Let him come, said the pot.

Idonna's brows, gray and wiry, came together in a frown. "You too? I see you have as little sense as she. If we thwart him, you know our lot: The law still stands. He will have us for the burning."

Bubbles welled up from the center of the heaving brew, burst on the surface with a sound like chortling laughter. Law or no law, he will have you, if that is his desire. You of all should know this.

Idonna's face drew itself into an even tighter knot of anger and perplexity. "It was you, wasn't it?" she demanded. "It was your counsel that turned her to this. It was different, better when she only heeded me!" She slammed a heavy iron lid down over the simmering vessel. "Curse the day she first summoned you!"

Steam sighed from between iron lips. So old you are, and still so fearful-fond of life, and still without the wisdom to see. Old woman, she was never the one to summon me.

"Then who? Not I! Not even if your coming gave us back what we lost that night. You were not meant to live. No spell's gone right since you've been one of our council."

The lid clanked and clattered against the rim of the pot, but the voice said no more.

Someone pounded at the cottage door.

The old woman shot upright in her seat, gnarled hands crossed over slack breasts like empty wineskins. Girlhood prayers long cast aside rose unbidden to her trembling lips. "Who-?" She felt cold sweat dew her papery skin. "Who's there?"

"Open!" A man's voice, harsh, loud. More blows battered the door. It was of good oak, thick, boasting iron hasps and hinges. Still it shook and groaned under the assault of heavy hands.

Idonna scuttled to the door and shot back the bar. She took her place a distance back, knowing what must come. Come it did: The door slammed open, sturdy wood hitting daub wall so that chips of whitewash went flying and dust sifted down from the cloth ceiling slung between the roof beams. Bootheels gouged small maiden-moons into the dirt floor as five men strode in, taking all the share of space they desired inside the little house.

Four were his men, the fifth was himself. He stood as tall and taller than the guards he'd picked to attend him here, and his hands in their gloves of supple leather were coarsened by the sword. The old woman sank to the ground in a ragged puddle of skirts, her fingers tangled in the fabric.

"She's here?" he demanded.

Idonna's answer did not come as readily as he'd like, or else was lost in a mumble of terror. He jerked his head toward the huddle of her bones and one of his men yanked the old one's head up by the iron gray plaits wound crisscross above her crown. The braids tore loose of their anchoring wooden pins but held one to the other; the man looked as if he'd picked up a cauldron by the handle, a pot with a woman's face.

"Lord-" Idonna licked her lips. "Lord, we had no thought that you might come-"

Another nod; this time the man served his master by slapping the old woman's face four times, with slow, careful attention to the blows. "Lie to fools, not to me. There's nothing happens for leagues around this hovel that you don't know. Not a mouse farts but you've word of it before the smell touches the creature's own nostrils."

Another darting touch of tongue to lips so wrinkled that they had folded in upon themselves. "Lord, she is here."

"In there, I suppose." He regarded the closed door. He did not even need to nod this time: A second of his men was on the spot, pounding on the planks, thundering for entry.

The door opened into dark. Haldis's face swam up into the flickering light, cool condescension spreading over her features like cream. "It was not locked," she said. "You did not need to prove to me that you're a brute beast." She turned her eyes to the man himself. "My lord . . . " (A smirk to take the deference off the curtsy she made him.) His eyes and mouth were slits bitten out of his face with the blade of a battle-ax. "Leave us," he told his men. Their obedience was as natural as breathing. The last of the four to leave the cottage was the one who still dragged Idonna in his wake. A flash of skirt licked between him and the door.

"She will stay here with me," Haldis said, barring the guardsman's way.

He turned an ox's head towards his master, seeking instruction. "Do as she requests." His lordship made it sound like a great gift. The guardsman let the old woman drop and stepped back outside with his fellows.

His lordship claimed the splitwood bench, Haldis resumed her chair. The hag sat shivering on the floor where she had been let fall. Neither of the two took notice, and eventually she picked herself up and found a three-legged stool to drag into the shadow of the woodpile by the hearth.

"You know why I've come?" he asked.

