She tipped up her face like she was under some spell, looking at his lips, and then at his eyes, which were fixed on hers, unblinking, and then his lips again. A new wanting bloomed in her. He was so near, but he was so tall. Like she was pulled by a puppet string, Pippin rose to tiptoe, but she was such a minuscule specimen it didn’t bring her nearly close enough. If she was going to get a kiss—just one kiss to go on—Matty would have to bend closer … but … he didn’t.
He didn’t. When she rose on her toes, he straightened up taller, taking his lips even farther out of reach. It was as good as a slap.
Pippin dropped back flat on her soles, and when a big wind came and tossed her hair all about, she was that glad to hide her mortification inside the tangle of it. Somewhere nearby an owl loosed a mournful note, and it could have come straight from her own heart.
“Is there someone you want to ask to marry you, Cathy?” asked Matty, the cruelty of him!
Her heart turned hard. She said, “I told you. I’m going to be a dragon. I’m going to cast my sharp shadow over the whole world, just fly and fly and eat spice and scare kings.”
“I never knew you wanted to see the world,” he said.
I don’t! “I suppose I should let you read my diary so you’ll know every single thing about me?”
“Okay, fool girl.” He was shaking his head, kind of smiling but kind of dark around the eyes too. “Let’s say you can turn dragon, and I don’t doubt your witching. You’ve still got your whole life to live first, before you change. What about that?”
Whole life. Whole long empty life.
“What about it? Nothing says I can’t change right now, if I’m through with being human.”
“Through with—?” Matty looked shocked. “Cathy, what are you talking about?”
She didn’t mean it.
Did she?
No, of course not. She would never surrender her life and body and humanity just because a boy didn’t love her! Fool girl? Fool girl indeed. Someday she would fly, yes, dragon or bird, and as for all the life up till then, she would endure it, even if she didn’t get to have her one true person and an end to lonesomeness.
She wouldn’t have him pitying her, though, rubbing in the empty years that lay ahead for her while his own phantom was off settling his future. “Oh, why not?” She flung the words. “What do you care? Enjoy your life, Matthew Blackgrace!”
Tears started in her eyes and she wheeled around and ran away and left him there, and the owl’s cry floated after her, just as sad as sad.
5. NOT AT ALL SPYING
Down in the orchard cottages, Ava had fallen asleep. Restless, she stirred awake again and again, and on one of those wakings she found she wasn’t alone. It was John Ginger’s phantom sitting there, just quiet with his legs dangling off the side of the loft. He was a boatwright from Gale, the nearest village on the far bank of the Mosey, and she hadn’t even considered him, but now, blinking awake, she couldn’t think whyever not. He was too shy to dance, was one thing she knew about him, and another was that he was a widower. He was young still, five and twenty at the outside, and he had a baby girl his sister was bringing up for him.
Not anymore, she’s not, thought Ava, and she gave John Ginger’s phantom a big, shy smile.
Across the way, Elsie did not fall asleep, not even for a second. She lay in her bed all stiff and antsy, watching the shadows cavort like imps on the wall, and it wasn’t until her candle sputtered that, in the flash before darkness, she saw a face on one. Hmm, she thought, unsure, for it was Loren Dean, the apothecary’s apprentice, who stood only as tall as her chin. He wore little round glasses that the sun glanced off, and he read thick books and marked his place with sprigs of herbs. All the nans liked him, both before and after they turned, so he always had birds flitting round him—and one fox that was probably Edith Moonworthy, who’d been afraid of heights—and leading him off to find hidden wildflowers for his potions, which, as it happened, were exceptionally fine.
Hmm, thought Elsie, and hmm, and she lay awake all night remembering every good thing she ever knew of Loren Dean—there were a lot!—and by morning she was convinced she’d wanted him all along.
