The Case of the Spellbound Child

by Mercedes Lackey

  “I’m here, Linwood,” Alderscroft replied. “I need to be brief. I have reason to believe someone is abducting children around Dartmoor, and it may be a magician. Have you gotten wind of anything?”

  “Well . . . perhaps? Over the past several years I have heard of children going missing, but it has mostly been Travelers, itinerant workers, and orphans about to be sent to the workhouse.” Nan bit her lip to keep from blurting something rude as the figure of the man in the flames shrugged his shoulders dismissively, as if to say, and those people don’t matter. “Dartmoor is a dangerous place, children run away from their parents, and really, what can one do?”

  Nan saw the corner of Alderscroft’s eye twitch a little, but he didn’t rebuke the other man. “In that case, I am very likely to send five people down to you to investigate for me. Two are a married couple, three are sisters. The couple will be there to paint the moor. The sisters are from the Harton School; the two eldest are teachers, the third is a pupil, and they are all getting away from London during the Long Vac. This is what you will tell people who ask, and we both know they will ask.”

  The man shrugged again. “It’s a village, my Lord. Anything and anyone new is talked about.”

  “Our mother died in Sarah’s infancy. Our father married an Italian woman, who died giving birth to our sister,” Nan said, speaking clearly into the fire.

  The figure started a little. “I didn’t know you weren’t alone, my Lord,” he said.

  “Well, now you have some gossip to use to prepare your regulars,” Alderscroft told him. “Suitably tragic, which should give them plenty of fodder for speculation without alarming anyone if there is something afoot. Oh . . . and on that head, please do not start making inquiries about missing children yourself. I don’t want to make any potential quarry go to ground. Remember, the potential to be gained from blood magic is the same regardless of who the child’s parents are. If there is something of the sort going on, the perpetrator is crafty, has been operating freely for several years, and is likely someone people know and think harmless.”

  “In Yelverton, my lord?” the innkeeper asked nervously.

  “Possibly, possibly not. So guard the secret, Linwood.”

  “Yes, my Lord. Absolutely, my Lord. When can I expect the visitors?”

  “Just hold your two best rooms. I’ll pay for them regardless,” Alderscroft replied dismissively. “It will be some time within the week. Not sooner than tomorrow, not later than four or five days from now.”

  “Certainly, my Lord,” the innkeeper said. “Is there anything else I can assist you with?”

  “Just take care of my agents, keep your ear to the ground, your eyes sharp, and your counsel to yourself, and thank you, Linwood. I’ll send you a sign by Elemental when my agents leave from here.”

  “Thank you, my Lord,” the innkeeper returned, and the flames died back down.

  Four more times he spoke to Earth Masters or Earth Magicians through the flames. All had heard rumors of missing children, none had thought anything of it. They all said the same—children were known to run off rather than allow themselves to be sent to the workhouse, Travelers and itinerant workers couldn’t keep track of their hordes of offspring, the moors were dangerous. Nan could tell Alderscroft was losing his patience with these attitudes when he sat back in his chair and allowed the fire to die down to coals, staring at it without speaking.

  “Well,” he said, finally. “There is not a great deal I can do to rectify these deplorable attitudes, if their own preachers and padres have not been able to instill the basics of decent Christian thinking in them.”

  “It’s lazy thinking, or so my parents would tell you,” Sarah replied. “If something doesn’t affect them directly, they are too self-centered to care about it. The more foreign someone is from the circles they move in, the less they care. By the time you get to Travelers, well, to their way of thinking, Travelers are scarcely human at all.”

  Alderscroft’s thunderous brow told wordlessly just what he thought of that sort of attitude, especially among the Magicians and Masters of whom he was the loose head.

  But then he sighed, and passed his hand over his face. “Hopefully now that I have raised the specter of a Blood Magician working out there, the fates of Traveler children will seem a bit more important. And you two should go to bed. You might be packing tomorrow.”

