by Patty Jansen
“I think the Regent and mayor and shepherd will hold court in the marketplace to decide whether the prisoners are guilty.”
Agatha scoffed. “How can they tell that?”
“These men can tell, that’s all I know,” Mina said. Her voice sounded ominous. “They use church relics that can pick out witchcraft. I’ve seen it before. The shepherd has a skull with ruby eyes. He holds it up in front of your face and the eyes glow when they feel witchcraft.”
Nellie felt cold. She had seen this dreadful thing.
Agatha said, “I thought they weighed people. Anyone less than four stone is held up by magic and is a witch.”
“What happens to the people who are witches?” Koby asked.
“Likely they will be thrown into the dungeons,” Mina said.
Agatha said, “They don’t want to feed any more mouths down there. I think they’ll be hanged or burned at the stake.”
Mina hissed, “Shhh, don’t say that in front of the—”
The children all watched, eyes wide. Nellie didn’t think the little ones understood, but the older ones, Jette and Ewout, certainly did.
Nellie had been through this before. Alexandre, the fire magician, also made a point of making an example of anyone who disagreed with him. She remembered Mistress Johanna’s own father being put up on a stake to be burnt and how the intervention of the people had saved him and the other prisoners.
“We have to do something,” she said, hugging herself.
The others nodded.
But saying that was easier than figuring out what to do. It was hard enough to figure out how to survive. If she had any say over the dragon, would she give the dragon up to the Regent to save these people? What would the Regent do with him?
The women gathered all their possessions and brought them all in one spot to determine if there was anything they could sell. Many of the items were worthless mementoes of long-dead family members, or lost homes. In Nellie’s case, she was determined to hang onto her father’s book and the dragon box for as long as possible. She promised to continue to go to the palace for leftovers.
But there was more work to be done and fewer people to do it, and no one knew an easy way to make money like Zelda did.
Once the meagre meal of dry bread and the remainder of the soup had been eaten, Nellie asked the children to bring down their bedding from the hayloft so they were together and kept each other warm. Some of the young ones cried for their “Boots” and Nellie had to explain that the dragon was a free creature.
By the light of the fire, Nellie sat in the hay, surrounded by the children. The kitten had been mewling all day—missing its friend—and it curled up on Nellie’s lap.
“Tell us a story,” Anneke said.
So Nellie told a story about a girl who was headstrong and wanted to be a businesswoman.
“That’s funny, because all girls want to be princesses,” Anneke said.
“Well this girl did not want to be a princess. She wanted to take over her father’s business because that was what she was good at. But her father was a widower, she was his only daughter, and he needed someone to leave their estate to.”
“What is that?” Ewout asked.
“An estate is a house or a piece of land or a business.”
Anneke said, “But she already had the business. It was hers, wasn’t it? Because it was her father’s.”
“It was,” Nellie said. “But unfortunately, that is not how people see these things. There always has to be a man who owns these things because women cannot own it by themselves.”
“What about you? Do you own anything?”
Nellie laughed. “If I did, I would not have been working as a maid for all of my life. Now, do you want to hear the story or not?”
“Of course we do.”
“All right. One day the king held a great ball and all the girls in all of Saardam were invited. He wanted them to dance with his son. He needed to marry his son, because he had no other children. But the prince was rude and not good in the head. And during the ball, a great magician invaded the city. He could throw balls of fire with his hands, and he burnt all the houses around the palace. The girl fled, as the king and queen were killed. But the prince also fled, and when the magician’s men tried to take him prisoner, he jumped into the harbour. You see, he could swim. And the girl and her friends . . .” Nellie stopped. She had been there. She remembered fishing the man out of the water, weighed down by his heavy cloak. She remembered the horror of realising that the man was Prince Roald. She remembered how scared she had been of him, and of his outbursts where he would bang his head against a wall or a tree, and how upset she had been with his rude and lewd remarks. “So the girl and her friends fished him out of the water, and they escaped together. They could see the entire city in flames and knew everyone was dead. They knew the survival of Saardam depended on them. So the girl ended up marrying the prince anyway, but it was her own choice, because she chose to save the country.”
“You’re talking about Queen Johanna,” Anneke said.
“Yes, I am. That is very smart of you. The queen and the few people who were still alive fled up the river because the evil magician still lived in the palace. The girl and her new husband couldn’t be king and queen until he was gone. She had to save the country from his evil, and she did that by uniting all the people against the evil magician. And when her own father was going to be burned at the stake, she led a crowd of people into the market square and they all created such a fuss that the guards did not know what to do, and most of them weren’t terribly loyal to the fire magician anyway. They only did what he said because they were scared of him. As soon as they saw that the common people might win, they abandoned him and helped the Queen.”
After a small silence, Anneke said, “Is the Regent an evil magician?”
Nellie looked at her, frowning. “No, he isn’t, why do you ask?”
