“Well... She’s not hearing ghosts, that’s for sure,” Widow said, and Kate’s heart fell sick into her stomach. “Sweetie, they’re not ghosts.”
Kate swallowed around a growing lump. “You don’t know—”
“Not ghosts, you hear me? Ghosts are the trapped spirits of the dead, and maybe they’re real, I couldn’t say. But I’ve heard of folks talented like you. It’s rare, but... They’re not ghosts. I think what you’re hearing are the loose, drifting thoughts of living people.”
Dad said what Kate was thinking. “That’s impossible.”
But it made so much sense. Thoughts. That’s why the forest was so quiet, why the barroom at dinnertime was so confusing—too many people thinking all the different things. Not ghosts after all. “Does that mean...outside your house, I was hearing Ally?”
“I believe so.” Widow’s gaze darted back home and then critically at Dad before settling back on Kate. “Why don’t we go save your sister and prove the impossible?”
Ignoring the pain in her probably-broken wrist, jostled with every step, Kate ran full tilt back the way they’d come, Widow and Dad trailing behind. The closer she got to the house, the stronger the sense of Ally became, but at the house she was stumped, unable to pinpoint the feeling...Ally’s thoughts...any further. When Widow caught up, Kate told her. “She’s here somewhere, but I can’t tell exactly. It’s dark, scary.”
“But she’s okay?” Dad asked like he finally maybe believed her.
“For now, but we have to hurry. That’s all I know.” To get more, since she could sense thoughts, she wanted to ask Rees what he knew and listen to behind his words. That’s how she’d find Ally. “Widow Carigie, can you take me to Rees’s room? I want to ask him a question.”
Widow let out a slow angry breath and nodded, jaw clenched. “This way.”
It only took one look at them as Rees answered his door. Kate didn’t even get a chance to ask about Ally before the worry and guilt flooded the area, then the confidence that they couldn’t actually know. The girl was hidden too well. She wasn’t in his room where she’d make noise to give him away, and she wasn’t even in Widow’s house. They’d never find her...
In the abandoned storeroom of the building next door.
Kate grinned. “I’ll get her!”
And as she rushed away, she heard Rees—confused, guilty Rees—commenting. “Isn’t that the dimwit? What bad luck you have, innkeeper! One girl’s crazy and the other runs off with a minstrel—”
She was pretty sure the next sound was Dad’s fist slamming into Rees’s face, but she just focused on finding Ally. Now that she knew where to go, it was easy to find Rees’s trail through the fence at the back of the garden onto the neighboring property, overgrown with weeds. Kate pushed on the door, which didn’t budge, but the boards blocking the window were loose and only rested leaning against the empty space. Climbing in, she sensed Ally’s anxiety, her exhaustion and fear, and Kate was able to go straight to the right storeroom, unlatch the lock on the outside, and free her big sister.
She silently led Ally out to the street where Dad and the Widow were waiting. A guardsman held onto Rees and cursed when he saw Ally, saw the proof of what Rees had done. He tied Rees’s hands and led him away, and Ally started crying harder—but in relief, now—and Dad just hugged her and patted her hair and promised to protect her forever. They started towards the inn, Ally limping a little. Dad helped her walk but didn’t look back to see if Kate was following. Much less thank her for not giving up, for saving Ally’s life, for being the good daughter for once.
“Some people are too fragile to admit when they’re wrong,” Widow said, watching alongside her.
“Do you think things will change, now that he knows I’ve been telling the truth all along?”
Widow just shrugged, and Kate sighed. At least she was used to it, and while they didn’t need her there, it was probably time to go home.
She made to leave, but Widow Carigie stopped her. “Wait, listen.” Widow put an arm around her shoulders and squeezed. “Tomorrow I’ll send letters to some friends who know things, and we’ll work together to get you placed immediately in a good school where you’ll be trained to use this power you have. There you can learn all about that and about everything else you’ll need. If you want.”
It didn’t sound right. Well, it sounded amazing to leave town to attend a school where she could study and belong and talk and maybe people would even listen to her sometimes like Widow Carigie did. Could she learn to control the ghosts? Hear them clearly or shut them out whenever she wanted? And she’d be able to join the Company when she was old enough or go and do anything without Dad or her mother telling her she wasn’t good enough.
Too good to be true, it sounded.
But was it?
The ghosts said... No, Widow’s thoughts confirmed the offer was real. Kate smiled and answered, loud and clear, “Yes, please.”
~***~
At Castell Henllys in Wales, a little girl sneaking a bottle of Dr. Pepper in her Iron Age costume told Sarah she sounded like Buffy (the Vampire Slayer). She’s not, however, from California. Then, after spending years training in Shotokan karate with no serious injuries, Sarah fractured her finger taking soil samples in Northern Ireland, so that’s one vote for martial arts being safer than archaeology.
It’s still debatable where writing and cats fit on the danger spectrum, but she tries to test both every day.
HOPE BEYOND DEATH
JEREMY ZIMMERMAN
Morna had died waiting for someone to rescue her, wasting away in a tower cell seemingly without doors. The wizard who had kidnapped her stopped showing up with food and water, and she died far from home in an unfamiliar land.
