“Aunt Valerian,” some sticky moppet says, serious and grubby, fingers only briefly not shoved in its dirt-smeared mouth, and then garbles whatever actual question it wanted to ask around spit-drenched digits.
“Yes,” Valerian says.
“Noooooo,” the moppet says, brow creased. “Basil says — says — that ladies can marry ladies when they grow up.”
Valerian puts her satchel on the table, looks around at the family gathering, and wonders whether — if she spent money on a pointed hat — her siblings’ many sticky spawn would be sufficiently cowed by the mystique of witch to leave her alone.
“Yes,” she says, surreptitiously rolling a cigarette stuffed with special herbs.
“Nooooooo,” the moppet says angrily, because apparently that’s not the actual question. “Borage said that ladies who marry ladies are all budlos!”
Valerian makes a mental note to find out which one’s Borage. She narrows her eyes.
Some family ancestor make a bargain with the Fast Folk. Every seventh child for ever, signed away; born bright and memorable, senses lush and sharp, dreams alien. Witches, mostly.
They like to maintain — when they acknowledge the family shame at all, quietly, among themselves — that it’s not the same as the budlo, the changeling, mock-children dreamed into being by the Fast Folk and exchanged in secret. The budlo has a tell, they say: webbed toes, perhaps, a vestigial tail, eyes an unearthly colour, too many fingers, a contrasting streak of hair — some detail amiss. Surely no child of ours has any such freakish feature. Surely our children aren’t gone, replaced with dream-children, taken to the place the Fast Folk come from for their wondering entertainment. Our seventh children are merely…touched by greatness. And if they have strange hair or eyes or some small peculiarity, that’s merely a sign. Of greatness.
Valerian runs her tongue around her teeth, and thinks of the vivid landscapes she sees in her sleep, of the way she can smell magic. Of the entrancing qualities of women: softness and mystery and inner steel. Pretty hair. Thighs.
It sounds like small and petty bullshit. But. Does she know, for certain? Perhaps the hot coil within her is her own tell. Perhaps she should hide it better.
“You can marry whoever you like,” she says, and the child scoffs something contemptuous and incomprehensible around its hand, and shakes a threadbare cloth rabbit at her; she thinks she’s given to understand that one day, they shall marry the only possible worthy candidate, Mister Ears.
She glances across the raucous gathering, to the solidarity cluster of wives and husbands married-in to her terrible family, to where — in lieu of any spouse of her own, or any prospect, given that she’ll live and die a witch, not a person proper — one of her colleagues has deigned to tag along with her, to save her from condescending prying, should she need it. Tippet Le Prevost, with her dark curls and sloe eyes, who has a pointy hat and an air of rich enigma, whose cryptic smile or intense lack of one can silence any man or gossip. And Valerian blushes to find Tippet looking back in her direction, grinning at her diminutive interrogation.
“Well, then,” she says. “Do you care what Basil or Borage say?”
The sticky child thinks, brow furrowed. Shakes its tangled little head.
Valerian gives a stiff nod, swallowing the feeling that Tippet’s gaze is melting her from the inside.
