by Sandra Unerman
in Issue 147, April 2024
The room was more crowded than Jan had ever seen it. The old woman’s sons and their wives, grandchildren and cousins, avoided each other’s glances. They did not fidget or murmur, keen to hear every word as the clerk read the long, complicated will aloud. Jan leaned against the wall, out of the way, and tried to remember which son was which. She had seen little of the family while Dame Clara was alive, although she had heard a good deal about them. ‘And to my servant, Janetta,’ the clerk said, ‘I bequeath my haunted cottage in the village of Stonebristle, along with its contents, including the books. She will have a better chance there than any of my kin.’
Jan pushed upright in indignation. She had never been a servant here. She had agreed to help the old woman with daily chores, in exchange for the lessons she had no other means to afford. She had stayed on during the months of illness and decline, out of compassion as well, admittedly, as because she had nowhere else to go. She opened her mouth to protest but closed it in silence, as she grasped the rest of the clerk’s words. She would not have been surprised by some kind of token for remembrance but a cottage with books in it, even a haunted cottage, was an astonishment too big to swallow at once.
The clerk had come to the end of his recital. Jan’s bequest must have been a late addition. Everyone took a breath and stared at her. The short, bulky man in front of the fireplace cleared his throat. ‘Stonebristle,’ he said, in disapproval. ‘I hope she warned you what to expect, young woman.’
Jan blinked at him. ‘Don’t you want the cottage, any of you?’
‘It’s derelict,’ he said. ‘And dangerous.’ The authority in his voice and stance meant that this was Athelstan, the eldest son and chief heir. ‘A burden we don’t need. Just don’t expect help from us when you run into trouble.’
Jan was too dazed to mind her tongue or show what these people would consider proper respect. ‘Why a burden? What’s wrong with the place?’
Nobody wanted to answer, until one of the younger men said, ‘Aunt Clara would never talk about it.’
‘She wasn’t your aunt,’ said one of the others. ‘Second cousin, at best.’
‘Never mind that,’ said the cousin. ‘We can’t send this girl into danger without any warning.’
The others glared at him. An ancient-looking woman said, ‘I remember the trouble when young Oliver was found dead in that cottage, the year before Clara was born. Bruised and beaten, he was, but nobody could work out what had attacked him.’
‘Was that when the haunting started?’ Jan asked. ‘Was there no tale about what caused it?’
‘The place was Sir Holger’s favourite retreat, more than a hundred years ago,’ the woman said. Sir Holger had been a great mage, so Jan had been told, Clara’s ancestor and the founder of the family’s fortunes. ‘He wouldn’t let any of his children visit him there. The haunting started after he died, and that’s as much as I know.
‘Mother went down there in her youth, ’Athelstan said, ‘and again, at the height of her powers as a mage. Both times, she had to leave to save her life. Whatever’s there, she failed to deal with it.’
‘But she believed I might?’ Jan said, doubtfully.
Athelstan sniffed. ‘She wanted to teach me magecraft but I never had the patience for it. She must have thought you would do better.’
None of the three sons had been diligent pupils, according to Dame Clara. She had grumbled to Jan about them all. ‘That’s why I came to her,’ Jan said. ‘But to learn how to understand old books, not to work any magic. I aim to research magecraft, not to practise it.’
‘I doubt research will keep you safe in that cottage.’ Athelstan frowned. ‘We won’t oppose your claim to it. But if you have any sense, you’ll stay away.’
The family had other properties and prosperous lives, by the looks of them, not counting their inheritance. Jan had none of that. She could not return to her own family and she had quarrelled with the few other mages she had met in the city. But she need not discuss her plight with these people. She bowed and said, ‘I’m grateful for her regard. I’ll try to live up to it.’
Stonebristle was half a day’s journey from the city by carrier cart. Jan hitched a lift, in exchange for a cheese from Dame Clara’s larder. She had little to take with her, only a few, well-worn clothes and her book, an ancient miscellany, hard to decipher. Rescuing it from a rubbish heap years ago had inspired her determination to study and brought her to Dame Clara’s door.
