The Case of the Spellbound Child Read online

  That little cannibal! Or . . . is it cannibalism, if it’s not your species? He does eat chicken with us. And pigeon pie when we do. And eggs of every sort. . . .

  Then, in the distance, came a forlorn little figure trudging along the verge of the road, head down, basket clutched to her side, looking discouraged and weary.

  What a good little actress she’s become!

  Sarah continued to sketch with one eye on Suki, the other on her work, all the while thinking that this was not ideal. They were a great deal farther from the cottage than she would have liked, and John and Mary were farther still. She had to keep reminding herself that Suki ran with the Irregulars all the time, in some of the meaner parts of London. That she was armed, and she knew very well how to defend herself, both with her knife and with fists and feet. That she’d been trained by the same men—and their nephews—who had trained her and Nan. Suki could certainly hold her own for the few minutes it would take for the girls to get there.

  None of this helped her nerves, of course.

  Finally Suki reached the cottage, trudged up the path, through the gate, and knocked on the door.

  This time a man answered. He spoke too low for Sarah to hear the words, but the short greeting didn’t sound unfriendly. Suki said something else, and the two of them—

  Oh heavens, she’s gone inside!

  The logical half of her reminded her that this was the plan. Suki was to go inside if need be. If the man actually had work, she was going to have to perform it. And if she needed help, she and Nan were both telepaths and could speak to each other as easily as with words.

  But then Suki came out again, without her basket this time, with a pail instead. She went straight to something within the walls . . . ah, a pump! . . . and filled her pail with water.

  Then she went back in. Neville hopped about on the roof, cocking his head and seeming to listen. Finally he flew down to the ground, then up to the windowsill.

  Suki is scrubbing the kitchen floor, Nan said, amused. The man is telling her she’s doing a good job, and saying his old knees aren’t up to that anymore. Now he’s gone to sit by the hearth and smoke, while Suki works. Now they’re both chattering away about what fruit makes the best pies.

  Sarah felt faint with relief.

  Oh good Lord. He’s spotted Neville.

  Oh, no! The man was an Earth Magician, according to John! What if he—

  He just gave Neville a cheese rind and called him an ‘alkitotle.’ I have no idea what that means, but the man is very amused. Neville’s bowing his head. Neville’s letting him scratch the nape of his neck, the cheeky little slut.

  When the man finished giving him a scratch, Neville flew back up to the top of the roof with his cheese rind, pecking bits off and swallowing them. It was obvious their target did not have any captive children, was not a danger to anyone, and had the approval of Neville. So poor Suki was going to have to scrub away at the kitchen floor until it was clean, and they were going to have to stand here and pretend to paint until it was over.

  On the other hand—that was two prospective magicians eliminated as their kidnapper.

  And then Sarah had a brilliant idea. “Nan, tell John and Mary what’s going on, and suggest that they just come up and introduce themselves to the fellow, why don’t you?”

  “Why? Oh! Of course! He’s a magician, we know he’s not the one we want, it would only be polite, and he’s a potential ally! I don’t know why I didn’t think of that myself.” Nan went very quiet, and then John and Mary emerged from the copse and came strolling down the road. Meanwhile they packed up their kits, joined them, and they all went up to the cottage and knocked on the door.

  * * *

  “I really am sorry to have deceived you in this way,” John said apologetically.

  John and Mary had been given the only two chairs in the cottage aside from the one the old man occupied. Nan and Sarah sat on the floor, the birds on their shoulders. They had all been invited inside immediately once John declared himself.

  The cottage was very like the Byerlys’ except for the dozens and dozens of bundles of drying plants hanging from the rafters. There was a small fire on the stone hearth, it did not have a loft, and the old man’s neatly made bed was right out in the open in one corner, but otherwise it might have been the same building.

  The man—calling himself “Gatfer Cole”—waved a dismissive hand at him. “’Ee has a black mage t’cotch,” he said. “Es’d’a done likewise, ’ad Es th’ mother-wit t’ think of it.”

