Description: If you had asked her, Tabby would have said she was not expecting it, did not want it at all. But when the man came back the next fall, carrying the girl in his arms, her eyes had filled with tears of relief. She could not speak, but drank up the child with a thirsty heart: already pretty, the tiny thing had yellow curls and eyes as blue as the iris that grew in a thick, companionable cluster by Tabby's well. But it was not the dainty features or fair hair that stunned her, that flooded her own face with warmth. It was the way the baby leaned from her father's hold and reached her arms toward Tabby, as if she meant to fly across the space between them. Though Tabby was speechless, the man was a veritable gossip. His wife was pregnant again, he told her, and though he hated to part with his first-born, he knew, fiend that she was, Tabby would hex the second babe if he did not. This one was weaned and walking, and a stout little soul besides. Her needs were few, and she looked as though she would grow into a strong worker. But four were a lot of mouths to feed, and if the new child was a son, why, he bore no grudge. Even witches could be made to serve God's plan. Tabby said nothing, only stared at the treasure he carried. "Farewell, my Rampion, my tender babe," he told his daughter at last, setting her down and striding to the door. "God keep you in his care." He stepped outside and without another word, left the child he had named after a kitchen green standing in front of the hearth. He did not look back or wave, but hurried off as if he were afraid Tabby might change her mind. The girl did not look after him, only studied Tabby solemnly, then climbed into her lap and fell asleep. Tabby had wanted to run after the man, to find out where he lived, to ask the countless questions that suddenly occurred to her. She needed clothes for the child, and shoes, and toys. She wondered if Rampion had ever been sick or whether there were foods she must not have. But the weight of that small creature kept her pinned to her chair, fearful of talking or moving lest the moment dissolve like a bubble in a stream. Rampion. A strange name, but a good one, Tabby thought. Some girls were called Rose, after all, and some Violet or Pansy or Blossom. Wasn't it better to bear the name of a sturdy little plant, a green that flowered in the summer and gave food the rest of the year? As she listened to the shallow, even breaths of the babe in her lap, she closed her eyes and tried to feel her way ahead, through the years the two of them would share. Tabby was not blessed, as some in the coven were, with the gift of second sight, so the image she saw was more yearning than certainty, but it was a comfort nonetheless--a girl fair enough to be a princess, with a slender, graceful form and a laugh that tumbled like falls down a mossy bank. She did not know how long they sat, the little one curled against her with her left thumb in her mouth, Tabby rigid with bliss, counting the small heartbeats that drummed against her own chest. But when Rampion finally stirred, her father was long gone and it was too late to ask him anything at all. They must make do, the two of them, with just each other. And make do, they did. Though she could speak only baby nonsense, Tabby's new daughter (daughter! the word was too sweet to say aloud) made her wants clear. And each one was given her, nearly as soon as she pointed or cried or smiled at it. Tabby hugged and fed and petted and played. She sang and clapped and laughed and jigged. She made dolls from old bed sheets and crowns from dried periwinkle and sweet William. By spring, the girl had spoken her first words, and by late summer, she was chattering like a magpie, telling her rag dolls secrets or begging her mother for treats. Though Tabby fell into bed each night panting with exhaustion, she lay sleepless for hours, tense and hopeful, her love like a hunger that could only be fed by Rampion waking and wanting more. She let the garden go to seed. All except the vegetables and herbs she grew to feed the child. There were not enough hours in the day to waste on primroses. Tabby was tending something far more precious now--something that responded to her care by growing more beautiful with every season. There were times, often when she sat stitching, that she looked up to find the girl playing in a stripe of sunlight spread across the floor. She would stop then, losing a stitch she must pick up later, and stare at the fearful loveliness of her daughter. And when, feeling doting eyes on her, Rampion looked up as well, she would likely run and put her arms around Tabby's neck, settle in her lap, and set to unpinning her own bright curls. "Moother! Mother!" she would beg. "Brush my hair." Then Tabby would stroke Rampion's shining locks with a brush she had bought at mmmmmarket, a fine one made of willow wood and boar's bristles. The soft lapping of the brush, the hair falling, pale as light across her daughter's shoulders, it worked the same miracle every time--the soaring inside her chest, the yearning up and up of her heart. Her body never left the chair, but her mind and spirit flew away, to the sweet future when her lovely child would grow to womanhood, when Tabby would take her by the hand to the sacred grove. When she would teach her what she knew of splendor, of endless joy. Because she cherished this vision, the two of them flying together, Tabby's garden died before her meetings with the coven stopped. But it was not long after the peonies withered, their wilted heads drooping on broken stalks, that Tabby began to find reasons to miss the gatherings with her sisters in the woods. What had been her greatest joy was now cheating her of one far greater. Each time she left her daughter, she suffered dreadfully, imagining an endless variety of accidents and illnesses that might strike while Rampion was alone. What if the girl were to wake, to feel thirsty, for instance? Were to push a stool against the wall to reach the cupboard overhead? And what if the stool tipped and sent her sprawling? Or say she managed to lift the latch and wander outside while Tabby was away? There were snakes in the old garden wall; Tabby had seen them several times at dusk, slithering out of sight before she could find their nest. The night she remembered this, Tabby tortured herself with a vision of Rampion being bitten, falling to the ground, then crying for her mother, calling and calling until she had no breath left but lay still and cold. When Tabby finally told them she could no longer come to the woods, the others had been sad but not surprised. "You have caught the way of human love," her friend Maeve warned her. "'Tis not a bad way, but it clouds the heart and will make your magic weak. The Great Mother will ne'er abandon you, but ''tis you that will draw away from her. Further and further, until you have forgotten how to fly." Tabby had laughed, knowing she would always remember the upward thrust, the whirling through moonlit air. "'Twill not be for long," she reminded them all. "Only until my daughter (she said it out loud now, proudly) comes of age. We will return to these woods after her first blood. The two of us." Maeve and the others had nodded, but it was clear they did not believe her. "Paths are never straight," Sheba said, pointing the same finger at Tabby she had once used to show her the stars in the sky. "Turnings and choices leave tangles behind." Tabby's old teacher had drawn her close. "You are not likely to find your way back to us." She kissed the younger woman, but it was a sad kiss, one that Tabby felt for a long time on her cheek, like a print, a seal of farewell. After that night, she did not meet with the others again. And though she sometimes felt the urge to fly alone, to shoot like a lance through the dark, she stayed true to her changed life and her new responsibilities. These last were so consuming they kept her from self pity. For Rampion was soon old enough for lessons. Though Tabby could not teach her to embroider or play the spinet like the daughter of the village mayor, she had her own skills to pass on. The kitchen garden was still intact, and if Tabby had not raised the stone wall until it met the bottom branches of her cherry tree, their neighbors might have seen the two of them gathering herbs each morning, might have stopped to listen to Rampion's cheerful recitation: "Burdock for skin and blood; goldenseal for what ails; yarrow for strength, and . . ." Sometimes she would break off, forgetting the name of a plant. ". . .What is this one, Mother? It has an awful stink! I hope ''twill vanish in the stew!" "'Tis tansy, love," Tabby told her, smiling at the way the girl's lips and nose had nearly met in the center of her darling face. "The root for fevers and flies, the leaves for puddings and cakes." "Then let us leave the root in the ground," Rampion had decided. "'Twill grow more leaves that way, and you know how I love pudding!" There were cooking lessons, too. And darning. And the smattering of Latin Tabby had learned from the coven. It was mostly words that went with flying spells, not the Church Latin the other children in town knew. Her sisters' church, after all, had been the wild woods, and their prayers had focused on thanksgiving, not penance, on the Great Mother, not the Holy Father. So it was little wonder that, at last, Rampion came to be regarded with the same suspicion and fear her mother was. It did not happen all at once. There were only whispers at first, some nervous laughter when Tabby and her daughter appeared in public. But if Rampion chanced to stretch her tiny arm toward a stranger and utter a Latin phrase

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