Keturah and Lord Death

“No, not at all,” she said. She brushed all the words from the air with her long, spider-leg fingers. “Not at all, my dear, my heart.” Her words disappeared into breathy nothingness, as if from moment to moment she forgot what she was saying.

I thought I would stand and leave, now, now, but I did not, for I could hear the wind in the forest around me.

“Is it true?” I whispered at last. “Is it true that you can make a charm that would show me my true love?”

“Oh yes, it is true,” she said with sad resignation. “True love. Mmm—the highest of magics.”

“I will have it,” I said, sounding braver than I felt.

“You will have it,” she said, nodding to herself.

I waited some time, looking at her, but she did not look at me. She studied the fire as if waiting for a phoenix to rise out of the flames.

“Well?” I said at last.

She glanced at me, cleared her throat, and went back to studying the fire.

“Soor Lily, I said I would have it.”

She turned glittering eyes upon me, and I could have sworn they had become as hard as amber. “Yes. Yes, you would have it,” she said low, almost in a whisper. “But there is the small matter of the price.”

Ah, the price. The price was why people feared Soor Lily, for it was not always money she asked for. “I am poor,” I said. “You know I am poor.”

“Poor, poor,” she said sympathetically, but there was no sympathy in her face. She studied the fire again. At last she said, in a voice that was hypnotic in its quiet power, “But there is a price you can pay.”

My skin prickled from my scalp to the soles of my feet. “Then name it,” I said.

She slowly reached across the table and gripped my hand in hers. It was as strong as a man’s. “All the things I could ask of you, Keturah. Couldn’t I ask you to let me live forever? Mmm. I could ask to see my departed mother—oh, the questions I would have for her. What was that recipe against the toothache? She told me, of course she did, but I have forgotten. No, Keturah, my beauty, I want none of these things. But come.”

She beckoned to me, and I followed her, wooden-legged, to the doorway of another room. There, on a massive bed, lay one of her sons, a boulder of a man. Fevered and distressed, he was not conscious that we were there.

“He is sick,” I said.

“So clever you are,” said Soor Lily with cloying sweetness. “Yes, he is very sick.”

“Why don’t you cure him?”

“Precisely,” she said. “Exactly. Just so. Why don’t I? Is that not what anyone would ask? Who would come to me for cures if they saw I could not cure one of my own sons? But my art, unlike yours, has no power over death.” Here she leaned forward very close to me and peered into my face.

I leaned away from her. “How—how did you hear …?”

“Do I not know all things about the forest?” she whispered.

“Then you know I have no power but have only made a bargain.”

She shrugged slowly, but I knew she did not believe me.

She shut the door, and silently we went back to the table before the fire. I was so angry and afraid that I could not speak. I thought to leave, but I could not leave empty-handed. I stared at the fire, and Soor Lily stared at me.

At last she said, “You make me broody, you do, for a girl—a girl of my own. A man-child takes no interest in woman wisdom. Who will learn my recipes as I learned from my mother?”

I glanced at the bulgy bags of roots and things that hung from her ceiling. I could think of no answer. Who would come here, day after day, into the deep, greeny gloom of the wood to learn her dark recipes?

At last I said, half whispering, “Do you know him, too?”

She nodded. “We all know Lord Death. Do I see him as you do? No. But it is closeness to him that imbues my stuffs with power. What is a love potion without the breath of him upon it? How can I make a healing draught without sensing from which direction he comes? One day you will understand, Keturah, that he infuses the very air we breathe with magic.”

As she spoke, I thought I saw his face in the fire, his eyes hot as embers, losing all patience with me if I were to ask for the life of her baby giant.

“I have no power over Lord Death,” I said weakly. “I see him, but he has no regard for my wishes.”

“He will not live the night,” Soor Lily said, glancing toward the bedroom where her son lay.

“Nor perhaps shall I,” I said. “But—but I will see what I can do.”

She nodded. There were tears in her eyes.

“So I will have my charm,” I said.

She nodded again. “For you,” she said, “my most powerful magic.”

She stood up and stared into her kitchen, bracing herself on the back of the chair. She looked as if she were going to have to commit some foul deed against her will, so white was she, yet resolute.

“First the distillate,” she said. She went to her cupboard and removed a small vial with only her thumb and forefinger. Her lip curled in distaste. Carefully she put three drops in a small bowl and stepped away from it. She said, “This will be a pure love, a pure and …” She looked at me and stopped speaking.