"Will you tell me I'm lying, too, if I say no?" Her mouth was small and set, her lips pale.

He scowled. "No games, Haldis. I want no games; I'll have none."

"Not even for your own idle amusement?" Her voice scaled up unnaturally bright and giddy, though her face betrayed no change. "Not even to see how fast a lone woman can run before you catch her?" The tight mouth twitched. "But that was sixteen years past. We were both younger then."

He drew off the fine leather glove and leaned through the steam rising from the lidded pot. The glove struck her a solid blow across the cheek, sent her trim white head-cloth flying. Dark hair streaked with gray tumbled out of its pins and down over her shoulders. In her corner, the old woman moaned in sympathy. "I said no games."

Haldis cradled her reddening cheek. "As you wish, my lord Galeran. No games. I knew you were coming-there has been talk of little else drifting down the mountain roads-but as for why . . . " She shrugged. "Rumors."

He clasped gloved hand and bare together between his knees. "Tell me," he said. "Tell me what they say, these rumors."

"That your third wife is dead. That your name is still yours alone. That three wives, young and fair and broad-hipped and sturdy, have gone one after the other into the grave without leaving behind any sign that you ever lay with them as a man lies with his bride. That not one had the courtesy to die in childbirth."

The hands unclasped, clenched into stones on either knee. "Three wives," he said through gritted teeth. "Three, and all barren bitches! What odds that?"

"What odds indeed?" She had the power to haunt her face with the ghost of a smile her lips never formed.

"You cursed me," he said, the firelight making his eyes burn red. "You cursed my marriage bed and me, didn't you? Didn't you?" His roar shook the rafters.

She never moved. "I am too wise to contradict your opinions, my lord. What good will it do me to deny what you already believe? And yet, those who know the workings of the Art will tell you that any casting-for blessing or for curse-would be impossible with only the two of us left, and I no longer a maiden, by your grace."

"I do not care to be lessoned in the dirt and dealings of witches." The firelight fled, leaving his face all darkness. "It is galling enough to know that you have black powers over decent folk. I praise the day I made it law that the fire should have any of you filth caught and convicted of sorcery."

She let the words pass over her, clouds across a summer sky's serenity. "As my lord Galeran wills it," she said. "Then you have come to feed me to the fire for having placed that curse on you?"

"On them, damn it; on them! The only way you could touch me was through them. If the dead could speak, they'd tell you that it was their wombs your spells destroyed, not my manhood."

"Wombs are easily come by," she replied. "Especially for such a man as you. Why stop at three? I can tell you of fathers enough who are ready to sell you their daughters."

"And waste more years battering at a locked door? Don't take me for an idiot." He stood and measured out the length of the hearth, pacing back and forth over the baked and beaten earth before it. "Noble or common, lady or trull, no woman who knows my favor goes away full with my rooted seed. If I had stoked that fire with you and your granddam as well as your mother, you'd have had no time to cast the curse, but I spared you. There was talk that you carried my child. For that alone I spared you, and the old one to tend you when your time came. Maybe that was my error."

Her eyelids lowered. "My lord is as wise as he is kind."

He stopped in his tracks, back to the fire. "It was her death that made you cast the spell."

"Certainly nothing else," Haldis said softly, sweetly. "If you caught me in the forest, threw me down, had your joy of me, well-! It was your forest, my lord; you have the rights for hunting all fair game within its precincts. I hear some women say I should have felt honored."

Her words floated from her mouth, of no more substance to him than a water bubble.

"Damn you, will you not see?" He stamped his boot on the raised hearth. Caked red mud flaked down, staining the stones. "I had no choice! She left me none. She came and stood in the town square, a wild woman, baying accusations against me like a moon-mad dog. I did her a mercy by locking her away. It is no fault of mine if she was too stupid to accept it. She spewed curses against me from the cell, too, in my own castle, under my own roof. More than a score of my men were witness to her venom. They feared for their lives as well as mine, harboring a witch."

"And so you burned her." Haldis got the words out quickly, a mouthful of bitter roots. "You have not come to justify that to me after these sixteen years. What does my lord Galeran desire? I would be grateful to grant it as soon as I may."

