Now she walked to the end of the path, singing the chorus of "Careless Love." As she stepped into the scant light which fell through the open door and onto the stoop, a harsh raincrow voice spoke from the shadows: "Stop yer howling, missy - it catches in my brains like a fishhook!"
Susan, who had been told all her life that she had a fair singing voice, a gift from her gramma, no doubt, fell silent at once, abashed. She stood on the stoop with her hands clasped in front of her apron. Beneath the apron she wore her second-best dress (she only had two). Beneath it, her heart was thumping very hard.
A cat - a hideous thing with two extra legs sticking out of its sides like toasting forks - came into the doorway first. It looked up at her, seemed to measure her, then screwed its face up in a look that was eerily human: contempt. It hissed at her, then flashed away into the night.
Well, good evening to you, too, Susan thought.
The old woman she had been sent to see stepped into the doorway.
She looked Susan up and down with that same expression of flat-eyed contempt, then stood back. "Come in. And mind ye clap the door tight. The wind has a way of blowin it open, as ye see!"
Susan stepped inside. She didn't want to close herself into this bad-smelling room with the old woman, but when there was no choice, hesitation was ever a fault. So her father had said, whether the matter under discussion was sums and subtractions or how to deal with boys at barn-dances when their hands became overly adventurous. She pulled the door firmly to, and heard it latch.
"And here y'are," the old woman said, and offered a grotesque smile of welcome. It was a smile guaranteed to make even a brave girl think of stories told in the nursery - Winter's tales of old women with snaggle teeth and bubbling cauldrons full of toad-green liquid. There was no cauldron over the fire in this room (nor was the fire itself much of a shake, in Susan's opinion), but the girl guessed there had been, betimes, and things in it of which it might be better not to think. That this woman was a real witch and not just an old lady posing as one was something Susan had felt sure of from the moment she had seen Rhea darting back inside her hut with the malformed cat at her heels. It was something you could almost smell, like the reeky aroma rising off the hag's skin.
"Yes," she said, smiling. She tried to make it a good one, bright and unafraid. "Here I am."
"And it's early y'are, my little sweeting. Early y'are! Hee!"
"I ran partway. The moon got into my blood, I suppose. That's what my da would have said."
The old woman's horrible smile widened into something that made Susan think of the way eels sometimes seemed to grin, after death and just before the pot. "Aye, but dead he is, dead these five years, Pat Delgado of the red hair and beard, the life mashed out of 'im by 'is own horse, aye, and went into the clearing at the end of the path with the music of his own snapping bones in his ears, so he did!"
The nervous smile slipped from Susan's face as if slapped away. She felt tears, always close at the mere mention of her da's name, bum at the back of her eyes. But she would not let them fall. Not in this heartless old crow's sight, she wouldn't.
"Let our business be quick and be done," she said in a dry voice that was far from her usual one; that voice was usually cheery and merry and ready for fun. But she was Pat Delgado's child, daughter of the best drover ever to work the Western Drop, and she remembered his face very well; she could rise to a stronger nature if required, as it now clearly was. The old woman had meant to reach out and scratch as deep as she could, and the more she saw that her efforts were succeeding, the more she would redouble them.
The hag, meanwhile, was watching Susan shrewdly, her bunch-knuckled hands planted on her hips while her cat twined around her ankles. Her eyes were rheumy, but Susan saw enough of them to realize they were the same gray-green shade as the cat's eyes, and to wonder what sort of fell magic that might be. She felt an urge - a strong one - to drop her eyes, and would not. It was all right to feel fear, but sometimes a very bad idea to show it.
"You look at me pert, missy," Rhea said at last. Her smile was dissolving slowly into a petulant frown.
"Nay, old mother," Susan replied evenly. "Only as one who wishes to do the business she came for and be gone. I have come here at the wish of My Lord Mayor of Mejis, and at that of my Aunt Cordelia, sister of my father. My dear father, of whom I would hear no ill spoken."
"I speak as I do," the old woman said. The words were dismissive, yet there was a trace of fawning servility in the hag's voice. Susan set no importance on that; it was a tone such a thing as this had probably adopted her whole life, and came as automatically as breath. "I've lived alone a long time, with no mistress but myself, and once it begins, my tongue goes where it will."
"Then sometimes it might be best not to let it begin at all."