Strix rolled her eyes. Her lip curled. “There’s no such thing as a ‘friend,’” she said. “Friendship is a lie, made up by mortals.”
If someone had stuck a red-hot knife into Lizbet’s heart and twisted it, it could not have hurt more.
“It’s not a lie!” she exclaimed. “It’s not, it’s not, it’s not! How can you say such things? Take it back! Friendship is not a lie!”
“You’re hyperventilating,” Strix observed.
“How can you say that,” Lizbet whispered.
“Friendship is a lie,” Strix said, “that mortals use to manipulate each other. There are no ‘friends.’ There are the strong and the weak, the ruthless and the timid.”
That could not be true. That must not be true. Friendship was so important that Lizbet would not let herself be friends with anyone, because it hurt so much when it was taken away.
“Why did you come back, then?” she asked. “When I’d sent you away? If if wasn’t because you wanted to?”
“You didn’t send me away,” Strix said. “You said you never wanted to see me again, so I knit myself into the shadows.”
“But—” There was still a mystery here. She felt as if Strix were tippy-toeing around something big and awkward, and Lizbet had the sudden feeling that it was very important to find out what it was. “But why did you help me? If he killed me, you’d be free to return to Mrs. Woodcot. You said you didn’t want to come with me to begin with.”
“You know why.” Strix’s voice was poisonous.
She knew why? Lizbet said, “No, I don’t.”
Strix clenched her teeth.
Wouldn’t she answer unless Lizbet asked directly? “Strix,” Lizbet said, “tell me why you helped me.”
Strix stared at the ground. “Because I had to.”
“Why did you have to?”
“Because I am enthralled to you.” Strix spat out the words.
Enthralled? “What does that mean? Why are you enthralled to me? Does that mean that Mrs. Woodcot told you to help me?”
“Because of the egg!”
The egg? What egg? Lizbet tried to think. At the pothouse, she had given an egg to Strix. Strix had acted strangely after eating it. “The egg I gave you at the pothouse?”
Strix was beside herself with frustration and anger. “Why are you doing this? Why are you making me humiliate myself?”
“I’m not trying to humiliate you,” Lizbet said, as gently as she could. “I just don’t understand.”
Strix spoke slowly, as if each word caused her pain. “Mortals fall under the power of witches if they tell the witch their true names, or if they let the witch have a part of their body, like a lock of hair or a fingernail paring. Or if they accept food from the witch.”
Lizbet nodded. “I’d heard that.”
“I didn’t know it also worked the other way around!”
Lizbet tried to make sense of this unexpected turn of events. “You’re under my power, then? Because you accepted the egg from me?”
“Yes,” Strix said miserably.
Did that mean that Strix had to do what Lizbet said? “Um . . . Lie down?”
Strix just looked at her warily. Maybe Lizbet had to give a direct order. “Lie down, my good and faithful servant.”
Strix stretched herself out on the ground.
“Get up!”
Strix got up.
“Hop on one foot.”
Strix hopped.
Lizbet watched her, wondering at this strange development. Strix glared at her with palpable venom.
“Okay, you can stop hopping,” Lizbet said.
Strix stopped, and bent, bracing her hands on her knees. “So you see,” she said, “there’s no such thing as friendship. It’s all a lie. I am your thrall and minion. Not your ‘friend.’” She spoke the word as if it were a curse.
It’s awful to have one’s life owned by someone else, Strix had said, back in Abalia.
“You really hate it, don’t you?” Lizbet said. “Being my . . . thrall.”
“I hate it, and I hate you!”
“Strix,” Lizbet said, “even if you think there are no such things as friends—wouldn’t you like there to be?”
Strix looked at her suspiciously.
“I’m going to play a game. It’s like a pantomime. I’m going to pretend that you are my friend, and I am yours. I’m going to pretend that you helped save me from the Outlaw out of friendship. In return, I will treat you as a friend would.”
“This is ridiculous,” Strix said, rolling her eyes.