"So that you can see the back of me, eh?" He managed a chuckle. His bare hand stroked the wealth of his beard, black badger-streaked with white and gray. "We're of one mind, then, Haldis. I can't shake the stink of this hut from my clothes fast enough. What a shame that you're a damned soul. We might have made a match of it, otherwise. I may wed where I like, you know, high or low. At this late date my vassals would be glad to see me wed to a wild pig of the forest, so long as I might get a child on it. But a witch-! They fear that worse than they dread the wars that must come if I die with no heir of my body."

"Wars?" Haldis echoed.

"Unlike me, they have never known a true war. They dwell safe under my rule, my lordlings, and grow fat. They would like to grow fatter. But if my holdings fall free at my death, each will turn on each; not from greed for land or thirst for conquest, but solely out of fear that if he does not strike his neighbor down first, his neighbor will strike him."

Haldis stood. She was a small woman; the top of her head did not come up to Lord Galeran's chin. "I do not care for your lands or your wars or your rabbit-minded lordlings. You have not come here to ask for my hand in marriage-that much I know. If you have more to say, say it."

"I have come for the child," he said.

In her corner, old Idonna gave a gasp that was half sob.

"Child?" Haldis's expression was guileless. "What child?"

His gloved hand snapped around her wrist, a prisoner's iron shackle. He tightened his grip until bone grated over bone. "This can be your neck," he said.

She eyed him steadily, refusing the pain. Little white lines twisted along the angles of her jaw, but she did not cry out. At last he released her. She chafed the martyred wrist and said, "You will forgive me; that was a light-minded jest, and after I gave my word to speak frankly with you. But you see, I did not have any idea that you knew."

His eyes grew warm. "So the rumors spoke rightly. There is a child; a girl?" Haldis nodded. "Well, even so, she must do. I will wed her to the strongest man I can find and for once I shall be able to sleep in bed of nights without the belly-cold." He grinned, pleased with himself.

The grin paled as the silence crept back into its place before the fire, like a cat hearthcome home. Haldis fed upon it, drinking down the strength of quiet places, but old Idonna whimpered, and the lord Galeran's teeth grated out impatience, one against the other.

At last he could bear no more. "Where is she?" he snapped. "Now that you know why I've come, what keeps you from summoning her into my presence? God witness me, the girl will be as glad to quit this place as I. They claim you've kept her here secretly, letting no human eye see her from the day of her birth." A swift, suspicious frown touched his face. "She's not birth-marred, is she?"

"She is not birth-marred," Haldis said.

"Good! Fetch her, then, as you value your life."

"I will." And Haldis dropped his lordship another curtsy and went to the hook beside the fireplace to take the ladle down. She hummed a strange, half-hobbled tune as she wrapped her left hand well in her apron and took up the lid from the pot. The ladle dipped into the steaming brew, traced invisible whorled designs through the liquid. From her corner, old Idonna's voice quavered up in fearful harmony, both melodies twining into a braid with the wordless song of the bubbling pot.

Lord Galeran stared, at first too stunned at such outlandish doings to be angry. He had given a command, showed the power of his hand, and still the jade would not fly to obey! What was she about, this strange witch-woman he'd taken once for his pleasure? He was afraid, and he did not care for the feeling. He wanted to boot it far from him, like an importunate hound.

He lunged forward, bare fingers digging deep in Haldis's shoulder so that she gasped with the shock more than the pain. "Games? Games again? I want my child!"

"You want." The words slipped past him, little lizards of the breath. She hung the ladle back in its place. A measure of the liquid still sloshed in the small wooden bowl. Then, in a voice meant to be heard: "My lord, I am surprised at you. You know we are witches. Did you think we call our children home as common folk do?"

"You use a spell to call her?"

"Less than a spell. No casting can be made without three voices raised-maiden, mother, and crone. But when only two ring out, the third is drawn to answer. She will be with us soon. Will it please you to wait? I can offer no great refreshment for your grace, but I think we still have some peaches. I have heard they are your favorite."