As for Scylla Grey, it was a lie the Breeds told that she’d lit a candle for phantoms. Sure she had an eye on Matty, but being a town girl, she didn’t believe in that phantom malarkey at all. She was down in the square, dancing to the strangers’ music, spinning and twirling, and one of their scythe-billed birds took a fancy to her and came to perch on her head. Her Manx cat got jealous and tried to eat it, and in the commotion the stranger had to drop his lute to rescue his bird, and that was that. He was handsome as a pirate, and he didn’t pick up his lute again all night, just danced with Scylla instead, and he danced her right to the church door at sunup, his bird riding on the Manx now, bird and cat giving each other smug looks like they’d arranged it all between them.
Up in the orchard, a squirrel came upon Pippin’s wedge of abandoned cake. It had some kind of markings etched into its surface, the squirrel saw, but he couldn’t read, and nor could he count to tell if there was one set of initials or two. He just ate it up, happy as only a squirrel can be who’s found a wedge of cake abandoned on a tree root, even if it did savor of flower-rot water.
As for Pippin, when she ran off and left Matty behind, she didn’t have a thought to where she’d go. Tears were streaking down her cheeks and she kept raising angry fists to swipe them away. Every time she thought of him straightening up clear of her kiss, her face went hot with shame. By the green god’s mercy, what madness had come over her, trying to kiss him when she knew it wasn’t her he wanted?
She stumbled and went down on her knees, biting her tongue in the process, and it was all just so pathetic. Some fairy I make, she thought, tripping over branches! Anyway, fairies didn’t weep. They didn’t even have tear ducts, which was why, Nasty Mary had taught her, if you ever saw fairy tears in the ingredients to a spell, you knew it was a fake. Pippin got to her feet and kept running, and soon enough she came to a path—a path made by many feet over the years, including her own. It led to just one place, and she found herself going there.
Since she happened to know Matty was elsewhere, it was sure to be empty. She came around a curve and there it was, tucked under the giant oak: Matty’s house. It looked almost a toy under the great tree, and Pippin came to a halt when she saw it was lit up.
Orange light played out the windows, and since there was no roof yet, it glowed up and lit the underside of the oak too. Wind was tossing the branches and shaking loose leaves, and they swirled all around and fell right inside. “Careless,” Pippin whispered, surprised that Matty had gone off and left a lantern lit. That wasn’t like him at all.
She hugged a tree at the edge of a clearing and watched the house. She felt shy being here, and then mad at Matty about it. This had been a place for all the tots and kids once, the pair of them especially. They’d built a nest high up in the branches of that oak and kept watch over the whole earth, or so it had seemed to them then. They’d called it their crow’s nest. She wondered if he remembered that.
But now he’d gone and built his house here and made it his own place, and worse: it would be his wife’s soon enough, though Pippin could scarcely see fine Scylla living up here so far from town, and having to set her slippers to that muddy footpath all the wet winter long. I hope your toes mildew, Pippin thought pettishly, little imagining the other girl was at that moment clasped in the tattooed arms of a pirate lutanist from over the Bigwater, and more than halfway to falling in love.
She released her hug on the tree and went to the next, and then the next. Tree to tree she went around the little clearing, saying goodbye to each one in her way, until she came to the oak. And once she was touching it, there was no help for it, it had to be climbed. She knew the best route and was up it quick as a skink, her shoes left behind on the ground, and she told herself all the while that she was just climbing her favorite tree. She was not
in any way planning to peer down into Matty’s roofless house.
Because that would be spying.
And when her bare feet found themselves on the long horizontal bough that was as broad as a bridge, she still was not going to spy, and when she skimbled down where it thinned and wrapped her knees around it so she could scooch out farther, she was innocent in her heart. Even as she found a likely branch to cling to so she could lean out and look down, it was not at all spying, and then it was spread out beneath her: Matty’s house, built with his own good hands. It had three rooms; the two little ones Pippin supposed would be bedrooms. One was beneath her, empty except for a swept leaf pile and a leaning twig broom. And next door there was the big room where the lamp was lit—
—and the room was not empty!
