Tender Morsels (47 page)

By the time the fire had been lit, and begun to crackle and converse like a third and more cheerful person among them, Branza was somewhat recovered. The cat came from wherever it had been hiding and leaped up to sit on the arm of Miss Dance’s chair.

‘When you first brought us back, me and Mam,’ she said, ‘I remember, on the bank of that stream’—Miss Dance nodded from the hearth where she knelt—‘I remember you said that ten years was as close as you could come to pulling the two times back together.’

‘I did. I was working at the very limits of my powers to achieve that much, too.’

‘Well, that made me think. It sounded to me as if,
before
you had
got it back to ten years, the times between the two places had run on very much
further
than ten years.’

Miss Dance nodded, and leaned forward to give the burgeoning fire a good shaking-up with the poker.

When she had sat back, Branza ventured, ‘And so it seemed to me that what you had to do, to bring the times as close as you did, was to
undo
quite a number of years. The way a person unpicks a seam, so as to let out a dress.’

Miss Dance raised her firelit eyebrows, but nodded again.

‘So that you had to un-happen I-don’t-know-how-long of Mam’s and my lives that had already happened. Which, I thought, we
did happen
that other way—we did stay, and you did not come through from this world and fetch us until much later in our lives, if you had not managed to pull the differences back, back to ten years.’ She covered her face, leaving only her mouth clear. ‘Am I talking nonsense? I am so tired!’

‘You are making perfect sense, my dear. Let me see, and you were hoping that I could lift you from this world, where your life is running one way, and place you back on that seam that I unpicked, there to live out your life with your mother.’

Branza nodded.

‘And without your sister.’

Branza swallowed. ‘If that was the price, yes.’

Miss Dance looked to the fire again, but it was burning most spiritedly now, and did not require her attention. She hung the poker on its nail and rose, weariness evident along her every limb, and sat in the armchair opposite Branza.

‘I only thought,’ said Branza hopelessly, ‘that if you had so much powers over time, and over people moving between worlds, you might be able to do all sorts of things that seem impossible when I first look at them.’

Miss Dance laughed low, her teeth glinting in the firelight, and nodded.

‘Perhaps to send me there,’ Branza went on, ‘or even, only, to bring my friend Wolf into this world. I would not mind that he was of dream-matter. He was real enough for me.’

‘Either of those is, strictly speaking, within my powers,’ Miss Dance said to the fire. ‘But what one
can
do and what one
ought
—those are often two different things. Annie Bywell will be able to tell you that. In all one’s movements and transformations, one should be working
with
the directions of nature, not against them.’

‘But nature gave my mother her heart’s desire,’ said Branza, not hotly, but puzzled still.

‘Nature did, and I do not question that it was of benefit, in terms of her safety and your own.’

Branza met Miss Dance’s gaze. ‘What was she keeping us safe from? Has she told you? Wild animals, was it? And improper things that men do?’ She pushed the memory of Teasel Wurledge from her mind.

‘If your mother has not told you, I will not tell it you either; I will not breach her protection of you.’

‘I am a grown woman.’

‘Then go like a grown woman and ask her. She may tell you; she may not; but it is her story to tell, not mine.’

‘And you will not send me back to that place of safety—or to whatever world is mine? To my own heaven?’

She heard it in her own voice: her last bit of hope and longing, the appeal she was making to this mysterious lady’s pity.

The lady looked upon her a long time. Then the fire crackled and spat sparks out onto the hearthstone, and she turned away to take the little broom there and sweep them back.

‘A heart’s desire,’ she said, sitting back when she was done, ‘it sounds like a fine thing. And your mother’s was, as she wished, the best place to raise her babies in: a kind world with no enemies, gentle upon children and full of natural wonders and pleasant society. Having walked there, I can vouch for your mother’s good heart; I have been to other heavens that were nowhere near so sweetly made. I do understand, Branza’—here she reached across the space between the chairs, and her white hand, surprisingly warm, rested momentarily on Branza’s—‘I do understand your sadness in being here, in the true world. I took you away from your home most abruptly because I was under such strain, and your grief will be greater for it, for the
suddenness with which you have had to adjust to a world without your wolf, without all those littler wild things that you loved and that seemed to love you back, without all the kind people. You are enduring a great loss.’

Branza sat silent, stiff with disappointment, seeing those animals, that house, those brown-haired people, all too clearly.

‘But heart’s desires? My dear, I see by your misery—by this very request you are making—that you know more of true men’s and women’s hearts than once you did, than your mother’s world permitted you to see. Such chipped and cracked and outright broken things they are, are they not? They have their illnesses too, and their impulses. And hearts are not always connected well to minds, and even if they are, minds are not always clear and commonsensical. A heart may desire a thing powerfully indeed, but that heart’s desire might be what a person
least
needs, for her health, for her continuing happiness.’

Branza hardly heard the words—these would be the parts of the conversation she would be unable to relate to Urdda later, for she was listening only for the tone, the gentleness, the understanding coming from this woman, who had seen inside her to her raw, sore soul and was taking such care not to damage her further.

‘My mother,’ she managed to say. ‘Mam was healthy and happy there—and so were we! Well, I was. Urdda always yearned for the true world, even before she knew of it, I think.’

‘In your mother’s case . . .’ Miss Dance’s eyes looked blind, reflecting the fire’s orange. ‘She had suffered so greatly, you see—but that is her story to tell you. But I think she was in such deathly pain—and none of it deserved—that when she came to that place, the precipice there . . .’

