by Patty Jansen
In the dark, all kinds of terrible thoughts took hold of her. They had cut down the tree that the wizard had been imprisoned in. Had that freed him?
If nothing else, this evening had made one thing clear to her: Mistress Johanna used to say people with magic had to be taught what to do with it. She had even started classes—which were quickly abandoned after she and the king had been killed by their own daughter. But stopping the classes had been wrong. They needed more classes. To defeat a magic threat, only one thing was useful: the understanding of magic.
Nellie had no understanding of it. She didn’t think the science group had much understanding either, but they, at least, understood the power of knowledge and wanted to gain it.
These were dark days for Saardam.
Nellie had to walk by herself the last part of the distance. The streets were dark and lit only by the occasional street lamp.
The platform at the quayside where the punishment would be carried out was barely visible against the blackness of the water. It was lit by a single street lamp that cast a golden glow over the macabre installation. It lay ready. The carpenters had removed the spare wood and their tools.
Nellie hugged herself at the sight of the dreadful thing. A couple of sea cows followed her in the water as she turned towards the disused wharf and walked along the empty warehouses. Their soft splashes were the only sounds in the still night.
In the barn, the women sat around a fire, and the smell of soup hung in the air.
To Nellie’s surprise, there was also a horse in the barn. It stood against the far wall, its beautiful headpiece tied to the workbench with a piece of rope. Madame Sabine’s grey and white horse.
“It just turned up at the barn door,” Mina said. “It was spooked and nervous, but we let it in and gave it some carrots, since we have plenty.”
“I think it’s Madame Sabine’s horse,” Gertie said. “Someone will be along to pick it up, and maybe they’ll give us some money.”
As with all animals, the horse had probably been drawn here by the dragon’s presence.
Nellie now noticed a couple of bags of vegetables that stood underneath the workbenches.
“How did you get all those?”
“I don’t know. We were away, picking up fish, and we traded some eggs, and when we came back, all this was here. I thought it had something to do with you.”
There were bags of carrots and beets and parsnips, and a bag of beans.
“That’s strange. I talked with a couple of merchants who wanted to speak to the dragon. They were prepared to give us supplies in return.”
Mina laughed. “Good luck to them.”
“I don’t think they’re coming. We never reached an agreement. The negotiation was interrupted.” Yet the supplies were here anyway. It was very strange indeed.
“Where is the dragon?” she asked.
Mina jerked her head in the direction of the storeroom.
Nellie looked inside. The dragon lay in the hay, and all the children were sleeping against his flanks. Madame Sabine must have done something bad to cause it to attack her.
Nellie went back to the fire, pulling along a tin to sit on.
She accepted a warm bowl of soup from Mina. They still didn’t have any salt, but the children had caught some fish and traded one fish for two eggs and all of that had gone into the soup. It was the best meal Nellie had eaten in days.
She told the others all about the meeting. Several women gasped when she told them Madame Sabine had been arrested.
“But why would the Regent arrest his own wife?” Mina asked.
“She never wanted to come here in the first place. They distrust each other. I heard them have an argument. Not a healthy family life by anyone’s definition.” Nellie told them how she had first gone to visit Madame Sabine, seen the scars, and found the dragon box in Lord Verdonck’s travel chest.
“Might the Regent be outlawing magic just because he is trying to make her life difficult?” Agatha said. “Because he hates her so much? I wouldn’t give a husband any favours if he cheated on me.”
Hilde nodded sagely. Her husband had cheated on her. Agatha had been none too fond of her own husband.
Nellie was going to say the Regent wouldn’t let the whole city of Saardam suffer for his poor marriage but, being a noble, he probably would. This might well be part of the Regent’s reason to chase magic: because he knew his wife had stolen the dragon and dabbled with magic.
And because Adalbert Verdonck was breathing down his neck, demanding that someone be punished for the death of his father.
Neither Wim the taster nor Nellie appeared to be high profile enough to make a satisfactory culprit, so why not blame your unfaithful wife? That solved two problems at once.
Madame Sabine could either confess her affair or accept the blame. Either would destroy her.
Because of the mysterious appearance of bags of carrots and parsnips in the barn, Nellie did not need to go to the palace for leftovers the next morning, and for that she was glad.
Mina cooked soup straight after breakfast, filling the warehouse with a smell so delicious that the puppy brought a friend and the number of cats swelled to over twenty. None of them were afraid to enter the storeroom where the dragon lay in the straw.
Despite being much bigger, the dragon let the cats climb on his back.
Nellie was busy.
Tomorrow was the big day, and the group’s supplies needed to be brought to Floris’ boat, since he had agreed to help take their things to the Guentherite ship and hide them below the deck.
Nellie needed to go to Gisele’s gin distillery to pick up a monk’s habit that she would wear on their adventure into the church crypt tonight.
