Under My Hat: Tales from the Cauldron Read online

  So he ran off to Copenhagen with his mother’s drunken blessing, to do the actual work of writing his books.

  Years went by, lonely, hard, amazing years. Everyone from his old life was dead—father, mother, grandparents, half sister. But as the Ice Maiden had promised, Hans prospered.

  Did he remember the childhood bargain? Hardly. It was only a fairy story he’d told himself as a child when everyone around him was failing. He knew how hard he’d worked to write, how hard it was to do readings at town halls and great houses. Hard work—not a child’s wishes—had made him a great man.

  However, sixty-five years after his bargain with the Ice Maiden, lying on his deathbed at a friend’s house just outside Copenhagen, Hans sat up after a fright-filled dream. It had been about the ice witch, whom he hadn’t thought of in half a century or more. His hands and face were ice cold with fear of the dream, though the cancer in his liver seemed white hot. He was sweating and shivering at the same time.

  Surely a price will be demanded, he thought feverishly. Witches promise you sweets and then shove you in the oven.

  “Sir, shall I call the doctor back again?” asked the manservant his friends had loaned him.

  “A doctor for the digter?” He laughed at his own play on words. Even in a fevered state, he could not stop himself from making word jokes.

  “Sir,” the servant said, his face stern. His entire body radiated concern far beyond what Hans’s friends were paying him.

  “No, no. No doctor. Just help me change out of these wet clothes.” Hans did not feel shame in asking. After all, that’s what a manservant was for.

  When the man came back with a dry nightshirt, Hans shook his head. “No, no, not the nightshirt. I am afraid I have not been clear. I have to dress in my formal clothes. I am expecting a most important visitor.”

  The manservant looked momentarily confused. “There is nothing written in the diary, sir, about a visitor.” In fact, Mrs. Melchior, the mistress of the house where old Hans lay dying, had given the servant specific instructions: No visitors. Wake me if there is a change. Do not be afraid to send for the doctor. And for the Lord’s sake, do not stint on the pain medication.

  “Nevertheless, my visitor is coming today,” Hans told him.

  “Do you want a dose of morphia, sir, to ease the pain?”

  Hans shook his head. “I need to be sharp for this visitor. Pain keeps me sharp.”

  “Pain keeps you … in pain,” the serving man said.

  “Please … do as I say.”

  Once dressed, even down to his leather shoes—shoes that Papa never would have had the skill to produce—Hans dismissed the man. “Wait in the kitchen till I ring,” he said.

  “But sir—”

  “Do it.”

  The servant went out, for he had to follow orders.

  But as soon as the man left and the red-hot flare in his belly subsided once again, Hans remembered the story of his promise to the Ice Maiden as if it were one of his own tales. He spoke the tale aloud, as if telling it in the royal court, as he had often done in Denmark and in Germany. The tale of an old digter and his bargain with a powerful witch.

  And when he got to the end, he whispered, “Aha, so it is only my death that is the payment. A good bargain after all.”

  But the story did not sit well in his mouth. Death as a payment for a good life lived was not enough of an ending. Everyone dies: the good people and the bad people, the good storytellers and the bad ones. And people who were not storytellers, well, they died, too. Hans knew that his story demanded a different ending. Something stronger. It needed to be revised. Hadn’t his own little mermaid found a way into heaven after her awful bargain with another kind of witch?

  He forced himself to tell the story again, this time his voice as slight and light as a child’s. He didn’t push the story where he willed it, but let it go to its natural end. Inevitable but surprising, he reminded himself.

  “Ha!” he said when he’d finished. Now all would be right. He settled back to wait for his visitor.

  The warm summer’s day closed around him. He let go of his vanity and opened the top button of his shirt, loosened the collar. She would have to take him as she found him. He closed his eyes and, like the swamp plant of old, began to fade.

  A sound like wings called him back to himself. He opened his eyes to a shift in the room, like a curtain blowing. Something white and shimmering floated into his sight, cold and distant as any star.