Once in the village, she found the cottage from the directions provided; set apart at the western end of the main street, with a pair of overgrown yews either side of the gate. The building was more substantial than she expected, with walls of stone and two storeys of glass windows, mostly uncracked. Jan halted among the creepers on the front path and stared for a while. She could sense other stares, from neighbours or passers-by, but nobody came near. Nobody called out to greet or challenge her.
She had not come all this way to be daunted by appearances. She picked up her bag and took out the keys she had been given.
Inside smelled cold and sour with decay. Jan tried to open windows as she came to them but they were stuck or overgrown with ivy on the outside. She went into the kitchen, unbarred the back door, and wedged it open. The breeze felt chilly for a summer afternoon but scented with grass. She walked through the rooms upstairs and saw a fur of dust on cloth hangings and good, plain furniture. She was disappointed not to come across the promised books, until she went back down to the parlour and spotted a box seat in an alcove by the chimney. Inside she found half a dozen tomes filled with writing she could not make out in the fading light.
The kitchen was cluttered with pots, dishes and dried herbs, so old they crumbled at a touch. Mould stained the walls and spread uneasy patterns across the ceiling. Jan lit a fire from the logs set ready in the hearth. Dame Clara must have left that prepared when she had visited the cottage, though there were no other traces of her, except a few bottles of wine in a cupboard.
The old woman had never spoken of the cottage. Nor had she given any sign that she thought highly of Jan’s magecraft or had any fondness for her. Jan had turned up at her door after a quarrel with the mage who had first taken her on. By then she had no funds left to offer as a fee, only the opportunity to study the book she had brought with her and a willingness to carry out the tasks of an assistant. When Dame Clara said, ‘I am in more need of help in the house than the study,’ Jan had taken her chance. She had received help with her own studies in return, though she had resented the old woman’s insistence that even a research mage should learn some practical skills.
Dame Clara had been obstinate, not malicious. She would not have sent Jan to tackle a haunting with no hope of success. All the same, Jan had to work hard to contain her fear. She had had no ambition to do deeds of daring. But she would rather face the haunt than another struggle to make a living in the city. She wished she had learned more, while she had the chance.
Jan wanted to examine the books but cleaning the place seemed more urgent. She brought in bundles of leaves from the weeds in the back garden to use as scourers and scrubbed everything within reach. She wiped a bucket clean and went to find the village well. Bystanders watched her walk up the street in silence and stood back from the well handle, without meeting her glance. When she picked up her full bucket, a voice said, ‘You’re not one of them.’
Jan set down the bucket and turned. ‘Dame Clara left me the cottage,’ she said, to let them all know. ‘I’m moving in to stay.’
‘You won’t last.’ The speaker was a small woman with a round, crumpled face. ‘You’ll stir up the haunt again and run away, just like she did.’
‘Tell me about the haunt,’ Jan said. ‘What can I do to fight it?’
‘Nothing.’ The woman folded her arms, while others looked away. ‘You’d best get out of here before you come to harm.’
‘What kind of harm?’
‘You won’t make me tell you,’ the woman said. ‘You can’t be much of a mage in those clothes, and with no spell to help you lift that bucket. Just go away and leave us in peace.’
‘I can’t,’ Jan said. ‘I’ve nowhere else to go.’
That evening, by the time the fire had subsided into embers, her back was stiff and her hands sore. But at least the kitchen smelled clean. She shut the kitchen door, though she did not bar it, and fetched the bedcovers from the upstairs room. Piled in a corner near the hearth, they would do as a bed for the night. She lay down at once, too tired to think about food, and fell asleep.
She woke to an insistent whisper. ‘Another greedy wretch, another sweaty-fingered blunderer to spoil the air I can’t breathe.’
