Serana and the Crones

I stood still, all atremble with the sounds of the night: the bridle bells, the horses’ hooves pacing beneath my window, the uncanny silence of the streets. The Queen had never looked up and seen me, white as bone, as milk in the pail, staring down at her. She did not have to. She certainly knew I was there.

With the first false dawn, she left, going through the curtain of time that separates the Greenwood from the human world. I ran downstairs, to walk widdershins around the block, for all the good that might do me. I passed alleyways where bits of old newspapers and magazines whirled in silent eddies. Where old men slept on the pavement in cardboard boxes. Where feral cats prowled around garbage cans looking for food. And then I came home again just as the city stretched, stirred, came back to life.

I had just sat down, still atwitter, when a knock came at the downstairs door. It was a loud hammering and could have awakened the dead.

Gathering my skirts about me, I walked slowly down the stairs as if going to my own execution. My unprotected hand turned the iron knob. I did not mind the scorching. What did that small burn matter when surely the Queen could melt me like candle wax whenever she felt like it?

On the doorstep stood a young woman with white-gold curls and a strange, dark center part, and a man the color of crow feathers. Suddenly, I remembered them as if they were part of an old, odd dream. They had been my scare-bird’s companions in the park. But how had they found me? And who had sent them?

“What is it with you old people?” the girl said, the moment I opened the door. “No landline, no cell? Robin called and told us to get our butts over here. Now.”

Surely I looked fuddled, for the crow-colored man said, “Slow down, May. She’s just out of bed.”

“She looks like a rumpled bed, Chim, if that’s what you mean,” she countered. “And don’t forget who else just tumbled out of bed. And just when things were getting . . . interesting.”

“He’ll wait.”

“He’d better.”

May. Chim. Now the whole scene in the park tumbled back into my brain. And what had come after.

The girl held out a small, pink object. “Call him,” she ordered.

“Call who?” I said. “Call how?” I wasn’t just fuddled, I was entirely confused.

“Oh, for God’s sake!” she said, and pushed some numbers on the pink object, held it to her ear. Said, “Rob. Yeah. Me. She’s here.” Then held it out to me again. “Just talk.”

I held it as she had, to my ear, and began to talk. “Hello? Hello? Is this a summons? I am ready. I yield.”

I dropped the pink thing and then, as if all the strings connecting my body parts had been cut at once, collapsed hard onto the stone steps. Stone, which had never harmed me in the Greenwood, bruised me in unmentionable places.

Chim propped me up against the wall, spoke briefly into the pink thing, saying “Hold on a minute, bro,” and then explained that the pink object was called a cell, though all the cells I knew were deep and dark and inescapable. “You can talk to people across the air, all the way to . . .” He stopped talking to me, and said into the cell, “Where the hell you at, Rob?” Then back to me, “Milwaukee.”

I remembered the woman shouting to the air, the one almost hit by the yellow car. I had thought her crazed. Perhaps she had been talking to a cell, too.

And then I realized what Chim had said, pronouncing it far differently than I ever had. Milwaukee. Where Meteora lived. “May I speak to my sister?”

“Can she speak to her sister?” Chim asked the cell.

I grabbed it before he received an answer. “Meteora. METEORA!” I shouted into the cell, into the air.

The answer, thin, bodiless, came back to me, “Not so loud, sister. And not with that name. It is Sophia, remember?”

And then we wept. Any other time we might have laughed to hear our voices trilling like birds through the cell. Quickly she told me what had happened, and I was relieved to know she was all right.

All right? With the Queen on her solitary Rade, with Red Cap on the loose, with mandrakes screaming in Meteora’s garden, the Highborn Lankin breaking into her house, the arum calling all to wake. With the Queen’s child, hiding her golden beauty with black dyes, poisoned by Lankin’s foul spells.

There was nothing all right with any of it.

She assured me that she had aloe aplenty. “From where I work,” she added.

