by Julie Hearn
Ready, finally, she pushes open the cottage door.
The garden is threaded with cobwebs that sparkle like fairy lace in the frost. There is a bag of walnuts on the step and a loaf of barley bread. Nell adds them to her basket in case the fresh air restores her appetite. She doubts it will. She doubts anything will. Everything tastes of nothing since her granny died.
Through the gate she goes, along ruts and bumps of frozen mud toward the orchard. The oldest apple tree has lost most of its leaves and all of its fruit. Nell looks for the sinister knot of blossom, but it, too, has gone, fallen off, vanished, or eaten for pudding by a piskie.
All the trees look very dead. The ball of mistletoe is flourishing, though, high up in the oldest tree’s branches. Nell knows she ought to gather some, but she hasn’t the heart to try. And anyway, she has lost track of what the moon is doing. It has to be six days old, for the picking of mistletoe. No more, no less, or the stuff will be as useless as a handful of grass pissed upon by piskies.
Oh, Granny, I miss you.
She turns her back on the orchard and heads west, away from the village. There is nothing for miles in this direction, except open moorland and tracks that meander to nowhere. You can get lost if you’re not careful. Or step into a bog and be sucked down and swallowed like a dinner, with no one ever knowing what became of you.
Nell walks until her ankles ache, until the frost has melted and a pale sun has risen behind her. She has a vague notion to keep right on going until she reaches the fairy hill. Common sense tells her that she will never find it again and that even if she did, and tried to get in, she would only bounce right off its surface with a bruised nose for her trouble.
I could try, though, she thinks to herself. I could search for a while.
She has no idea, really, why she would want to return to a place where time means nothing and emotions don’t count. All she knows is that she cannot stay huddled away in the roof space forever, with only a daft chicken for company. The fairies, for all their strangeness, might give her something—a piece of advice, a challenge, a surprise … something, anyway, to get her thinking properly again. Something to move her on.
Trudging farther, she turns over in her mind the various spells her granny taught her for summoning different beings. Each one is different, depending on whom or what you want to see. There’s one for goblins, another for unicorns, and a complicated one for water nymphs involving three cups of seawater, a lily root, and the beams of a spring moon. The one for fairies is pretty straightforward. This is it:
A SPELL TO SUMMON A FAIRY
Find thyself a gallitrap (fairy ring), and lay down within it, with thy feet pointing north. Best this be when the moon is full and the hour late. Wear thy coat inside out, and have a four-leaf clover in the pocket, to prevent mischief being wrought upon thy limbs or senses. Take three swallows of sleeping draft, place wild thyme upon thine eyelids, and recite, over and over, until sleep claims thee: “In peace I come, in peace I lie. Come forth in peace and round me fly.” So mote it be.
Since she has no thyme, four-leaf clover, or sleeping draft, and since it is early morning, and anyway, the moon could have turned hexagonal or exploded like a cannonshot for all the notice she has been taking of it recently, Nell can have no real intention of trying to summon a fairy this day.
Still, she keeps half an eye out for gallitraps as she walks and thinks about what she would do or say should she ever meet the fairyfolk again.
So deep she goes into her imaginings that she doesn’t see the lad, sprawled among bracken with his back against a boulder, until she practically trips over his outstretched legs.
“Oh!” she cries, jumping away. And because her mind is all taken up with spells and conjurings, she truly believes, for a few startled moments, that she has summoned this boy from the land of fairies by the sheer force of her will.
But, no. There is blood seeping through the front his shirt and pain all over his face. This is a human being, all right. A soldier. One of the King’s, by the look of him, and so glassy-eyed and blue around the mouth that Nell can tell that he is going to die.
Where’s the battle? she wonders. I dont hear one. I don’t see one. How did he get here? Who shot him?
No point asking, for the boy has drifted beyond all reason. If Nell is to do what she can to save him, there is no time to lose.
