Ogre Enchanted, page 2
As soon as he saw me, Oobeeg screamed.
I tried to explain, but the words seemed to choke me. Oobeeg jumped on his enormous horse and spurred it. His terrified wail wafted back to me. I watched him grow a little less huge in the distance.
Aeediou would die without doctoring. Ogres are fast, so I started running, clutching my basket to my chest and stumbling in my broken boots. Ahead of me, the streets of Jenn cleared, as if Lucinda had cast another spell.
Beyond town, I stopped to strip off my boots. Luckily, the soles of an ogre’s feet are calloused, so the dirt and pebbles of the road wouldn’t hurt. I ran again.
Aeediou’s farm lay ten miles from town. I hoped ogres had stamina. Ahead of me, Oobeeg crested a hill. As he descended, his height, especially on his mount, kept his head visible until, finally, all of him disappeared into the valley.
My mind returned to Wormy. Blockhead!
Edible blockhead.
Ugh! I wanted to leap out of my skin, as if the ogre were just a covering. I let go of the basket with one hand to touch my face, hoping for a miracle.
No miracle. Still hairy. Nincompoop fairy.
Why did I keep thinking this one or that one stupid? Was being angry part of being an ogre?
A side of beef hung in our shed at home, untainted by vegetables. I’d eat it raw. Mother wouldn’t have to see.
As I streaked along, a new feeling mingled with the misery and rage—pleasure in the strength of my legs, the energy in my muscles, the depth of my breathing.
By now, Aeediou’s large leg had probably swollen to three times its size.
Again I thought of Wormy’s proposal. As a healer, I had seen too much unhappiness in marriage. Stomach complaints and worse were the result! The commonest cause, I’d observed, was youth. So I had decided that no one younger than eighteen should wed, no matter how in love they believed themselves to be. Many married at fourteen, and then—for example—one or the other grew ten inches! And height was the least of it.
My calves were aching when I finally reached a stile for giants and had to boost myself up each step with my arms. When I descended the other side, Aeediou’s bull, an acre away, pawed the ground and lowered his horns.
I heaved myself up the far stile with his breath on my neck.
There was Aeediou’s vast farmhouse—made of boulders, thatched with a mountain of straw. I banged on the door.
No one answered, but Aeediou and Oobeeg had to be inside. Exee trotted to me, clearly meaning no harm. His back, which used to be as high as my shoulders, now came up only to my waist. He rubbed himself against me. Did he know me despite my form?
I wondered how dog tasted.
I wouldn’t eat a dog!
The door didn’t open.
“Exee trusts me!” I cried. “Uueeetaatii (honk) obobee aiiiee.” I am a friend. I knew a few words of the giants’ language, Abdegi, which includes sounds as well as words.
Oobeeg’s face appeared in a first-floor window, right above my head.
“I mean no harm. I’m—” The words your healer, Evie wouldn’t come. “I’m a healer ogre. Aeediou needs me.”
Oobeeg’s face left the window. Was he going to let me in?
Five minutes passed.
Aeediou had to be in pain, which would soon rise to agony, and shortly after that, she’d be beyond my remedies.
Now was the time for ogrish persuasion. A born ogre would have had the door open before the end of her first sentence.
“Oobeeg, I won’t hurt anyone.” I tried to soften my voice, but it still came out rough. “I’m as kind as . . .” As what? “As a good human.” In exasperation I cried, “If I were an ordinary ogre, wouldn’t I have convinced you by now?”
Nothing happened. I was furious. Two stupids.
I couldn’t reach the door latch, which hung too high for me even now. I saw nothing to stand on to get to it, either.
My rage melted as my own leg ached in sympathy with Aeediou’s. I backed away and put down my basket. “Oobeeg! Aeediou! I’m leaving my basket and going away.” I told them what was in it and how to use the ingredients. “Be generous with everything except the purpline. A few drops are all you need. I want the rest back. Aeediou, don’t stand up—Oobeeg, don’t let her stand—until the pain is completely gone. Coat every bit of the wound.” Now I was just repeating myself. “If you wait another half hour, nothing will help. I’m going now.” They’d pay me next week. You can trust a giant.
