The Skull of the World

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Authors: Kate Forsyth
Tags: Fiction, General, Fantasy, Contemporary, Witches
entrance of the cave. With her owl-sight she could see clearly in the darkness. With a great bulge of rock above the gaping cave and the two waterfalls streaming down from clefts on either side, the cliff face looked like a face contorted with grief. The entrance to the cave was like a mouth stretched into a howl. Memory came back to her, and with it a kind of horror. The World's Mouth!
    Isabeau fled back to the sanctuary of the trees, owl-thought and human-thought jostling together. She crept into the burrow in the hole of the tree, though this time she did not sleep, just huddled there, her head nervously rotating to one side then the other. Buba crept in and snuggled down close for comfort.
    I have to-hooh change back, I have to-hooh change back, Isabeau thought frantically. How-hooh? How-hooh?
    Buba gave a derisive cry. Why all this hooh-Jwoting? Just do-hooh it, she said. Not here-lwoh though. Too-hooh huge for- this nook-hooh.
    Isabeau calmed a little. True-hooh.
    It was almost dawn and Buba was sleepy. Snooze-hooh through noon-hooh, in moon cool you-hooh change, hooh-hooh?
    Hooh-hooh, Isabeau agreed, coughing up a little pellet and settling down to sleep.

    In the pine-scented darkness Isabeau crouched on the ground, her head sunk down into her wings as she concentrated as hard as she could. Buba sat on a branch above her, rotating her head occasionally to scan the forest, her round eyes unblinking.
    Isabeau had absolutely no idea how she had managed to change shape. One moment she had been fleeing down the mountainside, an ocean of snow crashing down upon her. The next moment, she had been soaring up into the sky, a tiny white owl. There had been no conscious decision, no setting of her will as was usual with the working of witchcraft. All she had felt was an urgent need to escape, to fly into the sky as Buba did.
    Shapechanging was not something witches could usually do. It was magic out of fairytales and myths, magic against the natural order of things. It was not like conjuring fire, which shivered always in the air between sky and earth. It was not like whistling up the wind, which coiled and shifted around the world in constant motion anyway. It was not like Meghan's charm with animals, which came from loving them and understanding them, or Ishbel's ability to fly, which came from reversing the natural forces of the universe which caused a stone to fall to the ground and the stars to swing in their courses.
    Yet Isabeau had seen tadpoles grow legs and lungs and become frogs. She had seen caterpillars spin themselves silken cocoons in which to sleep, gnawing their way free in the spring with new wings glued to their backs, transformed into butterflies. Nature was full of transformations.
    And Eileanan was full of magical creatures that shifted from one shape to another. Isabeau had watched her friend Lilanthe shift into the shape of a tree many times, flesh growing leaves and bark and flowers in a most disconcerting manner. She had seen Maya the Ensorcellor metamorphose into her sea-shape, shining with silvery scales, her back curving down into a great finned tail like a fish. She had even watched as her father had been transformed back into a man after seventeen years trapped in the body of a horse. Thinking about those metamorphoses, Isabeau remembered what Buba had said. Just do-hooh it.
    So Isabeau did. She imagined herself as a woman, her own well-known and comfortable shape, and concentrated all her will and all her desire on returning to that shape. And suddenly she was no longer a little white owl but a tall white woman, crouched shivering and naked in the forest.
    It was bitterly cold. Isabeau hugged herself, her breath hanging before her face in frosty clouds. Above the forest the two moons sailed, one red as a blood plum, the other an ethereal blue. The sky itself was a midnight blue and strewn with stars and planets that glittered with all the cold colors of crystals, white, green, amethyst, rose.
    The

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