Flinging aside her basket, she kneels down, grasps the front of the bloodied shirt between both hands, and rips right through the blossoming stain. The boy winces but does not cry out.
“Yell if you want to,” Nell tells him. “I wont think you a coward for it. Now …”
The shot has missed his heart but made a mess of his rib cage. Frowning, Nell forces him to lean forward while she feels rapidly along his back. No exit wound, so the ball must still be lodged somewhere in the smashed pulp of his body. He has lost a lot of blood and is sinking deeper.
Moss.
Peat moss.
Packed close to a wound, it will staunch the bleeding and aid recovery.
There is plenty of moss around. But will it do the trick?
’Tis worth trying, thinks Nell. Particularly if I summon the Powers, for good measure. And she leans past the boy’s shoulder, gathers up two great clumps of spongy greenstuff, and slaps them against the open, seeping hole in his chest.
The boy’s cry rises in agony, like the wail of a martyr being weighted with stones or stretched on a rack.
“Beggin’ your pardon,” Nell tells him. “But if I’d warned you first, you might have clenched up, and then it wouldn’t work.”
It isn’t working anyway.
Powers or no Powers, it is doing absolutely no good at all. In fact it is making what was already looking like a very nasty death ten times worse.
Nell is thinking fast.
An injured mans dressing, sprinkled with oil of rue, then hidden inside a hollow oak, will transfer the injury from person to tree and thence into the earth. … A plaster made from ship’s pitch, white wax, oil of juniper berries, the fat of a heron, and a dozen leaves of plantain, crushed, be good for wounds caused by shootings…. Carnation oil will speed healing, but only if applied during a waxing moon.
“Oh, bogger it!”
There is only one thing left for Nell to try, and it has nothing to do with waxing moons or heron fat.
She doesn’t want to do it. She doesn’t have to do it. She could stand up right now and walk away—on toward the fairy hill, if she feels like it, or back to the village. It would be easy enough to simply go. There are no Watchers around—no one to know or care that she left a fellow human being to bleed to death on the moor.
And the caul, the most valuable piece of magic she owns, would still be hers, to use at a time and on a person of her own choosing.
She looks down at the useless wad of moss, soaking up red gore like a sea sponge, then away down the hill toward home.
She doesn’t even know this soldiers name. He could stride away from here as fit as a ferret and get shot again tomorrow. He could walk straight into a bog and get swallowed. And what a waste of good magic that would be.
The boy is watching her with glazing eyes. Another moment, and even the mightiest of spells will be useless.
Now, Nell tells herself. Run away from here. Go on. Go.
But her legs won’t move.
What would Granny have said? she wonders. What would she have wanted me to do?
And the answer is right there in her head.
You’re a healer, girl You do all you can, for as long as you can, with whatever you have to hand. It’s your calling.
“You’d better be worth it,” she tells the dying boy as she reaches for her basket. “You’d better be deserving, that’s all I can say.”
The boy can barely focus, through the blurring of his eyes that goes with dying. When the girl first appeared, he thought she was a ghost, come to guide his spirit to wherever spirits go. When she ripped his shirt away, he had a moment
’s fear that she was going to pluck his still-beating heart straight out of his injured body, to hasten him on.
Fetch help, he wants to say. Bring me a horse. Get word to my father. But it is too late for any of that, and he knows it.
He has no idea what it is she has slapped against the open wound in his chest. No idea … only that the agony of it is worse than anything … anything …
Through the mist in front of his eyes, he sees the girl throwing things from a basket. A knife, a loaf of bread. What? Is she going to feed him now? Is she mad?
This is not the way my life should end, he panics. Not lost in this godless part of the kingdom with none buta brain-addled maid to bear witness.
He struggles to speak, but a great wash of pain takes him, and it is as much as he can do to keep his eyes open, to fight the pain and the mist and the fading.
And now the girl has flung aside whatever infernal weights she had pressed to his chest and is coming at him again, with upraised hands. Her face is a pale oval, looming closer, and she is muttering something about water and air.
