12. Chapter 12
“You look like you could use some help.” She seemed cut from a twisted fairy tale, engraved with wrinkles, revoltingly embellished with moles sprouting whiskers. Her grizzled hair sprung out in every direction, her eyes pouched and sunken, the waterlines pink as a rabbit’s.
I will admit her brazen hideousness gave me certain pause, but I felt sure that it was frank assessment I found in her rheumy eyes, not evil schemes. She hardly stood taller than a child. I could knock her flat on her backside if I had a wish to.
My chest heaved as I looked up at her. “Can you offer it?”
“For a price.”
Is she evil? I asked, my blood still pumping hard, shunting through muscles. How long before we had a pack of monsters upon us?
I don’t know. She’s not a demon.
In a second, I sized up where I’d fallen.
Some sort of overgrown garden. I lay in a tangle of vines, the damp earth sprouting sharp shards of green leaves every few inches.
She’d been tending her plants by moonlight.
A thatched little cottage stood some twenty feet away with merrily yellow windows and a chimney belching smoke. Then why does she live here?
She might not have a whole lot of choice. A hag can hardly live in the human world without men with pitchforks eventually showing up on her doorstep. They’re not inherently good or bad. They’re whatever they choose to be.
Serich stood beside me, one hand clapped to his shoulder, where blood flowed freely through his fingers. “We have no coin to pay you.”
Her laugh was more of a wheeze, and she didn’t remove her gaze from mine. “I’ve no use for coin.”
Serich looked down at me, apprehension etched upon his face, and I stared back at him, still quivering in the dirt. She could want anything. A firstborn child, a limb.
“Yes or no?” she rasped.
An eyeball, my life, indentured servitude. She could demand any of it, but Serich bled profusely and there was nowhere else to hide where we might survive the night.
“Yes,” I said, before It and Serich could open their mouths to speak for me. Whatever her price, I would pay it. What choice did we have? The screams were getting louder and the earth quaked ominously, as though soon something would be upon us.
She smiled, and it was not a pretty sight. “Inside,” she said, stooping to collect an upended basket a few feet behind her, from which it appeared a bounty of vegetables had spilled.
I scuttled forward to help her without much conscious thought, rounding up the cabbages, the spears of carrots, the hairy onions. When I rose and handed her the basket, she caught my chin between her thumb and index fingers, peering into my eyes.
“They’re coming,” Serich called as It gave a nervous twitch, and they were right, I could feel the angry shuddering of the earth beneath my feet.
“Inside,” she said again, releasing me.
Serich waited for me to race past before following up the garden path and through the shabby cottage door, which did not look strong enough to protect us from a horde of demons.
The hag hobbled behind, sedate, slow as the drip of molasses. Serich jittered at my side. I had the impression he’d like to dart back out there, sling her over his good shoulder, and haul her inside, the sooner to shut the door. And yet she took her time, even as the screams grew deafening.
“Shut it!” she yelled out the open door before banging it shut behind her with an ancient hip, vegetable basket dangling from her forearm.
And now the night was alive with screams, animal hissing, voices calling, haunted echoes, howls of fury. As if they had the cottage surrounded.
“Nothing can get inside unless they’re invited,” the hag said, watching Serich and I back away from the door in terror.
“My wards have always held.” She hooked a thumb over her shoulder.
“Moved here instead of the first stretch of wood because these ones are generally quiet, but once in a blue moon there’s a night like this.
They move on and take it somewhere else eventually. ”
I tucked my arms around myself, trembling with the beat of my own blood as I looked around.
The cottage was no more than one large room; parlor, bedroom and kitchen blended together.
A fire roared in the hearth, its dancing sparks sending light winking and bending off rows of glass jars and phials and their sinister contents stuffed inside a bookcase.
Her bed stood smashed into a corner, covered with a quilt.
There were a few worn little chairs and a bench grouped around a table.
A dead bird ready for plucking dangled from a hook near the pantry, luminous cobwebs in every corner.
Her cottage did not seem like the home of an evil woman.
Save the potions, it was little different than the cottages in Monde’s End. Maybe a bit dustier.
I glanced at Serich to parse his thoughts about her nature and started guiltily when I found him still nursing his shoulder. “Come here.” I knelt, pawing through my satchel to find the clothes covered in faerie blood.
