Lizbet’s heart thumped. The top of the Montagnes du Monde? “Can I see?” she asked.
“No,” Strix said. “It’s too dangerous.”
“Just for a moment?”
“No.”
Lizbet struggled upward, shoving her head between Strix’s arm and body. She pushed the blanket aside with her face.
“Why do I even try?” Strix said. She covered Lizbet’s mouth and nose again with her hand to hold in Lizbet’s soul.
Icy wind lashed Lizbet’s skin, as if it were trying to tear out her soul through her very pores. Her eyeballs were cold when she blinked her eyes. After only moments her cheeks were numb and nerveless. She would not be able to withstand it long. She looked around.
On either side, the crests of the Montagnes stretched to the north and south horizons, an archipelago of granite islands jutting through clouds that concealed the world below. Steep mountainside fell away to the east and west. Above, the sky was black as night, the sun hot and almost white. Strangely for midday, the stars were out.
There was a hole in the sky.
Lizbet almost didn’t see it: a black void in the black firmament. But if she looked closely she could see sunlight glinting on its broken edges. It was large, three or four times the size of the moon. And was the hole moving across the sky as she watched, just a little, from east to west?
She had little time to consider this. In only moments the gale winds chilled her so much she could barely move. Lizbet pulled her head back under Strix and curled herself up against Violette’s back. Strix whispered encouragement to Violette and he walked forward, down the rocky mountainside. For the first time since the journey’s start, they were descending rather than climbing.
Into a world unknown.
Chapter 11
The winds that roared against the eastern slopes of the Montagnes du Monde were no less cold or perilous than the winds on the western side. Lizbet huddled beneath Strix and the blankets for hours, listening to Violette’s hooves going clink-clink, clink-clink down the rocks, feeling the stallion’s muscles move beneath her. By the time Strix shook her shoulder and told her it was safe to sit up again, they had come far down the mountainside.
Lizbet sat up, rubbed her eyes against the light, and looked around. Violette was walking on a downward trail through dense forest, but the forest trees were . . . odd. They wouldn’t quite come into focus.
One sort of tree looked like a spruce from a distance, but the closer you got, the more you realized that it wasn’t a spruce at all. As Violette walked underneath, Lizbet stretched up and plucked off a shoot to examine it.
Instead of needles, the twig was clothed in soft azure feathers. The stem was not a twig of green wood, but a steel buttonhook. When Lizbet looked closely at the other forest trees, they proved to be equally odd. One had branches made of rakes. On tips of their tines, tiny umbrellas were opening. Another tree, that at first looked like a willow, was not covered with dangling leaves and branches but paper streamers. Out of the forest floor, instead of fiddlehead ferns, curled rods of black iron erupted, like the tops of wrought-iron fence staves. Yet, now and then, Lizbet saw a real, ordinary tree, a larch or a fir, and here and there a real fern poked its green whorl from the ground.
Once Lizbet might have been simply astonished and charmed by such a curious forest. Now, though, she recognized something familiar in it. Like Violette, or Strix herself, the forest was cobbled together out of all sorts of different things. Like Lizbet’s legs.
“It’s a witch forest,” she said to Strix. “It’s like a forest a witch would make.”
“I like it,” Strix said.
“So there are witches here?”
Strix nodded. “Mrs. Woodcot knows some of them.”
A faint trail led between the trees. Lizbet spotted a footprint in the soft earth near a puddle and jumped off Violette to examine it. But it was only the three-toed splay footprint of a goblin.
After they had descended for several hours through the witch forest, the trees abruptly gave out. They emerged from the wood into a wide alpine meadow broken by rocky outcrops. Strix brought Violette to a halt. It was mid-afternoon. Sunlight fell from behind, casting their shadows onto the rutted road in front of them. The road ran between the falling hills, disappearing into a valley, then emerging again, until it was lost to the eye.
Lizbet’s gaze followed the hills down. Far away, at the foot of the mountains, half seen in the cloudy distance and shimmering air, the land turned flat. A broad plain stretched eastward to a blue and hazy horizon.