  “Hello, Ice Maiden,” he said. “You look a great deal older.” It really wasn’t the way to address a woman of a certain age, but Hans was beyond such niceties now.

  “So do you, Hans,” she answered, shaking her hair till it was like falling snow. “A great deal older. As you can see, I am no longer an Ice Maiden but the Snow Queen, thanks to you. My castle, though, is still the same—seals and polar bears.”

  “Ah,” said Hans, “I remember. And the cold.”

  “Yes, of course,” said the Snow Queen, “always the cold. Are you ready to come away with me now?”

  He smiled, maybe more of a grimace, for a sharp pain caught him right before he spoke again. He let it pass through, then said, “Oh, I doubt you’ll want me for your palace, you old witch, for I have beaten you at your game.”

  “No one beats me,” the Snow Queen said, smiling, though still the smile did not reach her eyes. “And no one calls me a witch.” There was a strange tic beating beneath the skin of her right cheek.

  “Well, I have,” said Hans. “It all has to do with storying.”

  “Storying?” She came a step closer, her breath pluming out before her. He could smell the coldness of it.

  “As I was lying here,” Hans said, “thinking over my long life—for that is something humans do, you know, when we reach the end—I realized that I have stood alone almost continually since I was a child of five. However kindly people behaved toward me, I still remained cut off from them. And this, I believe, was the bargain we made.”

  “Ah,” she said, but nothing more.

  “You told me when I made my wishes that I would understand the payment much, much later. It does not come any later than this.”

  She nodded, saying nothing, for indeed, what need was there for her to speak? Hans had told the truth.

  “You gave me poetry and stories, even a story about you,” Hans said, sitting up in the bed despite the pain of the cancer. He ground his fist against his belly to quiet the ache.

  She gazed at him without pity, even though she understood how much the talking cost him.

  “You knew my soul longed for true recognition as a thirsty man for water, and had so even as a child.”

  This time when she smiled, it radiated from her eyes. They were greedy eyes, hungry eyes, a witch’s eyes.

  He leaned toward her despite the pain. “But I realized today that you kept as payment any love that I would have ever gotten. Not from a woman, not from a man. So I never had a single grown person in the entire world who loved me just for myself.” Hans shifted his position, trying to find somewhere comfortable, but his body would not obey him. Finally he stopped trying and, with that, the pain seemed for a moment to cease. “I never married, never had a home of my own, always lived in someone else’s house.” He made a small gesture with his head, indicating the very room they were in. “I am even going to die in someone else’s house.”

  “A fair trade,” the Snow Queen said, her voice satisfied. “I have made the same barter with poets and writers and musicians and—”

  “Ah, yes, you do not think yourself a witch, but did it ever occur to you that you are a fairy godmother?”

  “Never!” she cried, and he realized he had scored a point. Something like a smile passed across his plain face and made him seem almost handsome.

  He took a moment more, covering the intense pain with another smile, before saying, “Your mistake was thinking there is only one kind of love.” The pain in his gut was sharp again, and he had to stop, t
ake a shallow breath, before going on. But the years of storytelling helped him here, and he made the moment of silence work for him.

  “I make no mistakes.” Now the Snow Queen stood very still, arms folded, like a woman who knew how to wait. He had met very few of them in his long life.

  Then the pain ebbed a bit, like a receding tide on an Odense beach, and he told her the rest. “You see, my dear ice witch, I have had the love of children from all over the world because of my stories. A child’s love is the perfect love, for it is given with a whole heart. That love will outlast me a hundredfold. And it will outlast you as well.”

  “Never,” the Snow Queen said, but her voice was way too high, and her face contorted in anger. The tic he’d noticed earlier was beating again under her right eye, but this time it was more pronounced.

  “Oh, I am sure of it,” said Hans. “The children will know you from my story, and in that story you lose to little Gerda because of her perfect child’s love for Kay. And here, in this room, you lose again.” He held out his hands, but not to her. She began to tremble, then collapse, and at the last dissipated into water vapor.