  Suki, who had insisted on finishing the floor “because the Gatfer’s knees hurt,” listened as she worked. Gatfer Cole glanced over at her and laughed. “A’sides,” he added. “Es gets clean floor.”

  Suki laughed heartily. “It bain’t fust time I done floor t’ get inside a housen.”

  “So you’ve heard or seen nothing?” Mary asked. Gatfer Cole shook his head. “Nomye,” he said with regret. “But Es don’ leave house much, and Es bain’t the dab Es were at magic. Ac’chully, the real dab were me wife.” He waved his hand at the house. “She done all the wardin’, clear an’ sheer. Es did the potions an’ all, an’ her-ubs. Tha’s why Es don’ need t’ leave house. Folk come t’me from Yelverton up an’ Milton Combe down t’trade, so they brings what Es need. When yon lass come knockin’ on me door, I thought ’twas for that.”

  Finished with the floor, Suki stood up, took the pail of dirty water outside, and dumped it. “They said Gatfer were a witch,” she pointed out, when she came back in. “We just didn’ ast what kind.”

  “Now, me little maid,” Gatfer said, getting laboriously to his feet. “Es was gonna pay ’ee in potions an’ nummet, but Es got somethin’ better.” He went to the mantelpiece, opened a small wooden box, and took out a leather cord on which something was strung. When he turned around with it dangling from his hand, Sarah saw that the pendant was a highly polished piece of cherry-amber in the form of an inverted “T”—the bar of the “T” was thick, and the stem of the “T” was short. “This ’ere been in th’ fambly a cruel long time, an’ I got no one t’leave it to. So Es’d take it kindly if ’ee’d have it, gift o’ mine fer gift o’ work o’ tha’s.”

  “Good Lord, sir, that’s a real amber Viking charm, an amber Thor’s Hammer!” John exclaimed, as the old man slipped the leather cord over Suki’s head. “Suki, that’s hundreds and hundreds of years old!”

  “Aye, ’tis,” Gatfer said with quiet pride. “But this lass’s got th’ Favor of the Oldest Old One; Es sees it on ’er, plain as plain. Ain’t she a Raven friend then? Reckon ’tis in good hands.”

  “Chell be very careful of’t Gatfer, Es promise,” Suki said, fervently, cradling the charm in both hands and looking down at it.

  “Aye, an’ it’ll take care’a tha’.” Gatfer was clearly very pleased with his decision, and Sarah decided there was no point in trying to get him to take it back. “Noaw, wilt share nummet wi’ me?”

  * * *

  Gatfer Cole evidently did a very brisk trade in “potions and her-ubs,” since his larder was packed as full of good things as the Byerlys’ larder was empty, and he had been happy to treat them all to a fine “ploughman’s lunch,” quite as good as they could have gotten at the Rock. The walk back to the Rock to collect horses had gone much faster than the walk out to Gatfer Cole’s cottage, fortified as they were not only by the lunch but by mugs of Gatfer’s very potent home-brewed scrumpy. Suki, to her vast disappointment, had not been permitted to indulge; Gatfer had provided her with a much less alcoholic cherry cordial instead.

  Now they were riding north and east of Yelverton, out on the moor itself, to a point south of Sheepstor, where there was no road, no track, barely a trace to follow. But they really did not need a road, not when they had Neville, and Neville not only knew the way as shown to him by Mary’s sylph, he had a literal bird’s-eye view of the countryside benea
th him.

  Their destination was a cottage at the back of a combe—a sort of dead-end valley, with a steep cliff at the end of it. This was going to be tricky; the combe was heavily wooded, the cottage in a clearing up against the cliff, surrounded by both a garden and a stone wall. It was definitely inhabited; Neville had already made a scouting flight overhead, and not only was there smoke coming from the chimney, the garden was well-tended. And there were chickens scratching and pecking in between the rows of vegetables, providing pest removal, tilling, and fertilizing all at the same time. The fact that they weren’t pecking about outside the walls, John said, was circumstantial proof that whoever lived there was, as suspected, another magician, who used his or her powers to keep the birds where they belonged.

