The Dollmage

When Annakey returned home she did her work with a song and a light hand. Even when the work became heavy and long, when the other children played while Annakey must weed and clean and cook, she had a meadow for her mind to live in.

Because of her pet deer, Renoa’s desire to do the work of a Dollmage left her again. She would stay all day upon the mountain and come home only at dark. At times she slept in the woods. She took her friends from the village to places no one had seen. She became respected for her knowledge of the wilderness and all things in it.

I prayed for the day the deer would go wild again and leave her. Once I tried to take her clay deer from her pocket as she slept. I would put the doll over the mountains, far away from the Seekvalley village doll. But she woke, and her eyes glowed in the darkness like a wild animal’s.

“What are you doing?” she whispered in the dark. Her voice hissed low and piercing as a serpents. I felt a chill between my shoulder blades.

“It is time for you to be a woman and do the work of a woman,” I said, my voice just above a whisper.

“I will do my own work,” she said.

“You will work here, with me.”

“No.” She was not arguing with me. She was explaining. “You suck the magic out of me, old woman. I feel my power only when I am far away from you.”

“Renoa.”

“Someday, when I am Dollmage, I will make new valleys and new mountains, and I will go there.” Then she dressed herself and ran out of the house into the night.

She was fearless, and all my efforts to tame her only made her vicious.

I ceased to worry about Annakey. She grew out of my sight and largely out of my mind. Over the next three years, her mother became weaker of body and mind, and rarely went out of doors. She did sewing and mending in exchange for the things she and Annakey could not provide for themselves. Annakey had to care for the cow and the pig and the chickens; she had to plant and weed and harvest the garden. She was too busy to trouble me. I did not know that whenever she could, she would run away to her secret place where the mountains’ toes are bunched, where the sheep do not wander for fear of wolves and mountain cats. I did not know she would add to her meadow, putting in hedges and bees, and dew on the leaves, and all manner of wonders. I did not know what made her happy. I did notice that Oda Weedbridge’s field was lusher that year, and that in it the wildflowers grew more abundantly than anywhere else in the valley. I spread dust over her field in the Seekvalley doll so it would not excite envy among the villagers, but it remained green and thick with flowers as ever. I could not know that already Annakey was stealing my story.

Vilsa had a secret of her own. Whenever Annakey was gone,Vilsa had taken to spending her time in the root shed where she could think about her husband without interruption. She spoke to him while she was in there, laughing over old jokes they had shared and quietly swearing her love forever. Her grief had become madness. One day I listened at the window and heard her carrying on a conversation with her husband.

I looked in the window. “Vilsa,” I said, “who are you speaking to?”

“My husband,” she said.

“He is not here,” I said.

“His ghost, then.”

I looked all around. “His ghost is not here.”

Vilsa looked around the room groggily, as if coming out of a trance. “No,” she said. “He is not dead.”

“If he is not dead, he does not love you enough to return to you. It is not my fault.”

Of course it was my fault. I chose not to think of it, to delay the day of my repentance.

One day not long after that, Annakey summoned me to the house. She was dough-colored, and her eyes were swollen.

“Dollmage,” she said. “Mother is ill.”

“She is always ill.”

“This time it is different,” Annakey said.

“It comes of spending too much time in the root shed,” I said sharply, but I followed her to the house.

When I arrived, I saw everything as usual. The windows were polished and the stoop swept. The laundry was hanging fresh, the lamp was trimmed, the butter churned and molded.

I looked at Vilsa and knew at once she was dying.

The woman looked away, staring at the mountains through her sparkling windows as if her husband might come for her even yet. She knew also.

“Take care of my daughter,” she said weakly. “Teach her to use her gift.”

“Renoa is the true Dollmage,” I said. “It is possible that Annakey drowned a cow, but to tame a deer is the work of a Dollmage. You know the law. There cannot be two to a village.”

Vilsa got up on one elbow. The effort made her forehead and chin glisten with sweat. “Listen, Grandmother Hobblefoot,” she said. “You think my promise doll drained me of my happiness so that Annakey might have it. You are wrong. It is her promise doll that did it. She has great power to make the story go how she wills it. Teach her, Dollmage.” She lay back on the pillows. “Care for her until her father returns for her.”

She was again telling me my own art.