The Third Bear Read Free Page B

the change of seasons every year. He knew this from the growing of the crops and the birthing of children. He knew it from the forest itself, and the cycles it went through that often seemed incomprehensible and yet had their own pattern, if you could only see it. From the first thawed trickle of stream water in the spring to the last hopping frog in the fall, the world held a thousand mysteries. No man could hope to know the truth of them all.
    When the door opened and he stood in a room very much like the room one might find in a woodman's cottage, with a fireplace and a rug and a shelf and pots and pans on the wood walls, and a rocking chair - when this happened, Horley decided in the time it took him to blink twice that he had no need for the why of it or the how of it, even. And this was, he realized later, the only reason he kept his wits about him.

    The witch woman sat in the rocking chair. She looked older than Horley remembered, even though no more than a year had passed since he had last seen her. Seeming made of ash and soot, her black dress lay flat against her sagging skin. She was blind, eye sockets bare, but her wrinkled face strained to look at him any way.
    There was a buzzing sound.
    "I remember you," she said. Her voice was croak and whisper both.
    Her arms were mottled with age spots, her hands so thin and cruellooking that they could have been talons. She gripped the rocking chair as if holding onto the world.
    There was a buzzing sound. It came, Horley finally realized, from a halo of black hornets that circled the old woman's head, their wings beating so fast they could hardly be seen.
    "Are you Hasghat, who used to live in Grommin?" Horley asked.
    "I remember you," the witch woman said again.
    "I am the elder of the village of Grommin."
    The woman spat to the side. "Those that threw poor Hasghat out."
    "They would have done much worse if I'd let them."
    "They'd have burned me if they could. And all I knew then were a few charms, a few herbs. Just because I wasn't one of them. Just because I'd seen a bit of the world."
    Hasghat was staring right at him and Horley knew that, eyes or no eyes, she could see him.
    "It was wrong," Horley said.
    "It was wrong," she said. "I had nothing to do with the sickness. Sickness comes from animals, from people's clothes. It clings to them and spreads through them."
    "And yet you are a witch?"
    Hasghat laughed, although it ended with coughing. "Because I have a hidden room? Because my door stands by itself?"
    Horley grew impatient.
    "Would you help us if you could? Would you help us if we let you return to the village?"
    Hasghat straightened up in the chair and the halo of hornets disintegrated, then reformed. The wood in the fireplace popped and crackled. Horley felt a chill in the air.

    "Help you? Return to the village?" She spoke as if chewing, her tongue a thick gray grub.
    "A creature is attacking and killing us."
    Hasghat laughed. When she laughed, Horley could see a strange double image in her face, a younger woman beneath the older.
    "Is that so? What kind of creature?"
    "We call it the Third Bear. I do not believe it is really a bear."
    Hasghat doubled over in mirth. "Not really a bear? A bear that is not a bear?"
    "We cannot seem to kill it. We thought that you might know how to defeat it."
    "It stays to the forest," the witch woman said. "It stays to the forest and it is a bear but not a bear. It kills your people when they use the forest paths. It kills your people in the farms. It even sneaks into your graveyards and takes the heads of your dead. You are full of fear and panic. You cannot kill it, but it keeps murdering you in the most terrible of ways."
    And that was winter, coming from her dry, stained lips.
    "Do you know of it then?" Horley asked, his heart fast now from hope not fear.
    "Ah yes, I know it," Hasghat said, nodding. "I know the Third Bear, Theeber, Seether. After all I brought it here."
    The spear moved in Horley's hand and it would have