The shirt he wore had to be sawn off with one of my blades, as he couldn’t lift his shoulder.
The hole I’d put in him was a nasty one, deep and dark with tattered edges.
I tore off a strip of faerie blood-soaked material and pressed it to the wound, looping it over his back and beneath his armpit to keep it covered.
His pulse fluttered at the side of his neck like a trapped bird, a breath hitching in his throat. He smelled like musk and muck and sweat.
“I’m sorry,” I told him, my palm flat against his ruined shoulder. “I couldn’t think what else to do to wake you up. I thought if you felt real pain you might come back.”
He covered my hand with one of his. “I don’t accept your apology. You saved me.”
I shook my head as if shaking off his thanks.
“I didn’t do that, It did. All I’ve done is maim you.
” And I pressed an impulsive kiss into his forehead, heedless of the grime upon it, which his sweat had turned into rivulets of mud.
He slid his arms around me, crushing me against his chest, his heart pounding beside mine.
“I thought that was it,” he whispered in my ear, smoothing back frazzles of my hair.
“So did I.”
The hag bustled about, dropping the basket on the table, shrugging out of the shawl around her shoulders. “We need to discuss my payment.”
I stood, smearing the mud off my lips with the back of my hand, and It shrewdly sized her up when I turned to face her. “What is it that you want?”
As It appraised her, so she evaluated me, running a careful, probing eye from my filthy shoes up to my mud-caked face, as if she were trying to squint beyond the grime. “Your youth.”
No, It spat, with an immediacy that surprised me.
“My youth?” I asked, as though I’d misheard.
“Yes. Yours.” She offered me a yellow smile. “Just a day or two.”
No, It said again, louder that time, for it had felt me actually considering the bargain.
It’s just a day or two, I reasoned. Without her Serich and I would be dead. What’s a day of lost youth compared to being killed? I would be gone without her; you’d be sent inside another host. You should be kissing her feet.
You think I don’t want out of this empty doom? Find another way. One without such a high cost. You’ll be old and weak, vulnerable for days around some hag you barely know. If she kills you, she’ll never have to give your youth back. Have you considered that?
If you have another idea I’d love to hear it. I think I trust her.
Like you trusted the baker, It said, with exquisite scorn.
I only have your word that he was a murderer, I retorted.
“There is a presence in you,” the hag said, gravel in her voice. “I feel him. He doesn’t like my price.”
“He doesn’t like much of anything.”
She reached for my hand, greenish veins ridged along the back of hers. “Does he speak for you?” she asked, as though she disapproved.
“I speak for me.”
Her hand was soft, fondling my young flesh with greedy fingers. “And what say you?”
I cast a nervous glance behind me at Serich, who swallowed so hard I could see the jolt of his Adam’s apple bobbing.
“Will you have mine in her stead?” he asked, stepping forward. “Youth is youth. There’s only two years difference between us.”
She didn’t spare him a glance. “No. Hers.”
I can have her heart out in a second, It said spontaneously.
And then her charms and wards would break and Serich and I would find ourselves surrounded. She asks a fair exchange.
The hag looked at me as though she could hear the heated words hissing inside my head.
“Okay.” I squeezed her gnarled hand and nodded. “It’s a deal.”
There was a needle in her other hand before I knew it.
The point pierced the pad of my middle finger, where a dot of blood welled.
She pressed it against her withered lips, looking up into my eyes.
I braced myself for the years to hit me all at once, the aches of age, for my skin to loosen and puddle, my back to curve into a hunch.
For my teeth to rot out of my skull, my vision to go filmy.
And quite suddenly, I was looking up at me, one side of my young face stained a vivid, autumnal orange in the firelight.
I wished she wouldn’t display my own body so boldly as she examined what her bargain had bought her.
Her hands drifted along my bare calves as if she were caressing a lover, exalting in my flesh.
My mud-caked pants were puddled in the corner.
I looked as though I’d clawed my way out of a grave.
Dirt crusted my face, my lips red and flaking, my hair a ragged knot at the back of my head. None of it seemed to trouble the hag.
“So filthy,” she mused, watching dried dirt crumble all around the bare legs that used to belong to me as she ran her hands against them. “You tried to disguise your scent?”
Is this truly what I sound like? I wondered. The voice was off; it was me but not me. The same arcs in pitch, the same tenor, yet still so foreign.