“Because he sits in the palace, and the church won’t make him king. Also, everyone says the prince is still alive, so he should let the prince be king.”
“There are rumours about the prince. No one knows for sure if they’re true.”
“If they’re not, then why won’t the shepherd make the Regent king?”
“Because . . .” Because the shepherd had selected the Regent for incompetence and didn’t want him on the throne. Because . . . well, what if the church knew Prince Bruno was still alive and this was the reason they didn’t want Regent Bernard to become king?
Also, in the days with Mistress Johanna and Prince Roald, the church had been on their side, and most nobles had been against the Fire Magician already. This time, a lot of nobles liked the Regent, at least for as long as they could come to his banquets. Most of the merchants didn’t mind that the Regent was holding banquets as long as they could trade. And the Church . . . she shivered. She was sure that most of the deacons, and shepherd Adrianus and the other shepherds of the smaller churches were with the people, but they had to obey Shepherd Wilfridus, and Nellie wasn’t sure of the good intentions of Shepherd Wilfridus at all.
Anneke said, “What about making a fuss with all the people? Isn’t that the thing we should do?”
“When we get a chance, yes. But first we have to have a plan.” A plan that involved making most of the city angry enough to do something.
“You have a plan?”
“Not yet, but we will think about it, the adults and I.”
By that time, most of the children were already asleep, and Nellie returned to the fire with the other women.
The mood was grim.
Mina finally voiced the one concern that had bothered Nellie for most of the day. “If it was clear to the guards that Zelda was a herb woman, then why did she not get taken?”
“I reckon it’s because she’s friends with the ones doing the arresting,” Hilde said. “She sells concoctions to the nobles and tells them about the things she hears on the streets. Why would those men have come down our di
ngy alley? There are so many other old buildings and warehouses. They only went to places where they knew people had magic.”
That was a disturbing thought.
“If that’s true, we can’t stay here,” Nellie said. “We need to find a better hiding place.”
Preferably one in a place where the guards would not come looking. And a place away from the artisan quarter and its colourful characters, away from the gaze of Zelda.
“Do you know a place that’s better than this?” Mina asked.
“I might.”
It was so easy to pretend that this little group of women and children could make any difference. Last time, the enemy had been just one person, who happened to be a foreigner who happened to have invaded the city, a fact that most citizens remembered all too well. As she had said in the story, most of the citizens had been afraid of this man, who burned their houses whenever they said something he did not like.
This time, everything was different. Not only was the Regent not hated, and had not himself performed any evil acts, but he also had the support of the church.
Nellie didn’t want to fight the church because most people related to the church were good people. The problem was that this time, there were no clear lines in the sand. This time, the people who could make a real difference—the people with money—weren’t angry. This time, there was no one man up there shouting I am your enemy. It wasn’t clear who, or what, they were fighting, only that Saardam was slowly dying as citizens left, were accused of having magic or became too poor to survive.
The winter would be long.
It was cold in the warehouse that night, and the fact that they were all sleeping together in the hay made little difference.
And as she lay awake staring into the darkness, Nellie had another worrying thought: she had given the dragon the choice of freedom. He had chosen to hang around. She could think of only two reasons he would do that. The first was food, although he didn’t seem to need people to feed him whatever dragons ate.
The second was that his master was still alive somewhere in the city.
Chapter 7
IT WAS NO LONGER SAFE to stay in the warehouse. It was probably no longer safe to stay anywhere in the artisan quarter because the guards would just keep looking for whatever they were looking for, besides magical things, and would pick up more people. They would use any excuse to arrest people, including waving around a metal rod. They were looking for people to scare and intimidate. And they were doing it in the artisan quarter because many of the citizens of Saardam cared little about those who lived there and because they had always been “strange” people and wayfarers. So they couldn’t stay here anymore. Nellie had an idea where they might go, but she needed time to check it out. But first she had to go back to the palace for more leftovers the next morning. Now that Zelda was gone, it would be even harder to feed everyone.
She got up early so she could be back in the warehouse while it was still dark. The less she showed her face, the better.
The snow-covered streets were nearly deserted. Here and there city guards patrolled the streets, but the raids from yesterday had left no traces except a lot of footsteps in the snow and the occasional bits of broken glass. All the items the guards had tossed into the street had either been carted away or collected by scavengers.
The windows in the palace were still dark, especially those on the first floor that faced the courtyard. This was where the Regent, Madame Sabine and their sons and courtiers had their residence. Nellie used to live up there when Johanna was alive. Every morning she had risen early to get the children out of bed. Celine was always fast asleep and was cranky at being woken up, but Bruno was full of beans. He would run out of the room the moment the door was open, and liked screaming in the foyer because of the way his voice echoed in there. He would not sit still and, no matter how many times Nellie or the Queen told him, he would not say thank you or wait his turn. He was a truly boisterous toddler whose hero was his father, who visited from his office in town regularly.