  Hans no longer saw her. His gaze was focused past the vapor and beyond, his hands held out to the other figures gathering in the room, a group of small children from all over the world, wearing crowns of roses.

  One of them, whose crown was made of just the briars and thorns, tiptoed over to Hans’s bedside. Now holding the dying man’s hands, he said, “We are here to bring you home, Papa Hans, but first you must tell us a story.”

  “With all my heart,” Hans said. “It is about a beautiful witch who was outwitted by an ugly old digter.”

  So saying, he sat up straight on the bed as if he were as young as they, and told them that one final story about his life as a fairy tale. When he finished, the children all clapped their hands and laughed delightedly, and his old worn-out body fell back against the waiting pillow, no longer in pain. But his spirit, set loose of the body’s gravity, rose to go hand in hand with the children through the stone walls of Mrs. Melchior’s great house, into the soft Danish air, and home.

  —For Hans Christian Andersen; this is his story, sort of

  B IS FOR BIGFOOT

  JIM BUTCHER

  WHEN PEOPLE COME to the only professional wizard in the Chicago phone book for help, they’re one of two things: desperate or smart. Very rarely are they both.

  The smart ones come to me because they know I can help—the desperate because they don’t know anyone else who can. With a smart client, the meeting is brief and pleasant. Someone has lost the engagement ring that was a family heirloom, and has been told I’m a man who can find lost things. Such people engage my services (preferably in cash), I do the job, and everyone’s happy.

  Desperate clients, on the other hand, can pull all sorts of ridiculous nonsense. They lie to me about what kind of trouble they’ve gotten themselves into, or try to pass me a check I’m sure will bounce like a basketball. Occasionally they demand that I prove my powers by telling them what their problem is before they even shake my hand—in which case, the problem is that they’re idiots.

  My newest client wanted something different, though. He wanted me to meet him in the woods.

  This did not make me feel optimistic that he would be one of the smart ones.

  Woods being in short supply in Chicago, I had to drive all the way up to the northern half of Wisconsin to get to decent timber. That took me about six hours, given that my car, while valiant and bold, is also a Volkswagen Beetle made around the same time flower children were big. By the time I got there and had hiked a mile or two out into the woods, to the appointed location, dark was coming on.

  I’m not a moron, usually. I’ve made enemies during my stint as a professional wizard. So when I settled down to wait for the client, I did so with my staff in one hand, my blasting rod in the other, and a .38 revolver in the pocket of my black leather duster. I blew out a small crater in the earth with an effort of will, using my staff to direct the energy, and built a modest campfire in it.

  Then I stepped out of the light of the campfire, found a comfortable, shadowy spot, and waited to see who was going to show up.

  The whole PI gig is mostly about patience. You have to talk to a lot of people who don’t know anything to find the one who does. You have to sit around waiting a lot, watching for someone to do something before you catch them doing it. You have to do a lot of searching through useless information to get to one piece of really good information. Impatient PIs rarely conclude an investigation successfully, and never remain in the business for long. So when an hour went by without anything happening, I wasn’t too worried.

  By two hours, though, my legs were cramping and I had a little bit of a headache, and apparently the mosquitoes had decided to hold a convention about ten feet away because I was covered with bites. Given that I hadn’t been paid a dime yet, this client was getting annoying, fast.

  The fire had died down to almost nothing, so I almost didn’t see the creature emerge from the forest and crouch down beside the embers.

  The thing was huge. I mean, just saying that it was nine feet tall wasn’t enough. It was mostly human-shaped, but it was built more heavily than any human, covered in layers and layers of ropy muscle that were visible even through a layer of long, dark brown hair or fur that covered its whole body. It had a brow ridge like a mountain crag, with dark, glittering eyes that reflected the red-orange light of the fire.

  I did not move. Not even a little. If that thing wanted to hurt me, I would have one hell of a time stopping it from doing so, even with magic, and unless I got lucky, something with that much mass would find my .38 about as deadly as a pricing gun.