What now, for pity’s sake?
What is it she holds?
The knife? A bandage? A slice of bread?
He cannot see. He cannot tell.
Such pain … too much pain … too much to bear …
Oh!
Nell isn’t sure what she feels as she watches the fairybaby’s caul work its spell. Regret? Awe? Pride? Relief? They’re all there, crowding her head, as the boy’s torn flesh and mangled innards begin to heal. First, the blood disappears, sucked back into the body as if the hole in the chest was a mouth. Then the edges of the wound knit together, forming a livid line that gradually pinkens, then lightens, then vanishes completely.
She had expected the caul to change color; to fizz, perhaps, or emit sparks. She had thought the air might fill with fairies and glowworms, all chanting and watching and willing the magic to work. She had hoped for high drama. Some pomp and ceremony. A bit of a show.
But the caul simply settles, to the right of the boy’s heart, as if it just happened to land on him, like an autumn leaf, while this incredible thing took place. And when the spell is complete, when the boy is whole again, as if the wound had never been, the caul looks just the same. No flimsier or smaller or paler or darker. Nothing to show that its power has been all used up or that it has done something quite miraculous.
Maybe it will work again, Nell dares to think. If I charge it by moonlight and say the right words.
But: “What happened?” shouts the boy, sitting bolt upright and staring goggle-eyed at the place where he is entirely certain he recently got shot. “What in the name of heaven did you do?” There is what looks to him like a cobweb sticking to his skin. Quickly, impatiently, he brushes it away.
“What manner of creature are you?” he adds, uncertain for the moment whether to be grateful or afeared of this skinny being with the solemn eyes and hair so short and ragged, it looks nibbled.
Nell considers the fairybaby’s caul, all ripped and crumpled on the ground and definitely no use anymore to man nor beast.
“My name is Nell,” she replies, without shifting her gaze. “And I be a healer. A cunning woman.”
The boy inspects her face, her small hands, her grubby clothes.
“Well, Mistress Nell, healer and cunning woman, I owe you my life,” he says eventually. “And I thank you for it.”
She looks back at him then, mildly curious. He is not from hereabouts, for his voice is refined. A gentleman’s. He has dark eyes and a tumble of brown hair, and his hands, she notes, are as smooth and white as a lady’s.
She does not ask how he came to be dying alone with no comrades to aid him and no sign of a skirmish, for it no longer matters. He expects her to ask and is relieved when she doesn’t, for had she known he was shot by a landowner for frolicking in a hayloft with his apple-cheeked daughter, he suspects she might not have been so ready to save his life—by whatever miraculous means she has managed to do so.
She doesn’t ask his name, either, so he keeps that quiet too.
In return, as seems only fair, he does not press for further details about her incredible healing powers.
“I’ll never be able to do it again,” she snaps as if reading his mind. “So don’t go spreading tales around the bogging garrison, or they’ll say I be a witch and come after me for it. I won’t be telling no one about this day’s business, and nor must you.”
“You have my word on that,” he declares. “It will be our secret. Always.”
“Good,” she says.
He smiles at her then, a charming, easy smile.
“I must get back,” he tells her. “Before I’m missed.”
“Me too,” she says briskly. “I’ve a chicken to feed.”
He holds out his hand, and she takes it, thinking he wants help getting to his feet. When he raises her fingers to his mouth and kisses them, she grows flustered and embarrassed.
“You really are human, aren’t you?” he laughs. “Not an apparition haunting the moor or an angel sent to save me?”
“I told you,” she splutters, pulling her hand away. “I told you what I am.” And she jumps up quickly, brushing bits of moss and dirt from her apron with her kissed fingers. Her empty basket is beside the boulder. She retrieves her knife and flings it in.
“Take the bread,” she tells the boy. “You might need it for strength. Really, you could do with a cordial.”
