“We don’t know who did kill the little girl, your lordship,” the headman said. “Now that you’ve told us who didn’t kill her.”
“Where did she live?” Aruendiel asked.
* * *
The house was smaller than most of the others in the village, a one-room wooden hut in a yard of brown dust. An ancient apple tree grew by the front door, bare and dead except for one last green limb. As they approached the house, a middle-aged man stood up uncertainly from where he had been lying in the meager shade of the tree, and called out something unintelligible.
“Too drunk to go see his own daughter’s killer hanged,” said the headman disgustedly.
The girl’s mother led them into the house. She had been standing next to the gibbet, Nora recalled, a slight woman in a black shawl. The headman called her Massy. Along one wall was a fieldstone hearth; on the other side of the room, a rough bedstead and a pile of straw, covered by a blanket. A trio of low stools stood in the middle of the dirt floor.
Aruendiel prowled around the room, peering into earthenware crocks, sifting the hearth ashes through his long fingers, while a group of children straggled into the hut. The missing child’s siblings, evidently: a boy around six, two smaller girls, and a half-naked toddler. The children milled about with a shy restlessness. Massy wrapped her arms protectively around the boy’s shoulders until Aruendiel told her to sit down. “When did you last see the child?” he asked.
There was a hesitant, almost grudging tone in Massy’s voice as she answered, but slowly the story emerged. The girl, Irseln, had been feeling poorly that day. A stomachache. She had stayed inside the house while the other children went out to play. Massy had been doing the wash. Coming back from the well with a load of water, she had seen Short Bernl behind the hut, near the shed. She didn’t like seeing him there. Everyone knew Short Bernl was filth. She asked him to leave. After he left, she did the wash in the yard. Only then did she go inside and see that Irseln was missing. At first she thought that the girl must have felt better and gone out to play. But when the other children came home, Irseln was not with them. Massy gave them supper and went out to find the child. There was no answer to her shouts.
“Where was your husband during all this?”
He got home late that night and went right to sleep, Massy said. “Fat Tod and Pirix say he was with them all day,” interjected the headman. “Helped them take some goats to market and then drink up the proceeds.”
The next day, presumably more sober, Irseln’s father had found bloodstains inside the shed.
“I see,” said Aruendiel. He looked at the children clustered around their mother. “Mistress Nora,” he said sharply, “take the children out of here.”
“Me?” said Nora, disappointed. She had been following Massy’s story with close attention. “Take them where?”
“Anywhere—but well away from here.”
Massy looked as though she would like to protest, but said nothing. With some difficulty, Nora managed to herd the children out of the house, carrying the toddler in her arms. The older boy stood defiantly beside his mother until she told him in a low voice to go look after his sisters.
Behind the hut was a small clearing with the remains of a vegetable garden, a tangle of thirsty, yellowing leaves and vines. To one side was the shed that she had already heard so much about, a small, fragile structure of weather-roughened boards.
“Irseln got killed there,” said the older girl, pointing at it. “Want to see the blood?”
“No,” said Nora untruthfully. “Also, I don’t think we should disturb your father.” He was slumped against the side of the shed, snoring gently. Man and building seemed to be propping each other up.
“He’s not my father,” said the boy contemptuously, tossing his hair out of his eyes.
“That Irseln pa,” said the smaller girl.
Nora looked at the children more closely. It was true that none of them bore much resemblance to the heavy-framed sleeping man; they were all fine-boned and slender, like their mother. Painfully thin, in fact, like a family of young sparrows. “Where’s your father, then?” Nora asked.
“Our father’s dead,” said the boy. “We used to have a bigger house, and chickens. Then Ma married Rorpin,” he said, looking at the sleeping man with distaste. “He drinks all the time. He’s been drunk ever since Irseln got killed.”
“Maybe he misses her,” Nora said.
“Maybe,” the boy allowed. “No one else misses her.”
“Why not?” Nora asked.
The boy shrugged. “She cried and complained all the time. She didn’t like us. We didn’t like her.”
