“A floater?” Elizabeth sounded confused.
“A floater,” Isabelle repeated, liking the sound of it. “You know, someone who floats through time and space, going from here to there, exploring.”
Elizabeth was quiet for a moment. “Don’t think there’s such a thing,” she said finally. “Everybody’s got a time and a place. You leave it now and again, in dreams, or if you’re drawing a picture and all wrapped up in your imagination—” She paused a second. “Do you know what I mean by that?”
Isabelle nodded. “That’s a kind of floating too, I suppose.”
“I think that’s mostly the kind folks do. And then every once in a while, maybe, one or two do as you have, and fall into another world for a bit, but you can’t stay. You’ve got to go back.”
“But why?” Isabelle asked. “I’m not saying I won’t, but why do I have to?”
Elizabeth touched Isabelle on the shoulder. “Because your ma misses you.” She paused, then added softly, “She does, ya know. She hasn’t much family other than you, has she?”
Isabelle stopped short. “How do you know?”
Elizabeth grinned. “You think you’re the only one who has a bit of a gift, girl?”
“You mean magic?”
“Magic, gift, different words for the same thing. You know when folks need help, I know when folks need each other. ‘Tis a simple gift, but sometimes useful.”
And so the two girls continued walking toward the camp, one smiling, the other shaking her head.
37
Faint voices rang in Isabelle’s ears. She shook her head, trying to make the voices fall out, and rolled from under the layers of blankets that made up her bed. “Bed” in quotes.
They had been in the camp three days, and Isabelle was exhausted. Some of the kids seemed to be improving, true enough, especially the younger ones, who were beginning to come out of their tents and take tentative steps this way toward the fire or that way to the creek. Sugar had grown well enough to help Rat Face tend to the brewing, and Isabelle noticed that he didn’t seem half as cranky when he was making up riddles and rhymes to keep the little girl amused.
But a lot of the kids were still sick, and Hen and Isabelle were tending to them hour after hour, bringing them the teas, applying cool cloths to their foreheads, singing little songs. It felt to Isabelle like they had been there a hundred years and would be there a hundred years more, and she would never see Grete or her mom again, and there would never be a time to tell everyone there was no witch and they could all go home.
Isabelle dressed and made her way to the tent where Elizabeth was doling out the little bit of breakfast there was to be had. That was another problem: Food supplies were low.
“We’ll have to move camp,” Isabelle heard Samuel say as she walked into the tent, where Elizabeth was holding up a piece of bread in each hand, as if to show how little they had left. “We’ve barely enough to feed ourselves.”
“The children aren’t well enough to be moved,” Elizabeth told him. “Besides, it’s the season. We can’t go back now—the witch would get us for sure.”
Samuel turned to Isabelle, raised an eyebrow at her. “It’s time, don’t ya think?”
“To move camp?” asked Isabelle. “I don’t know if that’s even possible right now.”
“No, no. Time to tell this one the truth,” Samuel replied. “As the others get well, we’ll tell them, too. But we can’t stay here more than two or three more days before there’s nothing left to eat.”
Elizabeth shook her head sadly. “It wasn’t planned well, that’s the truth of it. Witch came upon us unawares. We didn’t expect the signs till much later in the spring, so when the shadow crossed the moon, no one was ready. Usually we come in with plentiful flour and soda for bread, our packs filled with potatoes. But there wasn’t time this season. She’s got us trapped now, that witch does.”
And so Samuel and Isabelle told Elizabeth about the witch, the non-witch, the complete absence of a witch in the woods. She listened closely, then said she had to think about it and walked in circles around the camp for an hour before returning and saying, “Not everyone will believe you, you know,” before beginning to chop mushrooms to put in a soup for lunch. “You’ll have a hard time with this crowd, convincing them.”
“Have we convinced you?” Samuel asked. “That would be a start.”
“Don’t know yet,” said Elizabeth forthrightly. “I’d like some proof.”
Isabelle and Samuel looked at each other. “Bring your grandmother here,” Samuel said, and Isabelle nodded. In fact, why hadn’t they thought of that as soon as they came into a camp where everyone was sick? Why hadn’t one of them run to retrieve the famous Grete the Healer?
