Wonders of the Invisible World Read Online Free Page A

blob that constantly changed shape.
    “How will you know a Yewsalope when you see it?” I asked, fascinated with their color combinations, their imagery. Brock shrugged slightly.
    “We’ll know.”
    A new animal appeared in an empty cage: a tall, two-legged creature with long golden hair and wings made of feathers or light. It held on to the bars with its hands, looking sadly out. I blinked.
    “You have an angel in your zoo.”
    I heard Brock’s breath. Indra frowned. “It could fly out. Why doesn’t it fly? Whose is it? Anyway, this zoo is only for animals. This looks like some species of human. It’s illegal,” she said, fastidiously for a thief, “on Hublatt.”
    “It’s an angel,” Brock said.
    “What’s an angel? Is it yours?”
    Brock shook his head. They all shook their heads, eyes onscreen, wanting to move on. But the image lingered: a beautiful, melancholy figure, half human, half light, trapped and powerless behind its bars.
    “Why doesn’t it just fly?” Indra breathed. “It could just fly. Brock—”
    “It’s not mine,” Brock insisted. And then he looked at me, his eyes wide, so calm and blue that it took me a moment to transfer my attention from their color to what they were asking.
    I stared at the angel, and felt the bars under my hands. I swallowed, seeing what it saw: the long, dark night of history that it was powerless to change, to illumine, because it was powerless to speak except to lie.
    “Matrix?” Brock whispered. I closed my eyes.
    “Don’t call me that.”
    When I opened my eyes, the angel had disappeared.

 
    O ut of the W oods
     
    The scholar came to live in the old cottage in the woods one spring.
    Leta didn’t know he was there until Dylan told her of the man’s request. Dylan, who worked with wood, cut and sold it, mended it, built with it, whittled it into toothpicks when he had nothing better to do, found the scholar under a bush, digging up henbane. From which, Dylan concluded, the young man was possibly dotty, possibly magical, but, from the look of him, basically harmless.
    “He wants a housekeeper,” he told Leta. “Someone to look after him during the day. Cook, wash, sew, dust, straighten. Buy his food, talk to peddlers, that sort of thing. You’d go there in the mornings, come back after his supper.”
    Leta rolled her eyes at her brawny, comely husband over the washtub as she pummeled dirt out of his shirts. She was a tall, wiry young woman with her yellow hair in a braid. Not as pretty or as bright as some, but strong and steady as a good horse, was how her mother had put it when Dylan came courting her.
    “Then who’s to do it around here?” she asked mildly, being of placid disposition.
    Dylan shrugged, wood chips from a stick of kindling curling under his knife edge, for he had no more pressing work. “It’ll get done,” he said. He sent a couple more feathery chips floating to his feet, then added, “Earn a little money for us. Buy some finery for yourself. Ribbon for your cap. Shoe buckle.”
    She glanced down at her scuffed, work-worn clogs. Shoes, she thought with sudden longing. And so the next day she went to the river’s edge and then took the path downriver to the scholar’s cottage.
    She’d known the ancient woman who had died there the year before. The cottage needed care; flowers and moss sprouted from its thatch; the old garden was a tangle of vegetables, herbs and weeds. The cottage stood in a little clearing surrounded by great oak and ash, near the river and not far from the road that ran from one end of the wood to the other. The scholar met her at the door as though he expected her.
    He was a slight, bony young man with pale thinning hair and gray eyes that seemed to look at her, through her and beyond her, all at the same time. He reminded Leta of something newly hatched, awkward, its down still damp and all askew. He smiled vaguely, opened the door wider, inviting her in even before she explained herself, as though