
“You’re so lucky,” she says. “Having these adventures and all.”
I don’t know if lucky is quite the right word. I wouldn’t want to lose Mabon, but my times in the other dreamlands are never comfortable. Even though I can come back any time, simply by waking up, I don’t usually remember that when I’m there. The dangers feel too real and I’m always changed when I get back. The experiences linger and become part of who I am, and that’s a little disconcerting to say the least when you consider where they’ve taken place.