UP HERE.” MEG climbed onto the stone bench skirting the well. Poppy and I hopped up. From there we could see above the crowd. People jostled for position close to the stage beside Sheriff Bollard’s jailhouse. I scanned the gathering, trying to find the man I’d seen at the water. So many feet stirred up the common street stench. Folk tossed garbage out their windows day and night, and emptied their sewage pots onto the cobbles below. The muckrakers were sorely overworked, trying to keep up with it all. My nose was schooled to the odor; still, a brisk sea breeze wouldn’t be amiss just now.
Mother pushed her way through the mob with my father and Master Percival.
“There’s your betrothed,” Meg said, spotting him too.
Goose-necked, middle-aged Master Percival carried a fat purse. My father would prosper from the match. “Let my father marry him if he likes him so much.”
“Tess!” Poppy laughed.
Meg’s husband, Tom Weaver, pressed his way through the crowd with little Alice riding on his shoulders. He joined us at the well. The red-haired weaver was taller than most folk, so three-year-old Alice had the best view of all atop his shoulders. She glanced back at her mother, then pointed to my black eye. “That’s sore,” she said.
“Hush, Alice.” Meg patted her daughter’s small back. Alice lived, I thought. Some children live. Why not Mother’s? Why was I the only one to survive when all the rest died even down to Adam? I touched Alice’s strawberry curl so lightly, she did not feel it and did not turn around.
On the other end of the square I spied Tidas Leech with his plump, sow-eyed sister, Joan Midwife, who’d lost every child my mother birthed. A sour taste came to my mouth.
Poppy pointed to the bridge. “Look.”
A shout went up: “Lady Adela!” People cleared a path for the horses, waving and calling her name. At the end of the procession, a pimply boy drove a cart with the lady’s trunks and three stately deerhounds with red velvet collars.
I’d been in bed with fever the last time Lady Adela came to town, so I’d not seen her myself: never seen her royal escort or the Gray Knight sent by her uncle, the king’s regent, Lord Sackmoore, to guard the lady. The red plume atop the Gray Knight’s helm bounced in time with his horse, and the black swan of the Sackmoore family crest was painted on his shield. But among the riders, it was Lady Adela who caught my eye and kept it.
Sitting tall in the saddle, she straddled the horse like a man even though ladies both highborn and low- were all taught to ride sidesaddle so as not to split their skirts. Astonished at her gall, I watched her as she steered her horse toward the stage that served as a speech platform, players’ stage, and hanging gallows.
The youthful lady was all opposition in her dress, both plain and fancy. A short gauzy veil covered the top half of her face. She wore a proper black armband about the sleeve of her gray gown just like the woodward had. Yet for all this, her belt was jeweled, her sword ruby-studded.
Here’s a woman who has mastered the world of men, I thought. Unfettered by marriage, in command of her own life. How had she risen to a man’s post, commanding eight knights?
I had to admit I’d expected to see a more downcast woman, knowing her sad tale. As the story went, witches kidnapped Lady Adela four years back, when she was just eighteen. On the night of the Black Sabbath they tortured her in Dragonswood, slit her ankle tendon so she could not run, burned her with hot pokers, and worst of all, put out her left eye.
The lady knew violence from witches; we knew violence from our fathers and husbands. Still, she was more than conqueror now. Draw her, I thought. I did not render people well, yet my fingers tingled, thinking how I’d ink the straight line of her back.
I tossed her my buttercups. Three thin stems caught in her horse’s mane. She took two in her free hand. A smile bloomed below her veil. I was glad I’d thrown them. As she rode past, one blossom fell from the white mane and was crushed under her horse’s hoof.
Anon she dismounted and took the stage walking with a slight limp from her witch-wound. Above us all, she raised her hand. “Good citizens.” She paused for silence.
Had they found the treasure? Was Prince Arden home to be crowned?
The town was still, waiting. “We have all been in mourning for our noble Pendragon king. God rest King Kadmi’s soul,” she said.
“God rest his soul,” we all said, crossing ourselves.
“And we are an isle without its royal treasure until young Prince Bion and his army find the thieves who stole it.”
She let the words sink in. The treasure was still lost.
“But I have not come here to speak of sadness or missing treasure. I have come to ask you, people of Harrowton, to stand with me and make ready for Prince Arden, our future king!”
“Make ready for King Arden,” we cried.
She drew her sword and held it up. A ray of sunlight glinted from the blade. “Prince Arden has risked life and limb these past four years fighting in the crusades. Should our God-fearing prince come home now to find his beloved island crawling with Satan’s spawn?”
“No!”
“Never!”
“Then,” she cried, “let us scour our island clean of all wickedness before our new king returns!”
People raised their hands shouting. I felt a fervor growing in me. Even old Blind Cropper hollered, holding up his walking stick. Townsfolk gazed up at her in that spreading light as if she were an Angel of the Lord come to purify us.
When the shouting abated, the lady sheathed her sword and pulled back her veil, revealing the black eye patch covering her glass eye. The sight sent a soft, uneasy moan through the crowd. We’d all heard how King Kadmi asked the fey folk to create a glass eye especially for the lady after she’d been attacked. Some said the eye was magical, that it empowered her to winnow out a witch.
The lady stepped forward. “How do we know a witch?”
Quavering, I drew my hood up. Was this what she was after? Another witch hunt? She’d come to Harrowton four years back, right after her abduction. I did not know she was still on the hunt.
