by Morgan Smith
But there it was: right in the middle of brewing up the ingredients, Glynnis discovered she was clean out of dried violets, and left the girl to mind the pot while she went out to the woods to retrieve a handful of wild petals.
The flowers turned out to be somewhat elusive, it took a full half-glass to locate enough that were unblemished, and by the time she’d returned, the damage had been done. Not that she ever knew that. How could she have?
Keeley, left to her own devices, had still been in that state of unreasoning panic.
What would Anyon think? What would he do? He had already been angry with her at the betrothal feast, because she’d made that stupid comment about his mother’s nettle soup. If he found out she’d lost the silver ring he’d given her, he was bound to be livid, and who could blame him?
She’d watched as the witch had carefully measured out the distilled wormwood and the corpse-dust. She’d asked questions, not because she understood or even cared about these things, but because asking and listening served to stop her anxious mind from worrying over the problem.
“Ashwood, that’s for retrieval. The fur – it really should be squirrel hairs, but badger’s what I’ve got. It’s not as strong, of course, but it’ll do. And willow – willow always finds things.”
And then Glynnis had gone off for the violets, and Keeley, without any distractions, began to worry anew.
The witch hadn’t taken her plight very seriously, to Keeley’s mind. In fact, she’d seemed a wee bit amused by it all. How was Keeley to be sure that the witch was doing all she could to make this charm work properly?
That badger hair, for example. She’d only put in three or four of them, even after saying that it wasn’t so strong.
She thought about Anyon. So muscular and handsome, and those deep-set brown eyes. All of her friends had swooned over him, but it was her he’d picked, in the end. Maybe she wasn’t as pretty as some, but Anyon seemed to think she was. And he laughed a lot at her jokes.
They’d made such plans, too. Her father was gifting her with a full five acres of good farmland as a wedding present, and Anyon and she had talked over all the things they would do with it, how they’d make it prosper.
Well, Anyon had talked it over, anyway. He’d been pretty certain about what would work and what wouldn’t. She liked that about Anyon, that certainty. It felt like she would never again have to work overhard at understanding things, because Anyon was good at explaining and knew his own mind so well. It was comforting.
But he had a bit of a temper. And if he found out that she’d been so careless as to lose her betrothal ring less than a seven-day after the feast, well, she didn’t know what he’d do. He could not find out. He mustn’t.
And so she’d come here to Glynnis, desperate to get the ring back, no matter what it took.
Keeley stirred the pot. She was staring blindly at the shelf where the jars and boxes of the witch’s spellstuffs were stored. Three badger hairs. That could not possibly be enough.
It was the work of an instant to reach up and pull down the jar with the blue-glaze streak. Only another instant to drop three more hairs into the brew, and to put the jar back. And then, because surprisingly, she really had been concentrating on the witch’s words, she opened the box containing the powdered remains of willow bark and dumped a handful of that in as well.
When Glynnis came in, Keeley was still carefully stirring the pot. She handed back the iron spoon, and watched as Glynnis added the violets. The pot bubbled gently, giving off an aroma of woodlands and damp earth that was not unpleasant.
The Finding Cord had been readied first thing, an intricate knotting around a large wooden bead that Glynnis had told Keeley would centre the charm. Now she lifted the arrangement carefully, wound the cord onto the neck of the spoon, and lowered it into the pot.
There was a hissing sound.
Glynnis raised her eyebrows slightly, but then shrugged.
“Fresh petals,” she said. “Always noisy.”
It wasn’t long after that Keeley emerged from the cottage, blinking in the sudden sunlight, with her Finding Charm stowed safely in the pouch under her skirts. It would work best after dark, when the moon was setting, Glynnis had told her. All she needed to do was to go to the places she might have lost the ring at, and watch the bead. It would glow, the closer she came to the ring.
Easy-peasy.
She stayed awake that night, in a fever of anticipation and dread.
What if it didn’t work? Oh, but it had to. It had to, because if it didn’t, she would lose him, she felt sure of it. Anyon would break off their betrothal, and not only would she have lost her beautiful red wool shawl, which she had given Glynnis in payment for the charm, but she’d be the laughingstock of the village, and probably never marry and her life would be ruined and her heart would break.
The charm would work. She lay there, repeating this over and over in her mind, desperate to convince herself, until she was quite sure that everyone was deeply asleep. Then she crept out of her bed, and pulled out the charm. It lay on her palm, doing nothing.
In the big, open room that served the farmhouse for everything from kitchen to dining hall to living space, she cast around. She had still had the ring when she’d made breakfast four days ago, and the bead gave off no glow of any kind when she passed it over the hearth. It remained a simple globe of smooth wood when she hung it over the flour bin. It was still dull and lifeless as she moved over every corner of the room.
She slipped out the door. The bead remained dormant all over the yard, as she retraced every step of that day, and it was still inert when she went through the sheepcote and the chicken-run.
Her heart sank. This was what she had been dreading. If the ring hadn’t slipped from her finger during the normal household chores, then she had lost it when she’d gone to pick brambleberries in the woods below the stream, a good half-mile away from the farmhouse.