More words had been dripping through her sleep but she did not want to remember them. She sat up and saw a figure crouched above her, his knees bent onto her legs, his face close to hers, though she felt no weight. His skin shone a mottled, phosphorescent blueish grey. By its light, she threw herself out of bed and across to the other side of the kitchen table. He followed but stopped opposite her. ‘How would you like to die? Strangled or stabbed, smothered or beaten?’ He raised his arms, his hands spread wide. He looked solid, a great lump of a man, with a head too heavy for his neck. But his voice had no breath in it and his shape wobbled, bulging in and out as he spoke.
‘You can’t touch me.’ Jan forced the words out.
‘I don’t need to touch you.’ His eyes glowed like flames underwater and his teeth were a crescent of knives. ‘Run, before I make you hurt yourself.’
‘This cottage is mine.’ Those words came out more steadily. ‘Your time here is long past.’
‘The King’s Mage could not drive me out, nor the most cunning of his rivals, in the years after I died. The lucky ones ran away before I broke them.’
In her studies, Jan had seen spells for releasing a trapped spirit. But she would be a fool to try what had failed for those other mages. ‘You don’t belong here any longer,’ she said. City mages had no better notion than other folk what happened to a person after death. Dame Clara had believed that her soul would travel to adventures beyond the world and her ancestor did not seem the kind to be less ambitious. ‘How can your spirit move on until you let go of your body and your old home?’
‘Are you trying to argue me out of here?’ Sir Holger’s laugh made his shape flare wildly in and out, while his head leaned closer to Jan. She took a grip on the table to anchor herself. ‘I chose to bind myself to this place, to enjoy every memory of the tricks I played here and the hurts I inflict now on those who invade my domain.’
So he had trapped himself. That would make the release harder. But if he despised Jan enough, perhaps he could be tempted into giving himself away. ‘The binding must be strong, to have lasted all this time.’
‘Strong and well hidden,’ he answered. ‘Out of reach of the sharpest eyes and the twitchiest fingers.’
So there was a physical tie, a thing that could be discovered in the cottage. And therefore a way to learn where to look if Jan dared attempt it. She gripped the table harder and called on her mage senses to reach out to Sir Holger, to the mind which held the apparition together. The knowledge must be there, if she could take him by surprise for long enough to trace it.
She dropped into a storm of hunger and glee, a restless maw eager to devour other minds. Any memories of the man’s old life, even his tenderness for the cottage or triumph at his achievements, were long gone, worn into meaningless fragments. The storm licked at Jan’s own mind, ready to suck her into its emptiness. Just in time, she shut down her mage senses and pulled back inside the wall of her body. She bent over the kitchen table and retched, although no bile emerged. Her throat hurt and her head ached.
‘Easy as pie,’ came the whisper. ‘Now see what I can do to you. Bang your head on the table, little girl. Take the poker from the hearth and beat your breasts. Smash your face against the wall.’
He could not touch her: she was sure of that. But his words drove into her mind and pushed at her nerves. She would have no relief until the whisper stopped and it would not stop unless she did as he told her. She tried to draw on her core strength, built up with the exercises she had learned from Dame Clara, to centre herself and guard against invasion. But it was too late. She had tipped off balance with her strike at the apparition and she could not right herself.
‘Try the snug fit of your belt round your neck.’ The sticky whisper was as much inside Jan’s head as out in the room. Sir Holger’s shape loomed close enough to pour into her whenever she opened her mouth. ‘Scarify your arms with your knife. Cut your cheeks and your lips.’
Jan had not taken off her belt when she lay down to sleep. Before she could prevent it, her hand drew her little knife from its sheath. She forced herself to hurl it at Sir Holger, who laughed. ‘Pick it up,’ he said.
Jan ran for the back door. Her hands trembled as she struggled to open it and her legs shook as she tumbled outside.
The night air welcomed her, cool and dark. She pulled the door shut behind her but dared not stop to fasten it. She did not know whether the ghost could leave the cottage but she could still hear his voice. ‘Come back, you wretch, you poltroon. I haven’t finished with you.’ He was shouting now, instead of whispering, so perhaps he could not follow her. But the urge to obey him had not diminished. Jan fled away, without knowing where to go. The summer night was not completely dark but she could not pause to make sense of the obstacles around her.
