by Blair Drake
“Ath-a-letes,” the girl said, adding a syllable. “What is an ath-a-lete?”
Tash rolled her eyes, her patience running out. “Come on,” she said. “This is getting old.”
The girl gave her a quizzical look. “I do not understand,” she said, then gave a good-natured shrug. “You can teach me. I love to learn.” She resumed walking along the dirt road, considerately slowing her pace so Tash could keep up to her. “My name is Elspeth,” she said. “What do they call you?”
“Tash,” Tash said automatically, then added, “Natasha. Everyone calls me Tash.”
“Na-tash-a,” Elspeth sing-songed, sighing rapturously. “I have never heard such a name before. Na-tash-a.”
Tash had never liked her name. She was named after her maternal grandmother, whose parents were Russian immigrants. She’d loved her grandmother, and loved eating the Russian foods her grandmother cook from scratch—blinis, borscht, and angel wings, which were like the kind of fried dough you could buy at carnivals, only better. But Tash wished she hadn’t been stuck with a Russian name. It was exotic, but not in a cool way.
Elspeth abruptly turned off the road, following a path into the woods. When Tash hesitated, Elspeth turned and waved her on. “Prithee, follow me. This way will get us to Goody Cooke more quickly than the road.”
The woods were awfully dark. Tash wasn’t scared, but…but where the hell were they going? She already didn’t know where she was. She didn’t want to travel even farther into unknown territory. She always heard that if you were lost, you should stick to the road. Also…all that poison ivy.
But Elspeth was prancing down the dirt path, and Tash didn’t want to lose sight of her. Even if she was a first-year involved in some stupid cosplay, she was Tash’s best chance of getting back to school. Sooner or later, the charade would be done, and they could both return to campus.
The path was twisted and uneven, with jutting roots and bulging granite stones. Tash slowed her pace, and Elspeth skipped ahead toward a clearing. A rustic wood cabin stood at the center, surrounded by a few smaller outbuildings. The land on one side was cultivated into a garden that looked pretty much done for the season, most of the plants dead or dying. A few chickens clucked and walked jerkily around inside a small enclosure abutting a tiny hut.
“Goody Cooke!” Elspeth shouted, running to the cabin’s door and swinging it open. “Look who has come to call on us!”
As Tash reached the clearing, an older woman appeared in the doorway. She was dressed like Elspeth, in a long gray dress, black shoes, and a white cap. Her face was narrow and weathered, her nose sharp and her eyes even sharper.
The woman frowned as Tash approached. She glanced past Tash, swept her gaze left and right, then clamped a hand around Tash’s arm and urged her into the cabin. Elspeth followed them inside, and the woman slammed the door shut.
The cabin looked like something a few strong people could build with their bare hands. A tall fireplace filled one wall, with hinged wrought-iron rods protruding from its brick walls, holding black pots. A rustic table surrounded by several rough-hewn chairs stood near the fireplace. Shelves filled with jars, bowls, and cloth sacks lined the wall beneath a couple of multi-paned windows. A straw broom stood propped in a corner. Pegs along another wall held coats and dresses, all as plain as what the woman and Elspeth wore.
The other side of the room contained two beds with wooden frames, lumpy mattresses, and puffy quilts. Ancient-looking trunks stood at the foot of each bed. A small table between the two beds held a kerosene lamp. A ladder climbed the wall to a loft above the room. The only lighting came from the sun spilling through the windows.
Tash turned from the bed area back to the main part of the room. An unlit waxy candle stood in the center of the table. What looked like bouquets of dead flowers hung on the wall near the window. A pitcher and bowl sat on top of a cabinet beside the front door, with buckets stashed beneath it. In a shadowed corner, a black cat sat so still, Tash almost didn’t notice him. His amber eyes gazed at Tash with the sort of snooty expression most cats seemed to have. She was a dog person, herself.
What was this place? Had she wound up in one of those historical reproduction villages? How? Why?
“She is hurt,” Elspeth reported, untying her bag from her waist and setting it on the table.
“I can see that,” the woman said, pulling out a chair. “Sit,” she commanded.
Tash lowered herself onto the chair, wincing when she bent her knee.
The woman glanced over her shoulder at Elspeth. “Did you find any Hens of the Woods?”
“One. It was not terribly large.”
“One is better than none.” The woman lifted Tash’s leg and propped it on another chair. “Fetch me some comfrey leaves and a wet cloth.” Then she turned back to Tash. Her eyes glinted with an odd combination of concern and suspicion. “Who are you?”
“Natasha Pruitt.”
The woman seemed stern and more than a little forbidding, not someone Tash wanted to get on the wrong side of.
“I found her on the road by the field.” Elspeth poured water from the pitcher into the bowl and carried it to the table. She handed the woman a square of white cloth, then crossed to the shelves and located a brown fabric sack, which she brought to the table as well. She was so spirited and light on her feet. If she were a student at Gray Cliffs Academy, Tash would recruit her for the soccer team. They could always use girls who were quick and energetic.