It wasn’t that Keeley was particularly fearful of the woods. She’d been in and out of them all her life, gathering firewood, picking berries, or just walking through on her way to the lake where her brothers sometimes went fishing.
But that was in daylight. She’d never walked under those trees in darkness. It seemed…mischancy.
But even as she confronted this new fear, the bead – well, it didn’t exactly do anything. But it felt as though it was trying to – it felt as though it were tugging at her. Telling her something. She made her way along the path and into the trees, and by then it was glowing. Only faintly, but clearly a glow, a kind of greenish cast of light on her palm.
The glow got stronger the closer she came to the bramble patch, and when she stepped off the path and towards the place where she’d sat filling her basket four days before, it lit up like an emerald, so brilliantly that it illuminated everything for several feet around.
The light caught on a tiny spark at her feet. One little circle of silver, caught on an exposed root of the bush beside her. She bent and picked up the ring, and just as suddenly as it had begun, the glow died, and the woods lay quiet and dark around her.
Her heart, which had lain like a heavy stone inside her for over three days, was suddenly light as a feather, and the sick queasiness of her stomach that had killed her appetite was miraculously gone. She slipped the ring back onto her finger and stood happily in the darkness in a state of quiet, utterly joyous and serene.
And then the bead began to glow again.
Faintly, barely, just the merest haze of greenness. She might have not even noticed, except for the tugging at her heart, just as it had tugged at her when she’d thought about the brambleberry patch.
She might have ignored the tug. Certainly she meant to, because she had her heart’s desire, and all was right again in her world, and there was nothing more that she wanted from the Finding Charm.
But then she heard it.
The sound of laughter. Giggling, actually, and then the rumble of a male voice that she recognized.
She moved, without conscious thought, in the direction of the tugging, and the bead began to glow even more brightly, until she had gone past the bramble bushes and past the trees beyond, and to the edge of a little clearing, drawn by the sound of voices she knew quite well.
“Ah well, this’ll be the last time, then.”
“Why should it be?”
“You’ll be married.”
“That, my dear, is business. I never confuse business with pleasure.”
They were so intent upon each other, Anyon and Cait. Cait. Her friend. The girl she’d poured her heart out to. The girl who’d told her how happy she was for her, who was now standing naked to the waist and pressed against Anyon like moss on a tree-root, and his arms all around her, moving like snakes. They didn’t see Keeley at all.
At least, not until she starting screaming obscenities at them.
***
Becan had become headman of his village almost by chance, really.
He wasn’t the wisest man in his village, but he wasn’t unlearned or a fool, either, and his father had been headman before him, but he hadn’t really wanted to be headman. It just sort of happened, and he went along with it, because he was used to doing things that way.
He did know a thing or two. Years ago, he’d actually gone as far as the big fair at Davgenny, and stayed for a full seven-day, and because of that, he was considered to be more worldly than most. He was known to be a man who kept his wits about him, a watchful sort of fellow who probably knew more than he let on about things.
And when he went out one day gathering firewood and found an odd-looking wooden bead wrapped in knotted string, he actually did know what it was, more or less. He’d seen bits and bobs like it before. He scooped it up and put it in his scrip, thinking it wasn’t the sort of thing that anyone would casually drop, and that sooner or later, someone was bound to mention they’d lost it.
No one actually did, and what with one thing and another, Becan forgot about it, until late summer, when his best ram went missing.
The whole village turned out to help search. Becan had grazed his sheep in the meadows alongside the lake, everyone did, and since the ram had sired a number of very fine lambs for all of them, it was held to be a village problem.
Airic, who had bargained with Becan to have the ram tup his best ewe in exchange for three bushels of oats, was especially concerned. He was owed that tupping, in his mind, and he was inclined to be troublesome when thwarted. Becan liked to avoid trouble, wherever he could.
But although they scoured the most likely places, the ram seemed to have disappeared entirely.
It was then that Becan remembered the bead. He’d known it was a Finding Charm, right off the hop, and he had guessed that Glynnis would have made it. He might even have asked her about it, except that she had died that spring, before ever he had found the thing.
Even so, he understood vaguely that it might no longer be in working order. He had heard somewhere that those charms were usually only good for a single Finding, which made sense, because how could you sell more than one if it could go on finding things forever?
Remembering the bead, and locating it still in the bottom of the leather bag didn’t seem to be hugely useful to him, and it was another day or so when, out alone, still searching the hills for his ram, he finally pulled the thing out and gave it a try.
It was incredibly gratifying, considering that he didn’t have the slightest idea how these things really worked, when the bead immediately began to turn a bit greenish. When he moved to the west, the glow died. When he moved back to where he’d been standing, it resumed the colour, and when he moved east, the glow strengthened.
And Becan, not being a fool, caught on.
The bead led him across the low hills and up into the beginnings of a ravine that wound up into the mountains, and there, on a rocky shelf above a long scree of tumbled stone dotted with nettles, his ram sat, looking no worse for wear.