Pippin gasped.
Matty was there. Matty was sitting there in his chair with the lamplight gleaming on his red hair and he was bent over, carving something on a plaque of wood. The hoarse leaf chorus drowned the sound of his chisel, and it must have carried off her gasp too, because he didn’t look up. Pippin sat frozen. How had he gotten here ahead of her? He couldn’t have! She’d run all the way!
How?
As mystifying as it was, him being here, it wasn’t her foremost care as she swayed above his head like some kind of nosing tree creature. And after all her foolish talk and trying to kiss him and running off! Oh, what would he think if he caught her spying?
She inched backward, the bark rough between her knees, and if she’d gotten away unseen, she would have just crept off. That was the way things were unfurling. She’d have forgotten her shoes on the ground, and Matty would have found them and always wondered, and that would have been an end to the night: a sad little ending made out of pride and heartbreak.
Thank the green god then for biddies who didn’t cease meddling just because they happen not to be human anymore!
Before Pippin got more than two furtive scoots back along the branch, a shape came hurtling at her with an ungodly screech. It was an owl, wings widespread and feet flexed, claws coming right at her like she was a mouse it wanted for its feast. And why not, since you’re acting like a mouse? Nasty Mary would have said if she still had words, and Pippin gave a little cry, throwing out her hands to protect herself.
Matty looked up just as she lost her balance and fell into his house.
6. CROW’S NEST
She landed in the leaf pile and wasn’t hurt, only so mortified she half considered turning bird right then to escape seeing the look on Matty’s face. She didn’t, of course, and when he dashed in not two seconds later, what was on his face was nothing scornful—only surprise and concern. And if that was a bright dash of happiness too, Pippin missed it entirely, being as she was so busy with her own humiliation.
“Cathy! What …?” Matty looked up, then at her, then up again, as perplexed as if she’d ridden in on a cloud.
She picked herself up with as much dignity as she could scrape together. “You see what comes of having a roofless house, Matthew Blackgrace?”
He blinked. “Fairies fall in?” He reached out and plucked a leaf from her hair.
“I never fell. I’ll have you know an owl pushed me off.”
“I see. Good thing I didn’t sweep out the leaf pile.” He grinned his devilish grin and Pippin bristled to see it. “Shall I leave it, do you think? Will you be needing a landing pad in the future?”
“I don’t imagine I will,” she said with a glare. She was knee-deep in leaves, and kicked them aside. “I’ll just be going now.”
His grin vanished. “Going? But—”
Pippin stalked from the room, barefoot and with her chin in the air. Matty followed. The big room wasn’t as empty as the other, with his rocking chair, a table, the lamp, and some tools lying about. There was his bit of wood carving, and there were his shoes kicked off. He was in socks with a couple of toes peeking out. Matty toes.
All this Pippin saw on her way to the door, before he came around her to block her way. “Wait. Can’t I fix you some tea?” he asked.
In the stone fireplace hung a copper kettle she knew for his mother’s old one. “There’s no fire,” she pointed out.
“I’ll make one. I even have a tin of biscuits.”
“Biscuits?” She stared at him. Was he really talking about biscuits?
“And …” He got shy. Matty was never shy. “I could show you the house if you wanted.”
She’d wanted to see it bad enough to shimmy up a tree, but now she couldn’t say why. It was like eating ash, imagining him living here with someone else. “I’ve seen it,” she said shortly. “And I can’t stay. I have dragon business, remember?”
His brow furrowed. “Dragon …? Cath, are you … mad about something?”
“What would I be mad about?” she asked, in a voice that said I most certainly am.
He was still in front of the door. She made to go around him and he touched her shoulder. She jerked away, and he pulled back quick like she was some unpredictable cat. “What’s the matter?” he asked her. “Did something happen?”
“Oh no, nothing at all,” she said, flat, looking anywhere but at his out-of-reach lips.
