by Diane Zahler
Darkness was coming on, and the clear sky had turned gray, with clouds spitting out a cold rain. I pulled my shawl around me and stood, still confused by my deep sleep and fearsome dream. I thought I heard shouts, and then realized there was indeed someone calling my name.
“Zita! Is that you? Are you all right?” It was a voice I did not recognize, nor did I recognize the boy who came crashing into my clearing a moment later.
“Was that you shouting?” he demanded. “Are you hurt?”
I rubbed my eyes, trying to focus. “Who are you?” I asked.
“Breckin. I’m the new stableboy. Cook sent me to look for you—she was getting worried.”
“What kind of name is Breckin?” I said crossly, my head heavy with sleep.
He laughed. “It means ‘freckled,’” he said. “I came out of the womb like this.”
I looked at him. Freckled he was indeed—his face and hands, all I could see of his skin, were speckled with orange. It gave him a friendly look, somehow. I smiled at him.
“I fell asleep,” I told him. “I had a bad dream, and I think I must have yelled. But I’m fine.”
“Well, you won’t be for long if we don’t get back!” Breckin said. “There’s a storm coming on, and you know the wolves are out this time of year.”
I had never seen a wolf, and knew no such thing, but the cold breeze made me shiver and I could see the wisdom in his words. I picked up my basket. Breckin tried to take it from me, but I kept a good hold on it.
“I can carry it!” I said. He shrugged.
“Doesn’t look like you got much, anyway,” he said. “Cook won’t like that!”
I started back along the path through the trees. “I’m not afraid of Cook.”
“Really?” Breckin drew even with me. “Why not? I hear she’s got a quick hand with the switch! Everyone’s afraid of her.”
I snorted. “Cook’s harmless. That switch just whistles through the air—it never actually hits anything. She’s all talk. Besides, she wouldn’t dare hit me.”
Breckin raised an eyebrow. “She wouldn’t dare? Why’s that? Have you some special power over her? Are you a witch, perhaps?”
“Hush!” I said swiftly. I turned around in a circle and spat over my shoulder to ward off evil. “Don’t say that—even in jest. Of course I’m not a witch. I’m a princess.”
Breckin hooted, and suddenly I didn’t think his freckles were so charming. “You’re a princess, are you? Like one of the blond beauties upstairs? Well, pleased to meet you. I’m a knight in shining armor, myself.” He bowed deeply to me, and I pulled a branch toward me and let it fly, smacking him on the head.
The branch left a red welt on his forehead, and in an instant he was after me. I ran as fast as I could along the darkening path, dodging vines and stumps, laughing and gasping as I fled. I was strong and quick, and Breckin did not catch me until we were nearly back at the lakeshore, where he grabbed my shoulders and spun me around and shook me. The nuts spilled out from my basket.
“You could’ve taken out my eye!” he said.
“Ah, but I missed,” I retorted. “Instead, I’ve just erased a few of your freckles.”
For a minute I thought he really was angry, but then he burst out laughing, and I realized that I liked this Breckin very much indeed. I put my hand up to the welt on his forehead and touched it gently.
“I am sorry,” I said. “Come into the kitchen and I’ll find some salve to put on it. Cook keeps some for burns, but it works on scrapes and cuts as well.”
We gathered the nuts as well as we could in the dim light and made our way over the land bridge and into the kitchen. I managed to dress Breckin’s wound before Cook saw me, and he hurried back to his duties in the stables. But before he left, we agreed to meet again in secret. We would both finish our tasks with all speed the next day, and in the late afternoon, if we could get away, he would take me riding. I was so pleased with this plan that I did not mind Cook’s wrath when she saw that I had collected barely enough nuts for a single tart, much less the five she’d made crusts for, and I smiled to myself as I shelled the nuts and then peeled apple after apple to fill the four remaining crusts.
