 |
| Level 5 | Level 6 | |||
| Level 8 | Level 9 | Level 10 | Level 11 | Level 12 |
| Home |
The Moorchild
by
Eloise McGraw
It was Old Bess, the Wise Woman of the village, who first
suspected that the baby at her daughter’s house was a changeling.
For a time she held her peace. Many babies were ill-favored, she told herself.
Many babies cried with what seemed fury against the world – though this
little Saaski had not done so as a newborn. It even seemed to Old Bess that
the child had not looked quite like this for its first few months, but somehow
she could never quite remember. Likely the babe just had a worse-than-usual
colic. No doubt, her skin, dark as a gypsy tinker’s so far, would lighten
so as to look more fitting with that fluff of pale hair – or the hair
might darken. It was even possible that the strange, shifting color of her
eyes would settle down in good time. The parents both had blue eyes –
Anwara’s sky blue like Old Bess’s own, big Yanno the blacksmith’s
deeper shade. The child’s were cloud gray, or moss green, even a startling
lilac – never blue.
They were oddly shaped eyes – set at a slant, wide and shiny, with scarcely a glimpse of white around the iris. Old Bess, strongly reminded of the eyes of squirrels, shook off the thought. Plenty of babes looked like their great-aunts, or their third cousins, or some forebear nobody remembered, she told herself, and kept her lips closed and her face shut to the rest of the village, and her fears to herself.
| Home |