Once Upon a Time: New Fairy Tales Paperback(17)

? Tanith Lee ?

out as apt as her cooking, she might even get rid of his pain for good.

Then some few minutes after eating he noticed his leg felt better.

“It was in the soup, then, the medicine?”

“Quite right,” she said. “And in what I gave you at noon.”

He had tasted nothing, and stupidly thought it was relief at this interval that calmed his phantom leg. He supposed she could have poisoned him too. But then, she had not.

“Great respects to you, Missus,” he said. “I’m more than grateful.

May I take some with me when I go?”

“You can. But I doubt you’ll need it. There’s another way to tackle the hurt of your wound. That’s the first secret. But I won’t be showing you until tomorrow’s eve.”

He was relaxed enough he grinned.

“What will all this cost me?”

“It will,” she said, “be up to you.”

At which, of course, he thought, I’d best be careful, then. God knows what she’s at, or will want. But the fire was warm and the leg did not nag, and the stoop of dark beer, that was pleasant too. Well, she had bewitched him, in her way. He even incoherently dreamed of her that night. It was some courtly dance, the women and the men advancing to and from each other, touching hands, turning slowly about, separating and moving gracefully on . . . There was a young girl with long golden, golden hair, bright as the candlelight. And he was unable to join the dance, being old and crippled; but somehow he did not mind it, knowing that come the next evening—but what the next evening?

The succeeding day, at first light, he noticed the large pawmarks of wolves in the frost by the witch’s door, and a tiny shred or two that indicated she had left them food. There had been no nocturnal outcry from the goat or chickens. Another bargain?

Everything went as before. Today the goat even nuzzled his hand.

It was a nice goat, perhaps the only nice goat on earth. The chickens chirruped musically.

? 65 ?

? Below the Sun Beneath ?

When the sun set, she called him again to eat.

She said, “We’ll come now to the first secret. It’s old as the world.

Older, maybe. And once you know, easy as to sleep. Easier.”

Probably there was more medicine in the food—his resentful leg all day had been charming in its behavior—but also tonight she must have put in some new substance.

He woke, having found he had fallen asleep as he sat by her fire, his back leaning on the handy wall.

She was whispering in his left ear.

“What?” he murmured.

But the whispering had stopped. She stood aside, and in the shadowy sinking firelight she was like a shadow herself. The shadow said, in its young, gentle and inexorable voice: “Easy as that, soldier.

Nor will you ever forget. Whenever you have need, you or that wounded leg, then you can.”

And then she slipped back and back, and away and away, and he thought, quite serenely and without any rage or alarm, Has she done for me? Am I dying? But it was never that.

He floated inwards, deep as into any sea or lake. And then he floated free . . .

Children dream of such things. Had he? No, he had had small space for dreams of any sort. Yet, somehow he knew what he did. He had done it before, must have done, since it was so familiar, so known, so wonderful and so blessed.

He was young. He felt twenty years of age, and full of health and vigor. He ran and bounded on two strong, eloquent legs, each whole and perfectly able. He sprang up trees— ran up them, impervious to pine-needles and the scratch-claws of branches, leapt from their boughs a hundred feet above and flew—wingless but certain as a floating hawk—to another tree or to the ground below. Where he wished, he walked on the air.

The three gray wolves, feeding on bits of meat and turnip by the witch’s door, looked up and saw him; only one offered a soft sound, ? 66 ?

? Tanith Lee ?

more like amused congratulation than dismay. Later a passing night bird veered to give him room, with a startled silvery rattle. A fox on the path below merely pattered on. Later he went drifting, careless, by three or four rough huts, where a solitary man, cooking his late supper outdoors, stared straight through him with a myopic gaze. Blind to nothing physical—he was dexterous enough with his makeshift skillet—the woodlander plainly could not detect Yannis, who hovered directly overhead. Even when Yannis, who was afterwards ashamed of himself, swooped down and pulled the man’s ear, the man only twitched as if some night-bug had bothered him. A human, it seemed, was the single creature who could not see Yannis at all.