Shield Skin

by F. E. Arliss

  SHIELD SKIN

  By F.E. Arliss

  Table of Contents

  1.The Crones

  2.The Mansion House

  3.Learning Stuff

  4.The Protection Ceremony

  5.Scrying

  6.Study

  7.Canyon de Chelly

  8.Eagle Rising

  9.Romance - Not

  10.Calakmul

  11.Priestess

  12.Snake Bite

  13.Envy Envelopes

  14.Bats and Frogs, No Eye of Newt

  15.Where to Next?

  16.Wood Wose or Fairies; House Elves or Erdenne?

  17.Wolpathugas

  18.Fairies, Werewolves, Ogres and Bahkauvs

  19.What the Heck?

  20.Rest and Contemplation

  21.Preparation and Graduation

  22.Gift from the Crones

  23.Into The Badlands

  24.Wind, Air, Fire, Flying

  25.Lightning

  26.The Aftermath

  Chapter One

  The Crones

  Emery Harlow lay on her side, her spine pressed into the cool dirt at her back. She lay in a concave depression hidden by a great tangle of roots. The small niche had been exposed when a flood the year before had swept downstream behind the farmhouse where she lived and washed out this hiding spot behind the roots of the giant elm that towered above her. The creek, burbling just a foot below her hiding spot, swirled lazily along its way over rocks and pebbles. A few crawdads crawled clumsily around its bottom searching for food or better hiding spots.

  Emery’s hidey hole was perfect. It was hard to get to, as one had to cross the creek first, and it was small - just the right size for one running-wild eight year old girl. If she lay very still and pulled the flap of dirt encrusted roots over the entrance, she could have remained in hiding indefinitely. There was just the small problem of food, water and unfortunately, school.

  She’d learned her lesson the hard way - do not show anyone your hiding spots - as last year she’d showed one of her sisters her small fortress under a pile of brush in the field and their mother had soon marched out to the hiding spot, dragged Emery out by her hair, and hauled her protesting back into the house for a dinner of sliced garden tomato and cottage cheese. Not that Emery had anything against tomatoes and cottage cheese. She actually loved that combination. It was just that it also came with the requisite complaints about her appearance and her lack of interest in school.

  Emery hated school. School was full of mean little snots and horrid lying brown-nosers. School was boring. Now that she was in the third grade they were learning phonetics. Emery had never had to deal with anything as aggravating as phonetics. It just made her feel sick and like she never wanted to get out of bed. Somehow, lying in her hidden dirt cave always made her feel better.

  Dirt in general was wonderful stuff. Emery liked to grow things and while the rest of her family was off doing other things, she’d helped her grandparents plant garden, pick strawberries and cherries, gather eggs from the chickens and occasionally sling a bucket of household scraps to the rooting pigs out between the shed and the corn crib.

  When it was hot, a freshly plowed furrow of earth was as cool and welcoming against hot skin as a fan over a bowl of ice. When it was cold and windy, a berm of earth could protect one from the howling knives of ice the heavens slung sideways. Dirt was good.

  She used to think she was odd, liking dirt and animals and all sorts of things in the out of doors. That was until last year, when she’d fallen out of the old barn down along the creek and been found dazed and covered in straw and old feathers by the crazy, disheveled lady that lived in the three-story, dilapidated Victorian mansion on the front of the property.

  Dorothea King was supposed to be a witch. Emery would later find out she was. A good, old-fashioned, earth-magic-raising witch. She’d helped Emery to her feet, picked the straw, feathers and matted owl droppings out of her hair and asked her, “Whatcha doin’ in my barn missy?”

  “Trying to see the owls,” Emery said hesitantly, looking up at the gray-haired woman, whose piercing blue eyes drilled into her from behind sharply-pointed cat-eye glasses. The etching on the black rims of the glasses looked strangely like lightning bolts and the woman’s long grey hair was pulled haphazardly up into what would have been a fabulously chic chignon if the hair itself had been combed. In any case, the hair that comprised the chignon was a frizzy mass of knots and tangles and made Dorothea King look as though she was wearing a set of stacked bird nests on her head.