She came to a prickly lump of leaves and twigs, higher than her head and too wide to dodge. She jumped and scrambled over it, despite the scratches to her face and hands. She fell down the other side and could not move for a moment, in her relief that Sir Holger’s voice was gone. But she could not stay there. She picked herself up and stumbled over something which fell with a clatter.
A door opened ahead and lamplight dazzled her. ‘Don’t you dare.’ The woman from the well stood in the doorway.
‘Dare what?’ Jan asked. ‘I’m sorry, mistress. I didn’t mean to disturb you.’
‘It’s only you.’ The woman raised her lantern. ‘You’re bleeding and your breeches are in shreds. You’d better come in here, you tiresome child.’
Back in the city, pride had kept Jan from accepting less grudging invitations. Tonight, she was grateful for anything that took her further away from the voice. In the light of the lantern, she stepped cautiously between tubs and pots to follow the woman indoors. She entered a kitchen which showed her what the one in the haunted cottage ought to be, well-ordered and cheerful, with a smell of beans and porridge. ‘Thank you, mistress.’ Jan accepted a damp cloth to wipe the blood from her scratches.
‘Call me Tibbett.’ The woman leaned back against a cupboard. ‘And don’t thank me. You wouldn’t have made it to this side of the hedge if I could only keep a guard dog here.’
‘I didn’t know this was your place.’ Jan spread the cloth over her nose and pressed hard. ‘I just ran to get away.’
‘You’d be long gone by now, if you’d listened to me this afternoon,’ Tibbett said. ‘Now you’ll need decent clothes, before you can leave in the morning.’
‘I’m not leaving.’ Jan peeled the cloth from her face and held it out. ‘I can’t take your help, if that’s what you want of me.’
‘What else can you do?’
‘Search next door, as soon as daylight comes.’ Despair, not hope would accompany her but she tried not to let that show.
‘So the other one said, when she came here in her pomp.’ Tibbett’s exasperation tightened her face. She must be younger than Jan had thought earlier from her flounced cap and stern demeanour, a wiry, nimble woman, bright-eyed despite her disapproval. ‘I was a slip of a girl then, wide open to any foolish hope. Not that I was the only one.’ She took the cloth and set about cleaning Jan’s cuts. Her touch was brisk but not rough, her head turned down, her voice an unhappy murmur.
‘Do you think we are glad to live in a place where no cats or dogs will stay or birds nest? We must keep the goats out on the hills even in the bitterest winter. We listened to that fine lady and helped her in her search. Three times she chanted words over the things we fetched her, words that made me sick, but they achieved nothing.’ Tibbett bent down to clean Jan’s legs. ‘I stayed on when the others gave up. I was there when she called up the haunt before nightfall, to question him, she said, but he taunted her. And mocked at me. I ran away before she did. His voice stayed in my dreams for years.’ She finished her work and sat back on her heels. ‘Whatever happens to you in there, I won’t go to your rescue and nor will any of your neighbours. Do you understand that?’
She was not angry at Jan but at her own helplessness. ‘I don’t understand about the animals,’ Jan said.
‘They can feel the ghost by day as well as by night,’ Tibbett answered. ‘Even the mice have kept away from that end of the village since the trouble started. It was the trouble with the dogs that drove my grandparents and their neighbours to send for a mage back then, one who wasn’t related to the old man. He took their savings and ran out of the cottage while the night was new.’
‘I’ve nowhere to run to,’ Jan said. ‘Maybe that will sharpen my wits.’
In morning light, Jan stood in the kitchen of her cottage and opened up her mage senses, sore from the night’s adventures but not faded. She spoke aloud in the language innate to all the living things of the land, beetles and fungus as well as trees and river horses. Only humans had to be taught this language, instead of knowing it by instinct, and few bothered except mages. Jan was less than fluent but she knew a little. ‘What doesn’t belong here?’ she asked. ‘What’s cramped by a knot which should never have been tied?’
