Chapter 15
Luckily my visitor is hesitating, making her uncertain way towards the cottage, so I with my long strides manage to intercept her before she comes too close.
I know of old that the line of sight from that path to the fields is obstructed by the barn, so she won’t have seen Arlo.
As long as Rhea is careful about where she takes him, as long as she’s swift – into the woods, hopefully, down by the stream – no one should be any the wiser.
I don’t look over my shoulder to check, don’t draw attention anywhere else, merely pin a broad smile on my face and nod at the child coming towards me and call, ‘Hello.’
The child’s wide-eyed, scraggly red-haired, thin-limbed.
There’s a purple bruise along her chin, blossoming up to her right cheek.
My hand itches to reach out and examine the injury, but she looks skittish, likely to flee at any sudden movement, so I knit my fingers together in front of my skirts, calm and untroubled.
‘I’m Mistress Mehrab. Do you need help?’
The girl nods, hesitantly.
‘Is it Tieve, then?’ Has my patience paid off at last? Rather later than I’d imagined, but still a result.
Again, she nods, says timidly, ‘Yes.’
‘Can I offer you some tea? Perhaps breakfast? There is sweet porridge and fresh cream.’ The child looks half-starved, so this offer seems a good one.
She grins, relieved whether at the offer of food or tea I cannot divine, but sweep one hand towards the front door anyway.
‘You may enter, or I can bring your breakfast out here if you’d prefer to eat in the garden? The fresh air?’
Giving her a choice is important, I sense, but I also think her curiosity wins out. She wants to see the witch’s cottage; my, won’t she be disappointed to see how ordinary it is, all light and bright and airy? Perhaps I should decorate with bats’ wings and cobwebs?
* * *
Settled at the table, Tieve eats with spectacular speed, burps and turns bright red with embarrassment.
I smile as I take a seat across from her, my own cup of tea warming my hands. ‘Take your time, there’s no hurry.’
‘Mam says I’ve bad manners.’
‘Nonsense. You’re hungry is all, I can tell. But I don’t want you to make yourself sick. There’s no need to hurry, no one will take your food and there’s more if you wish.’ Her smile breaks out at the promise. ‘Do you have brothers by chance?’
She rolls her eyes. ‘Seven.’
‘Hard to get enough food when they’re around, I imagine.’
Another nod, chagrined. ‘There’s not much anyways and they eat first. Mam says the boys need it most because they have to work in the fields.’
It sounds like her family’s among those with too many mouths and insufficient skills for finer work or even much land of their own, so they’re at the mercy of those who employ them for hard physical labour.
The sort of family that sometimes doesn’t survive winter months intact.
‘Well, you’re welcome to visit here. There will always be bread and butter to break your fast, something to drink, and a fire to warm yourself by. ’
Which seems a lot to offer so quickly when I hardly know this child, but there’s something haunted about her (do I see something of myself in her eyes?), and I cannot leave a child whose mother puts her last to hang in the wind.
She thanks me, then finishes her meal at a normal pace.
When she’s done, she politely refuses a second helping.
But I’ll make a parcel of sweet buns for her to take when she goes, and a few copper bits to hold against a rainy day, a few more to buy bread from Anselm (and perhaps I’ll have a quiet word that he shouldn’t be letting his daughter’s best friend starve, even if they no longer speak).
She asks to use the privy, then returns, wiping damp soap-scented hands on her tunic. When she sits, Mr Tib jumps up onto her lap and she seems delighted.
‘Just don’t let him on the table,’ I say, despite the knowledge of a losing battle with the cat. ‘Now, why have you come to see me, Tieve?’
She doesn’t look away, instead holds my gaze and speaks clearly and firmly. ‘Orin said you’d been asking for me. And about Ari.’
I nod. ‘But your friends let me know you didn’t want to be found.’
‘No.’
‘You’re here, so something’s changed.’
‘Ari’s been my friend since we were very small. If I’d wished for a sister, she’d be it. But… she doesn’t want to play with me anymore, and I don’t want to play with her.’
‘Why’s that?’
‘She’s different. She pinches other children, slaps them, pulls their hair. Only the worst ones will play with her now. The ones that like to hurt birds and cats and foxes.’
I point to the bruising on her face. ‘Did Ari do that to you?’
She shakes her head. ‘But she egged on the one who did. A boy, Jory.’
I rise, go to the workroom and bring out a blue glass vial.
She permits me to rub the cream onto the bruising, and I’m careful not to hurt her.
‘This has essence of calendula, arnica and witch hazel suspended in lanolin. It should help improve things very quickly.’ I put the cork back in the neck of the bottle.
‘Take it with you, you should get another five or six applications out of it.’
Her hand darts, out then back, empty. ‘I can’t pay you.’
‘Well, let us barter then. Information in return for treatment. Fair?’
The hand returns, I place the vial into the centre of a slightly calloused palm, and her thin fingers curl around it. ‘Fair.’
‘Can you recall anything strange the day Ari went missing?’
‘Nothing. We were supposed to play in the afternoon after she’d done her chores, were going to meet by the well, and I waited.
