Crewel Lye Read Free Page B

birdbrained lizards were getting stabbed by flying stone needles, and it served them right.
    Ivy caught a flicker of something just off the edge of her vision. It looked like a swishing horse's tail. The day mare! Imbri had brought her the nice, violent day-dream, but now the mare had to gallop off to her next delivery.
    There was a yowl. Ivy looked up. The kitty-hawk had come quite close to her and was having some kind of problem. The parts of it had intensified, the cat-head and feet becoming more feline and the bird-wings and tail more avian. Now they were fighting for dominance. The head was reaching around to bite at the wings, and the wings were pounding on the head.
    Ivy watched closely, so of course the intensification of separate qualities continued. The fight got worse. Feathers and tufts of fur flew out. Finally the kitty-hawk spun out of control, crashed into the moat, and was gone. This was one experiment of nature that didn't seem to have worked out. The sharpening of its facets, as it had approached Ivy and her violent day-dream, had caused the creature to fragment and destroy itself.
    Ivy walked on, glad to be past the kitty-hawk but sad how that had happened. She was still looking for the door into the castle. She came to a small plot that contained a single headstone. It was in the shape of the head of an old man, with sparse stone-gray hair and white whiskers. It looked almost alive, and became more so as she contemplated it; its stony gaze was fixed on her. Slowly one mineral eye closed in a wink.
    “You are alive!” she exclaimed, startled.
    “No, snippet, I'm just cold stone,” it said. “I take the form of the head of whoever is buried near me. That is my nature; I'm a headstone.”
    “You mean you look like--” she began, glancing at the oblong of dirt in front of it.
    “Exactly, peanut. Like the loudmouthed old man who is buried here.” Actually, he sounded to Ivy like a loudmouthed golem, but maybe all loudmouths were similar.
    “That's interesting,” Ivy said. This headstone didn't seem like much of a threat.
    “Last year I was planted near a lovely, dead, young woman; you should have seen me then! My surface was like polished alabaster, and my shape was beautiful.”
    “That's nice,” Ivy said, losing interest. “I've got to go now.”
    “Ah, but if you try to pass me, I'll yell, and you'll get the brush-off,” the headstone warned.
    “Oh, pooh!” she said. “You can't do anything, rockhead!” She walked on defiantly.
    “Intruder alert!” the headstone yelled loudly. “Undisciplined child! Probably a real brat! Give her the brush-off!”
    From around the castle flew the most awesomely terrible object Ivy could imagine: a huge hairbrush. She scooted back the way she had come, covering her behind. That headstone hadn't been bluffing!
    Ivy backed up against the wall so that her tender posterior wouldn't be exposed. What was she to do now? She couldn't face that--or turn her back on it, either.
    The brush hovered a moment. Then, spying no naughty posterior, it flew back the way it had come. Ivy relaxed; she had escaped this time.
    But she knew with sick certainty that the moment she passed the headstone again, it would cry another warning and that horrendous brush would return. She was stuck. She was a fairly self-assured little girl, but that brush--! She had to figure out a way to be rid of it!
    Then she had another notion, for her mind was filled with notions, some of them almost as cute as she was. Suppose she nullified the headstone instead? If she could just stop that loudmouth from blabbing, somehow silencing it--She looked in her bag again. Maybe she could get creative. Stone, mare shoe, dead moth. Nothing here to--
    Then a creative bulb lit up, for an instant flashing as brightly as the brightside effulgence she had so recently negotiated with the dark lamp. Yes, there was a way, maybe!
    She marched up to the headstone. “Hi, rockbrain!” she said boldly.
    The stone