The woman dipped the cloth into the bowl, wrung it out, and pressed it to Tash’s knee. While the water softened the scabs of blood, the woman loosened the drawstring on the sack and pulled out two large green leaves. “This will bring ease,” she said, crushing the leaves and then pressing them to Tash’s knee so the juice from the leaves oozed onto her cut.
“I think some antiseptic ointment and a Band-Aid would do the trick,” Tash suggested, not exactly thrilled about having leaf sap smeared over her skin.
The woman scowled at her. “I know nothing of such an ointment. And a band would likely constrict your leg and cause it to wither.”
“You must trust her,” Elspeth said. “She is the wisest healer in the county.”
“Do not boast about me,” Goody Cooke said, although her expression softened slightly at Elspeth’s praise. She spread the leaves across Tash’s knee and draped the wet cloth over them. “Who sent you?” she asked.
“Sent me?”
“If you come bringing trouble, I cannot help you.”
Elspeth laughed. “You help everyone, Goody Cooke.”
“Hush,” the woman snapped. “You know not who this girl is, yet you brought her into our home.” She turned back to Tash. “I shall do what I can for you, but then you must go.”
“Go where?” Tash blurted out. Frustration churned inside her. She didn’t want to be here any more than the woman wanted her here. But she had no idea how to get back to where she belonged. “Nobody sent me. I just—I was in my dorm room at school, and then on the roof, and suddenly I was here. I don’t know why. I want to go home.”
The woman lifted the cloth and the leaves from Tash’s leg. Almost immediately, the pain level dropped a few notches. “What school?” the woman asked.
“There is a school where girls go.” Elspeth sounded almost giddy. “I should like to go there, Goody Cooke.”
The woman sent her a silencing look, then turned back to Tash. “Why do you dress this way?” she asked. “It is not proper dress for a woman.”
“It is at my school,” Tash told her. “Believe me, I’d rather be in jeans.”
“She calls it a uniform,” Elspeth added, then frowned prettily. “What are jeans?”
Before Tash could answer, the woman spoke. “You are hurt, and I shall help you. But you could bring danger into this house.” She wiped the damp leaves over Tash’s knee, and the pain receded even more. “I will ask again: did someone send you here?”
Tash checked herself before blurting out, “
No.” Had someone—or, more likely, something—sent her here? She hadn’t gotten here, wherever here was, on her own. She hadn’t bolted from the dorm, marched off the school grounds, and walked until she found that dirt road along the edge of the field…and then lost her backpack and tripped and fallen onto her hands and knees.
“I don’t know,” she answered honestly. “I don’t know how I got here.”
Goody Cooke and Elspeth exchanged a look. “Maybe she is possessed,” Elspeth said quietly.
“Or she is an apparition, come to trick us,” Goody Cooke added. “I have warned you, Elspeth. You must be more careful. There are people who wish us ill.”
“I don’t wish you ill,” Tash insisted, surprised to hear herself speaking in their strange, old-fashioned manner. “I’m not an apparition. I’m Natasha Pruitt, a senior at Gray Cliffs Academy. Co-captain of the girls’ soccer team. Violinist in the school orchestra. I’m taking BC calculus and two other AP courses this year. I’m Kyle Tillis’s girlfriend. Or at least I was all those things this morning. And I—” She cut herself off before giving voice to the strange thought taking shape in her head: I have come here to help you. How she could help this cranky old woman and her effervescent young sidekick, Tash couldn’t begin to guess. What help did they need? Who the hell was Tash to be offering help to anyone, when she felt so weirdly helpless herself?
Goody Cooke and Elspeth stared at her as if she were speaking a foreign language. After a minute, Elspeth said, “Nathaniel Rogers plays the violin. I have often seen him playing outside the tavern.”
“And you have seen the Reverend Beecham disapprove of fiddling,” Goody Cooke said. “He calls it the work of the devil.” Her gaze swung back to Tash, dark and accusing.
“Playing the violin is not the work of the devil,” Tash said harshly. “Not that I play all that well. But I’m in the first violin section.” Seated pretty far back, and only in the first violin section because all the seniors played first violin. As far as Tash was concerned, violin was just one more thing she’d added to her college applications, to make her look brilliant and well-rounded. She wasn’t even sure she’d continue to play, once she graduated from GCA.
She had no idea who the woman and the girl were, and she was pretty much at their mercy. But she wasn’t going to sit in this rigid, uncomfortable chair and listen to them claim her time spent in the school orchestra was in any way sinful. “Music is cool. It’s…holy,” she said.
“You do believe that,” Elspeth told Goody Cooke. “You do not believe the nonsense the Reverend Beecham preaches.”
“Hush, child, or you will get us all killed.” Goody Cooke directed her attention back to Tash. “Did the Reverend Beecham send you here to trick me?”
“I don’t even know who Reverend Beecham is.”