“I am as good as new,” he reassures her. “Truly!” And to prove it, he leaps to his feet, flinging wide both his arms as if he wants to dance or be hugged.
“Go carefully anyway,” Nell tells him warily. “Mind the bogs. And eat the bread.”
He isn’t listening. He has his face turned toward the sky, and his eyes are crinkled shut as he breathes deep lungfuls of air and touches the smooth skin of his chest in wonder and relief.
He will need a new shirt, Nell thinks to herself. But not a shroud, at least.
And since her job is done and she has no reason to linger, she turns away and starts walking. Home. She will go home now and see to the chicken. Then she will scour the cauldron and start brewing something.
“Wait!”
She stops and looks back.
“Do you not seek payment, Mistress Nell, for your healing? I have no purse with me. But I will see to it that you are rewarded, and handsomely, for saving my life this day.”
The boy’s voice rings out at her, full of authority, good breeding, and a desire to do the right thing.
Nell sighs. She has no regrets anymore about saving this person, but she has her own life to get on with, and it is nothing like his. There is no point prolonging this encounter, nor does she want to, for all it might improve her chances of eating well for a while.
Anyway, she didn’t heal him. Not really. The fairybaby’s caul did that. And what price do you put on a fairybaby’s caul? A king’s ransom? A flower? A smile?
The boy owes her nothing, she decides. Although …
“There is something,” she calls to him. “But not money. I don’t want your money. A lad from the village—Sam Towser by name. He went away, to fight for the King, and no word has come from him since. If you hear tell what became of him—whether he be dead or alive—his father, the blacksmith, would find comfort in knowing.”
So would Grace Madden, she thinks to herself. And the minister. And me. In fact if that frolicking rascal be alive still, I will track him down and drag him home myself to do the right thing by his Merrybegot.
Surprised, amused, the boy agrees willingly to such a simple request.
“I will make enquiries,” he tells her. “I promise.”
Shivering a little in the thin sunshine, he pulls the tatters of his shirt across his chest. Although the material remains torn, the bloodstain has vanished. He checks the bracken. Not a splash of red anywhere. Amazing.
His attention has shifted for only a few seconds, but when he looks up, Nell has
gone.
He opens his mouth to call her back but thinks better of it. Instead he picks up the bread she left next to the boulder and sets off in the opposite direction.
Left behind, the remains of the fairybaby’s caul flutter where they hang. Torn though it is and completely drained of its life-saving power, there is just enough magic left in its tatters to make it a once-in-a-lifetime’s find for any passing piskie. Unraveled, its threads could be used to sew a tiny garment whose wearer would know flashes of inexplicable bliss. Wadded into soft balls, it would make nose plugs so effective that the lucky recipient would sleep through anything, even a triple murder right next to its ditch. Worn as a neckerchief, it would lend such radiance to the face that its owner would attract a constant stream of admirers, all bearing gifts and singing love songs, in a most unpiskie-like fashion.
But the piskies won’t venture this far from the village. Even those who catch a whiff of what’s out here won’t risk it. So the caul just hangs, like a wraiths entrails, droops, and finally falls. And eventually, it melts away as if it had never been—as if it had never saved a life or, in doing so, changed the course of history.
October 31st. All Hallows’ Eve. The one night of the year when the veil between the worlds is so thin that communing with ancestors can be as easy as having a chat with a neighbor over a garden gate. To those with the Knowledge, it has always been so. Others, with no understanding of these matters, hang wild garlic on their doors to deter ghosts and warn those most vulnerable to strange visitations—children, cider-drinkers, unwed maids, and the splutter-minded—to stay away from the churchyard.
The minister has made it clear that Satan and his minions treat All Hallows’ Eve like one big feast and will be abroad with a particular vengeance this year, cavorting in who knows what shape or form. And paying calls to witches.
The Watchers are trimming their lanterns. They have taken it upon themselves to mount a vigil after dark, in case Satan and his minions have a mind to drop in on the cunning woman’s granddaughter.
