I’m sorry, he said to Halsa. But it’s no good. Maybe you should just go away. Wake up. Catch fish. Fetch water for the wizards of Perfil.
The pain in Halsa’s stomach was sharper, as if someone were stabbing her. When she put her hand down, she had hold of the wooden doll.
What’s that? Onion said.
Nothing, Halsa said. Something I found in the swamp. I said I would give it to the wizard, but I won’t! Here, you take it!
She thrust it at Onion. It went all the way through him. It was an uncomfortable feeling, even though it wasn’t really there. Halsa, he said. He put Mik down.
Take it! she said. Here! Take it now!
The train was roaring. Onion knew where they were; he recognized the way the light looked. Someone was telling a joke in the front of the train, and in a minute a woman would laugh. It would be a lot brighter in a minute. He put his hand up to stop the thing that Halsa was stabbing him with and something smacked against his palm. His fingers brushed Halsa’s fingers.
It was a wooden doll with a sharp little nose. There was a nose on the back of its head, too. Oh, take it! Halsa said. Something was pouring out of her, through the doll, into Onion. Onion fell back against a woman holding a birdcage on her lap. “Get off!” the woman said. It hurt. The stuff pouring out of Halsa felt like life, as if the doll were pulling out her life like a skein of heavy, sodden, black wool. It hurt Onion, too. Black stuff poured and poured through the doll, into him, until there was no space for Onion, no space to breathe or think or see. The black stuff welled up in his throat, pressed behind his eyes. “Halsa,” he said, “let go!”
The woman with the birdcage said, “What’s wrong with him?”
Mik said, “What’s wrong? What’s wrong?”
The light changed. Onion, Halsa said, and let go of the doll. He staggered backward. The tracks beneath the train were singing tara-ta tara-ta ta-rata-ta. Onion’s nose was full of swamp water and coal and metal and magic. “No,” Onion said. He threw the doll at the woman holding the birdcage and pushed Mik down on the floor. “No,” Onion said again, louder. People were staring at him. The woman who’d been laughing at the joke had stopped laughing. Onion covered Mik with his body. The light grew brighter and blacker, all at once.
Onion! Halsa said. But she couldn’t see him anymore. She was awake in the cubby beneath the stair. The doll was gone.
Halsa had seen men coming home from the war. Some of them had been blinded. Some had lost a hand or an arm. She’d seen one man wrapped in lengths of cloth and propped up in a dog cart that his young daughter pulled on a rope. He’d had no legs, no arms. When people looked at him, he cursed them. There was another man who ran a cockpit in Larch. He came back from the war and paid a man to carve him a leg out of knotty pine. At first he was unsteady on the pine leg, trying to find his balance again. It had been funny to watch him chase after his cocks, like watching a windup toy. By the time the army came through Larch again, though, he could run as fast as anyone.
It felt as if half of her had died on the train in the mountains. Her ears rang. She couldn’t find her balance. It was as if a part of her had been cut away, as if she were blind. The part of her that knew things, saw things, wasn’t there anymore. She went about all day in a miserable deafening fog.
She brought water up the stairs and she put mud on her arms and legs. She caught fish, because Onion had said that she ought to catch fish. Late in the afternoon, she looked and saw Tolcet sitting beside her on the pier.
“You shouldn’t have bought me,” she said. “You should have bought Onion. He wanted to come with you. I’m bad-tempered and unkind and I have no good opinion of the wizards of Perfil.”
“Of whom do you have a low opinion? Yourself or the wizards of Perfil?” Tolcet asked.
“How can you serve them?” Halsa said. “How can you serve men and women who hide in towers and do nothing to help people who need help? What good is magic if it doesn’t serve anyone?”
“These are dangerous times,” Tolcet said. “For wizards as well as for children.”
“Dangerous times! Hard times! Bad times,” Halsa said. “Things have been bad since the day I was born. Why do I see things and know things, when there’s nothing I can do to stop them? When will there be better times?”
“What do you see?” Tolcet said. He took Halsa’s chin in his hand and tilted her head this way and that, as if her head were a glass ball that he could see inside. He put his hand on her head and smoothed her hair as if she were his own child. Halsa closed her eyes. Misery welled up inside her.
“I don’t see anything,” she said. “It feels like someone wrapped me in a wool blanket and beat me and left me in the dark. Is this what it feels like not to see anything? Did the wizards of Perfil do this to me?”
“Is it better or worse?” Tolcet said.
“Worse,” Halsa said. “No. Better. I don’t know. What am I to do? What am I to be?”
“You are a servant of the wizards of Perfil,” Tolcet said. “Be patient. All things may yet be well.”
Halsa said nothing. What was there to say?
She climbed up and down the stairs of the wizard’s tower, carrying water, toasted bread and cheese, little things that she found in the swamp. The door at the top of the stairs was never open. She couldn’t see through it. No one spoke to her, although she sat there sometimes, holding her breath so that the wizard would think she had gone away again. But the wizard wouldn’t be fooled so easily. Tolcet went up the stairs, too, and perhaps the wizard admitted him. Halsa didn’t know.
Essa and Burd and the other children were kind to her, as if they knew that she had been broken. She knew that she wouldn’t have been kind to them if their situations had been reversed. But perhaps they knew that, too. The two women and the skinny man kept their distance. She didn’t even know their names. They disappeared on errands and came back again and disappeared into the towers.
Once, when she was coming back from the pier with a bucket of fish, there was a dragon on the path. It wasn’t very big, only the size of a mastiff. But it gazed at her with wicked, jeweled eyes. She couldn’t get past it. It would eat her, and that would be that. It was almost a relief. She put the bucket down and stood waiting to be eaten. But then Essa was there, holding a stick. She hit the dragon on its head, once, twice, and then gave it a kick for good measure. “Go on, you!” Essa said. The dragon went, giving Halsa one last reproachful look. Essa picked up the bucket of fish. “You have to be firm with them,” she said. “Otherwise they get inside your head and make you feel as if you deserve to be eaten. They’re too lazy to eat anything that puts up a fight.”
Halsa shook off a last, wistful regret, almost sorry not to have been eaten. It was like waking up from a dream, something beautiful and noble and sad and utterly untrue. “Thank you,” she said to Essa. Her knees were trembling.
“The bigger ones stay away from the meadow,” Essa said. “It’s the smaller ones who get curious about the wizards of Perfil. And by ‘curious,’ what I really mean is hungry. Dragons eat the things that they’re curious about. Come on, let’s go for a swim.”
Sometimes
