Puck had told me about my smell, but hearing it from her was like being slapped. I felt totally mortal, unbelievably old. If I could have shrunk into wrinkles and ashes, I would have done. She stood apart from me, her back to me, and it was a time before I could answer her.
“Mama, I had to go away. Thomas the Rhymer was gone. I know you wouldn’t have meant for it to happen, but it’s likely Mab and Oberon would have used me for the teind if I’d stayed.”
“Better me than you, is that it?” She drew herself up, proudly.
“They didn’t break the covenant with you, Mama. They would have broken it with me. And you survived. Puck told me when you came back.”
“Puck!” she sneered. “I have a daughter who not only betrays me but also associates with Bogles.”
“Mama!”
“I should never have given you the gifts I gave you. You’re merely mortal! You aren’t worthy of them!”
“Mama!”
She turned away, obdurate, angry.
“Take them back,” I said. “If that’s the way you feel.”
She was sobbing. The Sidhe never cry. “No, the gift once made remains. You are what you are because of me. I try, but I can’t hate you enough to take the gifts away.” And she ran away, back to the courts, leaving me in the meadow staring after her, longing for a mother’s strong love and seeing a child’s weakness. Perhaps she could have loved a fairy child. She had nothing to give me. She had never had anything to give me. It was the other way around, and I understood for the first time what Puck meant. The Sidhe did not have children in order to give but in order to get. Mortals have a strength that they need.
Ridiculously, what came into my head then was the third hank of thread. I had wanted for a long time to ask her about the third hank of thread. Now I could not ask. She was hurt with me, but hurt with something else as well, something she had been worried about when I returned. Something great and mysterious had them all in an uproar. I had needed her, and she needed … what?
“Fenoderee,” I whispered. “Take me to Carabosse.”
He was there, holding the bridle of a horse. We went together, the same way I had gone before. Puck was waiting for us at the cottage door, and as I knocked I heard the susuration of clocks suspended into sudden silence.
“Come in,” she cried. She sat huddled in a chair before the fire. Behind her, all around her, the walls were still covered with clocks. More hung down a hallway I could see through a half-open door, while others stood on the window ledges and in the corners, hung from the rafters, or lay on the table before her with their gears and hands spread out before them.
The only thing I could think of to say was, “There are few, if any, clocks in the fifteenth!”
“Fifteenth what?” she demanded.
“Fifteenth century,” I said.
“Fifteenth, twelfth, first, makes no difference to me,” she said.
Puck squatted on the carpet and picked at a toenail.
“I don’t keep human time,” Carabosse said.
It looked to me as though she kept a great deal of human time, but it seemed inappropriate to say so. “What are they for?” I asked.
“Amusement,” she said. “Entertainment. A hobby.” She got up from her chair, leaning heavily upon a gnarled stick. I sensed little glamour about her. She evidently didn’t care what she looked like. Her hair was sparse; her eyes were bloodshot; her forehead was high and corrugated with deep lines. She had a hump on her back and walked bent in half. She pointed her cane to one of the clocks on the wall and said, “That’s Oberon’s. The one next to it is Mab’s.”
I looked at them more closely. They were fine clocks, very beautifully made. Italian, I thought, eighteenth-century, perhaps. Enameled bronze and gilt, a matched pair.
“They’ve about run down,” she cackled at me.
“Would you like me to wind them?” I asked politely.
“Would I like you to wind them? Ha, ha. So, you’re a jester, are you? Beauty. Come sit by the fire. Have some tea.”
She stumped her way back to her chair, and I took the one across from her, a comfortable rush-bottomed chair which fit me exactly. I had a feeling it would suit any guest exactly. For all its small size and sparsity of furnishings, the cottage was warm and comfortable.
She poured and handed me a cup, cream and sugar, the way I like it. There was no tea of this kind in the fourteenth, either, at least not in my part of the world. It seemed unnecessary to comment on that. It was real human tea. So were the biscuits, real. She and Puck seemed determined to feed me real food.
“You’re getting older,” she said.
I nodded. “That’s my inescapable conclusion, Carabosse. Are you doing something about it?”
“About your getting older?”
“About this package I’ve been carrying about.”
“Shhh,” she said, glancing sidewise at Puck.
“He’s known about it since I was a child,” I said. “Puck knows more about me than either my mother or father ever did.”
She glared at Puck, and he made a face at her, like an impudent boy.
“More than your father, certainly,” she agreed. “Stupid man. Couldn’t think of anything but his ridiculous pilgrimages. Wandering about, gazing at pieces of rotted bodies, thinking that conferred some kind of grace, all the time letting Westfaire go to ruin.”
“It really wasn’t,” I contradicted, a little angered by what she had said. “It wasn’t going to ruin, I mean. The roof was whole. All the walls were sound.”
“Oh, child, I don’t mean the
