The birthday dinner proceeded without incident. Bradley was effusive in his praise of the roast chicken and even more effusive in his thanks for the birthday presents, which he declared were exactly what he had wanted. He then started badgering Gretsella into letting him cutherhair. She bridled. “And what’swrongwith my hair, young Bradley?”
“There’s nothing wrong with your hair, Mother,” Bradley said. “It’s only that…well, it makes you look like a witch.”
“And what’s wrong with looking like a witch?” Gretsella asked, affronted.
“There’snothingwrong with it, Mother,” Bradley said. “But you always complain about people stopping you when you’re on your morning walks to ask you how to cast a spell to enchant their one true love.”
Gretsella eyed him. Bradley gave her a very sweet smile. Gretsella, backed into a corner, scowled. “Oh, fine,” she said. “In two minutes.” Then she went out to use the outhouse, hoping that maybe he would get distracted by something likean attractive young woodsman walking past the cottage window and forget that his mother had made any promises.
Gretsella was walking back to the cottage when a bat swooped ominously past her head. This, in itself, was not unusual. It was dusk, after all, which was the proper time for vespertine pests. Gretsella, being a witch, approved of a nice traditional bat doing a bit of nice traditional ominous swooping. What wasentirelyuntraditional was when the bat swooped past her head a second time and, in the voice of a horrible little man, screamed, “Hail, King Bradley! Hail to the One True King!”
“Oh, shut up,” Gretsella hissed, and started furiously waving her hands through the air to try to fend it off. “Bradley doesn’t want to be the king. Now go away! Shoo!”
“Mother?” Bradley said, poking his head out the door. He was already wearing his haircutting apron. “Who are you talking to? And why are you waving your hands in the air?”
“Don’t you comment on a witch’s business, young Bradley,” Gretsella said, and swept back into the cottage, resolving to cast a spell in the morning that would make her home smell overwhelmingly of large, vicious bat-eating cats.
The next few days continued to present challenges to Gretsella’s usual equilibrium. She was hounded at every turn by prophetic creatures of the forest, all of which seemed heaven-bent on relaying their dreadful tidings to her son. At first, she thought it was purely a mania that had seized the local bats, and that she would be safe so long as she kept Bradley indoors during the evening hours. This pleasant fantasywas brutally squelched the first time she went into the forest with Bradley to gather mushrooms and spied a squirrel sitting on a branch. The squirrel very clearly spotted Bradley at the same time. Its beady little eyes widened with shock, which Gretsella hadn’t been aware was a facial expression available to squirrels. Then it dropped the acorn it was clasping, sat up on its furry haunches, and opened its mouth. It had just barely managed to get out a shrill “Hail!” when Gretsella flung a rock at it.
“Mother!” Bradley cried as the squirrel scampered away. “Why would youthrow a rockat a squirrel? The poor animal didn’t do a thing to you!”
“It hasn’t done a thing to meyet,” Gretsella said. “You never know what the filthy creatures might be planning.” Then she grabbed ahold of Bradley’s elbow to drag him away.
The squirrel, unfortunately, was far from the last of Gretsella’s problems. That evening, Gretsella was forced to light a fire to smoke out an owl that was trying to hoot prophecies down the chimney, and she spent most of the following morning chasing a large family of chattery rabbits out of her garden before they could fill Bradley’s dear, simple head with dangerous ideas about the role he ought to play in international geopolitics. She only felt entirely free to let her guard down when Bradley was at work. The hairdresser’s shop was blessedly free of little woodland beasts who might attempt to crown him without his mother’s consent.
After two weeks of this nonsense, Gretsella reached a day when she felt as if she had, perhaps, emerged victorious. Shepassed an entire blissful morning without any wretched animals attempting to disrupt her domestic tranquility with their relentless prophesizing. Then Bradley came home from work, and Gretsella knew immediately that something was afoot. In the nearly eighteen years of their acquaintance, she had never before seen Bradley with this particular expression on his face. He had the look of a young man who was, for the first time in his life, confronting a question that no one had been able to immediately resolve for him after a single glance at his delightful face. “Mother,” he said, “a bunch of singing mice came into the shop from the back alley today.”
“Singing mice!” Gretsella said, affecting utter astonishment. “Whoever heard of such a thing! I suppose that some high-spirited young witch must have been playing a practical joke.”Mice. She hadn’t evenconsideredthe possibility of Bradley being waylaid by a bunch ofmice.
“A practical joke?” Bradley asked, looking distinctly relieved. “Do you really think that’s it, Mother? They told me that I’m thetrue king!”
“Oh really, Bradley,” Gretsella said. “A bunch of musical rodents barge into your workplace to sing songs about how you’re the head of our national government, and your first response is tobelievethem? Don’t you think that a practical joke is the more likely explanation?” She feltslightlyguilty for misleading him like this, but it wasn’t a very urgent feeling. Bradley would be much better off without all this king nonsense cluttering up the thus far blessedly well-ventilated space between his ears.
“You know, I think you’re right,” Bradley said. He looked more cheerful already. “How silly of me! I was starting to get awfully worried about it too. What would I do without you, Mother?”
“I have absolutely no idea,” Gretsella said, and then they sat down for some tea and cake.
A Short Story About Stories
Once upon a time, a moderately long time ago, a young woman who was doggedly trying to rid herself of the nickname Carrots fell painfully, desperately in love.
The object of Carrots’s passion was a young man named Gareth who lived at the other end of the lane. He was a nice-looking boy, with big, sure hands that he used to milk his family’s cows in the morning (he did this well but resentfully) and to strum his great-grandfather’s lute in the evenings (he did this terribly but enthusiastically). He was a popular boy—not like Carrots—and so the first time he called out to her as she walked past his cottage, she looked behind her for the girl he was looking for. He wasn’t looking for another girl, though, and she loved him for that like a sheepdog loves the shepherd.
Gareth would often walk down the lane to the cottage that Carrots lived in with her parents, lean against the gardenfence, and talk to her about how he was going to leave home as soon as he turned sixteen and head straight to the city to seek his fortune. He and Carrots were both hazy about the details of how, exactly, a fortune was sought, let alone what one was supposed to do with it after it had been found, but that wasn’t the point. The point was that hewantedto leave, wanted to go to faraway places and talk to fascinating people, possibly while drinking red wine and wearing a shirt with the buttons undone just past the point of masculine modesty. Listening to him talk made Carrots feel as if the world stood in front of her with its gates flung wide open. So she’d lean on one side of the garden fence, and he’d lean on the other, and once in a while they would kiss.
Carrots was a girl who read books. This was, most of the time, a wonderful thing. They broadened her perspective. They gave her things to think about other than herself. She loved stories, and she had faith in them in the way other people had faith in their own domestic gods. To a girl who believed in what she’d learned from stories, it felt lovely and gratifying but not particularly shocking that a handsome, popular young man could one day look at the girl who lived down the lane and suddenly, trulyseeher for the first time. This was what she thought had happened between her and Gareth, so she didn’t hesitate for a moment to smile and wave and call out his name when he and three of his friends walked past her cottage one sunny afternoon.
He didn’t smile back. He didn’t wave. He looked at her with no expression at all, then looked away and saidsomething to his friends. They all laughed. They didn’t even stop walking.
Two things changed in Carrots that day.
The first change was that, somewhere deep in her appendix (the appendix being, in the folk tradition of Evermore, the organ said to excrete magic), a metaphorical gear ground into action.
The second was that, from then on, she had a certain amount of contempt for people who believed in silly romanticstories.
Chapter 2.5
A Continuation of the Story That Was Interrupted by a Short Story About Stories