Lizbet said, “Friends are kind to each other. For example, if I were your friend, I would want to free you from servitude.”
Strix’s voice was bitter and resigned. “It’s mean of you to tease me. No one ever frees a thrall.”
“But if I were to do it, how would I go about it?”
Strix said, “You’d have to grant me equal dominion over you. Each opposing power voids the other. All bonds are released.”
“Suppose I were to tell you my true name?”
Strix’s eyes locked with Lizbet’s. She barely nodded.
“I was christened, Elizabeth Theresa Isabel Lenz.”
Nameless emotions fled across Strix’s face. She held up her hands in front of her and stared from one to the other, as if seeing them for the first time. “The spell is broken,” she said softly. “You’ve freed me.” She gazed at Lizbet. “Why? Why did you do that?”
“Because I believe in friendship,” Lizbet said.
“I still don’t believe in it,” Strix said. But she said it softly, and without rancor.
Lizbet believed in it, but would not let herself have it. To Lizbet, friendship was a thing as glorious and necessary as the sun. And as distant, and unattainable.
Sweat ran down her brow. Her fever still raged. Her exertions and emotional turmoil of the past hour caught up with her. She was burning up. Her head spun, and whirlpools of black sparks choked her vision.
Lizbet fainted back onto her pallet.
Chapter 9
Lizbet woke, shivering so hard she could barely speak. Her teeth hammered together.
Strix had knelt beside her, her face an emotionless mask. “You fainted,” she said. She put her hand on Lizbet’s forehead.
“My feet,” Lizbet said to Strix. “They really hurt.” Yellow and green pus oozed from the raw spots on her feet. The angry red color on her legs had spread up to the thighs. The skin there was broken out in blisters filled with dark fluid.
Strix said, “I think it’s blood poisoning. Your legs have gangrene.”
Gangrene. Blood poisoning. A boy named Offa whom Lizbet knew in third grade had it, once. A tradesman’s horse had stepped on Offa’s foot with its iron shoe, crushing it. The foot became infected, the infection spread up the leg, and the leg turned black and terribly swollen. Offa died.
“I know some medicines for infection,” Strix said. “Poultices, unguents. I’ll search in the forest for herbs.” But Lizbet heard doubt in her voice.
Lizbet’s fever raged on through the morning and afternoon. Strix returned from the forest with spruce needles, fern fiddleheads, moss, and lichen, which she pounded into a wet green paste and applied to Lizbet’s legs. The cool sensation felt good on on her burning skin, but her swollen legs and fever did not improve.
She could not eat. She tried to take sips of water, but her stomach rejected even that. She dozed fitfully, a troubled sleep that brought no relief from pain or fatigue. Toward evening she woke confused, forgetting where she was. Delirious, she thrashed and fought with Strix for half a minute, until she woke enough to recognize her.
“Strix,” Lizbet said. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what I’m doing. I feel like I’m burning up.”
“You’re very sick,” Strix said. “My rem
edies aren’t working.”
“Am I . . . dying?”
“I think so,” Strix said.
Lizbet’s head swam, and she realized she was sinking into a faint again. She felt for Strix’s hand. “Strix. I don’t know what’s going to happen. If I die, I just want to thank you again for trying. For doing your best. For helping. For being . . .”
She couldn’t tell whether she had touched Strix’s hand or not. She lost the thread of thought. Her soul tumbled away into realms of fever and delirium.
From that point on, Lizbet was never fully aware of where she was, or even who she was. She had vague memories of waking once and finding Strix kneeling by her pallet like a tawny sphinx, watching, listening, holding Lizbet’s hand in silence. In moments of wakefulness, Lizbet babbled confusedly about her father, about their life fleeing from town to town, about her fears, her dreams, the tiny tragedies and hurts a child endures in a world not made for children. She freely shared with Strix her most intimate, embarrassing secrets, things she would be ashamed to tell anyone.
Strix listened to it all with utter seriousness and concentration, as if she were a prince trying to parse the ravings of a god-drunken sibyl.
Lizbet woke.
