"It came right before you did. I thought it might have been meant for a neighbor, maybe, but…" Sarah let her sentence trail off.
Belinda shook her head wordlessly and pulled the twine away from the crumbling pages. Her hands skimmed over them lovingly, tracing the swoops and swirls of the letters on the thick paper.
"No," she whispered. "Not for you. I know this handwriting." The witch bit her lip and pulled out the last page. Her eyes filled with tears as she traces the signed name.
"Orinda. Taliesin. Sarah, she was so close… And I was late. Again." Fat tears rolled down Belinda's face, but to Sarah, who was unsure how to comfort her, the witch seemed to be more angry than grieving. She uttered something in a language Sarah didn't recognize, but was sure was a swear.
Belinda flipped to the front page and read through the packet thoroughly, mouthing the words. Sarah waited and watched, and while she wanted an explanation, she was not optimistic. She felt that she'd been plucked out of her own life and dropped in the middle of a play that she knew none of the lines to-again.
"Have you any particular connection to a stag, Sarah?"
Sarah blinked, taken aback by the question. Belinda, who just moments earlier had been on the brink of tears, stared at her, waiting for a reply.
"No, I can't-well, wait, my high school's mascot was a stag. There were all of these annoying jokes about us all being horny, so-"
Belinda smiled, closed her eyes, and let loose a gusty sigh. "Good; that's some of the best news I've heard in about a decade. Sarah, I could kiss you!"
But Belinda hugged the papers to her chest instead, and Sarah almost sighed in relief. There was no way she'd be able to keep up with Belinda's rapid mood changes, and the witch still hadn't really told her what was going on. Sarah considered herself a fairly patient individual, but Belinda was starting to make her anxious, and being anxious made her cranky. The fact that she felt yanked around by the whims of fate didn't help, either.
"Who is Orinda, Belinda? Is she why you need help?" The witch did have a haunted air about her, as if she had been running from something the moment Sarah met her; Sarah supposed that could be the case. After all, she'd never met anybody else who voluntarily lived the way Belinda did. Perhaps being a self proclaimed witch and fortune teller drew all the wrong attention. She knew Jareth hadn't been too keen on her either, but…
At the thought of Jareth, Sarah had to close her own eyes and smother the sudden wave of rage that swept over her.
There's no reason, she tried to tell herself. Absolutely no reason to be so angry. You haven't even seen him in years; he's done nothing. You've done nothing. But her own thoughts didn't help the fact that she wanted to scream at him and she didn't even know why. Sarah tried to take a calming breath, but she was interrupted by Belinda.
"She's my wife, of course, if I really have to put it in your terms. We've been together for a very long time, but… also apart." Something in Belinda's eyes shuttered and she pulled in on herself just enough to appear that some part of her had withered away. "It hurts, Sarah. You have no idea, you can't know how much it hurts to be pulled, to see so far and so much, forever…"
All traces of Sarah's residual and irrational anger faded as she watched Belinda's shoulder's tremble. Belinda, in Sarah's mind, was strong. She knew things that Sarah couldn't even guess at and had access to the inner workings of the world. Sarah knew, of course, that Belinda was capable of being upset; she just never thought she'd see it. Belinda took deep, even breaths and placed the papers in the satchel handing off her shoulder. In the same movement, she pulled out shimmering grey yarn and knitting needles that looked like worn bone.
Sarah watched as Belinda cast on her first few stitches, moving with an inhuman speed. Before long, she had several inches of what looked to be like an improbably wide scarf; even though she was using thin needles, the stitches were loose and the yarn snarled frequently. Belinda swore under her breath and unraveled an inch of her work, trying unsuccessfully to untangle the yarn; no matter what she did, it slipped through her fingers and wound the knots tighter.
"Give me your hand," Belinda ordered, impatiently grabbing Sarah's wrist when she didn't immediately move. Belinda pursed her lips and pinched her fingers in the air just above Sarah's wrist. Sarah watched as her own red thread materialized, showing a dull red color with frayed fibers. It didn't look anything like she thought she remembered it when Belinda first gave it to her all those years ago, and Sarah didn't think it was something that would age with time. Her suspicions were confirmed when Belinda's face pinched in pain and she dropped Sarah's hand as if scalded.
