"Be still, and be on your feet before I kick you into the fire, unnatural thing."
The old woman's lips wriggled back from her few remaining teeth in a doglike sneer, and now, Susan realized, she and the witch-woman were back where they had been at the start: ready to claw each other's eyes out.
"Raise hand or foot to me, you impudent cunt, and what leaves my house will leave handless, footless, and blind of eye."
"I do not much doubt you could do it, but Thorin should be vexed," Susan said. It was the first time in her life she had ever invoked a man's name for protection. Realizing this made her feel ashamed . . . small, somehow. She didn't know why that should be, especially since she had agreed to sleep in his bed and bear his child, but it was.
The old woman stared, her seamed face working until it folded into a parody of a smile that was worse than her snarl. Puffing and pulling at the, arm of her chair, Rhea got to her feet. As she did, Susan quickly began to dress.
"Aye, vexed he would be. Perhaps you know best after all, missy;
I've had a strange night, and it's wakened parts of me better left asleep. Anything else that might have happened, take it as a compliment to yer youth'n purity . . . and to yer beauty as well. Aye. You're a beautiful thing, and there's no doubtin it. Yer hair, now . . . when yer let it down, as ye will for Thorin, I wot, when ye lay with him ... it glows like the sun, doesn't it?"
Susan did not want to force the old hag out of her posturing, but she didn't want to encourage these fawning compliments, either. Not when she could still see the hate in Rhea's rheumy eyes, not when she could feel the old woman's touch still crawling like beetles on her skin. She said nothing, only stepped into her dress, set it on her shoulders, and began to button up the front.
Rhea perhaps understood the run of her thoughts, for the smile dropped off her mouth and her manner grew businesslike. Susan found this a great relief.
"Well, never mind it. Ye've proved honest; ye may dress yerself and go. But not a word of what passed between us to Thorin, mind ye! Words between women need trouble no man's ear, especially one as great as he." Yet at this Rhea could not forbear a certain spasming sneer. Susan didn't know if the old woman was aware of it or not. "Are we agreed?"
Anything, anything, just as long as I can be out of here and away.
"You declare me proved?"
"Aye, Susan, daughter of Patrick. So I do. But it's not what I say that matters. Now ... wait... somewhere here ..."
She scrabbled along the mantel, pushing stubs of candles stuck on cracked saucers this way and that, lifting first a kerosene lantern and then a battery flashlight, looking fixedly for a moment at a drawing of a young boy and then putting it aside.
"Where .. . where .. . arrrrr.. . here!"
She snatched up a pad of paper with a sooty cover (citgo stamped on it in ancient gold letters) and a stub of pencil. She paged almost to the end of the pad before finding a blank sheet. On it she scrawled something, then tore the sheet off the spiral of wire at the top of the pad. She held the sheet out to Susan, who took it and looked at it. Scrawled there was a word she did not understand at first:
Below it was a symbol:
"What's this?" she asked, tapping the little drawing. "Rhea, her mark. Known for six Baronies around, it is, and can't be copied. Show that paper to yer aunt. Then to Thorin. If yer aunt wants to take it and show it to Thorin herself - I know her, y'see, and her bossy ways - tell her no, Rhea says no, she's not to have the keeping of it." "And if Thorin wants it?"
Rhea shrugged dismissively. "Let him keep it or bum it or wipe his bum with it, for all of me. It's nothing to you, either, for you knew you were honest all along, so you did. True?"
Susan nodded. Once, walking home after a dance, she had let a boy slip his hand inside her shirt for a moment or two, but what of that? She was honest. And in more ways than this nasty creature meant.
"But don't lose that paper. Unless you'd see me again, that is, and go through the same business a second time."
Gods perish even the thought, Susan thought, and managed not to shudder. She put the paper in her pocket, where the drawstring bag had been.
"Now, come to the door, missy." She looked as if she wanted to grasp Susan's arm, then thought better of it. The two of them walked side by side to the door, not touching in such a careful way that it made them look awkward. Once there, Rhea did grip Susan's arm. Then, with her other hand, she pointed to the bright silver disc hanging over the top of the Coos.
"The Kissing Moon," Rhea said. " 'Tis midsummer."
"Yes."
"Tell Thorin he's not to have you in his bed - or in a haystack, or on the scullery floor, or anywhere else - until Demon Moon rises full in the sky."