The Wizard Priest

by Patty Jansen

  She wasn’t getting anywhere near solving who had poisoned Lord Verdonck, but she knew where she might find Prince Bruno. Because the more she thought about it, the more convinced she became that the boy was Prince Bruno. She also remembered that she had seen a drawing in a book in the crypt of a boy aged about ten who looked like Prince Bruno. If there was indeed a boy in the crypt, as Gisele had insisted, then it was Prince Bruno.

  If the women were going to escape from the city, they should take him, because the thought of a young boy locked up inside the crypt horrified her.

  She should tell the dragon she knew where his master was. If anything could entice him out of hiding that information would do the trick.

  When she came back to the barn, the women were again sitting on the floor of the main barn tying wooden slats together with a thin rope to make a shield against arrows.

  They looked up when Nellie came in. “Where have you been?” Agatha asked, her voice brusque.

  No matter what Nellie did or said, she could never shake the feeling that Agatha disliked her.

  “This is going really well,” Nellie said of their handiwork.

  “It’s cold work,” Agatha said. “My fingers are ready to fall off.”

  She held up her hands. Her fingers were red, the skin flaky.

  Nellie was more concerned about Koby’s fingers. The girl was quiet and didn’t complain, but her hands and legs were covered in sores that never seemed to heal.

  “I will come and help you soon, but I have some news I have to tell the dragon.”

  “What makes you think it will listen this time?” Agatha said and continued to talk about some people doing all the work while other people gallivanted about.

  Nellie ignored her. At some point, she would figure out what Agatha’s problem was, but that time was not now.

  At the word dragon, the children in the corner of the barn stopped dropping pebbles in the water near the sea cows and watched Nellie.

  She went into the storeroom where they slept and retrieved the dragon box from her bag.

  When she picked it up, a puff of sparks exploded from the top shelf and drifted down to the mattresses that lay on the hay, and then back up into the air.

  Nellie opened the box.

  The sparks withdrew to the door.

  “Do you want to get in? Are you afraid of this box?”

  The sparks moved closer to her and back to the wall a few times.

  “Come on, show yourself. We won’t bite.”

  And then she had to laugh about that. Fancy telling a dragon not to be afraid. Dragons shouldn’t fear anything.

  She snapped the box shut again.

  “Suit yourself, but if you don’t get in the box, you will never see your master. I know where he is.”

  The sparks came a bit closer again.

  “Do you know that he’s alive? I learnt this today from someone who knows there is a boy living in the crypt. I think that’s him. I think you know that, too.”

  Sparks came a little closer.

  “Come on. I’m not angry with you. At least I won’t be angry if you’re nice and behave yourself and don’t mess things up again.”

  Now the sparks went lower, to about knee level.

  “So this is it, right? You feel sorry because you made a mess?”

  The sparks went even lower.

  Nellie kept talking. She wasn’t sure that the dragon understood, although she would like to think he did. “I know you can’t help it. That fire dog scared me, too. I don’t know where it came from. I need your help to figure out who it belongs to. We need to make sure it doesn’t discover us. Maybe when we have your master we’ll defeat the magician who owns it, but for now we just need to be careful.”

  The sparks shivered.

  Nellie bent down and pretended to pat them as if they were a dog.

  Her hand and went right through, and she didn’t even feel any pricks of the sparks.

  “Come on, we could you use your help. I forgive you. We all make mistakes. I’m sure that the other women will forgive you too, as long as you now know to be quiet.”

  The sparks exploded outwards.

  Slowly the space in between solidified. First a golden mist appeared that grew thicker and thicker until it formed into a deep golden dragon with shimmering scales. Not the same colour as before, because the dragon had been red, but still the same animal.

  “Boots!” Anneke yelled from the door. She ran into the storeroom and spread her arms against the dragon’s flanks.

  “See, he came back. He was here all along. He loves us.”

  The other children also stood in the doorway, cheering. “Boots is back, Boots is back.” This brought the adults to the door.

  Nellie went to stand in front of the dragon and held out the box. He sniffed at the box, and then sneezed, blowing a gust of warm air over Nellie’s hand.

  “I hope this means you will behave, and you will go back into the box whenever we tell you. It’s for your own best interest, and we do want you to come with us.”

  But in all honesty, she was happy to see the dragon again, because having him around would mean they had another weapon against the guards. If things went wrong during the escape attempt, having a dragon in your pocket was always a good thing.

  With the dragon in the room, it was already much warmer, so at least tonight they would not have to bring coals into the room with all kinds of danger of fire.

  The other women were all standing in the doorway.

  “Look, mammy, Boots is back,” Anneke said.

  “As long as it doesn’t get you kids into any more mischief,” Agatha said, in a prim voice.

  “We’ll be very careful. We’ll teach him to lie still and be quiet, won’t we, Boots?”

  Her mother sniffed and turned to the barn.

