The Hex Witch of Seldom

by Nancy Springer

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  PRAISE FOR THE WRITING OF NANCY SPRINGER

  “Wonderful.” —Fantasy & Science Fiction

  “The finest fantasy writer of this or any decade.” —Marion Zimmer Bradley

  “Ms. Springer’s work is outstanding in the field.” —Andre Norton

  “Nancy Springer writes like a dream.” —St. Louis Post-Dispatch

  “Nancy Springer’s kind of writing is the kind that makes you want to run out, grab people on the street, and tell them to go find her books immediately and read them, all of them.” —Arkansas News

  “[Nancy Springer is] someone special in the fantasy field.” —Anne McCaffrey

  Larque on the Wing

  Winner of the James Tiptree, Jr. Award

  “Satisfying and illuminating … uproariously funny … an off-the-wall contemporary fantasy that refuses to fit any of the normal boxes.” —Asimov’s Science Fiction

  “Irresistible … charming, eccentric … a winning, precisely rendered foray into magic realism.” —Kirkus Reviews

  “Best known for her traditional fantasy novels, Springer here offers an offbeat contemporary tale that owes much to magical realism.… An engrossing novel about gender and self-formation that should appeal to readers both in and outside the SF/fantasy audience.” —Publishers Weekly

  “Springer’s best book yet … A beautiful/rough/raunchy dose of magic.” —Locus

  Fair Peril

  “Rollicking, outrageous … eccentric, charming … Springer has created a hilarious blend of feminism and fantasy in this heartfelt story of the power of a mother’s love.” —Publishers Weekly

  “Witty, whimsical, and enormously appealing.” —Kirkus Reviews

  “A delightful romp of a book … an exuberant and funny feminist fairy tale.” —Lambda Book Report

  “Moving, eloquent … often hilarious, but … beneath the laughter, Springer has utterly serious insights into life, and her own art … Fair Peril is modern/timeless storytelling at its best, both enchanting and very down-to-earth. Once again, brava!” —Locus

  Chains of Gold

  “Fantasy as its finest.” —Romantic Times

  “[Springer’s] fantastic images are telling, sharp and impressive; her poetic imagination unparalleled.” —Marion Zimmer Bradley

  “Nancy Springer is a writer possessed of a uniquely individual vision. The story in Chains of Gold is borrowed from no one. It has a small, neat scope rare in a book of this genre, and it is a little jewel.” —Mansfield News Journal

  “Springer writes with depth and subtlety; her characters have failings as well as strengths, and the topography is as vivid as the lands of dreams and nightmares. Cerilla is a worthy heroine, her story richly mythic.” —Publishers Weekly

  The Hex Witch of Seldom

  “Springer has turned her considerable talents to contemporary fantasy with a large degree of success.” —Booklist

  “Nimble and quite charming … with lots of appeal.” —Kirkus Reviews

  “I’m not usually a witchcraft and fantasy fan, but I met the author at a convention and started her book to see how she writes. Next thing I knew, it was morning.” —Jerry Pournelle, coauthor of Footfall

  Apocalypse

  “This offbeat fantasy’s mixture of liberating eccentricity and small-town prejudice makes for some lively passages.” —Publishers Weekly

  Plumage

  “With a touch of Alice Hoffmanesque magic, a colorfully painted avian world and a winning heroine, this is pure fun.” —Publishers Weekly

  “A writer’s writer, an extraordinarily gifted craftsman.” —Jennifer Roberson

  Godbond

  “A cast of well-drawn characters, a solidly realized imaginary world, and graceful writing.” —Booklist

  The Hex Witch of Seldom

  Nancy Springer

  To Joel, who brought me home.

  PART 1

  The Dangerous Stranger

  “They branded him,” the old woman said. “They shouldn’t have done that.”

  She was talking to her cane, her walking stick, and the stick nodded agreement. A carved snake, unpainted but finely detailed as to scale and eye, spiraled up the hazelwood shaft then curled its head around a smoky-hued, sphere-shaped handle of glass or perhaps quartz. It was the snake’s head that nodded as the old woman talked. Its wood-yellow eyes seemed to glint, but the globe that topped the staff remained opaque.

