Under My Hat: Tales from the Cauldron Page 35

  The bus drove away and quiet fell, warm afternoon quiet in which things moved slowly, if at all. Half her strength, half the weight she had put on was gone now, merely from traveling here, with still the blessing to be done, and the traveling home. She walked slowly and kept a careful eye out for vehicles, for she felt a little dazed. She was also too warm in her dark clothing, now that she had thawed out from the flying; she would love a hot shower, or better, a bath with scented oils in it, and a candle and a glass of wine glowing on the rim.

  In the hospital doors her sunlit reflection took fright, and tried to straighten her travel rags and tame her hair. It was no good; she was clearly a wild woman. Look at the claws in that hair, the bags under those red eyes! She hadn’t calculated for this, but she pulled on a glamour of shining permed-and-set hair, neat jacket and skirt, stockings and well-kept shoes and handbag—all dark, as if she were in mourning, so that people would think twice about stopping her and asking what she was about. She was hungry; she pulled a few leaves from the plane tree nearest her, found a purse within the handbag, and slipped the leaves inside.

  The glass doors slid open. She proceeded into the corridors and up the stairs toward the baby, not hurrying, not lingering where people might ask her her business. Reaching ahead for the little one, she was, and examining all around her, to see what would be necessary, how much delay, how much disguise.

  The afternoon was drawing on; some patients had visitors, some lay alone and wakeful, some were asleep. Nurses conferred or chatted at their stations. An orderly with a drinks-and-snacks trolley trundled about; Pen immediately liked his manner, both hearty and gentle. The warm light through the sunlit blinds gave everything a sleepy-sickroom feel, only with more equipment—fire extinguishers, signage and warnings, phones and filing systems and computers. The floors that bore it all up shone and shone, polished right to the edges and into every corner.

  Sophie shared a ward with three other women, each with a plastic cradle beside her high, narrow bed. Two of the women slept; one of these was Sophie—by the window there, on the right, behind that curtain. Of the two awake, one lay reading a gossip magazine; the other had visitors murmuring around her, taking turns with her baby. All heads turned to Pen in the doorway.

  She put a finger to her lips and stepped in. Her sensible shoes made no noise on the gleaming floor. She crossed to the foot of Sophie’s bed. Sophie lay on her back, her lovely lips a little parted in sleep, her hands folded on her still slightly rounded belly. Only now did Pen realize that the girl had been cut open to bring the baby out, as had two of the other mothers in this room—she looked around at them. What a pity. What they had missed out on. She had birthed Rowan in a crouch, catching him with her own hands. The whole earth had backed her up in doing that, the whole sky, the whole ungodly wonderful mess of the universe; she had laughed, surrendering to something else’s power for a change.

  The baby girl lay expertly wrapped, a saintly maggot, one hand at her chin to assist her in her sage thoughts. Pen leaned over and looked and laughed through her nose. To all other eyes this face would have seemed utterly still; to Pen, its tiny movements flashed out at her baby Rowan’s face, her own face, her father’s, her ex-husband Arsenio’s in turn, as well as Sophie’s, and others that must be Sophie’s family’s. This baby belonged to them all; she was them all in the future; she was Pen and the rest of them, carried forward.

  Delicate pale reddish hair crowned the baby’s head. Someone had tried to part it already, but it had sprung back over to the place it had been used to lying in, in the womb. Pen ventured to help it there. The hair itself was warm, and the skin with the skull beneath it was that miraculous combination of firm and soft that she remembered from her baby son.

  Under cover of the visitors chatting, Pen whispered a welcome and a well-wishing. She planted a little seed so that the girl would recognize and accept her when they met again; she tweaked the fabric of things just slightly, so that circumstances would be kind to this girl and favorable. It was utter pleasure to make these murmurings; there was not the least trace of fear in what she did. She stroked the fine hair again, took hold of a tuft of it, and spoke it gently away from the child’s head. From her handbag she brought a tiny ziplock bag, and she sealed the pale hairs into it. You never knew what work might be required for the girl in the future, from across the water.

