By Gregg Glory [Gregg G. Brown]
Chapter Twenty-Three "Sarah, Darling"
"Plimsoul! Hecatomb! Boroshkovic! Walpurgisnacht is upon us!"
Eva, singing an ecstatic song of destruction and vile victory, had returned from the North Country in giddy triumph. Her long black velvet wings unfurled like banners at a half-time show. Eva swooped and circled the isolated house that contained the Casket of Augersaal. Eva shouted the names of her co-conspirators, urging them to wake from their slumbers.
"Plimsoul! Hecatomb! Boroshkovic! Walpurgisnacht!"
Eva swung by the windows of the house's bedroom, peppering them with pebbles, and shouting to wake the dead. One by one, the bedroom lights went on, until the entire upper floor of the house was lit up. Sleepy faces appeared at the windows, yawning like walruses on their rocks, and throwing up the sashes to see what was the matter.
"Plimsoul! Hecatomb! Boroshkovic! Walpurgisnacht!"
Mr. Plimsoul was the first to his window, and when he saw Eva's winged form, and heard her wicked song, a smile like a long crooked string bean came over his thin face. The dwarf, Gar Boroshkovic, was the next to wake in his attic keep, the light of his bedside candle showing his nightcap in the lowest part of the window, and his wary eyes looking out at his mistress, who was doing backflips at that point over the barbecue pit in the backyard. Gar was too short to reach the light switch in his room. Mr. Hecatomb blinked many times, donning his glasses crookedly in the harsh light of his room, and gazed blankly out into the darkness with a dopey indifference available only to the truly near-sighted.
"Plimsoul! Hecatomb! Boroshkovic! Walpurgisnacht!"
Once Eva had seen that they all were roused, she flapped up to the tippy-top of the chimney. Eva put out a buckled boot, and landed flawlessly atop the bricks. She perched there, her elaborate wings folded around her like a happy bat, waiting for the others to assemble in the back yard. Dawn was just coming to the countryside, and a murder of ravens had started to caw from their places in the cypress trees that grew along one side if the yard.
"Walpurgisnacht's more'n a week away, isn't it?" asked a sleepy Mr. Hecatomb.
"But now there will be something to celebrate!" crowed Eva. "The night of our destinies is almost upon us!"
"Eva," said Mr. Plimsoul, stepping out onto the back patio, turning round, and leaning far back to look up at her. "What's the meaning of this? Where were you? What has happened?"
Gar stood beside him, his candle's flame very close to catching the sleeve of Mr. Plimsoul's fancy red robe on fire. Mr. Plimsoul batted the candle out of its holder without even looking, spritzing Gar in the face with hot beeswax.
"Oh, Plimsoul!" Eva nearly sang. "Loyal Hecatomb! And dear Garvin Alexandrevich Ivanovski Boroshkovic from my own country! The Gods of Autumn are upon us! Or, more precisely, upon them!" Eva threw her head back, and laughed a long and throaty laugh. The dawn was coming up behind her, and she seemed like one of those carvings of mermaids on the prows of the old wooden ships-of-the-line. Her wings, swept back behind her as she laughed, formed an angle that suggested the sides of a sea-going vessel, and the dawn wind brought them all the taste of salt from the Traeshurstaene inlet.
"Sounds good," commented Mr. Hecatomb, feeling a bit out of his depth. "But what's it all mean?"
Eva looked down, her brows knitting together as though she were examining a beetle crawling in the dust before her.
"What it means, Eugenius," Eva said to Mr. Hecatomb, "is that the Gods of Autumn, who had been fully waked by the well and by Sarah Tone had the wit to bargain for their permanent freedom from their old debt to the Ancient One. A freedom which the Ancient One, will-he, nill-he, would had no alternative but to grant.
Mr. Plimsoul's eyes grew large. So that's where Eva had rushed off to! When they saw the Gods of Autumn float past the moon, she must have figured out the danger at once and flown after them to stave off disaster. And she had succeeded, but how?
"I see you understand well the danger, Simon," said Eva, turning her attention to Mr. Plimsoul.