Please, Oobeeg, be brave enough to go outside for my basket. Aeediou, please let your son go out and save you. Be well, both of you.
Chapter Three
DISCOVERIES:
Ogre hands are blink fast.
Squirrels are not quite blink fast.
Biting through fur with fangs is easy.
I ate three squirrels by the time I reached the outskirts of Jenn. Mother and I had many times dined on squirrel ragout. Raw squirrel was chewier. Soon enough, I’d discover if it made me sick.
The September afternoon was half over. On Earl Road, Jenn’s widest thoroughfare, I heard a hisssss. An arrow whizzed past my ear. Another hisssss. Smack!
An arrow bored into my right arm just above my elbow. The numbskulls were shooting at me! People poured out of houses and shops, making a mob.
I dashed into Rushy Alley and loped between fences that guarded back gardens.
The ogre heart has a triple beat. Sped up, it sounds like a dancing three-legged stool.
No one in the alley yet. I stood still to look around. Nobody peering down at me, either, all probably drawn to the front of their houses by the ogre on the avenue.
I felt no pain, but I yanked the arrow out and hoped the tip wasn’t poisoned. Human-looking red blood seeped through my sleeve. I wondered if the blood of born ogres was the same color.
Someone shouted, “That way!”
I vaulted a fence and landed on a woodpile, which avalanched, bringing split logs down on me. One rammed the side of my head but didn’t knock me out. I lay still and clenched my jaw against the pain.
A crowd pounded by. Luckily, its own noise covered the rumble of the cascade I’d caused.
Gradually, my heart quieted. My arm throbbed, and my bones and skull ached from the log attack.
I wondered if Oobeeg had dared retrieve my basket.
Time ticked by.
When Aeediou smiled, her cheeks rounded into melons. A dose of an Aeediou smile kept me cheerful for a month. I couldn’t help imagining her anguish if Oobeeg had been afraid to retrieve my basket. I got mad at both of them again.
Mother and I were toiling people. I was a healer, and Mother a learned this-and-that: scribe, reckoner for folks baffled by mathematics (though she wasn’t as adept as Wormy), and go-between when the poor had to parley with the mighty. We earned enough to keep up a modest household and afford two servants, but without either one of us, we’d starve. With my new appetite, we might starve anyway.
Half an hour passed. Carefully, quietly, I restacked the firewood, this time two feet from the fence, providing myself a cramped hiding place. I’d be invisible even to a householder who came out for logs. Only someone peeping over the fence would see me.
I squeezed in. The pain in my arm grew.
Hours later, by following alleys and streaking across thoroughfares, I avoided the night constables. The lord mayor’s clock chimed midnight as I climbed the steps to our front door. My second day as an ogre began. Sixty-one days left.
Inside, Mother and Wormy sat at my worktable.
Mother—my own mother!—tempted my stomach, too. Wormy couldn’t have told her what Lucinda had done, but he must have said he’d proposed and must have communicated that some disaster had befallen me as a result. Perhaps he’d been able to say a fairy had been involved. When she saw my ruined clothes on my new body, she instantly drew the correct, dreadful conclusion.
She stood so quickly her stool fell over. “Oh!” She righted the stool and smile-grimaced at me. She sat again. “It’s not so bad, Evie. You’re just bigger.”
What a dreadful liar she was. I smile-grimaced back, which, considering my fangs, must have been appalling, but, to her endless credit, I sensed just pity and sadness, no fear—
—until she saw my wound. “You’re bleeding!”
Wormy cried, “Evie!”
“I’ve treated worse.” Except I knew what I was about when my patient was human.
While they watched, I mixed the same ingredients from my remedies cabinet that I’d assembled for Aeediou, including a scant drop of purpline, so called because dragon pee is purple. The scent of camphor seared my nose. When I’d been human, I’d barely smelled it.
Mother stared down at her hands in her lap. With my new awareness, I felt her concentration. I believed she was running through solutions, as if I were a customer with an unusual problem. “Evie,” she said, “can’t you accept Wormy but stipulate you want a long engagement? Anything can happen before you have to get married.”
