Page 66 of Son of a Witch (The Wicked Years 2)

“What’re they going to come back for? The goat?”

She rolled her eyes. “Do you know anything about milking goats?”

“I learned to fly on a broom,” he said, rolling up his sleeves. “I can learn to milk a goat, I bet.” Though flying on a broom proved to be the easier task, he found.

4

CANDLE SAID EVENTUALLY, “The weather is steadily chilling. If we’re going to be here all winter we’re going to need to get in some firewood. Are you feeling well enough to begin to collect some?”

He was, and he did. In finding his way around the browning dales and hollows, he realized that the press had been set up in a farm that most likely had been abandoned a generation ago. Rangy teenager trees were colonizing some of the pastures, and deeper in the woods, the crisscrossing of stone walls suggested that these had been working meadows not all that long ago.

At suppertime he told Candle what he’d seen. “I don’t know much about how land is used anywhere but Ovvels,” she admitted. “I have seen those walls among the trees, and I thought perhaps they grew there like lichen.”

“The influence of pebbles! To grow stone walls. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could plant a farm that way! Drop the seeds of a barn here, drip a tincture of millpond in an eyedropper over there. Plant an egg and get a whole henhouse, complete with cockcrow and breakfast omelet.”

“What would make a sheepfold?”

“All you need is a lamb’s tail.”

“How horrible!”

“Not really. To avoid fly strike, shepherds often dock the tails of lambs.”

She didn’t like this line of play. She got her domingon—Liir guessed as much to change the subject as anything else. He needled her anyway. “To grow a mauntery you’d have to plant a…a what?”

She struck up a tonic depressive and then played it backward. “Plant a prayer,” she said, despite herself. “To grow an army…?”

“Touché. Well, the story of the Seven Spears says you plant dragons’ teeth.” He’d heard the folk story eventually, the one that had given the company of the Seventh Spear its name. A bit close for comfort, that. “To grow a melody?”

“You can’t grow a melody on purpose,” she said, and slyly added, “you have to plant an accidental.” This seemed a musical reference, and it went over his head. “To grow a memory. Tell me that one, mister magic farmer.”

“To grow a memory. To grow a memory, one must plant…I’m not sure. Who wants to grow memories, anyway?”

“I’ll make it easier. To grow a good memory. A happy memory.”

He shrugged, indicating, Go on.

“It doesn’t matter what you plant,” she concluded, “but you must plant it with love.”

Then she whipped up a scale and finished with some splay-handed chord clusters. The sounds hung in the air like prisms suspended from the trees on invisible strings. The donkey brayed in an altogether more accomplished voice than usual, looking astonished at himself. The goat cocked her head.

Candle added a few grace notes in a complementary modality.

The hen stepped closer as if surprised, at her age and station, to receive an invitation to dance. She let out a squawk that turned into a nightingale’s sonnet, line after line after line, though Liir couldn’t imagine what it meant.

Candle added a hedge of bass notes, tense as the girders of a bridge. The goat opened her mouth and provided an alto obbligato line—rather huskier than

would work for a paying audience, but entirely serviceable in a barnyard.

Then the Quadling girl sang something in Qua’ati—some rural advice; Liir had to struggle both to hear her and to translate. He guessed she was singing, “No one can sing unless they can remember.” The trio of animals attempted a big harmonic finish, but it was beyond them, and the moment passed.

“You can make the animals sing,” he said. “You are a wonder.”

“I can play a wonderful instrument,” she corrected him. “To grow a song, you must plant a note.”

THE NEXT DAY he went for more kindling. His strength returning little by little, he scaled another rise, a higher one than before. He saw in the distance a blurred line of tree heads a different shade of brown. The oakhair forest, in that direction, and, when he turned to see, the suggestion of the Kells in the other.

He collected what he could comfortably carry, not yet having regained full strength, and put off what needed to be said another day or two. Before he could bring the matter up, though, Candle got there first.

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