When she left the barn, there were a lot of guards on the streets, and she hated to think how alert the guards at the palace gate would be. If she went to the palace, she might even run into Henrik, and she wasn’t sure any more that he would not betray her. She had a fleeting thought that he might have told the Regent’s guards about Madame Sabine’s scars, except she was sure she never told him about them.
More guards than usual stood lined up in front of the door of the council building to the side of the marketplace. A big group of people were standing in front of the building, held back by the line of uniformed men, where they were waiting for something.
Nellie stopped at the edge of the group so she could listen. A woman behind her was giving a younger woman—a cousin or neighbour—instructions on how to use rabbit bones for making soup. A man on the other side said, “Don’t let anyone hear that your son is trapping rabbits illegally.”
And many people shushed him up because illegal trapping was the only way they could survive.
“I think the Regent has finally heard our plight,” a woman said.
Another snorted. “I’ll believe it when I see it.”
Nellie couldn’t restrain her curiosity. “What are you all waiting for?”
A man next to her replied, “The Regent’s giving out food from the stores. He says he understands life is hard for us. He says that it’s better than to have people steal the food, which is happening anyway.”
The woman in front of him turned over her shoulder. “Those people need to be hanged.”
A lot of people agreed, and many had their own opinion on it.
A man said, “I heard they come at night.”
“Cowards.”
“My neighbour says the guards get distracted and then, when they come back, the door is smashed in and some bags are gone.”
“Are those men calling themselves guards? In my day, we were taught: one person stays with the door you’re guarding, no matter what happens.”
“There is no defending a door against evil magic.”
“They’re dark magicians.”
Another woman butted in. “Foreigners. They don’t know manners. They take what they see and think it’s all theirs.”
“Yeah. Long live the Regent.”
The line shuffled forward.
Nellie didn’t really want any food, nor did she want to wait for that long, but she had a strong suspicion that she knew who the thief was. And it was not a human. She had wondered for a long time what dragons ate and remembered the stolen carrots from the kitchen. Dora had complained about it. The dragon had already been in her room, and clearly he had helped himself to some contents of the kitchen pantry. And those bags of supplies that mysteriously appeared in the barn? She had a strong suspicion that she knew where they came from. Dragon poop was orange, after all.
She could see the dragon frightening the guards at the stores and helping himself to whatever he wanted.
But giving out the supplies seemed too radical a solution.
They were only at the start of winter. If the Regent gave out all the supplies now, there would be nothing to give later.
There had to be another motive.
She walked past the long line of waiting people until she got to the entrance of the building. People were going in, and others were coming out with bags and buckets full of parsnips and cabbages and carrots. Some people also got beans and flour, and they carried all this back to their homes, chatting happily.
But as people went into the building, they had to go past a table where a man was writing names in a big book.
A scruffy man was standing at this table, in a heated argument with the guard who stood behind the table. Nellie recognised him. It was old Bert, who used to sleep in Shepherd Adrianus’ church. Mad Bert who had gone completely grey. His face was red and blotched and his coat had seen better days. She wondered how he was doing, living in the poorhouse.
“Why do you need our names? Why our addresses? Why do you want professions?” he yelled at the guard behind the table.
The man replied in a dry voice, “We need to make sure that every person in the city who is eligible only gets one lot of supplies.”
“There are other ways you can do that. You can mark our hands with ink. You don’t need to do the scribbly scribbly scribbly on the paper and write down everything about us. Yes you can have a name, but why do you need people’s professions? Why do you need to know where they live?”
“The Regent has told us to collect this information.”
“The Regent wants to know which of us have a trade, so he knows which people to come after in his stupid quest to find magicians. I want my share and I’m not giving you my name or telling you where I live.”
The guard replied with a straight face, “I suggest you apply for an audience with the Regent, if you want to protest against that. I need your profession and address, otherwise you get no food.”
“Fine.”
And Bert turned around and stormed out of the building.
Several people in the waiting crowd gave him strange looks as he made his way down the street.
“What was that man saying, mammy?” A little boy asked.
“Don’t worry about him. He is just Bert, and he’s mad. Everyone knows that.”
“Is the Regent still going to give us food?”
“Of course he is. He’s a good man.”
But it seemed to Nellie that the only thing wrong with Bert was that he didn’t know when to shut up.
This appeared to be the Regent’s latest venture. The Regent wanted to be king. He needed support from the people. He had sensed that he wasn’t popular in the city, so he opened the city stores—and damn what would happen at the end of winter when they needed the food—and he got the citizens’ professions at the same time. She felt sick at the thought that people would fall for it so easily, but knew once she would have done the same. In fact, she had been grateful for her position at the palace because the palace gave her food.
Of course, the Regent had been doing the same thing to the nobles for a long time. That was the function of the banquets, so aptly sponsored by Lord Verdonck, and now under threat of having funding withheld by Adalbert.
