Foretold Read Free

dove under the quilt in her best slip to wait.
    As for Elsie, she lived right across the way, so she had only to dart out Ava’s door and into her own. Like Ava’s, her house was empty—no family crowd to put fright to skittish phantoms. There was a fair down at Mosey Landing tonight to keep folks happy, and casks of drink and a cakewalk, and for a special treat some music-makers from across the Bigwater. All strange they were, handsome and dark-eyed and clad in patterns, with scythe-billed birds perched on their heads that made their own shivery songs in tune to the drums and chimes.
    Elsie’s hand shook lighting her candle, and unlacing her bodice she fumbled about as bad as if she’d got frozen fingersfrom making a snow troll. Finally, though, she was in her sheets, coverlet to her chin and long feet poking out the bottom. She waited, trembling and fidgeting as the flame teased shadows up and down the walls, and every single minute she thought a phantom was come, and almost died of nerves.
    Now, Pippin, she was out alone in the night. She lived all the way on the far side of the orchard, no small walk, and she set off quick with her wedge of dreamcake cradled to her chest, her heart tight and sore from all her big wishing, not just tonight but all her life. Little life, big wishing. That doesn’t go easy on a heart, and she thought maybe she’d stretched hers all out, how a sweater neck gets when you’ve shown the poor judgment of dressing the goat—though
that
, she consoled herself, was long ago, and had been all Matty’s idea in any case.
    She hurried. If Matty was at the Blackgrace house, his phantom wouldn’t have far to go to get to hers, and she’d better not miss it if it did! But if he was in his own unfinished house, where he liked to go and work or just sit sometimes to dream, he’d have to send his phantom down Century Hill and that would give her a little time. She could get back home and fix her hair at least.…
    But Matty
liked
her hair all fairy-tangled, didn’t he?
    Pippin hesitated for only a second. She crouched and set down her dreamcake on a tree root, then unpinned her hair. It tumbled to her waist, as shadow-colored as her eyes were sky, and the wind zoomed in at once to get it. This breeze tugged a strand here, this one there, and it was a snatch-grab dance of wind and hair fit for a queen of fairies.
    Pippin closed her eyes. She loved the feeling—the stir of it, and the ache as her tame hair came wild-alive. Hairs got used to lying one way, so that it hurt the scalp to muss them up, but it was a good hurt—like the ache from too muchlaughing, or the tightness low in your belly when your eyes sparked together with someone special and lightning zinged all through you.
    And then, before Pippin could pick up her cake to rush home, she heard voices and froze stock-still.
3. G ENTLEMEN S END P HANTOMS
    Now, magic was a true thing; a certainty. No one who had seen their nan turn creature could doubt it. They’d be wrinkled old biddies one minute, just about to gasp their last, and—blink!—they were gone, and owls or hawks were shaking off their nightgowns. Once in a while a cat or a fox, but it was flying they mostly wanted, and so they went with birds. It was a one-time, one-way change, and only women could make it, to the bitterness of the boys and men, who got up to the end of their lives just to die.
    There were other bits and bobs of magic too: cures and curses; fairies and treelings dashing stealthy at the edges of sight; sweet moon milk and shadow castings and such like that. Nothing like what the Ancestors had brought here with them on their carved ships, but some things still remained.
    As for phantoms on St. Faith’s Day, a lot of folks thought they weren’t real foretellings at all, but just the dreams girls had when they nodded off waiting and saw who they wished. And sure there was reason for doubt. Often enough it happened that two girls claimed the same phantom and