“Had you not set wards?” But even as I asked, I knew that if she had, they would not have done any good. Oh, we could keep out unwitting humans with locks, and pigeons with a scattering of herbs, but not a Highborn like Lankin. Or a Lowborn like Red Cap. Even in the Greenwood we had had no strong magic. Here in the cities, stripped of the little we once had, we were naked to even mediocre spellcasters.

“I will try and find you,” I said. “Good-bye. Good-bye. My lovely sister. I will come.” Iron rain be damned. If my sister was hurting, I would be there, whatever the cost. I waved my hand toward the west, where I knew she had to be. Then I handed back the pink cell to Chim, thinking: How can I get there? I have no more money to ride the horseless carts. Or to buy protection from the iron rain.

Suddenly I had no idea what to do next.

I began to weep again. “I must. I must . . .” The words could not push through the tears or the closing of my throat with sorrow. Finally I managed. “I must go to her. To them. They are in terrible danger. In . . . in Milwaukee.” I pronounced it as Chim had. “But how . . .” And then my throat closed down again.

May’s hands fluttered. “Okay, no more tears. You’ll have me bawling next.” She turned to Chim. “Your aunts, the crones. Could they . . . ?”

“Dunno.” He shook his head, closed his eyes. Opened them again. “Maybe. They can be fierce.”

I managed to stand. Everything in my body ached. I doubted I had enough aloe for these pains. “Fierce is good.”

“It’s on your head then, lady,” he said.

I patted my hair. We all laughed at that, but the laughter was heavy and dark. “Let me use the water room first.”

“Owls are good,” I said.

They laughed again, though this time I did not know why.

* * *

I WAS NOT LONG AT all. I brought along my dam’s shawl for warmth. I also brought an offering of salt and bread in a paper sack for the aunts. In case that mattered.

“Bus or subway?” May said to Chim.

He shook his head. “Neither. If she’s anything like my aunts, they’ll make her sick.” He looked sideways at me. “We hoof it.”

And despite May’s complaint, we walked.

After a while I stopped counting the blocks. One place looked so like the other. When I asked where we were going, I got a one-word answer.

“Uptown,” Chim said.

Walking on the stone walkways is so much harder than striding along any carpeting of pine or grass. I was fairly winded and my feet hurt, but I would not let it show.

The tall buildings became smaller buildings, and many had flat, tan-colored boards blocking both windows and doorways, as if the people who had lived in those places had moved far away. There were fewer of the yellow cars here, more buses, and people all shades of brown chatting on the streets. A friendlier place than where we had come from, perhaps because many of the people here seemed to be Chim’s brothers and sisters. What a huge family he must have, I thought. And that would mean many aunts. No wonder May had suggested it.

Finally, we got to a place where shadows lay heavy on the ground, even with the early morning light streaming down. We turned into an alleyway. There was nothing that distinguished this alley from any other; it was simply a dark space between brick buildings. The walls were covered with signs, old and weathered, telling of things like milk and cigarettes and beer.

“How many aunts have you?” I asked.

“Two,” said May.

We went deep into the alley, turned a sharp corner, and there in the semidarkness of the shadows stood two ancient crones hovering over a fire contained in a steel drum. Tall, agonizingly thin, their skin stretched like black paper over fine bones. They each wore a voluminous black ankle-length dress, which only emphasized their height, their thinness. The sleeves of the dresses were rolled all the way up so that their arms were bare. As we neared, they were spreading some sort of ointment along the inside of those scrawny arms.

They must have heard our approach. We weren’t quiet. But they took a long time before looking over at us. May they dismissed quickly, Chim they nodded at in recognition, but me they stared at with eyes hard as walnuts.

The taller one signaled me to them with cupped hands.

I was suddenly afraid. There was something royal about them. They may have been Chim’s aunts—but were they queens? Well, if a queen beckons, one obeys. I handed them the paper sack with the bread and salt. The shorter crone opened it up, nodded, smiled as I stood warming my hands over the fire, which snapped and snarled at me from behind its grate. Close up, I could see they were not queens, but something else. Something older perhaps.