So he turned to the common people, because it cost him little to give out food from the city’s stores, since that food was all part of taxes paid to the city anyway.
Under the guise of giving people food, he was making a register of everyone who lived in the city so he could send his guards around to target any he didn’t like.
Chapter 21
NELLIE HAD TO WAIT around until it got dark before she could carry out the next part of the plan: to rescue the boy—who she was reasonably sure was Prince Bruno—from the crypts.
Meanwhile, she helped the others pack up their supplies, ready to be carried to the Guentherite order’s ship.
During the day, the children, and especially Koby, had kept an eye on whether anyone visited the ship, and had concluded that the monks sometimes came to pick up things or deliver goods that had to go back to the monastery, like a chest full of books, but that no one was permanently at the ship.
After dark, Floris would come with his rowboat and they would take the supplies across the harbour and heave them on board the ship. They would hide the bags and barrels underneath a sailcloth the women had found in a nearby warehouse.
Mina and Hilde would stay on board the ship to guard the supplies.
At dusk, Nellie met Gisele in an alley behind the market square.
She was dressed as a monk today, with the hood of her habit over her head so it only showed the lower half of her face.
She asked Nellie, “Have you got everything?”
Nellie nodded and felt for the key in her pocket.
She had also taken a handful of carrots and a small bag of beans from the stock, in case they need to bribe someone.
Gisele gave her a bundle of fabric. Nellie recognised the brown coarse weave of a monk’s habit.
“Put that on when you get a chance,” Gisele said.
Nellie took it from her with a heavy heart. She had always respected the monks and didn’t like pretending to be one. Even though she knew some people in the church were not good people, she still didn’t like deceiving them.
She went onto a porch and pulled the habit over her head.
The inside of the garment smelled musty, and Nellie was surprised how heavy the fabric was. It was quite long and hid Nellie’s stockings and shoes. The hood went all the way over her eyes and would only stay up far enough to see the ground immediately in front of her.
“It’s even got pockets,” she said when she rejoined Gisele in the street.
“Of course it does. Where else do you think the monks put their prayer books and rosary beads?”
Gisele held her own pocket open. It contained a hammer and a knife in a sheath.
“Prayer books,” Nellie said, her voice flat.
“You do have a sense of humour.”
“You better make sure you don’t accidentally cut the string for the rosary beads, because you won’t be able to strangle someone with them anymore.”
Gisele gave a broad grin.
To be honest, the girl frightened Nellie a little. She wasn’t quite sure what Gisele wanted or expected from this expedition.
But for now, she would be useful, because the monks and the shepherds knew her and trusted her.
They set off through the streets. It was bitterly cold, the moon was clear, and the first stars were already coming out in the sky. Nellie’s breath steamed in the cold air. There would certainly be frost tonight.
When they arrived at the church, Gisele went inside first to check if anyone was there, and she came back to say that the church was empty.
So they went up the church steps and in through the heavy doors.
It was very dark in the church vestibule. The altar was a pool of golden light at the end of the aisle and seemed to float in a sea of darkness.
In her mind, Nellie spoke a brief prayer to the Triune, whose terrible statue stood behind the altar, overlooking the church with its contorted faces and water stained bodies. She prayed for forgiveness for what she was about to do.
Not a single sound dis
turbed the silence. It was so cold that even the mice and rats had gone quiet.
Nellie followed Gisele down the aisle to the altar. She kept stepping on the hem of the habit, which was really annoying. When she tried to tie it up higher at the waist, the hood kept falling over her eyes.
Gisele crossed in front of the altar and opened the door to the crypt.
The door to the staircase opened into pitch darkness.
“Urgh. The candles are out. Hang on.” Gisele went back to the altar and lit a torch from one of the giant holy candles that stood on either side.
Nellie followed her down the steps into that stifling darkness, trying not to trip or be disturbed by the strange shadows of the flapping flame from the torch over the stairwell’s curved walls.
Down in the crypt room Nellie could almost feel the eyes of all the past kings and queens who were buried here. She was doing this for the good of the city. She was doing this because neither the Regent nor the church should get their hands on objects of power. She was doing this because if people were kept prisoners down here, that was wrong and the Triune would never agree with that.
They reached the end of the burial room and now it was Nellie’s turn to do her part. She dug in her pocket, took out the key and opened the little door in the metal grate.
“How often have you been here?” she asked Gisele.
“A few times. The shepherd keeps his supply of good wine in here, and there is also a cabinet full of various other concoctions. He uses both on different occasions. He has a bad stomach sometimes.”
Nellie remembered the cabinet with the bottles she had seen on the previous visit. Most of those had been extremely dusty.
They walked along the corridor with the cabinets stuffed full of strange, wonderful and dangerous objects that Nellie still didn’t have the time to look at. She suspected there was more than a lifetime’s worth of study in these cabinets.
“Look at this,” Gisele said.
She held up the torch.
