Chapter 13
MARIS
The summons is folded under the bakery door when I open at dawn.
Heavy paper, the council's wax seal pressed into the fold. I stand on the stoop in the cold morning air and read it twice. The Brindle Hollow Village Council requests the presence of Maris Alderwyn regarding concerns related to her household. Third day of the week, morning hour, Council Hall.
Elin is still asleep upstairs.
I stand there for a moment, the paper in my hands, and think about how long it would take me to pack the essentials.
Two bags, maybe three. Elin's doll, the strongbox under the floorboard, the good flour tools.
My horse is stabled two streets over. We could be on the valley road before the market opened and no one would have grounds to stop us. Not yet.
I fold the summons and put it in my apron pocket and go inside to start the bread.
The decision is made before the first loaves come out of the oven.
Running is not an answer. It's a direction, and directions can be followed.
If I leave now, I confirm everything the town has already decided about us, and I spend the rest of my life looking for another Brindle Hollow, somewhere new and manageable, until Elin's ears or her eyes or her skin gives us away again. I know how that story ends.
I leave Elin with Brennor's wife, who takes her without questions and with the kind of firm, practical warmth that asks nothing in return. Elin goes willingly, distracted immediately by the older woman's collection of carved spoons.
The council hall sits at the far end of the market square, stone-fronted, older than most of the surrounding buildings. I've walked past it my entire life. I've never had cause to go inside.
The door is open.
I hear the noise before I see the crowd — the low collective murmur of a room that's been filling for a while, people already settled, already talking.
I stop in the doorway and take it in. Every bench is occupied.
People stand along the walls. Faces I know, faces I sell bread to every morning, turned toward the head of the room where five council members sit behind a long table.
Hestara Dunwick sits at the center. She's watching the door. She watches me come in.
I walk the length of the hall. The murmur builds, it shifts — adjusts around my presence as I move between the benches toward the single wooden chair set in front of the council table. I don't look at faces. I stare at the chair, and I sit down in it, and I set my hands flat on my knees.
At the back of the hall, half in shadow near the far wall, Kaedrin stands with his arms folded. He's not with the townspeople. He's apart from them, watching. Our eyes meet for a fraction of a second and I look back at Hestara.
"Mistress Alderwyn." Hestara folds her hands on the table. "Thank you for attending. The council has called this meeting to discuss concerns that have been raised regarding your household, and specifically regarding your daughter—"
"She practices witchcraft." The voice comes from the left bench, a man I recognize as Geld, the farmer from the north pasture. "That's what needs to be said plainly."
A second voice from somewhere behind me. "The child isn't natural. Everyone can see it."
"My sheep—" Another voice, a woman this time, closer. "Four of them, Hestara. Four since that child started showing what she is."
Hestara raises her hand for quiet. She doesn't get it.
"Dark magic is what it is." Geld speaks again, louder. "Pointed ears and steely eyes and the animals dying at the forest edge. Draw your own conclusions."
"She was seen without the scarf." A voice I can't place. "There's no hiding it anymore."
"Someone ought to ask where the child's father is." A whispered comment from the right side, audible enough to carry. "What manner of creature—"
"That is enough." Hestara's voice cuts across the hall. Partial quiet. "This is a council hearing, not a market argument."
I tighten my hands on my knees. The room presses in from all sides — the heat of too many bodies, the smell of wool and tallow and the sourness of collective anxiety. My pulse is loud in my ears. I fix my eyes on the middle point of the council table and breathe through my nose.
Hestara looks at me with heavy eyes and a discrete frown. "Mistress Alderwyn. These are serious concerns raised by your neighbors. The council must ask—"
"Serious concerns?" The word comes out steadier than I feel. "Based on what a child looks like?"
"Based on what has been happening to this town," Geld says.
I turn my head and glare at him. He doesn't look away. Neither do I.
"My daughter is three years old," I say
The hall doesn't quiet. If anything, the murmur behind me thickens. Someone near the door says something I can't catch, and the person beside them responds, and the sound of it rolls forward like the hall itself is pushing at my back.
I face front. Hestara watches me. The four council members flanking her have the assorted expressions of people waiting to see which way the current runs.