  “How do you know there are owls?” The old woman asked, eyes glaring at Emery through dirty lenses. “And what do you want with it if there are owls?”

  “Ummm, I saw one fly in. I’ve been watching them in the evenings. It caught a mouse and then took it to the tree next to the barn and then in through the hole at the top, under the eaves,” Emery whispered, intimidated by the woman’s drilling question. “I just want to look at them,” she added softly. “They are ever so beautiful and majestic looking. Their eyes are so big and when they spread their wings they are huge and fly like they are floating on the air.”

  “That’s because they are floating on air, idgit,” the old woman snapped, then reared back, using one long, bony finger to push her sliding spectacles back up the ridge of her thin-bladed nose. Emery thought all that was missing from the woman’s visage was a large mole and she’d be the perfect image of a witch. No wonder everyone was afraid of her. In person, while intimidating, she hadn’t been mean yet, just a bit scary. Emery was to find that she wasn’t exactly a shrinking violet herself.

  Scrutinizing Emery closely, the old woman said, “Very well, follow me.” Then turned, and marched off towards the side door to the barn. Emery supposed the barn had been red once upon a time, but it was now a weathered silvery-gray. Strangely, the door didn’t squeak when opened, but glided on its hinges soundlessly, yawning outward to show a dark recess beyond.

  Dorothea had disappeared inside and hissed, “Come on, girl!” She urged Emery through, over the board on the bottom of the door that acted as a threshold, and then into the dust-mote filled gloomy interior. A narrow ladder, nailed in place from old scraps of lumber, ran between two of the timbers on the wall. “Up you go. Don’t clunk around like a gorilla either. Be quiet or she’ll fly,” the old lady whispered in such a low voice that it was more like Emery imagined what she was saying than actually heard it.

  Emery, no stranger to stealth, ghosted up the ladder like a monkey with a tail. The old woman was beside her in a second and Emery was surprised at the old woman’s agility, having never expected her to follow Emery up the ladder.

  Several bales of moldy hay had been erected about five feet in from the square opening in the floor where the ladder ascended. Hiding behind the bales, the two peaked over the top. It was a perfect sight-line to the nest and Emery’s mouth hung open in awe as the top of the great horned owl’s head came into view. Busy feeding the mouse to her hatchlings, the owl was intent on tearing chunks of the mouse into pieces for her babies. Finally, as though sensing their presence the large head swiveled towards them, yellow eyes searching the darkness for intruders.

  Emery froze. Dorothea King made no sound. The owl found their faces, blinked slowly, then returned to tearing the mouse to bits. They stayed in place for almost half an hour before the huge female owl flew again on the hunt for food for her ever growing brood. Emery scrambled down the ladder, turned to face her hostess and erupted with, “That was so great! Did you see how big she was? She tore that mouse apart like it was paper! She was so beautiful!”

  The older woman crossed her arms, looked Emery over as though she was a piece of meat herself, then dropped her arms heavily and said, “Come in the house.”


  Emery went, not even hesitating.

  Chapter Two

  The Mansion House

  The inside of the house was almost as dark as the interior of the ancient barn. They entered through the rear door, which opened in from a covered portico where a car could have pulled through to drop off passengers under cover should it rain. What had been a graveled drive was now a matted, tangled turf of crab grass and weeds.

  The rear entry hall was darkly paneled in something that looked vaguely like walnut under its layer of grime and decoration of old coats on hooks, dirty boots and umbrellas laying hither and thither on the floor and propped in corners.

  The entry opened into a rear hall. A door showed a glimpse of a small kitchen tiled in black and white marble to one side and a large dining room to the other. Emery only knew it was a dining room because as they tromped up the hall a two-foot wide window with a ledge opened into the room. The kitchen had a matching window on the opposite side of the hall. She supposed it was where the plates of food were to be passed from the kitchen into the dining room.