“She hit me,” said the older girl. “She hit me a lot. And Gissy, too.”
“Irseln hit me,” said the smaller girl, rather proudly.
“Ma said her pa spoiled her. Irseln wouldn’t do what my ma said, ever,” said the older girl self-righteously. “Is that man in there really a wizard?”
“Yes,” said Nora.
“Is he going to do magic?”
“Probably.”
“Can we watch?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“He doesn’t want to be disturbed,” Nora said. “Where were you playing the day Irseln was killed?”
“Down in the meadow.” The girl indicated a path leading through the trees.
“Will you show me?”
“I guess so. Have you seen him do magic before?”
“Yes. A couple of times.”
“Like what? Can he turn things into gold?”
“Can he talk to animals?”
“Can he fly?”
Keeping small children entertained becomes much easier if one has spent some time in the company of a practicing magician, Nora discovered. Even a spare, relatively unemotional account of how Aruendiel had arranged her escape from the Faitoren held the children’s attention on the way to the meadow. Along the way she learned that the boy was named Horl, the two girls were Sova and Gissy, the wooden spoon that Sova clutched was actually a doll named Princess Butter, and no one seemed to call the toddler anything but the baby.
The children began a rambling, unstructured game of tag, all of them chasing one another around the meadow, except for the baby, who functioned as home base. It was a good game for unsupervised kids, Nora thought, because it meant that someone was always running after the toddler. She could not quite rid herself of the faint apprehension that Irseln’s killer might be lurking nearby, but the only other visitor to the meadow was a skinny dog that raced around with the children, barking.
His name was Browncoat, Sova informed Nora; sometimes he belonged to her family, sometimes he belonged to the family in the next hut. “Right now he belongs to them,” she said, flopping down on the grass and hugging the dog, “because Ma says we can’t feed him. Except sometimes. I miss Irseln,” she added suddenly.
“I thought you and Irseln didn’t get along.”
“No, but she could run fast. She was good at this game.” Sova twisted a lock of hair. “I wish she could have run away from the killer. Then she would still be alive.”
“We don’t know what happened yet,” Nora said carefully, but Sova shook her head.
“Gissy saw her ghost. Felt it.”
“Her ghost?” Nora said dubiously. Maybe Irseln was alive and Gissy had seen her.
“She pinched Gissy, like she always did. But there was no one there.”
The game was slackening. Gissy came trotting up slowly, tired, wisps of dry grass in her hair. “Tell Nora how Irseln pinched you last night,” Sova urged.
Gissy shook her head rebelliously. “Hungry,” she said. “I want stew.”
“Irseln pinched you, remember? Say yes, or I’ll pinch you.”
“Hold on, Sova. No pinching,” Nora said hastily. “Why don’t we go back to the house now?” Would there be anything to eat there? She hoisted the baby onto her hip and took Gissy by the hand. As she and the girls walked through
the grass, Sova scolded her doll: “Did you pinch Gissy? Bad girl, do you want a whipping? There, how do you like that? Stop crying, you bad girl! I’ve never known a brat as bad as you.”
“She’s crying because you’re slapping her,” Nora said.
“If she won’t stop crying, I will hit her with a stick. She has to mind her ma. She’s a bad girl, as bad as Irseln.”
Horl ran over to them. “Are we going back?” he asked.
“Gissy’s hungry, so we’re going back to the house,” Nora said.
“There’s nothing to eat there,” Horl said flatly.
“I want more stew,” said Gissy, her face crinkling. “The stew Ma made.”
“It’s all gone now, Gissy,” Sova said.
“You be quiet, Sova,” said Horl. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I do, too!” Sova said with indignation. “My ma found a hurt goat, it was going to die,” she explained to Nora. “So we had stew.”
Horl sighed dramatically. “We weren’t supposed to say anything about that, remember? The goat might belong to someone.”
“It wasn’t Nora’s goat. Was it, Nora?”
“No, not mine,” Nora said lightly. “Was the stew good?”