  There was something familiar about her behaviour that made Nellie think of herself when she first came to work for Mistress Johanna. The little girl had only been a few years younger than Nellie, but Nellie was so very disturbed by the way Johanna used her wood magic to snoop on people. Because it was Not Proper, and One Didn’t Do That Sort Of Thing.

  And the church said magic was bad and therefore people with magic were bad, which she believed . . . until she met a person with magic, and it wasn’t like that at all. Nellie had been afraid of Johanna at first, and her fear had manifested into telling Johanna not to do anything that brought her into contact with situations where magic might happen.

  Nellie was scared of it, and she had been even more scared that her father would find out that the well-off, wholesome merchant family who employed his daughter had dealings with magic. Because she was sure her father would be furious and tell her to stay home. Nellie had liked the young girl and her father, and she liked living away from her home, so she had forced herself to accept Johanna’s magic.

  That made her realise: Agatha was scared of her daughter’s ability.

  Chapter 16

  * * *

  AT NIGHT, IN the storeroom, while listening to the waves slapping against the quay and the soft snoring of the dragon which again slept surrounded by the children, Nellie attempted to sort out the disturbed thoughts she had about the church.

  She believed the church had collected evil artefacts with the purpose of keeping them out of the hands of unwitting citizens.

  The past of Saardam was littered with stories of people who had acquired evil items by accident and had suffered for it.

  So she accepted the good intentions of the church in keeping those items out of the hands of the public.

  With no will in the world, however, could she justify keeping people prisoner. Not even the most evil of crazy people deserved to be locked up in the crypts of the church. She didn’t think that most people in the church knew about this, because good, honest people would never stand for it. And most of the people in the church were good, she had no doubt about that.

  And then, because it was dark, and at night everything se
emed different, the more she thought about it the more she doubted that there was a boy locked up in the crypts. Why would the church lock up people when there was a perfectly good prison for them to go to? A prison, which she should add, the Regent had no trouble using.

  At night, when the world was dark and strange and sounds kept her awake, was when she needed her faith in the Triune to pull her through. All her life, the church had been her one shining beacon, the light that guided her through the dark waters, the home she longed for.

  The church couldn’t do something as bad as lock up a young boy.

  Gisele had to be mistaken. She had to be.

  But, as the fishermen woke up outside and she could hear them talking on the quay, and the light that peeped underneath the barn door slowly turned grey, she thought about the things Gisele had told her. Gisele would not lie about the things the monks did to her. She could blame the Guentherite order, but they were ultimately part of the same church, and if the church did something bad and the order covered it up, or the other way around, they were both wrong.

  There was no way she could shape or bend it. If there was a boy locked in the church crypt, that was unspeakably evil.

  She got up early, because pretending to be asleep was a waste of time, and started making the fire. She hung a pot over the fire to boil.

  While she waited for the fire to spread across the chunks of wood she had thrown in the pit, she stared over the water. A couple of sea cows stuck their heads above the surface and looked at her with their sad eyes.

  She felt utterly miserable. It had taken her all this time, since she had received her father’s book, to realise that the world that was the foundation of her very essence was a lie. She had always believed kings and barons and dukes existed solely to enrich themselves, and that the church existed to keep them honest and make sure they didn’t abuse the people. But they were all in bed with each other. They sat at the same table and shared the same wine.

  There was a soft sound behind her. She turned around to see the dragon coming out of the storeroom. He did this by dissolving into sparks and reforming into a dragon once he got into the barn, because otherwise he wouldn’t fit through the door. He came up to the fire and blew a gust of hot air over the flames, fanning them into a roaring inferno.

  “That was useful, thank you. But be careful. We don’t want to start a fire in there.”

  The dragon turned his head to her, with his ears flat against his neck.

  Nellie patted the warm skin.

  “You are a silly dragon.”

  He made a soft purring sound. Maybe he had taken too much notice of the kitten.

  “You want to free your master, don’t you?”

  The dragon looked up at her, giving no sign that he understood what she said.

  Nellie patted his warm neck, seeing the inside of the barn and the dragon’s golden skin through a haze of tears.

  Everything was broken. Everything she had ever believed in was gone. She had always found strength in her inner peace, and now even that was gone.

  Was there anyone left in this place she could trust?

  But she would give the truth one more chance.

  Nellie hadn’t seen Shepherd Adrianus since she had left the palace. In fact, she hadn’t seen him since he had stood by while Shepherd Wilfridus evicted the poor people from the church. Since it had turned out that some of those poor people were not quite as poor as they looked and some were there because that was their way of life, Nellie could see some of Shepherd Wilfridus’ reasoning.

  The church was for worshippers. There were other places where homeless people could sleep. With so many of the houses in the city empty, it shouldn’t be hard to find somewhere. It did not need to be the church.

  It was just that . . . many of those, especially the women and children, were church people, looking for help and being turned away.

