The Line Between

«No," she said, raising her voice now. «No, I was just pissed–off, that's different. Never underestimate the power of a pissed–off woman, O Mighty One. But you … you went all the way back, on your own, and you grabbed him. You're going to be way stronger and better than he is, and he knows it. He just figured he'd get rid of the competition early on, while he had the chance. Not a generous guy, El Viejo.»

Marvyn's chubby face turned gray. «But I'm not like him! I don't want to be like him!» Both eyes suddenly filled with tears, and he clung to his sister as he had not

done since his return. «It was horrible, Angie, it was so horrible. You were gone, and I was all alone, and I didn't know what to do, only I had to do something. And I remembered Milady, and I figured if he wasn't letting me come forward I'd go the other way, and I was so scared and mad I just walked and walked and walked in the dark, until I…» He was crying so hard that Angie could hardly make the words out. «I don't want to be a witch anymore, Angie, I don't want to! And I don't want you being a witch either…»

Angie held him and rocked him, as she had loved doing when he was three or four years old, and the cookies got scattered all over the bed. «It's all right," she told him, with one ear listening for their parents' car pulling into the garage. «Shh, shh, it's all right, it's over, we're safe, it's okay, shh. It's okay, we're not going to be witches, neither one of us.» She laid him down and pulled the covers back over him. «You go to sleep now.»

Marvyn looked up at her, and then at the wizards' wall beyond her shoulder. «I might take some of those down," he mumbled. «Maybe put some soccer players up for a while. The Brazilian team's really good.» He was just beginning to doze off in her arms, when suddenly he sat up again and said, «Angie? The baby?»

«What about the baby? I thought he made a beautiful baby, El Viejo. Mad as hell, but lovable.»

«It was bigger when we left," Marvyn said. Angie stared at him. «I looked back at it in that lady's lap, and it was already bigger than when I was carrying it. He's starting over, Angie, like Milady.»

«Better him than me," Angie said. «I hope he gets a kid brother this time, he's got it coming.» She heard the car, and then the sound of a key in the lock. She said, «Go to sleep, don't worry about it. After what we've been through, we can handle anything. The two of us. And without witchcraft. Whichever one of us it is — no witch stuff.»

Marvyn smiled drowsily. «Unless we really, really need it.»

Angie held out her hand and they slapped palms in formal agreement. She looked down at her fingers and said, " Ick! Blow your nose!»

But Marvyn was asleep.

* * *

Quarry

This story was born of my inability to stay away from the world I created as the back–drop for my personal favorite among my novels, The Innkeeper's Song. The immediate provocation came during a phone conversation, when the party of the second part asked me just how two of the characters from that novel — the wandering mercenary Soukyan and his shapeshifing fox companion — ever met. I had absolutely no idea, so I wrote «Quarry» to find out.

I never went back to my room that night. I knew I had an hour at most before they would have guards on the door. What was on my back, at my belt, and in my pockets was all I took — that, and all the tilgit the cook could scrape together and cram into my pouch. We had been friends since the day I arrived at that place, a scrawny, stubborn child, ready to die rather than ever admit my terror and my pain. «So," she said, as I burst into her kitchen. «Running you came to me, twenty years gone, blood all over you, and running you leave. Tell me nothing, just drink this.» I have no idea what was in that bottle she fetched from under her skirts and made me empty on the spot, but it kept me warm on my way all that night, and the tilgit —disgusting dried marshweed as it is — lasted me three days.

Looking back, I shiver to think how little I understood, not only the peril I was in, but the true extent of the power I fled. I did know better than to make for Sumildene, where a stranger stands out like a sailor in a convent; but if I had had the brains of a bedbug, I'd never have tried to cut through the marshes toward the Queen's Road. In the first place, that grand highway is laced with toll bridges, manned by toll collectors, every four or five miles; in the second, the Queen's Road is so well–banked and pruned and well–maintained that should you be caught out there by day–light, there's no cover, nowhere to run — no rutted smuggler's alley to duck into, not so much as a proper tree to climb. But I didn't know that then, among other things.