  “Course they didn’t know what they was doing,” the old woman added. “But that don’t change the facts.” She was sitting in a hickory rocker time had turned mouse-colored, in front of a cast-iron cookstove set up off the floor on claw-footed legs. She rocked, taking care to follow the grain of the braided rug under the rockers, and she held the cane in her hands. It was evening, and she liked a good conversation in the evenings, sitting in front of the stove when the night was chilly, on the porch when it was fine.

  “He’ll be bitter now,” the cane said. Its voice was very low, yet curiously flat and not at all vibrant. “More than ever.”

  “Of course he will,” said the old woman promptly. “You don’t just take a man like that and tie him down and brand him and stick him in a pen without him remembering. And him as moody as he was to start with. And after all that’s happened to him already.”

  “It’ll be hard to bring him back now,” the cane remarked. This was only one of the many things it discussed with the old woman. The cane cared about it only tangentially. She cared perhaps a bit more.

  “Near to impossible,” she agreed. “I can help him find his way here, if that’s what he wants, if he’d trouble himself to escape. But that’s about all.” The thought made her wrinkle her brow. She wore her gray hair back from her face, in two long braids wound around her head; the hair was as long as it had been when she was a courting girl. “Near to impossible,” she repeated more softly. “I thought he’d be tired of his foolishness by now. A few weeks in that corral, I thought, and he’d have had enough. He don’t take kindly to being penned up. But it seems he ain’t never going to give in. As a man he went through too much trouble even for one of us. No, likely there’s only one thing that could bring him back now.”

  “Your touch,” the cane said.

  She shook her old head. “No. I wish it was so, but no. Not since they done that to him. I ain’t as strong as him when his will is set.”

  “What, then?”

  “It ain’t likely to happen.”

  The wooden snake on the walking stick stirred impatiently. “Just tell me what.”

  She said. “A woman’s love. A man like that can only be tamed by a woman’s love.”

  The snake made a brief, sneezing noise of scorn through its minute nostrils. “Women are what made him hide himself away,” it said.

  “I know it.” Her eyes clouded like the staff’s globe. “And it ain’t never going to be no different for him. Part of what he is … Well.” She blinked and straightened in her rocker, and her eyes no longer looked old. “Least we can do is get him out of that pen.”

  “You plan to go after him?” the walking stick asked in its smoothest tones, knowing she had no such intention. It took a lot to get her out of the house. She gave her staff a quelling look but did not answer. Her gaze clouded again, and she stared over the serpent’s carved head and far away.

  “Yandro,” she murmured after a while. “They might help. Let me see if I can get through to that muleheaded Grant Yandro tonight, while he’s sleeping.”

  “You’d do better to talk
to the son,” her walking stick told her. “The ghost.”

  “The poet. Yes, I mean to talk to both.” The old woman gazed off into distance, and her eyes seemed to mist and darken like mountains at nightfall, and the staff held still in her left hand, not speaking. Her right hand had lifted, bent and swollen with arthritis, but steady—and in the air it traced the mystic circle and six-lobed design her people called hexefus—the witch’s sign.

  Chapter One

  “You’re soon sixteen years old,” said Grandpap. “You’re almost a woman growed.”

  Bobbi looked back at him across the width of the cabin without replying. She did not feel like a woman grown. She had never dated, and did not much want to; there was something strange about her, and she knew it. Maybe it was the dim light of the 25-watt bulb overhead deceiving her, but she seemed to see something moving behind her grandfather: just a whisper, a hint, of a form that was Grandpap and yet not Grandpap, like heat haze in the air. She had seen it before and it did not scare her any more except to shiver her spine a tad, but for sure she wasn’t going to say anything about it, not to anyone, and especially not to Grandpap. Nearly all her life she had lived with her grandfather, Grant Yandro, and she knew him. Pap was not unkind, but he had no patience for nonsense.

  “What you want for your birthday?” he asked her. He was scraping supper’s leftover brown beans into a plastic bowl for his hounds. The half-seen form behind him, form of—what? Something hard and jagged, like the gray rocks outcropping from the Pennsylvania mountain sides, but—she could not see it any longer. It faded and disappeared.