  Then it turned its head and part of its upper body toward me and said, in a rich, mellifluous Native American accent, “You done over there? Don’t mean to be rude, and I didn’t want to interrupt you, wizard, but there’s business to be done.”

  My jaw dropped open. I mean it literally dropped open.

  I stood up slowly, and my muscles twitched and ached. It’s hard to stretch out a cramp while you remain in a stance, prepared to run away at an instant’s notice, but I tried.

  “You’re …,” I said. “You’re a …”

  “Bigfoot,” he said. “Sasquatch. Yowie. Yeti. Buncha names. Yep.”

  “And you … you called me?” I felt a little stunned. “Um … did you use a pay phone?”

  I instantly imagined him trying to punch little phone buttons with those huge fingers. No, of course he hadn’t done that.

  “Nah,” he said, and waved a huge, hairy arm to the north. “Fellas at the reservation help us make calls sometimes. They’re a good bunch.”

  I shook myself and took a deep breath. For Pete’s sake, I was a wizard. I dealt with the supernatural all the time. I shouldn’t be this rattled by one little unexpected encounter. I shoved my nerves and my discomfort down and replaced them with iron professionalism—or at least the semblance of calm.

  I emerged from my hidey-hole and went over to the fire. I settled down across from the Bigfoot, noting as I did that I was uncomfortably close to being within reach of his long arms. “Um … welcome. I’m Harry Dresden.”

  The Bigfoot nodded and looked at me expectantly. After a moment of that, he said, as if prompting a child, “This is your fire.”

  I blinked. Honoring the obligations of hospitality is a huge factor in the supernatural communities around the world—and as it was my campfire, I was the de facto host, and the Bigfoot my guest. I said, “Yes. I’ll be right back.”

  I hurried back to my car and came back to the campfire with two cans of warm Coke and half a tin of salt-and-vinegar Pringles chips. I opened both cans and offered the Bigfoot one of them.

  Then I opened the Pringles and divided them into two stacks, offering him his choice of either.

  The Bigfoot accepted them and sipped almost delicately at the Coke, handling the comparatively tiny can with far mo
re grace than I would have believed. The chips didn’t get the careful treatment. He popped them all into his mouth and chomped down on them enthusiastically. I emulated him. I got a lot of crumbs on the front of my coat.

  The Bigfoot nodded at me. “Hey, got any smokes?”

  “No,” I said. “Sorry. It’s not a habit.”

  “Maybe next time,” he said. “Now. You have given me your name, but I have not given you mine. I am called Strength of a River in His Shoulders, of the Three Stars Forest People. And there is a problem with my son.”

  “What kind of problem?” I asked.

  “His mother can tell you in greater detail than I can,” River Shoulders said.

  “His mother?” I rubbernecked. “Is she around?”

  “No,” he said. “She lives in Chicago.”

  I blinked. “His mother …”

  “Human,” River Shoulders said. “The heart wants what the heart wants, yeah?”

  Then I got it. “Oh. He’s a scion.”

  That made more sense. A lot of supernatural folk can and do interbreed with humanity. The resulting children, half mortal, half supernatural, are called scions. Being a scion means different things to different children, depending on their parentage, but they rarely have an easy time of it in life.

  River Shoulders nodded. “Forgive my ignorance of the issues. Your society is … not one of my areas of expertise.”

  I know, right? A Bigfoot saying “expertise.”

  I shook my head a little. “If you can’t tell me anything, why did you call me here? You could have told me all of this on the phone.”

  “Because I wanted you to know that I thought the problem supernatural in origin, and that I would have good reason to recognize it. And because I brought your retainer.” He rummaged in a buckskin pouch that he wore slung across the front of his body. It had been all but invisible amid his thick pelt. He reached a hand in and tossed something at me.

  I caught it on reflex and nearly yelped as it hit my hand. It was the size of a golf ball and extraordinarily heavy. I held it closer to the fire and then whistled in surprise.