  The handbag closed with a clop. Pen’s gaze leaped to Sophie’s face, and she couldn’t tell if the sound or the stab of her own fear fluttered the eyelids open. Sophie locked eyes with her mother-in-law, let out a little scream and started to sit up, but subsided under the pain of her wound. “You! What are you do—”

  Pen put out a hand to subdue the girl, to erase this memory, to send her back to sleep.

  But the hand flung back, as if she’d touched a hot stove. Sophie had resisted, thrown her off. Sophie had known how to throw her off—the gesture had been fast, smooth, practiced, quite invisible.

  Pen took a step back. They stared at each other.

  “I knew you’d come,” said Sophie.

  “You knew a whole lot more than you ever let on.” Confused, a little stung, Pen decided to opt for being pleased. “At the wedding, even. At our little chat. That was a nice bit of concealment.”

  The girl began to blush. She checked her arm for a watch that wasn’t there, consulted it on the side table. “Rowan will be here in half an hour. You don’t want him to know you’ve visited.” Maneuvering herself more upright in the bed, she spared a hand to wave Pen closer to the baby. “I need you to see, though,” she said. “No one else will understand. Wake her up.”

  “Wake her? Are you mad?”

  “Look in her eyes. Just for a second, but properly, you know.” She reached over and gave the baby bundle a little shake. “Come on, Chrissy. Show Grandma.” She looked sharply up at Pen. “Do you want to be Grandma, or Nan, or what? Now’s the time to imprint it.”

  Pen balked. “She’s as sensitive as that?” She met Sophie’s level gaze. “I want to be Pen,” she said breathlessly.

  “Come on, Chris. Here we go. Just a glimpse is all Pen needs. Look right in,” she said to Pen.

  Baby Chrissy’s face flitted through several expressions: Churchillesque stolidity, haughty surprise, crumpled on the point of crying. Her tiny bud-mouth tore itself open, her eyelids parted, and her slate-blue eyes swam nearly blind within. Pen bent to look in.

  She did not show herself, the little one, so much as throw herself outward, not at Pen particularly, but furiously blasting in all directions, at all things and beings. It was not an event, a detonation, so much as a glimpse of a constant outpouring, outroaring state of being, snatched in a millisecond before the fragile eyelids closed again.

  “Ah!” Pen clanged back against the foot of the far bed. The woman there woke with a cry; all the visitors turned, aghast, and saw Pen without her disguise. “What on earth?” came through the curtain from the next bed. A nurse appeared at the door as if Pen had magicked her up from the worst that could happen.

  “What’s going on here?” The nurse stared at the madwoman intruder, her rags, her wide eyes, her wild hair.

  “Nothing,” said Pen, putting out hands to calm them all.

  But it was Sophie who stroked down the air, turned the visitors’ faces away, glued the woman opposite back down into sleep, threw a fuzz of forgetment through the curtain, snuffed out the nurse’s alarm into boredom and sent her on her way. There was nothing left for Pen to do but to resume her mourning glamour.

  Legs shaking, she crossed back to Sophie, took the chair against the wall beside the bedside cupboard, breathed.

  Sophie was making the wryest mouth at her, beyond the watch and the water glass. Pen’s own face had fallen open, cleansed of any expression by surprise.

  “So you see,” said Sophie.

  A three-note run of cold laughter loosed itself from Pen’s throat.

  “I will need you,” said the girl, eyeing the crib. “I was wo
rried about letting you see what I was. I thought someone so powerful would scorn me, not think I was good enough for her son. But now?” She gave a helpless laugh. “Look what we’ve got on our hands. None of that matters—liking, not liking, who’s greater than whom. Guarding this … creature, keeping her safe from herself—oh my God, Pen, I’ve hardly the first idea.”

  “Nor me,” said Pen. “I only raised an ordinary boy, after all.”

  “There’s nothing ordinary about Rowan.”

  Their gazes went from the crib to each other. Sophie was lit up from the inside; Pen allowed herself to glow somewhat with pride and love. “Does he know?”

  “He begins to know, about me. He hasn’t a clue about Chris.

  All he knows is that she’s the most amazing baby that’s ever lived—because she’s his, not because of all that you and I see in her, not from anything in herself. Perhaps he’ll never know more, if I bring her up right. She might only look like a genius of this world; he might not realize she has dominion in the other.”

