The Case of the Spellbound Child

by Mercedes Lackey

  Please make Mother not angry at us. Please help us find something really good to eat tomorrow. Please make Mother realize we should be foraging all the time, because when Simon’s inside four walls, he goes spare. Please don’t let us be lost. Please— And then Simon’s warm little body helped hers warm up completely and she drifted off, her prayers unfinished.

  She woke up with thin sunlight streaming from the east, as Simon sneezed loudly and threw off most of the bracken covering both of them with a wordless grunt of impatience. Cold damp air struck her face, smelling of bracken and mud. “I be ’ungry!” he announced, as if it were a royal proclamation, or a fact of supreme importance, and looked at her as if he expected her to provide him with food.

  “Drink some water,” she snapped. “Find some cress. Feed t’y own self. I bain’t a witch, t’conjurate up eggs an’ toast a-cause ’ee got usn’s sent out on moor yestere’en!”

  Whether it was the mention of the eggs and toast that they were not going to get, or the reminder that they were both out here with empty bellies because of him, Simon looked at her and burst into tears.

  And ordinarily, she’d comfort him. But she was cross, her hair was full of bits of bracken and she hadn’t a comb to make it right, she was hungry too, and the sound of him crying satisfied the part of her that wanted him to feel as badly as possible. Because it was all his fault. Every bit of it. If he hadn’t been larking about, they wouldn’t be here. If he hadn’t fought her over the broom, they wouldn’t be here. They’d be in their beds, and mayhap Pa would have brought home food last night, and Mother would be making hot porridge to eat for breakfast.

  And right now, hot porridge with a bit of salt sounded wonderful. Not as good as eggs and toast, but wonderful.

  She threw off the rest of the bracken, and clambered out of the hollow, and went off in the direction of where she thought that stream was without seeing if Simon was following. It wasn’t as if she needed to see . . . she could hear him easy enough, stumbling after her and sniffing and blubbering, because he thought blubbering would make her feel sorry for him. Well, it wouldn’t. Not this time.

  Sure enough, the stream was where she’d thought it was, and she went to her knees to drink out of it. And as luck would have it, there was watercress right there. With a grimace—because she was still thinking about porridge and toast and eggs—she picked a handful and stuffed it in her mouth. “Cress, gurt loon,” she said around the mouthful, and Simon knelt down next to her to join her until they’d pulled up and eaten every bit of it.

  He rubbed the back of his hand across his tear-streaked face, leaving a smear of mud across his cheekbones. “Now what d’we do?” he asked her, looking up at her woefully.

  “We gets our baskets, and we bring back feast,” she told him. “We went west, now we go east, an’ forage on the way.”

  She washed her hands and face in the cold water—Simon didn’t, the little pig—and went back for her basket. After a good night’s sleep and at least a sketchy meal of cress, she felt confident again.

  They moved slower, this morning, peering carefully at the ground at their feet, and plucking everything that they knew was edible. The baskets weren’t filling up fast that way, but when you combined baskets with bellies, they were making much better progress than yesterday. They had all day to forage, after all, and just because they were supposed to be filling their baskets, that didn’t mean they couldn’t eat some of what they’d found. In fact, even though she still felt like a grazing sheep, she reasoned that they’d be able to hunt better if their stomachs were full.

  Since they were moving slowly and carefully, they found a lot more food than they had last night, when they’d been larking a bit, and careless. Simon started up a rabbit, and she almost managed to hit it with a rock. That was a disappointment; one rabbit or a fish would have been more than enough to purchase Mother’s good graces again.

  What she really wanted was something besides greens. Big baskets of greens did not a “feast” make. What she really wanted was to find either berries or something more substantial. She took a thought longingly for ’taties. Did ’taties grow wild?

  And it was too late for bird eggs; all the nests they found were empty. She wouldn’t have turned up her nose at baby birds, either; after all, they would net wrens and doves when they could, and cook up the entire birds into pies when they had the flour. But when they got down into wooded valleys, the nests were empty, and none of the tree hollows they explored yielded any stored nuts.

