by Bell, Hilari
’Twould also expose my friends to any risk that might still be posed by my assassin, but with this Noye trying so hard to arrange Rupert’s demise, I dared not leave them. I could see no other way, except to—
“No, we don’t,” Fisk said slowly.
He then fell silent for so long Kathy ran out of patience.
“We don’t what? You can’t just leave that hanging.”
“What...? Oh, sorry. But we don’t have to go chasing all over the countryside. In fact, it would be counterproductive. How have we found out everything important we’ve learned so far?”
I hate it when Fisk turns scholarly, trying to make me work out an answer he’s already discovered. Rupert, just out of university himself, wasn’t so fussy.
“We’ve learned the most from their attempts to kill us,” he said. “More from Michael’s assassin than from the Flintruckers, but even they... Wait, you’re not proposing we let them try to kill me.”
“Why not?” Fisk asked. “We know they want to kill Rupert — they’ve tried three times, so they’re not likely to give up now. If we just sit still, they’ll have to come to us. And make their next attempt on ground of our choosing, when we’re ready for them. Once they’ve — hopefully — failed, even if we can’t capture one of them, maybe we can track them back to Mistress Meg!”
’Twas the maddest idea I’ve known Fisk to come up with ... but no one had a better plan.
Rupert wanted to take a room under his own name, to make it easier for them to find him, until I reminded him of the reward his father offered for his return. I’d started hearing rumors about that in the last few days, and my friends’ encounter with Sheriff Willet confirmed it. Given the sums that were rumored — and for once, the rumors fell short of reality — if he revealed his identity to anyone, he’d be dragged back to his father forthwith.
His sulking over that didn’t annoy me, as I was too amused by watching Fisk sulk over the fact that all his work in forging a Liege writ had been wasted. He didn’t dare use it, now that every sheriff in the Realm would have a real Liege writ to compare it to.
I suggest he destroy it, if ’twas so dangerous to carry, but Fisk said, “You never know.”
We kept alert for suspicious people around us whenever we went out, and also set a night watch, which Fisk, Rupert and I divided between us. Though we were all awakened in the middle of that first night, when Monster decided to take True up on his offer to play. The resultant tornado of jostling furry bodies and pounding feet was so loud it woke not only us, but the lodgers on both sides and in the room below — at least, judging by the angry thumps on our walls and floor.
Kathy offered to take a watch shift too, but she’d snickered so much when we purchased a mere half a dozen daggers, to be secreted about our persons, that we didn’t think she’d take it seriously. Though mayhap ’twas us she wasn’t taking seriously. I also took to wearing my sword whenever we left our rooms, which was as awkward and annoying as it usually was.
We did not, however, leave a guard in our rooms, which I profoundly regretted when we returned from an outing and the innkeeper told us, “Your friend was here, looking for you, sir.”
Fisk started asking about a slim nobleman with a bitten hand, but I was already sprinting up the stairs. ’Twas no great surprise to find my room ransacked, and the crossbow gone.
The dismayed innkeeper said he hadn’t let the man into my room — even though he’d known my name and described me perfectly. Indeed, I couldn’t blame the man — I blamed myself, for not finding someplace outside of the inn where we were staying to conceal it. Or at least someplace besides our rooms.
Kathy, in a consoling spirit, said that mayhap Wheatman just wanted to reclaim his possession ... but even she couldn’t summon up much conviction, and I all but knew we’d see the man again.
Hopefully, I’d see him before he spotted me.
But aside from that, three days passed uneventfully. On the morning of the fourth day, one of the maids knocked on our door and delivered a note.
She said someone had given it to the tapster, and asked that it be passed on to us as soon as possible. Rupert took one look at it and became so agitated he barely managed to wait till she’d departed before he snatched it out of my hand.
“’Tis Meg’s writing! But ... she’d never write twaddle like this. Could she have been forced to write it?”
He turned it over to read the back, which was a bit irritating as I’d not finished reading the first page. But even knowing she’d not written it of her own will, his face went white when he reached the end.
“Cheer up,” said Fisk brutally. “No one who really means to kill themselves sends a note more than twelve hours in advance. ‘I will throw myself from the abandoned grain mill into the stream, but Only when the Creature Moon is at its height. Two hearts cannot be so cruelly torn asunder...’ I’m amazed they didn’t give us directions to the place.”