  “I don’t know,” Bobbi said. She hadn’t thought about her birthday.

  Pap straightened and looked at her, his lean, clean-shaven jaw thrust forward as always. An old man with white hair and the body of somebody half his age—she knew he was every bit as tough as he liked to look. A man didn’t try to farm these hills without getting tough as the stones. The first settlers had been Deutsch, Germans, known ever after in these parts as the “Dumb Dutch” for leaving the rich Susquehanna valley lowlands for these thin-soiled, acidy slopes. But they had stolidly persisted in clearing the land and building their big, womanly, wide-hipped, great-lofted barns. They lived here still, slow-moving egg-shaped people, and amid land going back to bramble and cedars the barns still stood, the hex signs fading on their peaks.

  The Yandros had come later, and they were not “Dutch,” but a mix of Scotch-Irish and Welsh and something else. Yandros were dark and wiry, hard-muscled and hard-minded, Bobbi had been taught. The neighbors could keep their superstitions and their stories of witchcraft. Grant Yandro would not have hex signs on his barn.

  “You do those dishes,” he said to his granddaughter, “and I’ll get you something right now.” He went out into the cluttered yard. The baying of the hounds greeted him.

  Bobbi opened the draft of the woodstove a bit to rouse the fire—not for warmth, not now that spring was coming on, but to heat washing water. The water from the wooden cistern overhead ran cold through the kitchen tap. She half-filled the dishpan, added hot water from the kettle on the stove lid, then did the dishes. It was her turn anyway, as Pap knew well enough. He was always fair. Sometimes harsh, but always fair. She wondered what he could be bringing her.

  The hounds had quieted. Bobbi heard Pap’s holler echoing back from the wooded slope behind the house. He was calling in the horses to be fed.

  It took them a while to come in from their pasture, as usual. Without looking out the window she could see them coming down the hillside step by slow, hesitant step. Horses always came to a calling human that way, as if they were suspicious of the person’s motives. In her mind’s eye she saw Grandpap impatiently waiting, grumbling to himself, and she smiled.

  She was done with the dishes by the time Pap came back from the barn, carrying a dusty wooden box on one shoulder. He eased it down and got himself a dipperful of well water from the covered bucket by the sink, and she knew better than to ask him about the box before he was done drinking, though she eyed it curiously. Homemade, by the looks of it. Reminded her of the pine coffin Pap had once made for a child who had died, lost up on the mountain, a migrant’s child. She had never seen this box, and she had thought she knew just about everything in the barn. This box had been well hidden up on the rafters somewhere.

  “It’s some of your father’s things,” Grandpap told her. “I figure it’s time you had them.”

  Bobbi gave him one startled glance, then kneeled and worked at the clasp. It was corroded shut. She had to bang at it. And when she got the box open at last and saw all the yellowing papers, she got up and carried the heavy box into her cubbyhole of a room, under her studying light, which was bright enough to read by. Outside, night was falling, darker than the fir trees. She sat on her bed, her knees nearly against the beaverboard wall, and lifted the first ragged sheet in shaky fingers. That was Saturday night, a young springtime night when a girl her age should have been thinking of love, maybe going out with Travis Dodd, who lived up the mountainside from her. But Bobbi Yandro was thinking about Travis even less than ever, and for the dark hours she was as good as gone from Canadawa Mountain.

  The yellowed papers did not take her too far away at first. Newspaper clippings. Graduating class of Silver Valley Area High School, and Wright Yandro’s name on the list. Wright Yandro inducted into army. Wright Yandro weds Chantilly Lou Buige in Louisiana. She was the girl he had met on base in Georgia, and she had taken him home to marry him, but then he had brought her to his own home to live before he shipped out. Wright Yandro sent to Vietnam.

  Bobbi gazed down into the stark newsprint face, hard-jawed under the military hat, as if it could tell her something she badly needed to know. It did not. The strong-boned face so much like her own, the grave gray smudges that were its eyes, might as well have belonged to a stranger. Bobbi had never met her father. Shortly after she was born he had died in Nam. There was a newspaper clipping for that, too. Local Man Killed In Combat.