In death, she wandered the abandoned castle, wailing in her dismay. The sun would set, she would rise and begin her mournful cry afresh. She couldn’t say how long she had been dead. Countless nights of moaning blurred into each other. She no longer noticed seasons, and she didn’t keep a journal.
One night, a boy appeared on the blasted heath that surrounded the castle and watched her.
Normally she didn’t see people. There was no settlement visible and people rarely passed near the castle. When she did see people, they didn’t want to see her. Some averted their eyes, made a sign of warding against evil. Some were children, daring each other to touch the wall of the fortress and then run giggling from their fear.
But this boy seemed fearless, and he returned most nights. When he wasn’t looking at the castle walls, he was looking at her. She walked along the battlements, sounding her mournful cry, and he watched.
Even in death, she learned, she still felt self-conscious.
On one trip to the castle, the boy arrived carrying a heavy sack. Morna paused in her wailing, curious about the change in his routine. The boy pulled out a strange looking crossbow that was nearly as long as he was tall. After wrestling with it, he cocked the bowstring and placed a multi-pronged hook on top of it.
He staggered to lift it, then fired it toward the battlement near where she stood. The hook, which trailed a rope behind it, hit the wall and clattered back down to the ground. He cursed and reset the whole process. After several more tries, the hook caught on the wall, and he began climbing.
In all the time Morna had haunted this castle, no one had ever tried to break in. Since she had died, no one had tried to leave, either. She didn’t know if she should assure him that he didn’t need to go through all this effort for her. It was too late to rescue her, and the wizard was missing.
It was hard to monitor his progress along the wall. She could walk through everything in the castle except the exterior walls and the space above them. She couldn’t lean out over the crenellations to see how the boy was doing.
With a grunt of effort, the boy reached the top of the wall and pulled himself onto the battlements. He sat there panting, then looked up as she drew close, smiling a lopsided smile. She was so baffled by his arrival th
at she didn’t know how to respond. It didn’t occur to her to smile back.
“I can’t believe it,” he said. “I can’t believe I swiped you right from under Gill’s nose. You’re going to make me rich beyond my wildest dreams.”
Morna frowned, not certain what he meant.
“You probably don’t understand me at all,” he said as he rummaged through his bag. He pulled out a box with a brass screen on one side and a crank handle on another. “I just need you to hold still while I put you in this box, and then I’ll get you off to market.”
Though she didn’t know what the box was, she suspected it was bad. Even in death, she felt fear. And she ran.
She shot through the nearest wall, gliding down the stairs and through the next wall at the bottom. Since she no longer drew breath, she wasn’t winded from the effort or tight-chested from the fear. And yet she couldn’t remember the last time she had been this afraid. Certainly not since she died. And even then, she had been more delirious from hunger than actually afraid.
She paused in the garden and lurked between the trees and the overgrown flowerbeds, listening for her pursuer. No sound reached her ears. She would have sighed with relief if she breathed, but she felt certain she had escaped whatever bizarre fate the boy had in mind for her.
And then his footsteps rang in the corridor. He glanced into the garden from the hall he ran down before running past. Then he doubled back and paused in the doorway with his smile. He lifted the box with the mesh aimed toward her and began walking her way.
He made shushing noises. “It’s alright, Princess. It’s alright. Just get in the box, and I’ll get you out of here to a new home.”
“What kind of new home?” she asked. She hadn’t spoken since her death, and the sound of her moaning words alarmed her.
The boy’s expression fell. “I guess you can understand me after all. I don’t know what you heard me say earlier. But it’s a nice place, definitely not weird or uncomfortable. Probably.”
Morna shrieked and ran through the nearest wall and down the corridors again. She didn’t have a plan, she just ran through rooms, desperate to get away from the boy. In each room, she looked around for something useful. The castle was not large, and she had been through almost every room multiple times in the past. She had seen everything in those rooms, but she kept darting through them in hopes of finding something new.
She spotted the boy sneaking around the corridors of the castle, peeking into each room before creeping on to the next door. Each time she saw him, her fear went up another notch.
Eventually she willed herself to enter one of the two rooms she hadn’t returned to since she had died: the library.
It had been her first memory when she was kidnapped by the wizard. He had brought her there, tied up, while he gloated about the ransom he was extorting from her father the king. She’d wept and begged, but to no avail. He had dragged her up into the tower and sealed her in her doorless prison.
But in her fear, she grew desperate, and ventured into the library.
It was the largest room of the castle. Most of the walls were lined with books. Tucked into one corner was a small writing desk. The center held a large work table with stacks of books and a large glass bottle resting on its side in a wooden cradle. As she moved about the room, she noticed someone had painted dozens of symbols in a circle. Next to it stood a lectern with an open book turned toward the circle. A shadowy smudge of some sort hovered inside the circle near the book.
As she drew near it, the smudge shifted and a cold and alien awareness focused on her.
Morna retreated from the circle and bumped into something in the process. From one of the shelves, a tiny voice yelled, “Mek!”
She had moved through the table and collided with the bottle. It teetered in its perch until a winged imp the size of her fist landed on it to stablize it. The imp glared at her and again said, “Mek!”
