“I’d like to think all my studying is worth something.”
“Okay, then. Good luck with the witch.”
“Thanks,” she said between her teeth, and dragged the furious greyling in the opposite direction.
The greyling finally stopped struggling when the door to the apartment building closed behind them. It quietly trudged upstairs beside Averil, only muttering a little now and then, its ribbony arm dangling limply in her grasp. She scarcely heard it; she was trying to figure out how Fitch was getting back into the school without being caught. Did he already know how to turn invisible? What other things might he have learned on his own, while she was only learning what was required? Would breaking rules make him a better wizard? Better than, say, Griffith, who would surely have skipped his Naming Day to come and help her, if he had been able to see her. Or would he? More likely, he would have done the practical thing and simply told one of their teachers that she seemed to be in trouble. Try as she might, she couldn’t imagine Griffith missing his Naming to sneak out of school and help her catch some witch’s demented familiar.
She was thinking so intently that she had opened the door of her own apartment out of habit. Her mother, sitting on the couch and reading, lifted her head to smile at Averil, who remembered, horrified, what she was holding.
“Hi, Mom,” she said hastily, backing out before she had to explain the greyling. “Oops. I’ll just be a moment—”
“Thanks, Averil.” Her mother sighed. “That’s the most peaceful morning I’ve had in years.”
The greyling broke free of Averil, ran to the couch, and climbed up beside their mother. “I’m tired,” Felix groaned, falling sideways onto her lap. “Really, really, really—”
“Oh, that’s wonderful, sweetie.”
Averil, frozen in the doorway, remembered finally how to breathe. Her eyes felt gritty, as though fairy dust had blown into them. With great effort, she swiveled them toward the witch’s wand in her hand.
Wooden mixing spoon.
“Mom—” Her voice croaked like a frog; she still couldn’t move. “How did you—how could you—”
“Well, you saw what I was turning into. Nobody was listening to me.”
“But how—”
“I learned a few things at the school before I left to have you.” She stroked Felix’s hair gently; he was already asleep. “Peace,” she breathed contentedly.
“Mom. It was my Naming Day.”
Her mother just looked at her. Averil saw the witch in her eyes, then, shadowy, shrewd, filled with remnants of magic. “And did you finally choose a name?”
Averil looked back at the Averil who had been so blithely trying on lovely names and discarding them just that morning. She moved finally, closing the door behind her. She dropped down on the couch next to Felix.
“No,” she admitted, twining the spoon handle through her hair. “And now, nothing seems to fit me.”
Her mother said after a moment, “I have a name that I haven’t used since I left Oglesby, until today. You can have it, if you want.”
“Really?” Averil studied her mother, suddenly curious. “What is it?”
Her mother leaned over Felix, whispered it into Averil’s ear. The name seemed to flow through her like air and light. Her eyes grew wide; visions and enchantments swirled in her head. “Mom, that’s brilliant,” she exclaimed, straightening with a bounce. “That’s amazing!” Felix stirred; they both patted him until he quieted again. “How did you think of it?” Averil whispered.
“It was just there, when I looked for it. Do you want it?”
“Are you sure? You really want me to have it?”
Her mother smiled wryly. “I really don’t want to be tempted to use magic on my children again. Anyway, ever since you became interested in the wizardly arts, I dreamed of giving it to you. Of it meaning all the wonderful magic you could do.” She paused, shifted a strand of Averil’s shining hair back from her face. “Lately, I haven’t been sure that you’d want it.”
“I want it,” Averil said softly. “I want it more than any other name. I never would have thought of it, but it’s perfect. It feels like me.”
“Good.” Her mother rose then, took the spoon from her. “I’m glad you brought this back; it’s my favorite mixing spoon.”
“You didn’t give me much choice.” Averil watched her walk into the kitchen to drop the spoon into the utensils jar. “You make a pretty fierce witch.”
“Thanks, sweetie. Are you hungry? Do you want a sandwich before you go back to school?”
“You know they won’t let me in after First Bell.”
