Read Online The Light Ages by Ian R. MacLeod - Free Book Online

a moment as I stared at her, and then, with the realisation that she wasn’t, the whole illusion of her humanity seemed to ripple. Although she was nothing like my imaginings, I knew instantly that she was a changeling.
    ‘I don’t know if you remember …’ my mother began.
    ‘Of course. Of course. Mary—Mistress Borrows! You must come in,’ she said with a wrinkly smile. In many ways, she was unremarkable. She was small and old, her skin had browned and tanned, was drumheaded across her cheekbones and thinned to almost nothing over her twig-like hands. She bore little resemblance to the trolls and witches of my night-time fears and imaginings, but at the same time there was something about her which was unlike anything or anyone I’d ever seen. That presence, and then being so thin and brown and old. It was all of those things, and everything else I couldn’t name or place, which made me sure I was witnessing something beyond the guilds, beyond my life, beyond Bracebridge.
    There was a snip. I saw that she was holding a pair of secateurs in her thin fingers. Yes, she was plainly old, yet the way she moved as she beckoned us in across the huge and empty hall, still snipping those secateurs, you half-expected her to fly. She was wearing the kind of straw hat my mother might have worn if she hadn’t had on her bonnet, from which spiderweb strands of grey hair escaped, and her ears were like anyone else’s; their tips weren’t even pointed. Blink once, and she seemed ordinary. Blink again, as she stepped into the deeper shadows of the hall, and she almost seemed to vanish. Mother’s shoes and umbrella tapped. Shining tails of engine ice twinkled like dirty snow from the sunlight which drizzled in patches through the roof. My boots stubbed and rattled on the loose stonework. My mother and I seemed a ridiculous pair, arriving here at this strange and ancient house, unannounced but somehow not quite unexpected,
    ‘Is everything safe, Mary? Are things all right?’ The changeling’s face almost frowned. ‘You’ll probably want to see me alone?’
    ‘Yes. If that would be … Convenient.’
    She nodded, smiling.
    ‘And you’re Robert, of course.’ She made my name sound enchanting. ‘Who else could you be? I’m Mistress Summerton, although your mother called me Missy when she was just about your age …
    But I liked Mistress Summerton better. To me, it made an intensely pretty sound, which felt pleasant on the lips and tongue. In fact, I decided, this Mistress Summerton herself was almost pretty as well, old and wizened and changed though she seemed. Her bare, thin arms were twined with muscle like the stems of old ivy, and what inner flesh there was on her left wrist seemed unblemished, but that was only as it should be. I looked around for other creatures of myth and rumour, not just along the dim spaces, but up on along the cracked and sagging ceilings as well, and on the sills of the mostly broken windows and the branches of the nearby trees which grew through them, just in case more changelings happened to be hanging there like bats. But she seemed to live alone here-there was a child’s skipping rope hanging in a hallway, but such oddities were to be expected. Then we reached a part of the house into which ghostly piles of dandelion seed had penetrated. She opened a door along a passageway. The room beyond was cluttered with flowerpots, half-dead blooms and cuttings, seed troughs, cloudy bottles and green demijohns and what looked and smelled like a small sack of dray manure, although, at least in the piled desk and sagging chairs, the place also gave the impression of a kind of office. Beyond the desk, a tall half-circle of windows looked out on an bright garden, suffusing the air with a coloured haze. My astonishment was still growing as Mistress Summerton added to the haze by lighting a clay pipe.
    ‘It’s about …’ my mother began, still standing, her umbrella and picnic basket jutting out from