Chapter 4
IN WHICH I MEET A WITCH
No longer did my life revolve around Sunday nights with my sisters. Now when Monday dawned, I knew I might see Breckin. The weeks sped by, and I spent more and more time outside, though the weather grew cold and ice formed in the shallows of the lake. Breckin taught me to ride a horse, and I was pleased to find that I was very good at it. “Better than your sisters,” he told me, having realized that I’d been telling the truth when I told him I was a princess. He’d heard the whole story from the horse master and thought it was appalling. “You can’t blame a child for its mother’s death!” he protested about my father’s treatment of me, but when I just shrugged he left it alone. He was good to talk to, always ready with a jest but able to be quiet, too.
We walked in companionable silence through the forest one morning. It was a warm day, with the muted sunshine that comes only after the first frost, giving a clarity to the yellowed fields and vivid trees. Our feet scuffed aside brilliant fallen leaves as we searched for signs of truffles under the earth. Father loved them shaved on scrambled eggs, and they only grew at the base of certain oaks, and then only at certain times and under certain conditions. We had once had a pig that could sniff them out, but she got loose one day, dug up and ate every truffle that existed for miles around, and then took herself off to a neighboring kingdom to eat theirs. Only recently had the truffles repopulated, but I was terrible at finding them. We had yet to see if Breckin could do better.
I had learned much about Breckin during the past weeks. We had shared our likes and dislikes: he did not like eating things that were green, or wearing wool, which made him itch; he loved nuts of all kinds. I told him that I could take nuts or leave them, but chocolate—that was my passion. He admitted that he feared snakes above all things, and I told him of my uncanny fear of rats. I admitted to him that even the water rats that sometimes swam along the edges of the lake spooked me, though I knew they weren’t real rats.
Breckin came from the kingdom of Blaire to the west, where King Tobin ruled. He’d been raised on a farm deep in the country with a brother and sister, and when his father died, his mother had turned to bees.
“Bees?” I asked. “What does she do with bees?”
“She keeps them and harvests their honey, of course,” Breckin said.
I was astonished. We did not keep bees, and it had never occurred to me to wonder where our honey came from. Cook bought it at market, and it arrived in green-tinted glass jars to keep the sun from spoiling it. I had thought—well, I had not thought at all. Perhaps I had assumed that honey was distilled from a plant or was mined from the hills. All I knew was that it sweetened cakes wonderfully.
“Bees,” I repeated, amazed. Breckin laughed at my ignorance, but it was a kind laugh.
I learned that his sister was wed, and that she and her husband helped with the honey business. His brother was a soldier, guarding the Western Reaches, and Breckin missed him very much. I found it all fascinating—the lives of ordinary folk.
“Was it very different, where you lived?”
He laughed. “Well, of course it was. It was a farm beside a tiny village, not a palace built over a lake. We’d no royalty there—the only king was our banty rooster.” He was quiet for a minute, and then said, “There was another difference, too. A difference in the air, or something. Your kingdom has such a strange feel to it.”
“What do you mean, a strange feel?” I asked.
“It’s hard to explain. When you come over the border from Blaire at Mickle Crossing, there’s a difference. It’s like…oh, I don’t know, exactly. Like a sort of silence. A lack of something.”
“Ah,” I said, nodding. “That’s the lack of magic.”
He stared at me. “You have no magic at all here?”
; “Father forbade it, when Aurelia was born. He didn’t want a curse on any of his children. He sent all the witches and wizards out of the kingdom, big and small. We don’t even have a soothsayer.” I regretted this very much, for I thought it would be interesting to know the future.
“Ah! That’s why it’s so damp and all,” Breckin said.
Of course it was. I’d never thought of it before, but surely any decent witch or wizard could dry up damp. I shook my head. “How stupid!” I said. “Think of all the things gone moldy that didn’t have to!”
“It must have been very odd, living with no magic,” Breckin mused.
“Why, did you have a lot of it where you grew up?”
