Chapter 58 #2
“Well, when those strangers finally left, Mage Baldwin wasn’t with them.
But no one’s seen him since… or that awful woman he married and her four daughters.
” Mrs. Hild made a face. “It’s like they were all stolen by the Fae.
Maybe they were,” she added. “It’s been a long time, but my grandmother always told me stories about how the Fae would visit human healers from time to time, and either reward them richly for their help or mete out terrible curses if the healer failed to help them. ”
My blood had gone cold at the mention of mainlanders visiting Papa. If they’d needed a mage-healer, there were several in Herrewick. No need to travel all the way upriver to Bernswick.
And I didn’t believe the Fae had stolen Papa and the others. Besides, there had been very few Fae visitors to Bernswick since the Supernatural Relations Act went into effect a century ago.
“And Jacinthe?” Juno asked. “Where’s Jacinthe?”
Hild frowned. “Your Papa didn’t write and tell you?”
We all shook our heads. “We only got one letter from him, announcing that he was betrothed to Mage Narcissa.”
“Well, Jacinthe’s been gone for nearly a month now,” Elfrieda said.
“She and your papa went down to Herrewick right after Midsummer, and the way he tells it, out of nowhere, she indentured herself to the Dominion Bureau of Apprentices. Everyone in the village was talking about it. Even with how badly your papa and Mage Narcissa were treating her, none of us could believe Jacinthe would do something reckless like that. The DBA sent her to Darkstone Academy to work, of all the terrible places—”
Darkstone Academy. The reform school. The prison island where Cresta and Bernardo and Ormond now resided.
“Oh, no!” I gasped. I wanted to throw up.
Jacinthe indenturing herself as a government apprentice. Which meant she was now little better than a slave, and that Papa really had gambled away the money Mama had saved for Jacinthe’s future.
“Are you sure?” I asked. “Darkstone Academy? You’re sure that’s where they sent her?”
Mrs. Hild nodded. “Your father was beside himself when he returned home. He swore he tried to stop her, but she insisted on signing those papers.” Hild shook her head.
“Now, everyone knew that your sister and Narcissa didn’t get along, and that woman appeared to be working Jacinthe half to death…
but still.” She sucked air through her teeth in disbelief.
Nothing made sense.
Mrs. Hild was still talking. She told us we must be exhausted from our journey and invited us to join her and her family for supper once we’d put away our trunks and washed up.
She assured us that the village would look out for us until we either returned to that fancy mage-school or got ourselves settled.
Dazed by the flood of unwelcome news, I nodded in the right places and thanked her.
“Come on over whenever you’re ready to eat,” she said. “It’s lentil soup tonight with plenty of good smoked ham, and fresh-baked bread besides. I’ll keep the pot warm for you.”
Elfrieda hugged me again. “I’m so sorry about all this,” she said. “We’ll talk more tonight. I’ll be sure to save you some strawberry tart before my brothers gobble it all down.”
“Thank you.” Then my sisters and I watched Mrs. Hild and Elfrieda retreat down the lane.
When she was gone, the silence rushed back in.
Mama was dead. Papa was gone. And Jacinthe was working as an indentured apprentice on a prison island far to the south.
I felt utterly defeated, standing on our doorstep with a locked door between us and whatever was left of our lives.
I heaved a sigh. “Well, we can’t stand here forever,” I told my sisters. “Don’t tell anyone, but Elio taught me a lock-picking charm when we started pranking the aristos.”
A few minutes later, the door swung open.
I inhaled tentatively, bracing myself for the worst.
But I smelled only dust and stale air, underlaid with the scent of dried herbs from the apothecary shop on the ground floor.
We stepped inside the house one by one, like intruders in our own home.
The hallway was dim in the gathering twilight. I knew where the lamp should be—on the shelf by the door, next to the tinderbox.
Sure enough, the tinderbox was still there. So was the lamp. I struck a spark, touched it to the wick, and a pool of yellow light warmed the dark interior of the apothecary shop.
At first, everything looked in order.
Then I noticed Papa’s coat was missing from its peg, and his boots were gone from the shoe-rack next to the front door.
In the hallway, beside the door to the parlor, his leather traveling satchel lay open on the floor, a folded shirt spilling out of it, next to a pair of socks rolled into a ball. It looked as if someone had said, “That’s enough, we’re leaving now,” and forced him to leave midway through packing.
We moved through the house room by room, the lamp throwing our shadows against the walls.
In the kitchen at the back of the house, dishes still stood in the drying rack, dusty now. A cup sat on our dining table, with reddish-brown stains of dried tea and shriveled leaves at the bottom. The breadbox held half a loaf, gray with mold.
The hearth was the heart of this house, or it had been. Even on the hottest summer days, Mama had kept the fire going, because healers always needed boiling water to hand. The hearth had never gone out on her watch.
Now it was a mess of cold ashes.
We searched the rest of the house, room by room. Our bedrooms were filled with strangers’ belongings.
I found Jacinthe’s clothes and books in the attic, next to a pallet-bed on the floor. It looked as if she’d been living there for some time, without any regard to her comfort.
Narcissa, I thought with revulsion.
And I guessed Papa had just gone along with it, because he’d never liked Jacinthe.
Our older sister was another man’s daughter, an ever-present reminder that Mama had once loved someone else before she met Papa, someone she refused to talk about.
“What now?” Juno asked, when we’d finished our search and returned to the kitchen with no new answers.
Feeling utterly inadequate, I stood in our deserted house with two thirteen-year-olds looking at me like I had all the answers, and the only thing I knew for sure was that we were all alone in the world now.
If you don’t know the way, just take one step at a time, Mama said in my memory.
“Let’s start by taking Mrs. Hild up on her offer of supper,” I suggested. “We’ll all feel better with a full stomach.”
“And then what?” Mira asked.
“I don’t know,” I said honestly. “Get a good night’s sleep, if we can. And figure out our next step in the morning.”
The remaining money in my velvet purse was enough to support us for a while. If we were extremely frugal, we might even have enough funds to travel back to the academy in the fall… though not enough to pay the tuition and housing costs.
Mama would have known what to do. And I was sure Papa would have tried his best.
Now it was up to me.
∞∞∞
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