The Case of the Spellbound Child

by Mercedes Lackey

  Sarah knew exactly what he meant—this second girl looked not unlike the soulless husks of the young ladies who had been the victims of that madman in Battersea, who had tried to open a Portal into a strange and terrifying other world to bring in the thing that ruled over it.

  “Well, there’s one way to be sure of that,” she replied. She took her own place next to the pallet, placed her hand on the girl’s pallid forehead, closed her eyes, and reached out with her own magic.

  It was dark, very dark. And cold, and empty. But . . . there was something in the darkness, something hiding just out of reach. Out of reach, because every time Sarah tried to touch it, it skittered away again. As if it was afraid of her. Or . . . afraid of something, something that it thought she was and was going to flee and flee so she could never catch it.

  She retreated back into her body, and opened her eyes. “Not like the Battersea girls,” she said definitively. “The soul is there, but it’s afraid and hiding and very, very weak.”

  “What the devil. . . .” muttered John, and cast a suspicious glance at the woman, who shrugged, as if to say, don’t look at me, I had nothing to do with it.

  John scowled. Clearly he suspected Maude had done this herself—and Sarah didn’t entirely disagree.

  But she didn’t agree, either.

  She glanced at Nan, who nodded, and at Neville, who was calmly sitting on the back of a chair, and at Grey, who was doing the same. Suki sat at the hearth, toying with her amulet and alertly watching the faces of all of the adults in turn.

  “There’s a very simple way to determine the truth, here,” she said aloud, and turned to Maude. “You allow my friend Nan to read your mind.”

  Now Maude looked bewildered. “Wut, naow?” she asked.

  “Nan can see inside your head and know what you are thinking, even see some of your memories, if you will let her,” Sarah began, then rephrased it. “Nan can see i’ tha’ head,” she repeated, tapping her own temple. “Canst see wut tha’ knows. Canst see the truth. But tha’ mus’ say ‘aye.’”

  Maude looked at her as if she thought Sarah was crazy, but then shook her head. “Yon doctor brung ’is pistol,” she pointed out wryly. “Es’d soon as not be shot.” She gestured at Nan. “Es gi’ ’ee leave.”

  It grew very quiet in the cottage again, giving Sarah the chance for another covert look around. It was smaller than Gatfer Cole’s, and the ceiling was lower, but otherwise it looked pretty much the same. She could not imagine the amount of work it must have taken to haul all the stone needed for the walls and floor and the wall around the place here. She wondered how the woman—or whoever had built the place in the first place—had ever managed to get a crew of thatchers out to this remote spot.

  There was a tangible aura of peace around it, however, that had been missing from Gatfer Cole’s cottage. Not that there was anything wrong with the Gatfer’s place—but this one almost felt like a religious retreat.

  There were six small windows in the stone walls, each of them fitted with shutters currently standing wide open to allow the breeze to flow through, and the sounds of birdsong and the gentle clucking of the chickens. The air held so many different faint scents that Sarah couldn’t really sort them out; they all mingled into a sort of faintly sweet hay scent that had a slightly bitter, medicinal undertone. That was all the drying herbs, she supposed.

  “Well,” said Nan, bringing her attention back to her friend. “I’m afraid you’re going to have to look elsewhere for your villain, John. Everything is just as Maude told you. She found first this girl, then Helen Byerly, lying on the moor. There were many days between finding the first and the second. She was led to both by the circling of kites and ravens.”

  Neville made an embarrassed quork, as if to apologize for the uncouth manners of his brethren.

  “She brought both of them back here. The only thing she hasn’t told you is that Helen has been here for about four days, very sick, and unable to tell her anything, even her own name.”

  Maude shrugged. “One day like th’ next, out ’ere. Get back se fore sometimes. On’y ever see shepherds, come fer sheep doses, trades fer wut Es needs. Reck it were a week, no more’n nine day ’tween findin’ fust an’ findin’ second.”

  A rapid succession of emotions crossed John Watson’s face, but the final one was disappointment. “Damnit,” she heard him mutter under his breath. “Another dead end.”

