Yellowcake - Margo Lanagan [13]
A golden light played against the wall, opposite the room she fought in. I stepped into that light, and drew my love after me into it, and held her to me with both arms, that she should see her tormenter overcome.
The room was a storm of golden hair. Through the beat and fog of it I saw the wooden beams of the witch’s loom, on which she had been winding my love’s hair as warp, and from which those threads now flailed and loosened. For the rest, for the hairs that had lain about the room in withy-baskets, they were up and about the woman, and those that could not reach her flew and fretted in the airs around, as their sisters bound the old horror in a golden shroud, as they masked her bony face and gaping mouth in shining gold, as they spun and cabled themselves and noosed her evil neck, and tightened, tightening her to silence, trapping the dead breath inside her and shutting the live air out. And the tighter they grew, the limper and quieter fell the witch, until she was nothing but a golden rag, laid to the flags on strands flung down like rushes, and rained upon, snowed upon, covered and blurred by falling strands of my love’s hair, swathes of the golden magic, of the power we had made together out of nothing more than our affections and our selves.
We rode home together, my love astride Goosestep, myself on the leery black, tamed by a harness of hair. We had buried the witch behind us, with stones on her head and heart and a golden net about her to keep her in the ground forever. Several strands we had kept aside, for the purposes of leading us to my father’s castle from this outland, and keeping us from danger along the way. The remainder of the hair had plaited and put itself away in the baskets, and these our horses bore as panniers.
Side by side we travelled, and if the forest ways grew narrow I fell back, so that my love should have the assurance of her sisters running ahead and her betrothed riding behind, as she went through strange country towards her new home, the hair that was left to her light upon her shoulders, soft beside her sun-kissed cheeks, and borne up and flying like so many guardian birds or butterflies, on any breeze happening by.
{ A Fine Magic
Well, in the town where these two beautiful daughters lived there was a fascinator, name of Gallantine. He was neither young nor handsome, but he had no wife and he was as interested as any of the young men were in getting one of the girls—if not the rich elder girl, the more beautiful younger one. Whichever he won, he would be an object of other men’s envy—and even magic-men are not immune to wanting that.
Gallantine did all the things that those young men were trying. First he put himself regularly in the young women’s way, happening by outside their house just as they crossed from door to carriage, or arriving at the edge of the path as they made their daily park promenade. Tall and thin in his dark suit, he lifted his dark hat and lowered his gaze to their lovely feet as they passed.
On one of these occasions, seeing that the mamma’s carry-dog was suffering some kind of skin affliction, he struck up a conversation with her, professing more interest than he truly felt in the care of such animals. Afterwards he sent her a pot of a cream to apply to the dog’s skin. He had magicked the cream both to cure the lesions and to engender tenderness towards himself in any person who touched it. Which ended with my lady’s chambermaid developing quite a crush on him, while Mamma herself, who almost always wore gloves when carrying the dog, came no closer than being able to abide having Gallantine near, where before she had felt a natural repugnance towards his self-conscious bearing, his funereal clothes and his conspicuous lack of associates or friends. The two beautiful daughters, who thoroughly disliked the dog, no more noticed