I WOKE UP. The carriage wasn’t moving. My throat stung.
Trunk leaned over me. “Mistress Ogre?”
“Yes?” I opened my eyes. Beyond Trunk’s shoulder, I saw Squire Jerrold’s worried face. I sensed fear from them both, fear for me, I thought, not of me. “Did you dose me with purpline?”
Trunk’s expression cleared. Satisfaction replaced fright. “We don’t have tea, but I dripped four drops right down your throat.”
Brave! He’d inserted his fingers beyond my fangs.
He added, “Four because you’re so big.”
“Thank you.” I hoisted myself back on the bench and then breathed hard, but, once established, I ate a meat stick—my appetite proof of returning health. “How did you know something was amiss?”
They hadn’t. Trunk’s jug of sheep’s milk had run out.
“Mistress Ogre, when the squire saw your poor fingernails, we knew.”
I checked my hands. The bumps were still prominent. “You could be a healer, Trunk.”
“I believe I could be.” His pleasure threatened to burst the carriage apart at the seams. “It’s like cooking. You have to know your ingredients.”
I smiled. That was part of it.
Squire Jerrold said, “We’re about an hour from Frell.”
My hands chilled from fright, not illness. My throat tightened. Even another meat stick didn’t quiet my stomach.
I must have looked bad again, because the two watched me anxiously.
Only hatred would greet me in town. How many arrows would it take to finish me off? Or would I be killed by a sword or a knife?
“If people attack me, take my satchel with the purpline. Don’t defend me. If we’re all dead, no one will be cured.”
Admiration for me engulfed Squire Jerrold.
ZEEn him into proposing now, I thought.
I said, “If the outbreak is bad, you’ll run out of purpline.” Hurriedly, I described my other remedies.
They nodded and left me. The carriage started again. I looked out the window. Clouds scudded across other clouds in a brisk wind.
After a while, I checked my fingers again and discovered that the bumps had almost flattened. I felt fine.
The road became lined with a decorative wrought-iron fence in a pattern of flowers, frogs, and large leaves. Along the top were spikes. We were approaching Frell, but the way was empty of traffic.
Soon we crossed a bridge. On the other side, on a wooden stake planted in the ground, was the BB sign—barley blight—lettered in green paint.
Perhaps ten minutes later, the carriage stopped, though we hadn’t reached the castle.
Oh! Faces I knew topped the fence spikes, three heads on each side of the road. I swallowed convulsively as I jumped out of the carriage.
SSahlOO, whose last sight was me, wore an eager expression.
AAng had died snarling.
“I pulled that one,” I told Squire Jerrold and Trunk, pointing at the gap in the line of fangs.
“You knew them?” Trunk said.
“I killed these two.” I pointed. “This one had a toothache. Her name was AAng.”
“They have names?” Squire Jerrold said.
“I have a name!” I named the others.
Squire Jerrold said, “Sir Peter lied about killing them. We have to tell King Imbert.”
If he lived. “The king won’t believe us,” I said flatly. “No one will.”
I lifted the heads off the pikes and set them on the ground. We had no time to bury them, though that didn’t matter. Ogres didn’t have rites. I climbed back in the carriage. Squire Jerrold followed me in and opened the window. Unwillingly, I tingled.
And thought about Sir Peter. Lying to the king was serious, especially since King Imbert had knighted him for valor. But lying itself wasn’t much of a crime. Sir Peter hadn’t killed anyone, and the heads had once been attached to ogres. This was the act of a rogue more than a complete villain—though he might be that, too.
If he still lived, he could be a threat to me for knowing the truth and to Squire Jerrold and Trunk simply for being my companions.
We galloped through the city gates. Squire Jerrold kindly named the streets as we careered along them: Progress to Merit to Larkspur to Eastview. The only other vehicle on the road, a two-horse carriage, trotted toward us and passed by. Few people were out. The attack on me that I’d expected wouldn’t occur. The barley blight had progressed too far.
A figure slumped in a doorway. Dead? We zipped by.
A woman, seemingly healthy, leaned into the wind, bent on some purpose. A man pushed a wheelbarrow piled with corpses. My wicked stomach growled.
The carriage entered a roundabout and took the first right-hand street.
“Peaceable Road,” Squire Jerrold announced. “The highway to the castle.”
I fought my fright. “Where will we find the king?”
“Sir Stephan—my patron—says he’s usually in the great hall unless he’s dining. Or he could be in the library or in one of his drawing rooms. At night, he’s in his apartment.” He burst out, “Let him still be somewhere, alive!”
Yes.
The drawbridge was down. We clattered across. Trunk reined in the horses before the castle entry arch, which was unguarded. No grooms came running.
I took my satchel and jumped out. We hastened under the arch. Trunk opened carved double doors into a vast receiving room. The doors swung closed behind us. The castle clock chimed three times. Three in the afternoon.
Squire Jerrold and Trunk stopped. Except for a faint glow from a window at the top of a long and grand stairway, we were in darkness. No one had lit the candles in the many-armed chandelier. The fireplaces had all burned down to ashes.
“Ogres see perfectly in the dark. Follow me.” They’d be able to make out my shape in the gloom, but castle folk, unless they had a torch, wouldn’t see clearly enough to tell what I was. I started up the stairs.
A woman lay on the first landing. I bent over her.
