Free Shoggoths in Bloom by Elizabeth Bear Page B

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 softshoed foot from under her kirtle and skipped it back to him, bouncing 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 on 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 house and began twining the legs of the stool, miaowing.
    “Question ’tisn’t what tha can or can’t do,” he said sourly. “ ’Tis what tha will or won’t.”
    The witch lifted the pail and splashed milk on the stones for the cat to lap. And then she stood, bearing the pail in her hands, and shrugged. “You could pay me a Name. I collect those.”
    “If’n I had one.”
    “There’s your own,” she countered, and balanced the pail on her hip as she sauntered toward the house. He followed. “But people are always more disinclined to part with what belongs to them than what doesn’t, don’t you find?”
    He grunted. She held the door for him, with her heel, and kicked it shut when he had passed. The cottage was dim and cool inside, only a few embers banked on the hearth. He sat when she gestured him onto the bench, and not before. “No Names,” he said.
    “Will you barter your body, then?”
    She said it over her shoulder, like a commonplace. He twisted a boot on the rushes covering a rammed-earth floor and laughed. “And what’d a bonny lass like thaself want