  There were good and bad things about this situation. The good thing was that unless the magician had some sort of warning system set up, there was no way they’d be seen as they approached. And because of the woods, they should be able to slip up quite close to the cottage without being seen.

  The bad thing was that while John was dressed for skulking through woods and brush, the ladies were not. Suki—well, Suki was still small enough to be able to skulk no matter what she wore.

  So this was going to take a very careful approach.

  They tied the horses and the pony up at the very edge of the woods, well in the shade. Sarah kept Grey on her shoulder; granted, these woods were not that different from the jungles Grey was born in, but Grey was decidedly an urban bird these days, and they had both decided that Grey was rather too out of practice to be trying to get those skills back at such a crucial moment. Sarah also had the feeling that Grey still remembered with some trepidation the time that she had been pursued by a hawk and only Neville’s intervention had saved her. Sarah didn’t remember that time with trepidation—she remembered it with horror, and the memory still made her want to collapse in a heap and weep.

  So Grey clung to her shoulder as she attempted, with the handicap of skirts, to follow noiselessly in John’s wake.

  Once again, Neville was ahead of them, perched on the roof of the cottage.

  This time Suki would use, “Help me, I’m lost.” And her story, if interrogated, was that she was from Meavy, her parents were dead, she was going to be sent to the workhouse, and she had decided to strike out and try to find a place as a kitchen maid rather than be sent to such a dire place. She had been heading (she thought) to Yelverton and had gotten all turned around. It was a good story, and a believable story. And if this particular lone magician was their child-thief, it would be an irresistible story, particularly with Gatfer Cole’s Viking amulet around Suki’s neck. Any magician worth his or her salt would give a great deal to get hold of something like that. John had not yet had a chance to examine it closely, but such things generally had power—some more, some less—but they all had something.

  When the walls of the cottage were just barely visible through the trees, John crept forward until he found a spot with enough brush to hide all four of the adults, then motioned them to join him, one at a time. Sarah moved in a crouch, trying to move as silently as possible, sweating with fear that she’d be spotted.

  Once they were in place, it was Suki’s turn to come walking openly through the trees, past them and up to the wall. Sarah watched with her heart in her mouth as Suki opened the wooden gate set into the wall, went up the bare earth path to the door of the cottage, and knocked.

  There was no response.

  Damn! Did we somehow have the bad timing to turn up here when the magician is away? But surely that’s not possible—the chickens are out in the garden. Surely, if the occupant was going to be away for any length of time, the chickens would be penned up!

  Suki knocked again.

  This time the door flew open.

  A woman stood there, dressed in dark—well, it wasn’t a dress. It was more like robes, like a monk’s robe or something of the sort. She had an apron tied over the garment, but it was definitely a robe, and not a dress or a skirt. And her hair was chopped off at chin-length, very roughly, as if she had done it herself.

  Without a word, she seized Suki’s hand and yanked her inside.

  Neville sounded an alarm and plunged into the open door. John leapt over the concealing bushes and the wall, and followed. Sarah, Nan, and Mary paused only long enough to haul their divided skirts up above their knees and vaulted the gate behind him, plunging into the darkness of the doorway in time to hear John thunder, “Let that child go, you—”

  They all ended up in a knot just inside the door.

  Suki did not have her knife out, and Neville was just standing there, not attacking. Something’s—not right! And Nan shouted even as John raised the pistol he had brought with him.

  “John! Don’t shoot!”

  Behind the woman were two pallets on the floor near the hearth. There were two children on them. One, terribly still and unmoving, was an adolescent girl that Sarah didn’t recognize. But the other—oh, the other she knew very well from the images Nan had plucked from Maryanne Byerly’s mind.

  It was little Helen Byerly.

  The woman had dropped Suki’s wrist.

  “What are you doing with those children, you villain?” John shouted.

  The woman faced him, a tigress to his tiger. “I’m tryin’ t’ save their lives, tha’ gurt noodle!”

  17

  TO Sarah’s astonishment, the woman turned completely away from John—a big, angry, and clearly dangerous man—and grabbed a bucket from the floor. She shoved it at Suki. “Out! Pump! Right o’ th’ door. Now!”

