Maguire, Gregory - [Wicked Years 04] by Maguire Gregory

Author:Maguire, Gregory
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fantasy, Fiction, General, Fiction / General, Fairy Tales; Folklore & Mythology

“Are you showing solidarity with something besides the Clock?” asked Little Daffy. “Senility hits at last.”

The dwarf grunted. “Least we could do is stand by her, since she never bought the ticket to come.”

“And I have no return ticket,” added Dorothy. “I don’t suppose there are any more of those pastries left? They leave a kick, but my, they are tasty.”

At St. Prowd’s

I.

Rain didn’t count the days or the hours in a day.

She didn’t count the items in the colections she made, neither of pinecones nor grey stones. Feathers ranging from the length of a human fingernail to that of a folded umbrela, in colors from pale white to coal and al the stations between. Animal bones—antlers, a bat wing, a femur someone had whittled partway into a flute and then abandoned. It was strange and triangular on one end and no one could identify the creature it must have come from.

She cataloged clouds but didn’t count the varieties; she noticed separate weathers but didn’t taly up

the sorts. She gathered a bevy of smal lake seashels like babies of her precious large one, or like its toys.

The tin cup of arrowheads was her favorite. She knew each one by heft and design, by adze stroke and lichen stain. She didn’t know how many she had.

She didn’t look as closely at family matters. The incidents, the backgrounds, the causes-and-consequences, the self-delusions presented as potted biographies. To the extent she was aware of them—her relatives—they seemed like bundled, ambulatory atmospheres. But she’d picked up the art of pretending to listen. It seemed to calm them al down, and who knows, maybe she learned something. She didn’t count the lessons, if there were any.

In two years the family had managed, among them, to build a little home. It had been hard going at the outset. Not much more than a lean-to dug into the side of a hil. More cave than cottage. When they’d survived the first winter, Nor had made her way overland to the nearest settlement—some two weeks away by foot—and come back to Nether How with a sack of square-head nails. Useful enough, but since the art of construction wasn’t one of Lir’s strengths, everyone was grateful for the help of a trio of hunters heading west to hunt skark. They’d stopped to water their horses at Five Lakes, and by the time they’d left ten days later, they had framed up a tidy cottage on the stone foundation Lir had been carting into place for a year. It remained only for him to finish it. He got the roof shingled just in time, though that second winter the house had to double as a shed. (Candle had managed to befriend a goat and some wild chickens.) He and Nor worked al winter fitting the floor and wals with planking while Candle foraged in the woods for edible roots and bark and for seedpods to begin a lakeland farm.

“What does it take to grow a farm?” Lir asked his wife once.

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