  “Nay, lad. . . .” Maude, who certainly was not that much older than John Watson, reached out and patted his hand as if she were his grandmother. “Tha’ knows some things naow. Tha’ knows twa wee lasses can’t ha’ gone too far fra’ th’ monster what kept ’uns.”

  John’s face lit up again. “That’s true,” he admitted. “I very much doubt they crossed the reservoir, for instance.”

  “Sur-e-ly they’d ha’ seen th’ smoke of Sheepstor an’ gone there, ha’ they come from North an’ went round reservoir,” Maude agreed. “Well, yon Helen would. T’other lass were maze as a brush.”

  “And if she had done that, she’d have known her way home,” Mary Watson pointed out. “So she had to have come from south of the reservoir. That eliminates a vast amount of Dartmoor!”

  “So it does,” John agreed. But before he could continue with his musings, Maude interrupted him.

  “Mayhap this will ’elp?” she said, and got up from where she was still sitting on the floor, went to the mantelpiece, and brought back a dirty bit of rag with something in it. She handed it to Watson, who opened it—and his face went white.

  “Dear God in Heaven!” he exclaimed in something close to a yelp. “Where did—”

  “Yon Helen had ’un knotted up in corner of ’er smock,” Maude said, just as calmly as if she came across severed finger-ends every day. “Reckon it’s her’n. Reckon th’ lass needed t’ ’ave it. Powerful magic on’t, I cain’t parse. ’Ee be th’ Marsters ’ere.” She gave John a long and measuring look. “Mark ’ee, there be twa bits, an’ th’ lass on’y lost one.”

  “One is clearly older than the other,” John said, his voice shaking just the slightest bit.

  “Well, then. Tha’ be doctor. I bain’t slept i’ twa, three days. So . . . if tha’ll watch forbye, I’ll be ’avin’ a sleep. Bring tha’ horses up t’cot, tie ’em oop outside garden, gi’ em what tha’ wilt an’ water an’ watch lasses. When I wake, tha’ can take the bits, hie ’ee back t’ Yelverton an come back i’ mornin’.” She gave John no chance to object; she marched straight over to her bed, flung herself down on it, and was asleep in moments.

  “I suppose,” John said into the silence, “we had better do as she says.”

  There was about an hour to sundown. That was not the problem. All four of the adults had the skills in their various forms of magic to conjure enough of a light so the horses wouldn’t step in something and break a leg, throw them, or both. And Mary’s sylphs could easily find their way from this cottage back to Yelverton, even if Neville couldn’t guide them in the dark.

  No, the problem was what Sarah had found.

  “. . . . so I don’t know who that older bit is from, but we can dismiss it. If it ever connected to someone, it doesn’t anymore.” Sarah gulped around the lump of anxiety, and yes, fear, in her throat. “We know it’s not from the comatose girl, because she has all her finger-ends, and that’s what matters right now. But the other thing that matters is that Helen’s bit is connected to her so powerfully that she literally cannot move beyond a certain distance from it. I saw it manifesting in the spirit world, and so did Nan and Suki.”

  Just to be sure that the comatose girl was not . . . call it “semi-dead” . . . and her spirit was somehow lurking in the spirit world, Sarah and Nan had taken the time to go there themselves. And that was where they had seen it—a kind of twisted lump in the spirit world that was connected to little Helen. And when they had used their powers to look fro
m the spirit world into the real world, they’d seen that what they had taken for a “lump” was a sort of perverted version of the cord that bound a soul to a body until the dissolution of death. Except this ugly, festering, pustulent thing looked like nothing so much as a half-rotten umbilical cord that tied Helen to that bit of finger.

  “Wait a moment,” said Mary, running her hand through her hair as she tried to remember something. “I think I’ve heard of this. There’s a folk charm to keep an animal from straying. You take a bit of it, do the spell, and bury it in the center of the place you want to keep it from straying out of. It’s good for chickens, or a goat or two you want to keep near your house, or a cow or pig if you’re better off. Nice people use something like a dropped feather, or a toenail clipping. Nastier people—”

  “—use a toe. Or a finger,” John finished, as Mary shuddered. “I would imagine the further from ‘alive’ the bit is when you take it, the weaker the spell would be.”