  The going was easier to the north, and the foraging better, too, so they drifted in that direction for a while. She still wasn’t worried about getting lost. After all, home was west. And she knew where west was!

  And that was when they came upon a heavily wooded combe, which looked like the best place to forage yet. But on the other hand . . . the trees were bigger and darker than anything she’d ever seen on the moor. If there was ever a place where a witch would live, this was surely it.

  They looked at each other. Simon licked his lips. “Bet there be mushrooms in there,” he ventured. Mushrooms weren’t a rabbit, but they were better than greens. She knew there was still a bit of fat left, meant to scrape over that stale bread. Fried mushrooms were almost as good as meat.

  She nodded. Many of the trees were oaks, and everyone knew that the best mushrooms grew under oaks. “And ’ee see slip shell?” she observed. “Mebbe last year’s nuts.”

  Nuts were as good as meat, and hard come by on the moor.

  She led the way into the combe.

  There were mushrooms, and they were the kind they’d been taught were safe. And in little tree hollows, the last few nuts from squirrel hoards. It seemed with every step they took, they found another bit of something to eat—not much, but every bit in the basket was a step closer to going home in triumph, the more especially since now it wasn’t such thin stuff as greens. So they moved slowly and methodically, both their gazes on the ground, and ears cocked nervously for the voices of piskies. Because piskies there surely were here, and they were more likely to do her and Simon a mischief than bake them a cake.

  “Ellie,” Simon whispered. “I think we be t’end of combe.”

  She looked up; Simon was right. There was more light ahead. Was that the end of the combe, or something else?

  They hunched over and crept forward, until they crouched behind a screening of slip shell bushes. Under the trees, it was dark—but before them was a clearing with the sun shining brightly down onto it. And in that clearing was a cot.

  A bit smaller than the cottage they lived in, but it was still stone. The thick slate roof had green moss and even grass growing on it—the sure sign no one had tended that roof in a very long time. There were two small windows with no glass in them, one on either side of a half-open, crooked door. No smoke came from the chimney.

  From here, it looked abandoned. There was a half-ruined wall around it; shutters gaped open over the two windows, which were dark, like a pair of hollow eyes.

  Instinctively, they crouched down further. The first thing that Ellie thought of was that this surely must be a witch’s cot. Who else would live out here, all alone and lonely, but a witch? And she waited for the hag to emerge and demand what they were doing there. But there was nothing. No movement. No sounds.

  “Do ’ee think there’s anybody there?” Simon whispered.

  She shook her head. “Maybe a garden, though. . . .”

  If there was a garden, there might still be edible stuff in it. Stuff Mother wasn’t guarding like a watchdog! Even gone to weeds and seed, some garden stuff survived for a very long time on its own. This might be the best place to find Mother’s feast.

  Especially if the cot hadn’t been abandoned for long. Weeds grew up powerful fast; what she could see from here might just be the growth of a single year, untended.

  Ellie stood up first, and moved cautiously to
ward a gap in the wall. She winced a little as she moved out into the sunlight, and paused, waiting again for a challenge from inside the cot.

  But no challenge came, and she peered around the wall into the weed-filled yard. And anything Ellie had in her mind until that point was completely driven out of it by the flash of bright red beneath trefoil leaves.

  “Strawberries!” she shrieked, overcome with greed, surprise, and delight, and fell on her knees in the weeds inside the wall.

  Yes, they were strawberries, and they were real, and fat and plump and there were a lot of them, more than enough to stuff her and Simon full and still have plenty to carry home!

  She dropped her basket without any regard for how much she spilled, and gathered up as many berries as she could fit in both her hands. Beside her, Simon did the same. She opened her mouth as big as it could get and crammed them inside—

  * * *

  Ellie woke up with a hideous headache, the taste of strawberries in her mouth, and shivering with cold—and knew there was something terribly wrong. She wasn’t in the sunlit garden by that old cot; it was dark and damp, smelled of mildew and wet dust, and all she could make out from the straw mattress she lay on was a dark, huddled lump on another straw mattress between her and the wall. She knew she was on a straw mattress—or rather, a burlap sack stuffed with straw that served as a mattress—because it crackled and prickled her when she moved, and the unmistakable smell of mildewed straw was all around her.

