by Guy Antibes
The healer was out of bed by the time Sam returned to their room. He walked in, rubbing a towel through his wet hair.
“You didn’t wake me up for breakfast.”
Sam shook his head. “I figured you got in late last night, so I let you sleep.”
Harrison grinned. “Good. I needed a little bit more. There is a letter to Bentwick on the table that I’d like you to deliver while I finish up here. We can talk when you return.”
Sam nodded and grabbed the note that the Chief Constable was expecting and headed to the constabulary.
Bentwick walked out of his office. “I heard you come in. I’ll take that. Tell Dimple that the soldiers followed the tracks to the main road. There was no way to follow after four days of travelers. I will send out notices to the constables in each village to listen for rumors of flocks of sheep expanding all of a sudden.” He held up Harrison’s notes. “I’ll make sure I pass the information on to Captain Rangerfield.”
“Thank you, Chief Constable.”
The man saluted Sam and returned to his office.
One of the constables who had ridden with him stopped in the little foyer as Sam walked out.
“Good job, lad. If you ever need a reference to become a constable, I’d be happy to write one out.”
Sam bowed to him and hurried to Harrison, a bit embarrassed about the man’s offer. He didn’t see how the man could possibly be serious. He found Harrison eating in the common room.
“Letter delivered?” the healer asked.
Sam nodded, standing at the table. “Constable Bentwick said he would pass on the information in the letter to Captain Rangerfield.”
“Good. I’ve another day with Mags at her clinic, and then we will check on the other healers in Riverville. Have a seat.”
Sam sat.
“Your secret is out, you know.”
Sam shrugged. “Everyone in Cherryton knows I can’t do magic.”
“Not that. We haven’t been particularly discreet about your lack of magical ability. The secret is that you are a very smart boy. As I said yesterday, we would have failed to find out what had happened had it not been for you knowing where the shepherd was.”
“What if they had left his body to rot in the woods?”
“But they didn’t, did they?”
Sam shook his head. “What did your autopsy find?”
“The man was bludgeoned and then strangled. I guess the killers didn’t want any blood disturbing the cottage. Hiding the body was done intentionally, so no one would find the poor man for a few months. Since it wasn’t permanent—”
“They might have figured they would come back and get rid of the body later. Someone wanted the valley, and the shepherd wouldn’t sell?” Sam asked.
“You have a devious mind, Sam Smith,” Harrison said. “That is a possibility. When we see the Chief Constable again, I think we will warn him of some kind of claim on the shepherd’s land. Property rights are sacred things in the mountain villages. We will have to visit the village hall and see how much land Seth owned.”
Sam nodded. “If the murderers know that Seth was found, they might not make a claim, and that puts a stop to the whole investigation, doesn’t it?”
“I would see it that way, too.” Harrison smiled. “Do you like doing this kind of thing?”
Sam frowned. “I don’t know, but it was fun working with adults. Other than a few comments by the soldiers, I liked it, especially working with Emmy.”
“Good. I generally get a problem or two to solve every trip. However, most of them aren’t quite so dramatic as what we have had to deal with this time. Today we will look at the village’s property records, and tomorrow we head for Fussel’s Ford.”
~
After an hour poring over deeds and other records, Harrison found that Seth Handblow owned five valleys all the way to the Gruellian border. Other than the vale, the land wasn’t good enough for much. The timber was sparse, and the topography was mostly rocky ridges. No one had come to present any kind of a claim, and the shepherd had had plenty of people look for minerals on his land through the years.
Harrison visited the other healers and spent a few hours at each clinic in different parts of the village. Everyone was glad Bacon was gone, but Sam got the feeling that there was something else. He didn’t think people were hiding anything from them as they made their way back to the inn, so he spoke about his reservations.
“What about Constable Bacon’s death?” Sam said. “Isn’t it a bit suspicious that he died only weeks before the shepherd.”