  “Yes, sir,” Nan replied, offering her hand to help Sarah up.

  They left him alone in his workroom, still brooding over the dying fire.

  11

  ELLIE had gotten all of the beds cleaned and restuffed with clean straw; she’d washed what passed for blankets, and everyone’s clothing, at least once. Odd, she had never done so much hard work in her life, yet somehow she was getting it all done, and feeling all right when she went to bed, not utterly exhausted. Maybe it was that she was doing it to make all the others feel better. Or maybe it was because Simon was chained up in his corner and not making twice as much work by undoing half of what she did and wasting the other half of her time by skylarking around.

  Once, and only once, the Dark One had stopped her. “Tha’s doin’ a mort of work for them,” with the emphasis on them as if her fellow prisoners were beneath her, and an unspoken implication that they weren’t worth her time. But she didn’t take its bait. It was clearly trying to get her on its side, pitting her—and possibly about to dangle the bribe of getting better treatment and better food before her—against them.

  As if she’d believe it. As if chopping off her finger and making her as much a prisoner here as they were was worth its table scraps! So she’d just looked down at the ground, her legs shaking, and replied, “Ev’un needs ter sleep an’ eat good so they’s strong. Tha’ needs ’em strong.” And when she got no answer, she looked up, and saw that it was just . . . staring down at her, apparently as astonished as if it had heard a toad talk.

  So she’d left it standing there staring, and went back to the washing.

  One huge advantage of doing all that washing was that she was cleaner than any of them. She’d always hated being dirty, and before she started doing this, she’d wanted to claw her skin off.

  Her hard work paid off; the others were all looking better, stronger as she had hoped, and not quite so much in despair. They had energy and the inclination to talk, and even to help her with the chores in the prison room, which gave her more time for the other things she was doing. And on the one hand, that was more than good, it was excellent.

  On the other hand . . . it meant the Dark One was sending them into the Dark Sleep a lot more often, and now it didn’t even bother to shut her out of the room when it did so.

  But on the third hand . . . that meant that it was leaving after supper a lot more often. And it was coming back with things, as she would discover in the morning. Mostly those things were only for its own comfort, but it seemed to have decided that treating the prisoners better meant it was getting more of what it wanted from them. So when it came back from wherever it went, sometimes things appeared piled in front of the prison door in the morning. More blankets—adult shirts and smocks they could wear if they rolled up the arms, so that they could strip to their skins and get their clothing washed regularly and have something clean to wear instead of huddling in a blanket like a naked heathen, as Mother would have said.

  And the Dark One was bringing back more food. Most of it, like a couple more fletches of bacon and two strings of sausages and a half-wheel of cheese, didn’t self-replenish, so none of that went to the prisoners, but some did, and that meant Ellie had more things she could make for them when the Dark One wasn’t there. For instance, it brought back a huge sugarloaf that must have weighed more than five pounds—something Ellie had only ever seen in a grocer’s window. And the sugar had been enchanted just like the flour; no matter how much she scraped off, the loaf never got any smaller.

  That meant s
he could make sugared pancakes with bits of candied carrot in them for everyone every night the Dark One was gone. The treat seemed to make everyone feel better, even when they were recovering from the Dark Sleep.

  The Dark One still allowed her to make extra bread, too, and if the Dark One left early enough, while the eggs were still boiling, she would go for a second foray into the garden and make a sort of vegetable stew to go with it. The extra food seemed to be helping everyone—except Rose.

  But what the Dark One didn’t know was that she was also baking hard biscuits a few at a time, the kind that kept forever, and they were all hiding them in their beds. The others were hiding them against the day the Dark One might decide to punish them by withholding food. She was hiding them against the day that she could figure out how to run away.