"None of this is working. Why isn't it working?"
It was a question that didn't need an answer; Belinda was already trying to make her knitting come out even, going slower this time and paying closer attention to where the thread twisted and refused to cooperate. No matter what she did, it kept slipping through her fingers. The more Belinda's yarn and knitting needles refused to cooperate with her, the more frantic she looked.
"Why don't you tell me what's wrong, and I'll do what I can to help?" Sarah placed her hands over Belinda's and gently slid the knitting needles out of the witch's grasp. "This knitting isn't helping you at all."
"It isn't knitting," Belinda snapped. "It's spinning, or as close as I can get these days. I've been cut off; Sarah, you don't understand. You can't. You don't know what you did… You have to be the stag, you must, or we're all lost forever and Taliesin will never help me spin again. The short night is falling, Sarah, and it's falling on you."
The witch's words felt like prophecy and settled on Sarah with an uncomfortable weight. Sarah wasn't even sure that Belinda knew what she was saying; Belinda's eyes were wide but unfocused, as if she were staring at something that Sarah didn't see. Knowing how many hidden things there were in the world, Sarah didn't doubt that it was possible, and in fact found it likely. But her ramblings were fevered and were starting to make less and less sense the longer Belinda went on, as if the witch's mind was unraveling the same way her spinning was.
"Okay," said Sarah, trying to soothe her. She took Belinda's hand and led them both to the couch, where she sat them both down. "Okay. You weren't knitting. You were spinning. Can you explain what spinning is to me?"
Groaning, Belinda placed her hand over her eyes.
"It's seeing, and it's creating. You have a place on the loom, your goblins have their own place; your parents, your friends, your enemies—all have places on the loom. And I helped to weave your lives with my sisters, but I've been cast out and the loom is still whirring; the house is not still."
Very little of that made sense to Sarah, but she nodded her head. Even though it galled her to admit even to herself, Jareth would probably know more… even if only because he had been around much longer. Sarah pinched the bridge of her nose and willed the sudden lick of anger away.
"And Orinda, your wife? Did she spin, too?"
Belinda erupted into peals of frantic laughter.
"Only my sisters and I can spin. But that's all we can do; without the poets or the bards, our work would rot on the loom. No, no, Sarah. Taliesin was a bard of the old traditions, but bards and spinners aren't supposed to fall in love, you see. My sisters and the other poets tried to forbid us, but what cares a witch for a hangman's noose?" Belinda bared her teeth and clenched her jaw, clearly caught up in some unpleasant memory. "So I have been cut off from the loom and Orinda is disappeared because they can't just let us be happy, they can't just let us be." She was breathing heavy and still hiding her face in her hands.
Sarah wondered if she should let Belinda cry it out; the pain she was expressing now had clearly been with her for a very long time, and it had taken its toll if her wandering was any indication. She didn't know her all that well, after all, despite the fact that it was Sarah's doorstep Belinda showed up on when she had nowhere else to turn. Sarah patted her shoulder and handed her a fistful of tissues.
"Her name isn't even Orinda," Belinda said in between hiccups. "That's just a pet name. Her real name is Taliesin."
Sarah hummed and wiped away what was left of Belinda's tears with a spare tissue while she turned over all of the information she'd been given in her mind. What Belinda was describing with her spinner sisters sounded a lot like the Fates from Greek mythology or their mythological counterparts from other nations. It was hard not to compare Belinda—normally bubbly, bright-haired Belinda—with the withered crones from one of her old textbooks. But surely, if Belinda meant to say that she was one of the Moirai, she would have just said so. Belinda might be confusing, but Sarah thought she always said what she meant. It was a rare quality, human or not.
"And your sisters and the other bards are… hiding her?"
"I've looked everywhere," Belinda admitted. "I've looked every when, but she's nowhere. Which is why I thought…" her eyes lowered to Sarah's wrists, around which the red thread was twisted. "I thought you might help me. You've done the impossible before. You come from a family who makes a point of doing the impossible. It would make a great story," she added bitterly, "which is why I am sure they mean to include you. Besides, they'll be pissed with you for that whole situation with the nothing. Somebody else was meant to slay it, I think. Start their own heroic journey."