  Passing through the door at the far end of the hall, they entered an enormous open space that ran the entire width of the house. Bay windows bulged out on either end of the massive room, allowing what little light there was to enter through the filthy mullioned windows. Brown water stains showed through the ornately plastered ceiling and rust dripped down from one of the heavy crystal chandeliers. It was a mess and it was still beautiful, just like the outside of the mansion.

  Emery’s mouth must have been hanging open because the old woman reached over, placed one long, gnarled finger under her chin, and pushed up, cackling happily at Emery’s embarrassment. “It’s a beautiful house ma’am,” she said, grinning guiltily. “The most beautiful house I’ve ever seen.”

  The old lady snorted, spittle almost flying from her mouth. “It’s a wreck. Costs a fortune to heat and every repair is worth the price of a car. Which I don’t have anyway,” she grunted out, then continued on towards the south side of the house where a brighter light poured in. As they crested the threshold of the room, Emery gasped. It was a conservatory room.

  Multi-paned windows lined the room from ceiling to floor and the entire thing must have been thirty-feet long and fifteen feet wide. Plants in huge pots lined the back walls and the circumference of the room. Strange herbs hung in bundles from hooks in the rafters and an old ladder on wheels was parked haphazardly in the middle of the room. Things dripped from it as well, though Emery wasn’t sure what all of the items were. Some looked like feathers, or dried mushrooms. There were bird nests, papery hornets’ nests and all sorts of things that caught her attention. She didn’t know where to look first.

  “Bertha, bring us tea,” Dorothea rasped out, seemingly to thin air. Soon, an even more ancient-looking woman appeared carrying a heavy silver tea tray. On it were three teacups on saucers, a mound of fabric in the shape of a toaster and a plate of store-bought cookies. Fig Newtons if Emery wasn’t mistaken. Old people always loved Fig Newtons. Her grandma ate them too.

  Bertha had short white hair that stood up in clumps and was wearing an enormous, stained apron over what looked like painter’s bib-overalls. Her feet bulged with bunions and were wrapped in a pair of black, down at the heels orthopedic house-shoes. Her glasses, cat-eyed as well, were even dirtier than Dorothea’s. Emery admired the tea tray. It was the only thing in the house that was shiny and glowed with the patina that only a piece of silver used every day will have. The china cups were beautifully painted, heavily chipped, but still gorgeous to a child’s eyes.

  Gently pulling the mounded fabric up, Berta exposed an ornate china teapot with a chipped spout. It was beautiful and covered with hand-painted cabbage roses in pink and red. Setting aside the piece of mounded fabric - what Emery would later learn was a tea cozy, Bertha poured the tea. The tea, when Emery sipped it was very hot, and strangely bitter. She didn’t like it. On the other hand, it would be rude not to drink it, so she did.

  “So, who do we have here?” Bertha asked, her eyes only slightly less piercing than Mrs. King’s had been.

  “I’m Emery Harlow,” Emery managed to squeak out. “I live up the street.”

  “Ah, yes, the teacher’s youngest, I believe,” Bertha sighed out. “Two older sisters,” she informed Dorothea. “Word is this one’s sweet. Doesn’t like school. Stays outside all the time and picks up all sorts of strays to fix. Drives her mother crazy. Woman’s got enough to take care of and doesn’t want the animals.”

  “That true?” Mrs. King grunted at Emery, sipping her tea and eyeing Emery over the top of the gold-gilded rim.

  “Yes,” Emery said, not hesitating, then plunging ahead with what she was really hating about school. “We’re doing phonetics at school. I hate phonetics. Plus my teacher is Mrs. Farringtown. She’s a grouch.”