  Sarah snapped her fingers. “I’ve heard of that, too! It’s African magic as well—or, I guess I should say it’s Elemental magic, just the African version.”

  “Very, very primitive Elemental magic,” John corrected. “I very much doubt you’d find it in anything but the oldest of village-witch grimoires. But that’s probably how the kidnapper kept Helen for so long.” He cast a glance at the child, still huddled in her blankets, still caught in fever, although doing a little better after John got an extremely nasty mush of comfrey, lobelia, and bread mold into her. The bread mold was something else Sarah had remembered from Africa. Her parents had learned the use of it from the African shamans and healers they worked with, and had told her it worked too often to merely be a “cure by suggestion.” He’d been dubious, but willing to try, since in his expert opinion, Helen had clearly contracted pneumonia as a result of her ordeal.

  It seemed to be working, with a powerful assist from both John and Mary. Water Magic was far from ideal as a healing power, but John had been doing the best that he could with his powers for as long as he’d been a doctor, and it was beginning to look hopeful that Helen would recover.

  Certainly more hopeful than when they had arrived here.

  “Well, the point is, we can’t just carry that rather grisly relic away with us,” Sarah continued. “It has to stay with Helen, at least for now. I don’t know of any way to sever the connection.”

  “It’s amazing that she had the mother-wit to figure out she needed to take it with her,” Mary mused. She was taking her turn at Helen’s side—the other nameless girl didn’t really seem to need much tending. Like the Battersea girls, she was something like an automaton; she ate when you put food in her mouth, drank when you put a cup to her lips, and otherwise needed nappies like a giant baby. Sarah was amazed that Maude had the patience and fortitude to tend someone in the girl’s condition. Sarah wasn’t quite sure how to bring her soul out of hiding—it wasn’t in the spirit world—but perhaps if they just waited long enough, she’d wake up on her own. . . .

  Or perhaps, if they could get her to a Fire or Earth Master—Earth, more likely—one of them would know what to do with her.

  Right now, that was the least of their worries. They needed Helen to recover. They needed to find out where Helen had been, and if her brother was still alive. They needed to find whoever had taken them and bring him or her to justice.

  “Well, obviously we leave the bit we can’t take with Helen, and carry off the other bit,” Mary said. “Surely we can learn as much from it as we could have from Helen’s finger!”

  Sarah wasn’t at all sure about that, but what could she say? John and Mary had both been trained in their powers since childhood, and since then had had the assistance of Alderscroft’s extensive circle of Elemental Magicians to learn more. She had only just learned she was a Spirit Master, only to find that Spirit Masters were so rare that there was very little known about them.

  She just got the sense that time was getting away from them. Not just for Simon Byerly, but potentially for most, if not all, of the missing children.

  The worst-case scenario is this blackguard finds out someone is looking for him—or her—gets the wind up, kills all the children, and escapes to hide somewhere else to start all over again. If that happened, the odds of tracking the bastard down were very low. Dartmoor was not the only remote place in the world. It wasn’t even the only remote place in the British Isles. In fact, truth be told, the best place for her—or him—to hide would be in a big city like London or Plymouth. You could buy children right out of a workhouse or an orphanage, or off the street from their own parents. And if the magician confined him- or herself to using very little magic, it would be a nightmare to try to find him. Or her.

  Especially if it was a her. As every woman knew, men, the police included, tended to overlook and underestimate women. Women got away with a lot of criminal activity for that very reason. And women had the excuse to have any number of children with them.

  “I don’t know, but until we know how to safely part Helen from that bit of herself, trying to pry some information out of the other finger is the only choice we have,” John admitted. “I can’t see any other way of finding out more about her captor.”

  “Actually,” Nan said, slowly, “I can. With your permission, I can read her memories.”