Grudgingly, ungraciously he sat again and let her offer him the basket of bright summer fruit. When she volunteered to pour wine, he waved it away. "I have no wish to try the taste of your poisons, Haldis." He turned the peach around and around in his hand, examining the flawless, unbroken skin. "With these, at least, I could catch at your mischief. You cannot slip a black draught through a skin that shows the mark, even of a needle." She laughed and called him clever, then went outside to present a second basketful to his men.

He devoured two of the sweetly blushing fruits while she was gone, letting the juices trickle from the corners of his mouth, smacking his lips. She returned just as he was reaching for a third.

Her hand fell on his forearm, a gentle restraint. "You will give yourself loose bowels if you have too many," she said. "I tried to tell that to your men, but they were greedy swine; they guzzled down four and more apiece."

"Then let them pay for it later," he said, full of good humor.

"You were always kind, my lord." She palmed one of the peach pits and walked back to the hearthside where the ladle hung.

"What are you up to?" he demanded. "What's that you're mucking with?"

"Nothing."

He thought he heard a splash, but before he could question her further a faint tapping sound jerked his attention away. He could not for his life tell whence it had come. It was almost as if someone outside were drumming a finger against the iron fastenings of the door, but why would that be? His men would have raised a challenge. Besides, the wood of a door was for the knocking.

Haldis smiled, rubbing her hands together as if she rolled a hot chestnut between them. "She's here," she said. She went to the door and opened it wide.

Galeran stared out into gray sky and black trees. If the moon rode full above leafless branches, he could not see it. Something white smeared the heavens, shining too bright to give honest men sight of the moon. He tried to rise from his place, to go to the door and have a better look, but his limbs were heavy and there was a seductive weariness lapped around him. He had ridden hard and far to come here; he deserved to have his desires brought to him.

"Where is she?" he blustered. "If you've got tricks in mind-"

Haldis knelt on the threshold, then rose and turned as if she were a silk-gowned lady weaving through the figures of a dance. Her hands she held joined together in the attitude of one who reads a holy book. "She is here," she repeated, coming forward to sparkle in Lord Galeran's sight.

For an instant he blinked his eyes, seeking to banish the dazzlement of pinpoint lights that dotted his vision like raindrops on a puddle. Then he saw her, and the faery lights were gone.

She stood with one tiny foot planted on either one of her mother's conjoined hands. Perfect in form, her breasts budding to the full, she was all smiles and curves and softness. Not a thread of clothing covered her, nothing kept her warm except the periodic gust of Galeran's astonished breath. From petal pink toes to dandelion-wisp hair the color of a raven's wing, she was only as tall as Haldis's thumb. Luminous dark eyes smiled up at him.

The breath of wonder could not hold against the Sour fear now scaling its way out of Galeran's belly. "What sort of abomination is this?" he demanded. The words came out stumbling, flecked with spittle. "I want my child, not some-some faery-get, some freak of nature!"

The tiny creature in Haldis's hands shrank in on itself, a tender shoot of grass frostbitten. Head bowed into hands, back curved over, knees bent as the little one curled up on its side, shivering.

"Now see what you've done," Haldis murmured, raising her cupped hands closer to her face. "Poor thing; since I brought her into this world she's known only love-more than she knew while in my womb, I vow."

"Damn you!" he thundered. "This is the working of your witchcraft, worshiping barrenness, making cows run dry and women's wombs open before their time! It blights even your own belly. You've given me a monster for a child. You'll answer for it at the stake."

"My lord, complaint?" Haldis's hands closed slowly over the small pink curl of flesh within. "How would you have your daughter be?"

"How?" he echoed. "You must he mad to ask. Of a woman's size, rot your eyes! What spell has robbed her of human height?"

"I told you." Haldis spoke as if lessoning a child. "There could be no spells cast from this house since you burned my mother, flesh and bone; none woven until she came to us, the maiden to complete our triad. All we might do meanwhile, my granddam and I, was use the herbs whose properties do not rely on enchantment. And so I did."

