Quite Contrary (35 page)

I’d half expected a doddering crone, but she was merely late middle aged, with just enough white in her bushy hair that I couldn’t tell what color it had started. Lined and leaning to the heavy side, she moved stiffly. The faded blue dress and stained white apron completed the picture of not looking like I expected.

What did I say to a witch? Scarecrow got there first by not caring. “We just had to follow the maze instead of walking through the walls. Did you put them up? They twist everything around!”

Scarecrow reached her arm out and flapped it through empty air. Whatever she was doing, it made the witch snap, “Stop that.”

The witch? You’re so quick to assume, Mary.
“Are you a witch?”

The oldish woman stared at me. Her expression was sullen and guarded, and could have been hiding anything. “No.” She sighed. Her shoulders sagged with defeat, and she flapped a hand theatrically by her head. “If I’d had time to learn as much power as a witch, I’d be much older than I am. I’m a widowed great grandmother who’s toying with magic she’ll never master. I haven’t half the power you have already, little girl. The puppet’s impressive. It’s not fair for a twelve-year-old child to have skill like that.”

“I didn’t make her. None of this power is mine. It’s a curse. I’m being chased by a Wolf.” I sighed too, straightening up. I could breathe properly again. “I’m sorry if he breaks down your spells, but if we don’t get moving again he’s going to catch up. Come on, Scarecrow.”

“You don’t mean a regular wolf. You mean the Wolf of stories, the one who’s all wolves rolled together.” She had an accusing, suspicious tone, and an impressive poker face. Just the kind of sour puss you knew was a distraction. It beat me over the head every time she spoke.

“He’s right behind me, and I mean
right
behind me. Come on, Scarecrow,” I repeated. I took a few wary steps and grabbed Scarecrow’s hand. My legs were getting firm again. I got moving in the direction Scarecrow hadn’t been poking.

The witch who didn’t want to admit it gave an irritable grunt. “He won’t be right behind you much longer. Come on,” she invited. She started walking too, and under those heavy skirts I spotted boots as heavy and ugly as mine. Raising her voice sharply, she added, “Don’t think I can stop him. I don’t have that kind of power. But fifteen years of rigging this forest with wards, glamours, amazements, and every damn thing will give you a good head start. Maybe a day or two.”

Scarecrow was already pulling me in the same direction, and she was the only guide I had. God, and I so badly wanted to be a day or two ahead of the Wolf again. I stomped after her.

We walked, and we certainly did seem to be navigating a maze. Scarecrow and the witch would turn at the same time in response to nothing I could see, over and over. It didn’t feel like we were getting very far at all, but I refused to be the ‘Is it much farther?’ girl. I didn’t have to make conversation anyway. Scarecrow kept wanting to touch things, and the old lady would swat her hand away, or snap, “Leave that alone!” A little mossy, carved stone, a bundle of rotted papers under a tree root, something hidden in a bush that I couldn’t see at all—it could have been magic or just trash to my eyes, but apparently this place was a mine field.

“Miss—” Rat started to say, but I reached up and pushed him back into my hood hanging behind my neck. He didn’t argue.

“Little girl, can you control your puppet?” the witch asked when Scarecrow bent down and tried to lift up a rock to peek under it.

“Not often,” I answered in exactly the same tone. Scarecrow put the rock down anyway, clasped her hands behind her back, and got walking again. She seemed downright sedate.

The pause in conversation lasted only seconds. “What’s your name, child?” the witch asked.

“What’s yours?” I responded. Rat shifted in my hood, but stayed down.

More silence. She smiled. “A smart girl is a wary girl, especially out in the woods. I don’t get many visitors out here, and I haven’t encouraged them, so I don’t know what to tell you to call me. My family called me Gramma Bathory. You can call me whatever.”

“I’m Mary Stuart, then,” I answered. I looked down at my feet and kicked a rock out of the way.

“Just how old are you? You look too young to get a wolf’s attention.”.

