4
I lay on my bed, feeling my whole body buzzing and arguing with itself like a hive full of bees. The carriage had gone. I had heard it clattering and rattling off, and it felt like some part of me had been attached to it by a rope and was getting yanked out to follow.
Was this how the men felt when the sorceresses visited? Perhaps I had been too quick to dismiss it as a bulge in the trousers and the memory of a pretty face to summon up when they were having a wrestle under the covers.
I couldn’t have been the only one to feel like this, I told myself; he must have done the same to others in the crowd. That was how it worked. I was just the one that fell on her arse in front of everybody. But still, this itching, growling life in all my limbs! I was lying still, but my heart raced as if I had been running.
I slept all through the rest of the day, and all the night, dreaming dreams that wrapped around me like vines and squeezed all the fight out of me, so that I woke feeling hot and tangled and defeated. When I rolled myself down the stairs, Da whistled through his teeth.
“You look like something’s been gnawing on you all night.”
“Thanks, Da.”
“Didn’t you get any sleep?”
“I did.”
“You sick?” He toddled over to feel my forehead. “Someone been cooking you? You’re about ready to serve.”
Sick. Maybe I was sick. That would be a relief.
“I might have caught something.”
“Can’t have you around the meats, then,” said Da. “Go back to bed.”
Bed didn’t sound inviting. I had left it a sodden, roiling mess, sheets half-off and trailing on the floor, and my pillows soaked through.
“I think I’ll go for a walk. Blow the cobwebs.”
“All right. But then back to bed, understand? I can’t afford for you to have a holiday.” He sounded stern, but I knew he was joking. He loved me, did Da. More than I deserved. Mam’s death in childbirth haunted me, and I knew he grieved for her, but he didn’t hold it against me. I was lucky, I knew it.
“I’ll see you in a bit, Da.”
The square was back to normal. No crowds goggling. Just the usual mess of peddlers and people, arguing and gossiping and wasting time. I went to the spot where I had fallen down the day before and stared at it.
“You all right, Foss?” someone said. It was Hallie, one of the girls around my age. One of the comeliest, as well, and the sweetest. She was always taking in birds with broken wings, or blind kittens, and nursing them, and she was always eager to be kind to me for much the same reason. If she could, I think she would have folded me up in a box and taken me home to be given milk-soaked rags to suck on.
“I’m fine,” I said.
“We were just talking about the sorcerer,” she said. She was standing with a gaggle of others, all pretty enough, as most young women are pretty.
“Oh yes,” I said, trying to sound uninterested.
“None of us got a wink of sleep,” said one of the other young women, at which I perked up.
“Bad dreams?” I asked. “Feeling sick?”
Maybe I wasn’t alone.
“No, just thinking about him,” another sighed.
“So handsome,” added another, and then they all started chirping.
“Well, he has to be handsome. If he’s like the ladies.”
“Do you think they do it to themselves? Change their faces?”
“D’you think they’re even human?”
“I think they’re people like us,” said Hallie. Of course she did.
“What do you think, Foss?” said someone, carefully including me.
“I think they’re trouble,” I said. “And I wish they would take their trouble elsewhere, rather than bringing it to us.”
I stomped back to the shop and home.
There was no escaping him. All people could talk about for days afterward was the sorcerer, how handsome he was and how grand, how eldritch his eyes had been and how tall he was, whether he would come back, whether he was different from the ladies or just like them.
The menfolk got a taste of what it was like for the women after the sorceresses left, and they went about glowering, with caps pulled low to muffle the chatter of their wives and daughters and sweethearts. He’s long gone. Just shut up about it, won’t you? they told the women. But the women wouldn’t, and they didn’t.
They drooped about during the days, minds a mile off, and sighed in their beds at night, probably diddling themselves under the covers. Some of the men too, I was sure. I thought about it, thought maybe that would help to fix whatever the ailment was the sorcerer had given me.
