Equal Rites

Smith looked at her over his porridge spoon.

“I’m not complaining,” he said. “She—”

“She’s got a long nose,” said Esk.

Her parents glared at her.

“There’s no call to make that kind of remark,” said her mother sternly.

“But father said she’s always poking her—”

“Eskarina!”

“But he said—”

“I said—”

“Yes, but, he did say that she had—”

Smith reached down and slapped her. It wasn’t very hard, and he regretted it instantly. The boys got the flat of his hand and occasionally the length of his belt whenever they deserved it. The trouble with his daughter, though, was not ordinary naughtiness but the infuriating way she had of relentlessly pursuing the thread of an argument long after she should have put it down. It always flustered him.

She burst into tears. Smith stood up, angry and embarrassed at himself, and stumped off to the forge.

There was a loud crack, and a thud.

They found him out cold on the floor. Afterward he always maintained that he’d hit his head on the doorway. Which was odd, because he wasn’t very tall and there had always been plenty of room before, but he was certain that whatever happened had nothing to do with the blur of movement from the forge’s darkest corner.

Somehow the events set the seal on the day. It became a broken crockery day, a day of people getting under each other’s feet and being peevish. Esk’s mother dropped a jug that had belonged to her grandmother and a whole box of apples in the loft turned out to be mouldy. In the forge the furnace went sullen and refused to draw. Jaims, the oldest son, slipped on the packed ice in the road and hurt his arm. The white cat, or possibly one of its descendants, since the cats led a private and complicated life of their own in the hayloft next to the forge, went and climbed up the chimney in the scullery and refused to come down. Even the sky pressed in like an old mattress, and the air felt stuffy, despite the snow.

Frayed nerves and boredom and bad temper made the air hum like thunderstorm weather.

“Right! That’s it. That’s just about enough!” shouted Esk’s mother. “Cern, you and Gulta and Esk can go and see how Granny is and—where’s Esk?”

The two youngest boys looked up from where they were halfheartedly fighting under the table.

“She went out to the orchard,” said Gulta. “Again.”

“Go and fetch her in, then, and be off.”

“But it’s cold!”

“It’s going to snow again!”

“It’s only a mile and the road is clear enough and who was so keen to be out in it when we had the first snowfall? Go on with you, and don’t come back till you’re in a better temper.”

They found Esk sitting in a fork of the big apple tree. The boys didn’t like the tree much. For one thing, it was so covered in mistletoe that it looked green even in midwinter, its fruit was small and went from stomach-twisting sourness to wasp-filled rottenness overnight, and although it looked easy enough to climb it had a habit of breaking twigs and dislodging feet at inconvenient moments. Cern once swore that a branch had twisted just to spill him off. But it tolerated Esk, who used to go and sit in it if she was annoyed or fed up or just wanted to be by herself, and the boys sensed that every brother’s right to gently torture his sister ended at the foot of its trunk. So they threw a snowball at her. It missed.

“We’re going to see old Weatherwax.”

“But you don’t have to come.”

“Because you’ll just slow us down and probably cry anyway.”

Esk looked down at them solemnly. She didn’t cry a lot, it never seemed to achieve much.

“If you don’t want me to come then I’ll come,” she said. This sort of thing passes for logic among siblings.

“Oh, we want you to come,” said Gulta quickly.

“Very pleased to hear it,” said Esk, dropping on to the packed snow.

They had a basket containing smoked sausages, preserved eggs and—because their mother was prudent as well as generous—a large jar of peach preserve that no one in the family liked very much. She still made it every year when the little wild peaches were ripe, anyway.

The people of Bad Ass had learned to live with the long winter snows and the roads out of the village were lined with boards to reduce drifting and, more important, stop travellers from straying. If they lived locally it wouldn’t matter too much if they did, because an unsung genius on the village council several generations previously had come up with the idea of carving markers in every tenth tree in the forest around the village, out to a distance of nearly two miles. It had taken ages, and re-cutting markers was always a job for any man with spare time, but in winters where a blizzard could lose a man within yards of his home many a life had been saved by the pattern of notches found by probing fingers under the clinging snow.

It was snowing again when they left the road and started up the track where, in summer, the witch’s house nestled in a riot of raspberry thickets and weird witch-growth.

“No footprints,” said Cern.

“Except for foxes,” said Gulta. “They say she can turn herself into a fox. Or anything. A bird, even. Anything. That’s how she always knows what’s going on.”

They looked around cautiously. A scruffy crow was indeed watching them from a distant tree stump.

“They say there’s a whole family over Crack Peak way that can turn themselves into wolves,” said Gulta, who wasn’t one to leave a promising subject, “because one night someone shot a wolf and next day their auntie was limping with an arrow wound in her leg, and…”

“I don’t think people can turn themselves into animals,” said Esk, slowly.

“Oh yes, Miss Clever?”

“Granny is quite big. If she turned herself into a fox what would happen to all the bits that wouldn’t fit?”

“She’d just magic them away,” said Cern.

“I don’t think magic works like that,” said Esk. “You can’t just make things happen, there’s a sort of—like a seesaw thing, if you push one end down, the other end goes up…” Her voice trailed off.

They gave her a look.

“I can’t see Granny on a seesaw,” said Gulta. Cern giggled.

“No, I mean every time something happens, something else has to happen too—I think,” said Esk uncertainly, picking her way around a deeper than usual snowdrift. “Only in the… opposite direction.”

“That’s silly,” said Gulta, “because, look, you remember when that fair came last summer and there was a wizard with it and he made all those birds and things appear out of nothing? I mean it just happened, he just said these words and waved his hands, and it just happened. There weren’t any seesaws.”

“There was a swing,” said Cern. “And a thing where you had to throw things at things to win things.”

“And you didn’t hit anything, Gul.”

“Nor did you, you said the things were stuck to the things so you couldn’t knock them off, you said…”

Their conversation wandered away like a couple of puppies. Esk listened with half an ear. I know what I mean, she told herself. Magic’s easy, you just find the place where everything is balanced and push. Anyone could do it. There’s nothing magical about it. All the funny words and waving the hands is just… it’s only for…

She stopped, surprised at herself. She knew what she meant. The idea was right up there in the front of her mind. But she didn’t know how to say it in words, even to herself.

It was a horrible feeling to find things in your head and not know how they fitted. It…

“Come on, we’ll be all day.”

She shook her head and hurried after her brothers.

The witch’s cottage consisted of so many extensions and lean-tos that it was difficult to see what the original building had looked like, or even if there had ever been one. In the summer it was surrounded by dense beds of what Granny loosely called “the Herbs”—strange plants, hairy or squat or twining, with curious flowers or vivid fruits or unpleasantly bulging pods. Only Granny knew what they were all for, and any wood-pigeon hungry enough to