The Hex Witch of Seldom (25 page)

The hurting, craving something she could not or would not name. That she had wanted, always wanted, long before Shane had walked into her life.

Bobbi still held the long, slender sword in her hand, the shining blade that craved Bissel's blood … but Bobbi stood as motionless as Shane, trammeled like the dark rider, caught up in a trap made of her own rage. Her mother in front of her—Bobbi wanted to send the sword darting at Chantilly, but she could not do it. Why? Why not? Bissel standing atop the rock behind her—she no longer cared what he did to her. Why was he her enemy? She remembered; he threatened Shane. And there stood Shane, like a dream under a horseshoe moon, and he had been her friend for a while but even if Bissel did not take him he would leave her. Go away to wander. He would never give her—

The something she could not seem to get past. The hurting, wanted thing Grandpap had taken away.

It all whirled through her, a chaos made of hoop skirts and stormwinds and gypsy dancers, Witchie and circling hex-sign cards, Bissel the trickster, Chantilly-Scarlett, Rhett-Shane-dark rider and Grandpap Grant Yandro, which was her enemy? The thought of Grandpap burned in her heart. She saw Chantilly standing stupidly, and Shane, white-faced, struggling to take even one stumbling step—and with a yell made half of despair that she could not attack any of the others, Bobbi turned and lunged at Bissel.

He raised his fiery hammer and struck.

Her own burning anger made Bobbi strong and savage. She felt the blow, but it did not knock her down; it merely kept her from getting as close to Bissel as she wanted, close enough to topple him off the hilltop rock, close enough to try out her sword on his body. She feinted with her bright blade, and Bissel countered with his hammer—she thrust, but could not reach her enemy; the warlock smith shuddered as if something chill had touched him but did not give way; he struck again. Bobbi felt herself staggering. Even rage could not hold her up much longer under such magical battering.

“Bobbi,” she heard Shane's labored voice, close at hand but not close enough, “I can't—help.”

“You damn Yankee, let Melly alone!” Chantilly shrilled. Bobby saw her heaving bosom, her clawing hands as she came running. Bissel flicked a scornful glance at her, motioned with his hammer, and Chantilly seemed to run against an invisible wall. Her emerald-shining skirt swirled, she fell and lay still.

Bissel turned, and his eyes seemed to flame like his weapon, and Bobbi knew that with one more blow she would be downed like her mother. There had to be—some way, some help …

“Witchie,” she whispered. Witchie had made a sort of daughter of her for a while. But it was not enough. There had to be someone who—who loved her more.

Loved her.

All her anger was gone. Hurting and yearning filled her instead. Love. It was the thing she wanted so badly that she could not name it. It was what—her grandfather—had taken away—

“Grandpap!”

Bobbi no longer felt strong enough to stand. She was falling, and she knew she would not get up to face Bissel again. But as she fell she screamed aloud.

“Pap!”

With a vengeful roar and a clap of huge wings, the dragon came down from the distant mountain, out of the black sky, faster than stormwind, out of the maw of the moon.

Bobbi lay on the ground and looked up as it swept over her. It was the dragon with gray hair, the one she had seen once in Shane's eyes, once on an old woman's fortune-telling cards. Immense, with a hard, lean face and leathery wings it flew. Samuel Bissel threw up both his hands when he saw it, not in attack but in hopeless defense. There was a fiery blossom, like a huge, single full-blooming rose, whether from Bissel or the dragon Bobbi could not tell, but it seemed to fill the night sky, fill the world. The dragon's swooping charge never faltered. Nothing could stop it. Bissel gave a throaty cry and threw himself out of its way, off the rock.

And then Shane was springing forward, the dark rider, grace and strength his once again, leaping like a cat as the dragon wheeled past, and Shane had hold of Bissel by the wrist, trying to wrestle the hammer out of his grasp. The smith was strong; he fought back. Bobbi struggled to get up—not to help Shane, not really. It looked as if he didn't need help any longer. She badly wanted to give Bissel a black eye or two for her own satisfaction. But she felt as if she had been beaten up by experts. Too weak and sick to move.

Then she saw her mother get up off the ground. “Damn Yankee!” Chantilly screamed, and she hefted a sizable stone and conked Bissel with it.

