Strawwe finished.
"Well!" The secretary tucked a bony knee under her arm and stood on one leg. "In all the years I have been here, this is the most outrageous and brazen episode that has come to my ears. Can there be any doubt of her punishment?"
She looked to Grunt. He cleared his throat and looked away. She looked to Strawwe. He met her gaze. "Very well," she said at last. "Throw this wretched child to the basilisk!"
With eyes averted, Grunt and Strawwe dragged her out into the hall. They flung open the door to the dire office and thrust her inside. The door slammed shut behind her. She looked up and saw the Principal's creature preening itself atop a blotter befouled with green droppings.
The basilisk clutched at the corner of the desk with clawlike fingers. It was a featherless biped, pale as chicken flesh, with a long neck and undersized appendages that were less wings than stumps. The round alembic of its belly was taut as a drum, where the rest of its body had the disorganized looseness of butchered meat.
But it was the creature's face that inspired dread, eyeless, all but headless, tiny human ears framing enormous soft lips that glistened with mucous surfaces. It had no nose, so that its every breath was a liquid gasp of pain.
Seeing this horror, Jane involuntarily found herself imagining what it must be like to be trapped within such flesh. It would be a fate even more repulsive than the creature itself. She wanted to look away and could not.
It flapped its stubby, goosefleshed wings.
Suddenly it craned its pale neck forward and down, and stretched wide its rubbery lips, revealing even white teeth and a wet pink tongue. Jane flinched away from its blind scream.
Everything went blank. For a timeless, airless instant she stood nowhere, dimensionless, unthinking. In a state of perfect negation. Then she staggered as she found herself back in the Principal's office, staring horrified at the basilisk, mouth closing, lips wet with spittle.
She had not heard the least fraction of the basilisk's black scream, yet its effects echoed in her body. She wanted to run for the nearest toilet so she could vomit up bile and foulness. She felt unclean, filth encrusting her tongue and digestive passages all the way down to her anus.
Then for the first time Jane managed to drag her gaze away from the basilisk, and up to the Principal. He sat unmoving behind the desk, dressed in waistcoat, rep tie, and jacket. His hands rested inert in his lap. His eyes studied her with a reptilian alertness that was totally without emotion.
It was the Baldwynn.
A little choking cry rose up in the back of Jane's throat. She had been found! Melanchthon had promised he would shield her from detection, from search, from the hounds of persecution. It was yet another lie. She experienced now such a despair and sense of betrayal as she had never felt before.
But the Baldwynn, though his eyes tracked her every movement, said nothing, and made no move to stop her when she edged toward the door.
Jane's hand was on the knob when her eye was caught by the folder in the Baldwynn's lap. It was a pale manila rectangle, held lightly in both hands, and something about it told her it was significant.
This is crazy, she thought. But, cringing a little, she forced herself back to the Baldwynn.
His eyes followed her hand down to his lap. There were age spots on the backs of his pale hands. Cautiously she took the folder between thumb and forefinger, and tugged. It came free of his hands. His eyes followed the folder up. She looked at the name on its label.
Peter of the Hillside.
In a frenzy she opened the folder. It held a single flimsy square of paper, and nothing more. The lettering on it was gray and blurred; she could not possibly read it here. Not in the state she was in. Jane folded it in quarters and slipped it inside her blouse.
The Baldwynn did not move, even when she put the folder back in his spotted hands.
The halls were empty. Slowly, she stepped into them. A teacher starting out his doorway saw her emerge and ducked back in again. He clearly did not want to know.
Feeling dizzy and unreal, she floated down the hall.
As she passed the secretary's office, Grunt and Strawwe seized her by the arms and hauled her backwards into the room. "What did he say to you?" the secretary demanded. "What did he say?"
Jane had been holding herself tightly under control. Now she broke down, crying uncontrollably, from fear and disgust intermingled. "She's hysterical," the secretary said. She cocked her arm back and slapped Jane so hard her face rang. Spittle flying, she screamed, "What did he say?"
Some cold calculating aspect of Jane, lurking unsuspected deep within her, saw the chance then and took over. They none of them had a clue. They were so fearful of the Principal that they dared not confront him in person. They had no more idea what he really wanted than Dame Moon herself. "He said I should be an alchemist!" she sobbed. "He said you should get me a full scholarship."
The three traded looks of perfect bafflement. They could not believe what they heard, no more than they could imagine someone being able to lie after an encounter with the basilisk. It was an incredible statement, and at the same time undeniable.
But in the end there was nothing they could do about it.
The secretary began typing up the forms.
— 10 —
THE DRAGONFLY GIRLS STOOD IN A KNOT BY THE SIDE DOOR, smoking. Because their bodies remained neotonous well into sexual maturity, they looked like perverse children. Jane saw them every day, gossiping together, their wings buzzing with excitement, sharp-hipped and all but breastless in their designer jeans and sheer silk blouses, flicking lipstick-stained cigarette butts into the yard.
She picked out one who looked marginally less aloof than the others, and waited for her to separate herself from the group. "Excuse me," Jane said.
The dragonfly girl walked right by her, then stopped and glanced scornfully over a shoulder. "It's the thief," she said to nobody.
"Look." Jane dipped into her handbag and pulled out a silver amulet. It was a delicate thing, a hammered flower-of-life, and worth a pretty bit of change. She had cut classes this morning to lift it, and if she'd been caught, there would have been bad trouble. It was a chance she'd had to take, though, because the masses of cold iron in the dragon meant she could never take jewelry home; inevitably it always sickened and died. The silver sang in the sunlight, and the dragonfly girl's eyes widened at the sight of it. "It's for you."
"Gra'mercy." She extended an anorexically thin arm.
Jane jerked the amulet back. "There's a price."
Those dark eyes went lightless and cruel, lips parting slightly to reveal small, pearly fangs. Jane bulled ahead anyway. "Where can I get good information on birth control?"
Blank astonishment. Then: "Birth control? You?" The dragonfly girl threw her head back in savage elven laughter.
"Do you want it or not?"
"Hand it over."
The instant the amulet hit the dragonfly girl's palm it disappeared. She spun and strode away. But in the air behind her floated the words, "Peg o'the Landfill. She'll want silver."
It took Jane weeks to build up her courage. But on a cold and rainy morning early in the Matron's Moon, she stood shivering in a too-thin windbreaker before Peg's place. It was a rundown redbrick row house, one of those that backed onto the landfill. A corroded tin plaque with a double-headed ax on it was all that indicated a witch dwelt within. A crack ran crazily up the front wall, skewing the bricks to either side off true, and plastic sheets had been stapled over the insides of all the windows. The shades were drawn.