Nothing answered her. She walked from room to room, her eyes alert as well as her inner sight, but nothing revealed any sense of wrongness. She took out one of Sir Holger’s books and sat on the back steps to study it. The writing inside was shadowed and difficult, with no headings or gaps to guide the reader. She turned the pages for a few minutes before she gave up. If mage lore could have broken the haunt, Dame Clara or another would have achieved it by now.
The path to the hill above the village was easy to find. Jan climbed as far as a stand of three oaks, just below the summit. The middle tree was half decayed, with bare branches at the top and a great hollow in the trunk. The other two were younger, their wide branches clotted with leaves. The place seemed the likeliest in sight for what she meant to try. She sat down among the roots of the middle oak and opened her mind as far as she could.
‘I need a champion,’ she said, in the wilderness language. ‘Who is here with the skill and strength to fight the unyielding dead?’
The branches creaked above her head and a crow squawked as it flapped out of the trees. Nothing else happened for a long time. Jan was too weary even to repeat her plea. She sat and waited in a dull trance. She did not see the fox until he came under the shade of the trees. He stopped there, for a good, long stare at her, while she stared back. He was big, the size of a large dog but narrower, with a sharp muzzle and golden eyes. The red of his coat was streaked with grey and black and his black tail rose high above his head. Eventually, he came and sat up on his haunches, opposite Jan. ‘You don’t look like a trap,’ he said.
‘You don’t look like a warrior,’ Jan answered. She had hoped for a fae knight or wild hunter who would delight in combat with the ghost. What she would have to give them in return for their help, she had not dared to contemplate.
‘Lucky for you,’ the fox said, in an uncomfortable echo of her thoughts. ‘You’d better make do with me, Brindle, if you don’t want worse misery than waits back in your den.’
‘You know about the cottage?’ That was a surprise. Maybe a talking fox could be of some use after all.
‘So does every creature within a day’s run of the place.’ Brindle’s yawn was contemptuous. ‘The taint sickens any who go too close. Only human noses are deaf enough to endure it.’
That explained about the animals. ‘The taint must come from the ghost that haunts the cottage or the binding that keeps it there,’ Jan said. ‘Can you help me get rid of it?’
Brindle lowered his front paws and rested his muzzle on them. ‘If sharp wits and a keen nose can do it. But why should I?’
‘To clear the village from the taint.’
‘I have the wide hills to roam. I’m not a cat, to seek shelter under a human roof or a pig to scavenge in the village midden.’
Nor was he a creature safe for Jan to trust. But she had not the strength for another summons. ‘I can’t offer you much of a reward,’ she said. ‘Spells of healing, maybe, when I puzzle out the old man’s books.’
Brindle’s ears flattened and his tail twitched. ‘Lay no words on me. The old man burdened the land with the lore from those books, even before they tempted him into madness.’
‘How do you know?’ Jan could not guess how old he was but he might have lived far longer than a natural fox. ‘Did you meet him?’
Brindle shut his eyes and did not answer. Jan sighed. If this was a battle of wits, she had already lost. ‘What else can I offer you?’
‘Those books.’ He sat up and his eyes gleamed at her. ‘Destroy them, free me and mine from the threat of them and I’ll search out the old man’s spirit for you.’
‘I can’t destroy books!’ Jan had fought to keep hold of anything with writing on written papers, ever since she had learned to read.
‘Call another champion then,’ Brindle rose to his feet. ‘The next to come may demand your youth or your first-born child but let you keep the old man’s vile scribblings.’
‘Don’t go.’ Jan tried to keep the panic out of her voice. ‘I won’t open the books. I’ll send them out of reach.’
‘Where?’
‘Back to the city.’ If she sold them, the profits might maintain her in the cottage for a year or two but that was not the safest plan. ‘To the King’s Library. If anyone consults them there, they’ll have no reason to trouble these hills with the results.’
Brindle’s tail switched and his eyes slitted. ‘Let’s see,’ he said.
At the back gate to the cottage, Brindle halted for so long that Jan grew impatient. ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘He won’t arrive until after dark.’