Maybe if I could just twiddle my fingers about a bit and have a release and get it all over with ... But it didn’t work. It was like trying to kick a stubborn donkey over a puddle. I rubbed until my fingers were raw, until it started to chafe, but my quaint just lay there sullen and dumb and refused to help me.
What, then?
I went in search of Dav Mallet, because I couldn’t think of anything else to do. I had never exchanged more than a few words with him before he was taken, and none at all since he had come back.
There was an unspoken rule that the girls and women of the town shouldn’t talk to Dav, for fear of hearing the possibly unsavory things to which he had been subjected, so I sought him out at a time when not many other people would be around to gossip and speculate—when he was leaving the pub at closing.
He sat there every night at his table off to the side, weeping into his ale. Everyone ignored him now, too accustomed to him to even be embarrassed any longer. He had become one of the town oddities, like the man who kept ferrets and walked them on bits of string, and the mad old woman who slept with the pigs on Goodman Marrow’s farm.
Da was a hardworking man and had little time or inclination for drinking, and so he was long abed by the time I slipped out to wait for Dav. I stood in the shadows until he emerged from the pub, one of the last to do so. He had an odd, shambling walk that wasn’t due to drunkenness, but it was a kind of disorientation, strange to see in a man who had lived in the same village since his birth.
“Dav,” I said, and then, “Mr. Mallet,” because that sounded more respectful.
It took repeating his name a few times for him to stop and look about for me. His eyes were unfocused and lost.
“What do you want?” he said. “What do you want with me?” He raised his hand, perhaps to shade his eyes to see me better, but it looked like he was warding off a blow.
“It’s me, Foss Butcher,” I said. “From the shop.”
“Oh. Foss.”
“I wanted to ask you some questions.” I took a deep breath. “About the sorceress.”
He moaned a little. “I didn’t do nothing,” he said. “She took me.”
“Yes, I know she took you, Dav. I wanted to ask you about it.”
“I didn’t do nothing.”
“Right, but ... When she took you, how did you feel?”
He looked at me properly, then, as if he was really thinking about it. “It was the happiest I had ever been in my life,” he said.
“And you went with her, right? To the city?”
His eyes went blank again.
“You don’t have to tell me everything, Dav. It’s just ...” I hesitated. “I think something happened to me, when the sorcerer came the other day. I feel ... well, strange, and I think it’s something he did to me. I think I have to go and find him.”
“No.” Dav shook his head vigorously from side to side, and clasped my forearms with hands that were surprisingly bony and strong. “No, no, no. No, you mustn’t.”
I writhed in his grip. “I have to do some thing,” I said. “I feel like I’m sick. Like he made me sick, and only he can fix it.”
“Don’t go,” said Dav. “There’s nothing worse.”
He took one of my hands and guided it to his chest. I curled my fingers in, unwilling to touch him. I could smell his fishy sweat—or perhaps he had been around fish for so many years that their oils just seeped from his pores now.
“She took it,” he whispered, and put one finger of his other hand to his mouth in a hushing gesture. “I don’t know where she keeps it, but I know it is still alive somewhere, because I am. But not for long. Not for long.”
I twisted myself out of his grip. “But you’re here, Dav. You came home. You got away.”
“No, I didn’t,” he said, and shambled off with blank eyes, as if forgetting I was standing there. I wiped my hand on my dress, feeling my skin crawl where he had touched it.
I went home and collapsed into bed again, feeling as if I could sleep for a year. I fell into another crowded and claustrophobic dream, where everything was black, black, black, and tunneled my way through to morning. I saw Dav again through the window the next day, and he looked up at me when I called, but without recognition.
I went back to the shop, because we couldn’t afford for me to take any more time away. Those tangled-up and suffocating dreams still bothered me every night, however, and I still looked like someone had leeched all the color out of me.
Da was worried, and got all kinds of tisanes and herbs from Goodwife Tilly with which to dose me, but nothing helped. I don’t remember exactly what was in those dreams, if anything. There were no images, no stories. Just this feeling of being wrapped tight all around, like a baby in swaddling, and then feeling suffocated.