“That’s what they say,” her mother said with a chuckle. “But once you find your way in, they always let you stay.”
Averil stared at her. She glimpsed something then, in the corner of her mind’s eye; it grew clearer as she turned her thoughts to contemplate it. Her mother, giving up all the knowledge she had acquired at Oglesby, all that potential, just to go and have Averil and take care of her. And now that incredible name…
She drew a sudden breath, whispered, “I didn’t miss it.”
Her mother, who had stuck her head in the refrigerator and was searching through jars, said, “What?”
“My Naming. You just named me.”
Her mother turned, embracing mayonnaise, mustard, pickles, cold cuts and a head of lettuce. “What, sweetie? I didn’t hear you.”
“Never mind,” Averil said, and summoned all her powers to speak words of most arduous and dire magic. “I’ll-watch-Felix-for-the-rest-of-the-day-if-you-want-to-go-out.”
Her mother heard that just fine.
Winter’s Wife
ELIZABETH HAND
One of the most respected writers of her generation, Elizabeth Hand won both the Nebula Award and the World Fantasy Award for her story “Last Summer at Mars Hill,” and has been a finalist for the World Fantasy Award on a number of other occasions as well. Her books include the novels Winterlong, Aestival Tide, Icarus Descending, Image of Support, Waking the Moon, Glimmering, and Black Light. She’s also written a number of Star Wars novels, including Maze of Deception, Hunted, A New Threat, and Pursuit, and movie novelizations such as Twelve Monkeys, Anna and the King, Cat-woman, and The Affair of the Necklace. Her acclaimed short fiction, which has appeared in most of the major markets in science fiction, fantasy, and horror, has been collected in Last Summer at Mars Hill, Bibliomancy, and Saffron & Brimstone. Her most recent book is the novel Mortal Love. Coming up is a new novel, Generation Loss. She lives with her family in Lincolnville, Maine.
In the—appropriately enough—chilling story that follows, she shows us what happens when all the money and influence and bright shiny gadgets of the modern world come into conflict with ancient magic. Magic old and slow and cold, and as immovable as rock.
WINTER’S real name was Roderick Gale Winter. But everyone in Paswegas County, not just me and people who knew him personally, called him Winter. He lived in an old school bus down the road from my house, and my mother always tells how when she first moved here he scared the crap out of her. It wasn’t even him that scared her, she hadn’t even met him yet; just the fact that there was this creepy-looking old school bus stuck in the middle of the woods, with smoke coming out of a chimney and these huge piles of split logs around and trucks and cranes and heavy equipment, and in the summer all kinds of chain saws and stuff, and in the fall deer and dead coyotes hanging from this big pole that my mother said looked like a gallows, and blood on the snow, and once a gigantic dead pig’s head with tusks, which my mother said was scarier even than the coyotes. Which, when you think of it, does sound pretty bad, so you can’t blame her for being freaked out. It’s funny now because she and Winter are best friends, though that doesn’t mean so much as it does other places, like Chicago, where my mother moved here from, because I think everyone in Shaker Harbor thinks Winter is their friend.
The school bus, when you get inside it, is sweet.
Winter�
��s family has been in Shaker Harbor for six generations, and even before that they lived somewhere else in Maine.
“I have Passamaquoddy blood,” Winter says. “If I moved somewhere else, I’d melt.”
He didn’t look like a Native American, though, and my mother said if he did have Indian blood it had probably been diluted by now. Winter was really tall and skinny, not sick skinny but bony and muscular, stooped from having to duck through the door of the school bus all those years. He always wore a gimme cap that said WINTER TREE SERVICE, and I can remember how shocked I was once when I saw him at Town Meeting without his hat, and he had almost no hair. He’d hunt and butcher his own deer, but he wouldn’t eat it—he said he’d grown up dirt-poor in a cabin that didn’t even have a wooden floor, just pounded earth, and his family would eat anything they could hunt, including snake and skunk and snapping turtle. So he’d give all his venison away, and when people hired him to butcher their livestock and gave him meat, he’d give that away, too.