‘I’ll come when I come,’ the fox said, head up, whiskers stiff. ‘Be still.’
The garden was a heap of broken stones and brambles, where nothing moved that Jan could see. She waited until Brindle flicked his ears and slipped under the gate. He padded through the weeds so slowly that Jan had trouble keeping pace. At the kitchen door, he lowered his head and tail, his reluctance so deep that Jan expected him to bolt away. She dared not try to challenge or encourage him. She opened the door and stood back as he crept inside.
The rooms smelled as stale as before Jan had done any cleaning, worse than they had in the morning. In the middle of the kitchen, Brindle stretched to his full height and bristled out his fur. ‘He’s gone,’ he said. ‘There’s nothing here but the stink of carrion. I can eat carrion.’
‘Something was here last night,’ Jan said. ‘Something with a voice to hurt me.’
‘The voice and shape he dreamt before he died.’ Brindle licked his lips. ‘I’ll be glad to eat his dream, once we find it.’
He paced the length of the cottage before he slid upstairs to nose round the bedrooms. Back down in the parlour, he nosed at the chimney breast and turned his head from side to side. ‘Rot and decay,’ he said. ‘Too bitter to be human. Where are the books?’
Jan opened the box seat and he whined. ‘Show me.’
She knelt and pulled out the books, one by one. They were solid and square, with covers embossed in maze patterns which hurt her eyes. ‘Are these the bond that keeps the old man in the cottage?’
Brindle gave her the stare of a hunter sighting prey. ‘They are my price. Burn them or I’ll do nothing for you.’
‘I’ll send them away.’ Jan’s endurance was worn thin but she would not be bullied so easily. ‘I told you, I can’t burn books.’
Brindle stretched up towards Jan, his teeth a hair’s breadth from her face. ‘I can eat a fresh kill as well as carrion. Light the fire or you’ll be my prey, my reward for entering this place.’
Jan felt sick from rage at her weakness, as well as the fox’s betrayal. ‘You promised to help me.’
‘I promised nothing, out on the hill. Here, I’ll promise you your death if you don’t fulfil my wishes. Light the fire.’
Sir Holger’s notes might be irreplaceable but so was Jan. She did not know how she would forgive herself afterwards but she was not nimble enough or strong enough to withstand the fox any longer. She piled the books on the hearth and stared at them. Her hands shook as she took out her tinderbox and scraped a light.
Sir Holger’s ghost swelled up in front of her, so dense and dark that she flinched back. The spark of fire went out. ‘Reach through him,’ Brindle growled. He pushed at her shoulders and she lurched forward into nothing.
‘Not in there!’ The ghost was behind her now and she scrambled up to look at him, the tinderbox still in her hand. ‘Do you want to burn down the cottage?’
‘Why not?’ Brindle was crouched, ready to spring. ‘It’s done no good to anyone.’
‘How dare you, girl?’ Sir Holger surged at her again and she could not help backing away. ‘How dare you bring in vermin to foul my home? Drop that box before your fingers cramp into everlasting knots. Get away from this hearth before your knees twist backwards in your legs.’
She could feel him hammering at the doors of her mind, each blow more powerful than the last. But Brindle’s ears pricked up and his whiskers stiffened. ‘Wait now,’ he said and his voice steadied her, though she did not know why. In a single leap, he sprang across the fireplace and up the chimney, supple as a cat half his size. For a moment Jan could only see the tip of his tail. Then he dropped down with a yowl and a bundle fell after him in a cloud of choking ash and a graveyard smell.
Brindle shook his pelt, his eyes and ears fixed on the bundle, which was held together by knotted cords. ‘Open it.’
Sir Holger’s intangible body writhed across the thing, arms and legs flailing. ‘Filth, whore, slut.’ His screech grew inarticulate, the insults too fast and loud to catch.
‘Cut it open,’ Brindle’s snarl reached under the clamour. ‘He can’t stop you.’
