Newford Stories (10 page)

Zia nodded. “We
were supposed to.”

“So that’s what
we did.”

“Because it’s
our job.”

“And we ate a
few,” Maida admitted.

“A veryvery
few.”

Santa frowned.
“How many is a few?”

“Hmm,” Zia
said.

“Good
question.”

“Let’s
see.”

They both began
to count on their fingers as they talked.

“We were
veryvery careful not to eat more than twelve an hour.”

“Oh so very
careful.”

“So in four
hours—”

“—
that would be forty-eight—”

“—
times two—”

“—
because there are two of us.”

They paused for
a moment, as though to ascertain that there really were only two of
them.

“So that would
be…um…”

“Ninety-six—”

“—
times how many days?”

“Eighteen—”

“—
not counting today—”

“—
because there aren’t any today—”

“—
which is why we need to go the stockroom to get
more.”

Santa was adding
it all up himself. “That’s almost two thousand candy canes you’ve
eaten!”

“Well, almost,”
Maida said.

“One thousand,
seven hundred and twenty-eight,” Zia said.

“If you’re
keeping count.”

“Which is
almost
two thousand, I suppose, but
not really.”

“Where
is
the candy cane stockroom?” Maida
asked.

“There isn’t
one,” Santa told her.

“But—”

“And that
means,” he added, “that all the children here today won’t get any
candy canes.”

The crow girls
looked horrified.

“That means us,
too,” Zia said.

Maida nodded.
“We’ll also suffer, you know.”

“But we’re ever
so stoic.”

“Ask
anybody.”

“We’ll hardly
complain.”

“And never where
you can hear us.”

“Except for now,
of course.”

Santa buried his
face in hands, completely disconcerting the parent approaching his
chair, child in hand.

“Don’t worry!”
Maida cried.

“We have
everything under control.” Zia looked at Maida. “We do, don’t
we?”

Maida closed her
eyes for a long moment, then opened them wide and
grinned.

“Free tinsel for
everyone!” she cried.

“I don’t want
tinsel,” the little boy standing in front of Santa with his mother
said. “I want a candy cane.”

“Oh, you do want
tinsel,” Maida assured him.

“Why does he
want tinsel?” Zia asked.

“Because…because…”

Maida grabbed
two handfuls from the boughs of Santa’s Christmas tree. Fluttering
the tinsel with both hands over her head, she ran around the small
enclosure that housed Santa’s chair.

“Because it’s so
fluttery!” she cried.

Zia immediately
understood. “And shiny!” Grinning, she grabbed handfuls of her
own.

“Veryvery
shiny,” Maida agreed.

“And almost as
good as candy,” Zia assured the little boy as she handed him some.
“Though not quite as sugary good.”

The little boy
took the tinsel with a doubtful look, but then Zia whirled him
about in a sudden impromptu dance. Soon he was laughing and waving
his tinsel as well. From the line, all the children began to
clap.

“We want tinsel,
too!” one of them cried.

“Tinsel,
tinsel!”

The crow girls
got through their shift with great success. They danced and twirled
on the spot and did mad acrobatics. They fluttered tinsel, blew
kisses, jingled their bells, and told stories so outrageous that no
one believed them, but everyone laughed.

By the end of
their shift, even Santa had come around to seeing “the great
excellent especially good fortune of free tinsel.”

Unfortunately,
the mall management wasn’t so easily appeased and the crow girls
left the employ of the Williamson Street Mall that very day, after
first having to turn in their red-and-green elf outfits. But on the
plus side, they were paid for their nineteen days of work and spent
all their money on chocolate and fudge and candy and ice
cream.

When they
finally toddled out of the mall into the snowy night, they made
chubby snow angels on any lawn they could find, all the way back to
the Rookery.

* * *

”So now we’re
unemployed,” Zia told Jilly when they came over for a visit on the
twenty-third, shouting “Happy eve before Christmas Eve!” as they
trooped into the professor’s house.

“I heard,” Jilly
said.

“It was awful,”
Maida said.

Jilly nodded.
“Losing a job’s never fun.”

“No, no, no,”
Zia said. “They ran out of candy canes!”

“Can you
imagine?” Maida asked.

Zia shook her
head. “Barely. And I was there.”

“Well, I’m sorry
to hear that,” Jilly said.

“Yes, it’s a
veryvery sorrysome state of affairs,” Maida said.

“And we’re
unemployed, too!”

“Lucius says
we’re unemployable.”

“Because now we
have a record.”

“A permanent
record.”

“Of being bad
bad candy cane-eating girls.”

They both looked
so serious and sad that Jilly became worried. But then Zia laughed.
And Maida laughed, too.

“What’s so
funny?” Jilly asked.

Zia started to
answer, but she collapsed in giggles and couldn’t speak.

Maida giggled,
too, but she managed to say, “We sort of like being bad bad candy
cane-eating girls.”

Zia got her fit
of giggles under control. “Because it’s like being
outlaws.”

“Fierce candy
cane-eating outlaw girls.”

“And that’s a
good thing?” Jilly asked.

“What do you
think?” Maida asked.

“I think it is.
Merry Christmas, Maida. Merry Christmas, Zia.”

“Merry Christmas
to you!” they both cried.

Zia looked at
Maida. “Why did you say, ‘Merry Christmas toot toot’?”

“I didn’t say
‘toot toot’.”

“I think maybe
you did.”

“Didn’t.”

Zia grinned.
“Toot toot!”

“Toot
toot!”