And I thought about the sorcerer all the time. I hated myself for it. I wasn’t even mooning, like the others, and talking about his hair and his eyes and the muscles of his legs. I thought of him with resentment, with anger that he had done this to me—and yet I thought of him.
I still felt that tugging and pulling, fainter now than it had been on the first day, and I imagined him sitting on a great black throne somewhere, hauling on a rope he had wrapped around my innards somehow and made invisible. A shining black rope, made out of the same rock-hard stuff as his carriage.
“You’re not thriving, Foss,” Da said, weeks after the visit. We hadn’t seen any more carriages since then, which was unusual for this year, when one had been showing up almost every week.
The excitement of the sorcerer’s visit had faded, and people were concerned again with the meager crops and the unusual sickening of livestock.
Big Cully had lost three newborn lambs, which was almost unheard-of, and the incident was much talked about in the pub of an evening. If I hadn’t been so preoccupied with the sorcerer, I would have been worrying about whether this had brought the circumstances of my birth to the forefront of their memories again, but right then, I didn’t care.
“I know,” I said.
“Still feeling poorly?”
“Yes.”
“Getting any worse?”
It was. I felt sick but also antsy, reckless, as if I might break into a lopsided run or start kicking at the hanging carcasses in the shop, anything to get that dark, frenetic energy out of my legs.
“I don’t know what else to try,” Da sighed.
“I’m not dying, Da,” I said, although, truthfully, I wasn’t quite sure. I didn’t know what dying felt like, but if it felt like you were going to fall over at any moment, and if it turned your insides to black custard, I might indeed have been dying.
The restlessness got worse as I thought about it. I felt like shite, but I could have run a thousand miles without stopping, it felt like. So long as it was in his direction.
I suppose it was inevitable. Perhaps this was how all the sorceresses and sorcerers got hold of folk now, infecting them and then buggering off and leaving them to follow like ducklings. They didn’t even have the decency to truss someone up and throw them in the carriage anymore, like they did with old Dav.
I had thought that exchanging the odd heart for prosperity and peace was a small price to pay, but it felt rather different when it was your own heart.
I’d like to say I gave it a lot of thought, turned it about in my head, but I didn’t. I just reached a point where staying put became impossible in the same way that standing calmly in a fire becomes impossible, and I had to go.
As I was packing for my journey, I muttered and swore under my breath. The last thing I wanted to be doing was leaving Da in the lurch and going off to a city I’d never seen to look for someone I hated, someone who was gods-knew-where but was tugging on me nevertheless, like a farmer pulling his great heavy plough.
Well, he wouldn’t get what he had bargained for, that was some comfort. He had probably wanted to snare one of the pretty girls, one of the Hallies, but no—his gaze had settled on me, and here I was, readying myself to journey across the countryside to find him. Here I am, Your Lordship.
I imagined the look on his face when he saw what flavor of heart he’d harvested, and it gave me some kind of satisfaction.
I didn’t tell anyone I was going. It was embarrassing enough telling myself. I left a note for Da, on the counter, saying that I was headed to the city for a few days. I wanted to write more, but I didn’t know what to say, or how to explain it.
I left the note as it was, scrawled and inadequate, and hoped that I would fix myself up and be back before long. I opened Da’s door, just once, to peer in at the great lump of him in his bed and listen to his whistling breath.
He would do well enough by himself in the shop, for a little while. And if it turned out that having your heart hooked by a sorcerer was fatal, if I were ground down to little bits, or my soul was sucked empty like marrow from a bone, he would find some other girl in the village to do my job.
And perhaps it was a blessing in disguise. Without me to worry about, Da would have a chance at a new life—even marrying again, perhaps. He wasn’t too old to father a sprout again, either—one not cursed with the circumstance of my birth, not destined to live in his house forever as an old and increasingly crotchety spinster.
I tried not to think of how it would hurt him.