"Watch Musty, my little sweet one! Tricksy, he is! And tripsy as well, betimes, so he is! Hee!" And off she went, in another gale.
The cat looked up at Susan, its ears laid back, its gray-green eyes wide. It hissed at her. And Susan, unaware she was going to do it until it was done, hissed back. Like its expression of contempt, Musty's look of surprise was eerily - and, in this case, comically - human. It turned and fled for Rhea's bedroom, its split tail lashing. Susan opened the door and went outside to get the wood. Already she felt as if she had been here a thousand years, and that it might be a thousand more before she could go home.
4
The air was as sweet as she had hoped, perhaps even sweeter, and for a moment she only stood on the stoop, breathing it in, trying to cleanse her lungs . . . and her mind.
After five good breaths, she got herself in motion. Around the side of the house she went... but it was the wrong side, it seemed, for there was no woodpile here. There was a narrow excuse for a window, however, half-buried in some tough and unlovely creeper. It was toward the back of the hut, and must look in on the old woman's sleeping closet.
Don't look in there, whatever she's got under her bed isn't your business, and if she were to catch you. . .
She went to the window despite these admonitions, and peeked in.
It was unlikely that Rhea would have seen Susan's face through the dense overgrowth of pig ivy even if the old besom had been looking in that direction, and she wasn't. She was on her knees, the drawstring bag caught in her teeth, reaching under the bed.
She brought out a box and opened its lid, which was already ajar. Her face was flooded with soft pink radiance, and Susan gasped. For one moment it was the face of a young girl - but one filled with cruelty as well as youth, the face of a self-willed child determined to learn all the wrong things for all the wrong reasons. The face of the girl this hag once had been, mayhap. The light appeared to be coming from some sort of glass ball.
The old woman looked at it for several moments, her eyes wide and fascinated. Her lips moved as if she were speaking to it or perhaps even singing to it; the little bag Susan had brought from town, its string still clamped in the hag's mouth, bobbed up and down as she spoke. Then, with what appeared to be great effort of will, she closed the box, cutting off the rosy light. Susan found herself relieved - there was something about it she didn't like.
The old woman cupped one hand over the silver lock in the middle of the lid, and a brief scarlet light spiked out from between her fingers. All this with the drawstring bag still hanging from her mouth. Then she put the box on the bed, knelt, and began running her hands over the dirt just beneath the bed's edge. Although she touched only with her palms, lines appeared as if she had used a drawing tool. These lines darkened, becoming what looked like grooves.
The wood, Susan! Gel the wood before she wakes up to how long you've been gone! For your father's sake!
Susan pulled the skirtof her dress all the way up to her waist - she did not want the old woman to see dirt or leaves on her clothing when she came back inside, did not want to answer the questions the sight of such smuts might provoke - and crawled beneath the window with her white cotton drawers flashing in the moonlight. Once she was past, she got to her feet again and hurried quietly around to the far side of the hut. Here she found the woodpile under an old, moldy-smelling hide. She took half a dozen good-sized chunks and walked back toward the front of the house with them in her arms.
When she entered, turning sideways to get her load through the doorway without dropping any, the old woman was back in the main room, staring moodily into the fireplace, where there was now little more than embers; Of the drawstring bag there was no sign.
"Took; you long enough, missy," Rhea said. She continued to look into the fireplace, as if Susan were of no account... but one foot tapped below the dirty hem of her dress, and her eyebrows were drawn together.
Susan crossed the room, peering over the load of wood in her arms as well as she could while she walked. It wouldn't surprise her a bit to spy the cat lurking near, hoping to trip her up. "I saw a spider," she said. "I flapped my apron at it to make it run away. I hate the look of them, so I do."
"Ye'll see something ye like the look of even less, soon enough," Rhea said, grinning her peculiar one-sided grin. "Out of old Thorin's nightshirt it'll come, stiff as a stick and as red as rhubarb! Hee! Hold a minute, girl; ye gods, ye've brought enough for a Fair-Day bonfire."