A sound caught his attention, and he turned to watch. The moon was rising. The door was opening. He leapt into the saddle and drew me up beside him. He kissed me again. It felt like Giles’s kiss, that night when we danced on the terrace. He laid his head against my breast, where the thing burned, whatever it was. At Mama’s side he left me, then rode forward into the host.
“Someone will come to tell you about it, daughter,” she said. “Puck, if no one else. Do not grieve over us. We’ve played the proud fools for a very long time.” She leaned down and kissed me, too, on the cheek. My lips and my face and my chest all burned from fairy kisses. Then she rode off, down the hill, and I was left standing beside Puck, holding the reins of my horse in one hand. Carabosse jogged past, waving to me. Below, the horses were pouring through the doors like water down a drain. In no time at all they were gone. The door closed. The cold moon looked down at me, unsmiling.
I tied Israfel’s scarf around my neck. If there was something left for me to do, I could not imagine what. I had very little time left in which to do anything.
Puck was kneeling at my feet, holding the boots. I slipped my feet in, one, then the other.
“I’ll see you there,” he said.
Perhaps I nodded. Perhaps not. Far off on the top of a hill was a shimmer, a shifting, as of a time machine going back to its own time. I, too, needed to go to my own time.
“Boots,” I said, “take me home.”
29
I tottered on my feet beside the rose-hedge of Westfaire. Beside me was the shepherds’ well. I could barely see the cat’s-head stone. I put out my hands to catch myself, and they were only bones with a little flesh bagged about them, blue veins running like rootlets across their backs and between fingers with nails all ridged and twisted. I sat down on the coping of the well and leaned against the post. Israfel had told me to go to Westfaire. What could I do in Westfaire? Besides, I had no strength to go anywhere.
I sat there for a long time, accumulating strength, or perhaps losing it. The boots were heavy upon my feet, and I slipped them off. The cloak was heavy upon my limbs, and I took it off as well, letting it lie behind me over the well coping. I sat there in a ragged kirtle, feeling the sun strike my skin through the rents. Ah, well. If I got a bit stronger, I could put the boots back on and go to the Dower House. There might be someone there who remembered me. Or who would take me in, out of charity.
As I sat up, almost determined to go, something dropped from the pocket of my cloak. I picked it up and looked at it, the hank of thread. I reached into the cloak pocket for the packet of needles and found it with one unlucky fingertip.
Thread and needles. To sew, so Mama had said, a cap of wisdom, a thinking cap. If one wanted a thinking cap. Mama hadn’t. Wisdom was the curse of man, she said. In seeking wisdom, we had lost our heritage. I didn’t believe that. We hadn’t sought wisdom diligently enough, that’s how we’d lost our heritage. We preferred cleverness to wisdom. Instead of seeking the truth, we had preferred to believe in easy certainties. Always so much easier to take the lazy, easy way and then pretend God had commanded it. I sighed. I couldn’t make a cap. There was nothing to make it of.
One hand went to my face to wipe frustrated tears away, encountering a corner of the scarf Israfel had given me. Such luxurious silk. Silk for a princess. Real world silk.
I could make a cap of that.
That is, I could make a cap if I could thread the needle. My eyes were weak, half-blind. The needle was small. I fumbled with the hank of thread, moving the almost invisible end of thread back and forth. The needle slipped in my hand; I grabbed at it, pricking myself; and the thread fell into the well.
I sobbed. Weakly. Without conviction. What had made me think I could do it in the first place? My back pressed against the post, I waited to die, believing I could cry myself to death if I just kept at it. There wasn’t much to me anymore. I probably weighed no more than eighty pounds. I thought I would leak my life out through my eyes and then dry up and blow away. That would be the end to it, and I could quit trying.
“What’s the matter, Grandmother,” said a voice. It was a male voice, a young voice. I couldn’t see who spoke.
“I’ve dropped my thread,” I said hopelessly. “It dropped into the well.”
“I’ll get it for you, Grandmother,” the voice said. I hadn’t time to wonder how before I heard the plop of something sizeable dropping into the water. Not a big enough splash to be a person. Or had it been? A quite small person, perhaps?
I heard assorted liquid sounds, plashings and gulpings, then a scratching and grunting, and finally something wet and cool pressed the soaking hank of thread into my hand.
“I thank you,” I said. “But I’m afraid my reach is beyond my grasp. I needed it to sew with and cannot see to thread the needle.”
“It’s a pity we do not have a fairy about,” fretted the voice. “One who would give you keen eyesight as a fairy gift.”
I started to agree with the young man, coming to myself with rather a start. I was a fairy, one who had been taught such spells, a long time ago. I