"But how in the world did you manage it Eva? You are telling us that the Gods of Autumn will not return in their full manifestations next year, aren't you?"
"I am indeed. I am also telling you, that, as the other agent in their new wager--which they have lost--I and all my brood are safe from retribution. But, oh, the anger of Afagddu! The sinister frustration of ever-weaving Adsagsona! The death-like looks of Aeron and Agrona! Even that wishy-washy river goddess Aerfen had her currents in a twist!"
"You didn't enter into a bet against the gods?" Mr. Plimsoul was more astonished than he had ever been in his life. Someone who would bet against the gods--and win! She must be more dangerous, more treacherous than a hundred witches, a thousand dizzy wizards. Mr. Plimsoul began to feel... trapped.
"Oh, yes I did, Simon Plimsoul. And, what's more, I have won! By the way, Boroshkovic, we must prepare to entertain a guest. Please get the spare room ready. Sarah Tone will be returning to us."
"There has been news on the homefront as well, Eva," said Mr. Plimsoul, hoping to salvage some of his leverage with the Draggonnath. "Excellent news, I think you'll find."
"And what might that news be, my darling Simon?"
"I have extracted certain concessions from the enemy," Mr. Plimsoul stated boldly.
Eva's face registered surprise. "From Doris Pansy Tone?"
"Oh, yes," gloated Mr. Plimsoul. "The old woman cracked like a roasted cashew."
* * * *
Sarah and Eva went everywhere together.
Eva took Sarah shopping and set her up with a sophisticated new look that made the other girls in school totally jealous. At least, that's what Sarah told herself when Missy Quicknass told her in the hallway at school one day that she "looked like a fishing lure." In fact, school was a whole new experience for Sarah. Even though she was invited back onto the choir by a newly repentant Mr. Hecatomb, she refused to join. Such a little choir didn't deserve a voice as big as hers, she said. Eva was taking her to the city to try out for the city choir.
Eva showed Sarah some other interesting things that she could do with her voice. Eva gave Sarah some persuasion spells to learn, and Sarah tried them out on Bart and Basher. Instead of picking on her, now they were trailing around behind her everywhere, carrying her books, and asking what else they could do to help her. Other boys took an interest in her new look as well. Sarah no longer felt too-tall and awkward. Instead, she felt like a "presence," as Eva called it.
"You must project yourself into the room. Others' eyes will come to you. It is only natural, Sarah darling. You are different from them. You and they have very little in common. They know this already, but you are only starting to learn it. One day, you will exult in it."
Even Mr. Plimsoul, disappointed that he still couldn't convince Eva to use Sarah to help them open the Casket of Augersaal, had show Sarah many things about the magical world. Scrolls of power, and dusty bits of trivia that let Sarah see the world around her in a new way. Things and people were put on our path to help us achieve what we wanted, not to become onerous obligations. Still, Sarah didn't tell either Mr. Plimsoul or Eva about the "warrior crown," or how fretful she felt at times about having lost Gilman's pendant.
Walpurgisnacht was still a week away, on Mischief Night, the night before Halloween, so that all of the parents in the Political Committee with little kids could attend and still take their children out trick-or-treating on Halloween. While witches were chasing after the Gods of Autumn, putting out "prairie fires" as Great Uncle Charlie said, Mr. Plimsoul and the others were preparing for the Walpurgisnacht celebrations, and signatures were piling up on the petitions that would re-instate Berny Cottswold to office. Sarah's parents agreed to let Sarah stay at the Plimsoul house for awhile since they were so busy circulating the petition door-to-door. Granny Pansy's protests fell on deaf ears.
Sarah had shown up on Mr. Plimsoul's doorstep wet and bedraggled. Talking with Eva at the well seemed to sort everything out for Sarah in a way that being grilled by Granny Pansy just hadn't. Sarah had to look out for herself, Eva explained, and that way she would be a burden to no one, and beholden to no one.
"Be independent and make your own decisions," Eva had encouraged her. "If you don't look out for yourself, no one will."
Arriving at school on the day of the Walpurgisnacht celebrations, Sarah looked down at her shiny new shoes and clicked her heels together. Being independent had never seemed like so much fun.