  “I do stay outside a lot,” she admitted, continuing. “My sisters stay in the bathroom a long time, fight a lot, pull each other’s hair and talk about cheerleading and boys. They tease me a lot and say I’m weird. Better that than boy-crazy and stupid,” Emery rolled her eyes as she delivered this indictment of her siblings. Bertha snickered. Dorothea grinned, showing tea-yellowed, fang-like broken teeth. Emery snickered in return. All three started to giggle, then laugh, eventually they howled like banshees.

  From that moment on, they were friends.

  Chapter Three

  Learning Stuff

  Most days after that Emery Harlow had afternoon tea with the old biddies, as some of the townsfolk called them. School got out at 3:30 p.m. and Emery would go home, throw down her book bag and then glide into the woods at the edge of the clearing where their house sat. She really did not want her mother or sisters knowing that she was friends with the “crazy old witches” as they described Dorothea and Bertha.

  If they ever found out, all hell would be raised and Emery’s new friendship would be ruined. That was just the way things were at the Harlow house. Their mother wanted her girls to be pretty and maybe smart. She certainly did not want them associated with “nutcases”- another word used frequently to describe the old ladies.

  Since Emery had always roamed wild in the woods around the house, which sat at the far edge of the tiny little village they lived in, no one ever found out. Well, at least not until much, much later, when there was nothing to be done about any of it anyway.

  The old ladies began teaching Emery about herbs and plants. She learned about the cycles of the moon and what cycles of that giant orb had what properties. Waxing moon added; waning moon took away. That was how her child’s mind gripped the concepts of waxing and waning phases. As she matured, the concepts matured along with her.

  When she was twelve, they promised to teach her scrying, or looking into water to see the future. Using an ancient stone birdbath that the base had broken on, the old ladies had wrestled the heavy, weathered top into the conservatory, and heaved it onto a flat piece of stump from the front tree that had to be taken down. There it sat unexplained to Emery for several years. She just thought it was a nice little pond in among the plants. After all, there were occasionally tiny colorful frogs that swam about in its shallow waters and then leapt into the shrubbery when she came near. Emery had loved the tiny frogs and tried to catch them, only to have Bertha snap at her, “Don’t touch them, they’re poisonous.” Emery had snatched her hand back from the nickel-sized, bright red amphibian she’d been about to cup in her hand as though fire had leapt from its eyes. After that she spotted blue ones, yellow ones and a strangely-mottled black one in among the leaves. She knew better than to touch any of them, though they were adorable.

  Emery had always thought those tv shows that had witches boiling up eye-of-newt were silly. But the two cousins did indeed have a couple of newts that clung to the walls and occasionally liked to sit on the edge of one of the large pots. So, frogs, newts and who knew what else lurked in the jungle-like plants in the conservatory? She learned the names of the pla
nts, learned to care for them and in summers searched with the two old ladies for wild herbs in the woods that ran around the cornfields near town.

  Occasionally another batty old woman would arrive in an ancient, brown-rusted Chevrolet and take them out to a lake park that the impoverished community had once claimed as a fine resort, but which was now just a run-down cluster of disintegrating fishing cabins in the woods on one side of the shore and a tangle of undergrowth on the other. They’d spend a few hours searching for and harvesting several different types of herbs and then have a little picnic. After returning home, Dorothea would have Emery bundle the herbs and hang them from the rolling ladder. Later, after they’d dried to stiff, withered, brownish-green clumps, they’d be put in clay jars and carefully labeled. Emery didn’t mind doing the work as the old ladies gossiped. Here she felt useful and was learning astonishing things about the natural world.

  Many nights during full or new moons, she’d slip out of her attic bedroom by stepping out onto the porch roof, then crawl onto a large branch from the tree in the front yard and swing like a lemur down to the ground. Then she’d ghost into the long grasses along the ditch and make her way to the mansion house.

  She learned about pagan holidays and the power of spells and how to couple that with the phases of the moon. It was all very exciting and very interesting and during all these years of secret lessons and secret outings to the mansion-house, Emery forgot to complain about school and soon her lack of need for parental and sibling scoldings, made her even more unnoticed in the cluttered house she shared with her mother and sisters.