Page 27 of A Serpent in the Garden

You think I don’t want out of this empty doom? Find another way. One without such a high cost. You’ll be old and weak, vulnerable for days around some hag you barely know. If she kills you, she’ll never have to give your youth back. Have you considered that?

If you have another idea I’d love to hear it. I think I trust her.

Like you trusted the baker, It said, with exquisite scorn.

I only have your word that he was a murderer, I retorted.

“There is a presence in you,” the hag said, gravel in her voice. “I feel him. He doesn’t like my price.”

“He doesn’t like much of anything.”

She reached for my hand, greenish veins ridged along the back of hers. “Does he speak for you?” she asked, as though she disapproved.

“I speak for me.”

Her hand was soft, fondling my young flesh with greedy fingers. “And what say you?”

I cast a nervous glance behind me at Serich, who swallowed so hard I could see the jolt of his Adam’s apple bobbing.

“Will you have mine in her stead?” he asked, stepping forward. “Youth is youth. There’s only two years difference between us.”

She didn’t spare him a glance. “No. Hers.”

I can have her heart out in a second, It said spontaneously.

And then her charms and wards would break and Serich and I would find ourselves surrounded. She asks a fair exchange.

The hag looked at me as though she could hear the heated words hissing inside my head.

“Okay.” I squeezed her gnarled hand and nodded. “It’s a deal.”

There was a needle in her other hand before I knew it. The point pierced the pad of my middle finger, where a dot of blood welled. She pressed it against her withered lips, looking up into my eyes. I braced myself for the years to hit me all at once, the aches of age, for my skin to loosen and puddle, my back to curve into a hunch. For my teeth to rot out of my skull, my vision to go filmy.

And quite suddenly, I was looking up at me, one side of my young face stained a vivid, autumnal orange in the firelight.

I wished she wouldn’t display my own body so boldly as she examined what her bargain had bought her. Her hands drifted along my bare calves as if she were caressing a lover, exalting in my flesh. My mud-caked pants were puddled in the corner. I looked as though I’d clawed my way out of a grave. Dirt crusted my face, my lips red and flaking, my hair a ragged knot at the back of my head. None of it seemed to trouble the hag.

“So filthy,” she mused, watching dried dirt crumble all around the bare legs that used to belong to me as she ran her hands against them. “You tried to disguise your scent?”

Is this truly what I sound like? I wondered. The voice was off; it was me but not me. The same arcs in pitch, the same tenor, yet still so foreign.

I croaked out a yes that echoed Serich’s and watched myself shake my head and laugh in answer.

“They’re old, my dear.” She said it as if I’d done something enchantingly silly. “The oldest of them all. A bit of mud wouldn’t have done you any good.”

I would have answered but I couldn’t bear to hear that awful frog croak erupt from my mouth. She drifted across the room in my underwear, my legs so colorless they acted as a bare canvas, soaking in the orange of the flames flickering in the hearth.

Sitting before a misty looking glass, she washed my face with a bowl of water and a rag. She traced the arch of my eyebrows, stroked the jut of my cheekbones like one would a cat, pressed her fingertips into the firmness of my neck.

“Even when I was young, I was never what one might call beautiful,” she said. “It’s nice to see what it feels like every now and then. I imagine you take it quite for granted,” she called over. “When you’re young, you’re never going to be an old fossil. You see nothing but your flaws. Not until you’re gray and wrinkled do you realize how perfect you were.” She shrugged. In the looking glass, my reflection copied her as she stood.

I felt I’d die of embarrassment, watching her pluck at my naked thighs, testing the flexibility of my skin. Serich looked like he’d like to follow me into the grave.

She extended my arm, twisting my wrist this way and that. “How lovely, not to hear the creak of old bones when I move.”

I’ve never seen you so clearly before. It cocked its head, because of course he had had to come with me in the swap. The least the hag could have done was take custody of my demon.

You see me every single day.