One man joked, “Witches be the toothless hags what stink up the room!”
Lady Adela said, “How easy that would be, sir. But witches are more cunning than that. Any woman standing in this crowd with us today could be a witch. They are not always old crones. Some are young and lissome.” She paused and lifted her eye patch.
Now her fey eye was on the crowd. We all of us gasped. The sound came in a wave. I sucked a breath in and could not let it out.
“Could she be your neighbor, the baker’s daughter? Is she the girl at the well? A friend who has herb skills? Does she look innocent and yet she harbors secret powers?”
Sweat slicked my back. Only Grandfather knew I had the fire-sight, and he’d warned me to keep the power secret. The visions came when I was alone, so I’d managed to keep it to myself—until the day we buried Adam. In the sexton’s burning leaf pile by the grave I saw a flaming man all green and shining in the fire, swinging his bright sword. Later that same day I ran to Joan Midwife’s house to demand our money back. I found her cutting eel for her stewpot.
“Pay me back for the sticklewort we bought to cure Adam, or I’ll spread the word, Joan Midwife.”
“What word?”
“Adam died because of you, filthy hag. You’re not fit to handle infants. I’ll spread the word about you. No one will ask you to be their midwife now!”
“Was it me made Adam die? I saw you staring at the fire, didn’t I? In a trance, you were in the graveyard.” She poked her gray tongue through her gapped teeth. “What witch spells were you casting, girl?”
“Who is the witch?” Lady Adela asked again. “Look to any girl seen entering Dragonswood. She goes there after Satan. In secret places she joins her coven to torture her victims; she even sacrifices children, stewing their bones for the power it gives her. She’s a woman with a devil’s heart!”
Poppy took my hand and Meg my arm. Both were frightened, though they’d only come in once with me for berries.
“No one saw us,” I whispered to Poppy. But her wild-eyed look asked, Did your father maybe on that day, or the leech?
“We’re exposed so high up here,” I said. “Let’s get down.”
Meg managed to squeeze in next to Tom, but he could not make room for Poppy or me with the mob backed all the way up to the edge of the well. I tried to force my way down onto the cobbles and felt a crushing weight as my foot was pinned against the bench. I grunted with pain, tugging my leg, and barely managed to pull my foot back.
Up on stage Lady Adela turned her head slowly left to right. “A witch brings pestilence to your town, and death. Are your elderly safe from her, are your children? A witch need only give a babe the evil eye for it to sicken and die.” Oh, that went to my heart, thinking of my brother newly in the sod. I was not the only one, for next I heard Father’s booming voice.
“She’s a witch!” He pointed through the crowd. “Joan Midwife! She poisoned our newborn son and made him die!”
The midwife shrieked, and I screamed, “No!” I tried again to clamber down and reach my father, whose arm was out, finger pointing. I knew he was still crazed over losing Adam.
I’d cursed Joan Midwife to her face a week ago when she wouldn’t pay me back for her useless herbs. I might have called the midwife a witch when I fought with my father later in the backyard, but I hadn’t meant it. Surely he knew that?
I had one foot on the ground and was still pinned up against the well when I saw my father moving like a great muscled bull forcing his way through the throng, shouting, “Witch!”
“Stop him, Mother!” She couldn’t hear me above the din.
One man called, “Midwife’s a witch?”
Then another, “A witch surely. I lost my child after she tended the birth!”
“She gave my girl the evil eye!”
“Makes a man pay whether they live or not.”
“Get her!”
My shouts of “Stop. She’s not a witch!” were swallowed up with all the rest. The excited crowd churned like a tide pool. Some coming closer to the stage, some trying to back away from it as Midwife Joan and her brother, Tidas Leech, fought their way toward a side lane trying to escape.
Father was still bounding for Joan with his fists up when two of Lady Adela’s knights caught the woman from behind and dragged her toward the sheriff’s house.
“Let me go!” she howled. “The man’s a liar!”
“Witch! Witch!” people called. I couldn’t believe how quickly they’d let my father’s single outburst poison their minds against her.
“You want a witch?” the midwife screeched. “Look to yer daughter, John Blacksmith!” Joan was dragged inside the sheriff’s house. The heavy door slammed shut.
Struggling, I tried to push through the throng.
“Tess,” Poppy called from somewhere behind me. I could not stop for her. The alley was hidden by the pressing bodies, but I knew it was there. Get to it and I could run. Hood on, head down, I forced my way through, rammed into the fishmonger, stumbled. The crowd swirled around me. More shouts. Witch? Where? I know Tess. She was here.
There she is.
I ran, was knocked to the cobbles. On all fours I tried to crawl. Scratch my way to the alley. Where was it? Which way? Gowns, pant legs, stench. I stood, pushed past the man I’d seen earlier at the river.
More shouts. Tess! There she is! Heart in my throat, I reeled for the alley, ran past the baker’s, cobbler’s. Large hands grabbed me. Tidas Leech. “Call my sister a witch, Tess, Blacksmith’s daughter, and I’ll call you one!” His face was red as raw beef. Spittle foamed in the corner of his mouth.
I struggled against him. “Father doesn’t mean it. He’ll take it back. Let me go!”
He was thickly built, stronger than I. I screamed and fought as he dragged me back through the crowd toward the stage.
“I’ve got her now! Tess the witch! She’s the witch! Not my sister!”
I stomped his foot, elbowed him, threw back my head to pull away.
On stage Lady Adela looked down. Her fey eye on me.