  She’d put the others to limited work, besides having them take over the daily sweeping, now that they were all in better shape. When they swept, they swept the place clean from wall to wall. She’d had them move the beds to one side of the room, sweep the entire room thoroughly, oil and rub down the floor, then do the same with the other side. Then she’d laid sprigs of rosemary, lavender, and mint along the base of the wall. So now they had clean, dry beds, a floor that wasn’t oozing damp and cold all the time, and most of the vermin had been chased out by the herbs she laid along the wall. In fact, if it weren’t for the chains on their ankles and the Dark One . . . they’d probably have enjoyed living here. At least the ones that didn’t have homes and families to go back to.

  The only one that wasn’t doing better was Rose. She had changed to a clean smock that she was practically lost in, and she had washed, but she still spent most of her time curled on her bed in a kind of half-doze, and still had to be roused to eat. Even Ellie could tell she’d given up, and nothing anyone said to her made any difference at all.

  Something had broken inside her the last time the Dark One had sent them all into the Dark Sleep. Sam and Robbie were both worried about her, but what could they do? They’d tried coaxing her, tried putting some heart back in her, tried begging her with tears in their eyes for her to not give up. . . . She was indifferent to it all.

  Ellie regarded the girl with pity, but in her own mind, Ellie had already consigned her to a grave. It was like that kid the goat had had. There was no use getting attached to it, Mother had told her. It was only going to end up sold or stew. And Ellie had hardened her heart and not gotten attached, and stupid Simon had and would have blubbered buckets when it was gone. Ellie had seen the hand of Death in the form of the Dark One on Rose a long time ago. While Rose lived, Ellie would make sure the girl got everything Ellie could provide—but she wasn’t investing any emotions in the girl. Not the way she had already with Sam and Robbie and yes, even her pestiferous little brother, who was the one responsible for them being here in the first place.

  One of these times, Rose wasn’t going to wake up from the Dark Sleep. Sam and Robbie would probably go billid when she died. And then—God and his Saints only knew what the two of them would do after that. Ellie had already resolved to make sure to protect them from the Dark One if they did anything the creature didn’t like—

  That devil’d likely do a lot worse than just smack them crost phizog.

  So she had already thought of all the ways she could intercept one or both of them, and keep them locked up until their reason returned. It wasn’t as if it would be hard. They were chained, and she could get Simon to sit on their chains if need be. The others would probably even help her, to avoid getting the Dark One all riled up.

  So when the inevitable happened to Rose, she was ready. Meanwhile . . . Ellie tried to puzzle out how she could escape.

  * * *

  The Dark One was restless, a sure sign that it was going to drain the others and vanish for the night, and probably repeat the nightly visits to wherever it went for the next couple of nights after that. Instead of just lounging, it was playing with something—jewelry, Ellie thought. Threading rings onto a chain with a locket, and unthreading them again. By this time, Ellie was pretty sure the destination had to be a village or even a town, because of what it’d been bringing back to the cot when the creature returned. But this village couldn’t be anywhere nearby, because it was catching moor ponies to ride there and back, and she was pretty sure it was forcing them to gallop all the way there. So the goal was probably thirty miles away, maybe more. This cot was hidden well, and distance from any other human beings undoubtedly factored into that. Good for them, because that meant the Dark One was gone for the better part of the evening and night and slept heavily and late when it got back. Bad for her, because when she finally ran, there would be no path to follow, and a long, long way to travel afoot.

  But this time . . . this time Ellie caught the creature staring at Rose through the open door every time it was about to turn and pace in the opposite direction, staring in a way she could only think of as “predatory.” Like a stoat sizing up a wounded bird. And she got a cold feeling in her chest when she thought she understood just what that meant.

  Tonight the Dark One was going to drain Rose completely. It must have been going easy on her, the way it did on Sam, but something had changed.

  Why had it suddenly decided to do this tonight? Ellie had no idea. Maybe it had noticed that Rose was not producing very much of the mysterious “magic” that Robbie said it ate, anymore. Maybe it had decided that Rose was consuming more than she was worth to keep alive.

