Shapechanger's Birth Read online

  Edward gave the stones a quick glance, then his body relaxed slightly. Good; he had not forgotten what she was, and that any robbers trying to get past what seemed to be an innocent young girl would find themselves sharply rebuked.

  At the rear of the coach she stood facing away from him to idly watch the area around them, including the guard, while Edward unlocked the strongbox with the key that only he carried.

  Edward transferred the bags of money and other valuables to an empty valise. The guard offered to carry the valise but Edward politely refused, asking him to help with the luggage instead. Grumpily the guard complied. With his help and help from the staff of the inn all the luggage was soon transferred to two rooms on the top floor of the inn.

  Mary took a quick tour of the bedroom the girls would share to see if it contained fleas, which she was prepared to kill with her esoteric powers. Happily there were no fleas.

  Then she did the same to Edward's room. He surely did not understand why she closely examined the bedding but he made no demur. Long ago those who ran the orphanage had come to understand that it was best to humor "Granny" McCarthy in her strange ways. And after all, his door was open, he was her guardian, and the other two girls were right across the hall with their door open.

  In addition to the flea patrol Mary also checked security arrangements. She tried to open the window. It was stuck shut with paint and from warping from damp, but when she applied her extrahuman strength it gave with a sharp crack then opened smoothly.

  She stuck her head out and surveyed the side of the building, including that part above the window.

  She pulled her head back inside and said, "I could get up here. But no one else could. But someone could climb down a rope from the roof."

  Mr. Timmons looked out and agreed. "Perhaps it would have been better if you had left the window stuck closed."

  She grinned at him and closed the window. Concentrating for a few moments she softened the edges of the window frame and the slot it was in and let them glue themselves together.

  "It's stuck closed again," she said, "tighter than before. But they could always break through the window."

  "So they could," he said, looking around the room. Catching sight of a wardrobe he went to it and began to struggle with it. Mary went to help. In just moments the window was blocked by the heavy piece of furniture.

  There was a table by the door. Mary was sure that he would place it in front of the door before he went to bed.

  "We're going to freshen up," she said. "We'll knock on your door when we're ready to go." She smiled. "You likely have time for a nap. You can imagine how long it will take three women to get ready."

  It was full dark outside by the time the quartet sat down at a table in the dining room at the inn. Edward had picked one that let him sit in a corner with the valise beside his chair. It also let him keep an eye on the stair to their bedrooms, where they had left a few other valuables.

  By the time they finished eating the bar at one side of the room had a full complement of customers, and a trio of musicians had taken their place in a corner of the room apparently reserved for such. They were two men, one with a fiddle and the other with a small shiny-red button accordion, and one woman who had very black hair cut in bangs and very pale skin.

  The musicians began to play a slow reel. The woman took a sip of something in a mug and began to sing. To Mary's extra-sensitive ears she sounded a bit hoarse. She did not seem to have much energy. Her voice remained soft.

  After a few songs the audience was still not paying attention and the woman sat down in a chair beside the performing area, looking at the floor, while the men continued to play jigs and reels.

  Mary got up and went over the black-haired woman. She put a hand on one of the woman's shoulders and bent down to speak to her. The woman looked up at her. Her eyes were a pale, electrifying blue, now reddened as if from weeping.

  "Are you sick?" As she asked this she was probing the woman with her esoteric senses through her hand. It would have been easier if her hand rested on the woman's flesh, but the sweater was wool and thus almost transparent to Mary's esoteric sense.

  "Yes. These last three months." Mary placed her hand on the woman's brow. She could detect the fever from the temperature alone but her extranatural senses told her more and far more clearly. The woman was dying of an infection deep in her lungs.

  "Hmm," Mary said and knelt down in front of the woman to get in a better position. With the thumb and forefinger of her hand, Mary, felt the woman's lymph glands beneath the hinge of the woman's jaw. Through her hands she sent deep into the woman's body the message, Get well! Rest! Get well! Rest! Not in words, but in commands much more potent than that.

  And she heard the weak echo of her message that told her the commands had taken. The woman would get well, and afterward her body would be much better at fighting off sickness.

  Taking her hands away, Mary stayed hunkered down looking at her face. The woman had closed her eyes and her head was tilted back, a usual response to Mary's cool, soothing hands.

  She sat up straighter and looked back at Mary with her blue eyes. In an hour the redness would be gone.

  "You will get better now," Mary said.

  "Thank you," the black-haired woman said. She looked up, saw her two partners putting up their instruments. She made to get up but subsided back into her chair at the inexorable strength of Mary's repressing hand.

  "You're not singing any more tonight."

  "But I have to! We really need the money. And if we quit early they won't let us come back."

  "Suppose I get a substitute for you? Would you accept that?"

  "I ... I suppose."

  "My friend is very good, and she loves to sing. Relax."

  Mary went to the two musicians and got their agreement to work with Barbara, as long as Barbara was not too bad. They would quit playing, they warned, if Mary's singer was so bad that they would look like a joke.

  Mary returned to her chair and put her proposition to Barbara.

  "What would I sing? The stuff they were doing?"

  "That's right. Think you can do it?"

