Chapter Five
In which an Old Woman gets her wish.
Dorothea hated pears.
She had not always hated them. To begin with, she had accepted the gift of fruit with alacrity, and devoured it with full enjoyment. So crisp! So fresh! So juicy! She could happily eat a hundred of them.
The problem was, she had promptly been given a hundred of them. And by the time she had eaten her way through half of their number, she was heartily sick of the flavour. They were small, it was true: only the size of the bluegages she had eaten with such relish weeks before. Nonetheless, she could not face another, and she said so without compunction.
And then they resorted to trickery. They were Helewise and her husband, the rather dashing Ambrose; Mallinerla, the pallid but exuberant faerie woman, who called her