Haldis's hands began to open like the waking of a flower, to move by wavering degrees toward Galeran's face. He tried to shift his weight and could not, tried to turn his head away and could not, tried to close his eyes and found that he had lost power over even that, although his lids felt heavy enough to drop and never open again. Dust and wood were under his tongue. All he could do was move his eyes in their sockets, for what comfort it gave him. To one side were shadows, to the other a table on which rested a basket in which hard, small, brown, and wrinkled things that stunk of mold had somehow banished the peaches.

So he knew, and with only his eyes to speak for him she could still understand his late-come knowledge.

"Peaches at this season?" she said. "Your desire for them would not let you make them a thing to be questioned, like the wine, even though offered to you under my roof. Greed outdoes you, my lord Galeran, more than a double dusting of all venomed powders that cling to surfaces, show no outward mark on a fruit's tender skin. What you want must be good by the simple fact that you want it. You see things as you would have them; we hardly needed cast our spell of seeming." She clicked her tongue over the once-were-peaches in the basket. "If I had let you eat more than two, it would be with you as it is for your men, poor souls. I hope that by your lights they did not die with too many sins on them, unconfessed, unshriven."

He tried to speak and found that the paralysis had cast its net over his tongue as well. His eyes maintained immunity. Their sight-now blurred, now dazzled-still owned flashes of awful clarity. Her cupped hands were half-open, coming ever nearer to his face. Soon it would not matter whether he darted desperate eyes to right or left: He had no choice but to see what she willed.

Haldis opened her hands.

It was curled in upon itself, small and soft, red with blood, free of glamour. Except for its outsize proportion to the delicate limbs-the minuscule, perfect fingers and toes-the head and face of it were human enough. Only the eyelids were fused shut, to trap the slumbering soul forever in the place of many dreamings. The torn end of the birth cord passed between the fingers of one hand, as if it told the beads of an elfin rosary.

"See how she sleeps," Haldis whispered over it. "See how she smiles!" She shifted her hands so that one was sufficient to cup the manikin. She held one finger of the other along the exquisite curve of the spine. "You see? No bigger than my thumb. So she was when we first brought her forth, the night my mother's pyre still smoldered in your castle's courtyard. So we kept her, once we saw the sign marking her sex. We kept her warm and safe." She nodded toward the small black pot still simmering over the fire. "We did not know, at first, whether her presence would be enough to make up the third that we had lost." The flash of her teeth blinded him. "It was."

She pulled her blouse from one shoulder, baring a breast, and brought her cupped hand up beneath it. An old, old lullaby purled from her lips as she gazed down with all a mother's doting love. Ice shrouded Galeran's bones as he saw a hand no bigger than a grain of wheat reach up to press itself into Haldis's breast. When at last Haldis lowered her hand, a single glistening drop of milk hung suspended from her nipple.

Without bothering to cover her breast again, she stood with both hands cradling her child. "You have come to me for a daughter, my lord; I have given you one. You complain she is not of a size to suit you? I will provide. You are in haste to have her? This, too, will be my care. I am a witch, after all. We would not thrive if we could not content those who come seeking our aid."

Her skirts whirled out as she ran to fetch the ladle. Standing it upright on the table, she slid the ungrown child into its flat-bottomed bowl. Hands stippled bloody, she began to tear open every fastening of Lord Galeran's garb, rolling him from his seat like a log to lie naked before the fire.

He felt the pressure on his chest as she straddled him, the ladle in her hand. Two fingers hooked his mouth open, wood clunked against his teeth as she tipped the ladle to his mouth. Something hot and wriggling slipped over his tongue, down the back of his throat. He tried to scream; he only gurgled.

"There," she said, dismounting, satisfied.

He fought to regain control of his body and found, with as much surprise as if it were a miracle, that his fingers would respond to the commands of his brain. He wiggled them, and his toes, and the tongue in his mouth that had lain so lately stiff and useless. A quivering life came back into his lips, crept up his legs and arms, until all the webs of animated flesh met and meshed above his heart.

She did not seem to notice. Once her gruesome task was done, she had stood up and turned her back to him. There she was-he could raise his head and see her plainly now. She stood against the fireplace stones, one hip outthrust, gloating into the dark. If he tilted his head a little he could see the old woman who rocked herself back and forth behind the woodpile, keening.