  And a single clipping of a different sort. A poem, signed Wright Yandro, published in the Silver City Clarion, Canadawa County, PA.

  “The old gods live in hidden forms.

  In the autumn nights the wild geese fly,

  A cat roams under the bloated moon,

  The gypsies ride the highways still,

  Somewhere the horses run wild.

  The cunning mustangs defy you on the mountains.

  You have heard the dragon roar in the dark.

  You have heard the hounds of hell in the sky.

  The old gods chant to the crescent moon;

  The mustangs toss their heads and shout,

  The mustangs yet run wild on the western plains.

  Bobbi raised her eyes and stared as if her sight could blaze through the cabin walls, leaving wood smoldering. She felt, she knew—what? The words made little sense to her. She doubted that they had made much sense to the editor of the Clarion, either. He had probably printed them only to fill a hole in the local news page. They were probably pretty bad poetry.

  But—this strangeness of hers, this feeling of being alone inside, this—this affliction of seeing things: all her life since she had been aware of it she had thought it was because her mother had gone crazy. Chantilly Lou Buige Yandro had been taken away to the psychiatric ward one day when Bobbi was three. After that Bobbi’s mother had been shuttled like a lost soul from hospital to doctor to hospital, never really coming back, until her parents in Louisiana had placed her in a good private institution the other side of Pittsburgh. Chantilly was not dangerous, but her delusions did not let her cope with life in the real world, the doctors explained.

  And the first time Bobbi had seen something that she knew wasn’t really there, she had been scared half crazy that she would go all the way crazy, like her mother. The next day she had started to bleed between her legs, and even that hadn’t scared her as much. She had told Pap about the bleeding, and he had explained it to her as best he co
uld. But she had never told anyone about the things she saw. She was a Yandro, and Yandros didn’t talk rot.

  She had not known her father wrote poetry. Nobody had ever told her. Now she held his poem in her hand, and it was as if he had written it just for her, as if he spoke to her across the distance of years and death, reaching out to her through this bit of paper that smelled of dust, withering and crumbling and dry as the bones, his bones, lying six feet under the ground down in Silver Valley Cemetery. She could have wept without knowing why.

  Carefully she laid the frail yellow clipping aside and turned to the other things in the box.

  There were notebooks. Opening the first one, Bobbi felt a shock, a prickling sense of deja vu. It took her a moment to understand why. Wright Yandro’s handwriting, the figure-eight g’s, the airily looping tails of the y’s, the fly-away capitals—like hers. Could have been hers. A strong, wild scrawl, even messier than Bobbi’s, but very much like. She might be the only one in the world who could read it.

  Until sometime long past midnight, sometime in the silent heart of night, when cats roam and distant dragons roar in the dreams of the uneasy, Bobbi pored over the notebooks. In them she read thoughts, struggling bits of poetry, the scribbled and much-scratched-out beginnings of stories. One such fragment she read again and again, until she could nearly have recited it, though it filled her with questions left unanswered.

  “The staff bore a sword inside it,” (Wright Yandro had written, years before, maybe when he was no older than she) “and scrying in the shining surface of the sword blade I could see the long history and the hard destiny of the staff. Its name meant ‘the wise one.’ It had been made of a wand of hazel cut from the living tree at sunrise, for all puissant things draw their strength from the sun. I saw the druid cutting it from the tree with a knife baptized in blood. I saw the staffmaster shaping it. I saw the priest chanting over it during the course of the shaping, to make it a force of good as well as of magic. The staff had a soul and a fate. It remembered the staffs of Moses and Aaron; it could bring up springs of water out of arid land, striking hard at the stony earth with its tip of steel. It scorned the sceptres of rulers, the swagger sticks of sergeants, the policeman’s baton. It honored the caduceus, and would not strike an innocent person, no matter what hand wielded it. It knew the forces of evil, and knew that its own scruples would bring about its undoing, and hated and feared the death-wands made of cypress and yew. It had visionary power; it foresaw the manner of its death, and mine.