  Nellie might understand it, but agree with it, no. Shepherd Adrianus wouldn’t agree with it, either. To her, it felt like he might have known of some disturbing facts he was too scared to become involved in. That he was scared of falling foul of Shepherd Wilfridus, who was his ultimate superior.

  She wanted Shepherd Adrianus to know that whatever happened in the next few days, she still loved the church and she understood and forgave him, and that she would continue to worship the Triune and carry out His word.

  It was with a certain trepidation that she entered her beloved church, expecting . . . she didn’t know what. To be banished? To be called a witch? To be asked about the dragon?

  The muffled sound of her footsteps in the church vestibule, the achingly familiar smell of incense mingled with the musty smell of dust and dry stone made her eyes prick. She longed for the good times that she had come here during, times in which she had utter trust in this organisation.

  Her footsteps echoed in the empty space when she walked down the aisle to the statue of the Triune behind the altar.

  This statue looked a lot kinder than the one in the main church, and its faces, that were so contorted in the statue in the main church, were almost friendly. You could imagine the Father as an old man visiting your house, the Ghost as a patient friend who always stood behind you, and the Holy God as a shepherd who led the way.

  There were no more candles in the box next to the altar, and she had no coin to drop into the donations box, but she went up to say a prayer anyway.

  She prayed that the Triune would forgive her for all the things she would do. She prayed that He would see that her intentions were good, and that she was only angry with the selfish people who took the word of the Book of Verses and twisted those words to suit their own means.

  She prayed that the Holy Triune would see that she only wanted to expose those powerful men who wanted to enrich themselves and used the church to do so. And this, incidentally, was one of the major accusations they had levelled at the Belaman Church.

  She prayed that they would see their errors and return to the good intentions of the Triune.

  She prayed that the church had a very good reason to hold someone prisoner inside the crypt. She prayed that the person down there wasn’t Prince Bruno, but was a poor altar boy who had committed some transgression and that all the times that Gisele had heard about this person, it had really been a number of different people.

  It might even be that being locked up in the dark for several days was part of an obscure ritual that the church liked to put naughty boys through.

  She prayed that she had been mistaken, that she had misread her father’s notes, and that everything could go back to normal, the prisoners would be freed and she wouldn’t have to risk everyone’s lives by carrying out that ridiculous plan.

  When she finished her prayer, she got up, and walked through the side door of the church to the courtyard, on the other side of which the shepherd’s house stood.

  It looked so familiar. She had lost count of how many times she had walked up these steps to find Shepherd Adrianus and his warm friendship. The clean windows, the neatly painted door, the slightly worn door handle: she could picture it all.

  For moment Nellie thought everything would be as it was before. The shepherd would see her argument and would be able to convince everyone in the church she was right. The witch drownings would be cancelled and the prisoners released, because people were good, weren’t they?

  But when she tried to enter the door, it was locked.

  She knocked. “Shepherd, it’s me, Nellie.”

  There were some sounds from inside the home, and moments later the door opened. But the person inside was not Shepherd Adrianus. It was one of the deacons who used to work in the main church. Nellie didn’t remember his name. He was tall and lanky, towering over her, and regarding her with a flat expression. His face was unpleasant.

  “Yes? You knocked?” He sounded annoyed.

  “Oh. I’m here to see Shepherd Adrianus.”

  “He does not live here any more.” His voice was cold and the tone
chilled Nellie.

  “What do you mean? I was here just a few days ago, and he—”

  “He doesn’t live here anymore. Simple as that. This is not his house. It belongs to the church.”

  Yes, she knew that, but Shepherd Adrianus was the church. “What happened? Where is he now?”

  “Believe me, child, it would be better for you not to worry about it. The shepherd needed some time apart from the church and the congregation, and he has gone away for a while. When he has finished his deliberations, he will be back.”

  “When will that be?”

  “I can’t tell at this point in time. The Shepherd Wilfridus has the final say over that.”

  “I just want to know what happened to him,” Nellie said. “He’s my friend. He’s all right, isn’t he?”

  “He is in fine health,” the deacon said.

  “Then where is he? I want to see him.”

  “The shepherd has decided to relieve him of his duties for a limited time.”

  “He hasn’t done anything, has he?”

  “He needs to reconsider his position. Look, it’s nothing serious. We all do this from time to time, to reconnect our bond with the Triune.”

  Nellie was really starting to dislike this man. Avoiding her questions and making out like Shepherd Adrianus had done something wrong. She knew she should probably give up, but she wanted to show that Shepherd Adrianus had supporters. She straightened her back.

  “Well, I hope he comes back soon, because he’s a very good man. He always looks after the poor people. We all like him very much.”

  “That’s very nice to know, child. The church makes their own decisions, however. But I can ask the shepherd if he will take it into consideration.”

  And then Nellie left because there was nothing more to say. She had her answer.

  If the church appreciated good men, they would not send shepherd Adrianus away.

  She had no more excuse. She would need to act. And that meant a lot of things she dreaded doing, but they had to be done.