I waited a long time and then got angry because she didn’t come.
I went to the bakery, but her mother didn’t know where Ari was, and she got angry too.
I think she’d lost track of time. Then she yelled at Mr Hadderholm and they both got angry.
That’s when I went home. The searchers went out not long after that, and we young ones all had to stay locked in. ’
A natural reaction, the assumption that another child might be in danger. Especially living in the forest where children are such sweet meat for so many things lurking in the shadows, and sometimes walking boldly in the light.
‘And you didn’t see her again, not until she returned at the end of spring?’
‘Mam told me Ari was back. How happy her parents were – but, Mistress Mehrab, they’d barely paid any attention to her before.’ As I’d suspected. ‘Now, they’re so nice to her and she’s been so mean to them.’
‘And when did you see her?’
‘As soon as Ma told me, I ran to the bakery – but she just looked at me like she didn’t know me. Or didn’t care.’
I wonder if Ari – the old Ari – had sometimes fed her friend fresh stolen bread, enough to help the girl be not so thin. However, the weeks of Ari’s absence and the subsequent ones of her indifference meant Tieve was half-starved. ‘And she’s been cruel?’
Tieve nods, looks away. I don’t need any greater detail, I can imagine from those bruises. ‘And why did you come to see me?’
‘Another child’s gone missing.’
* * *
A little boy this time, younger than Ari, only three and barely able to toddle a circuit of his parents’ very large garden.
The son of headman-mayor-what-have-you Thaddeus Peppergill and his wife Deva – another couple who’d been childless until she’d come and begged for my help.
Prosperous people with business interests, who organise the caravans that move the various products of Berhta’s Forge out of the Great Forest and into larger towns and cities, and also bring other things back, either useful or frivolous, for those whose purses stretch to such fripperies.
Sold in the small Peppergill emporium: cosmetics, the latest fashions, jewellery, sweet treats, strange alcoholic brews more exotic than those made in the Fox the idea of letting a child wander in the woods on her own strikes me as the height of foolishness.
I could have insisted she stay the night, but if anyone thought her missing it would set off another panic.
She’s clasping the cloth-wrapped bundle of sweet buns as if they’re a treasure.
When we’re about halfway there, I hear the crack of a branch somewhere behind us, so loud, then utter silence, as if someone or something has frozen mid-stride.
I think about the black thing that stalked me weeks ago, but this doesn’t feel the same or sound the same.
Besides, I don’t have time to hide as I did then and I don’t want the child to see me do it, so I urge her up the trunk of an ancient spreading yew.
I reach upwards, grab a handful of leaves – its berries would be even better but it’s too soon for those to be out – so I scrunch the leaves, drop them where I stand and then climb the trunk as fast as I can.
Not a spell, no, but if I’m right, whatever’s coming will react to the scent of the crushed leaves.
I swing up beside Tieve, put a finger to my lips. Quiet.
The yew’s a tree for the dead; it often takes its place proudly in graveyards, roots winding their way through ribcages and skulls.
But in forests such as this, creatures will come to its foot to die; they sense a sacred place, choosing to fertilise it with their deaths.
The essence of dying is absorbed, making its leaves and berries not only poisonous to the living but also acting as a deterrent to those who hunt them.
A distraction. The smell of the already-dead can throw them off the scent of those yet-to-die.
Peering down, the multitude of branches and foliage obscures whatever comes along the track, then lurks and circles at the base of the trunk – and what I see is a bright red flare of fabric.
A cloak. A red riding hood. A quick glance at Tieve shows her hand over her mouth, her eyes big as the moon as she recognises her friend.
She probably realises, as I do, that Ari had followed her.
The child below makes a discontented sound, a sort of growl, and swirls away from where the crushed leaves lie; heads off in the direction of Berhta’s Forge.
Her reaction to the yew decoy makes me suspect Ari couldn’t cross the boundary of my holding. I hope not. I hope Rhea is safe, that she stayed within my borders; either way, I don’t believe Arlo would allow anything to happen to her.
We stay in the tree for another fifteen minutes, perhaps – not that I’m scared of an eleven-year-old, but of what one might think she can do after stalking an adult – then climb cautiously down.
As we continue along, I pluck long grasses from the undergrowth, twigs and leaves from rowan and elm and even spot some of the rare hairless nettles that don’t sting, and as we go I weave together a little doll, give her a rowan-berry cluster for a necklace.
I prick my finger and dab some crimson onto the crown of the little thing’s head and whisper a protection spell.
‘Here.’ I hand it to Tieve. ‘Keep her secret, in your pocket all the time, especially if you must travel this path again to see me. It’s to help you pass beneath notice.’ I wonder if I should enspell her shoes too, but the doll should be sufficient. ‘Remember, hide her. She’s yours.’
Tieve gives me the glance of a co-conspirator and hides the doll away in the pocket of her rough pinafore. ‘And don’t tell anyone about what we saw.’
‘Didn’t see anything,’ she says airily.
‘Good girl. Now, let’s hurry along.’