“Didn’t you … see something tonight?” Matty glanced out the window.
Only the future is what Pippin thought. “Nothing worth mentioning” is what she said.
Matty looked smacked. His face went red, his eyes mad, then meek, then mad again. “I see,” he said, tight. Then, “So why are you here, Cathy?”
She took it for a recrimination. “I’m sorry, all right? If I’d known you were here I’d never have come.”
“Well, why did you?”
As if she knew! “Maybe I just wanted to climb the tree one last time before—” She stopped herself and swallowed.
“Before what?”
Before there were wife things flapping on a laundry line, baby toys on the porch, and happiness-clutter that wasn’t her own. She couldn’t say any of that. Breaking for the door, she only said, “I don’t know how you got back here so fast anyway.”
His expression changed then. From dismay it squinched to lost confusion, then snapped to attention, sharp and glittering. “Back here?” he said, and this time when he reached for her shoulder, he didn’t let her tug it away, but held her firm and gentle. “From where?”
She gave him a look. “From down the hill, where do you think?”
His response was not what she expected. His grin came back as bold as she’d ever seen it, and he looked relieved, and just as pleased as pleased.
More mocking, was it? “And what’s that grin for, Mr. Smiles?” Pippin demanded.
He said, like he was telling her a good secret, “Cathy, I’ve been here since sundown. I haven’t left the house.” Still grinning, and his teeth so white. Before she could protest that it was a lie, he said, “I swear it. I’ve been sitting right here, making that for the front door.”
The plaque. She saw it was words he was carving. They caught her eye. Crow’s Nest. It was a little shock—him naming his house after their place in the oak—and it hid the big shock behind it so Pippin was slow to understand. But there it was. If Matty’d been here all evening, then …
Oh!
Her heart, her heart. All of a sudden it felt like the fire bell and someone was ringing it fit to summon the whole valley. Did he mean …?
Matty’s hand slipped from her shoulder down to grasp her own hand. “Cath, goose, I sent my phantom out for you hours ago.”
“For me?” squeaked Pippin, scarcely daring to believe him. Had that been …? Not even him but …? It had come from the direction of her house, she realized now. It was looking for her, wanting her. “But … what about Scylla Grey?”
“Scylla Grey? When have I ever given a fig for Scylla Grey?”
When indeed? Never was when. So why had she thought he did? She couldn’t even trace it back, she’d just gotten so sure and miserable.
“When I saw you here,”
said Matty, “I hoped you were coming to tell me …” There he went shy again, and blushing looked sweeter on him than it had ever looked on a human being in all of history.
Pippin was blushing too and ready to burst. She’d seen Matty’s phantom! She’d walked with it and danced for it, told it foolish things and even tried to … Oh.
“What? Cath, what is it?” Matty was watching her that close, he saw her flinch at the memory.
“If it came for me,” she asked, getting mad all over again, “then why, might I ask, did it pull away when I tried to kiss it?”
He lit up like a light. “You tried to kiss it?”
Her cheeks got hot. Now, why had she gone and admitted that?
“Fool girl,” Matty teased. “You can’t kiss a phantom. There’s nothing there to kiss.”
Of course there wasn’t, she thought, and hadn’t she known he looked different? The green gone from his eyes—oh, but it was back now, bright and tart as apples—and he hadn’t once touched her, not her elbow or her wild hair or anything, and he’d even dodged that bag of flour instead of catching it.
“But if you’re brave enough to try again,” he said, daring her, “I promise you I’m real now.”
Brave enough? Matty had sent his phantom out for her! She was brave enough for anything. “I would but you’re too tall,” she told him. “You’ll have to lean.”
“I can do better than that,” he said, and he took her around her waist and lifted her to him, and there were his lips, and he’d told true: he was real. And he was warm, and electric, and good. He was Matty.
And he was her one true person, settled and sure, for life.
Burned Bright
DIANA PETERFREUND