Willow Read Online Free PDF Page B

family would sometimes come to watch bluebirds play on summer evenings.
    There, the boat vanished.
    One instant it was sailing on; the next, gone. Perhaps, Willow thought, walking back to Bets, perhaps it had just sunk, sucked down in some freak vortex. Or perhaps his charm had worked belatedly and the bindings had loosened after all, allowing the little craft to fall into its parts—driftwood and reeds—parts too small to be noticed in the swirling currents.
    Dumping Burglekutt into the mud seemed to have restored Bets’s good humor. For the rest of that morning the sow contentedly hauled the plow, often uttering explosive little strings of grunts, like laughter, and by noon Willow had plowed and seeded more than half the field. They took a break together, sitting in the shade of a chestnut tree, watching the flowing river. “A long way,” Willow said, nodding.
    Bets turned an eye on him, and cocked a pink ear.
    “She didn’t come just from the ford at the crossroads. She came from farther than that.” Willow nodded again. “Much farther.”
    Bets grunted and turned back to gaze at the current.
    “And you know what? I think she must have had a lot of help to make that trip. That’s what I think, Bets. This baby has friends .” Willow stared at the current, too, chewing reflectively on a sweet stalk of grass. The river coursed on, seaming and smoothing its surface in an ever-changing enigma. Think what you like, it seemed to say. Then do what you must.
    All afternoon Willow thought and worried. What should he do? The child certainly did not look evil, but he well knew that Evil had many faces. What if he and Kiaya and the children had been fooled by a disguise? What if they had taken in something that would destroy their little family? Destroy the village? Destroy, perhaps, even all of Nelwyn Valley? Willow shivered. He glanced anxiously at his small house sitting on its rise at the highest point of Ufgood Reach. Whenever his plowing took him close, he could hear laughter there, the laughter of his family and the wonderful, contagious laughter of the child given by the river.
    No, no. It was impossible that she could be an instrument of Evil. No disguise could be that complete. But—Willow looked behind—what if she were the target of Evil? What if she were hunted? What if her pursuers raged into Nelwyn Valley, burning and killing and destroying? Willow shuddered. How awful to be so small, to be so torn by fears and premonitions! How awful to know deep down that you were a sorcerer, yet to be powerless to ward off Evil! Still—Willow smiled—he had loosed the boat with his spell. He had done that.
    Late that afternoon, when Willow and Bets had finished their plowing and come in from the fields, Willow found his little house full of color and happiness, as usual. No matter how tired he was, or how worried, his heart always lifted as he reached the porch and raised the door latch. Some of the color in the house came from costumes and props—part of his magician’s paraphernalia. Part of it came from Kiaya’s bright rugs and beaded tapestries, but most of it radiated from the wonderful paintings that Mims and Ranon made each day. They gathered and ground their own dyes, smoothed their own wooden panels with river sand, trimmed their own little brushes from dried stalks and, talking quietly as they worked, painted vivid depictions of imaginary worlds and monsters, sometimes funny, sometimes frightening. Sometimes it seemed to Willow that they were peopling another world. Once, when he interrupted her to ask what she was doing, Mims had laughed and answered, “We’re doing our magic, Dada.”
    “But what’s that?” Willow had asked, indicating a sinuous, two-headed creature near the top of her painting.
    “Mmmm . . . a dragon! An Eborsisk dragon!”
    “Good heavens! What’s it doing?”
    “Waiting.”
    “Not for me, I hope!”
    The little girl reached for Willow’s hand. “Oh, Dada, I hope not