My breathing is shallow and I work to even it without letting it show. The chair is hard under me. My hands are still flat on my knees, and I keep them there, and I wait for whatever comes next.
Hestara raises her hand again and this time the hall quiets enough to matter.
"Mistress Alderwyn." Her voice carries the patience of someone accustomed to managing rooms. "You may speak."
I stand up.
The chair scrapes back and I turn to face the benches rather than the council table. The room looks different from standing. More faces, more familiar ones than I expected, arranged in the configurations of people who have already decided something and are waiting for confirmation.
"What has my daughter done?" I let the question sit for a moment. "Not what does she look like? What has she done?"
Geld starts to speak. I keep going.
"Three years she's lived in this town. Three years I've sold bread to every household represented in this room. My grandmother sold bread to your parents before that." I look across the benches slowly. "What has Elin done to any of you?"
"It's not about what she's done." The woman who speaks is Pella, the same Pella who buys honey muffins on weekday mornings. "It's about what she is."
"And what is she?"
"Something unnatural," Geld says. "Something that shouldn't be here."
"She's a child." I turn toward him and point. "She’s just a baby and she spends most of her time arguing with me about wearing a scarf."
A murmur runs through the benches. Not agreement, not disagreement. The sound of a crowd deciding which direction to lean.
"Leave town," someone says from the middle rows. A man I don't recognize well, a newer resident. "If the animals stop dying after you're gone, that's your answer."
"And if they don't stop?" I arch an eyebrow at him. "Will you come find me and apologize?"
"Leave town," he says again, louder.
Two or three voices join it. I let them run for a moment, then raise my own.
"I will not uproot my business and my child based on pointed ears and bad luck with livestock." I enunciate each word clearly. "This bakery is my grandmother's bakery. Elin has never known another home. I will not remove her from it because some of you are frightened of what she looks like."
"She bakes it in." A woman near the back, older, her voice carrying absolute certainty. "The bread. Whatever she is, she bakes it into the bread and we all eat it."
I stare at her for a moment. "I bake flour and water and salt."
"We don't know that."
"You've been eating it for years without any unusual effects, unless you count Widow Fenn's mood, which was never going to improve regardless."
A few people laugh. More don't.
I look toward the door. Kaedrin stands where he was, arms folded, watching. I hold his gaze and let the question show in my face. He gives me the smallest shrug, barely a movement. An outsider. Nobody in this room will hear it from him. He's probably right.
I turn back to the benches.
"If unusual appearances are grounds for accusations of witchcraft," I say, "then we have considerably more work to do in Brindle Hollow.
Old Bobbit has been missing the same toe for thirty years.
Madame Kaeliss has had that face tick since I was a girl.
" I look around the room. "Shall we summon them next? "
The hall erupts.
Half the room takes it badly. Voices overlap and rise, and Hestara is on her feet calling for order before the noise crests.
Geld is saying something I can't hear over the general noise.
The woman who accused me of baking spells has turned to the person beside her with an expression that suggests she's already composing the next version of the story.
Kaedrin has straightened away from the wall. He's not moving, but he's stopped being still.
Hestara gets the hall quiet again through sheer volume and the banging of her palm on the table.
"The council will delay judgment," she says, when she can be heard. "Until such time as evidence can be properly examined." She points at me. "Mistress Alderwyn, you are asked to remain available for further questioning should the council require it."
"I'm not going anywhere," I say.
She nods. "See that you don't."
I turn and walk back through the hall. People shift to let me through and not one of them looks at me directly, which is somehow worse than if they had.
I reach the door and step out into the morning air and keep walking until I'm around the corner and out of the line of sight from the hall windows.
I stop and put one hand flat against the stone wall of the cooperage and breathe.
Delayed. Not dismissed. Hestara said evidence — which means the question is still open, the town's fear is still unsatisfied, and I've bought time rather than resolution.
If another animal turns up dead. If Elin's scarf comes loose again at the wrong moment.
If someone decides the council's patience has run out before the council decides it themselves.
I push off the wall and straighten my apron and start toward Brennor's house to collect my daughter.