Wizard and glass - By Stephen King Page 0,68

woman saw the look and laughed. “Don’t like the sound of the truth, do yer? Few do, missy. But that’s neither here nor there; yer auntie was ever a trig one, and she’ll have done all right out of Thorin and Thorin’s treasury. What gold you see of it’s none o’ mine . . . and won’t be none o’ yours, either, if you don’t watch sharp! Hee! Take off that dress!”

I won’t was what rose to her lips, but what then? To be turned out of this hut (and to be turned out pretty much as she had come, and not as a lizard or a hopping toad would probably be the best luck she could hope for) and sent west as she was now, without even the two gold coins she’d brought up here? And that was only the small half of it. The large was that she had given her word. At first she had resisted, but when Aunt Cord had invoked her father’s name, she had given in. As she always did. Really, she had no choice. And when there was no choice, hesitation was ever a fault.

She brushed the front of her apron, to which small bits of bark now clung, then untied it and took it off. She folded it, laid it on a small, grimy hassock near the hearth, and unbuttoned her dress to the waist. She shivered it from her shoulders, and stepped out. She folded it and laid it atop the apron, trying not to mind the greedy way Rhea of Cöos was staring at her in the firelight. The cat came sashaying across the floor, grotesque extra legs bobbling, and sat at Rhea’s feet. Outside, the wind gusted. It was warm on the hearth but Susan was cold just the same, as if that wind had gotten inside her, somehow.

“Hurry, girl, for yer father’s sake!”

Susan pulled her shift over her head, folded it atop the dress, then stood in only her drawers, with her arms folded over her bosom. The fire painted warm orange highlights along her thighs; black circles of shadow in the tender folds behind her knees.

“And still she’s not nekkid!” the old crow laughed. “Ain’t we lahdi-dah! Aye, we are, very fine! Take off those drawers, mistress, and stand as ye slid from yer mother! Although ye had not so many goodies as to interest the likes of Hart Thorin then, did ye? Hee!”

Feeling caught in a nightmare, Susan did as she was bid. With her mound and bush uncovered, her crossed arms seemed foolish. She lowered them to her sides.

“Ah, no wonder he wants ye!” the old woman said. “ ’Tis beautiful ye are, and true! Is she not, Musty?”

The cat waowed.

“There’s dirt on yer knees,” Rhea said suddenly. “How came it there?”

Susan felt a moment of awful panic. She had lifted her skirts to crawl beneath the hag’s window . . . and hung herself by doing it.

Then an answer rose to her lips, and she spoke it calmly enough. “When I came in sight of your hut, I grew fearful. I knelt to pray, and raised my skirt so as not to soil it.”

“I’m touched—to want a clean dress for the likes o’ me! How good y’are! Don’t you agree, Musty?”

The cat waowed, then began to lick one of its forepaws.

“Get on with it,” Susan said. “You’ve been paid and I’ll obey, but stop teasing and have done.”

“You know what it is I have to do, mistress.”

“I don’t,” Susan said. The tears were close again, burning the backs of her eyes, but she would not let them fall. Would not. “I have an idea, but when I asked Aunt Cord if I was right, she said that you’d ‘take care of my education in that regard.’ ”

“Wouldn’t dirty her mouth with the words, would she? Well, that’s all right. Yer Aunt Rhea’s not too nice to say what yer Aunt Cordelia won’t. I’m to make sure that ye’re physically and spiritually intact, missy. Proving honesty is what the old ones called it, and it’s a good enough name. So it is. Step to me.”

Susan took two reluctant steps forward, so that her bare toes were almost touching the old woman’s slippers and her bare breasts were almost touching the old woman’s dress.

“If a devil or demon has polluted yer spirit, such a thing as might taint the child you’ll likely bear, it leaves a mark behind. Most often it’s a suck-mark or a lover’s