I had just brought Mrs. Penn a cup of tea. She’d returned to her bed, still weak enough to relish an afternoon nap. She motioned to put it on the table, which I did. Then she asked me to sit down so she could discuss a few things with me.
Willow looked up and winked. I knew then that something was brewing, something much stronger than the weak tea I’d brought Mrs. Penn.
“Willow and I have been chatting,” Mrs. Penn said.
Okay, I blinked at that. In fact, my eyes must have widened fatter than the iris of a sunflower. Two possibilities: either Mrs. Penn was hallucinating or . . . A familiar could only speak to a witch. A commoner could never hear them. Was Mrs. Penn getting sick again? Had she had a relapse?
“No, I can see that my words have worried you. Willow explained that you are too young to be fully developed, but she says that I, even though I have almost no white witch power, once had that tendency. I could have been a witch, had I known. But that is neither here nor there. I can hear her, Shama, and I know what you are and why you left your former home.”
I bolted up, ready to run off, ready to leave Tinker Town and everyone I’d come to love.
“Shama, stop,” she said, holding her hand up like I’d seen Frank do when he wanted to halt someone’s retreat.
“I will not hurt you with this knowledge. In fact, I will never allow any harm to come to you. We are bonded, we two.”
I cautiously resettled myself on the chair, on the edge, it’s true, but at least, I hadn’t scrambled to the door, fleeing into the wilderness of an unknown future. My eyes fastened on Mrs. Penn’s. I was listening, not understanding where this was going, but willing to hear her out.
“I would like to adopt you, if you’d let me. Maybe that’s the wrong word. You are twenty, almost fully grown, but I want to give you my last name, at least. Will you let me do that?”
I had not expected anything that wonderful. The breath fled my lungs as surely as if I’d fallen off Frey and been purged of air. I gasped but found no relief from the suddenness of my lack.
“Willow, go to her,” Mrs. Penn commanded, and just as strangely, the kitten leaped into my arms, purring air back into my lungs.
When my breaths were regular, and my huffs and puffs a mere memory, I regarded Mrs. Penn with skepticism.
“Have you taken leave of your senses? If you know about me, and I don’t understand how you could know — and Willow wasn’t even with me in the village. She couldn’t see what happened there.”
“She knows. Old Mother talks to her, and . . .”
“Old Mother is dead.”
I shot up, at the end of my tolerance for such a strange conversation.
“What’s this yelling about?” Frank and Dr. Stevens cried out, storming into the room in a massive surge of masculinity that meant neither were able to get through the doorway.