“Not to mention the fact that we know she’s a prisoner, and not free to slay herself even if she wished to,” I added. “Fisk is right — this is insulting.”
“Oh!” said Kathy, who’d been ignoring us to study the note. “I know why she wrote such silly stuff. Look at the first letter of every sentence. Too much trouble has come from our love. Rupert, my dear... Although... Please... TRAP. And here again, at the end. Time will heal... Remorse... Always yours. Pray forgive... She didn’t have to tell us twice.”
“She didn’t have to tell us once,” said Fisk. “The content of that note makes it perfectly clear. The question is, how do we turn it back on them?”
It was easy to get directions to the abandoned grain mill — it was the local lover’s leap, where all the thwarted lovers went to end everything ... only to talk themselves out of it on the long journey. The mill had been placed on a waterfall, a full day’s ride from the present town.
Even after the villagers had moved themselves downstream to flatter land, the tapster told us, the mill had remained in the deserted village for some time — mostly because making the trip to get your grain milled once a year was less trouble than moving those big stones and building a new one. Then the miller’s daughter had been jilted by her lad, and thrown herself from the mill’s second story into the churning water below. The description of how badly the rocks in the rushing stream had battered her lovely face was still the stuff of tales.
The miller and his family had sold the place and moved on, and the new owner had recruited every ox team in the village to move the stones down to a new mill. It was built on a big slow bend, where you could jump into the river if you wanted to, but you had no better chance of drowning there than anywhere else.
But it wasn’t just its gory history that made this place so appropriate for an ambush — by the time we got our horses saddled and rode out there, it would be so close to the moment the Creature Moon was high that we’d have no opportunity to set up something clever.
Though the exact time hardly mattered. Whenever we arrived, they’d be waiting for us.
The good news was that “they” seemed to have shrunk in number. There was another clue in Meg’s note, that Rupert spotted; everywhere the word “only” and the word “two” occurred, they’d been capitalized. And those words occurred a lot, bless Meg’s clever little brain.
The bad news was that, as Rupert said, all they had to do was threaten Meg and our advantage in numbers wouldn’t do much good. Why their numbers would suddenly decrease so much was a mystery, and I don’t like mysteries — particularly going into a situation where people might want to kill me.
But the worst news was that with only two opponents, there was no way I could talk Katherine out of coming with us.
I’d been so caught up in figuring out how to thwart the plot that I’d forgotten, for one fatal instant, that I also needed to come up with a plan that had absolutely no part for Kathy. I did point out that we were assuming that “there’s only two people guarding me” was what Meg was trying to say �
�� and it might not have been. But with so many unknown factors, coming up with a way to “turn their plan back on them,” as I’d so cleverly blurted out, was going to be tricky enough without leaving a competent and clever adult behind.
Particularly without her knowing I’d done it deliberately. She’d barely forgiven me for the last time I excluded her, without her knowledge or consent, and I didn’t want to get caught doing it again.
Even as this passed through my own mind, I could hear how condescending, how insulting it sounded ... but this was Kathy.
And I failed to come up with any way to keep her from coming with us, so the point was moot.
Not that I hadn’t tried. I proposed several other plans, including one in which we swapped Michael and Rupert’s clothing, and used the sudden revelation that Rupert wasn’t Rupert as a distraction...
But Rupert said that Noye knew him too well to be fooled for more than a moment, that anything that frightened Noye might put Meg at risk, and he flat out refused.
We couldn’t even get there early, to scout the place to create our own trap, so the best plan we could think of was to have Michael leave us at the entrance to the valley where the mill resided. Then he’d find a way to the mill through the woods, while we convinced any observers that he hadn’t rejoined us by riding down the road without him. Assuming, of course, that they hadn’t already learned that Michael had rejoined us.
After that ... well, we’d have to see what they’d set up. But with luck Michael might be able to get the drop on them, while they were trying to get the drop on us, and then find some way to distract Noye so the rest of us could jump in and rescue Mistress Meg.
I may have beaten Jack, as Kathy said, but I couldn’t help but imagine his probable opinion of this plan.