It took Becan a good hour to find a safe route down for the ram to follow, and a few anxious moments where it seemed both he and the ram might fall and come to grief in this wasteland, but eventually he managed it.
Home again, and sitting up long after his wife had gone to their bed, he pulled the bead out and looked it over. Whatever it had been made to find originally, he felt sure it hadn’t been just for errant livestock. Would it work again? Probably not, he thought, but he put it back into his scrip, all the same.
But the charm tugged at him, now and then. When his wife misplaced things, he could feel it – a kind of gentle pull at his heart – and he’d wait till he was alone, pull out the bead and dangle it in the places he thought the lost items might have got to, and he was – or rather, the bead was – always right.
When Rutha’s youngest girl went missing the next spring, Becan went with everyone else to search for her in the woods, of course, but almost as soon as he could, he drifted away from the others, desperate to pull out the charm and oddly reluctant to admit its existence to anyone else.
The bead was very green, brilliantly green, and he looked up to see the girl, asleep beneath an ash tree not ten man-lengths away from him.
Lucky, said the villagers. And such keen eyes, said his wife, proudly. He’s got the knack, his old da said, down in the tavern, the night after.
Becan said nothing at all.
The harvest that year wasn’t as good as they’d all hoped, but they were an organized, thrifty folk, and they agreed that in times like these, it was important to stick together. To help each other along. They decided that if each family put an equal amount into the granary against it being, potentially, a hard winter, then no one need go truly hungry, and there would be seed for all come springtime.
It was a good plan. Everyone liked it. They said so.
The winter did prove to be a bleak one, and it lingered. Most years, it wasn’t so very many seven-days past Midwinter before the snows melted and the villagers could eke out the dwindling stores with the first tender dandelion leaves, the green shoots of nettles and cattails, or the early wild asparagus.
But this year the snows were deeper, the frosts more chilling, and the winter seemed in no hurry at all to leave.
“We’re lucky,” said Becan’s da, “that we decided to put so much by. That Cait, with all those youngsters to feed – she’s at her wits’ end, I shouldn’t wonder. We’d best be doling out the barley sooner rather than later, Becan.”
He could not have told anyone why he felt so reluctant. He could not have told himself why, because he didn’t have any reason to feel anything but pride in his village’s forethought. He had no idea why every time he thought about the granary, his heart sank, and the bead tugged at his heart.
Well, not until, along with all the other households, he went to open the granary up to apportion out the grain.
The disaster was as complete as anything could have been.
Instead of the neat rows of grain sacks that they had tallied and marked onto the sticks (sticks that were still in Becan’s hand, in fact) there was simply an empty barn.
The shock left them silent, all of them.
But not for long.
It was slightly amazing, the way perfectly amiable people can turn into raging demons in a heartbeat.
The men yelled. The women yelled, too, except for the ones like poor Cait, who just stood weeping, because his old da had been all too right about the state of Cait’s larder.
“Stop it!” Becan rarely shouted, but he shouted now.
It didn’t help. He’d lost control, and the accusations were flying thick and fast. Fingers were being pointed every direction, even his.
“Wait, wait, there’s got to be an explanation!”
“I’ll say there’s an explanation,” Airic said. “You’ve stolen our grain.”
“Not me.”
“Then who? I say we look in your sheds, that’s where it’ll be.”
“I don’t believe it,” said Rutha. “He
wouldn’t, Airic. Why should he?”
“Well, someone did. The barley didn’t get up and walk off on its own!”
“No,” Becan said. “You’re right about that. Everyone’s buildings must be checked. But don’t you all go off in a rage. We’ll do this right and proper. We’ll have justice where it’s due.”
The search turned up nothing. Becan hadn’t expected it to. Inside himself, he could feel the tug of the Finding Charm, but he pushed that away. It occurred to him that, as tough as the next few weeks might be, this wasn’t a mystery he wanted to solve.
The people rallied. Those farmers who still had some stores decided they could put together a bit here and there, to see the poorer folk through a few more days, at least, and the anger, having found no target, went from a boil to a simmer.
But this was a short term solution. Becan knew his village wanted more, expected more of him. They wanted a culprit and a punishment, and they wanted their hard-won grain back, and they wanted it sooner, rather than later.
He resisted the tug as long as he could. He had a feeling that if he gave in this time, he would regret it all the rest of his days, but the urge proved too strong for him.
On the third day after they’d opened the granary doors, he went out into the yard and pulled out the bead. He held it in his hand, and walked where it led him, along the side of his cattle-byre and over to the little dairying shed.
Inside, although the shed was empty of all but the most basic of equipment, a pail here, a scoop there, the big churn still in its corner, the bead shone out like a deep green beacon.
He pushed aside the rush matting that covered the floorboards. He saw the outline of the hatch. Underneath, he knew, was a kind of cellar. Cool, even on the hottest summer day. His wife put extra milk and butter there, now and again.
He didn’t even bother to open it. He turned back to the door, instead, because she was standing there, arms crossed, looking defiant.