“Aha!” the boy shouted from the doorway. He smiled, trying to catch his breath, and stepped into the room. “Look, I get it. Change is hard. But you’re a sad princess, and this is your chance to get away from here. Just hold still, I’ll crank this handle, and then we can leave together.”
A derisive snort came from the circle of symbols. “Spookmonger,” a grating voice said from within the shadows.
“Who said that?” the boy asked, looking about frantically.
“What...what is a spookmonger?” Morna asked.
The boy’s attention whipped back to her. “Not me. No. I’m definitely not one.”
“They capture ghosts and sell them,” the shadow said. When it spoke, Morna thought she caught a glimpse of white specks flashing. Like teeth.
“People buy ghosts?” she asked. “Who? And why?”
“No one,” the boy tried to answer as the shadow said, “People with a lot of money and desperate for a cure of dubious quality.”
The boy glanced around the room, still not recognizing where the grating voice came from. He began working the crank again on the box. “Quiet, you. It’s nothing like that. What you’ll be doing is helping me. I have a wife and three kids to feed.”
Morna no longer had a stomach, and yet she felt increasingly nauseated as the boy cranked the handle on the box. She doubled over and tried to back away, but he pressed closer to her. In frustration, she shoved at the glass bottle, forcing it out of its cradle and over the edge of the table.
“Mek!” the imp cried in dismay.
If the glass made any noise when it was shattered, it was immediately overwhelmed and forgotten by the shrieking that erupted. A yellow miasma swam up around the boy and soon he screamed as well. Eyes wide, he dropped his box and swatted at the smoke that shrieked all around him. He staggered farther into the room and into the circle of symbols.
And into the shadow.
More teeth than seemed plausible flashed in the darkness. At the first sign of blood, Morna fled the room.
~*~
It was many nights before Morna returned to the library. Instead, she skulked around the battlements and stared at the horizon. The sorrow that had prompted her years of wailing had abated. It was replaced by a cold dread.
She’d never heard of spookmongers before, or that ghosts could be bought and sold. She’d thought starving to death was as bad as it could get, but clearly there were more cruelties than she imagined. And the only one who seemed to know anything about these spookmongers was in her second least favorite room in the castle.
But finally, her fears motivated her enough to seek out the shadow. She worried that there would be blood and gore all over the study. But instead, the room was returned to its previous state. The bottle that she had broken had been replaced with a different bottle, the swirling yellow mist once more inside.
“Hello?” she called out.
The tiny imp reappeared and positioned itself between her and the bottle, arms spread wide as though it would block her from accessing it.
The darkness said, “You returned faster than I expected.”
“I need help,” Morna said. “The boy—the spookmonger—he said something about beating someone else here. There are more people, more spookmongers coming.”
“That will not end well for you,” the darkness said.
“You aren’t worried?” she asked.
“I’m not a ghost. And they wouldn’t be able to do anything with me. The old wizard had trouble binding me, and he was an actual practitioner of the arts, unlike ruffians like the spookmongers. If someone damages the circle, I’ll return to my own plane. Which is a shame, but not lethal. I’ll miss having books to read, but I will survive.”
“Can you help me, umm—I beg your pardon, I do not know your name.”
“You would not be able to speak my actual name. But I have many sobriquets. My favorite has always been ‘The Empress of Teeth.’” White danced in the darkness, which Morna wanted to believe was a smile.
“My name is Morna,” the girl said. “Princess of—”
“Yes, I know who you are. And no, I cannot help. It is nothing personal. I simply cannot leave the circle. The best I could do is be available for you to lure people in here again.”
Morna wrung her hands and paced in front of the Empress. “What can I do then?”
The Empress was quiet for a while before asking, “What abilities have you cultivated?”
“Abilities?”
“Can you move physical objects? Possess living things? Sway emotions?”
“No. I can walk through walls?”
“Any ghost can do that, and I’m sure those cretins will be prepared for such.”
“What about castle defenses? He was a powerful wizard. He must have had something.”
“Yes, he did.”
Hope blossomed in Morna’s absent heart. “Wonderful. How can we use them?”
“You need to wield his staff. I don’t know why the wizard disappeared, but he probably took his staff with him. Even if you were able to find it, you have no ability to wield it because you are insubstantial.”
“He could be dead,” Morna said. “And left the staff behind.”
“Have you seen a body? I thought not. Plus, even if he had died, he has contingency plans. His soul is bound to some hidden location far from here. He would just return as soon as he regrew his body.”
“He can do that?”
“Anyone can, if they know how. But that’s a more complicated prospect.”
“What about that bottle?” she asked. “I was able to touch that.”
“Of course you were. It’s warded. Much like my circle and, I gather, the outer walls. It keeps the screaming madness inside, and you out. Which makes it a physical thing for you.”
“Is the staff warded then?” she asked.
“Potentially, but this assumes the staff is still here. The wizard never left without it.”
“Where could I look?”
After a long pause, the Empress said, “Mek, can you bring us the master’s staff?”
Swords, Sorcery, & Self-Rescuing Damsels Page 22