  Her left ankle hurt. She sat up slowly and tried to move it, and was rewarded with a clank, and the bite of metal into her skin above her bare foot.

  Frantically, she felt down her leg, and her questing fingers encountered a metal band locked around her ankle, a chain attached to it. When she tugged on the chain, she was able to drag a few more feet of it toward her, with a hideous rattling and clanking noise.

  She’d been chained up like a dog! Why? Who had done such a thing? A thousand questions whirled in her aching head, and she had answers to none of them.

  “Ellie? Ellie! ’Ee be awake!” The lump next to her shot up straight and scrabbled over to her on hands and knees, his own chain rattling behind him. Simon threw himself into her arms, sobbing and shaking with fear. Well, she was quaking with fear herself. Where were they? How had they gotten here?

  Had they been taken by a witch? But how?

  Had the berries been bewitched?

  “Where—” she began.

  “Dunno!” he wailed. “Es et the strawbs, an’ Es woket up ’ere!”

  She took him by the shoulders and shook him, trying to get more sense out of him. “Where’s ’ere?” she demanded, choking on the words, eyes burning with tears. One thing she did know, it couldn’t be a piskie-barrow. Piskies couldn’t abide iron and steel, and that was an iron shackle on her ankle. Was it a witch as she’d first feared? But witches weren’t supposed to like iron much, either.

  But if it was a man, why do this? Why not just beat them for trespass? All they’d touched were two double-handfuls of berries!

  “We dunno,” came a thin voice out of the dark, and she nearly dislocated her neck, swiveling her head around to find the source. “We dunno where’s ’ere. Most on ’uns was like ’ee; come on garden, et somethin’, woket up ’ere. Some on uns et somethin’ else, e’en in town, ended up ’ere. But uns dunno where ’ere is. ’Tisn’t in town, ’cause there ain’t no town-sounds. And ’tis bigger nor cot, we thinket.”

  She put her arms around Simon, who was crying in utter despair. She felt like wailing herself. “’Ow many of ’ee?” she asked, unable to really make out dark lumps against the dark floor.

  “Ten, mebbe?” the speaker sounded doubtful. “Dark One comes twicet day, feeds ’un. There’s water an’ dipper by me, slop bucket for to piss an’ shit in by you. Dark One feeds us good, but . . . anon the Black Sleep comes, an’ ’ee’ll wake up weak an’ doattie an’ addle-pated an’ all a-biver. ’Ee don’t really get strong again. An’ it comes agin, an’ ee’ll wake up weaker. Then ’ee don’ wake up, an’ Dark One takes ’ee away an’ ’ee don’ come back.”

  “The Black Sleep?” she whispered, making it a question.

  “Like real sleep, but ’ee don’t dream, an it makes ’ee weary, nay rested,” said the other child.

  There was a weak chorus of “ayes” at that.

  She strained her eyes to make anything at all out, but the room’s sole window was shuttered tight, and all she could see were four dim walls, vague shapes lying or sitting on the floor. Under the prevailing smell of mildew, there was the faint stink of shit and piss, but no worse than came from the chamberpots at night at home.

  “If ’ee needs shit, there be bucket uv earth aside the shit bucket,” said a female voice. “Cover the shit wi’ earth or the Dark One’ll beat ’un all.”

  She blinked back tears in the long silence that followed that helpful statement. Finally she spoke again. “Us be Ellie an’ Simon,” she said, finally.

  One by one, the children—or at least the ones strong enough to speak—told her their names. Rose and Lily. Colin. Mark and Stephen and Bill. Sam and Ben. Deborah and Jess. And lastly, the speaker, Robbie.