“There’s a whole world here,” Lizbet said uncertainly. Might it be as large as the world she’d left behind? The wide sky and the endless earth made Lizbet feel tiny. How was she to find the Margrave’s lost book in all this immensity?
Twilight began early on the eastern slopes of the Montagnes but lingered a long while: the sun, declining in the west, disappeared behind the mountains hours before daylight left the sky. When the sun was long gone, and the sky had finally begun to grow dim, the girls stopped for the night. On a hilltop near the road they found a copse of shrubby trees that looked suspiciously as if they had been constructed of worn-out brooms. The ground was littered with fallen broomstraws and made a tolerable seat or bed. Lizbet and Strix spread out the blankets on top.
They had no way to build a fire. For supper they gnawed off bites of dried ham as tough as leather and chewed handfuls of dried pod beans until Lizbet’s jaws and temples ached. She envied Strix her razor-sharp teeth. She wondered if Strix could replace her teeth with stronger, sharper witchy teeth.
No! she told herself. What was she thinking? She didn’t want to be any more of a witch than she was already.
Besides being tough, the dried ham was intensely salty. It left Lizbet dry-mouthed and thirsty. They had already finished the jug they had brought along, so she set off across the meadow in search of water. The meadow grasses, just now springing from the dead brown mounds of last year’s growth, resembled the braid on soldiers’ epaulets and banknotes scissored into leaf shapes. Lizbet plucked one. It had an engraving on it of an elegantly dressed woman with three chins, and tall white hair hung with strands of beads. Here and there a pink or yellow paper pinwheel thrust out of the turf, spinning on its stick in the dusk. Stars were beginning to appear on the eastern horizon.
The sound of water rattling over stones led Lizbet to a stream. It was clear, and bitter cold. Lizbet found a pool where minnows darted among misty clumps of roots. She lowered the jug into the pool. Water gurgled in.
One clump of roots circled the jug, feeling and exploring it.
Alarmed, Lizbet lifted the jug out of the water and brushed the roots off with her fingers. Immediately the roots whipped back and forth, and vanished. The muddied water cleared. Nervous, but curious, Lizbet reached in and touched another root. It, too, thrashed about, then vanished. This time Lizbet saw that it had pulled back into the streambank. “Come look at this!” she called to Strix.
As Strix looked over her shoulder, Lizbet reached into the water and flicked one root after another with her finger. As she touched them, they pulled back into the bank. Soon the pool was empty.
“You shouldn’t bother strangers,” Strix said.
“Strangers?”
“Witches.”
Lizbet frowned. “Witches? Those are witches?”
“Those are witches fingers,” Strix said. “There are witches that are made of roots, grubs, clay, pebbles, and badger holes. They’re slender, crooked, and hard like wood or stone. They burrow through the earth. Sometimes they stick their fingers out of riverbanks, like willow roots, and tickle the fish. They eat corpses they find in graves and steal bags of coins that misers bury in their gardens.”
Lizbet thought about witches burrowing through the earth beneath everyone’s feet, and shivered. “There are really witches underground?”
she said. She stamped her foot on the ground. It seemed solid enough.
“Don’t do that,” Strix said.
The ground began to rumble and shake. Pebbles danced. Alarmed, Lizbet drew back.
Not a moment too soon. The earth fissured. Dirt sprayed into the air, and amidst the geyser, something thrust up and regarded Lizbet with black depthless eyes. It was terribly thin and twisted and brown like a root and seemed to have four or five arms with dozens of spidery fingers that stretched and branched into tiny threads.
“What have you got for me, sweetie?” she said.
“I . . . ,” Lizbet said. She turned to Strix, expecting help.
Strix was gone.
“Did you bring me a present, dearie?” The witch turned her head to regard Lizbet. Her joints creaked as they moved. “You called me out of the earth to give me a present. What’s my present? What is it, honey? Where’s my present? I want my present.” She swayed forward until her mouth, a yawning dark blot, was only inches away from Lizbet’s face. Her breath smelled of soil. Tiny white grubs crawled over her.
