The Catswold Portal

She could not see the village below, the land dropped too steeply. She would have gone with Mag but for the sow, due to farrow and as likely to eat her piglets as nurse them. The cottage felt larger without Mag, and she liked its emptiness. Mag’s occasional absence was the only privacy she had. She loved Mag, but the cottage was small. She turned from the window, took up the mop, and began to scrub the wooden floor, mopping first without spells. When she tired of that she sent the mop alone over the boards, making it dodge around Mag’s loom and around their two cots, around the table and their two chairs.

The one room served the two of them for cooking, for sleeping, for weaving and mending, and for canning and drying their garden produce. Its stone walls were smoke darkened, its rafters low, with herbs and onions hanging from them. She seldom went beyond the cottage and garden, except when Mag took her trading to some small village. There were no neighbors; she was used to the company of the beasts. The cottage was the only home she remembered. She thought she was no kin to Mag. Mag was as sturdy as a turnip, always the same and always steady. Sarah was, Mag said, as changeable as quicksilver. In this room Mag had taught her the jeweler’s arts and taught her to weave so she could earn a living, and had taught her the spells for gardening and gentling the beasts.

She could remember nothing of her childhood. That part of her life was without form, and Mag would tell her nothing about her past. When they did travel to some small village among other Netherworlders, the old woman sometimes put the deaf spell on her so that, listening to the villagers’ conversation, suddenly she would lose meaning and know that she had for a few moments been deafened, made unaware. Though Mag would never admit to such spells.

She took up a cloth and carefully dusted the clothes cupboard and the kitchen safe, then knelt to polish a carved chest. She liked to dust by hand, rubbing oil into the ancient wood. But now as she pulled out the drawers of the chest to do the edges, the bottom drawer stuck. Kneeling, she tried to straighten it by reaching underneath.

When she felt papers stuck there, up under the bottom of the drawer, she drew back.

Then she reached again, fingering them. They crackled dryly. When she started to pull them out, one tore. Dismayed, she hissed a spell to free it. Three sheets came loose, the old, yellowed papers dropping into her hand. She spread them on the floor.

She thought Mag would not hide papers unless they had to do with her. How furtive the old woman was. Sarah was afraid to look at them. Maybe she wouldn’t want to know what they would tell her. She closed her eyes, trying to collect herself, torn between excitement and fear.

The earliest thing she could remember about her life was her ninth birthday. She had become aware suddenly, as if jerked from deep sleep, had been riding a horse double behind an old woman who was a stranger to her, had sat pressed against the woman’s soft back as the horse worked his way down a cliff. She didn’t remember ever riding a horse before; she didn’t remember the landscape around her. She had been bone tired, aching from a journey she could not recall. Below them stood a thatch-roofed stone cottage, a lonely, bare-looking hovel. The old woman had called her Sarah, but the name had meant nothing to her.

At the cottage she had stood against the fence while the woman unsaddled the horse and watered and fed him, then the wrinkled old creature said, “I am Mag. Today is your ninth birthday.”

“It’s not my birthday. I don’t remember my birthday. Who are you?”

Mag had led her into the cottage and sat her down in the rocker before the cold wood stove, had knelt and built a fire, lighting it with a flick of her hand. Then she took a clay bowl from the shelf and began to mix gingerbread. Sarah had watched, numb and angry. When the dough was rolled out, Mag made a gesture with her hands that caused ginger dolls to be cut from the dough without any cutter or tool. “The dolls are tradition,” Mag said. “Part of the birthday celebration.”

“It’s not my birthday.”

“It is now. This is the first day of your new life. You are nine years old.”

Mag had set about decorating the dolls with magic runes that appeared suddenly deep in the dough. She had baked and cooled them, and made Sarah promise not to watch as she hung them outdoors in the fruit trees.

But of course she had watched from the window, and when, after her birthday supper, Mag sent her to search for the ginger dolls she found the wishing doll at once. It was the only one with emeralds baked in for eyes, in the fading light its green eyes gleamed at her. Coming back with it, she had stopped to look in the water trough at her reflection, wanting to see her own face, and her image shone up at her as unfamiliar as the face of the ginger doll. She was surprised that her eyes were the same clear green as the doll’s emerald eyes.