“What are you doing?” she whispered in the dark. Her voice hissed low and piercing as a serpents. I felt a chill between my shoulder blades.
“It is time for you to be a woman and do the work of a woman,” I said, my voice just above a whisper.
“I will do my own work,” she said.
“You will work here, with me.”
“No.” She was not arguing with me. She was explaining. “You suck the magic out of me, old woman. I feel my power only when I am far away from you.”
“Renoa.”
“Someday, when I am Dollmage, I will make new valleys and new mountains, and I will go there.” Then she dressed herself and ran out of the house into the night.
She was fearless, and all my efforts to tame her only made her vicious.
I ceased to worry about Annakey. She grew out of my sight and largely out of my mind. Over the next three years, her mother became weaker of body and mind, and rarely went out of doors. She did sewing and mending in exchange for the things she and Annakey could not provide for themselves. Annakey had to care for the cow and the pig and the chickens; she had to plant and weed and harvest the garden. She was too busy to trouble me. I did not know that whenever she could, she would run away to her secret place where the mountains’ toes are bunched, where the sheep do not wander for fear of wolves and mountain cats. I did not know she would add to her meadow, putting in hedges and bees, and dew on the leaves, and all manner of wonders. I did not know what made her happy. I did notice that Oda Weedbridge’s field was lusher that year, and that in it the wildflowers grew more abundantly than anywhere else in the valley. I spread dust over her field in the Seekvalley doll so it would not excite envy among the villagers, but it remained green and thick with flowers as ever. I could not know that already Annakey was stealing my story.
Vilsa had a secret of her own. Whenever Annakey was gone,Vilsa had taken to spending her time in the root shed where she could think about her husband without interruption. She spoke to him while she was in there, laughing over old jokes they had shared and quietly swearing her love forever. Her grief had become madness. One day I listened at the window and heard her carrying on a conversation with her husband.
I looked in the window. “Vilsa,” I said, “who are you speaking to?”
“My husband,” she said.
“He is not here,” I said.
“His ghost, then.”
I looked all around. “His ghost is not here.”
Vilsa looked around the room groggily, as if coming out of a trance. “No,” she said. “He is not dead.”
“If he is not dead, he does not love you enough to return to you. It is not my fault.”
Of course it was my fault. I chose not to think of it, to delay the day of my repentance.
One day not long after that, Annakey summoned me to the house. She was dough-colored, and her eyes were swollen.
“Dollmage,” she said. “Mother is ill.”
“She is always ill.”
“This time it is different,” Annakey said.
“It comes of spending too much time in the root shed,” I said sharply, but I followed her to the house.
When I arrived, I saw everything as usual. The windows were polished and the stoop swept. The laundry was hanging fresh, the lamp was trimmed, the butter churned and molded.
I looked at Vilsa and knew at once she was dying.
The woman looked away, staring at the mountains through her sparkling windows as if her husband might come for her even yet. She knew also.
“Take care of my daughter,” she said weakly. “Teach her to use her gift.”
“Renoa is the true Dollmage,” I said. “It is possible that Annakey drowned a cow, but to tame a deer is the work of a Dollmage. You know the law. There cannot be two to a village.”
Vilsa got up on one elbow. The effort made her forehead and chin glisten with sweat. “Listen, Grandmother Hobblefoot,” she said. “You think my promise doll drained me of my happiness so that Annakey might have it. You are wrong. It is her promise doll that did it. She has great power to make the story go how she wills it. Teach her, Dollmage.” She lay back on the pillows. “Care for her until her father returns for her.”
She was again telling me my own art.
“If you insist her father lives, she will be denied an orphans portion. But I will do my best to see that she is cared for.”
Annakey knelt beside her mother. She was not smiling now. Her face was full of astonishment, as if she had never seen death before.
“Is it true, Mother? Did I take your happiness for my own? I will give it back.”
Vilsa touched her daughter’s hand. “Things have been as they were meant.”
“I will make things to be as I wish them,” Annakey said. She was weeping openly now.
“Someday you will understand about daughters, how their happiness becomes your own,” Vilsa said.
“Are you afraid to die?”
“A little.You can help me to be less afraid.”
“Tell me, Mama. I will do anything.”
“Take your promise doll in your hand.”
Annakey did so.
“Promise me, now, that you will be happy, that you will make your life good.”
I gasped. “She will do no such thing. That is for God to decide.”
“Promise me, child,” Vilsa said. “It is my dying wish.”
“I promise, Mother,” she said.
Vilsa closed her eyes and her hands were still. “Tell your father,” she whispered, “that I died speaking of my love for him.” She looked out the window and I saw her smile for the first time in years.
Then she died.
Annakey moaned as if her stomach were in pain. She laid her head on her mother’s chest.
“Come,” I said.
“Dollmage Hobblefoot, I feel I am going to be sad forever,” Annakey said, and in her face was real fear.
So. Finally. The promise doll I had made her was not without power after all.
“Come. I have an idea of someone who will take you in.” She closed her eyes. After a time she stood up. “No. I am not an orphan. I have a father yet, and I am old enough to live here on my own until he returns.”
The way she said it made me look at her differently. I was astonished to realize how grown she was. She was as tall as I, and with the breasts of a woman. My Renoa was the same age, of course, but she seemed younger to me. By the time I was this age I was doing all the work of a full Dollmage. Renoa still dabbled and played, and had no taste for the labor.
“You’ll get no orphan’s portion unless you raise your father’s tombstone along with your mother’s,” I said.
“My father promised my mother that he would return,” she said. “If I give up on the promise he made, it will kill him. My faith will keep him alive. I will do extra work for my keep.”
I thought of the smashed valley doll, its pieces long since broken beyond recognition, and I was sick with guilt.
“What will you do for work?” I demanded.
“I — I do not know. . . ”
“Have you manure shovels? Buckets?”
She shrugged, defeated.
“Come. I know who does.” I grabbed her hand and pulled her out of the house.
The truth is I believed I was God’s defender. Was it not for him to decide who would be happy and who would not? Was it not for him to send the fruitful field, the long-milking cow and good health? If we lacked for anything, was it not God’s Fault? Capital F? He it was who had given Annakey a frowning promise doll. I encouraged her promise doll to keep its promise by taking Annakey to work for the egg-woman.
The egg-woman was Oda Woodbridge. She was a spring berry, small and bright red, but so sour as to bring tears to the eyes. She lived at the far end of the village, in the last house, in fact, that Annakey would run past on the way to her secret place. She was a spinster who refused to accept the help due her from the village. She burned dried cow dung for fuel, saving for rainy days the little wood she could forage for herself.