“The fairy can hear you!” Wormy jumped up, and his stool capsized, too.
Mother said, “Good. Say you no longer want to marry Evie.”
He nodded. “Evie, I no—”
“Stop! Who knows what Lucinda will do to Wormy when she hears.” If she was listening—I had no idea. “She could turn him into anything.” What would be worse than being an ogre? “Or do some other dreadful thing. And she’d punish me for trying to trick her if I delayed the wedding.”
Using my left hand, I applied the remedy to my wound. Then, with my hand and my teeth, I wrapped a linen cloth around my arm and managed to tie a neat knot. “And she probably wouldn’t change me back anyway. I still rejected a suitor, even if he decided later that he didn’t want me.”
No one spoke.
“I’m hungry!” burst out of me.
Wormy jumped in his seat. “We hardly touched the stew.”
“No!” I didn’t want the taint of vegetables with my meat. I ran out the back door, through my herb garden, where the scent of herbs disgusted me, and into our shed and the darling side of beef. Too hungry even to bring it into the kitchen to butcher, I lifted it off its hook and plunged my face into a haunch—
—and looked up, while still eating, to see Mother in the doorway, holding a candle in one hand, the other fist stuffed in her mouth, tears running down her cheeks.
I loved her so much—even if she made me think of food. She had deep smile lines around her mouth and equally deep lines of puzzlement between her eyebrows. Up-tilted chin. Brown eyes flecked with blue.
My tears welled up and spilled over, too. I couldn’t bear to see her seeing me, so I closed my eyes and kept eating, more aware of need than taste. When I checked a few minutes later, she was gone. I devoured the entire side down to bones. Full at last and exhausted, I curled up on the straw.
Ogres—or human ogres—dream in red, the color of anger.
Surrounded by a vermilion haze, I wafted spectrally in and out of the bedrooms of Jenn, where I stood over its sleeping citizens, some of them my patients, saliva dripping. Even in sleep I knew I couldn’t eat them, but, oh, how I wanted to.
Chapter Four
AT DAWN, fresh hunger woke me. My arm no longer ached. When I untied the bandage, I found the wound not red, not swollen, not even needing another bandage.
Ogres are excellent at recovery from arrow wounds.
I crossed to the house in a light drizzle. Inside, I crept upstairs and sat at my vanity table to consider the hairy, blotchy nightmare in the looking glass. I tried to make the small, bloodshot (still hazel) eyes sympathetic but couldn’t judge my success.
Ogre hunger and human nausea warred in my belly.
If this was to be my shape, I had to ogrishly persuade people not to mind. “Friend . . .” Too raspy. I swallowed. “Dear friend . . . Beneath this . . .” This what? “. . . this odd exterior, I’m really—” I couldn’t say aloud who I actually was, even to myself. “I wouldn’t harm anyone.”
Even I wouldn’t believe me. I spent the next half hour practicing, until I thought I detected a scintilla of improvement. Then I stepped into the hall, though I should have listened at the door first. Bettina, our maid-of-all-work, was sweeping.
“Eeee!” Her broom clattered on the tiles.
Use a sweet voice. “Kind Bett—”
She flew down our stairs. I heard the front door thud.
Rupert, our manservant—big, young, bovine—gawked from the stair landing above. After an instant, his cry was as high-pitched as Bettina’s. He stood frozen, afraid to pass me on his way down.
Honey voice. “I’m harmless. A healer, too, like your mistress.”
His eyes bulged. He clutched his head. To save him from apoplexy, I backed into my room and stayed there until I heard his boots clumping down the stairs.
I reemerged into the silent hall. Last year, I’d hardly left Rupert’s bedside when he was desperately sick with fever, and he’d lived, even though I’d had no purpline to dose him with at the time.
His decamping gave me an idea. In his room, I sat at his shaving table, poured water from pitcher to bowl, and applied his razor to my face and the back of my hands. That done, I took his pig-bristle brush and attacked my fingernails, succeeding in freeing them almost entirely of grime—which half of me missed when it was gone. Then I stripped out of yesterday’s tattered gown and donned his spare breeches and worn linen shirt. The fit was fair, too tight here, too loose there. His boots, miraculously, pinched only a little.