That was how my mother met him, that first winter fifteen years ago when she was living here alone, pregnant with me. There was a big storm going on, and she looked out the window and saw this tall guy stomping through the snow carrying a big paper bag.
“You a vegetarian?” he said, when she opened the door. “Everyone says there’s a lady from away living here who’s going to have a baby and she’s a vegetarian. But you don’t look like one to me.”
My mother said no, she wasn’t a vegetarian, she was a registered certified massage therapist.
“Whatever the hell that is,” said Winter. “You going to let me in? Jesus Q. Murphy, is that your woodstove?”
See, my mother had gotten pregnant by a sperm donor. She had it all planned out, how she was going to move way up north and have a baby and raise it—him, me—by herself and live off the land and be a massage therapist and hang crystals in the windows and there would be this good energy and everything was going to be perfect. And it would have been, if she had moved to, like, Huntington Beach or even Boston, someplace like that, where it would be warmer and there would be good skate parks, instead of a place where you have to drive two hours to a skate park and it snows from November till the end of May. And in the spring you can’t even skate on the roads here because they’re all dirt roads and so full of potholes you could live in one. But the snowboarding is good, especially since Winter let us put a jump right behind his place.
But this part is all before any snowboarding, because it was all before me, though not much before. My mother was living in this tiny two-room camp with no indoor plumbing and no running water, with an ancient woodstove, what they call a parlor stove, which looked nice but didn’t put out any heat and caused a chimney fire. Which was how Winter heard about her, because the volunteer fire department came and afterwards all anyone was talking about at the Shaker Harbor Variety Store was how this crazy lady from away had bought Martin Weed’s old run-down camp and now she was going to have a baby and freeze to death or burn the camp down—probably both—which probably would have been okay with them except no one liked to think about the baby getting frozen or burned up.
So Winter came by and gave my mother the venison and looked at her woodpile and told her she was burning green wood, which builds up creosote, which was why she had the chimney fire, and he asked her who sold her the wood, so she told him. And the next day the guy who sold her the wood came by and dumped off three cords of seasoned wood and drove off without saying a word, and the day after that two other guys came by with a brand-new woodstove, which was ugly but very efficient and had a sheath around it so a baby wouldn’t get burned if he touched it. And the day after that, Winter came by to make sure the stove was hooked up right, and he went to all the cabin’s windows with sheets of plastic and a hair dryer and covered them so the cold wouldn’t get in, and then he showed my mother where there was a spring in the woods that she could go to and fill water jugs rather than buy them at the grocery door. He also gave her a chamber pot so she wouldn’t have to use the outhouse, and told her he knew of someone who had a composting toilet they’d sell to her cheap.
All of which might make you think that when I say “Winter’s wife” I’m referring to my mom. But I’m not. Winter’s wife is someone else.
Still, when I was growing up, Winter was always at our house. And I was at his place, when I got older. Winter chops down trees, what they call wood lot management—he cuts trees for people, but in a good way, so the forest can grow back and be healthy. Then he’d split the wood so the people could burn it for firewood. He had a portable sawmill—one of the scary things Mom had seen in his yard—and he also mills wood so people can build houses with the lumber. He’s an auctioneer, and he can play the banjo and one of those washboard things like you see in old movies. He showed me how to jump-start a car with just a wire coat hanger, also how to carve wood and build a tree house and frame a window. When my mother had our little addition put on with a bathroom in it, Winter did a lot of the carpentry, and he taught me how to do that, too.
He’s also a dowser, a water witch. That’s someone who can tell where water is underground, just by walking around in the woods holding a stick in front of him. You’d think this was more of that crazy woo-woo stuff my mother is into, which is what I thought whenever I heard about it.
But then one day me and my friend Cody went out to watch Winter do it. We were hanging out around Winter’s place, clearing brush. He let us use the hill behind the school bus for snowboarding, and that’s where we’d built that sweet jump, and Winter had saved a bunch of scrap wood so that when spring came we could build a half-pipe for skating too.
