Wizard and glass - Stephen King [68]
The nervous smile slipped from Susan’s face as if slapped away. She felt tears, always close at the mere mention of her da’s name, burn at the back of her eyes. But she would not let them fall. Not in this heartless old crow’s sight, she wouldn’t.
“Let our business be quick and be done,” she said in a dry voice that was far from her usual one; that voice was usually cheery and merry and ready for fun. But she was Pat Delgado’s child, daughter of the best drover ever to work the Western Drop, and she remembered his face very well; she could rise to a stronger nature if required, as it now clearly was. The old woman had meant to reach out and scratch as deep as she could, and the more she saw that her efforts were succeeding, the more she would redouble them.
The hag, meanwhile, was watching Susan shrewdly, her bunch-knuckled hands planted on her hips while her cat twined around her ankles. Her eyes were rheumy, but Susan saw enough of them to realize they were the same gray-green shade as the cat’s eyes, and to wonder what sort of fell magic that might be. She felt an urge—a strong one—to drop her eyes, and would not. It was all right to feel fear, but sometimes a very bad idea to show it.
“You look at me pert, missy,” Rhea said at last. Her smile was dissolving slowly into a petulant frown.
“Nay, old mother,” Susan replied evenly. “Only as one who wishes to do the business she came for and be gone. I have come here at the wish of My Lord Mayor of Mejis, and at that of my Aunt Cordelia, sister of my father. My dear father, of whom I would hear no ill spoken.”
“I speak as I do,” the old woman said. The words were dismissive, yet there was a trace of fawning servility in the hag’s voice. Susan set no importance on that; it was a tone such a thing as this had probably adopted her whole life, and came as automatically as breath. “I’ve lived alone a long time, with no mistress but myself, and once it begins, my tongue goes where it will.”
“Then sometimes it might be best not to let it begin at all.”
The old woman’s eyes flashed uglily. “Curb your own, stripling girl, lest you find it dead in your mouth, where it will rot and make the Mayor think twice about kissing you when he smells its stink, aye, even under such a moon as this!”
Susan’s heart filled with misery and bewilderment. She’d come up here intent on only one thing: getting the business done as quickly as possible, a barely explained rite that was apt to be painful and sure to be shameful. Now this old woman was looking at her with flat and naked hatred. How could things have gone wrong with such suddenness? Or was it always this way with witches?
“We have begun badly, mistress—can we start over?” Susan asked suddenly, and held out her hand.
The hag looked startled, although she did reach out and make brief contact, the wrinkled tips of her fingers touching the short-nailed fingers of the sixteen-year-old girl who stood before her with her clear-skinned face shining and her long hair braided down her back. Susan had to make a real effort not to grimace at the touch, brief as it was. The old woman’s fingers were as chilly as those of a corpse, but Susan had touched chilly fingers before (“Cold hands, warm heart,” Aunt Cord sometimes said). The real unpleasantness was in the texture, the feel of cold flesh spongy and loose on the bones, as if the woman to whom they were attached had drowned and lain long in some pool.
“Nay, nay, there’s no starting over,” the old woman said, “yet mayhap we’ll go on better than we’ve begun. Ye’ve a powerful friend in the Mayor, and I’d not have him for my enemy.”
She’s honest, at least, Susan thought, then had to laugh at herself. This woman would be honest only when she absolutely had to be; left to her own devices and desires, she’d lie about everything—the weather, the crops, the flights of birds come Reaping.
“Ye came before I expected ye, and it’s put me out of temper, so it has. Have ye brought me something, missy? Ye have, I’ll warrant!” Her eyes were glittering once more,