He smiled, remembering. “We had a neighbor who was a healing witch. It’s a great thing to live near one of those. We were never ill. Nobody in our village ever died of sickness, hardly. Or even of accidents, unless they were really terrible ones. She could heal bone breaks and cuts. When my brother and I were little, whenever we’d fall down—or hit each other—and we’d be bleeding and crying, Mother would send us over to Elba’s house to get fixed.”
I stopped walking. “How did she fix you?”
“She’d give us a cup of chocolate, and then wash the cut or scrape. Then she’d put something on it—it smelled vile and stung. But a few minutes later—nothing! As if the cut had never happened. No scar at all.”
I thought about this. I’d gotten my share of cuts and burns working around the knives and fires of the kitchen. My hands were marked all over from accidents, and I always felt vaguely ashamed of them on Sundays with my sisters, comparing my red, scarred skin to their porcelain hands.
“I wonder if she can fix scars after they’ve set,” I mused, and we walked on.
A little later, I wondered aloud, “Then how did your father die, if there were no accidents or sicknesses in your village?”
Breckin was silent, and I was afraid I’d offended or hurt him by asking. Then he said, “He fell off a roof that he was fixing. He was killed right away. There was no chance for him to be healed.”
“Oh, I am sorry!” I said. “I hope you don’t mind that I asked.” I snuck a look at him to see if he was upset or angry, but he just looked as he always did.
“It’s all right,” he replied. “It was a long time ago. I was only four. I barely remember him.”
We had that in common, Breckin and I, both losing a parent before we were old enough to have memories of them. I wondered, though, if Breckin missed his father as I missed my mother—missing the idea of her because I had not known the real person to miss.
Then I saw an oak tree with a peculiar bare patch at its base. “There!” I said, pointing. Gingerly, with sticks, we dug down to the tree’s roots and found a rough round ball that smelled of mold and rot and a little like mushrooms, “with a touch of sweaty feet,” Breckin said, sniffing it and grimacing. “People eat these?”
“Just a tiny little bit at a time. It’s like an herb,” I told him. “A great delicacy.”
“They can have them!” he said. We wrapped the truffle and placed it in a sack Breckin carried and then walked on, looking for a place to stop and eat the lunch that Cook had packed. I’d added to it liberally, as Cook didn’t know that I would not be hunting truffles alone, and we sat under a willow on the edge of a brook and ate cold fowl and cheese, bread and pears, and drank from the sparkling stream.
After lunch, we lay back for a while and watched the white clouds scud across the sky, but the breeze was chilly, so before long we rose again and walked on, still searching for the elusive truffles. We were now in a part of the forest I did not know. Though I wasn’t afraid of much, the woods at nightfall did have a place in my nightmares, so I would not have gone so far by myself. Here the trees arched overhead so I couldn’t see the sky. The gloom they cast made me shiver, and if I had been alone, I would have turned back and walked very quickly home. With Breckin, though, it was an adventure, and I was pleased to follow the stream up to a little waterfall that plashed on the rocks below. We dug up another truffle a bit farther on, and then I saw something between the trees that caught my eye.
“Look!” I said to Breckin, pulling at his arm. There, deeply shaded by tall fir trees, was a ruined cottage, its roof sagging, its walls crooked and leaning. It looked as if it had been deserted for a century. Brambles grew up around it, trying to push their way in at the door. The two windows in front gazed like blind eyes, crusted over with the dirt of decades.
We walked hesitantly up the remains of the front path and pushed aside vines to peer in at one of the windows. The cracked glass was filthy, and we could see nothing.
“Let’s go in,” Breckin suggested. I was horrified.
“There are probably rats in there!” I protested. “And the roof could fall in on us at any moment!”
“Oh, don’t be such a—” He broke off. I could always tell when he remembered that I was a princess. He would stop whatever rude thing he was saying or doing and give me a look that I couldn’t interpret. And then he would grin and go on as before.
“Well, I’m going in,” he said, grinning that grin. He pushed at the front door, and to our astonishment it swung open smoothly. He stepped inside, and I crowded behind him. My jaw dropped open as I peered around.