  Suki took it and ran.

  Then she took two steps past Sarah to Nan and seized Nan’s arm, hauling her toward the pallets. “Tha’ looks least like aslat asneger o’ any body here—hold lass oop, she cain’t get breath.”

  Dumbfounded, Nan dropped to the floor beside little Helen, and did as she was told, and Helen did indeed stop laboring so much to breathe.

  Suki came back with the pail full as the woman dropped to her knees on the other side of the pallet, and stripped the blankets and the oversized smock from the girl, leaving her only in her smalls. “Bring water!” she ordered Suki, and seized a rag, dipping it in the water and sponging Helen down. “If Es cain’t get fever down—”

  That decided John. He holstered his pistol inside his coat, dropped to his knees beside the pallet, and shoved the woman to one side. “I’m a doctor,” he snarled. “Have you something like willowbark tea? And put her right on the stone floor, it will pull some of the heat out of her.”

  The woman pulled the pallet out from under Helen and looked at Mary. “Kettle’s at ’earth. Willowbark’s in square wood box on mantle.” She continued sponging Helen. “This be a cruel cawtch. Fever sparked oop nay long agone, an’ me havin’ nobbut twa hands. Fetch water, brew tea, cool th’ lass down? Cool th’ lass, fust, but with what?” She appeared to be talking to herself, but since she hadn’t given Sarah a task, Sarah went looking through the larder for something she recognized by opening lids and sniffing, and found a pot of honey just as Mary finished boiling the willowbark and the child began a series of racking coughs. Sarah snatched up a cup, not caring if it was dirty or clean, poured in a generous portion of honey, and held it out for Mary to fill. She brought it to the woman, who blew vigorously on it to cool it, then held it to Helen’s lips. “Drink, honey-sweet,” she coaxed. “Drink, little lass.”

  Helen hardly seemed to notice the words, but she did start drinking, or rather sipping. Mary took over sponging the child’s face, neck, and body while the strange woman continued to coax Helen to drink.

  “Where did you get this child?” John demanded harshly, all the while counting Helen’s pulse, and leaning down to listen to her chest.

  The woman didn’t get a chance to answer, as Suki pulled the leather cord over her head and held the amber amulet under the woman’s
nose. The woman started back, eyes wide. “Will this help?” Suki asked.

  “Shan’t ’urt,” the woman said shortly, took the amulet, and held it to Helen’s chest. She closed her eyes, and bowed her head, lips moving silently.

  For a long moment, nothing happened except the wheezing of Helen’s breathing.

  And then Helen heaved a huge sigh, and her tortured features softened.

  “Fever’s going down,” Nan said, and picked the child up, moving her back to the pallet. Mary covered her back up with blankets. The crisis had been averted.

  The woman handed Suki back her amulet, and sat back on her heels, but looked at John defiantly. “So. Water Marster Es-A-Doctor, ’oo be tha’ an whyfore tha’ comes burstin’ through my door?”

  * * *

  “. . . an’ then Es found that’un in fever, lyin’ on moor like t’other,” the woman—who in the course of things mentioned her name was Maude Rundle—said. “’Cept whate’er ails the fust un, ’tain’t what ails this ’un. This’s lung-fever, from sleepin’ wet. T’other?” She shrugged. “Dunno.”

  Now that they were not dealing with a crisis, Sarah was able to examine the woman in detail. There was no doubt about it, what she was wearing, if it was not a brown linen monk’s robe, was certainly virtually identical to one. It even had a hood. There was also no doubt that the poor woman was utterly exhausted. Her short brown hair hung in lank locks about her square-jawed face, there were dark circles under her deep-set brown eyes, and her tanned skin was dull. Sarah wondered when she had last slept. She didn’t think it was recently.

  John checked both girls; made certain that Helen’s fever, if not broken, was at least not to a point that it would kill her outright; then knelt at the pallet of the second one and examined her. He glanced over at his wife and the girls. “I think we’ve seen this before,” he said, reluctantly.