Her voice was quiet while she told me all this, but her face was drawn up tight. "Idri and I belong to a Sisterhood that over the past three hundred years has worked to develop our power. But when the gate opened, the time before last, Idri learned what the enemy had done. The ylver, they're called. They'd captured our Cloister-our town-and destroyed it, taking most of our Sisters captive."

Varia'd cried the edge off her grief a couple months earlier, though none of us knew it then, but the tears were running again. "Then they killed the children," she said, "and their soldiers raped the Sisters over and over, making the people watch. Finally they set their war dogs on them, on the Sisters that is, to tear them apart."

I sat staring at her. "And Idri wants us to go there?"

She nodded, and her voice took new strength "But I'm not. It's over with there, it's all turned evil, and this is my world now. You and I are going to Illinois and make babies, beautiful babies, one or two at a time, and bring them up ourselves, and love each of them. And each other."

What could I say? I kissed her right there in the cab in broad daylight, then put the truck in gear and headed out of Evansville, bound for Illinois.

3: The Blackland

Within a week we'd moved onto 120 acres of blackland in Macon County, Illinois, north of Decatur. And it was ours as long as we kept making the mortgage payments. Varia made the down payment, $600, from money left her by Will, and what Pa had paid down on Will's place. And had enough left over to buy a team and harness for $80, and equipment we hadn't brought with us, plus seed and some house furnishings. Everything secondhand, of course, but lots of people were selling stuff, good stuff, to keep food on the table. We weren't bad off, compared to them. We still had money for potatoes and beans, bacon and oatmeal, and salt and sugar and flour. Buying livestock would have to wait though. Except for pasture and hay, I figured to plant most of the ground to corn-corn and a big truck garden-and enough oats for the team next winter, and for the cow I figured to buy when I'd made a crop. In the barn there was already hay and oats enough for the team a few months, while the woodshed had wood and cobs for the stoves awhile. Even a couple sacks of coal for the kitchen.

The buildings were pretty decent, and the house was more than big enough for the two of us. They all needed paint, but that'd have to wait. The five hundred dollars Varia hadn't been able to get from Idri would have made a big difference-except it wouldn't have, the way things turned out. But anyway, it seemed to me we'd get by in good shape.

You never know entirely what to expect, working a new team, but when I brought them home, Varia talked to them awhile, and they worked out real well. She was always good with horses, riding or handling them. I started plowing that same day.

I even got a job milking eight Brown Swiss cows for a neighbor, morning and evening. Given the hard times, it paid pretty decent-fifty cents a day-and each morning I took home a big jar of milk and some fresh butter, worth another twenty cents or so.

It also meant I got up at four every morning, to eat before going to Morath's to milk, and finished up there at seven or so in the evening. Between milkings I walked a furrow behind the team all day, keeping the plow where it belonged. So I made a point of being in bed before nine, and I'm talking about in bed for the purpose of sleeping.

Nonetheless, we had time to sit around a little before bedtime, and the very first night, Varia told me she wanted to lay a spell on me. Naturally I kind of backed off from that. "What for?" I asked her.

"So you'll understand me better."

"Hon," I said, "I understand you pretty well already."

She didn't say anything for a minute, just sort of chewed on her lower lip as if she was thinking. Finally she said, "Why do you suppose the Macurdy family was chosen to father my children?"

I stared at her without knowing a thing to say.

"Where do you think the Macurdies came from?" she asked.

"What d'you mean? From Kentucky, way back when James Madison was president."

"And before Kentucky?"

It seemed to me right then that I was going to learn something I didn't want to know. I shook my head. "Grampa said we're Scotch-Irish. In school they told us that means from Scotland by way of Ireland."

"Let me put a spell on you, and afterward I'll tell you. It will make it easier for both of us."

I squirmed in my chair. "Will it take long? I thought maybe the two of us could go to bed early."

She laughed, the same young-girl laugh I'd heard since I was a little boy. "It won't take long. And it's as good as an hour's sleep anyway."

It took me half a minute to say yes, but I knew right away I'd do it. I mean, I'd trusted her so far, and she'd trusted me, and we'd bound ourselves together till death us do part. And what was I scared of? She'd never do me any harm. Besides, it seemed to me she'd spelled me that night she'd taken me to her house, and that had worked out just fine. "Okay," I told her, "I'll do it."

"Thank you, darling," she said, and pulled her chair up closer. "Now look in my eyes."

That was always easy to do, but this time was different. It was like they drew me right in, and I went limp, but after what seemed like ten, fifteen seconds I came back to normal again. "Sorry it didn't work," I said, thinking she'd be disappointed. But she laughed.

"Look at the clock."

I looked, and my mouth must have dropped open. We'd sat down at ten to eight, and now it was a quarter after. "What happened?" I asked.

"You and I did what was necessary. Told your body not to get old; that it's got the ylvin genes. And got you ready to start learning." She came over and knelt down beside me, and kissed me sweeter'n honey. Old Junior started to swell up right away, and Varia began to purr. "Do you still want to go to bed early?" she asked me.

We both of us stood up then, her laughing, and off we went. I didn't get to sleep by nine that night, but I felt fine when she woke me up at four. I'd been dreaming up a storm, and none the worse for it. Part of the dream was being a hundred years old and still young. Strange dream, but not near as strange as it would have been if I wasn't married to Varia.

The next evening we did something different. She laid a lighter spell on me that left me awake but relaxed. Then she taught me to do what she called meditate. I'd always thought "meditate" meant to think about something, but this was different. She told me afterward she hadn't thought it'd go that well, first time. The spell had helped, but she told me my breeding was showing itself. It turned out we'd sat like that, straight-backed in two kitchen chairs, for half an hour.

When we were done, she began telling me things. I listened, but I didn't really believe. I mean, part of me said she wouldn't lie to me about things like that, but what she told me was flat-out unbelievable. My great-great-grampa had come from her world, she said, where her Sisterhood was breeding up strains of people for special purposes, like we breed up hogs and cattle and horses. This was because they were always in danger from "the ylver," who had a lot more power than the Sisterhood, and the only way her people could survive was to get stronger and smarter, and be better at magic.

Anyway, Great-great-grampa had been an experiment, and it'd worked real well. Except for one thing: he hadn't wanted to do what they told him. He was to breed a lot of different sisters, but he'd fallen in love with one of them, and her with him, and he didn't want to keep on living as a stud horse. So the boss sister took her away, sent her off somewhere.