She said, “Do you not love the babies you tend while their mothers are afield?”
“Yes,” I said, “but...”
“It is all of a one, my dear, all of a one. There’s that baby who is loved, and then one day he loves so as to make another baby. Wear our souls out in love, we do, or looking for it.”
She leaned closer to me. The color of Grandmother’s eyes was hard to tell, the sun had bleached them so, but they were quick and piercing.
“Now I will tell you a true thing, child, and if you are wise you will remember it. The soul, it longs for its mate as much as the body. Sad it is that the body be greedier than the soul. But if you would be happy all your days, as I was with your grandfather, subdue the body and marry the soul. Look for a soul-and-heart love.”
A soul-and-heart love, I thought. Yes, that was what I would have, and I was minded of my urgency to see Soor Lily for a charm.
I asked, “What chores today, Grandmother?”
“Lass, everyone who came to mourn with me did chores enough to last a week. The women cleaned and washed, Ben Marshall cared for the garden, and Tailor did all my mending and tanned a fleece. Tobias did the yard, and Gretta and Beatrice did all the carding and spinning. Take the day for your own, child,” Grandmother said, “but go not one step into the forest. I won’t lose you again.”
That command I wished with all my heart I could obey.
I had two errands—to speak to John Temsland or his father, and to visit Soor Lily. While the latter was the easier to accomplish, it was the more dreaded.
Soor Lily lived near the road to Marshall, a short way into the green gloom of the forest, with her seven great sons, each the size of two men, who loved her and obeyed her slavishly and would not leave her for a wife. Though the air was still as I entered the wood, leaves of the trees whispered and seemed to bend, as if they were a little more alive than other trees for living near Soor Lily.
When I came to her house, I saw that the door was of oak and enormous, so that her boys, I supposed, might enter in without ducking, as they must do to enter any other house of the village. Not that they were often invited.
As I stood nervously before the door, I saw two of her big boys peering from behind the outhouse, and two more in her huge and mysterious garden. I shouldn’t be here, I thought. I should speak to John Temsland first. But even as I turned to go, Soor Lily opened the door.
“Come in, Keturah,” she said, half bowing. Her manner was unsurprised, as if she had been expecting me.
“You know my name?” I asked. We had never spoken to each other before.
“Everyone is speaking of you today, and not in quiet voices. But before, I knew you for your beauty.” She spoke in a soft, watery voice. “ ‘Twas no fairies you saw in the wood, Keturah,” she said, and I felt glad that she did not believe it.
Soor Lily had been well named. Her walk was measured so that she seemed to float like an autumn lily in a pond. Her clothes she wore in layers like petals, and no one could tell if she was fat or thin. Her skin was pale and waxy, her expression unreadable.
The furniture in her home was of large proportions. Great chairs made of rough-hewn logs and a table almost as big and heavy as Lord Temsland’s were set before a gigantic fireplace. Soor Lily’s pots, the size of cauldrons, hung from the ceiling, along with nets of bulbs and bunches of drying herbs. A great wooden closet stood against the wall opposite the fireplace, its carved doors discreetly closed. It was all very tidy and clean, and there was no evidence that Soor Lily was a witch.
Though she was.
She sat me in one of the great, solid chairs. In it, my feet did not quite touch the ground, though I was as tall as any woman. I listened for sounds of her big sons, but all was quiet.
She curtseyed a little and then laid out two cups. She wore her hair unbound. “Have some tea. You must be tired from your long walk. So tired. Here is tea. Here, here, my beauty... So nice to know there is someone in the parish more vilified than I.”
Her voice was a chant, soothing and gentle and throaty.
“I don’t believe in love potions,” I said stoutly, refusing to touch the tea.
“No, no, you don’t,” she said quietly, reassuringly. She put warm scones before me, each the size of a pie plate. She hovered around me, at once diffident and attentive, like a bird brooding over her chick, lightly touching my shoulder, my back, my arm. Finally she sat at the table beside me and looked at me as if she were hungry and my eyeballs were just what she had been craving.
“I don’t believe in sorcery, and I don’t believe in love sorcery most of all,” I said, though the defiance in my voice had lost its edge.
“No, not at all,” she said. She brushed all the words from the air with her long, spider-leg fingers. “Not at all, my dear, my heart.” Her words disappeared into breathy nothingness, as if from moment to moment she forgot what she was saying.
I thought I would stand and leave, now, now, but I did not, for I could hear the wind in the forest around me.
“Is it true?” I whispered at last. “Is it true that you can make a charm that would show me my true love?”
“Oh yes, it is true,” she said with sad resignation. “True love. Mmm—the highest of magics.”
“I will have it,” I said, sounding braver than I felt.
“You will have it,” she said, nodding to herself.
I waited some time, looking at her, but she did not look at me. She studied the fire as if waiting for a phoenix to rise out of the flames.
“Well?” I said at last.
She glanced at me, cleared her throat, and went back to studying the fire.
“Soor Lily, I said I would have it.”
She turned glittering eyes upon me, and I could have sworn they had become as hard as amber. “Yes. Yes, you would have it,” she said low, almost in a whisper. “But there is the small matter of the price.”
Ah, the price. The price was why people feared Soor Lily, for it was not always money she asked for. “I am poor,” I said. “You know I am poor.”
“Poor, poor,” she said sympathetically, but there was no sympathy in her face. She studied the fire again. At last she said, in a voice that was hypnotic in its quiet power, “But there is a price you can pay.”
My skin prickled from my scalp to the soles of my feet. “Then name it,” I said.
She slowly reached across the table and gripped my hand in hers. It was as strong as a man’s. “All the things I could ask of you, Keturah. Couldn’t I ask you to let me live forever? Mmm. I could ask to see my departed mother—oh, the questions I would have for her. What was that recipe against the toothache? She told me, of course she did, but I have forgotten. No, Keturah, my beauty, I want none of these things. But come.”
She beckoned to me, and I followed her, wooden-legged, to the doorway of another room. There, on a massive bed, lay one of her sons, a boulder of a man. Fevered and distressed, he was not conscious that we were there.
“He is sick,” I said.
“So clever you are,” said Soor Lily with cloying sweetness. “Yes, he is very sick.”
“Why don’t you cure him?”
“Precisely,” she said. “Exactly. Just so. Why don’t I? Is that not what anyone would ask? Who would come to me for cures if they saw I could not cure one of my own sons? But my art, unlike yours, has no power over death.” Here she leaned forward very close to me and peered into my face.
I leaned away from her. “How—how did you hear... ?”
“Do I not know all things about the forest?” she whispered.
“Then you know I have no power but have only made a bargain.”
She shrugged slowly, but I knew she did not believe me.
She shut the door, and silently we went back to the table before the fire. I was so angry and afraid that I could not speak. I thought to leave, but I could not leave empty-handed. I stared at the fire, and Soor Lily stared at me.