Page 56 of The Affair of the Mysterious Letter
Ms. Haas responded to this with a few words that were not at allpretty, causing the old woman to laugh in a way that can only be described as cackling.
“There’s the girl I knew. A workhouse brat, an alley cat, a starveling rat, but more than that.” I was not certain I was following her train of thought any longer, but she seemed very much to be enjoying herself. “You have come far, Shaharazad. But not perhaps as far as you think.”
This proved the first of the two and a half occasions on which Ms. Haas permitted another person to have the last word in an argument. The second would not come for some years.
Granny Liesl brought us inside her cottage, and I was struck at once by the unnerving similarity it bore to the sitting room at 221b Martyrs Walk. Its style of furnishing was, of course, wholly different, but it had the same air of barely corralled chaos, the same scent of unknown connotations, the same scattering of mysterious and forbidding artefacts. While Ms. Haas’s chaise longue was the most striking feature of our own parlour, here it was a black and forbidding cauldron that occupied a central position atop a stack of firewood, currently unlit. I settled myself nervously onto a wooden stool and waited to see what our hostess would do next.
“One gift I have given you already.” She raised a single bony finger. “Two more is customary, but you know that Granny hates it when people take and give nothing in return.”
I was ill at ease with the turn events seemed to be taking, but out of deference for the long acquaintance between the two ladies and an awareness that my companion was far more qualified to understand the dangers of our predicament than I, I kept my peace.
“What do you want, Liesl?” she snapped.
Granny’s eyes glittered. “A kiss, a wish, and a lock of your hair.”
All of those things sounded terribly innocuous and, from what little I knew of magic, this suggested that they should in no circumstances be parted with. “If I might,” I asked, “what are we to receive in return?”
“Oh, my dear sweet child.” The old lady hobbled towards me, her fingers making acquisitive motions in the empty air. “Have you not been listening? You will receive nothing in return. I offer gifts to you. It is polite for you to offer gifts to me. You can choose to be impolite, and many have made just that choice.”
I could not help but find my eyes drawn to the rows of skulls that decorated a number of the cottage’s shelves and windowsills and thought it best that I return to my earlier policy of silence.
Ms. Haas strolled quite nonchalantly towards us, a manoeuvre which happened to place her physically between me and the witch. “I’d have thought,” she remarked, “that you already had enough pieces of me to last a lifetime.”
“One can never have too much of a good thing, my pretty.”
There followed a long but very tense silence that reminded me uncomfortably of the last time I had spoken to my father. I was not certain, should the matter devolve into direct magical confrontation, which of the ladies would be victorious, an uncertainty which I suspected they shared.
At last Ms. Haas nodded. “Very well.” She stepped forward, stooped, and kissed Granny Liesl gently on the lips, a gesture that—from my somewhat awkward vantage behind my companion—seemed almost to speak of genuine fondness. Then she retrieved one of the many, many knives that lay here and there throughout the room and cut off a lock of her hair, which she handed to the witch somewhat defiantly.
“And my wish?” The old woman had an almost triumphant air that did little to reassure me about either her nature or that of the present exchange.
For the first time since we had met, I saw my companion hesitate. Then at last she said, “I wish for the moon.”
Granny Liesl gave her a look of exaggerated disappointment.
“I wish for a million wishes.”
“Don’t play games, my love. You know they only make Granny angry.”
“Have it your way.” Ms. Haas straightened her spine haughtily. “I wish that I regretted.”
The witch nodded. “Acceptable.”
“With apologies for my continued interruption,” I said, increasingly eager to be anywhere but where I was, “what happens now?”
The witch clapped her hands and the wood beneath the cauldron caught light. “Well, we can’t have you traipsing around Vedunia looking like two drowned rats in a pickle jar.” I was very much aware that the detritus on a nearby table did, in fact, include two such animals in just such a receptacle. “And we can’t have you running off to fight a vampire with nobody watching over you.”
“I’m not entirely sure that answers my question.”
“It wasn’t intended to. Now hold still.”
Granny Liesl began snatching ingredients from the nearby shelves and casting them into the cauldron. Ms. Haas, I observed, was watching her with an intense scrutiny—doubtless sensible that our hostess might be about to betray us utterly—but seemed to see nothing that gave her cause for concern.
As the cauldron began to boil, the witch cast in a pair of gossamer wings and a set of small, shrivelled objects that looked quite horribly like human fingers. She then began to chant in a low, guttural tone that rose ever louder as the ritual progressed. Smoke began to billow from the cauldron, and I became acutely aware of something crawling on my skin. I shivered, but resolved that I would take no actions unless my companion advised me to do so. I was not, after all, a witch hunter, and to act in panic when one is the subject of an unknown spell might doom one.
The room was now so filled with smoke that I could see nothing, but I felt dozens of sets of claws crawling over me, tiny teeth nibbling at my extremities. I was conscious of my garments falling away and oftheir being replaced with something else, an experience I found singularly unsettling despite the relative lack of danger it posed to my actual person. Once the clouds had dispersed I found myself attired in a manner which, I presumed, was more appropriate for Vedunia and the Austral Express. It was not, however, at all in line with my personal sensibilities. While the colours Granny Liesl had chosen were appropriately modest, being for the most part blacks and silvers, she had chosen a luxurious fabric and an ostentatious style: a full-skirted velvet frock coat, decorated with the kind of delicate embroidery I had been raised to believe constituted the worst sort of frivolity. This she had combined with matching breeches, a white lace cravat, silk stockings, and black satin shoes. These last were ornamented with silver bows and small diamonds and had the elevated heels that were currently modish amongst the well-bred gentlemen of the Hundred Kingdoms, although they were considered somewhat old-fashioned in the south, and nothing short of a personal affront to the Creator in Ey. I found them most impractical.
Ms. Haas, for her part, was now dressed in a swirling gown of crimson silk, decorated with golden flowers. Something similarly extravagant had been done with her hair, the dark locks bound up with ribbons, feathers, and an elaborate structure on which perched a live jackdaw, its grey eyes seeming to watch me with a malign intelligence. She seemed far more at ease with her new wardrobe than I was with mine.