* * * *
It was odd being around Eva so much, Sarah noticed. Eva was often away at night, all night, showing up at the quiet breakfast table looking neither worn nor tired, but perhaps unusually thoughtful. She never lost her elegance, not even when she was very angry. She and Mr. Plimsoul seemed to share a close, but antagonistic relationship. And she always remained solicitous of Sarah, which Sarah rather liked.
"Good morning, Sarah," said Eva.
"Good morning, Eva," said Sarah, straightening her posture.
They were eating alone. Mr. Plimsoul had already left for Ridgefield High. Gar Boroshkovic entered and left by the side door noiselessly, just the same as when Eva and Sarah had had that strange dinner together just a week and a half ago. The breakfast table was laid with dark grape juice, Baltic seaweed crisped in an oven, a loaf of black bread, slices of fine sirloin, caviar, and the ubiquitous bowl of black olives. The black candles stood unlit in the slanting morning light.
"What are your studies today Sarah?" asked Eva, pulling a bloody slice of sirloin onto her black plate.
"Just a mish-mosh of everything," said Sarah. "It's kind of boring."
"I understand, Sarah, darling," replied Eva. Unlike most adults, Eva understood how dumb people could be. "We train our hearts to fly, and the world says: slow down, walk! They pretend they are helping you, but really what they are saying, my extraordinary Sarah, is 'Don't leave us behind!'"
Sarah could feel the truth in Eva's words. She recognized envy in the eyes of her classmates, now that she was, as Eva said, "valuing herself." Sarah pulled at her black bread, swatting it into a puddle of poured olive oil. She nodded at Eva, noting how deep and lustrous her eyes were. The portrait of Eva's great-grandmother seemed to have grown more alluring as well, and younger. Later, when Sarah turned toward the door, she noticed that the princeling looked older than he had. Although still not a grown man at all, his face appeared worried by something happening far away in the distance.
"Can you do my hair before the bus comes, like it was Sunday?" asked Sarah. She grabbed for an olive.
"Most assuredly." Eva bit into her steak and smiled.
After breakfast, Sarah and Eva stood before the floor-length mirror in the front hallway. Eva's flexible fingers massaged Sarah's scalp, and pulled through Sarah's fine blond hair blindly. Sarah held a variety of hair pins and fasteners in her hand in front of her while Eva worked. Eva proceeded with her work wordlessly, rapidly pulling and setting Sarah's hair. Sarah could feel Eva behind her, and closed her eyes. Sarah could feel the soft caress of Eva's boa against her cheeks. The boa had lifted over Sarah's shoulders and ran down her velvet dress just as if Sarah herself were wearing it. She drew her free hand along the length of her new velvet dress. Nothing had ever felt so wonderful. Eva combed hard at a knot in Sarah's hair, causing Sarah to cry out into the feathers of the boa, which was fluttering at her face. Eva held up three golden hairs from Sarah's head where the knot had come loose, and wound them tightly against her index finger. Later, thought Eva. Finally, Eva's manipulations came to halt, and she thrust Sarah away from her by the shoulders and told her:
"Tonight, you will have a magic lesson with me, Sarah darling."
"Really?" said Sarah, pleased to think it might be so. So far, all she'd done is sing spells with Mr. Plimsoul, trying to crack that dumb casket open. Sarah was sick of it. She didn't learn anything, because Mr. Plimsoul never even explained any of the words of the different spells.
"Yes, Sarah darling. You are ready."
Sarah looked up into Eva's face in the mirror, and saw that Eva had done their hair the exact same.
* * * *
Sarah strolled into Ridgefield High as if she were the principal's daughter. Her long nose looked down at everyone else, and her hair had been swept into a grown-up style. Because Sarah was as tall as she was, she was able to pull it off, and the new teacher, a Miss Dabbledwight, even asked her collegially where the teacher's lounge was before she noticed the stack of school books in Sarah's arms. Sarah smiled and pointed Miss Dabbledwight on her way.
"God, Sarah," said Missy Quicknass from behind. "Why're you acting so big all of a sudden?"