“It’s a risk,” Samuel said, as though reading Isabelle’s thoughts (could he? she wondered, feeling at that very second a little weary of thought reading and voice hearing and magic and gifts in general). “But perhaps one well worth taking.”
It was decided: Isabelle and Samuel would go. Isabelle ran to tell Hen, who was at the campfire overseeing the brewing of a batch of echinacea tea. She agreed she could keep watch over the children with Rat Face and Sugar’s help, so Isabelle and Samuel started off, carrying several burlap bags apiece to fill from Grete’s stores of flour, sugar, apples, and nuts.
“I know your grandmother’s not the witch,” Samuel said after they’d gone a mile or two down the path toward Corrin, “but still and the same, it makes my bones quiver a bit to be walking in her direction.”
“Maybe if you remind yourself there was never a witch to begin with, you won’t be so scared,” Isabelle offered.
Samuel puffed out his chest. “I’m not scared,” he said. “Just a bit wary, is all. Grew up my whole life believing in a witch, you know.”
“But now you know there’s not a witch, so why worry about it?”
“Habit, I reckon,” Samuel replied with a shrug.
It was a warm morning, a few clouds in the sky, a handful of sparrows flitting through the trees over their heads. After days spent in stuffy tents, Isabelle enjoyed being outdoors. She could smell honeysuckle and thought she might grab some if she saw it. Grete could make some honeysuckle tea, and maybe some cookies, or a cake, a couple gallons of soup. . . .
Isabelle’s stomach growled.
“I could use something to eat myself,” Samuel agreed, and plucked a piece of grass from the side of the path to chew on.
After they’d walked for an hour, Isabelle heard something strange, and then realized it wasn’t what she was hearing that was strange—it was the fact she didn’t hear anything at all. No voices crowded her head, no moans and groans jostled for a place near the front of her brain. It was quiet as a garden at night in there, only the occasional chirp of one of Isabelle’s own thoughts disturbing the air.
Isabelle smiled. It was nice to have a break. Maybe when she’d had more practice at being magic, she’d be able to control the noise in her head a little better, organize it, give each troubled thought its own little room in her brain. Maybe, too, she could learn how to pick up happy thoughts. Why limit herself to cares and woe? It might get depressing after a while, if all she heard were people’s problems. How about their wishes? What if she could learn the sort of magic that would help her make wishes come true? Could a half changeling do that? Or was the wish-granting market cornered by fairies?
But for now, sweet silence, a beautiful spring morning, a walk through the woods, every step taking them closer to food—
Isabelle came to a sudden stop.
Something was in her head.
It was a voice so faint as to be a hundred miles away, at the farthest, darkest, most distant part of Isabelle’s thoughts. It took her a minute, but then she recognized it. Grete. Grete was in trouble. Isabelle froze, panicked. She could feel it, feel the pain in her bones, the dizziness swirling around her brain. Grete was sick. Grete was—
No. No, no. Isabelle’s heart thumped against her rib c
age. Her breath was trapped in her lungs. Nothing bad could happen to Grete, Grete who was not a witch, but a healer, Grete who took care of people, Grete who needed Isabelle, Grete who wanted everyone to know the truth—
Grete who was Isabelle’s grandmother.
“We have to run!” Isabelle grabbed Samuel’s hand and pulled hard. “Fast! Now!”
“Where?” cried Samuel, already moving, already breaking into a sprint. “What?”
“Run!” came Isabelle’s only reply. “Run!”
Like lightning, like wind, like their feet were on fire—
They ran.
38
Now, you don’t know Jacob, and neither did Isabelle or Samuel, or Grete for that matter. So how could you tell just by looking at him that he could make such a mess out of things?
Answer: You couldn’t.
Oh, little boys. Eight-year-old boys, boys old enough to come up with elaborate plans, young enough to completely flub them.