“I don’t have . . . I didn’t know . . . ,” Lizbet said. She backed away.
The earth witch dived back into her hole and vanished. Relief washed over Lizbet. She turned and walked away as quickly as she could without stumbling.
Beneath her feet, a rumbling and shaking. The ground rolled beneath her. Lizbet barely kept her balance. In front of her the earth fountained up. There was the witch. Her bottomless eyes and mouth regarded Lizbet. Lizbet’s heart rattled in her chest. The witch could dig through the earth faster than Lizbet could walk. “You’re rude to run away so fast, honey,” the earth witch said. “You haven’t given me my present yet. I want my present. Are you my present? Should I take you down into the earth with me? I like corpses. Can you be my corpse?”
“No!” Lizbet said. “No! I’m not your corpse. It was a mistake, I didn’t—”
The earth witch’s crooked arms reached out for her. Lizbet swallowed a shriek as cold tendril fingers brushed her skin.
“Here’s a corpse for you!”
Strix’s voice.
An object came hurtling out of the twilight. The earth witch reached up and caught it. It was one of the hams.
“Thank you, baby,” the earth witch said. She cackled. “Come back someday. Bring me another present!” She bent double, dived into the earth, and was gone.
Cicadas and spring peepers, with voices like the brass reeds of spring-wound music boxes, filled the twilight with their singing. A breeze rustled the banknote grass. The evening had returned to normal. Save for the circle of disturbed ground where the earth witch had vanished, there was no sign that anything unusual had happened.
“Thanks,” Lizbet said, her voice shaking.
Strix shook her head. “It’s never good to disturb people you don’t know,” she said.
By the time they got back to the copse of broom trees and Violette, it was almost fully dark. “Oh, Strix, look,” Lizbet said. She pointed down the hillside.
On the distant plains to the east, twinkling lights had appeared.
The dangers and worries of the last day fled in a moment. Lizbet threw her arms around Strix from behind and bounced up and down. “Look, Strix, look! Lights! There must be people here! Maybe even a town. I was so afraid this whole world didn’t have anyone in it. But there are people! If the Margrave took this same route over the Montagnes, maybe he passed through there. We can ask them. We’ll search for clues. We’ll be like inquisitors. We’ll find the Margrave’s book. We’ll save my father. We can do it!”
“You make it sound so easy, all of a sudden,” Strix said.
“Not exactly easy,” Lizbet said. She stopped bouncing. “I know it’s still hard. But it’s always better to be hopeful than despairing. You can at least be hopeful, can’t you, Strix?”
“Uh-huh,” Strix said glumly.
Sunlight woke them on their bed of broomstraws. After a jaw-breaking breakfast (dried ham and dried beans again), the girls set forth. The morning was cool and fair. Towers of white cloud cast vast shadows that crawled across the land below. Strix bounced along atop Violette, singing doggerel:
“One boy wondering,
Two scolds yelling,
Three storms thundering,
Four bells knelling,
Five dogs fighting
Six ships sinking,
Seven swords smiting,
Eight pens inking,
Nine whores bedded,
Ten kings beheaded . . .”
Lizbet thought she’d walk instead of ride. This gave her the chance to practice the fine points of balance on her new legs. They still wobbled, just a little. The last margin of skill, to learn to walk as gracefully as ordinary people walk, eluded her. Through the morning, as they traveled down out of the foothills of the Montagnes toward the plains beyond, Lizbet struggled to relearn the easy gait that she had always taken for granted.
After a while, understanding bubbled up from the secret parliaments of the soul where our decisions are made before we know we have made them. Why did she especially care about walking gracefully, at this moment?
It was the opinions of strangers.
They’d be coming to where those lights had been the night before. She expected houses, people, maybe a country crossroads village, maybe even a town. If she stumbled, or walked awkwardly, the people there would snicker at her. Or, if they didn’t, they would treat her with the too gentle, over-courteous manner that the well-bred reserve for the crippled, that serves in place of an insult.
The thought stopped Lizbet in her tracks. Strix halted Violette and looked back. “Hurry up,” she said. “Or do you want to ride for a while?”