  Maybe it already had a replacement in mind.

  Her insides went cold and her stomach flip-flopped.

  That might have been the most horrible thought in this horrible place that Ellie had yet had. To know that the Dark One was about to be rid of Rose, and that it was going to kidnap some other child, and that there was nothing she could do to stop it—

  It was awful.

  And all she could do was wait helplessly in the other room, up to her elbows in bread dough, while the Dark One strode in, raised its arms, and gathered that dark-light around itself.

  And this time, when the procedure was done, it did something it had never done except with her. It bent over Rose, took a key from somewhere inside its robes, and unlocked the shackle. That moment of the shackle dropping open dropped Ellie’s heart, too. This was the end for Rose. And despite her determination not to feel anything, her eyes stung and she swallowed down a sob.

  Robbie and Simon protested weakly from where they lay, dazed and barely awake—Robbie because he likely knew what was coming, and Simon because Robbie was doing so. Simon had taken to copying the older boy slavishly, which mostly was a good thing, but Ellie held her breath and hoped that Simon wasn’t going to earn a beating this time.

  Evidently, the Dark One was in a good mood. It slung the limp and lifeless-looking body of Rose over its back, and all Ellie could think was, is she dead?

  There was no way to tell. The Dark One strode past her without a second thought—except to look down at her and hiss, “Es be gone. Feed t’others. Finish tha’ work.”

  And then it was through the door. She ran to the window, and watched as it paused only long enough to summon a moor pony. It slung the usual bags over the pony’s shoulders, dumped Rose on top of the bags, and off the creature went, with Rose’s body slung in front of it over the pony’s withers.

  And in the other room, Robbie, Sam, and Simon began to cry, quietly. She hardened her heart again. This was probably the best chance she was going to get, and she needed to have a clear mind.

  Save th’ tears for thasel’s, she thought. Rose was gone, either dead already, or unconscious and the Dark One was going to take her off to die elsewhere. She had to shut down her feelings and concentrate on the living, and they should, too.

  She finished baking the bread and sweeping up. Finished boiling the eggs, and cleaned everything she used to make the bread. Last of all, she made candied carrots to give them with their
bread and eggs. All the while, Robbie sobbed softly in the other room.

  When she had done everything she could, she brought in their food; half-loaves hollowed out and filled with carrots, and the other half with the egg in it. Robbie was red-eyed, but seemed resigned to what had happened when she brought him his half-loaves. He seemed about to say something to her, then just shook his head. She went back out and brought in the basket with the remaining bread and made sure everyone got his fair share. There was, of course, one extra boiled egg. She considered it a moment, then sat down next to Robbie, between him and Sam.

  “Es gonna scarper,” she said matter-of-factly.

  That startled him out of tears. “’Ow?” he gasped.

  “Been thinkin’. Dark One chopped off m’finger an’ put it under ’earthstone, an’ now Es cain’t get past wall. Chickens all got one toe off, an’ they cain’t go past wall. So mebbe if Es get m’finger an’ throw it or take it through gate, Es c’n leave.” She let out the breath she’d been holding. It had taken her a long time to try to reason her way through how the Dark One must have been holding her here, and that was the only thing that made sense.

  “Wut c’n us’ns do?” he asked immediately.

  “Tha’ll tell th’ Dark One thet tha ’eard door close an’ thunk Es was come t’bed, late,” she ordered him. “Tha’ll tell thet all uns were too weary t’ do more’n eat an’ sleep an’ thet’s all tha ’member.”

  “But—” he protested.

  “No nort,” she told him firmly. “Do wut Es sez.”

  “Ellie, do tha’ get finger from under th’ stone, an’ try. Then come back here an’ tell us’ns,” Sam said just as firmly as she had. “We’ll spare tha’ half our’n biscuits, do tha’ take Rose’s clather an’ blanket an’ tha’n. Then run, run till tha’ canst run no more.”