Free Witches: Wicked, Wild & Wonderful by Paula Guran Page A

glassblower, he was not sure. But hearts, glass hearts, were outside his idiom and outside his magic.
    He would have to see the witch.
    The witch must have known he was coming, as she always seemed to know. She awaited him in the doorway of her pleasant cottage by the wildflower meadow, more wildflowers—daisies and buttercups—waving among the long grasses of the turfed roof. A nanny goat grazed beside the chimney, her long coat as white as the milk that stretched her udder pink and shiny. He saw no kid.
    The witch was as dark as the goat was white, her black, black hair shot with silver and braided back in a wrist-thick queue. Her skirts were kilted up over her green kirtle, and she handed Weyland a pottery cup before he ever entered her door. It smelled of hops and honey and spices, and steam curled from the top: spiced heated ale.
    “I have to see to the milking,” she said. “Would you fetch my stool while I coax Heidrún off the roof?”
    “She’s shrunk,” Weyland said, but he balanced his cup in one hand and limped inside the door to haul the stool out, for the witch’s convenience.
    The witch clucked. “Haven’t we all?”
    By the time Weyland emerged, the goat was down in the dooryard, munching a reward of bruised apples, and the witch had found her bucket and was waiting for the stool. Weyland set the cup on the ledge of the open window and seated the witch with a little bit of ceremony, helping her with her skirts. She smiled and patted his arm, and bent to the milking while he went to retrieve his ale.
    Once upon a time, what rang on the bottom of the empty pail would have been mead, sweet honeyed liquor fit for gods. But times had changed, were always changing, and the streams that stung from between the witch’s strong fingers were rich and creamy white.
    “So what have you come for, Weyland Smith?” she asked, when the pail was a quarter full and the milk hissed in the pail rather than sang.
    “I’m wanting a spell as’ll mend a broken heart,” he said.
    Her braid slid over her shoulder, hanging down. She flipped it back without lifting her head. “I hadn’t thought you had it in you to fall in love again,” she said, her voice lilting with the tease.
    “ ’Tisn’t my heart as is broken.”
    That did raise her chin, and her fingers stilled on Heidrún’s udder. Her gaze met his; her eyebrows lifted across the fine-lined arch of her forehead. “Tricky,” she said. “A heart’s a wheel,” she said. “Bent is bent. It can’t be mended. And even worse—” She smiled, and tossed the fugitive braid back again. “—if it’s not your heart you’re after fixing.”
    “Din’t I know it?” he said, and sipped the ale, his wife’s ring—worn now—clicking on the cup as his fingers tightened.
    Heidrún had finished her apples. She tossed her head, long ivory horns brushing the pale silken floss of her back, and the witch laughed and remembered to milk again. “What will you give me if I help?”
    The milk didn’t ring in the pail any more, but the gold rang fine on the dooryard stones.
    The witch barely glanced at it. “I don’t want your gold, blacksmith.”
    “I din’t want for hers, neither,” Weyland said. “ ’Tis the half of what she gave.” He didn’t stoop to retrieve the coin, though the witch snaked a soft-shoed foot from under her kirtle and skipped it back to him, bouncing it over the cobbles.
    “What can I pay?” he asked, when the witch met his protests with a shrug.
    “I didn’t say I could help you.” The latest pull dripped milk into the pail rather than spurting. The witch tugged the bucket clear and patted Heidrún on the flank, leaning forward with her elbows on her knees and the pail between her ankles while the nanny clattered over cobbles to bound back up onto the roof. In a moment, the goat was beside the chimney again, munching buttercups as if she hadn’t just had a meal of apples. A large, fluffy black-and-white cat emerged from the