“Yes. I wish we had more. Could the wizard turn a rock into stew?”
Nora had entertained similar questions. “I think so,” she hazarded. “But what if it turned back into a rock inside your stomach?”
They debated the potential side effects of transformed foodstuffs all the way back. Shadows were lengthening; the sun was low on the horizon. The dog accompanied them, running in and out of the woods with muddy paws. He carried a light-colored, knob-ended stick in his mouth; Nora found something about its shape disturbing.
When they came in sight of the house, Aruendiel and the headman were standing near the shed, talking. Horl broke into a run. “Where’s my mother?” he demanded.
“She’s inside,” Aruendiel said curtly, then watched as the boy ran into the house, slamming the back door behind him. Sova and Gissy followed more slowly, pulling the toddler between them.
Nora walked over to the magician. Aruendiel was having a discussion with the man in brown that was obviously growing heated, but had not quite risen to the level of argument. After a moment, Aruendiel broke off and looked down at her. She was struck by how somber he looked, the lines around his mouth as stark as cracks in ice.
“Aruendiel,” she said, “I have to talk to you. I think something absolutely terrible has happened.”
“Ah,” he said, seizing Nora’s arm and leading her a few steps away, “what did the children say?” He spoke more warmly than she expected; it crossed her mind that he was pleased to have an ally.
“There’s no proof,” she said, trying to marshal her thoughts and impressions, feeling dismayed because they made such a motley array. “But I have a bad, bad feeling. Irseln misbehaved, she wouldn’t mind her mother—who’s her stepmother, did you know that?” Aruendiel nodded, and Nora went on: “The little girl, Sova, she talked about hitting her doll with a stick because it was a bad girl, like Irseln. And they’re all so thin—practically starving—but they had a big meal recently. Some kind of meat, a stew. The boy didn’t want to talk about it. And then I saw the dog with a bone in its mouth, like a femur—oh, this sounds ridiculous.”
Aruendiel clenched his mouth. “No, this is an ugly business. Mistress Massy is lying about something, you don’t need magic to see that—although that’s what my magic says, too. But the headman doesn’t want me to force the truth out of her. It’s all right for that pathetic woodlicker, but not for the stepmother of the missing girl. His first cousin, too. We must find the girl’s body. Where is the dog?”
“The dog?” Nora blinked. Aruendiel repeated his question with some impatience. She looked around but Browncoat had already wandered away. After some inquiry, and curious looks from those they asked, they tracked the dog to a neighboring hut. The dog lay outside the door, contentedly grinding a round stub of bone.
“That’s not the same bone,” said Nora with disappointment.
“Where’s the bone you had before?” Aruendiel demanded. He spoke with a rough familiarity, as though he and the dog were old acquaintances.
The dog raised its head and looked hard at Aruendiel, mildly surprised. It thumped its tail in the dust.
“Fetch it for us, please.”
The dog stood up slowly, stretching, and then trotted away toward Massy’s hut. About halfway there, he left the path, scratched in the earth under a bush, and then emerged with a longer, more slender bone in his mouth.
“Good, very good, thank you.” Aruendiel bent down to rough the dog’s fur behind the ears. He took the bone in his hand. “Yes, human. A child’s thighbone. Where did you find this? Can you show me?”
The dog uttered a short whine.
“I don’t have any here.”
Another whine, with an emphatic tilt of the muzzle.
“Very well. But first, you take me to the place where you got the bones. Mistress Nora,” he added abruptly, “there’s some ham in my saddlebag. For our friend.”
“We’re all mad here,” Nora said to herself, going in search of the ham. “I must be, too, or I wouldn’t have come.”
When she came back, the hut’s yard was empty, but she could follow the sound of voices through the deepening twilight. Off the path to the meadow, she found a sizable group gathered: the magician, the headman, and the men from the village. She could hear the scrape of spades against soil and pebbles. The villagers on the outskirts of the crowd were muttering to one another, something about how clever wizards thought they were.
