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Defiant as a rooster crowing at sunset, the boy bellowed back, “Yes! Yes! I am a whelp! I am a wolf with teeth like pirates’ swords and I’ll tear you into as many pieces as there are jewels in the Sultan’s vaults! She is not a demon—and I am going back to her. Right now.” He crossed his arms over his young chest and felt pride surging in him like the Star’s blood.
But Dinarzad blazed. Her eyes grew dark as molded dungeons and she gripped his arm, tightening slowly.
“No, little brother. You are not going anywhere.”
The boy woke in a dark, foul-smelling prison.
Dinarzad held a child in each arm, twins bawling their identical hearts out. He was trapped with her in the royal nursery, amid the tortured cries of dozens of infants, more terrible than horned demons at their forges.
Dinarzad, almost a woman grown and ready to be married out of the household, spent her evenings caring for the Palace children, and she ruled them all with a fist stronger than any iron smelted by mortal man. She was a vengeful goddess and her will was absolute. Tonight she was tending the youngest, and for his trespass the boy was tied to her skirts and this wretched room. It was worse, he was certain, than any old dungeon in a King’s castle, and there was no hope of escape as long as his sister’s eyes were fastened on him like scorpion’s pincers.
But the gods are not always unkind to small boys, and fate was to intervene in the pink flesh of a colicky princeling. Not yet understanding its royal duty, the poor thing simply insisted on his mother’s arms. Thus Dinarzad was compelled to deliver the squalling child to the appropriate bedroom.
“If you so much as move a toe from one flagstone to the next,” she warned, “I will lock you away until you rot. One brother will not be missed amid the dozens.”
And with that, she swept out the door, rose-colored silks trailing behind her.
Of course, the boy had disappeared out the north window within three heartbeats.
The bower looked as though a battle had been fought there, pitch tossed from battlements and soldiers in formation crushing all underfoot. The white blossoms were in tatters, hanging like peasants’ rags on snapped boughs. Their supper had been strewn everywhere, and he saw that he had dented his water flask against a gnarled root when Dinarzad had snatched him away. The ruin of the flowers touched him most, the oleander torn petal from petal, scattered onto the dirt. The place where he had heard tales that still burned like lamp oil inside him was destroyed, ransacked like a fine house.
And the girl was nowhere in sight.
He searched over all the hiding places he knew in the vast Garden, through the hedges and rose trees, the lily ponds with their ululating bullfrogs, the olive groves and the borders of the fruit orchards. She was gone, disappeared, and all the stories with her.
The boy sat down heavily on the rim of a bronze fountain, whose water trickled gently into the night. He put his golden head in his hands, reproaching himself for lack of care, that he had let himself be caught, found missing. He was an impossible thief and even more hopeless protector. But then, he thought to himself, Prince Leander was also caught, so perhaps he could be forgiven.
He looked up in his despair, and the moon floated through his sight like a great paper lantern. And as the clouds passed over it, a single wild goose arced over its vast face, tracing a graceful path in the night. He heard it call, lonely and foreign, like a jade flute, and sighed deeply.
The goose sounded again, this time very near him, and the boy realized that it was no bird which called to him, but the dark-eyed girl, who was hiding behind a slender young cedar not far away. His heart flew upward like a duck taking flight from a still pond, and he ran to her, stopping just short of clasping her in his young arms. She looked bashful and embarrassed, her black eyes downcast.
“How did you learn to call like the wild water birds?” he asked eagerly.
“I told you. I have fed them and talked with them since I was a child—there was no one else. They… sometimes they spread their wings over me on winter nights when it is very cold, and we rest together under the hard stars.”
The boy again resisted the urge to embrace her, and instead clapped her on the shoulder as he had seen his father do with his comrades.
“You told me, but how could I believe it? Someday you must teach me!” he announced. “But first, the story! Continue the story! I must know what happened to the Prince now that the Witch has finished her tale!”
The two stole away from the fountain, which was, after all, a poor hiding place. They ducked into a grove of sweet-scented cedars and the girl settled in.
She smiled up at him, a strange, feline grin.
“You are wrong, though. The Witch had hardly begun…”
GRANDMOTHER FOLDED HER ARMS LIKE AN OLD stick-bug, smiling her thin smile and stroking my hair. I still remember her voice, and how it wrapped around that dark cellar, clawing at the walls and licking into the massive locks at the same time that it softened my fear like a spinner wetting thread between her lips.
“So you can change like that, even now? Right now?”
“Yes, I could.”
“Could I do it?”
“You will never go to the cave now, my love. You will never touch the light inside Liulfr, or inside the dead Star. You will be a witch of leaves and grasses, at best: you will make love-potions and cold-cures and gout-softeners for those who can pay you, and look up at the sky, and tell a young girl whether her husband will have light or dark hair, and deliver her baby when the time is right for it, and you will bury her when the time is right for that, but that is all.”
I swallowed that, chewing on it like a strip of hide. Finally, I grunted. A weak witch was better than no witch at all.
“Could you do it to another person?” I asked suddenly.
