Chapter Nine
I cannot find the strength to summon another wayfinding spell, so I stumble through the trees in the vague direction of east until I am dizzy with hunger and fatigue and, most of all, anger.
One of Fiona’s letters is stowed in my pocket, crinkling with every step I take.
I’m so rattled I can barely focus on where I’m stepping, and I trip more than once on jutting roots.
I need to speak to Lachlan, and soon. But first, I need to secure lodging in the village.
At last the wood breaks, and the moors roll ahead. Bending between the hills is a dirt road, and I smell the comforting aroma of cookfires. The surrounding land is fenced and lined with bare fields awaiting spring planting or dappled with grazing sheep.
The path to the village follows the line of the tanglewood, twisted trees on one side, the open moor on the other.
The trees break like a wave over the heather, gnarled branches snarling, leaves rattling in the wind.
Even in early spring, they look bleak. For a while I walk alongside a flat, lazy burn, its surface stippled with undulating ripples left by light-footed insects.
Every now and again, a fat fish surfaces with a slurp and sucks down a bite.
Then the path turns and there is Blackswire, a neat arrangement of stone buildings and shops, its outskirts peppered with crofts, whitewashed cob houses, and thatched roofs. The town sits in a low, flat green surrounded on three sides by forest, and on one by moorland.
A sound catches my ear—the voices of children. Perhaps one can point me to a nearby farm, where I might beg for a berth in a hayloft. But when I round the bend and see them, I find a familiar face: Sylvie North.
She’s standing in the center of a ring of five other children: three boys and two girls.
They are holding hands and blocking her every attempt to escape.
Sylvie is wearing one of her costumes, this time a fur cape with a feathered collar, and the black paint she used to paint whiskers on her cheeks has run from the tears streaming from her eyes.
“You smell!” a boy shouts. “Why are you wearing that dirty old rug, Batty Sylvie?”
One of the girls laughs. “My mum says you’re a child of scandal, and the Fates don’t even Weave a thread for you.”
“Maybe that’s why your parents are both dead,” says another boy. “Punishment for their sins!”
“Is that why you wear bones and paint your face, Batty Sylvie? Are you evil too?”
I’ve begun to Weave a hex before I’ve half had a chance to think. Then I realize inflicting a rash of warts on Sylvie’s tormentors will only make her more of a target. They still haven’t noticed me standing at the bend in the path.
Looking around, I spot three large bundles of wool tied with rope and guess these were being hauled by the children from their parents’ farms when they came across Sylvie and stopped to torment her.
Furtively, I go to them and begin tying knots around the ropes, then release just a touch of magic into each one.
The wool bundles begin to rise, pulled aloft by my hovering charms.
Then I back away and tuck myself behind a tree and wait.
It takes only a moment before one of the girls spots them and screams. The children gasp and cry out, one boy lunging upward to grab at a bundle, managing to get his fingers around the rope binding it.
But my hovering charm pulls him up too. He is forced to let go or be borne into the sky as well.
The wool bobs and drifts away, toward the town, like small clouds.
They’ll drift back to earth harmlessly in a few minutes, but of course, the children don’t know that.
“It’s her!” cries a girl. “It’s Sylvie doing that! Just look at her eyes!”
Sylvie’s eyes are wide with shock. But now she blinks and glances quickly around, eyes narrowing with suspicion, and then she spies me behind the tree. I give a small wave and a wink, and her mouth, which had been pressed into a thin line of anger and pain, now parts in a devilish grin.
“Indeed, ’tis I! Sylvie the Terrible!” she roars, and she raises her hands and makes a dramatic show of waving off the bundled wool. “I curse thee, Simon and James and Douglas! I curse thee, Mary and Felicity! May you all grow goat’s beards and lizard’s tails, and may all your food taste of frogs!”
The boys and girls scream and take off running toward the town, pale with terror, as Sylvie stomps around and howls and waves her hands. By the time they’re out of hearing, her horrible groans have turned to peals of laughter. She gives me a triumphant grin.
“Did you see them go?”
“Like sheep from a wolf,” I reply, stepping out from behind the tree.
“Aye, sheep! And my mum was a shepherdess, Connie says, so I should know how to handle them.” She wipes tears away, and I know behind her laughter, she is still raw from their bullying.
“What are you doing all the way out here? Were you on your way to school?”
“School?” she snorts. “Connie doesn’t let me go to school. I thought maybe you’d get lost on your way to the village, so I came to help you.”
A pang of guilt wrenches at my stomach. “Well, it’s lucky for me you did. I admit, I was quite lost.”
She smiles, then suddenly grabs my hand and holds it fast. I stare at her small fingers in mine with some surprise, but do not pull away.
“What do you mean,” I ask, “when you say your brother won’t let you go to school?”
She shrugs. “They use a bit of magic there. Not that the likes of Mary and Felicity McLure can channel, but the teacher can a little, and she does a bit of spellwork. Connie’s against all magic.”
I bite my lip, my own inner voice admonishing me to be quiet and leave well enough alone.
I’m not here to pry into the affairs of the Norths, but to save my magic and go back to my own life.
Nobody’s asked me to care about one country girl’s French and arithmetic.
The Weaver in me urges me to bid Sylvie farewell and be on my way.
But the teacher in me wins out.
“Where is your governess, then?” I ask. “Who is in charge of your education?”
She gives an exasperated groan. “Connie, I guess. When he has time, once or twice a week. Mrs. MacDougal teaches me a bit of cooking when the mood strikes her.”
