Em.” He scratched the back of his head. “I guess times change. Anyway, you need a ride? I can get you closer to Hansen’s place than you are now.”
“No, thank you,” she said, entertaining the dramatic notion that she’d rather walk than ride in a buckboard with a crate of Baugh’s Patent Magicks. “I have to go see about Pap’s lunch.”
Mr. Orta slapped the lines and clucked to the horses. Whistling, he disappeared beyond the bend, and Emily climbed the hill to gather up her paints. The hex she’d painted had dried nicely in the warm sun. She ran her fingers over the bright rough surface. She’d done it up neat, but the plaque was … rustic. Not shiny and precise like a hex of baked enamel from Baugh’s Patent Magicks would be.
Damn that Baugh, whoever he was! After looking to make sure Mr. Orta was gone, she did spit in the dust, and muttered a curse, too. But her curses seemed to be of little avail when it came to Baugh’s.
Over the past year, more and more folks had taken to buying patent magic from Baugh’s. Advertised in colorful chromolithographed catalogues, the products came in shiny pasteboard boxes stamped with gold foil and lined with blood-red tissue paper. They made Emily’s hand-sewn charm bundles and home-brewed potions look shoddy and questionable by comparison. And business had suffered for it.
The past winter had been the worst. Paying Pap’s doctor had left them short on cash-money, and as the hungry snow months had closed around them, Emily had watched Pap’s cheeks grow hollow, his collarbones grow sharp, and his spirit grow tired. She’d gotten them through on mangy possums and stringy jackrabbits, but having to watch him starve … starve! After forty years of hard, honest work! It wasn’t fair. Something had to be done.
And that something was Dag Hansen.
It seemed the perfect solution. All she had to do was get him to marry her, and Pap could live in comfort and plenty. And she was no cheat; she’d take on the job of being a pleasant and loyal wife just as she’d taken on Pap’s magical work. It was just trading one job for another.
But how to catch the prosperous lumberman? Her twenty-fifth birthday was a half year gone, which made her a pretty shelf-worn item. So she’d turned to Pap’s grimoire for help, and she’d gone to the Hanging Oak, and she’d danced naked in the light of the full moon, and she’d made the Ashes of Amour.
Tucking her paints away, she put the hex plaque in the willow basket and didn’t look at it again.
“I only want what’s best for everyone,” she muttered to herself. “And if you’re going to make an omelette, you have to break a few eggs …”
Then she stopped and pressed her lips together, resolving not to think about what she’d have to break to make a marriage.
She climbed back up Moody Ridge to Pap’s cabin, walking as fast as she could, making her legs burn. The exertion felt good. Loose wisps of hair tangled around her lips and ears; she pushed them back with annoyance. The chickens in the front yard welcomed her with low chuckles; she scattered the lazy biddies with a swing of the basket.
Inside, brightly colored bottles shone on the windowsills, and the bones of powerful animals dangled from braids of dyed red string. Scrolls of old vellum and parchment were rolled in stacks, ready to have spells writ upon them with eagle quills in ink of blood red or black gall. Pap’s most important tools hung above the stone fireplace: the ceremonial dagger that he called an athame, and his purple charm cap. Pap himself sat in front of a hugely roaring fire, wrapped in a bright wool trade blanket. As usual, he was surrounded by cats. Most regarded Emily with boredom, but one or two bumped their soft heads against her legs as she came in.
“Em’s back!” Pap smiled a greeting. A barn fire in Pap’s youth had left the right side of his face a cobweb of shining pink scars. When he smiled, his face crumpled like crepe fabric.
There was the sound of movement in the cooking part of the room (while it was screened by a sheet hung from the ceiling, it could hardly be called a kitchen), and Mrs. Lyman poked her head out.
“I made your pap some lunch, and brought some fresh cornbread and a dried-apple pie.” Mrs. Lyman, a mining widow with no