‘The moon-babby took pity on her, are you saying?’

Miss Dance took up the poker and stabbed the fire slowly, thoughtfully. ‘Something like that. I will not pretend to know exactly what happened.’

‘And I am not so sad as Mam? Or not so undeserving of my pain?’

Miss Dance sat back, a smile on her face that Branza could
never have imagined there when they first sat to talking—all the tiredness of the world was in it, and yet all the warmth, too, and the humour, and the generosity. ‘You are pure-hearted, Branza, and lovely, and you have never done a moment’s wrong. But you are a living creature, born to make a real life, however it cracks your heart. However sweet that other place was, it was not real. It was an artifact of your mam’s imagination; it was a dream of hers and a desire; you could not have stayed there forever and called yourself alive. Now you are in the true world, and a great deal more is required of you. Here you must befriend real wolves, and lure real birds down from the sky. Here you must endure real people around you, and we are not uniformly kind; we are damaged and impulsive, each in our own way. It is harder. It is not safe. But it is what you were born to.’

They sat awhile; the fire popped and whispered as Miss Dance’s words sank into Branza’s mind, and spine, and grieving heart.

Miss Dance regarded her, her face in the firelight sparely fleshed, strong-boned, decisive of nose and chin. Her eyes, and the cat’s beside her, seemed to glitter with equal intelligence. ‘You may never be entirely happy; few people are. You may never achieve your heart’s desire in this world, for people seldom do. Sit by enough deathbeds, Branza, and you will hear your fill of stories of missed chances, and wrong turnings, and spurned opportunities for love. It is required of you only to be here, not to be
happy
. But believe me, you will have a better life here than in the other world, where your mother’s happiness was the ruling principle—and the idea of happiness she held at
fifteen
, no less! She never refreshed or nurtured it by exposing herself to any truth, or hardship, or personality more complex than her own daughters’. And while I can understand why she did not, given the strength of her fears and the distresses of her past, I cannot—almost—’ She laughed a little. ‘Were it up to me to forgive or no, I could not forgive her, I do not think, for depriving herself so, and you and Urdda with her.’

It was not as if Miss Dance had been talking; it was as if she had been reaching into the clear stream that was Branza’s life and one by one turning over the rounded stones at the bottom. Deeper and
deeper she had gone, until she was unsticking stones that had been fast in the stream-bed, turning them and rubbing them with her long white witch-fingers so that the mud broke off them and was carried away. And now she was done, and the last, deepest, stone was excavated and washed clean, and the water ran clear among them, and all their surfaces, all their colours and veins and smoothness and imperfections, could be seen afresh.

‘Miss Dance?’ Branza said, but then her mouth would not pronounce such formal words as came to her mind. ‘Forgive me,’ she said, and pushed herself up out of her chair again, and bent and kissed Miss Dance’s high, smooth forehead, and then both hollows of her cheeks. ‘I will let you sleep,’ she said. ‘I have stolen so much of your time.’

Miss Dance laughed, low and quite as a witch should. ‘Better you should steal my hours, my dear—my days, even—than that you should stoop to hedge-witchery to achieve your heaven.’

‘So,’ said Urdda as the two sisters followed the footman’s lamp down the quiet streets of Rockerly to their night’s accommodations. She had been asleep when Branza returned to the parlour, and even with the goodbyes and the sharp outside air, she did not feel properly awake. ‘Will you be coming home with me? Or will you go home to Mister Wolf? You are so sprightly in your step, I think the second.’ Even in her sleepy voice there chimed a little sadness, and even with her sleepy ears she heard it.

‘Oh, no,’ said Branza cheerfully. ‘You will not have to travel alone.’

‘I won’t?’

‘No, no. I am coming with you.’ She glanced at her startled sister, then reached through the slit of her cloak to take Urdda’s hand and tuck it into the crook of her own elbow. Then she laughed, and the laugh echoed back from the walls of Rockerly’s houses. ‘I may not be happy,’ she said, ‘but I will
be
.’

‘You
seem
very happy,’ said Urdda crossly.

‘Do you wish I were not?’ said Branza. ‘Do you wish I would glum and gloom for you, as you’re used to?’

‘Of course not. Only—’ Only she did not know what. She felt three-quarters asleep; she could not be sure she was not walking in a dream.

Well, in a dream it hardly matters what one says, does it? ‘I don’t know what you are talking about, Branza. I think Miss Dance has magicked you a little bit mad.’ But she squeezed Branza’s arm hard, and she leaned against her sister as well as she could while they walked, so that Branza might know how glad she was to hear it, to know that she was staying, to keep her in the same world.

When Urdda and Branza returned to St Olafred’s, all went well for a time. Much of Liga’s anxiety faded once she knew that not only would Branza stay by her in this world, but that she would do so willingly, in response to whatever Miss Dance had explained to her. And the two daughters were not so cross-purposed as before; instead of seeming to blame Urdda for the way the town life operated and the thicket of customs and prohibitions she must negotiate, Branza, with many a roll of her eyes and an exasperated sigh, would consult her younger sister as to the manners to employ with different people and the shades of signification given off by garments and gestures, glances and tones of voice. The two of them still squabbled, but the fear had gone from Branza’s side of their arguments and the frustration from Urdda’s, so that often Liga would find herself smiling as she listened, as ghosts of her littler, less troubled daughters flashed and chattered in the air between the two young women.