  “Nan!” Sarah exclaimed with alarm. “The child’s in a state of delirium! That’s incredibly risky!”

  “For anyone else, maybe,” Nan replied with a shrug. “I have Neville, you, and Suki to anchor me and pull me out if I get caught up in a fever dream.”

  “Even so—” John and Mary protested together.

  “I’ll repeat what you just said—what other choice do we have?” Nan countered. “Besides, I want definitive proof that will convince you that Maude doesn’t have a bevy of children locked up somewhere else. Do I have your permission, since it’s a bit impractical to get it from the Byerlys?”

  “My reluctant permission,” said John, frowning. “Mary and I still do not trust this woman.” He glanced at his wife, who nodded.

  Sarah tried not to show her exasperation. “I think this is perhaps not the best idea, but we are running out of options,” she admitted. “Right, Neville?”

  The raven nodded.

  “All right. We’ll anchor you. Go ahead.”

  * * *

  Nan had been itching to do this, since she sensed John and Mary’s disbelief—and she was fairly certain that disbelief was entirely rooted in how unconventional Maude Rundle’s appearance and way of life was. Here she was, a middle-aged woman who by all rights should be living the life of a Dartmoor housewife, off in the middle of nowhere living and dressing like a hermit, and a male hermit at that. And, perhaps, the fact that Maude gave him absolutely none of the deference he was accustomed to getting by virtue of being a doctor and a man of authority figured prominently into his attitude.

  Actually, that’s probably the entire cause of his disbelief. He expected to be treated with awe and gratitude when he announced that he was a doctor, and all he got was “shut up and help me get the child’s fever down.” Poor John. That must have been a dreadful shock.

  She’d have been a lot more amused if the situation hadn’t been so serious. Not that she didn’t like and admire John Watson immensely, and usually he was humble to a fault, but every so often . . . well, every so often, he was a man instead of her peer in magic and her inferior when it came to strictly Psychical matters, and there was a certain faint condescension in his voice that grated.

  At least he never says, “Don’t worry your little head about it.”

  She composed herself next to Helen, sitting cross-legged on the floor next to her (thank goodness for split skirts and a lack of corseting . . . and come to think of it I have suspicions that Maude Rundle hasn’t a stitch on underneath that peculiar robe), then placed one hand on Helen’s burning forehead and let hers
elf sink gently into the child’s mind.

  The surface was a roil of hallucinations—and at first, that was all Nan thought they were. But as she drifted deeper into memory, and caught glimpses unclouded by fever, she nearly snapped out of her trance entirely. Because those hallucinations were not just the result of fever! They were the things she’d endured and feared, amplified, and only a little, by the fever! Everything in those visions was mirrored in the girl’s memories!

  Central to all of it was something Helen thought of as “the Dark One,” a menacing figure neither obviously male nor female, wearing a robe not unlike Maude’s, probably to hide its shape. Helen thought of it as a “witch,” gender uncertain, and indeed, in her mind a “witch” could be either man or woman. Helen was utterly terrified of the creature, and Nan didn’t blame her in the least. The most unnerving part was that there was nothing inside the cowl of the robe but shadows, and Nan was absolutely certain this was not a product of the fever, that this was, in fact, the creature’s actual appearance, at least to the children.

  And, oh yes, children. There were children, more than Simon. Nan sank deeper into Helen’s mind, and picked through memories rather than hallucinations, willing herself to go as deep as she needed to in order to glean as much information as she could.

  The first thing that formed up clearly was the prison that held them all, along with their captor. This was a two-room cottage, roughly twice the size of Maude’s. The walls were stone, the floor of pounded and treated earth. Nan watched as the memories unscrolled, Helen going through the work of the day under the control and direction of the Dark One. She cleaned, cooked, baked a great deal of bread, fed the prisoners—eleven children including Simon, all of them chained up by one leg in the second, comfortless room. She tended a garden and some chickens, fetched water and wood. Meanwhile the Dark One lounged about, eating far better food than it fed its captives, and Helen’s emotions boiled with terror mixed with rage.