Much improved, I told my ghastly reflection. My pores were vast, my lips thin, my forehead low. I wondered if another ogre would recognize me as female. I addressed my reflection. “You’re not so frightening anymore . . .” I grinned. “If you don’t show your fangs.”
The grin turned down. Who could possibly love me?
Daily, before breakfast, I visited patients. My roster for today: Mistress Poppy, who had birthed her first child the night before last; Master Caleb, who was probably at his ovens, though I’d ordered him to rest his knee; and Master Kian, whose cough had alarmed me. I plotted a route to each one that would avoid the trafficked thoroughfares.
Mistress Poppy had a younger brother my age, whom I’d never met. Perhaps he’d be visiting the baby. Perhaps he had odd tastes in sweethearts and would like the looks of me. Perhaps I’d like the looks of him—not just as a meal.
I had to eat.
As I descended to the kitchen, I thought of the chunk of bacon in the larder, which was all the meat we had left. But a side of mutton rested on the table, and Mother stood behind it. She must have sent Rupert to the market at dawn.
I framed my face with my hands. “Better? I shaved.”
She managed to hide her dismay, but I felt it. “You look distinguished.” She took a step toward me and stopped. Her eyes watered, but I didn’t sense sadness.
“Evie . . .”
“What’s wrong?” Silly question. Everything was wrong.
“Dear . . . er . . . I’m sorry. You smell.”
“Smell what?”
“Just smell, love.”
Me? I smelled fine: squirrel, beef, sweat, blood.
Ugh! I’d thought to clean only my hands. The mutton, sadly, would have to wait. I pumped water from our iron sink into our biggest pot and hefted it over the fire, which I now could accomplish easily.
When the water was finally hot and off the fire, it was hard to bathe without looking at myself.
Ogres have clumps of hair everywhere except on their bony knees.
While I washed, Mother butchered the mutton into chops and fried them according to my instructions—in suet, without any repulsive herbs or vegetables.
Finally I was clean, though my ogre side thought me dull and unsavory until I greased myself up eating the mutton with both hands. Then I ruined it all by washing them again. So it would have to be, or my patients would retreat when I approached.
Ordinarily, by midmorning I had at least five people waiting in the apothecary, but today my sole patient was Wormy, complaining of an itch behind his ear, which I dosed in an instant while resisting the temptation of his earlobes. I wondered if he’d invented the itch just to comfort me for having no patients.
He thanked me for the treatment and started for the door. Usually, he lingered.
“Wormy?”
“Evie?”
“Are you angry at me for saying no?”
“I’m not!” I felt his shock. “You had the right.”
Then why was he leaving so soon? “We’re still friends, aren’t we?”
“I’ll always be your friend, Evie.”
“Thank you, dear. I’ll always be yours.”
He left—as it turned out, just to visit Mother in her study.
When I opened our door to the street, I discovered that, despite a light rain, a mob had collected. My stomach roared at the sight of so much food.
They were armed with bows and arrows, rolling pins, knives, pokers. I stared down at the humans from the top of our steps. They stared up at me. The rain seemed to pause midair.
I supposed the clothing and the shave made them uncertain. They were two-legged sheep!
A woman’s voice wavered. “Is that the ogre?”
Not trusting my voice, I shook my head and began to descend our steps.
“It is the ogre!” I recognized Rupert’s voice. “It’s wearing my clothes!”
Everyone rushed at me. I ran up the stairs and threw myself back at the house. A hatchet whizzed over my shoulder and vibrated in our wooden door, which I cracked open and squeezed through. Once inside, I shot home the bolt.
Mother and Wormy stood in the vestibule. Mother was biting her lip. Wormy’s eyes were enormous. Pounding reverberated through the door. They were going to break it down!
I had to flee.
Mother’s thoughts must have followed mine. “They’ll have stationed people behind the house.”
I nodded. What then?
“Mother, Wormy, go to the back door. If you hear them come in here, run out there.” I didn’t think anyone would hurt them outside, but a mob indoors would be in a fever. “Go!”