Sarah looked down her long nose at her best friend, and dismissed her as you would dismiss a gnat.
"You wouldn't understand," she said, and turned away.
Missy wouldn't let the tears appear in her eyes, but they showed in her voice.
"I wouldn't want to understand being such a rotten snob."
Sarah continued to walk down the hall, collecting ogling looks from the boys, and envious stares from the girls as though she were the homecoming hero of a confetti parade. Her pride was like the prow of a great sea-going vessel, and parted the crowd before her.
When Sarah saw Bart Hecatomb in history class, she sang the "Remember Pain" spell that Eva had taught her under her breath, and watched with satisfaction as Bart's hand flew up to where Sarah had smacked him with that rock beside the Mickleswift.
At the cafeteria, Mr. Plimsoul held Sarah's chair out for her and exchanged cordialities with her in front of the other students. While Sarah was finishing her second pudding, Shelly slipped into the empty seat next to her and began a conversation.
"Sarah, why don't you go back home and visit your cousins Abbey and Dar. I know they miss you terribly."
"That's funny, they were always so appallingly annoying. Not a very effective way to get someone to like you."
"Well, they do. Especially Abbey. She feels really sorry about the things she said about your brother's room."
"A million apologies won't mend a single fence," said Sarah. That was a new saying, from Eva's Great-Grandmother. "Tell her I don't care. When her parents get divorced, she's leaving anyway."
Shelly looked up at Sarah critically. "What's gotten into you? You used to be kind of aloof, but now you're just plain mean."
Sarah ignored this comment entirely, and licked the little wooden pudding-spoon clean. A little kid like her would never understand a woman with a destiny, Sarah reasoned. When she got up, she plopped her tray on top of Shelly's and strode away.
Sarah spent the afternoon tying other kids' shoe laces together by gesturing with her fingertips at their feet, and laughing in their faces when the got up to go the their next class and tripped.
* * * *
The fireball left Sarah's hand as if impelled by a rocket-booster.
Sarah's eyes danced as it incinerated a cypress at the edge of the sloping field behind the Mr. Plimsoul's house. This was real magic, not a bunch of scary shadows on a wall.
"Come, Sarah, you must sing yourself feather-light if I am to carry you where we are to go next." Eva plucked another feather from her protesting boa, and blew on it. It stood at wistful attention as Eva whispered the words of the song into Sarah's ear. Sarah took the feather into her hand, and began to sing.
"Feather, feather, in the night Let me linger on earth so light Yhat all I am, all my weight Can flit and fly, not hesitate."
Sarah felt her heels dancing up off of the grass. Only her toes were touching the earth, and if she had to walk, it would had to have been the way you use the tips of your toes in the deep end of a swimming pool, each toe just touching bottom and pushing with a slight forward effect.
Eva swept into the air above them, her wings throwing shadows from the porch light, and making a flapping sound like a kite caught in the wind.
"Quickly," Eva commanded. "Grab my boots." Sarah did so without thinking. They were off! A moment later Eva called down to Sarah. "Do not let go!" The warning was utterly unnecessary. Sarah had to lift her legs to pass over the top of the chimney. She had no idea where they were headed, and the night wind was as cold as a doctor's stethoscope, or a dog's nose that nuzzles your ear when you're asleep.
The night landscape rolled away under their feet, warm houses with snugly lit windows passed by below Sarah's feet. The town square, with its grassy mall, and the Traeshurestane Savings and Loan with its luminous clock rolled by soundlessly. The dockworks stood idle as they had for weeks now. There was a quiet that was deeper than just the darkness. Eva and Sarah were flying after the curfew that had been imposed, and there was no unauthorized traffic on the streets. Traeshurestane looked as peaceful as it ever had.
Eva took them out over the docks, which looked like the dark jumble of an abandoned erector set in the almost absent moonlight. The sea was a scimitar of grey at the edge of her attention, and as Eva turned again, Sarah knew with a dread certainty that they were headed to the ash grove, the clearing, and the waiting well. Sarah's velvet dress clung tightly to her as they flew through the night.
