Fortune's Fool - Mercedes Lackey [68]
Not that he had ever heard of Baba Yaga holding anyone for ransom. It wasn’t as if she couldn’t have anything she wanted. She wasn’t bound by the conventions of “good” witches to use her powers unselfishly. She could be just as selfish as she liked. He’d heard tales that inside that weird hut of hers it was like a hundred palaces rolled into one.
But at bottom she was an evil old peasant woman with more grudges than a cur had fleas, and when an evil old peasant woman of that sort got her hands on a prosperous-looking young man…the results were generally less than pleasant for the young man.
“I don’t suppose,” he asked as he finished the last of his meal, “you’d be able to keep my horse?”
The cave-witch considered that for a moment. “I don’t know why not. There’s a side cave I could use for a stable. There’s plenty of grazing. And if you aren’t back by autumn—”
“If I am not back by autumn,” he said a bit grimly, “then I am dead, and you had best think about using my horse to get yourself as far from whatever is brewing in the north as possible.”
So he left his horse with his new friend, bundled his things on his back, and set off down the road. It wouldn’t be the first time he’d traveled afoot. Even a Fortunate Fool can have accidents, though even accidents generally tended to be the sort that got him where he needed to be at the time he needed to be there. He didn’t expect to be afoot for too long, anyway.
And he hadn’t gotten more than a league down the road when it happened.
The road passed through an area of rocks, where the trees thinned out a bit. There was now open sky above him, rather than branches. The first thing he heard the moment he set foot on that stretch of road was a strange roaring sound. It was something like the wind in the trees—except that there was no wind. Then he heard a wild, high-pitched cackling that made the hair stand up on the back of his neck. It wasn’t sane, that laugh. In fact, it was the laughter of someone who never had more than a nodding acquaintance with sanity.
But he kept going, pretending he hadn’t heard, either, because he had decided that he was going to pretend to be a deaf-mute. He marched down the road, head high, foolish grin on his face as if he hadn’t a care in the world.
He pretended not to know that the roaring, and the cackling, were approaching him from behind. He forced himself not to react as it drew nearer and nearer.
And then—
He found himself knocked flat on his face by a sudden burst of “wind” as the most improbable vehicle in the world shot down the road and skimmed just over the top of where his head had been the moment before.
The thing, and its driver, spun around in a tight circle and landed right in front of him as he picked himself up out of the dirt.
It was a giant grey mortar, the sort that apothecaries and herbalists—and witches—used to grind up ingredients in.
It looked as if it was made of stone, and the pestle somehow hung off the back of it, as if the witch was using it as a rudder. The mortar was fully large enough that it came up to the witch’s waist, and she was not small.
As remarkable as the vehicle was, the rider was even more striking. She had wild, bright red hair, red eyes and skin of a pale green. Tusks protruded from beneath her withered lips, and her face had more wrinkles than an oak tree’s bark. She wore at least three blouses, each a different clashing color, all layered on top of one another, all in various states of tattered, so that the colors of one showed through the holes of another. She had a kerchief tied loosely on her head, but not as a good, modest housewife would, so that none of her hair showed; no, the witch’s bright red hair stuck out in every direction as if squirrels had been nesting in it. There was a black shawl about her shoulders, three more in different colors tied about her waist. It looked as if she had on as many skirts as she did blouses and for the same reason, because all three of them were torn and tattered. Her neck was hung with necklaces