The inside of the cottage was not ruined at all. In fact, it was clean and pretty and bright, with knotted rugs on wide-beamed floors, a cheery fire burning in the fireplace, chairs with plump cushions, and ruffled curtains at the windows. The smell of shortbread scented the air, and a teakettle began to whistle as I started to back away.
“Let’s go!” I whispered. “This is too peculiar. Come on, Breckin!”
“Wait—,” he started, and then we heard a door unlatch. We could see, from our position at the front of the house, the door at the back of the house as it opened, and my heart leaped into my throat as we watched to see who would enter. I felt a great wave of relief as I saw an old woman, tiny and bent with age, come in with an armful of fall flowers—chrysanthemums and late daisies. She smiled when she saw us standing there, not at all surprised or concerned that we had come into her house without so much as a knock.
“Come in, children!” she said. “Come and have some tea and cookies.”
“B-beg pardon, ma’am,” Breckin stammered. “We thought—it seemed like the place was deserted. We never would have…”
The old woman laughed so heartily that neither of us could help smiling. “I can still do a good illusion, if I do say so!” she said.
“Illusion?” Breckin said. “Are you a witch, then?”
“Breckin!” I chided him. In my father’s home, to be called a witch was to be insulted.
“That’s all right, my dear,” the woman said calmly. “I am indeed a witch.” I gasped in shock as, moving spryly for someone her age, she placed the flowers in a pitcher and filled it with water from a jug. “Do sit down. Would you like some tea?”
Breckin and I looked at each other. He was very excited, I could tell, but all I could think was What if Father finds out?
“You don’t need to worry, dear,” the old woman said to me. I looked at her, confused. Had I spoken aloud? “Your father’s never noticed me yet, and I’ve been living here a long, long time. I’ve made the place seem deserted, you see, and I can always tell who is coming. I’m in no danger of being found out, and neither are you.”
I was astounded. She knew who I was and who my father was. She had known we were coming! She was a soothsayer at least—maybe more. I slipped past Breckin and moved farther into the house. Cautiously I took a seat at the wooden table in the kitchen. Breckin followed me and sat too. The witch poured steaming water into a little pot from which a lovely raspberry smell rose. Then she opened the cast-iron door of the stove and pulled out a pan. Ah—the source of the shortbread aroma! I did love shortbread.
She cut the shortbread into pieces and put the pieces onto a chipped plate, poured the tea into mismatched cups, placed a b
owl of sugar on the table, and brought tea and cookies over to us as we sat watching. Her movements were so smooth and graceful that we did not think to ask if we could help her; indeed, I wondered whether perhaps her aged appearance was another of her illusions. Again she appeared to read my mind and laughed merrily. “I’m quite as old as I look, dear. Maybe even older!”
We spent a few lovely minutes eating warm, silky shortbread and sipping our tea. I thought that I had never eaten anything so sweet and delicious, nor ever tasted tea so much like real raspberries before. I caught Breckin’s eye and saw that he felt the same, and we smiled at each other.
“Now,” the old woman said when we paused in our eating and drinking. “You must tell me a little about yourselves, my dears. I could see your coming, but not why. Do you have a trouble that needs attention? You, Zita, are you plagued by your father and his temper?”
I choked on my cookie and coughed, and Breckin pounded me on the back. “Stop!” I said crossly to him, and to the old woman, “How did you know my name?”
She smiled sweetly at me, and I marveled to see how much she looked like I’d imagined a witch would. Her nose was sharp and pointed and came close to meeting her sharp and pointed chin. Her eyes were a lively, sparkling black, and her white hair curled about her wrinkled cheeks like sheep’s wool.
“I am so unforgivably rude, my dears,” she said. “We have not even introduced ourselves, have we? I am Babette, which means, of course, ‘enchanter.’ And you, young man?”
“Breckin, ma’am, from the kingdom of Blaire,” Breckin told her, reaching for another piece of shortbread. “I work in King Aricin’s stables.”