Maid of Wonder by Jennifer McGowan Page B

freshly cut flowers and herbs. One stall leads to another, then another, and I find myself moving farther and farther away from Maude. The air seems to clear with every step, and I realize I am enjoying the pretty fall day. Lavender tendrils in large bound bunches mixed with sage catch my eye, and I stop at another stall, noting the woman’s broad collection of herbs. Sage is for purity and protection, and she has ringed it round her cart. She’s also taken the time to scatter a bedding of rushes around the space, so that villagers might be more comfortable while they view her wares. Beneath this layer of straw and herbs, the earth is stamped down, the ruts of the wheels deep.
    I squint hard, and then I see it—a thin line of salt beneath the rushes, circling the stall. More purification, more protection. Of what is this stall owner afraid?
    â€œSomeone there?” A thin, reedy voice startles me away from the cart, and I turn. A hunched old woman leaning heavily on her staff peers up at me, and my mouth goes dry as I see her eyes.
    They are milk white with age. The woman is blind.
    â€œMa’am?” I say, reaching out to her instinctively. “Is this your stall?”
    â€œMy daughter Agnes’s.” She smiles, and I feel slightly more at ease, but the woman tilts her head to the side, as if catching the tone of my sigh. “You’re too young to be so old,” she says. “You’ve seen too much, too soon.”
    â€œMother!” A woman comes round the corner, and we both stop short in recognition. It is the dove seller from a week ago, hardly a young woman herself. I blink from one of them to the other.
    â€œThis is your mother?”
    â€œAye. Her name is Bess.” The dove seller smiles indulgently at the older woman, who croons at me, stroking my arm. “Yes, sweetheart,” Agnes continues to her mother. “She’s a lovely young maid. I told you about her, remember? The one who startled my doves away? Fortunately, they all came back again.” She gestures, and I see the cages on the other side of her cart, the doves lightly cooing in the breeze.
    â€œShe saw them, didn’t she?” the old woman says. “Five scolds with only ravens for friends, and poor Sally Greer caught among them all.”
    â€œExcuse me?” I blink in surprise. “Is the old woman who spoke to the Queen, then—this Sally Greer?”
    Agnes the dove seller pats her mother on her stooped shoulder and glances at me ruefully. “Don’t listen to her. Her mind is not always with us.”
    â€œI say, she saw them!” the old woman protests. “Sweet, dumb Sally never did have a thought in her head unless someone else put it there. She was no match for ol’ Maude.” She spits into the dirt. “That one’s carried hate in her heart for so long, I’m surprised she hasn’t rotted from it.”
    â€œHave a care!” Agnes’s voice is harsh, and I step back quickly as she moves between us. “I think it’s time for your nap, sweetheart,” she says, but the ancient woman is looking directly at me with her odd, milk-white eyes.
    â€œHated the Queen, she did, and hates the Queen, she does. One is the same as the other to her, don’t you e’er forget it.” Then the old blind woman stiffens, her face going blank. And when she speaks again, the voice that tumbles from her mouth doesn’t sound anything like her own.
    It sounds like the unearthly rasp of the dark angel.
    â€œDeath plays your Queen in a game without end,” she moans, her sightless eyes flaring wide. “It circles and crosses, then strikes once again.”
    I wheel back, horrified. This is the first time I have seen the angels speak through a mortal, and to hear such a terrible, choked sound come out of a woman whose voice I verily knowseems the height of wrongness. Surely, this should not be allowed. Surely, I am hearing