"Well, tough," Sarah said, falling back on one of her father's common refrains. "If I've already thrown a wrench in their plans once, there's no reason I can't do it again." She offered the witch an encouraging smile. "Where do we start?"
Belinda stood and pulled the papers from Taliesin back from out of her bag. With her free hand, she reached out to Sarah and squeezed her fingers.
"Let's go to that forest of yours. It'll be quieter. Safer." She glanced around Sarah's apartment as if she were afraid it might be good. Sarah supposed that wasn't an unreasonable fear; just about anything could be listening, and it could be reporting back to Belinda's sisters. But reason was not necessarily welcome in Sarah's heart.
"I don't want to go back. I can't," she said, pulse quickening. "I won't. We don't need to involve him." In her anger, she squeezed her hands into fists, oblivious that she was crushing one of Belinda's hands in her own. There is was, again; that irrational hatred made all the worse because Sarah knew it made no sense. She couldn't figure it out, and wouldn't be able to do so in his presence.
"We do because he's the only one with a realm I can be sure is safe. And the only one I can trust because he trusts you." Belinda challenged Sarah to deny her and waved Taliesin's papers gently. "He might have an idea about some of this, too."
Sarah pressed her lips together in an angry line and tried to keep from growling. It wasn't fair—but that line of thinking never helped her, so she dropped it.
"Fine, but I can't promise that I'll stay long." Even agreeing to go was being more cooperative than she wanted to be, suddenly; Sarah understood that to Belinda, her change in temperament must be baffling. The problem was that she couldn't seem to make herself care. After all, it was confusing to her too.
"That's all I ask," said the witch frostily.
It isn't a lot, thought Sarah. In fact, it's entirely reasonable, which makes it even more annoying. But instead of rehashing her grievances, Sarah concentrated on pulling both herself and her passenger through the realms.
It had been a sunny but frigid day back at her apartment, which was part of the reason Sarah had her windows closed. But in the forest which had once housed the labyrinth it was warm, and the air was heavily perfumed with fresh blossoms. The seasons rarely matched up between the two worlds. She'd given up trying to figure out how to dress long before she stopped travelling to the forest altogether.
Nobody was there to greet them, which relieved Sarah. The last thing she wanted was a retinue of goblins shouting her presence to the treetops. The quiet gave her an opportunity to observe, just for a moment, what she'd missed in all of those intervening years. The trees were bigger, the grasses taller; the goblins had, to Sarah's surprise, built what looked like treehouses in some of the larger trees. Networks of rope bridges connected some of the bigger ones.
The only problem was that the hillock that Sarah remembered best, and so always chose to appear on, was rather exposed. Anybody looking toward it would see her and her travel companion immediately. Sarah considered tugging Belinda into better cover, but decided against it; if getting home as soon as possible was her goal, hiding like a scared child wouldn't help.
And that was how Hoggle found them, squinting into the distance.
"Still guarding entrances, Hoggle?" Sarah teased. Around him, at least, she could be herself. She could be happy. "How have you been?"
"Well enough," he said warily. "Didymus an' Ludo have been good too. Want me to tell that rat you're here?"
"No," Sarah said as Belinda said "yes." The goblin looked between them and shrugged. "He'll prolly be here soon enough leastaways. You've got a might big signature when you do that." He flapped his hand in her direction, clearly indicating 'that' was her entrance.
"Lovely," commented Belinda, who felt the tension. "I'm glad to make your acquaintance, Hoggle," she said, bending low so that she could shake his hand.
Whatever Hoggle might have said was drowned out by the flapping of wings and a great gust of wind. The Goblin King, as always had to make an appearance. Sarah gritted her teeth and kept her eyes on Hoggle. From the corner of her eye she could see that he was the same as always. She hadn't really expected him to change, but it was still jarring.
"Witch," he said, inclining his head towards Belinda. "And our erstwhile champion. How long has it been, Sarah?"
She felt the barbs in his words and wanted to rake her nails across his face for them. Her mood, which had been good enough when she was alone in her apartment, had since plummeted.
"You two can discuss what you need to, but I'll be going somewhere else," Sarah announced tersely. "Come find me and let me know when you want to go back," she directed at Belinda.