“Strix,” Lizbet said, “isn’t it awful that we care about the opinions of strangers more than those of our friends? I don’t care if I’m awkward on my legs around you, but I’d be all blushes if some stranger I don’t even care about saw me, and smirked. It’s such a shame, isn’t it? I suppose it’s because . . .”
She had been about to say, “. . . because friends trust in each other’s affection, so moments of awkwardness or foolishness don’t matter.” But then she remembered that Strix wasn’t a friend. Lizbet had been acting like a friend to her, because it was the proper thing to do, since Strix’s timely appearance had saved her from the Outlaw.
But now she was thinking of Strix as a friend even when she didn’t mean to.
“It looks like a town built by toddlers,” Lizbet said.
“If toddlers were as big as grown-ups,” Strix said.
It was early afternoon. The road had led them down out of the foothills and onto the plain, where it followed beside a river that meandered through meadows and fields. The road finally brought them to the outskirts of a town, where it turned into the town’s main street. Perhaps this town was the source of the lights Lizbet and Strix had seen the night before.
Lizbet, Strix, and Violette walked warily down the street. Such a town, Lizbet had never seen. Building stones were piled up helter-skelter, ends jutting out. Every wall was askew. Every window was crooked. Not a single angle was square. The town looked like it had been built by a child playing with blocks. Perhaps the streets and sidewalks were supposed to be cobblestone, but instead of being properly laid, the stones had been simply dumped onto the roadway. To walk down the road was to constantly bruise one’s feet on the upturned stone corners. Only the wrought-iron sewer grates were square, soundly constructed, and normal looking.
“Do you think this town was built by witches?” Lizbet asked.
Strix shook her head decisively. “No witch would ever build anything this sloppy.”
By the time they had traveled several blocks into the town, they had not seen a single soul.
“That’s funny,” Lizbet said. “It’s the middle of the day.
Where is everybody?” She yelled, “Hello! Anyone here?”
“We are travelers from over the Montagnes du Monde,” Strix yelled. “We have wonderful tales to tell, of thrilling adventures in our strange, foreign land!”
“We do?” Lizbet said.
“You almost had your soul blown out of you, remember? We fought off a murderer?”
“Those weren’t thrilling,” Lizbet complained. “They were terrifying and horrible.”
“‘Thrilling’ is when awful things happen to someone else,” Strix said. “‘Horrible’ is when they happen to you.”
Their voices echoed against the buildings. Otherwise, nothing broke the silence, save for the twittering of birds as they dug for stray seeds between the jumbled paving stones. When Lizbet looked at the birds closely, they appeared to be made of quilted calico.
“This is eerie,” she said. “I don’t like it.”
“Maybe there was a plague,” Strix said.
“Strix, I can always count on you to say something cheerful.” Lizbet shook her head. “It can’t have been a plague. There aren’t any bodies or skeletons. And anyway, the town hasn’t been abandoned. Weeds and trees would cover an abandoned town, and this town still looks like people live here. Suppose it’s a town of vampires? Maybe they’re all asleep in their coffins or something.” She shivered.
“Don’t be superstitious,” Strix said. “Vampires are just popular folklore.”
Farther up the avenue they came upon a town square framed by lopsided buildings. At the square’s center, water gushed over a pile of rubble that Lizbet supposed might be a fountain. A ridiculous yellow sandstone cathedral tilted to one side so badly that it surely would have fallen over had it not been propped up by an adjoining building that leaned the opposite way.
“Well, hello, little ladies!” a cheerful voice called out. “This must be my lucky day. I never expected a rescue party of beautiful maids like yourselves.”
In front of the cathedral stood a man, his neck and wrists confined in wooden stocks. He was fat-bellied and very tall, seven or eight feet at least. Coarse brown fur, ticked like a hound’s, covered most of his body. He had goat’s legs with hoofed feet, a snuffly wet pig’s snout, floppy ears, and curled horns. His naked pink tail lashed back and forth.
Half-Witch Page 12