But imagine poor Jacob. There he is, on the way to the Greenan camp, running off from Hen, a total lark—honestly, he had no intention of actually losing her. Hen was always in trouble with Mam as it was, the way she let the boys wrestle in the mud and couldn’t for the life of her put a braid in Sugar’s hair. Jacob didn’t want to make things worse for Hen. He just wanted to have a little fun.
So he reaches camp, sends off little Pip (only two, but amazingly self-sufficient) and Sugar and Artemis and Callou to the creek to play with the others, sets up the tents—without Hen’s help, thank you very much (if there’s one thing Hen’s good at, it’s putting up tents and tying knots, outdoors things; it’s only with kids that she’s hopeless), and where is that Hen, anyway?—and counts the blanket rolls, one for each. Every few minutes he looks up expectantly, sure that Hen will be standing right behind him, her arms folded across her chest, ready to box his ears for leaving her behind.
But there’s no Hen, and there’s no Hen, and then again, no Hen. Two hours, four hours, and then all the little ones getting nervous, like little chicks who’ve lost their ma.
Jacob had sat up half the night waiting, and by morning it was clear to him what had happened: They’d left Hen behind, and the witch had nabbed her! Not a doubt in his mind about it, and now it was up to Jacob to save Hen from certain doom. As soon as the morning broke across the horizon, Jacob was off to the woods, in search of the witch’s lair.
How easy it had been to find it too! Well, maybe “easy” was the wrong word, if you counted the blisters that had brought his hike to a halt only two hours out of camp, what he got for so much walking about in two days’ time, he supposed. He’d stopped by the creek’s edge to soak his feet and had fallen asleep, and by the time he woke up and recalled what he was doing, the sky was already growing dark. And maybe “easy” doesn’t describe the second day either, when he’d gotten terribly lost and after a half day’s hike realized he was back at the Greenan camp. He peeked through some bushes to see if Hen was about, and when it was clear she wasn’t, he moved on.
It was a fortunate thing that Jacob was the son of a traveling peddler and that he’d spent more than one summer sporting about from town to town with his father. He knew how to find food in the woods and where to find the freshest water and how to steal a cooling pie off a windowsill when need be. All these skills came in handy as Jacob became more and more lost in the County of the Five Villages, stumbling into Drumanoo and Aghadoc and then finding himself on the outskirts of Corrin after five days. Lucky then that he knew a good mushroom from a poison one and could recognize the tail end of a ramp sticking out of the dirt. One yank and dinner was served. After five days of a mushroom and onion diet, however, he was tempted to go home. Then he thought of how mad his mam would be if he showed up without the others and kept going.
It was on the eighth day of his misbegotten journey, following the creek north again, that he came upon the house in the woods, saw the old woman through the window, and knew he’d at last found the witch. What kind of old woman lived in the woods by herself, he wondered, except a witchy one? He looked up in the trees for the nets filled with bones, and felt almost entirely, positively, halfway sure he saw two of them hanging from the highest branch of a twisted elm. Yes, he had most certainly found the witch, and the hairs on his arm prickled with the news.
And what did he see there, on the porch? Wasn’t that Hen’s blue apron fluttering from the banister like a flag? Jacob squeezed his hands into fists.
Hen was here. He would save her.
Now, a less disciplined boy than Jacob would have run in right away brandishing a stick and yelling like a banshee for the old witch to give him back his sister. But Jacob was more cunning than that. He waited at the edge of the woods, passing the time by braiding vines into rope, and thirty minutes past the time the last light in the witch’s house was dimmed, he crept in as silently as a slithering snake.
It was nothing to tie the witch to her bed, twisting and turning the vines, knotting them here and there. Oh, it helped that she’d been asleep when he started, true enough, but she’d awakened after two passes of the rope and put up a struggle, for sure. Too bad for the witch that she was old and he was young, and besides, Jacob was sitting on top of her the whole time. Like a rock, his da had said about him, and Jacob reckoned that was so. So what could the old hag do except ask—when it was all done and she was tied tight to her bed—what in the blue blazes did he think he was up to?
“Tying you to your bed, ya old hag,” he’d happily informed her as he tugged at a final knot. “Ya tell me the whereabouts of my sister, I’ll consider letting you go, but I’ll only be considering it, mind you.”
