They came stealthily at night and asked for poison, or another’s heart, or a death, or a crown, and the witch, longing for the simple low–necked hissing of geese, shut the door in their faces.Ī few of these were subtler than the rest, and several lied smoothly. For all its forbidding appearance, the Waste provided much of what the book prescribed: gnarled roots that she picked and spread on a sunny cloth, bark peeled in long curls and bottled, snake skins cast in the shade of boulders and tacked to the rafters.Ĭertain of her visitors traveled farther, knowing only the hundred–year–old tale of a witch on the Waste. Their doubts lasted only until she compounded the requested charms for luck, for gout, for biting flies, for thick, sweet cream in the pail. The villagers who came with bread, apples, mutton, and the black bottles of cherry wine the old witch favored were surprised by news of the crone’s departure and doubtful of the woman they knew as goose girl and chandler’s clerk. Bent over the book, by sunlight and candlelight, she traced thorny letters with her fingertips and committed the old enchantments, syllable by syllable, to heart. Grasping the basket and her stick, the crone sneezed twice and strode off into other stories without a backwards glance.Īnd the clerk sat down at the table and leafed through the wormy tome of witchcraft, dislodging mushrooms pressed like bookmarks and white moths that fluttered into the fire. ![]() Be careful who you let through that door.” “I would teach you to listen, if I had the time. I was just as foolish at your age.” The crone shook a blackthorn stick under the clerk’s nose. You learned to walk by falling, and you’ll stir a hornet’s nest and see for yourself. “The forfeit is three years’ weeping.” She rummaged in her pockets and placed a brass key beside the book on the squat table. “Of course,” the clerk said, her thoughts full of names. “Mind, you must not meddle in what is none of your business, nor help unless you are asked.” Here was something better than liniment for the hurts confided to her, better than candles for warding off nightmares. There is a city of women many weeks’ travel away, and it sings in my mind like a young blue star. “It is past time for me to leave this place. “I have a proposition for you,” the crone said. She spat out a small object and said, “You will do.” The white–haired crone who lived in the hut opened the door, took the basket, and looked the clerk up and down. On a Monday like any other, the chandler gave her two inches of onion peel scrawled with an order, and precise instructions to avoid being turned into a toad, and shortly thereafter the clerk carried a packet of pins and three vials of lavender oil the three heathery miles from the chandler’s shop to the hut on Orion Waste. On the days when she wheedled the churchwomen into buying rosewater and pomanders, the chandler declared himself fond of her, and on other days, when she asked too many questions, or wept at the abalone beauty of a cloud, or refused to take no for an answer, he loudly wished her back among her geese. The witch of this story was neither very old nor very young, and she had not been born a witch but had worked, once she was old enough to flee the smashed bowls and shrieks of her home, as a goose girl, a pot scrubber, then a chandler’s clerk. ![]() Many witches had lived in the hut over the years, fair and foul, dark and light, but only one at any particular time, and sometimes no one lived there at all. Once, on the edge of a stony scrub named for a star that fell burning from Orion a hundred years ago, there stood a hut with tin spangles strung from its rafters and ram bones mudded in its walls.
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