She knew she had to get up soon, but for now the bed was so warm and comfortable, and she was still pleasantly muzzy with sleep, so she thought she’d just roll over, pull the blanket over her head, and catch a little more—
She rolled over, and the thought came her: My feet don’t hurt. That brought her fully awake. The movement should have caused exquisite pain. But it hadn’t.
Experimentally, she wiggled her toes beneath the blankets. No pain. She swiveled her ankles. She flexed her knees and hips. No pain. A wave of relief washed over her. At last, she was getting better! Her cheeks weren’t hot either. The fever had broken. Somehow, she had survived the crisis.
Lizbet sat up, rubbing her eyes. She was still on her blanket pallet in the loft. “Strix!” she called. She looked over the edge of the loft.
The cabin door was open. Strix came in from outside, carrying eggs in one of her skirts. She looked up. “I think I’m better,” Lizbet said. “My legs. They don’t hurt. I think they’re okay again.”
Strix nodded. “You like them?” She set the eggs on the table.
“Oh yes! Isn’t it true that you never appreciate something until—” Lizbet threw off the blanket.
Her legs were different.
Lizbet was pale-skinned, but her legs were even paler than before. Except for a few horizontal brown seams. Her toes were like round white pebbles. Her toenails were painted with little designs: a red heart, a diamond shape, a bumpy thing, an upside-down black heart with a handle. Her right big toenail displayed a colored drawing of a bearded man sticking a sword through his head.
No blisters, broken skin, pus, or any sign of disease, unless the brown marks were scars. How had she healed so fast? Or had it been fast? How long had she been asleep? “Strix,” Lizbet said, “did you paint my toenails?”
“Nope,” Strix said. “They came that way.”
When Lizbet lifted her legs up, she found them curiously heavy. Not weak, but heavier than she was used to. When she went to swing her right leg onto the ladder, to climb down from the loft, it moved more ponderously than it should. Lizbet cautiously climbed down the ladder. Walking proved to be awkward and off-balance, like walking after your foot’s been asleep, but without the numbness. She would have to take it slow for a while. But there was no pain, and her legs felt strong and well.
Clunk, clunk, clunk went her footsteps as she crossed on the wooden floor in bare feet.
Clunk?
Lizbet stared and stared at her feet. Something else was different, and not just the clunking.
Her feet were reversed. The big toes were on the outside, and the pinky toes on the inside. It was as if her right and left feet had been switched.
She must have shrieked. “What is it now?” Strix said.
“M-m-my feet! What, what, what—”
Strix’s brow furrowed. “I thought you said you liked them?”
“They’re, they’re on backward! What . . . how . . . ?”
“They’re not on backward. They’re on the way they should be.” Strix sat down on the floor, unlaced her black boots, and pulled off her darned and knotted wool stockings. She kicked her brown feet in the air.
Strix’s feet were on backward too.
“See?” Strix said.
So that’s what had bothered Lizbet about Strix’s feet when she first met her. The toes of Strix’s boots went in the wrong direction.
“But, my feet. How? Why?”
“I fixed them,” Strix said proudly. “Your legs were dying, and they were killing the rest of you. So I made new legs for you. And as long as I was fixing things, I thought the feet might as well go on the right way.”
“New legs . . .”
Witches made things, Strix had said. Strix could make little horses that walked on their own. Mrs. Woodcot had made Strix. So Strix had made human legs for Lizbet.
Or were they human?
Almost afraid to ask, Lizbet said, “What did you make them out of?”
“Oak, and strap iron from an old wagon I found behind the cabin,” Strix said. “You beat up the legs you had so badly, so I made the new legs stronger. The skin’s birch bark. You’re so pale, it was the best match I could find. The toes are stream pebbles. I cut the toenails from playing cards.”
“They’re witch’s legs,” Lizbet said.
“I thought about replacing them with the Outlaw’s legs.”
Lizbet’s heart went ba-bump. “You didn’t . . .”