“Twelve. You’re never too young to be murdered, and all he cares about is that I’m wearing a red dress,” I grumped.

“Mmm. Twisted creatures,” she spat in irritation. Then, she really did spit on the ground, which I admit made me grin.

We arrived. I hadn’t seen it coming. The clearing was big, big enough for a house that itself wasn’t small and a field for a larger garden. I should have seen it, but we turned a corner and walked right out into the open. The magic maze really worked, then. God, I hoped it worked on the Wolf. I strangled down the flutter of panic and the feeling of him watching me from the trees right behind us. He couldn’t be stopped, but he could be delayed. I had time again. I
had
to have time again.

The house looked better than I’d expected. The roof was a sloping mess of wood beams, tar, and hay, but the walls had been built out of solid, even bricks of stone, and the waist-high fence of piled stones seemed to be in good condition. From inside that fence, a sheep stared at me with the stupidest expression I’d ever seen on anything alive. Well, they couldn’t all be magic talking rats.

There was no real gate, just a big gap in the wall, and Mrs. Bathory led us around to it, then up a flagstone path to her front door. More carvings and hanging clumps of roots and feathers. More spells, no doubt.

“Your puppet stays outside. Her spell will make a mess of mine,” Mrs. Bathory said.

She acted like it wasn’t a big deal, and as she unlocked the door and bustled inside, I pointed at a spot under a window. I gave Scarecrow a pointed look. “Sit.”

She did.

“It’s not like you to leave her alone out here,” Rat whispered behind my neck.

Mrs. Bathory was inside. “I’m not leaving her alone,” I answered almost as quietly. Reaching back, I scooped Rat out of my hood and dropped him into Scarecrow’s hands. “I want someone watching from the outside. If I don’t get myself out of here, you’d better.”

“Do you trust anybody?” Rat asked.

“I’m trusting you,” I replied, and turned away so that I didn’t have to talk about it. Stepping through the front door, I shut it behind me.

“You can’t stay for long, I’m sure,” Mrs. Bathory said as she bustled through her living room into the kitchen.

I didn’t answer. I swung my legs but took a lot of time with each step, hands behind me as I peered around. It made me look like Scarecrow, but looking like Scarecrow was a great excuse to lollygag. The living room was more than a living room. It had big glass windows, a couple of old recliners, a wooden dining table with its own chairs, and weaving stuff. Stuff like a loom, a spinning wheel, one of those little spindle things, and a basket full of needles from the embroidery to the knitting sizes. A sealed up jar laying in one of the chairs was packed with twine soaking in a dark red dye. This was all obviously more than a hobby. Instead of normal spider webs, fake webs made of string hung in the corners, with tiny bones and dolls and other bits of junk caught in them.

“You really don’t like visitors, huh?” I asked.

“Depends. For every lost little girl there’s two superstitious lumberjacks, a witch hunter, three talking animals with a taste for meat, and a boy named Jack who gets himself killed messing with my spells. I decided I wasn’t missing much if I put up better fences.”

Apparently some people really did freak out if a stranger got to see how messy their home was, because she shoved packages into a freezer, ran water over dirty dishes, and packed jars up into the top cabinets.

I leaned against the frame of the wide arch that joined the living room and kitchen. “This is a little beyond fences, isn’t it?” I said. The kitchen was almost as bad. The freezer—huh, she had running water and electricity—was tied to the floor with little string webs and covered almost every inch in smeary red symbols. The edges of the windows had their webs, and more in the corners, of course.

“You’ve never met a witch hunter, then,” she retorted, mouth pursed up sourly. “My grandchildren don’t visit anymore, so I’ve got no reason not to practice. That practice is about to pay off for you, so I wouldn’t complain. Are you hungry?”

“Well, yeah,” I answered. That had been a sudden change of subject. I supposed grandmothers were supposed to be eager to feed little girls.

“First things first, I guess,” she said, wiping smeary traces of food off her hands onto her apron. She stumped out past me into the living room.