Elspeth gestured toward the cat. “Apollo has not leapt at the wayfarer. If she were evil, would he not have let us know?”
The older woman glanced at the cat, who swept his tail across the floorboards and blinked his large yellow eyes. He didn’t approach, though. He didn’t leap.
Goody Cooke sighed and turned back to Tash. “I shall let you stay until you are healed.” She sounded less than thrilled about her decision. “And then you must go. I know not what trouble you may bring us. Elspeth, fetch one of your dresses.” She eyed Elspeth up and down, then shook her head. “No, they will never fit her. One of mine, then. She cannot wear these odd raiments. If she is to stay here, she must look ordinary. Even though—” she zapped Tash with another cold stare “—she is not.”
Elspeth scampered to the row of pegs and riffled through the dresses hanging from them. She pulled one from its peg. It was a darker gray than the one she had on, but obviously created by the same no-talent designer as her own ugly dress.
Before she could bring it to the table, someone knocked on the door. “Goody Cooke!” a man hollered, then pushed the door open. “My wife needs you. Her time has come.”
Goody Cooke stepped between the man and the table, as if she could block Tash from his view. He appeared a lot younger than Goody Cooke, but older than Elspeth and Tash. His wavy black hair was pulled back in a ponytail, and he wore a white shirt with blousy sleeves, knickers, and mud-splattered white knee-highs. It occurred to Tash that three people of widely varying ages, dressed in bizarre, old-fashioned clothing, went well beyond some GCA prank.
“How frequent are her pains?” Goody Cooke asked the man as Elspeth darted to the shelves and grabbed a large bag. She carried it to Goody Cooke and positioned herself next to the older woman, forming a bigger barricade between the man and Tash.
It didn’t help. He leaned left and peered around Goody Cooke. “What have you here?” he asked. “A Scottish lad? I hear those men wear skirts. Kilts, they’re called.”
Goody Cooke wisely chose not to answer. She took the bag from Elspeth and nudged the man toward the door. “I do not know how long I shall be,” she told Elspeth. “Prepare the stew, so it will be ready by nightfall. And get milk from Goody Warren. There are eggs on the shelf.”
Standing in the doorway , the man attempted to peek past Goody Cooke. “It is a Scots lad, then? From the north?”
“Just a wayfarer,” Goody Cooke said, ushering him out of the cabin. “Have you summoned Ruth’s mother? She will need another woman with her…”
Through the open door, Tash glimpsed a wooden wagon with a horse harnessed to it. Elspeth slammed the door shut.
“Is Goody Cooke—” Tash stumbled slightly over the old woman’s name “—a midwife?”
“The best in the county,” Elspeth boasted. “She has never once lost a mother or a child. One would think that is a good thing, but some people—” she lowered her voice to a whisper “—think Goody Cooke performs magic. She does not. It is not magic. It is wisdom.” Elspeth returned to the table and lifted the wet mess of leaves and soggy dead flowers from Tash’s knee. “I should wish to be as wise as she is, but some people believe wisdom is treacherous—especially the wisdom of women.” She dabbed gently at Tash’s knee with the cloth, then carried a strip of muslin from one of the shelves and wrapped it around Tash’s knee. She tied it snugly, but Tash could still bend her leg. Handing Tash the dress, Elspeth said, “You must put this on. And prithee tell me what are jeans.”
“They’re…trousers,” Tash told her. For some reason, she was beginning to believe Elspeth actually didn’t know what jeans were.
“Trousers? On a girl?” Elspeth erupted in giggles. “What insanity! Remove your coat.” She tugged at Tash’s blazer.
Tash slid her arms from the sleeves of the jacket, but grabbed it before Elspeth could carry it away. For some reason, she knew the pin Headmistress Lalane stuck in her pocket was important. She pulled it off the lapel where she pinned it just a short while ago. It felt warm against her palm.
She had no idea what it was. More than a pin, clearly. Pins didn’t heat up, did they? And why did Lalane stuff it into Tash’s pocket? Tash wasn’t about to let Elspeth or the old midwife deprive her of it.
“I need this,” she insisted, setting the pin on the table. She looked at the drab gray dress Goody Cooke was ordering her to wear and wondered whether a decorative piece of jewelry might jazz it up a bit.
If she couldn’t wear her uniform, she probably couldn’t wear her pin visibly, either. She unbuttoned her blouse and fastened the pin to her bra strap.
Once again, Elspeth gawked at her. “Pray forgive my brazenness,” Elspeth said, touching one of the bra’s satin straps, “but what is this?”
The girl had never seen a bra before. She’d never heard of phones, or jeans, or girls attending school. The old lady didn’t know what antiseptic ointment was, and she treated Tash’s knee with a couple of leaves. And the guy in his period costume, and his horse-drawn wagon…
Tash wasn’t on the island. She wasn’t at school. She wasn’t even in the same century she’d been in when she’d started the day.
This was beyond weird.