By the time they touched down by the glowing portent of the well, still a steady blue-grey, with a collection of semi-zombified dockworkers milling around as the well hummed them in tune with the Gods of Autumn's will, Sarah's fancy hair-do had come utterly undone. Sarah stumbled over to the well on one shoe, the other having come off somewhere by the docks, and looked over into the well to set her hair back into order. Eva observed her for a moment, watching Sarah's underlit expression in the upwelling glow. Eva wrapped the three golden hairs she had surreptitiously plucked from Sarah's head that morning around her index finger and addressed Sarah formally.
"Acolyte, arise," intoned Eva, her voice half-singing the words. The well amplified and echoed the words behind Sarah as she straightened up to face Eva. Sarah looked at Eva with a proud smile. One day, thought Sarah, admiring Eva's dauntless poise, I will be as beautiful, as accomplished, as feared. "Would you be as you are destined to be, Sarah Tone?"
Sarah felt the words, ambiguous and yet powerful, roll over her. When the echo of Eva's voice in the well had stopped, Sarah answered.
"I would."
"Come kneel before the Draggonnath, child. You will arise a sorceress in your own right."
Sarah did her best to step gracefully to where Eva stood, holding her one shoe in her hand by its flimsy strap. Sarah bowed her head before Eva, and then knelt down on her left knee. Eva chanted, her voice as good as it ever was, the words of the Acolyte's Pledge.
"I pledge to the edge: All I live, to give To this mistress mine Come shade, come shine--- That I may never grieve, but live In my human form divine."
Sarah knew, like choir practice, that she was required to repeat the words. But Sarah, perversely, repeated them backwards, in her best singing voice, altering the meaning of the lyric considerably. The well took in her words and forcefully repeated them until the ground shook, and both women stood looking appalled and disheveled. The men around the well appeared unaffected, waiting morosely on the whim of the Gods of Autumn to scatter them across Traeshurstaene to perform some further mischief.
"In my human form divine, That I may never grieve, but live Come shade, come shine--- Oh mistress mine, All I live, I give To my pledge to the edge."
The golden hairs around Eva's index finger burned as if an electric current were passing through them. This was not the routine response to the binding of Acolyte and Mistress in the old country, but Eva had no doubt that she and Sarah now shared a connection that only death could alter or break. The night winds shifted their hair into their faces, and when Sarah stood, they leaned against each other, exhausted. They shared this unexpected hug for a long moment, Eva feeling surprisingly touched by the gesture, a daughter's gesture toward her from Sarah. Sarah simply bathed in Eva's acceptance of her until Eva gestured for them to sit down on the grass with their backs against the well.
Sarah and Eva had a long discussion then. Not about power or good and evil or Traeshurstaene or Sarah's Granny Pansy and what she might do next, or even about magic. They talked about being women in the world, and how it felt, how they each felt so alone in their extra-ordinariness. Both knew, or thought they knew, just how far they could trust the other one. They never spoke of it afterward, but that boundary got pushed back farther that night.
It was only when the first competing light of dawn was beginning to turn the far side of the world grey, long after the waning sliver of moon had set, that the topic of conversation turned to magic.
"Eva," asked Sarah seriously, as she would ask a friend. "Why am I so drawn to the well? Every time I get confused, or run away from something, or toward something, I wind up by the old well."
"The well was here before the town was here, is what the old people of this place say," Eva began. "And that may be all there is to say about it."
Sarah looked annoyed by this response, but Eva persisted in protesting her ignorance about the matter.
"The well is very ancient magic, Sarah. The waters beneath it connect all the different parts of the town to itself, and then the town to the sea. The Mickleswift and the Crossamum Falls connect to it via an underground river. They say King Arthur himself, and all his knights, once prepared for battle by blessing themselves in its waters. Not that the blessing helped them in that case; it was before their final battle. The waters of the well are treacherous. Just ask the Gods of Autumn. They are tied to the well through some mysterious agency, and even if they had managed to retain their freedom from the Ancient One, still they would have wound up back here at the old well."
As they flew back toward Mr. Plimsoul's narrow, tall house at dawn, Sarah thought she saw a glint of gold on the sea, just to the left of the rising sun.
END OF CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE