“Could not you sell it?” asked Rodvard.
“Who would buy it? It would be a confession that someone wanted to practice witchery, and then the priests would come down and there’d be a church trial. It is a very strange thing and a burden to have witchery in one’s blood.” She shuddered a little (attracted and yet depressed, as always when it was a question of That). “I do not want to be a witch, ever—”
“Why, I would think—” began Rodvard, (really thinking that in spite of her beauty, this was the reason she more than a little repelled).
“—and have people hating me, and those who want to like me not sure whether they really do, or whether it is only another witchery. The only real friend my mother has is Uncle Bontembi, and that’s because he’s a priest, and I don’t think he’s a real friend either, but keeps watch of her so that when she makes a witchery he can collect another fine for the Church.” Rodvard felt the small hand clench beneath his own. “I’ll never marry, and stay a virgin, and will not be a witch!”
“What would happen to the Blue Star then? You have no sisters, have you?”
“Only a brother, and he went overseas to Mancherei when the Prophet began to preach there. Somebody said he went beyond to the Green Isles afterward, when the Prophet left. We do not hear from him any more. . . . But he couldn’t use the Blue Star anyway, unless he were bound with a girl from one of the other families, who could witch it for him.”
Overhead the sky was deepening, with one faint easterly star agleam, a long slow smoke rose in convolutions from the chimney of a cot down there, (and Rodvard thought desperately of the lovely light-haired girl who had come so many times to search witch-family records at his clerk’s cabinet in the Office of Pedigree, but she was a baron’s daughter by her badge, and even if he did obtain the Blue Star from this one, and used it to win the light-haired girl, then Lalette would be a witch and put a spell on him—oh tangle!). The hand within his stirred.
“I must go,” said Lalette again. (He looks something like Cleudi, she was thinking, but not so old and hard and a little romantic, and he had eye enough to catch the wonderful tiny flash of green among the blue when the sun dipped under.)
“Ah, no. You shall not go, not yet. This is a magic evening and we will keep it forever till all’s dark.”
Her face softened a trifle in the fading light, but she pulled to withdraw her hand. “Truly.”