"If Incanto doesn't object."

"I don't think he will. Incanto, I could be wrong about this, but I think that Papa probably suggested your name before the two of you got to our house. If I'm right, why did he tell you to call yourself Incanto?"

"Because it was the name of his brother, who died in infancy."

"Wrong again. I have three and a half. It was because he wanted to brace up the ideas so many people here have about you. He wants them to think we've got a powerful witch on our side, so they'll fight Soldo instead of giving in. They're afraid. I think even Papa is, a little."

I said, "He and they have good reason to be afraid. I've seen war."

Fava put in, "We told the teachers you were the most powerful strego in the whole whorl, but very good and a very good friend of Inclito's. Didn't we, Mora? And then I said Inclito gave a secret signal to bring you here in our hour of need. Mora didn't approve, but they thought it was because I wasn't supposed to say anything about the secret signal. If I knew the answer, I'd ask you right now exactly how you plan to destroy Soldo without firing a shot."

Oreb bobbed on my head. "Good man!"

Fava smirked. "He'd better be."

"I haven't the least intention of destroying Soldo, " I told her. "I'm sure there must be many innocent people living there. Many and perhaps most of them must be poor people, too, bled white by their Duko and the inhumi. Can't we agree that they have sorrows enough without the death and destruction of war?"

"You'd better ask a game question instead, or Mora will."

"Bad thing!" Oreb eyed Fava with disfavor.

I told her that I had no objection to Mora's asking game questions, and added, "You know, I've just realized why it is that the inhumi attack the poorest people so often."

Mora snapped, "Because they're stupid!"

"They aren't, and in fact they can't afford to be. I grew up among very poor people, Mora. My own family was poor, though not in comparison to many others. There was enough money to send me, and my brothers and sisters, to the palaestra-but only just."

Fava said sweetly, " We call it the academy."

I shook my head. "Mora and her father and grandmother do, I suppose. You wanted another question for your game, so tell me-why did Mora's grandmother call her first child Incanto?"

"Not fair! You've got to know the answer."

"I do. Do you?"

Oreb dropped to my staff to bob up and down. "Silk win!"

Mora asked, "Is that your real name?"

"No." I tried to explain. "Silk has never really been my name. But when I first acquired Oreb I used to ask him questions about a man named Silk, and he picked it up."

I waited for one of them to speak. When neither did, I said, "My question wasn't for Fava alone. You may answer it if you can, Mora."

Her speech is always slow; this time it seemed slower than ever. "I want to think about the inhumi and the poor people first. We're not poor."

"It isn't an invariable rule; but I've traveled a bit, and in every place I've been it's the poor whom they attack most."

That is everything of any importance that was said. Not long after that, we were admitted by the sullen chambermaid.

And now I have other things to write.

We played the storytelling game again at dinner. This time Mora's grandmother went first.

Salica's Second Story: Stuck in the Chimney.

This is a true story, something that actually took place in Grandecitta when I was a little girl. There was a terrible Strega living among us then. She was old and ugly, but she knew so much magic that everyone was afraid of her. When I was about old enough to walk, she fell in love. The unlucky young man's name was Dentro, and he was a quiet, handsome fellow you'd think would be frightened to death if you so much as told him that a strega wanted to speak to him. But the strega could change her appearance whenever she wished, and whenever Dentro was around her, which was more and more often as the weeks passed, she became a beautiful young woman with a ravishing smile and a voluptuous figure. It did no good to tell Dentro that the fascinating young woman he saw was a wicked hag. The people in our district, who liked him and felt sorry for him, were at their wit's end.

After goodness knows how much dithering and arguing among themselves, they resolved to lock him up, thinking that if he couldn't see her he'd cease to love her, and hoping that she'd go away in search of him. Some men his own age went to his house pretending they were on a friendly visit, overpowered him, tied him up, and carried him to a room that had been made ready to receive him. It was comfortable enough, but herbs and spells had been hung on every wall to keep the Strega from finding him as long as he was in it.

She didn't, but she very quickly found out what they had done. Soon the luck of the whole district turned bad. If a man fell down, he broke both his arms. No woman could make a stew without burning it. If one child threw a stone at another, he put out his eye. Houses caught fire for no reason at all, and fires that had been doused with four cisterns sprang up again by magic. Things got so bad that they had to produce Dentro again and let thestrega marry him. As you can imagine, they liked her less than ever after that.

Well, one evening a man who lived in a house near ours happened to ride past hers. He was in a hurry, but he could not help noticing Dentro, as black as any printer, standing on her roof and poking a broom down her chimney. She had him cleaning her chimney himself, you see, instead of hiring a sweep to do it.

Such parsimony made our neighbor angry, and he clapped his spurs to his horse, as angry people always do, and fairly flew down the road until he came to a graveyard. Then out popped the Strega from behind a gravestone and into the road, where she stood like this and stopped his horse so abruptly that he was nearly thrown, calling, "What's your hurry, loafer?"

It made our neighbor angrier than ever. "I'm going for the doctor, " he told her. "Your Dentro's fallen into the chimney and can't get out. If you ask me, he's dead."

She turned as white as boiled icing and limped out of his way, and when he met his friends at the tavern, they had a good laugh about the trick he'd played on her.

Now up there in the Whorl, as Incanto here will tell you, the wild storms we had were the work of devils, who mixed and served them up to us in the same exact fashion that Green does down here. Stregas can make devils do their bidding, and this strega waited until our neighbor was called out of the city on business, and then had them make one for him that flattened half the houses in Grandecitta. It did so much damage, in fact, that he heard about it in the foreign city where he was and hurried home to see if his own house still stood.

He had nearly reached it, when who should he meet trudging down the road but the strega. She stepped into his path and stopped him as she had before. "Hurry home, loafer, your wife's stuck in the chimney."

He laughed, because his wife was a great, heavy woman, exceedingly fond of her plate and not at all inclined to move from her chair for any reason, and he thought that there was no chimney in all of Grandecitta big enough for her to get stuck in. But when he got home, he found his house half demolished and no wife. It was about this time of the year, when nights are liable to be chilly, so as night drew on he picked up some sticks of broken furniture and built a little fire in the fireplace of what was left of their bedroom. The chimney wouldn't draw, and I think you can guess what came out of it the next day, when he and my father climbed up to the top and dropped a broken timber down it to clear it.