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Sanity returned to her, and with it, fear.
With hands gone suddenly cold, Jane slapped off the interactives. The dragon's presence died away.
It took her a while to pull herself together. When she did, she began to gather up her books. She was not going to invoke the dragon. Not tonight at any rate. Their next conversation would have to wait on a moment of far greater import.
The printed pages, however, were unreadable to her now. Seven times she went over one before realizing she had not the slightest notion which text she had opened. She let it slip from her fingers, and rolled over on her back, staring blankly at the iron ceiling of the cabin.
After a while she began to cry.
Her loneliness seemed overwhelming, now, her isolation complete. Jane felt her inferiority like a physical blow. In a world filled with enchantment, she was nothing but a changeling girl, nothing but a high school kid, nothing but a little thief.
— 7 —
THE MATERIAL WORLD IS ULTIMATELY COMPOSED OF PRIMItive matter. No one has ever seen primitive matter, however, since it has only a potential existence until it is acted upon by form to create air, fire, water, and earth, and the near infinite number of elements that are admixtures of those four. Creation occurs in two exhalations. The Sun's heat acting upon the ocean causes a vaporous exhalation, which is both moist and cold, and its resultant compounds are therefore largely, but not entirely, composed of water and air. But when the Sun acts upon the land, there is a smoky exhalation, which is both hot and dry, and its compounds are mostly admixtures of earth and fire.
Jane loved alchemy. She was fascinated by the elegance of it. From formlessness by way of two operations arose the four basic elements and all things that derived from them. An oak tree stripped down to its components was made up entirely of these four in combination. You could prove this by taking a log from that tree and applying sufficient heat. The unraveling would begin with the expulsion of flames and hot jets of air—the first two elements. As it burned, tarry liquids would bubble from the cut end of the log—water. Then, when calcination was complete, a residue of ash would remain, and this last was the final element of earth.
"The smoky exhalation," said the pale man, "is masculine and the vaporous one feminine. Mercury is a womb in which embryonic metals can be gestated. This is why all the great alchemists are female."
Female Jane wrote in her notebook, and underlined it three times.
"I don't see why anybody would want to be wicker queen anyway," Jane said.
The others looked at her pityingly.
"For the glory," Hebog said. "She gets to cut classes, skip finals, date whosofuckingever she wants, and ride in a great big float while everybody looks up at her and cheers. She even gets to wear a stupid little tiara." He hawked up a gob of phlegm and spat it out. "What's so hard to understand about that?"
"Yes, but—"
"Oh, don't be tedious." Salome ski
"Yeah." Ratsnickle took a casual swipe at Jane's head. "Change the record, dipshit."
"Hey, speak of the devil, here comes Peter," Hebog said. "Peter, my man! What's the word?" He was a red dwarf and like many of his kind his moods swung precipitously between surly fatalism and a puppyish eagerness to please that bordered on the grotesque.
"Yeah, hi." Peter of the Hillside nodded vaguely down at the dwarf, ignoring the others, and then, to her amazement, addressed Jane. "Listen, I hear you know how to lift tapes from that store down to the mall."
"Yes," said Jane. "I can do that."
"Well, could you tell me how? This rusalka chick I'm seeing, you know what they're like. She wants me to get her this one particular tape, you know, and I'm flat out of money."
"Jane never—" Hebog began.
She quelled him with a look. It was her own decision to make, after all. To prove it, she said, "Okay. I've got this little red leather purse, see. I carry it in my right hand with the flap unsnapped, so I can slide in a cassette with my left when nobody's looking." The others, Salome in particular, were listening with interest; normally she didn't share her methodology. Ratsnickle's eyes were narrow slits of concentration.
"But what about the security gate?"
"That's why a purse instead of just shoving the cassette into your pocket. I go to the gate and just as I'm starting through, I see a friend out in the mall, okay? So I've got to call out to her, right? So it's like: Salome!" She squealed the name as if amazed and delighted, going up on her toes and waving her purse-hand high to draw her friend's attention. A step carried her through the imaginary gate and she brought her hand down. "You see? The purse actually goes over the gate, not through, but it all happens so naturally that store security doesn't think twice."
Her friends laughed and clapped their hands. "She's got a million of 'em," Hebog said proudly.
"That's no good," Peter said. "That'll only work for a girl." He started to turn away. "Well, thanks anyway."
"Wait," Jane said. "What tape do you want?"
"The new Conjunction of Opposites album. It's called Mythago."
"I'll get it for you. As a favor. Come see me tomorrow."
"Yeah?" He squinted, as if noticing her for the first time. "That's really nice of you."
When Peter was gone, Ratsnickle said, "Why did you go and tell him a thing like that?"
Jane didn't know why. She had acted on impulse. "He's kind of cute." She shrugged.
"She's sweet on him," Hebog said. "Talk about hopeless! That boy is doomed. You can see it written on his face."
"'As was prophesied Beneath the Mountain,'" Salome said mockingly, "'and y-carven in Runes ain spear's-haft deep even in its granite Heart.'"
"Hey!" Hebog clenched his fists and glared up at her. "That's not fu
Ratsnickle stepped between the two and pushed them apart. "Shut up, Salome. You too, Hebog." He favored Jane with a withering look, as if it were somehow all her fault. "He's right, though. It's worse than hopeless. That rusalka bitch Peter's seeing, you know who she is?"
"No," said Jane.
The bell rang, signaling the end of recess. Salome threw down her cigarette. "Well, back to the mines."
"Fuck you too," Hebog said.
Jane caught up to Ratsnickle at the door, took his arm, and said, "Who?"
He smirked. "Gwenhidwy the Green. Oh, come on now, don't shake your head like that. You know Gwen. Yes you do—it's the wicker queen herself."
Because she spent so much time in the mall, Jane aged more rapidly than the other girls in her class; it was possible to spend days on end within that glamourous domain and reemerge into a world no older than it was when she went in. Jane did a lot of schoolwork there. She was catching up in her studies, and only the predetermination by her teachers that she was stupid kept her from being promoted out of the pale man's tutoring sessions.
"What happens to the wicker queen?" she asked him that afternoon.
He stopped reading, looked directly at, through, beyond her. "You know what happens to the wicker queen."
"Yes, but why?"
"It's a tradition." He returned to the text. "Words which are transliterations from the Arabic via a metathetical process include 'Abric,' more accurately transcribed as al-kibrit, for sulphur; Alchitram,' from al-qitran, for pitch; Almagest,' or al-majisti for—"