“Things like that do happen, Sam,” Harrison said, but he went silent for awhile. “Let’s stop by Bentwick’s office.
They were ushered into the Chief Constable’s office and sat down. “Sam wonders about Bacon’s death. Could they be linked?”
Bentwick pushed out his lower lip. “It is still a secret, but Bacon was murdered, so Sam might be on to something.”
“How did he die?”
“Strangulation. We put out that he died from choking on a big bite of meat.”
Sam clutched the arms of his chair. “That’s the same way that Seth died!”
“It hasn’t skipped my attention. Now that we have a link, I’ll do some proper investigation into the matter.”
“I’ll leave it in your hands, Bentwick. You are the snoop, after all.”
“Finally remembered, eh?”
Harrison smiled. “I didn’t forget. I wasn’t going to bring it up. You understand.”
“I do. You said you were framed, and I didn’t believe you then. I believe you now.”
“But that water has already gone out to sea,” Harrison said.
“I wouldn’t say that. You are still in His Majesty’s Service on your own terms. You don’t seem unhappy, and you don’t seem bitter.”
“Not now,” Harrison said, smiling. “We all go through our personal refiner’s fire.”
“I know what that is,” Sam said. “It is where you burn the impurities out of metal ingots.”
Bentwick nodded. “It does. For some, it isn’t a one-time thing. I believe that will be the case for you, Sam.”
“How would you know such a thing?” Sam said.
“You have a talent which is also a burden. The burden is that many people won’t recognize the talent and will consider it an impurity.”
Sam nodded. “It has already happened then.”
Bentwick looked at Harrison with raised eyebrows. The healer told the constable a short version of Sam’s trials so far. The constable nodded. “I don’t take back a thing I said, but I believe you are of such solid stock that you can come out of all those fires intact.”
“I hope so,” Sam said.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
~
“W E AREN’T GOING TO STAY TO WORK ON CHIEF BACON’S MURDER?” Sam said as they headed out a different gate toward Fussel’s Ford.
Harrison shook his head. “If you recall, Bentwick is from the Investigative Unit of the Constabulary. They are the king’s snoops. He is more than competent enough, I know.”
“He investigated you, once?”
Harrison looked out on the road. “He did. We didn’t see eye-to-eye, but I had evidence of my innocence that I couldn’t share. I paid the price. I didn’t think he’d remember.”
“Was that when you officially left the King’s Service?”
The healer nodded. “I was unofficially cleared; my accuser met an end, permitting the truth to come out, and here I am.”
“Sort of in the King’s Service, and almost a spy.”
Harrison laughed. “That’s me, almost a spy.” He clapped Sam on the shoulders. “That’s all you’ll get out of me. Now that we are out of Riverville, we can resume your sword practice.”
~
Rather than spending one night out in the open, Harrison’s roundabout route to Fussel’s Ford took three.
“Are you disappointed we didn’t find any sheep?” Sam said as they rolled throu
gh the shallows of a small river that gave the village its name before arriving. It looked smaller than Horner’s Rest.
“No. Whoever stole Seth’s flock didn’t stop in Fussel’s Ford. I was doing the Chief Constable a favor, and it looked like he got to do a little sightseeing that didn’t amount to much. Oh, well. I’ll be glad to have a roof over our head. But we won’t treat ourselves to royal luxury here,” Harrison said. “The rooms are not the best. One advantage of Fussel’s Ford is that the herbs are nearly as abundant as Horner’s Rest, and some are unique to this area.”
“Another day of gathering?” Sam asked.
Harrison held up two fingers. “Two, since our gathering work was curtailed at Horner’s Rest.” He stopped in front of the little two-story inn. A placard on the front read The Blue Hart with a crude deer’s head painted next to the words. “This is a small tavern with a few rooms. No stable boys to watch the horses, so I suggest that Emmy sleep in our room.”