  Dominion. The crib was misty with tiny scratches from nurses’ use and cleaning, from countless previous babies being laid to sleep, being lifted out. Baby Chrissy lay motionless, her strengthless round fists beneath her sleeping chin. Pen stood and laid a hand on the tight-wrapped bundle, admiring the outer tininess, the harmless parcel containing the bomb flash, the shock, the star’s worth of power she had seen in the beyond. Pen herself was pinhead-sized in that place, bright and hot and well-made but small, and her inflowings and her outgoings were like roots and tree branches either side of that pinhead, slow, established, spread wide, doggedly shunting the forces along themselves. This girl—oh, this girl!—she was a boiling-surfaced sun. She had put out few tendrils, and none of any great reach yet, but those few flickered their messages in, flashed them out, seethed, raced with light. Pen didn’t know of anyone this powerful—now, or in history, or foretold. She didn’t know what this meant for the world, whether it presaged disaster or glory. She only knew that she herself, with her nutshell work and her feeble blessings, she and Sophie here with whatever small talent Sophie had, had been laid down like paving stones in this time and place for this queen to tread as she walked forth into her fullness.

  “I will give her my gift, still.” So doubtfully did she say it, she was almost asking permission of the mother.

  Sophie nodded. She looked immensely tired, shadows in her young face. Pen saw, as women do, ordinary women with no special talents, that Sophie would not age as well as she herself had, that she had no residual handsomeness that would allow her to go about wild-haired and pleasing herself. She would have harder work of it when her prettier days were done.

  Pen stood over the crib, put her hands to the wrapped baby, closed her eyes, and cautiously entered the other world. Sideways she went this time, for her own protection, and she felt for one of the smaller outthrowings of her granddaughter’s forceful self. She found no more than a thread. It petered out on the darkness yet pulled all of Pen askew with the force inside it, the baby’s hunger, huge, unfocused, endless, its sucking of everything toward its light.

  I have very little, she apologized. I know hardly anything of what you’ll need. But take it all, and use it as you wish. She held on to her core and let the rest be taken. It was less a giving than a surrendering, but it pleased her immensely to be so emptied, to contribute as she could to whatever great things this granddaughter, this grand granddaughter, would accomplish.

  She stayed a moment in that place, averted from the heat and light yet basking in it, a cautious small reveling and astonishment. Then she withdrew into the ward, the accidental here, the arbitrary now, where all was flat and quiet and stayed in its place. She bent and kissed Chrissy’s round cheek, then wiped away with her thumb the trace of crimson lipstick her disguise had left on the baby.

  Sophie had a cowed look about her that Pen recognized: face tipped down, eyes turned up. Pen sensed how cruel she might let herself be toward this lesser witch, either directly or by many acts of benevolence, many offerings of advice, many withholdings and stagy ponderings of her own wisdom. She must not use Sophie to salve her own old wounds. She must try to keep her dealings with her straight and plain.

  She laid her hand on the waffle-weave blanket over the girl’s knee. “I’ll go,” she said. “You know where I am. Call me if you need me.”

  “Thank you for coming.” Sophie strengthened, uttering the formality.

  Pen patted her knee and left. Her son passed her on the stairs; he smiled at her, alight with father-love; he was bringing bright flowers in an ornamental box, fruit in a basket. How happy he was in this world, unconcerned with the workings moiling away behind the surface of things! The neat middle-aged woman, somebody’s grandmother, smiled back at him. She had not much energy left. She would need food—ah, she was so hungry! She would need hours curled up in the sunny grass under the fruit trees before she could fly again.

  Home’s coast rose out of the kicking sea. Home’s cove, home’s beach rose out of the coast, headlands like arms, the sand blessedly still, blessedly soft-looking. The boat bottom skidded up the shelving sand. Pen took off her shoes, stepped out into the shallows, and waded to the beach. The boat shrank and sank behind her.

  She walked up the path through the rocks and hardy wild plants, emptying her pockets of loose change, of spare leaves. The baby hair in its packet? She hadn’t known what she was taking. She had thought to do favors for an earthly, ordinary child, using these pieces of her; instead she had an offcutting of a great power. How might she use it? Bind it into a ring, perhaps, and wield it, have her own way awhile as the new queen grew into her talents? She herself was one of the people Sophie sought to protect Chrissy from, the people who might take advantage. Pen dropped the packet, with the coins, into the toe of a shoe.

  A paper flapped on the kitchen door of her little gray house, pressing out against the screen. “Ha.” This would be from the people up at the store, who used phone and computer on her behalf.

  It’s a girl! their daughter had written in crimson and pink pencil, and she’d attached a sticker of a pink-wrapped baby, outlined in gold, and another sticker of three balloons, red, purple, blue, on golden strings. Pinned behind this paper was the email from Rowan, the general announcement, with a list at the top of all the people they had sent it to—that was showy, and possibly unwise, when she thought of it. The baby’s name was Kristina Opal. (With a K! But she approved of the Opal.) And there was her weight, laughable next to her actual significance. Baby and mother, Rowan had typed, were “doing well”—she remembered the baby’s pure clean skin, the mother’s shadowed face, pained as she tried to move a body wounded, repaired, and only just beginning to knit itself back together.

  Pen took down both papers and stuck the pin back in the door for whatever note might come next, whatever news—a death, new spring stock of clothes or garden tools, another baby, the newsletter she always read about people she didn’t know and hoped never to meet. In the hall, she laid the papers on the shallow table, weighted them there with the shoes. The little bag with the tuft of hair she took from the shoe’s toe. All through the house she went, opening everything she had shut before she left against possible wind and rain. Sea sound washed in, very gentle now that she was not on top of it taking the water’s thumps and battings; the thin hiss of wind in the bent trees passed through and around the house. She loved these four rooms, their clutter and haphazardness, their comforts, the fact that everything was in easy reach, fitted to her own size and habits. She laid the witch-queen’s hair on her night table and switched on the lamp above it like a ward-candle. There would be no binding, no wielding—she was beyond being tempted by such things. She would only keep the talisman here by her head, to see first thing when she woke in the morning, and last of all before she slept, every night.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  THIS BOOK HAS been a pleasure to work on, but it is the product of a lot of hard work by a lot of peopl
e. First and foremost, I’d like to thank Jim Thomas and everyone at Random House, who have been wonderful to work with and who have made sure the book is terrific. I’d also like to thank my agent, the dapper and ever-reliable Howard Morhaim. Special thanks to Jilli Roberts for her invaluable help with information on witches’ hats, and to Tansy Rayner Roberts for her kindness, support, and enthusiasm for this book. I’d also like to acknowledge my coeditors on this project, my wife, Marianne, and my daughter Sophie, both of whom read and discussed stories with me during the preparation of the book. Finally, as always, my deepest thanks to Marianne, Jessica, and Sophie, from whom each and every moment spent working on this book was stolen.

  ABOUT THE AUTHORS

  PETER S. BEAGLE was born and raised in the Bronx, where he grew up surrounded by the arts and education. His parents were teachers, three of his uncles were gallery painters, and his immigrant grandfather was a respected writer, in Hebrew, of Jewish fiction and folktales. As a child Peter used to sit by himself in the stairwell of his apartment building, making up stories. He is the author of such fantasy classics as The Last Unicorn, A Fine and Private Place, and “Two Hearts.” His story here, “Great-Grandmother in the Cellar,” is the latest in his Innkeeper’s World series (after The Innkeeper’s Song, the novel that first introduced it).

  Peter has written teleplays and screenplays for the animated versions of The Lord of the Rings and The Last Unicorn, as well as the fan-favorite “Sarek” episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. His nonfiction book I See by My Outfit is considered a classic of American travel writing, and he is also a gifted poet, lyricist, and singer-songwriter. He makes his home in Oakland, California.

  HOLLY BLACK is the author of bestselling contemporary fantasy books for kids and teens. Her titles include the Spiderwick Chronicles (with Tony DiTerlizzi), the Modern Faerie Tale series, the Good Neighbors graphic novel trilogy (with Ted Naifeh), and her Curse Workers series, which began with White Cat and continues with Red Glove and Black Heart. Holly has been a finalist for the Mythopoeic Award, a finalist for an Eisner Award, and the recipient of the Andre Norton Award. She lives in New England with her husband, Theo, in a house with a secret door.