  Barbara gave her a You must be crazy look and got up to talk to the musicians. Mary relaxed. She knew what Barbara could do.

  There was considerable conferring in the musician's corner. Barbara was obviously taking the lead in the discussion, speaking as if she were years older, firmly but without arrogance.

  Finally the musicians took up their instruments and began to play softly, Barbara watching them with her head cocked to the side. This meant the blond girl was totally focused on the music.

  Shortly Barbara turned to look at the audience and began to sing softly. The music was a slow reel. After a few bars she began to sing louder and made a signal to the musicians to increase the tempo. The patrons of the inn began to pay more attention. Another volume and tempo increase and more than half of the patrons were listening. By the time she finished, very loud and very fast, practically everyone was listening. And every foot was tapping to the rhythm.

  Mary had never known anyone, including Barbara, to change tempo and volume on a jig or a reel. But Barbara was a musical genius and invented new musical idioms as easily as she breathed. And listeners rarely disliked her innovations.

  Next Barbara sang a medium tempo jig at medium volume, an old favorite. There were no innovations with this song, or the next.

  The audience went back to their normal behavior: most of them listening but with the volume of conversation growing as more people arrived to eat. An old couple, both bent and wrinkled and in their eighties, but energetic, got up to dance. A few other couples soon joined them.

  Then Barbara did something unusual in the next piece, "O'Neil's Fiddle." A quarter through she stood to the side when she was supposed to sing a set of stanzas and motioned the fiddler forward and signaled him to play louder. As he did she sang more softly. In effect, since the fiddle and the singer were mirrors in this part of
the song, the two "instruments" had changed roles.

  Then Barbara took center stage again and the fiddle retreated. Another quarter way through and Barbara and the fiddler again swapped roles. This time the fiddler had gotten into the mindset of being the "singer" and played as if his instrument were a voice with all its animation and expressiveness.

  Mary listened, fascinated, wondering what break with tradition Barbara would do next. The answer came a few songs along, when Barbara began to sing about four Irishmen missing a goat. First they were peacefully drinking, and one bragged on his goat. They went to view this marvelous creature. It was gone.

  At this point Mary realized that Barbara was repeating a story she had told several times to young girls back at the orphanage. But Barbara was setting the words to the usual repetitive structure of a reel. Mary laughed with delight.

  The story went on, following the semi-drunken Irishmen, each with his bottle, up hill and down dale, having various stupid adventures. The stories went on and on, until the men realized they had run out of whiskey and abandoned the hunt to re-stock.

  To end the night, Barbara motioned the sick singer up to stand beside her. They began to sing an old favorite, a lament called "Johnnie's skean," about a widow whose husband had gone to war, leaving behind the specialized tool, the skean, that was used to cut turf.

  When the last stanza was sung, about the widow's heart being as without warmth as her hearth, most in the inn's common room had a tear at least trembling at the edge of an eye.

  The musicians received a bonus that night, from the patrons as well as the inn. Barbara split it four ways, taking only one part.

  Mary shook her head. Whenever she thought she understood the self-centered little brat Barbara would do something to confuse her.

  After a good and early breakfast the group was back on the stagecoach, leaving Limerick City. The road went west and south for a few miles, then turned abruptly south toward Cork.

  The first few miles the conversation was all about Barbara's marvelous performance. When that talked itself out Mary opened one of the two newspapers she had bought this morning, which had the grand title of The Limerick Reporter & Tipperary Vindicator .

  Bridget took The Limerick Chronicle and soon they were reading choice tidbits aloud to each other, and their companions. Such as the honest but none-too-smart, "Breeding bull, grand, but sometimes loses interest in cows."

  They took their first bathroom break at the small village of Croom where it crossed the equally small River Maigue. The river then paralleled the road till their next break at Rockhill and a little beyond. At noon they ate at Charleville, a village of several dozen houses.

  Just beyond that village a railroad came in from the left, from far-off Dublin, and began to parallel the road they were on. For a time they kept alert for a train, but were disappointed. Mary had never even seen a railroad, much less a train, and she was eager to see a locomotive.

  They soon picked up another companion river as the highway continued straight south. Mary noticed that the valley in which ran the river and road had steeper sides and larger, lusher trees. Soon the hills grew higher still, especially on their left, to the east. She found out why on their next afternoon break, at Buttevant. A portly brown-robed friar from the monastery there told them that they had just passed the Balleyhoura Mountains .

  They reached their overnight lodgings mid-afternoon at the large town Mallow, which was bisected by a major east-west waterway, the famous Blackwater River. Mallow was renowned for its horses and races. Indeed, as they passed through the common room in the inn where they would stay the talk was all about a race that very afternoon.

  The girls settled their things in their room and freshened up, then got permission from Mr. Timmons to go to the races. He had to keep company with the valise containing their valuables, which was best done at the inn rather than lugging it around at the track, so was reluctant to say 'Yes,' but a pretty pleading expression from Bridget got the best of him. This confirmed Mary's speculation about him being sweet on Bridget, but she kept the thought to herself.

  The track was just a mile or so west, said one of the inn's employees. Just follow the river road and it will take you there.