Standing behind Chantilly in the tricky moonlight Bobbi thought she saw Witchie. She blinked, gave up, closed her eyes and let it all go away into blackness.

Chapter Nineteen

Bobbi awoke a few minutes later to find Witchie leaning over her. At some time the old woman had found her way back to a supply of cornstarch; in the moonlight Bobbi could see it shining whitely from the accordion folds of her neck. Her pointed hat shone whitely, also, and her long hair, loosened from its braids, and her white robes, and her silver belt; all shone in the moonlight. She was the sorceress. I thought I was the sorceress, Bobbi thought hazily, but she suspected it didn't matter.

“You're in your work clothes,” she mumbled to Witchie.

“And got here with my backside dragging. Too late to do any good.” Witchie was just replacing a blister-pack of smelling salts in the capacious depths of a huge white purse. “But you managed wonderful without me,” the old woman added.

Bobbi eyed the purse suspiciously, wondering if it was capable of producing whatever was requested of it, a magical handbag, like Witchie's attic, or like the staff—

Kabilde.

“Kabilde,” she whispered.

“It's all right.” Witchie seemed to mean what she said, but Bobbi scowled up at her in protest.

“It—it's not all right. I think I—hurt Kabilde, and then the hammer—”

“I said it's all right,” Witchie interrupted, peevish as ever, though a gentler tone underlay the words. “Kabilde will be fine. Just needs rest, is all.” Witchie picked up the staff from where it lay propped across her purse and held it upright, softly stroking its silver ferrule, its globelike handle.

“Kabilde's one to spend himself when it comes to the death wand,” Witchie added.

Bobbi wanted to say something more to Witchie and to Kabilde. Something like, Thanks. But Witchie would have grumbled at her, and there were people standing near, crowding all around, one of them kneeling and holding Bobbi's head on her lap between warm hands, people—

Bobbi stared, and blinked, and shifted her glance, and stared again. No forms behind the forms this time. These apparitions were as real as Shane. And she couldn't look at any of them without her heart's turning to water or freezing into ice. Holding Bobbi's head in her arms, looking down with soft eyes, the madonna. The poet, reaching out to her. The golden hero—Bobbi gazed at him with a twist of her heart and an odd feeling that she had seen him before. The king, standing on the rock with Bissel's hammer in his hand—she couldn't look long at him. The priest, at the king's right side. Lady Death, at his left. She couldn't look long at them, either.

The old gods had come to the Hub.

Witchie hunkered down by Bobbi's side and ran her gnarled old hands down Bobbi's belly and legs and arms. Feeling for injuries, Bobbi thought hazily at first, but it was more as if Witchie had straightened her, smoothed her as she would a rumpled bedspread. Then she placed one hollow palm on Bobbi's forehead. With an intent look in her hazel-yellow eyes she muttered a few words Bobbi could not understand—in German, perhaps. Then she said, “There.”

Then she grumped, “Land's sakes, girl, get up! The Twelve have gathered.”

Bobbi struggled and sat up, feeling with a thrill the touch of the madonna's gentle hands helping her. She hurt all over, every bone aching from the combat with Bissel, but she felt strong enough now to stand. “Is—was—was Pap here?” she asked Witchie or the night. “I—hollered for him.”

The poet reached down and gave Bobbi his hand, helping her to her feet. Once up, she could see the dragon crouching behind the king, and she was glad the strange, pale-faced man who had helped her up had not taken his hand away from hers too soon. She wobbled with a shock that was not fear. The dragon was—Pap. Yet it was not Pap.

From behind her she heard Witchie say, “You are virgin and innocent and hero, Bobbi. And a touch of villain, like everyone. And you have it in you to be madonna and sorceress and poet. Nearly all of the Twelve are in you. Some of us are in everyone. And you are in us.”

Bobbi stared at the dragon and began to understand. Pap was in it. But it was more than Pap.

Witchie stumped to her side and said, “It's your mother's madness in you that makes you see us so clearly. And your father's poetry. And it's the inborn gift that lets you wield the staff.”

She heard Witchie without really listening, for at a small distance from her stood Shane, beautiful in darkness, with his black hat in his hand and the wild forelock of his black hair shadowing his blue eyes. He stood back from her, gazing at her but keeping that distance, like a wary wild stallion. “Bobbi?” he said in his low-voiced, quiet way, asking if she was all right.