I lift my eyes to the streaks of cloud above, searching for patience. “Is that so?”
Sylvie frowns, her eyes narrowing at me. “What? I know how to read. I read all the time. I’m not stupid.”
“That’s good.” My tone is strained, and I cannot help but hear the echo of her intolerable guardian in her words. She’s so quick to take offense, just like Mr. North. “Reading is good.”
“I had a governess once. Old Miss Teague. She smelled like beeswax. Connie fired her.”
“Why?”
“She taught me history.”
“History? Is he against history too?”
“Well . . .” Sylvie winces, her fingers worrying at a seam in her sleeve. “History about Weaving, mainly. About how the Telarians—”
“Telarii,” I correct without thinking.
“Right. Those ones. Anyway, she taught me how they turned the battle of Waterloo against that wretched wee devil Napoleon.” Getting caught up in the glory of it all, Sylvie leaps about, firing an imaginary rifle at the trees.
“First, they captured Napoleon’s battle standard, weakening the magic barriers around the Imperial Guard! Then—”
“Your brother fired her for teaching you basic history?” I ask.
She pauses and looks at me, her rifle-arm lowering. “Ach. Well. I might have bribed her to go into more detail than necessary about the magic behind Napoleon’s battle standard.”
“It was a good piece of spellwork,” I admit. “Come on, then. I’ll walk you back home.”
I hadn’t planned to return to Ravensgate, but I can’t very well leave Sylvie to be preyed upon, should her tormentors return for vengeance.
She grins, linking arms with me. “Will you show me how you did that thing with the wool bundles just now? What sort of magic was it?”
Her brother’s face flashes in my memory, his eyes stern as he commanded me to not practice magic in his house. And despite the fact we’re well away from Ravensgate, I still hesitate.
“Please?” Sylvie begs. “I won’t tell Connie, I swear it on my—”
“No need for swearing,” I cut in. The gesture may be empty without a vowknot to seal them, but still the words make me uneasy. “But all right. I will show you. Just don’t mention it to your brother.”
As we walk back to the manor, I thread several hovering knots for her, letting her tie them to little branches, then quietly channeling into them. She crows with delight every time one floats away. She’s a fast learner, her fingers quick.
“A week after I was sent to school,” I say, “the other girls tied my hair to my bedposts and pretended they were going to cut off my ears. I cried all night.”
“Children are beasts,” she replies. “I should know. I am one.”
From what I’ve seen, though, children are more like mirrors, reflecting the attitudes of the adults around them.
Those girls in school would never have singled me out if the teachers had not gossiped about me first. That one is fae touched; mind her closely.
Wicked hands Weave wicked spells. I had told myself I didn’t mind, that I’d rather have focused on learning Weaving over making friends anyway. But I know what it is to be lonely.
I take Sylvie’s hand and hold it tight as we walk. The road bends away from the forest and into the moors. In the bushes, a few red highland cattle graze lazily, lowing at us and shaking their great shaggy heads.
“Sylvie,” I say, “why does your brother dislike magic so much?”
“I think . . .” Her voice hitches. “I think it has to do with our pa. I think magic might have killed him.”
“Was he a Weaver?”
“I don’t know. Connie will never tell me anything about him, or my mum neither. He and I had different mums, but his died and mine ran away. I guess she must have died too, because she never came back for me.” She lets out a huff of breath, then changes the subject. “Where’s your mum and dad?”
“They got sick,” I reply, lost for a moment in memory so faint it’s little more than a scent in my nose—baking bread, a cottage on a hill, strong hands hoisting me into the air.
The sadness is a coil of cold wind around my ankles, swirling and then fading again.
“And so did my uncle. It was just me and my aunt until . . . she couldn’t care for me anymore. ”
She nods. “Like me and Connie.”
“A bit.”
“He’s not a bad brother, you know. Just overprotective.
And once he makes his mind up, not the Fates themselves could change it.
Or so Mrs. MacDougal says. He never lets me go anywhere or do anything!
We used to get invitations from other families, you know, for balls and parties and such.
Even some as far as Stirling or Edinburgh!
But he declined them all, and the invitations stopped coming. ”
I press my lips together, pressure building in my temples. So she not only is a pariah in her own village, she has no peers of her own class to confide in and learn from. The poor child’s completely isolated.
“Sounds lonely,” I say at last.
“Aye,” she sighs. “That’s why I was so excited when you showed up. We almost never get visitors. Except for the ghost, of course.”
I glance down at her. “Er . . . ghost?”
“You’ll probably catch a glimpse of her at night, if you keep your eyes sharp. All white and glowy like a . . . well, like a ghost. Conrad thinks I’m mad as a loon, but I’ve seen her more than once, and I know what I saw.”
Once again my thoughts stray to the pale figure from last night. And once again, I remind myself it was only a wisp of fog. “Do you have chats with this ghost?”
“No, I don’t think she can speak,” says Sylvie. “She just stares at me for a bit, then disappears. I think she might be the ghost of my mum, or Conrad’s.”
“Perhaps she is.” I give her shoulder a consoling squeeze. “At any rate, I’ll be sure to keep my eyes sharp.”
When we near Ravensgate, Captain bounds up to us, barking, and draws Sylvie into a game of chase. They run in great loops about the drive.
I stand uncertainly, eager to give Mr. Conrad North, laird of Ravensgate, a piece of my mind but unsure where to start looking for him, when I hear a sudden cry of pain from the stable.