“It took you long enough to get here, girl,” said the taller aunt.

“I had not known I was coming,” I said, stuttering between words.

“Lucky we did, then,” said the shorter. At which point they both laughed. It was the same as Chim’s laughter, a short, staccato cascade.

Then the two put a cape around my shoulders made of some strange yarn, and lucky it was that I was wearing Mother’s shawl or the iron strands in the thing would have burned me clear to the bone.

I said nothing. Could these two really give me the help I needed? Against the Queen. Against Lankin. Against Red Cap and his Dark Lord. But I nodded. Anytime someone offers protection, whether it works or not, the laws of hospitality take hold.

The two then spoke strange words of binding. Ones I had never heard before.

“Hi-di, hi-di, hi-di ho,” they sang. And again: “Hi-di, hi-di, hi-di ho.” It went on for some time.

When at last they were through, I said, “Thank you. I am beholden.”

“You ain’t beholden nuthin’,” said the taller one, and to demonstrate that, she gave me her name, Shawnique.

The other added, “Till we earns it.” Her name was Blanche.

I nodded again. Somehow the words of their binding, the naming of names—whether True Names or familiar names—and their refusal of payment had stopped my tremors.

“Here I am called Mabel,” I said.

“A good name,” said Blanche. “Solid as prestressed concrete.”

We stood for what seemed like hours more over that fire, the crones humming and chanting—I cannot call it singing exactly as the words were odd and unrhymed. Syllables of power, I suppose. I was quiet at first, but by the end I was chanting along with them: “Hi-di, hi-di hi-di ho . . .” And I could feel something more than warmth creep into my fingers. A tingling, a touch of what felt like magic.

Magic—how I had missed it.

When it was full morning, with Chim and May restless behind us, I said to the crones, “Sisters, come to my house. I have butter and jam for that bread, as well as spearmint tea.” If they would not take thanks, then I could at least give them hospitality. And what greater than bread and tea.

Blanche said, “Nuthin’ stronger?”

“Wine,” I whispered, “but it is morning.”

They laughed and Chim and May laughed as well. Instead, we went around the corner and upstairs to their own apartment, which was full of dark wooden statues of women with swollen bellies and warriors holding spears. There were fierce masks lining the walls. With such strong guardians, I doubted anyone not invited could get in.

We drank some dark amber liquid that burned my throat and opened it, too, for I found myself spilling out the tale of the Lankin to them. We ate the bread without butter or jam and still it was good. The salt they put in the cupboard.

“We was just about out,” Blanche said, “and it was good you brought that. But of course, we knew you would.”

Shawnique added, “Now, sister, it’s time for us to go to sleep. Past time actually. We gonna dream on your problem. We will find you in the evening. Be ready.”

I gave them the number of my house and the street, and then we hustled out of their apartment and into the afternoon sun.

* * *

WHEN WE GOT BACK TO my house, stomachs full of bread and warmed by the drink, I told all this to my sister, over the air cell. I said, “Who knew there was such magic in the city, though it is not what we are used to. The crones throb with an odd power I cannot name. They think me strange, laugh at my clothes, but their laughter is not harsh. Not at all. Almost, I think, it is . . . conspiratorial. Their power is built on something other than leaf and thorn. It has iron at its base, and paving. It has strong bones.”

Before falling back into bed, I did a last blood casting, this time with my own hair. And the surprise of it was so great, I knew I could never speak it on the air cell or commit it to paper lest the wrong hands touch it, the wrong eyes see it, the wrong ears hear it. Though the Queen had forbidden me to find Meteora, I knew I had to chance it. I dared because of the casting and because of the power of the crones.

In a quick letter to Meteora, sent by eagle mail before I slept, I wrote a short note about Chim’s aunts, ending with:

Get out a bottle of wine, or even something stronger, the color of old gold. Bake some dark bread—they like it crusty. We will find our way to you. I do not know how soon we will get there. But get there we will.

In haste,
Serana

61

Serana and the Crones