Sam nodded as they climbed off the wagon. When Sam stretched, he realized that all his pain had left him. He thought with all the jostling of the wagon, the fights, and the horseback rides, the aches would persist, but they were gone, and as he thought back, they had been missing since they had fled from Mountain View. Sam shook his head. He had completely forgotten about the injuries.
The common room of the tavern took up half the structure from the front to the back. The other half must have held the kitchen and storage.
“I live upstairs,” the innkeeper said. He looked young for his position. “I have a family. My dad let out all the spaces upstairs, except for his own room. I didn’t want to share my living space, so I added a few rooms along the back last winter for my patrons.”
“When did your father pass on?” Harrison asked.
“Mid-winter. He caught a cold that turned into something else. You’ll have to talk to Betti, the healer.”
“I will,” Harrison said. “Lead on.”
The rooms were small, so they each took one. They still had the smell of fresh-cut wood and paint.
“New locks, too,” the innkeeper said. “I tried to use the old ones, but I suppose the keys had gotten passed about.”
Emmy sniffed around the room and ended up walking in a circle, then plopped down on the hand-knotted rag rug in the center of Sam’s room.
“You stay there,” Sam said. “I’ll work on the horses.”
Before Sam closed the door, Emmy was at his side. Harrison still talked to the innkeeper while Sam unhitched the horses. A large open-fronted shed served as the inn’s stable. There were no stalls, so Sam tied the horses to a sturdy railing in front of a long feeding bin below a watering trough.
Harrison and the innkeeper joined him.
“There is a stream ten paces behind the stable. You can fetch as much water as you’d like.”
Sam took that to mean, he was stuck with watering the horses. “Can I back the wagon into part of the stable?”
“You can unless we get an onrush of customers, which I doubt will happen. I’ll help you.”
They put the wagon under the overhang. At least they wouldn’t have to lug all their possessions to their rooms.
“Carry on,” Harrison said, smiling.
Sam grunted and returned to his work while the two men walked back inside the little inn proper. He was finished with both horses and had begun to brush a more-than-willing Emmy when a man turned the corner and abruptly turned back. Sam walked after him.
“Did I disturb you?” Sam asked, knowing he had done no such thing.
“Uh, no,” the older man said, stopping when Sam stepped in front of him. He was scrawny and ill-kept. The man reminded Sam of Esra Bounty, the ailing oldster at Horner’s Rest.
“Were you looking for something?”
The man’s eyes darted this way and that before he took off towards the woods. He splashed through the stream and disappeared into the undergrowth before Sam thought to stop him.
He walked back to the stable and began to search for what the older man had been looking for. He took the pitchfork and then began to clear away the hay and spotted a dirty white bag. Sam leaned over and grasped it, but it had a rough pollen covering that he couldn’t see, of course.
“Find something?” Harrison said approaching the stable. “A fistful of hay? That’s not too hard to find in a stable.”
Sam shook his head. “The hay is camouflage for a bag underneath.” He handed it to the healer.
Harrison smiled and fumbled with it for awhile and found a flap to open. He pulled out the bag and opened the contents. His smile disappeared when he sniffed the rough-crushed herbs. “A concoction prepared for a potion. Drugs?”
“For his health?” Sam said, knowing the answer to his question.
“To addle his mind,” Harrison said. “I was going to wait until tomorrow, but we will visit the healer right now. Come with me.”
They walked down the dirt road towards a central part of the village. It had a small turf square, decorated with a statue of Havetta in the middle. Houses surrounded the square, along with a few shops. Harrison walked across the turf and knocked on the only cottage with a white door.
“Harrison!” a white-haired woman said. She looked younger than her hair color indicated, with rosy red cheeks and a long, thin face with bright eyes that looked like a smile was her natural expression. “Come in. What’s with the dour face?”
“This, Betti.”
She took the sack and took a sniff, screwing up her face when the scent registered. “This came from the village, didn’t it?”
Harrison nodded. “Sam, here, found it at the back of The Blue Hart. It’s too bad the old innkeeper died. He was always good for a story.”