“Ever done any weaving, Mary?” she asked as she stepped over to the loom. While I watched, she pulled wooden frames apart, sliding strings everywhere. An elaborately patterned cloth was scooped out and tossed in a hamper.

“It’s been a good century or two since girls were taught that where I’m from.” She had to know that. She had electricity!

That got a very brief chuckle. “The honest type, huh? You’re about to get a fast education in using a loom and witchcraft at the same time. Not that there’s much to know. Have a seat.”

I had a seat. The rocking chair with its little cushion supported me comfortably enough. The loom was a nightmare of strings and wooden arms and panels, though. I couldn’t have guessed where to begin. So, I told her just that. “Not even a clue where to begin, Mrs. Bathory.”

She handed me an elongated spool of green thread. I’d seen plenty of spools for sewing, but this thing was the size of a football. “Pass it through one of those lines of threads. Any of ‘em. Doesn’t matter,” she instructed.

I did. She reached over my shoulder and pulled a lever down on one of the wooden boards. The strings slid through each other, changing positions and fastening the thread I’d just run in place.

“Try a different one,” she said.

I picked up a blue spool and passed that through another line of strings that ran out at an angle. Reaching up to the wooden board at the head, I pulled down its lever. Strings shifted, and now the green thread and red thread were tied together at the base, but still strung out on the loom. “Huh,” I mumbled. Where was this going? I passed the blue spool through a third row of strings and pulled down the lever. My thread slid down, twisted over itself to tie back to the green thread at a different angle. Weird, but kind of cool. This loom made spider webs.

“Keep it up. The bigger, the better. The more of yourself you put into it, the more powerful it’ll be. My maze will slow down your wolf getting in, and this will slow him down a lot more when he tries to follow you out.”.

I felt a tug on my hair and heard a whisking of scissors, and tightened my arm muscles to keep myself from punching her by reflex. She’d cut off some of my hairs right at the base, and dropped them in a little tray in front of me on the loom. “When you’ve got a good net going, add those anywhere. That’s all you need to know. The loom will do the rest,” she said. Dropping the scissors into a basket, she turned and stumped back into the kitchen.

Through the door, I could see her opening up cupboards and pulling out a bag of flour and jars full of less obvious ingredients, so I turned my attention back to the loom.

I tried the green thread through another row and pulled the shutter. That just left the thread bent at a weird angle. I pulled up a purple spool, and ran it through the first row, pulled, and now the arms of the green thread were tied together. This was fast creating a bizarre three dimensional tangle, so I tried another row. And another. Okay, if I kept running a thread through one row it twisted all over the place, but switching to a new row created a knot.

I heard a crackling sound, and glanced into the kitchen. Mrs. Bathory was frying something in a pan. I could smell the breading, but I couldn’t see what, because her back was turned to me. I fished my hairs out of the basin and stuffed them into my sock. It was the only place I had, really. Then, I unwound some string from the darkest red spool and snapped it in several pieces. Laying one between the loom’s strings, I pulled a shutter, and the red thread got tied onto the mass, its dangling end making it look out of place. Good enough. I ran a few more lines of webbing, then added another string, and after that, put one in every other click of the shutter. I had quite a net forming.

With a click, Mrs. Bathory turned on a lamp behind me. I looked around. The window outside had turned dark. How long had I been working? I looked back at the loom. If I could get it off the machine, I could use the cobweb I’d made for a net. Huh. Guess I’d been enjoying myself more than I thought.

“Leave it there. Eat,” Mrs. Bathory said.

I climbed out of the chair, stretched my stiff legs, and slid into a different chair at the table. She laid out plain wooden plates with strips of fried chicken, a corn salad, and a pile of mashed potatoes. The mashed potatoes smelled good.
So
good. I hadn’t eaten all day, had I?

“What do you drink, Mary?” she asked as she set out a couple of glasses. No, they weren’t glass. They were plastic, with raised designs on them too worn to be made out. My mom had some like these from giveaways for popular movies.