But now it was spring, and since we didn’t have any money really to pay Winter for it, he put us to work clearing brush. Cody is my age, almost fourteen. So we’re hacking at this brush and swatting blackflies, and I could tell that at any minute Cody was going to say he had to go do homework, which was a lie because we didn’t have any, when Winter shows up in his pickup, leans out the window, and yells at us.
“You guys wanna quit goofing off and come watch someone do some real work?”
So then me and Cody had an argument about who was going to ride shotgun with Winter, and then we had another argument about who was going to ride in the truck bed, which is actually more fun. And then we took so long arguing that Winter yelled at us and made us both ride in the back.
So we got to the place where Winter was going to work. This field that had been a dairy farm, but the farm wasn’t doing too good and the guy who owned it had to sell it off. Ms. Whitton, a high school teacher, was going to put a little modular house on it. There’d been a bad drought a few years earlier, and a lot of wells ran dry. Ms. Whitton didn’t have a lot of money to spend on digging around for a well, so she hired Winter to find the right spot.
“Justin!” Winter yelled at me as he hopped out of the truck. “Grab me that hacksaw there—”
I gave him the saw, then me and Cody went and goofed around some more while Winter walked around the edge of the field, poking at brush and scrawny trees. After a few minutes he took the hacksaw to a spindly sapling.
“Got it!” Winter yelled, and stumbled back into the field. “If we’re going to find water here, we better find a willow first.”
It was early spring, and there really weren’t any leaves out yet, so what he had was more like a pussy willow, with furry gray buds and green showing where he’d sawn the branch off. Winter stripped the buds from it until he had a forked stick. He held the two ends like he was holding handlebars and began to walk around the field.
It was weird. Cause at first, me and Cody were laughing—we didn’t mean to, we couldn’t help it. It just looked funny, Winter walking back and forth with his arms out holding that stick. He kind of looked like Frankenstein. Even Ms. Whitton was smiling.
But then it was like everything got very still. Not quiet—you could hear the wind blowing in the trees, and hear birds in the woods, and someone runni
ng a chain saw far off—but still, like all of a sudden you were in a movie and you knew something was about to happen. The sun was warm, I could smell dirt and cow manure and meadowsweet. Cody started slapping blackflies and swearing. I felt dizzy, not bad dizzy, but like you do when the school bus drives fast over a high bump and you go up on your seat. A few feet away Winter continued walking in a very straight line, the willow stick held out right in front of him.
And all of a sudden the stick began to bend. I don’t mean that Winter’s arms bent down holding it: I mean the stick itself, the point that stuck straight out, bent down like it was made of rubber and someone had grabbed it and yanked it towards the ground. Only it wasn’t made of rubber, it was stiff wood, and there was no one there—but it still bent, pointing at a mossy spot between clumps of dirt.
“Holy crap,” I said.
Cody shut up and looked. So did Ms. Whitton.
“Oh my God,” she said.
Winter stopped, angling the stick back and forth like he was fighting with it. Then it lunged down, and he yelled, “Whoa!” and opened his hands and dropped it. Me and Cody ran over.
“This is it,” said Winter. He pulled a spool of pink surveyor’s tape from his pocket and broke off a length. I stared warily at the willow stick, half-expecting it to wiggle up like a snake, but it didn’t move. After a moment I picked it up.
“How’d you do that?” demanded Cody.
“I didn’t do it,” said Winter evenly. He took the stick from my hand, snapped off the forked part, and tossed it; tied the surveyor’s tape to what remained and stuck it in the ground. “Wood does that. Wood talks to you, if you listen.”
“No lie,” I said. “Can you show me how to do that sometime?”
“Sure,” said Winter. “Can’t today, got a towing job. But someday.”
He and Ms. Whitton started talking about money and who had the best rates for drilling. The next time my mom drove past that field, the drill rig was there hammering at the ground right where Winter’s stick had pointed, and the next time I ran into Ms. Whitton in the hall at school she told me the well was already dug and all geared up to pump a hundred gallons a minute, once she got her foundation dug and her house moved in.
Wizards: Magical Tales from the Masters of Modern Fantasy Page 20