Perchta sat back on her heels. “Someone?” she repeated.
But I did not want to tell her the foolishness in my heart. “Do theold gods still come to us?” I asked instead, fingering the edge of the remaining rushes.
“Which ones?”
I knew, deep down, that Perchta did not like Lord Death, and I did not want to reveal anything about what I had learned at his side and hear her disapproval. I wanted these two worlds to remain separate and for me to walk between them.
When I didn’t answer, Perchta went back to her digging. “Some of the old gods remain. Some of them have moved to other worlds or linger in their respective times. Most of them have fallen into a kind of sleep or have put on a new face. The Christ, as you call him, is one of the oldest and most terrible.” She tamped down the earth around her plants. “Mars wears the face of Crusade. But gods like Alchemy are new.”
This must be what Death had meant when he said Death was an office. In this age, Death wore my lord’s face. “How would you command a god?”
“Why would I do such a thing?”
“For greater power. Isn’t that what the church does with Jesus? Isn’t that what magic allows us to do?”
Perchta gave a snort of displeasure. “You just defined power as the means to save someone. If that’s the case, what do you intend to sacrifice for it?”
Instantly, I thought of Death’s comment about using a child or a woman. And how the water did not turn to wine until I killed the mouse. I groaned. “Haven’t I sacrificed enough? I have lost … everything and everyone. It seems all I’ve ever had is taken from me. Surely, I have enough credit.”
“Balance doesn’t work that way, nor does sacrifice. You breathe out to bring it in again. You must bleed to bring forth new life. You shit so you can eat.” She gave a throaty laugh and shifted on her knees, furrowing a trench for seeds.
“Dico vobis nisi granum frumenti cadens in terram mortuum fuerit,” I said, watching her deft fingers scattering seeds.I assure you that unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it can only be a single seed. But if it dies, it bears much fruit.
She shrugged. “The church fathers stole much from what was already known. If you want power, the power to save someone, for example, you must offer an equal sacrifice.”
“Like an animal or …”
“An animal can be a sacrifice, yes. Certainly, a type of magic is built on that kind of sacrifice. But what cost is that to you?”
“It is the cost of life. The blood?”
Perchta shook her head. “No, it is the stain ofspillingthat is your sacrifice. The greater the life you spill, the greater you have sacrificed of your soul, the greater you might then call forth.” She closed over the furrows with sweeps of her open palm. “It is this old, wild magic I am teaching you. Everything in the universe longs for completion and perfection. For balance. You cannot simply take and take, you must return. You felt it when you first began, the price exacted for working was feeling sick, feeling drained.” She stood up out of the dirt and brushed off her hands. “But you began by asking about the old gods. To what old god did you want to speak?”
I shook my head, unwilling to ever say its name again. I could still remember the gleam of his tusks in the moonlight.
She sat beside me in the grass and picked up the basket I’d woven, inspecting the tightness. “Why did you stop? You still have rushes.”
“My fingers hurt,” I said, stretching them out on my knees. They were stained with ink and reddened from the weaving and the damp air.
She gave me a handful of rushes. “See, it all requires sacrifice.” Taking part of them herself, she began deftly twisting the reeds into thick coils.
“It is easy for you now. This is no sacrifice.”
“Only a young woman could say such a thing.” She threaded the twine over the coils as she went, the twine settling easily between hergnarled knuckle bones. “I have spent years of my life weaving. For that matter, I have spent years gathering rushes and planting and spinning and listening to the wind and learning the names of all things and the uses of them. The time I have can be a sacrifice. The attention I give is a sacrifice. Witchcraft is not all blood and bones. Magic is not power, it is balance.”
“If magic needs sacrifice, then why is it so important I know my own borders? Wouldn’t it make sense that I simply pour myself out as the church demands?”
“Nothing valued is nothing worthwhile. You cannot pour yourself out, as you say, and expect your sacrifice to mean anything.” She handed me the basket she’d begun. “Here, finish this. This time with a spell.”
“What kind?”
“Whatever you’d like.” Perchta took my sad bundle of rushes and began again. “You could make an offering to a god, since that’s where your questions began.”
I thought of Mother Superior setting out Communion and her longing that one day she might also be a spiritual mother of the likes of Hildegard. She was so different from Perchta, but often the Mother Superior thought she was helping me. How could she have known that her prayers were for the things I prayed to be freed from? She was a devout woman, born to serve God, and I had been born for no other purpose it seemed than to have that God reject me over and over. My work was never a proper sacrifice, because I was an unholy vessel. But still, I obeyed Perchta and picked up the basket.
I did not think of misery or work. I did not think of anything. Copying as best I could Perchta’s smooth motions, I fell into that lulling focus. We worked in silence, sitting side by side in the grove. The wind whispered through the tops of the trees, and a few deep-throated frogs called from the edges of some brook hidden deep in the forest. The sun was warm on my shoulders, but the breeze carried cold from the mountaintops, swirling through the grove.
I did not see the goddess arrive. I only noticed her once Perchta dropped her basket and stood.