Betti nodded. “The son came soon after and took up the family business, I guess. None of us knew Nad had children.” She shrugged. “Back to this. Do you know what the concoction is?”
“Roughly,” Harrison said. “Mendica, alm’s wort, pollen from a podica, to start. Nasty stuff. It will certainly transport the user into a hallucinatory state, but most of it is poison.”
Betti nodded. “Mendica and podica are particularly prolific around here. Some thief stole all my alms’ wort.”
“I have some in my wagon,” Harrison said. “We did some gathering at Horner’s Rest.”
She nodded. Sam didn’t know why. He guessed it was all stuff healers knew about.
“I’ll let you dispose of this. It was wrapped up in an elaborate pollen camouflage made to look like hay.” He took the pollen pouch out of his pocket. “Someone is very good at making this. When I first saw it in Sam’s hand, I thought it was real.”
“How did you know this was pollen, young man? I am holding it in my hand, and I am still fooled.”
“I can’t see pollen,” Sam said.
Betti looked at Harrison. “He can’t?”
Harrison nodded and gave the woman the quick story about Sam.
“I am sorry for you, Sam Smith,” the healer said. “I don’t know how to fix your ailment.”
Emmy scratched at the healer’s door.
“My dog,” Sam said, letting Emmy in.
“That’s no dog; it’s a horse. I don’t want him in here for long. My patients will be scared away.” She looked at Harrison. “So are you going to gather first before you check up on my patients?”
Harrison shook his head. “I intended to gather first, but now I want to see if anyone has noticed addicts in the village. So patients first.”
“The older man must have been one,” Sam said. He gave them a description of the person he had scared away.
“He could be any of five or six old miners in the village,” Betti said.
“That’s right,” Harrison said. “Old miners sticking around, even though the mines played out long ago. Am I right?”
Betti nodded. “Only two of them have done much since then, so that leaves three miners and a few others. Do you want a list?”
Harrison put up his
hand. “Not needed yet. I’d prefer to get my information from your patients and keep you out of it. I’m only here once a year, and I don’t want to compromise your position with the villagers.”
Betti sighed. “That’s good thinking. You do that so well,” she said, smiling. “So, I’ll spread the word, if you’ll do the same at The Blue Hart tonight.”
The healer nodded. “Perhaps I’ll train Sam to look for herbs tomorrow morning before I start helping you.”
~
Sam waded through the luscious undergrowth while Emmy ran back and forth between Harrison and him as they traipsed through the woods.
“Over here,” Harrison said. “You can collect as much as you want of this.”
Sam drew a picture of the herb and the flowers that it produced, writing down the name.
They stomped through a stream and up towards a little pond.
“I’ll be darned,” Harrison said. “Someone is cultivating podica.”
“That’s one of the herbs of the poison?”
Harrison nodded. “Look around for a light green herb with bright yellow veins. That is mendica.”
It didn’t take long for Sam to find a plot of that herb hidden on the other side of the pond.
“How much does it take for these to work?”
“Not much. They are used in tiny quantities for a few illnesses. Alm’s wort doesn’t like soil this wet, but if we look around on the upper slope of the pond, I wouldn’t be surprised to see a plot started.”
They sought out the herb but didn’t find any.
“I wonder if Emmy could sniff out the stuff. We collected some in Horner’s Rest. Alm’s wort is good for soothing stomach pains. I imagine it helps dampen the drug’s effect on a person’s stomach. It wouldn’t do for the addicts to die too quickly,” Harrison said. “You can return tomorrow with a handful of alm’s wort and see if Emmy can find some more.”
Sam scratched Emmy behind the ears. “I don’t know if she can do it, but we will try.”
“If the drug dealers took all that Betti had, they used all of their supply, and you will only find sprouts, if that much.”
They walked through the forest, finding more herbs to collect and returned to the inn with two pollen baskets Harrison had made filled with herbs.