“No time! The king!” Squire Jerrold tugged me away.
I felt his touch in the pit of my belly and all the way down to my toes.
We continued up the stairs. A carved and gilded door opened into the great hall, where light flooded in from a wall of windows.
Perhaps a dozen people sprawled unmoving on sofas and chairs, islands on a sea of carpeting. I didn’t smell decay. If some were dead, they’d died recently.
I rushed to the closest person, a man in a high-backed chair, his head flopped back, mouth agape. Not the king, whose face I knew from our coins. This man’s chest hardly rose.
Somewhere in here a woman was sobbing.
All healer, the Evie I’d always been, my hands were steady. I pulled out my jug and let three careful drops fall into the back of the man’s throat. His next breath was deeper.
I straightened. Squire Jerrold was dashing from figure to figure. The next person I reached, collapsed across a couch, was past saving.
Equidistant from me, an old woman sat stiffly on a straight-backed chair and a woman sobbed into the knees of a man on a yellow sofa. I chose to go to them.
When she looked up, the woman—not much older than I and more beautiful than I’d ever been—reminded me by her terrified face of what I was.
Oh! My knees weakened. The man, in a green silk waistcoat, was Sir Peter, barely alive but still handsome and still able to squeeze my heart.
The young woman draped herself across him. “You can’t eat him!” Her voice trembled. “Or me.”
He’d made another conquest.
He hadn’t been grieving me.
“Please move aside.”
“I won’t!” Then, “‘Please’? Is that your persuasion?” She stood away.
Had he duped her as he had me? I dripped in the purpline. “He may sleep awhile, but he’ll get well, Mistress.” I hurried on to the old dame, who died as I reached her.
Squire Jerrold cried, “The king isn’t here! Come, Mistress Evie!”
How could I leave everyone?
Plates and teacups rested on several tables. I called to Trunk, who stood in the middle of the floor, gaping around the hall.
Squire Jerrold shouted, “Mistress Evie!”
When Trunk reached me, I dumped the contents of a teacup on the carpet.
He gasped. “You stained the rug!”
I poured half an inch of purpline into the cup. “Three drops each. Don’t waste any. Save what’s left.”
“Mistress Evie!”
Squire Jerrold and I left the light for a murky corridor.
“Third door on the left.”
The chamber was the library, also window-lit. I ran through the stacks on the left, Squire Jerrold through those on the right. No one rummaged for books or sat in the armchairs under the windows.
When Squire Jerrold and I left, we discovered the young woman who’d been with Sir Peter waiting for us.
“Lady Eleanor!” Squire Jerrold said. “Is the king alive?”
A lady? Could she be Sir Peter’s wife?
In the Fens, had he been married?
She didn’t know about King Imbert’s health, but she thought he was either in the red drawing room or the dining room. We pelted through endless corridors to get to the closer room, the red drawing room.
As we ran, Lady Eleanor said in a puffing undertone, “You’re . . . you’re . . .”
I looked at her to see if she was all right.
Her face was strained. “A fairy—” She tried again. “My uncle—” She gave up and fell silent.
Something had been done to her uncle, probably by Lucinda. She knew what had happened to me.
We reached the red drawing room. While Squire Jerrold and Lady Eleanor went from one figure to another, I dripped purpline into the mouths of two and passed by one who had succumbed.
King Imbert wasn’t in either this chamber or the dining room. We entered chamber after chamber. I dosed as many as I could while the two of them searched.
Moments stood out.
A man shouted at a corpse to sit up.
Two people had died folded into each other in an embrace.
A woman sang to a child in her lap, whom I was able to save.
A cat had died with a mouse in its mouth. In death, the cat’s jaw still clasped its prey. The mouse’s feet scrambled in the air. I pulled out the mouse and swallowed it whole.
In a small parlor, a young man bent over a middle-aged woman, trying to force her to drink broth.
“Sir Stephan!” Squire Jerrold ran to the man.
I remembered the name. This was Squire Jerrold’s knight.
“When all fails, Jerrold, try broth.”
Squire Jerrold stooped down. “I’m sorry, Sir Stephan. She’s dead.”
The knight broke into sobs. Squire Jerrold stood helplessly for a moment. Then we left for other chambers.
Finally, before climbing to the servants’ quarters, we entered the castle kitchen, where the king lay spread-eagled on the floor, surrounded by pottery shards, his cloak and neck wet, doused, by the smell of it, with broth.
We crouched over him. I felt a wisp of breath. “Prop him up!”
They both did, getting in each other’s way. I pinched his mouth open and dosed him. His breathing continued, unchanged. Had we come too late?
Finally, after an agonizing minute, his chest rose so high that even Squire Jerrold and Lady Eleanor saw.
“Will he recover?” Lady Eleanor asked.
“I don’t know. He’s been weakened, and I see he wasn’t robust before.” He was almost as thin as Trunk had been. “He needs to rest. I have herbs to help him sleep soundly.”
As if to prove his wakefulness, King Imbert opened his eyes and smiled weakly at Lady Eleanor. “Did I die?” He saw me. The smile vanished. “I must have.”
She said, “Oh, no, Sire. She’s a healer ogre. She saved you.”
I heard footsteps behind us.
The king’s gaze lifted above my shoulder. His smile returned. “Peter! My boy! Are we alive? I’ll believe you.”