  “Who’s be the Dark One, Robbie?” she asked, when the introductions were all made.

  “Dunno,” Robbie began, when the sound of footsteps approaching the closed door broke the heavy silence. “’Ee’ll find out,” the boy finished bleakly.

  And the door creaked open.

  Standing in the doorway, a pillar of black against the dim light of the next room, was a sexless creature with a hood hiding its face.

  And it turned the hood toward her.

  6

  “PENNY for your thoughts,” Nan told John Watson.

  The entire ménage had decided to visit that constant favorite, Hampton Court Palace. The venue was—somewhat more neglected than most of the Royal Palaces. The Queen didn’t care for it much; it was, after all, a patched-together hotchpotch of several styles, and these days most of the people living in it were those to whom the Crown owed some sort of debt, and who were given living quarters here for life. The grounds and some of the parts of the Palace, like the Tudor section, were actually open to the public to stroll through. Large sections of the extensive gardens were utterly neglected.

  But as far as Nan was concerned, that made the place all the more fascinating. The Royal School of Needlework was here, and she often thought about taking a class or two—until she reminded herself she barely had time to darn her stockings, much less learn complicated fancy-work. Suki adored the maze; it was much cooler than London—and it certainly smelled better than London in this heat. Both the girls’ flat and the Watsons’ were far enough from the Thames that at least the river-stench didn’t get that far, but there were plenty of horses (and dogs, and cats, and the occasional human) making the streets less than fragrant. And she preferred the untidy, overgrown gardens with their illusion of wilderness to any other parts except the great maze.

  And of course, there was always the chance that Robin Goodfellow would put in an appearance, though Nan suspected he’d be more likely to do so for Suki than for the adults. He tended only to come to them when they called, but would often surprise Suki any place where you could find something like a green oasis. Sometimes she wondered if this was because they were no longer childlike enough to interest him—but then her knowledge of Robin suggested another reason entirely. This was possibly sheer politeness on his part. Adults tended to dislike surprises, and didn’t much enjoy it when someone popped up unexpectedly, where children delighted in that sort of thing.

  Since by this point, Suki knew the layout of the place as well as she knew the grounds of their nearest park, and since she could be counted on not to run riot or call attention to herself, or do anything that might be considered impolite, the adults let her roam on her own, admonishing her only to meet them at teatime at
the front gate.

  “My thoughts are mixed,” Watson replied. “On the one hand, I am enjoying the peace and quiet. On the other, I begin to sympathize with Holmes’ restlessness when he does not have a case. Half my patients are out of the city, the other half seem infernally healthy. But then I remind myself that there is always the chance of a cholera outbreak . . . which I would not wish on anyone, and which strikes the people who cannot afford a doctor. So I am pleased with peace and quiet.”

  “Not that a doctor is much help with cholera,” Mary reminded him.

  “Only one who is also an Earth-magician, and most of them cannot abide London even for duty, love, or filthy lucre.” They had chosen the more overgrown portions of the Royal Gardens to stroll in; they were such frequent visitors here that the Palace Guards and guides merely smiled, waved, and allowed them to go where they willed. And the gardeners ignored them as if they were some species of wandering plant. It was much cooler here, and if you knew where to look, it was easy to find the old seats, since most of them were marble. Those marble benches were marvelously cool, too.

  “Well, you’ve cursed us now, John Watson,” Sarah laughed as Grey and Neville played tag with each other among the branches. Grey was as safe as houses here—at the least hint that any other bird was going to trouble her, Neville would swoop in to administer a trouncing.

  “Look, Mama!” cried a young child from somewhere past the overgrown arbors. “A Grey Parrot!”

  “Don’t be silly, dear,” replied a woman, sounding hot and impatient. “This is not a menagerie. Come, let’s go back to the Palace.”

  Grey snickered, and Neville outright laughed, and then the two went back to their game. But now it had a variation; Grey must have lost one of her red tail feathers, because she had it in her mouth—and Neville was trying to snatch it from her.