It was not going to be easy to set Shane free.

Her mind labored and ached like her body and her heart, trying to sort out shadows from truth. Where was there a home for her, really? The dragon was Pap and yet not Pap, and the poet her father, yet not her father, and the madonna was her mother, but her real mother stood nearby in bare feet and a muddy dress, green polyester silk shining in the moonlight, and her mother had—had plundered Shane's soul from its hiding place, and she, Bobbi, had made Shane a promise.…

Light flooded the pasture, and not from moon or magic, though Bobbi thought at first it might be from magic. There seemed to be many huge stars sending out singular beams. It took her a moment to recognize flashlights, and to blink and squint into the darkness behind them, seeing the silhouetted forms of police.

“Crap,” she muttered, standing still and looking at the cops with eyes prickling with tears, too tired and hurting to run away from them, almost wanting to go with them—but she couldn't go home, not yet, maybe not ever, since she had laid her touch on Shane.…

Gnarled old hands grabbed her—Witchie's. An eyeblink later Bobbi was twenty feet up in the air, tangled in the boughs of a—tree?

There had been no tree on the hilltop before. But there it stood, solid as the mountains, drinking deep at the breast of earth, as if it had been there for many lifetimes of a muck-slinging farmer; there it stood with Bobbi sprawled uncomfortably in its clutches while the officers of the law walked beneath her. Large, oval leaves shielded her from their view. She knew those leaves, though it was maybe a bit too early in the season for them to be so far unfurled, and certainly the tree was too large and sturdy for a—witch Hazel.…

She clutched at Witchie's branches, her mind in a swirling, kaleidoscopic confusion. Looking down as she was on a man who had been a mustang and a dragon who was the old man of the mountain, it should not have surprised Bobbi that Witchie could change shape, but it did. She would have yelped out loud if it were not for the burly cops directly below.

“That's her!” she heard one of the police officers say, and for a moment she cringed. “That's the one run off from the asylum,” the man amplified. “The one in the long dress.”

“You see the girl?” another officer asked.

“Nah. The girl ain't here.”

“Could she've run off when she seen us?”

“We would've seed her. She's probably with the old woman somewheres. The old woman ain't here either.” To Chantilly the cop said, “Come on, ma'am.” He reached out a burly hand to take her in.

Chantilly snatched her arm away from his grip and drew back her hand as if to slap. “Cuff her,” the man said to his partner.

“Wait a minute,” the other replied, and his voice turned courtly as he spoke to the madwoman. “Little lady, you come with us, please.”

Chantilly blinked, then adjusted the world to suit her. “Why, Ashley!” she crooned. “I declare, you do look so handsome in your uniform!” She laid her slender fingers in the crook of the softspoken cop's elbow. His partner offered her his arm on the other side, and the two of them escorted her downhill toward where the car with a star on the door waited.

White petals drifted down from her hair as she walked. On the stone-tipped mound, the dark rider stood and watched her go. And from her hiding place Bobbi also watched.

The remaining officers looked around at the people on the hilltop. “All youse,” one of the cops said heavily at last, “are trespassing. Youse clear out of here, now, or we'll have youse for vagrancy.”

Bobbi could not believe it. Couldn't they see the dragon holding Bissel between its clawed hands? Couldn't they see the mystic symbols glowing on the rock? The rich robes and glinting crown of the king? Couldn't they see by Shane's blue-blazing eyes that he was not just a man? But come to think of it, they had not seen a hazel tree appear in front of all their flashlight beams where no tree had been before. They had not expected to see anything but countryside and runaways and vagrants, and that was what they saw.

The men of the law stood watching for a while as the immortal members of the Hidden Circle moved down the hillside to the pasture bottom. Vagrants shuffling away into the night, that was what the cops saw. They would return to the hilltop as soon as the police went away, and both “trespassers” and cops knew it. After a few minutes the cops turned and left, conversing sardonically between themselves. As their flashlight beams dwindled down the hill, Witchie pulled in her leaves and limbs, pulling herself back into form of an old woman again, shrinking down to her normal stumpy size, and Bobbi found herself standing on the ground again, and the gnarled, crooked old hands released their grip on her.