After a few minutes, a spade hit something hard. Aruendiel said something to the diggers. They knelt and began using their hands to remove the dirt. There was a sudden pale wash of light; Nora recognized the illumination spell that Aruendiel had used in the library in Semr. Low murmurs traveled through the small crowd.
“Something’s gnawed those bones. Curse these dogs.”
“Looky how that one’s cut, straight as a rule. No dog did that.”
“Something funny about the color. Those bones, they aren’t raw.”
“Horsecock, you’re right, they’re cooked. Somebody cooked her.”
The diggers piled the remains onto a piece of cloth, Aruendiel directing them not to miss anything. When he was finally satisfied, they wrapped up the bones and handed them to the magician. He and the headman turned back to the hut. The crowd, now curiously silent, trailed after them.
Nora was about to go, too, when she felt something brush against her knee. She looked down. Browncoat gazed back expectantly, his nose aimed at the greasy package she held.
* * *
Nora waited outside Massy’s hut with most of the village. Aruendiel was inside, with Massy and the headman and a few others. The children had been extracted forcibly from the hut by a couple of men and taken to their aunt’s on the other side of the village. Their wails dissolved slowly in the night air. In her mind, Nora ran over the clues that seemed to point to a horrific crime—the missing child, the hints of abuse, the bones that had been split and gnawed—and wondered how to make them add up to a different result.
At last the door of the hut opened again. The headman stepped out. He looked around at the villagers outside the hut, their faces tired and rapt, and said, “The girl’s murderer has confessed. Time for you folk to go home.”
“Was it Massy?”
“Massy killed the girl?”
The headman said nothing; confirmation enough for the crowd.
“Did she cook the kid?”
“Did she eat her?”
“Go home,” said the headman again. Two more men came out of the hut, the same men who had been guarding Short Bernl in the afternoon, but now they were holding Massy, her arms bound behind her. The crowd began to shout at her. Massy looked away, head held proudly on her slender neck, as her captors pulled her toward the villag
e, along the same path her children had taken.
A light still burned inside the hut. As the yard emptied, Nora went inside. Aruendiel stood alone in the center of the room, rubbing the back of his neck. There was a slow, mechanical quality to his movements. Turning, he saw Nora.
“What do you want?” he demanded. Then he seemed to recollect himself. “Well, you were right,” he said in a more civil tone. “It was much as you reckoned.”
“What did she say?”
“She killed the girl. Not deliberately. The child would not stop crying. After some chiding, she began to scream—and kick—and bite. The woman, Massy, had chores to do. She hit the child again. The girl fell and bruised her head. On that iron pot.” He nodded at a black shape near the fireplace. “Mistress Massy says Irseln sat up and seemed well enough. She put the child back to bed. But the girl did not answer her when she returned. A little later, she was dead.”
Aruendiel paused and seemed disinclined to continue.
“And then?” Nora asked.
“And then Mistress Massy had four hungry children to feed, and a drunken worthless lout of a husband who was drinking up whatever wages he’d managed to earn that day.”
“That’s no excuse!”
“It was also a way to eliminate all traces of her crime. When the unfortunate Short Bernl came to the house that day, she even found a culprit for the child’s disappearance.”
Nora reached for one of the stools, which lay overturned on the floor, and set it upright. “He said he thought that Massy would give him something to eat.”
“Don’t sit there,” Aruendiel advised sharply. He went on: “Yes, he must have smelled cooking. But there’s almost nothing in Mistress Massy’s stores.”
“What do you mean, don’t sit there?” Nora asked. “On this stool?”
As if to answer her, the stool reared onto two legs, then toppled over. “Some of your magic?” she asked.
“Not at all. It’s the little girl. Irseln.”
“You’re joking!” Nora said. But there was Sova’s story. Nora looked at the stool dubiously. “Um, the little girl Gissy said Irseln pinched her, and there was no one there,” she added, in a more subdued voice.
The Thinking Woman's Guide to Real Magic Page 29