The old witch had squirmed, testing the strength of the rope, and finding she was no match against Jacob’s superior knot tying, sighed. “Hen isn’t here. She’s gone to the Greenan camp with Isabelle.”
Jacob staggered back a few steps. “Did I say her name was Hen or are you reading my thoughts?”
“You’re the very picture of her, even in the dark,” the witch insisted. “I’d know you were Hen’s brother if I met you on the streets of the moon.”
Jacob glanced around the room for a mirror but found none. Was it true he looked just like Hen? He thought Hen rather pleasant-looking, and he wouldn’t mind resembling her a bit in a boylike way, he supposed, not that he cared a whit what he looked like.
“Where is she?” he asked again, remembering his mission. “You best be telling me, or I’ll make you more the miserable for holding your tongue.”
The witch sighed even more loudly. “I’ve told you where she is. Now cut this rope, and I’ll get you something to eat, even if it is the middle of the night.”
At the mention of eating, Jacob’s stomach growled. He’d not eaten since the morning, and now the thought of food overwhelmed him. What could it hurt to untie the witch? he wondered. He’d keep close guard, let her fix him something to eat, and then back to the ropes it was, unless she led him directly to Hen.
“You best not be planning any witchy tricks,” Jacob told the witch as he began pulling at the first knots. “You’ve not met up with the likes of me before. I’ll have your hide if you try anything.”
“Oh, I’m sure of it,” the witch agreed, though Jacob wasn’t convinced she meant it. No matter, she’d learn soon enough if she tried any backhanded business, just as soon as he untied the knots. . . .
The job proved undoable. When Jacob tried cutting through the knots with a knife, he found the vines were too green to slice or pinch or pull apart. He didn’t know whether to be impressed with himself or out of sorts. Out of sorts, he decided two days later, as he was fixing another bowl of soup for the witch, which he’d have to feed her himself. He couldn’t let her die now, could he, or he’d never know Hen’s whereabouts.
“Just tell me if you’ve killed her,” he’d demanded on the morning of the fourth day, even though he knew he wouldn’t get an honest answer. If the witch admitted to any witchery, he’d stop
feeding her, and then where would she be? A dried-out, dead witch starved to death in her own bed, that’s where. No, it would be nothing but lies from this one, but he couldn’t keep himself from asking anyway.
“Why would I kill Hen?” the witch replied. “I’ve taught her everything I know. She’s like a daughter to me. Now go pull a book from the shelf and read it aloud. I’m bored to bits lying abed all the day long.”
It hadn’t been the first time she’d made the request. “What—and cast a spell on my very own self?” Jacob replied, just as he had before. “I don’t think I will, thank you very much.”
But this morning, instead of letting the subject drop, as she had every other time, the witch looked at Jacob long and hard. “You can’t read, can you?”
Jacob frowned. Of course he could read, he just chose not to unless it was absolutely necessary. He had to squint to read, or else the letters were fuzzy, and squinting gave him a headache. And was it his fault that sometimes words got twisted around, T-R-E-E written on the board looking like T-E-R-R to him, and all the others laughing at his mistake? Well, he wasn’t going to be a schoolteacher, like that pig-nosed Mr. Wearall, so what did it matter anyway?
“Fine,” the witch said when she saw she’d get no response from him. “Then go pull some potatoes out of the root cellar and roast them. You look like you need something other than bread and soup to eat.”
Really, Jacob was turning into quite a cook. The witch would yell instructions to him from her room, and he’d put together a nice meal of green tea soup and soda bread for the both of them. He was rather pleased with himself, he who had never cooked at home, cooking being a girl’s job. But he’d always liked to watch Mam cook, and as it turned out, he’d picked up a trick or two.
“I wouldn’t mind some pie, would you?” the witch called when Jacob returned from the cellar with an armful of potatoes. “There are dried apples in the cupboard and a bit of cinnamon I’ve been saving. It’s a rare thing, here, to have cinnamon. It comes from far away. Do you know what it looks like? You’ll find it on the top shelf.”
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