  They caught the last three races and still had time to kill. The day was pleasant so they retraced their footsteps then went a mile further into the downtown area of Mallow. Just past it was a huge castle with walls beyond that extended along the Blackwater into the tree-shrouded distance. They admired it while eating a snack from a confectioner that would no doubt ruin their appetite.

  Well, Bridget's. Growing girl Barbara was always hungry, and Mary's extranatural body needed more food than that of other humans.

  The next morning the three girls were downstairs ready to go early. Cork City lay just four hours away. This would be their last day on the road!

  Another little river kept their road company south and their bathroom break, at Kilmona, was beside a pretty growth of low weeping willow mixed artfully with tall, graceful alder. However their excitement had grown to such heights, Barbara said none too quietly, "that none of them could pee." Edward was close enough to hear her. He was so visibly embarrassed that the three of them somewhat heartlessly laughed at him. Then they apologized profusely, an act ruined by the fact that Barbara and Mary kept bursting into giggles despite Bridget's scolding.

  By now the country had grown even more up-and-down and the vegetation even more lush and varied. Mary thought it quite beautiful, but then she had grown up in a countryside that had more rock than trees and anything green was beautiful to her .

  In the coach the girls for a time contained their impatience — Cork City was only an hour or so away — by naming trees and shrubs alongside the road. Among the ubiquitous green and dark-green oak they claimed to see rowan and ash (which Barbara insisted were the same but for name), an occasional pine, white birch, and beech.

  Though there was some contention over the last, Bridget saying beech trees were not native to Ireland and Barbara stoutly insisting that in that case it was a very comfortable immigrant.

  Mary snickered at that. Little Barbara saying such thing as "comfortable immigrant" — though with her recent growth "little" no longer applied. The snickering annoyed Barbara for an instant before she began laughing at her own hurt dignity.

  Would wonders never cease? Snooty "Barbarous" laughing at herself?

  Suddenly the coach slowed and stopped. Mary looked out the window and saw horsemen bearing guns ride quickly out of the forest up ahead. She heard contentious voices from the driver's box, cut short by a jostling of the coach and loud gasp. Moments late she smelled blood.

  The coach jostled once again and she turned to tell Edward she thought they were about to be robbed. He needed no warning. His revolver was out and she heard the harsh click of its hammer being cocked.

  At the same instant she saw the guard step near Edward's side of the coach and begin to level his rifle at Edward's face. He never completed the motion. Edward fired into his heart area, the guard's rifle went off, and as the guard began to fall Edward yelled at the girls.

  "Get out! Your side! Hide in the woods!" Then he was spilling out his door and scrambling toward the woods on his side.

  Mary was already in full superhuman mode and practically levitating out her side of the coach, which was being jerked forward and back. In mid-air she saw three of the four horsemen riding quickly forward while one hung back aiming a rifle at Edward. The gun gave off a stabbing flame instantly obscured by an enormous puff of smoke.

  An arm was hanging off the driver's seat and the four horses were rearing and plunging. If the two rear horses had not been trying to go back while the front two tried to go forward the coach would already be flying down the road. Her feet striking the road and her knees flexing to take up the impact of her landing, she glanced back along the road. She saw no one behind them, at least not in the field of view unblocked by the coach.

  Inside it Bar
bara was dragging a foot-long dagger out of her valise and pulling on Bridget, who was looking out the other door toward Edward. Barbara was yelling something at Bridget, who turned an anxious face toward Barbara and Mary and began to move toward them.

  Mary flexed her long legs and leaped. To anyone watching from the other side of the coach her head and shoulders would have seemed to pop up above it like a Jack-in-the-box.

  No one was. The horseman lagging behind was trying to control his bucking horse with one hand and trying to keep hold of a rifle and loading rod with the other. Mary zoomed her binocular vision in on him and saw a powder horn strung around his neck that was spewing black powder into the air, before she zoomed it back out to normal view.

  The three other horsemen had halted their horses and were firing into the woods after Edward. One of them screamed and clapped a hand to the back of his neck as burning powder from a friend passed near enough to strike him. There was no sight of Edward except a translucent swirling in the air like heat shimmer that marked his path.

  Mary blinked. She also saw three translucent lines marking the path of the bullets.

  Ignoring this new kind of sight she pulled herself atop the coach, leaped to the front seat. The young driver lay sideways on it, knees drawn up to his belly and one hand still clutching a bloody wound. His eyes were wide and staring but blinked while she watch. He was trembling in shock as his life drained away.

  Mary was instantly beside him knocking his bloody hand away and pressing her own hand over the wound. She went out of herself, into the wound, tallied the damage, glued the wound shut with her witch hand, and began to probe the wound in detail, guiding his healing skill to encyst the fragments of his shirt in the wound and the intruding microlife from the air and from the knife that had stabbed him almost to the heart. She had his body heal a cut artery near his heart that was spilling his blood and had his body begin to carefully pull the wound together, working from the inside out, pushing the cysts outward. Mary dissolved the glue at the surface of the flesh and had his body begin to replace it with a scab soft enough to yield to the cysts rising like bubbles out of his body....