“And here y’are,” the old woman said, and offered a grotesque smile of welcome. It was a smile guaranteed to make even a brave girl think of stories told in the nursery—Winter’s tales of old women with snaggle teeth and bubbling cauldrons full of toad-green liquid. There was no cauldron over the fire in this room (nor was the fire itself much of a shake, in Susan’s opinion), but the girl guessed there had been, betimes, and things in it of which it might be better not to think. That this woman was a real witch and not just an old lady posing as one was something Susan had felt sure of from the moment she had seen Rhea darting back inside her hut with the malformed cat at her heels. It was something you could almost smell, like the reeky aroma rising off the hag’s skin.

“Yes,” she said, smiling. She tried to make it a good one, bright and unafraid. “Here I am.”

“And it’s early y’are, my little sweeting. Early y’are! Hee!”

“I ran partway. The moon got into my blood, I suppose. That’s what my da would have said.”

The old woman’s horrible smile widened into something that made Susan think of the way eels sometimes seemed to grin, after death and just before the pot. “Aye, but dead he is, dead these five years, Pat Delgado of the red hair and beard, the life mashed out of ’im by ’is own horse, aye, and went into the clearing at the end of the path with the music of his own snapping bones in his ears, so he did!”

The nervous smile slipped from Susan’s face as if slapped away. She felt tears, always close at the mere mention of her da’s name, burn at the back of her eyes. But she would not let them fall. Not in this heartless old crow’s sight, she wouldn’t.

“Let our business be quick and be done,” she said in a dry voice that was far from her usual one; that voice was usually cheery and merry and ready for fun. But she was Pat Delgado’s child, daughter of the best drover ever to work the Western Drop, and she remembered his face very well; she could rise to a stronger nature if required, as it now clearly was. The old woman had meant to reach out and scratch as deep as she could, and the more she saw that her efforts were succeeding, the more she would redouble them.