Chapter One #2
The hard-faced older woman came and stood in the room with her back to the window.
Arms folded, watchful, touching distance to her ward.
He saw in her face that she didn’t trust him any more now than she had when they had their misunderstanding at the door.
He wondered how many like him they’d already seen, how much of their obviously dwindling funds they’d seen wasted with no result, how many shysters calling and slipping away with an easy grin.
Demonologists, Theosophicals, Sword-and-Orbsters, all the sub-Blavatsky types and splinters, Woodsmen-who-weren’t, fly-by-night witch and warlock fakes, Otherkin flimflam artists, the whole sad circus erupting into their lives one tawdry act after another…
Once again, through the wall from the room next door, the awful, downward hurtling shriek. The older woman’s eyes moistened. He saw how Mrs. Rush flinched, how her hand rose trembling toward the livid mark on her cheek. Her gaze fell away into whatever place had stolen the strength from her voice.
“It won’t stop,” she husked—to him or to herself, it wasn’t clear. “It just…won’t stop.”
He nodded. “In all likelihood, it has the Sight. It will know I’m here.”
She looked at him again, then, as if for the first time. As if the whole thing had only now become real in her mind. It was a common enough moment among afflicted parents. Duncan took the snuff box from his pocket, crouched beside her to make himself less alarming.
“Look—Mrs. Rush, let me be honest. At this moment, I cannot be sure that your child has been removed to the Forest, or that what’s in the next room is a changeling. But it certainly sounds that way. And there is an easy test. Here.” He held out the snuff box. “Open this.”
She took the box, struggled a moment with the ornate catch, then lifted the lid and peered inside.
“Iron filings,” he told her. “Perfectly harmless. Touch them. You, too, please, madam.”
The older woman looked at him mistrustfully a moment, then leaned in and put a finger into the box.
“Take a small pinch, please, both of you. Rub it onto your skin.” He watched them obey him like sleepwalkers. “You’ll agree it does no harm?”
They both nodded, like mechanical toys. He straightened up. “Good. Now, should I bring Miriam in? Or would you prefer…”
Mrs. Rush looked up at the older woman. The retainer pursed her lips and left the room.
“It’s Mimi,” Mrs. Rush said brokenly. “No one ever calls her Miriam.”
Out in the corridor, Duncan heard a key in a lock, a door opened.
The shrieking began in earnest. The woman came back, dragging a thrashing, flailing, diminutive rag-clad figure by one thin arm.
It resembled nothing so much as a three- or four-year-old girl with similar features to Mrs. Rush herself, and it was clearly terrified of everyone and everything in the room.
“Mama, Mama, no, don’t let them,” it wailed. “Don’t let them burn me!”
Mrs. Rush dissolved in tears, buried her face in her hands.
“Mama, please, I’ll be good, I didn’t mean it, please, Mama, please, I won’t—”
Duncan hissed a word of command in Skogurtal, and the creature blinked, then shut up as if its jaw were a sprung trap.
It was all the evidence he needed. Nothing human could be compelled in the Forest speech that way.
But of course it would not do for the mother, and Duncan felt a tiny prickling sensation in his throat at that tenacity, an unquantified blend of joy and rage and loss that threatened to prick out tears in his eyes. He swallowed hard. Cleared his throat.
“Let me hold her,” he said very gently.
And rapidly, before anyone could react, he stepped across and took the child by both thin wrists from behind, held the skinny arms apart.
The older woman let go, startled. Duncan lifted the creature forward so it stood right in front of the mother.
He felt how its muscles tensed and writhed, fighting his grip.
He widened his arms, pulled seeming-Mimi into something resembling a crucifixion.
Tears flooded the child’s eyes, flooded down its face. It moaned and writhed.
But it no longer spoke.
“Mrs. Rush.” Duncan, urgently now—this had to be done fast, while her fortitude lasted. “For your own peace of mind, I would like you to take some of the iron filings and gently rub them on this child’s arm.”
She stared at him, long moments in which he saw the truth finally breach the walls she’d built in her mind, erupt to the conscious level, where it could no longer be denied.
She made a noise, a convulsive sob that wracked her whole body.
But when she met his eyes again, he saw the change, the new determination to go with the knowledge she now would not deny.
She pressed her lips together, tears still welling up, still spilling down her cheeks.
But she did it.
She pinched up the iron filings in her fingers, reached out for the thing that looked like her daughter. The creature’s muscles cabled against Duncan’s grip. It kicked out, twisted and thrashed. Duncan grimaced, tightened his hold, and nodded urgently at Irene Rush.
“I’m sorry,” she wept.
But she pressed the iron filings onto one thin arm near the elbow.
Duncan averted his eyes.
Flash-flare, magnesium bright, blinding in the dimly lit room.
The mother screamed, but it was lost in the high, ululating howl that broke from the child, and put every hair on Duncan’s body erect. It was all he could do to maintain his grip, haul back and prevent the creature from kicking Mrs. Rush in the face.
A sudden reek of scorching stormed the room, made the two women gag.
Then acrid smoke, ribboning up off a wound that glowed moss green in the blotched and blunted vision the flare had left them.
Duncan wrestled the thrashing sprite back, away from the mother it had fooled.
“Your daughter is in the Forest,” he said.