Jan wanted to run away. She wanted to hide in a corner, to muffle her ears and her mind. Only the gleam in Brindle’s eyes and his teeth fixed her in position. She felt nothing as she reached forward through the apparition with the knife from her belt. With the rags of her strength, she cut the cords round the leather wrap. Inside was a heap of matted fur and bone, a dead cat.
Sir Holger howled. His mind sucked at Jan with threats to melt and swallow her. Behind him, Brindle tore open the cat’s body, to show black feathers and smaller bones, the corpse of a crow. His eyes golden sparks in the soot streaks of his face, he prodded the feathers and his claw bounced off the crow’s beak, which snapped open. A small clay phial fell out and broke. Jan had a glimpse of nail and hair clippings before Brindle pounced. He licked up the shards of the phial with its contents. As he crunched them, the ghost abandoned Jan to pull at Brindle’s jaws, with a yell of despair as well as rage. And then he was gone, his shape vanished, his voice silenced.
Jan sat on the floor, too shaky to stay upright. Brindle ground his jaws and swallowed. ‘Drink,’ he croaked. ‘Give me a drink to finish the job.’
The water bucket in the kitchen seemed a long way off. Jan half crawled, half staggered towards it and then had a better idea. She fetched a wine bottle from the cupboard and cracked its neck against the table. She poured a dishful for the fox and a cup for herself. Brindle lapped thirstily and Jan gulped more deeply than she intended. ‘Was that the binding?’ she asked. ‘Have you broken it?’
‘I’ve eaten it,’ Brindle said, with satisfaction. ‘The leavings of his body and his distorted spirit. He won’t come back from that.’
Jan could not tell whether her mind or her body hurt the worse. ‘About the books,’ she said.
‘I need a wash.’ Soot clouded the room as Brindle shook himself. ‘If you won’t burn the books, bury them. Dig them a hole, somewhere my kin can watch over them.’
A week later, Jan sat among the garden weeds with the only book she had left, the one she had brought with her. She did not regret Sir Holger’s books, which she would have been afraid to use. Silent foxes had gathered round her when she carried them out of the cottage and led her to a cave deep in the hills. They had helped her dig a pit and backfilled it with their dung and with the bones of their prey. She doubted she could find the place again.
The ghost’s threats had stuck in her mind for days although cleaning the cottage had helped free her from them. Now she needed to work out how to make a life for herself in the village. Tibbett and the others had been generous so far in providing her with food and other necessities, in thanks, they said, for destroying the haunt. But she had no desire to rely on them for long. She had brought her book into daylight, to consider whether she could bear to sell it. Its stained covers and crumpled pages, rougher and older than Sir Holger’s books, were filled with a muddle of sketches and notes in different handwritings. The few passages she had deciphered under Dame Clara’s guidance had been about unidentifiable plants and forgotten heraldry. Nevertheless, if she sent it back to the city, it might earn enough to tide her over for a few months. But she was reluctant to give up her only chance at the kind of research she had wanted to undertake.
‘Please ma’am.’ A small girl stood at the back gate. ‘Please will you come and speak to our goat?’
Jan frowned. Nobody had ever ma’amed her before.
‘Tibbett says you know how to understand beasts. The goat won’t give us any milk and we don’t know why. Please will you find out for us?’
Surprise held Jan still. She had told Tibbett about Brindle, so that the villagers would not have false expectations of her mage powers. Opening her senses to the wilderness language had proved to have its drawbacks, because of the complaints from the weeds and the beetles when she tackled the mess in the garden. She had not considered that there might be advantages as well.
She had been silent too long. The girl hopped from one leg to the other and said, ‘We can spare you a loaf and half a dozen eggs from our new hen, if you’ll come.’
‘I may not be able to help.’ Jan stood up. ‘But I’ll try.’
©April 2024, Sandra Unerman
Sandra Unerman is the author of two fantasy novels, Spellhaven and Ghosts and Exiles. Her short fiction has appeared in the anthologies Never Cheat a Witch and The Casket of Fictional Delights, as well as previously in Swords & Sorcery, among other places. She lives in London, UK, and is a member of Clockhouse London Writers.