The Raven and the Reindeer Read Online Free PDF Page B

petals, one by one, in rebuke.
    “You don’t have to like it,” said Helga. “The important thing is that she’s safe.”
    The plants did not like it. A witch’s garden gains a sense of itself before long, drinking magic in with the mulch and the rain. They knew that Gerta was looking for someone and they knew by their roots that he was not down under the earth, down among the dead.  
    But to plants, most humans look alike, and so the dreams they sent Gerta ranged far afield, in distance and in time, based on some unknown vegetative logic.
    From the grapevines came a vision of a girl a little older than she was, with dark amber skin and thick black curls. She wore a bright scarf and a half-dozen wood pigeons moved around her, cooing to one another. Gerta thought she had an interesting face, and would have liked to know her better.  
    The rowan tree at the end of the garden sent her a dream of a heron standing at the edge of a lake. A man approached in ragged finery, and the heron turned and bowed like a courtier to a king.  
    The apple tree, as autumn approached and the small green apples swelled on the stems, sent her dreams of a child with hair as white as bone and eyebrows that stood out like scars. Gerta could not tell if the child was male or female, but she knew that she was looking for someone else, and the dream of apple leaves dissolved.  
    She did not know what to make of the dream sent to her by the bindweed, of three white foxes having tea together, drinking from delicate lacquer teacups—and likely no human would have known what to think of the vision brought by the reeds, of golden fish speaking soberly to one another in a language made of fin-twitches and scale ripples.  
    None of the dreams held what she was looking for, and the spell grew thicker and more entrenched, and she did not think of leaving.

CHAPTER SEVEN

    Gerta stood in the garden, pulling out the dead annuals. Frost had killed them down to their roots, and there was nothing left but to put them on the compost pile.  
    She stood and stretched. Her breath steamed in the air. The garden smelled of leaf mold and woodsmoke; a good smell, a harvest smell.
    A wedge of geese flew overhead, honking. Gerta smiled up at them, and then a single snow flake caught her eye, and another, and another. “Snow!” she said, out loud. “Like down falling from a goose!”
    Unbidden, the memory rose, of someone saying, It would have to be a big goose.
    “Or a whole flock of them…” she said slowly, remembering the conversation, remembering it as clearly as if Kay was standing next to her and she was standing at the window.
    Kay.
    She shuddered suddenly, violently, as if she had sobbed. She did not know it, but it was the spell sundering.  
    Inside the house, Helga cried out.  
    Gerta turned, slowly, seeing the garden as if for the first time. The beds were bare, except for the last root vegetables still in the ground, under a layer of straw. It might almost have been early spring, but the geese had flown in the wrong direction, and oak and apple leaves lay strewn about the path. There were red hips on the rosebushes.  
    The snowflakes, barely a flurry, landed and melted almost at once.  
    “It’s autumn,” said Gerta. Horror stole over her. “It’s autumn. I set out in spring. What has happened? How long—?”
    Helga burst from the house. “Gerta!” she said. “Gerta, my dear, come inside—please, I can explain—”
    Gerta backed away, shaking her head. “No,” she said. “No! Stay away!”
    Helga might not have stopped, but Gerta screamed—Gerta, who never screamed, who could not raise her voice without blushing— “I said stay away!”
    The older woman halted. Her face trembled, all the parts of it, as if it might collapse. “Gerta…”
    “How long have I been here?”
    Helga held up her hands. The painted flowers on her hat shuddered. “Seven months,” she admitted. “But Gerta—”
    Gerta staggered and had to catch