“No, I didn’t. See? You’re throwing a conniption just thinking about it. I didn’t want to hear you complain endlessly, so I didn’t do it.” Strix stared at Lizbet closely. Her voice softened. “Are you sure you like them? They’re better than human legs, really.”
No, I don’t like them! Lizbet wanted to shout. I don’t want witch’s legs! They’re peculiar and scary. I don’t want to be like the Outlaw, or like a witch, or like anything but myself. And now I have them, and I can’t get rid of them, because my old legs are gone forever. And having witch’s legs makes me different. And strange. And I’ll never be able to go back and be a normal girl again, no matter what happens.
I’m changed. Forever.
But how could she say that to Strix? Strix had saved her life. She had saved it twice. Strix had done the best she could think of for Lizbet: she had given Lizbet legs like herself.
Lizbet looked at Strix in that moment of silence and tried to read her face. She heard a new note in Strix’s voice that she had never heard, different from all the smugness and superiority and insults. Something hesitant and vulnerable. The need for Lizbet’s approval.
She could hurt Strix with a word, if she wished.
Instead, she forced herself to smile as widely as she could, and said, “They’re perfect, Strix. They’re just going to take some getting used to, that’s all. See?” Stomping and thumping her new legs on the puncheon floor, Lizbet hobbled around the tiny room as fast as she could go, teetering and tottering this way and that, wheeling her arms to keep her balance, until she heard Strix laughing.
There was still the matter of the Outlaw’s body. It lay where it had fallen, sprawled on the cabin floor.
“We ought to bury him,” Lizbet said.
“Typical mortal thinking,” Strix said. “Here you have a perfectly good dead body, and all you can think of to do is throw it away.”
“Burying is what dead bodies are for. What else would you do with it?” Lizbet remembered the fate of Carl. “Were you thinking of squishing him in a press? But we don’t have a press.”
Strix shrugged. She knelt beside the Outlaw’s head. “It’s too late for that, anyway,” she said
. “They have to be alive when you squish ’em. When they die, the affections evaporate like ether. However, he has other things we can use.”
Delicately, Strix inserted the tip of one index finger into the Outlaw’s left nostril.
“Ewww,” Lizbet said. “What are you doing?”
Strix pushed. Her finger slid in up to the third knuckle. Her brow furrowed in concentration, Strix squished and squeezed the tip of her middle finger into the nostril as well.
Could the man’s nose really be large enough to admit two fingers?
But a moment later, Strix had her ring finger inside too. And a moment later, her thumb and little finger. Strix took a deep breath and braced her free hand on the floor. She gave a determined grunt, flexed her arm, and shoved. Lizbet watched, biting her lip.
Strix’s entire right hand squeezed into the Outlaw’s nostril.
“Ew, ew, ew!” Lizbet cried.
Strix ignored her. The muscles in her temples worked. She continued to push. By inches, her hand, wrist, elbow, and finally her entire arm slid into the Outlaw’s nostril, up to the shoulder.
The thing was impossible, of course. It was like a dream, where you could fly, or monsters ate you but you were still alive. Except that Lizbet was wide awake. It was Strix. Being with Strix was like being in a waking dream.
“Got it,” Strix said with satisfaction. When she withdrew her arm and hand, dangling from her fingers was a mass of iron-gray material that twitched and moved.
“What’s that?” Lizbet said.
Strix sniffed at it, poked it with her finger, and said, “Courage.”
Courage was one of the cardinal virtues. Lizbet balked at the idea that the Outlaw had any virtues at all. “He wasn’t courageous, was he?” she said.
Her tone of voice must have revealed her thoughts. Strix snorted. “If you don’t like ‘Courage,’ call it ‘Recklessness.’ Is that better?” She was now squeezing her fingers into the opposite nostril.
“‘Recklessness’ is different,” Lizbet said.
“Is it? People call it one thing when they like it, but call it something else when they don’t.” Strix forced her arm all the way inside again. This time she drew out something sea-green, no bigger than a grain of barley. “‘Empathy,’” she pronounced it.
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