Page 87 of Son of a Witch (The Wicked Years 2)

“I don’t know.” The boy had a private look. “In any event, I wasn’t consulted.”

“Oh, she leached him, she took a lancet and bled him, she sucked his poison out, and a good thing, too,” said a biddy on a bench nearby. They hadn’t noticed her there.

“Why, Mother Yackle!” bellowed Sister Doctor in a matronizing manner. “Aren’t you the chatty one today!” She shared a wrinkled expression with Sister Apothecaire. The dotty old thing. Ought to be in the solarium with the other silly dears.

“She’s got a good instinct, that Candle,” said Yackle. “The oafs are pleasant enough to bed, in their way, but it takes a daughter of Lurlina to draw out the milk only boys can make…”

“Shame and scandal on the house,” said Sister Apothecaire. “Gentleboys, forgive her. You know, their minds wander at that age, and the sense of propriety wobbles ferociously.”

Liir turned to look at the woman. Her veil was pulled forward, but the splayed nostrils of her long rude nose showed. “Are you the one who directed us to the farm in the overgrown orchard?” he said.

“She never!” said Sister Apothecaire. “Liir, she’s yesterday’s potatoes, and mashed at that. Don’t pay her any mind.”

In a low voice, almost masculine in gruffness, Mother Yackle replied slowly, “I mind my own business.”

“Of course you do,” said Sister Doctor.

“But if I were you, I’d send those soldiers’ horses packing,” continued Mother Yackle. “You don’t want them found on the premises, I’d warrant.”

Liir shrugged, then nodded.

“Look,” said Sister Doctor, “this isn’t the place to talk. Finish up, lads; we need to have a heart-to-heart.”

But Trism had fallen asleep against the back of his chair, and Liir’s eyelids were lowering as they watched. There was nothing for the maunts to do but show them to the cots in the guest quarters, and find blankets, and retreat.

2

LIIR, NEARLY ASLEEP, tossed his body back and forth on the lumpy straw of the bedding. It was as if he had been here before.

Well, he had, but in a feeble enough way. In childhood he’d been more aware of the hems of Elphaba’s skirts, of the food in the wooden bowls. An awful lot of oatmeal mush. And more recently, he’d been broken and mindless, wandering his past in a feverish state. Even the night he and Candle had left the mauntery, and she had helped him move, as good as carried him on her back down the stairs, nearly, the halls had been dark. He’d collapsed into the donkey cart and slipped almost immediately into a real sleep, a sleep of fatigue and not one of voyage.

That was his first apprehension of Candle, he remembered. A slip of a thing with the strength and willpower of a pack horse. She’d been mostly naked, and Mother Yackle had thrown a cloak over her shoulders. Here in the mauntery again, Liir tried to lean into that recent memory, the way he had learned to steep himself in other memories. Maybe there was something yet to be understood about whether he’d actually slept with her, impregnated her…even more, whether and in what ways he might love her.

Now—a thousand difficult lonely miles away from Trism, who snored a yard to the east—Liir turned over, facing the wall. Candle was a cipher to him, sweet and elusive, and the memory was frail. There was nothing more he could unpack from it, nothing useful. To distract himself, in his heart and memory he walked about and examined the hull of the mauntery, doing a kind of spectral surveillance.

The place betrayed its origins as a gardkeep. It was a fortified house, here on a slight wooded rise, an oasis of trees in the Shale Shallows. The ground floor had no windows, and the front door was reinforced with iron bracing. Behind, the kitchen looked out on a greasy moat crossed by a simple drawbridge. The vegetable plots and cow barn were beyond.

The mauntery would afford little protection in a siege. The place was tall and, at this stage in its history, unsecurable for very long. In any effort to gain unlawful access, a modern police force might be slowed, but it wouldn’t be stayed.

Still, at least a few cows could be swept into the parlor, and hay stacked up under the stairs. The fruits of the

harvest crowded the shelves and larders, and the garde-manger was bulbous with blood sausage, dried muttock, and nine varieties of salami, to say nothing of cheeses. There was a mushroom cellar and a bin of desiccated fish fragments. And plenty of wine, and that wonderful rarity in a rural establishment, an indoor well.

In his dreams he checked the cupboards for rifles, he blew through each room to look for wardrobes that could be pushed against windows. He did not see the Superior Maunt asking questions of her esteemed guest about the payout schedule of a proposed beneficial annuity. He didn’t see Mother Yackle nodding in her own morning nap in the sunlight. He didn’t see nor overhear Sister Doctor and Sister Apothecaire squabbling gently in their shared cubicle about how they ought to proceed. The rooms were empty of novices, maunts, guests, spiders, mice, bedbugs, and any presence of the Unnamed God that he could determine.

What he saw, in the topmost room where he had lain, was a figure on a rush-bottomed chair, sitting away from the light, twisting her hands. Her dark hair was looped up on her head with no regard for neatness or propriety, just to get it out of the way. Her eyes were closed, but he didn’t think she could be praying. He didn’t know what she was doing. At her feet was a largish basket woven of twigs. He didn’t look into it; he couldn’t. Every now and then her shoeless foot would nip out from beneath the dark hem of her skirt and give the basket a little push, and because of its rounded bottom, the basket rocked for a time. Then the green foot would appear again, and start the rocking over.

HE WOKE WITH A START. It was sharp noon, and the house smelled of warm leek-and-cabbage eggery for lunch. Trism was still asleep, his hair rucked back against the pillow. The sound of cantering horse hoofs grew louder. Liir wanted to kiss Trism awake, but had the notion that the time for that was already over.

He did it anyway. Trism groaned, and made room, and after a while said, “We don’t do this sort of thing in our circle.”

Did he mean his class at St. Prowd’s? His family? The Home Guard? Didn’t matter. Liir replied, “Well, your circle seems to have widened, hasn’t it.”

“Or shrunk,” said Trism, reaching for his boots.

3

“THEY’RE LOOKING FOR TWO men,” said Sister Doctor.

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