They pulled
their jingling bell brooches out of their pockets, which they’d
forgotten to return to the store where they’d “found” them, and
marched around the kitchen singing “Jingle Bells” at the top of
their lungs until Goon, the professor’s housekeeper, came in and
made them stop.

Then they sat at
the table with their cups of sugar, on their best behaviour, which
meant they only took their brooches out every few moments, jingled
them, and said “toot toot” very quietly. Then giggling, they’d put
the brooches away again.

Make a Joyful Noise

Everyone thinks we’re sisters, but it’s not
as simple as that. If I let my thoughts drift far enough back into
the long ago—the
long
long ago, before Raven stirred that
old pot of his and poured out the stew of the world—we were there.
The two of us. Separate, but so much the same that I suppose we
could have been sisters. But neither of us remembers parents, and
don’t you need them to be siblings? So what exactly our
relationship is, I don’t know. We’ve never known. We just
are
. Two little mysteries that remain unchanged while the
world changes all around us.

But that doesn’t stop everyone from thinking
they know us. In the Kickaha tradition, we’re the tricksters of
their crow story cycles, but we’re not really tricksters. We don’t
play tricks. Unless our trick is to look like we’d play tricks, and
then we don’t.

Before the Kickaha, the cousins had stories
about us, too, though they were only gossip. Cousins don’t buy into
mythic archetypes because we all know how easy it is to have one
attached to your name. Just ask Raven. Or Cody.

But gossip, stories, anecdotes…everybody
seems to have something to pass along when it comes to us.

These days it’s people like Christy Riddell
who tell the stories. He puts us in his books, the way his mentor
Professor Dapple used to do, except Christy’s books are actually
popular. I suppose we don’t mind so much. It’s kind of fun to be in
a story that anyone can read. But if we have to have a Riddell
brother in our lives, we’d much prefer it to be Geordie. There’s
nothing wrong with Christy. It’s just that he’s always been a bit
stiff. Geordie’s the one who knows how to have fun and that’s why
we get along with him so well, because we certainly like to have
fun.

But we’re not only about mad gallivanting
and cartwheels and sugar.

And we’re not some single entity,
either.

That’s another thing that people get wrong.
They see the two of us as halves of one thing. Most of the time
they don’t even recognize us when they meet us on our own. Apart,
we’re just like anybody else, except we live in trees and can
change into birds. But when you put the two of us together,
everything changes. We get all giddy and incoherence rules. It’s
like our being near each other causes a sudden chemical imbalance
in our systems and it’s almost impossible to be anything but
silly.

We don’t particularly mind being that way,
but it does make people think they know just who and what and why
we are, and they’re wrong. Well, they’re not wrong when the two of
us are together. They’re just wrong for who we are when we’re on
our own.

And then there are the people who only see
us as who
they
want us to be, rather than who we really
are—though that happens to everybody, I suppose. We all carry
around other people’s expectations of who we are, and sometimes we
end up growing into those expectations.

* * *

It was a spring day, late in the season, so
the oaks were filled with fresh green foliage, the gardens blooming
with colour and scent, and most days the weather was balmy. Today
was no exception. The sun shone in a gloriously blue sky and we
were all out taking in the weather. Zia and I lounged on the roof
of the coach house behind the Rookery, black-winged cousins perched
in the trees all around us, and up on the roof of the Rookery we
could see Lucius’s girlfriend Chlöe standing on the peak, staring
off into the distance. That meant that Lucius was deep in his books
again. Whenever he got lost in their pages, Chlöe came up on the
roof and did her wind-vane impression. She was very good at it.

“What are you looking at?” we asked her one
day.

It took her a moment to focus on us and our
question.

“I’m watching a wren build a nest,” she
finally said.

“Where?” Zia asked, standing on her tiptoes
and trying to see.

“There,” Chlöe said and pointed, “in that
hedge on the edge of Dartmoor.”

Neither of us was ever particularly good
with geography, but even we knew that at least half a continent and
an ocean lay between us and Dartmoor.

“Um, right,” I said.

Other times she said she was watching ice
melt in Greenland. Or bees swarming a new queen above a clover
field somewhere in Florida. Or a tawny frogmouth sleeping in an
Australian rainforest.

After a while we stopped asking. And we
certainly didn’t fly over and ask her what she was looking at
today. We were too busy lounging—which is harder to do on a sloped
roof than you might think—until Zia suddenly sat up.

“I,” she announced, “have an astonishingly
good idea.”

I’d just gotten my lounging position down to
an absolute perfection of casualness, so I only lifted a
questioning eyebrow.

“We should open a store,” she said.

“Selling what?”

“That’s just it. It will be a store where
people bring us things and we put them in the store.”

“And when it gets all filled up?”

She grinned. “Then we open another. We just
keeping doing it until we have an empire of stores, all across the
country.”

“We don’t have the money to buy anything,” I
said.

She nodded. “That’s why they’d have to just
give us the stuff. We’ll be like a thrift shop, except we wouldn’t
sell anything we got.”

“That seems greedy. What do we need with
things?”

“We can give everything away once we’ve
established our empire. It’s just for fun.”

“It seems more like a lot of work.”

She sighed and shook her head. “You are so
veryvery lazy.”

“That’s because today is a day especially
made for being lazy.”

“No, today’s a day for building an empire of
stores and if you won’t help, I’ll do it myself.”

“I’ll help later.”

She nodded. “When all the hard work will
probably be done.”

“That’s the risk I’ll have to take.”

She stuck her tongue out at me, then shifted
to bird shape and a black crow went winging off above the oaks that
line Stanton Street. I laid my head on the shingles again and went
back to my very successful lounging.