Those memories seemed impossibly long ago.
The guards in the guard boxes looked tired and ready to be relieved at the crack of dawn. They were stamping their feet and swinging their arms until Nellie came up to the entrance when they asked where she was going. She again used the excuse that she was delivering spices to the kitchens and had no trouble getting in.
The kitchen seemed like the only place that was warm and where people were awake in the entire building.
When Nellie came in, Dora was preparing a couple of ducks for roasting, Corrie sat at the table scraping carrots, and Els and Maartje were both getting breakfast ready to be taken upstairs.
“Nellie!” Corrie abandoned her carrots and came to the door to give Nellie a hug. “We heard about so much trouble in town. We were afraid you weren’t going to come.”
“I have to be careful, but it takes a bit more than that to keep me away.” Nellie undid her shawl. It was quite warm in here.
“You want some tea?”
“I wouldn’t say no to that.”
Nellie sat down at the table and received a steaming cup of tea. Her hands were cold, so she wrapped them around the warm porcelain.
“Roasting ducks again, aren’t you?” she asked Dora.
“You know how much the Regent loves his ducks.”
Dora sat at the table opposite her. She studied Nellie with an intense look. It was rather uncomfortable. Nellie felt as if she was being scrutinised. Had anything happened here in the last day?
“You don’t look good,” Dora finally said to her.
No, Nellie knew. This morning, she had attempted to straighten her hair, but her comb had been lost somewhere and her hair was too knotty to fashion into a nice bun. She had no mirror either, not even a window where she could look at her own reflection.
Over the past few days, she had been so cold that now that she came into the warmth, her cheeks were glowing. She guessed the skin looked red and chapped and as blotchy as that of the poor children who came to work in the scullery.
“We were searched yesterday,” Nellie said, while looking into her tea. “A lot of people were arrested.”
“I heard something about that,” Dora said. “What was that about?”
“The Regent put a declaration on the church doors that all people with magic and magical objects would be punished. They raided a lot of shops and took a number of people prisoner. We’re trying to find out what happened to them. A few of our group got taken. One of them is the mother of six children in our group. Her husband is no longer in town, so we are looking after the children, but we need to find a safe place for them.”
“You can always take the children to the orphanage.”
“I could.” But Nellie didn’t want to do that. Just like the poorhouse was no place for women, the orphanage was no place for children whose mother had been arrested. “I prefer to look after them until their mother comes back.”
If she came back.
“If you come with me to the linen cupboard, we can give you some sheets and some old blankets.”
“That would be very nice, thank you. But first we have to find a safe place to stay and we have no money.”
“Can the children work?”
“I’m sure they can, but the oldest is only ten. He can do little jobs, but there are not many of those around.”
“Consider a job where he needs to be small. The sawmill might want to employ him to clean out the machines. I think you should come back here, too, if you can.”
Yes, maybe, when all this calmed down. Although so much had changed that Nellie wasn’t sure she would ever go back to the palace to cook meals for rich noble guests.
“I don’t know that I can or that they will ever accept me.”
“It’s about the dragon, isn’t it? You still have it, don’t you?”
“It’s not mine. It’s a wild creature. It flew off, and no one knows where it is.”
“We heard
stories about a dragon flying over the city. The guards were all in a panic and wondering how to catch it.”
“They can’t,” Nellie said.
“The Regent seemed pretty determined. He called all the guards in the audience room and gave them a real talking to. Apparently, he said there will be no method or expense spared. Adalbert Verdonck demands answers.”
“Is Lord Verdonck’s son still at the palace? I thought he left.”
“He did. He left for his father’s funeral, but came back. I saw him coming into the gates yesterday. People were saying that he requested a formal audience with the Regent, and then spent the next hour tearing into the Regent and the court, and the Regent didn’t get a single word in. Apparently he demands a full investigation into his father’s death. I’m sure the Regent is trying very hard to present the audience with a dragon.”
Which might also explain the obsession with finding magical people.
“Can’t the Regent just deny the investigation?” Nellie didn’t want the investigation either. She was sure that in cases like this, involved servants were called to give evidence.
“He can, but it won’t look good for him and he doesn’t have the final say. He’s not king.”
“I bet he’s not happy.”
“Not at all. And now that all the guests are gone, it’s just him and Adalbert Verdonck. They say the most horrible things to each other.”
“What’s he going to ask in this investigation?”
“I presume he’s going to bother the Regent until the Regent finds someone who can be forced to take the blame for Lord Verdonck’s death. Remember what happened after the death of the royal family?”
Nellie shuddered. She remembered all too well. The hearing had gone on for days, as the shepherd who presided over it asked every noble who survived to recount the events in the palace that day.
Even if the king and queen were both dead, none of the nobles wanted to talk about magic. At first they blamed the deaths of the people in the music room on bad wine, but the stories about Princess Celine’s exploding magic were just too strong.