I shared it.
“Cheer up,” said Katherine, who’d been almost as tense and worried about Mistress Meg as I’d been about her. “If there’s only two of them, like Meg says—”
“Like you assume she says,” I mentioned. Again.
“—then we’ve got them outnumbered! Six to two, if you count the dogs ... well, maybe not poor Scaredy. Five to two, then.”
“Unless Meg meant that there are only two entrances, or only two hours from sunset to moon high.”
Dusk was falling now, with the thin sliver of the Green Moon about to follow the sun down. The waxing Creature Moon was already half way to the top of its arc, but we were coming up on the foothills that held the abandoned mill.
“I think she did mean only two men,” said Michael. “And not just because of the note. If they outnumber us so badly, would it not have been simpler to ambush us here on the road?”
He had a point. This overgrown track led only to the old village, where no one ever went. We’d passed half a dozen places where a large group of men could have slaughtered us all.
“Then what happened to them?” I asked. “They were all there with Tizza, before Noye and the other three rode off, leaving just two poor saps to face Mam Flintrucker.”
“True. But mayhap ’twas facing Mam Flintrucker that convinced the two men guarding Tizzabeth they should find new employment,” Michael said. “Look at it from their point of view; we spoiled their plan to take up residence in the old keep, and we’ve been driving them all over the countryside ever since. And ambushing them. They haven’t once succeeded in harming us.”
“Except for breaking my head,” I said dryly.
“You don’t count,” said my beloved. “’Tis Rupert they want to kill, and they’ve failed every time. You’re right, Michael, they’ve had a very bad month. I shouldn’t be amazed if some of them ... changed their minds.”
“In the middle of a contract, which they’ve been pursuing for weeks?” I asked skeptically. “They can’t ambush us on the road, because Rupert’s death has to look like an accident. If he’s murdered, someone might start looking at the people who had a motive. I expect their plan is for him and Meg to throw themselves into the millrace, and leave her note to prove it was suicide. I told you to burn it,” I added.
Rupert, who carried the note in a pocket near his heart, looked mulish.
“The place doesn’t matter,” Michael said. “They can simply smash Rupert’s head in and toss his body into the water. By the time the rocks were done with him, one or two more blows would make no difference. But they haven’t attacked us, and that makes me think Meg might be right, that there are only two of them.”
“Or that Noye might have fooled her into thinking there are only two,” I reminded them. “And they haven’t attacked us, because there’s an even better setup for an ambush in that empty village, or the old mill.”
Not to mention the fact that Wheatman might pop out of the bushes and shoot us at any moment. But there was nothing we could do about that except leave Michael behind, and since Michael’s unexpected presence was our best chance to disrupt Noye’s plan...
“We’ll know soon enough,” Michael said. “This is where I leave you.”
The tapster had told us about the sign, marking the entrance to the valley where the village had been so neatly tucked away. The mill had belonged to the Scoffels, and the village that arose around it had been Scoffelton. But time, or maybe some clever vandal, had broken off a corner of the old sign, renaming the town, “offelton.”
With the light of day giving way to moonlight, the entrance to the valley was plunged in such deep shadow it was like staring into a giant’s mouth.
We pulled our horses to a halt, and Michael rode Chant off into the trees, True, as always, silent at his heels.
The talkative tapster had assured us that there would be other ways to approach the village. Almost certainly. Well, probably.
If I was going to leave Kathy behind, in safety, this was my last chance to do it. She knew it, too. Her gaze fixed on me, the challenge clear in her eyes. And if I tried to stop her, tried to make her an unequal partner, would she eventually leave me, as I’d left Michael in Tallowsport?
Even if I could have stopped her, I didn’t have the right.
“I want a wife,” I told her. “I want a partner, too. I want our children. I want all of it.”
The Green Moon had set by now, but the Creature Moon shed enough light for me to see the sheen of tears in her eyes.
The rapidly rising Creature Moon.
“I want a wife too,” there was an edge in Rupert’s usually mild voice. “How long do we have to wait?”
“We have to give Michael a while to find some way in besides the road.” Kathy’s voice was a bit husky, but her words were prosaic. If I was going to have a comrade, in adventure as well as life, it was nice to have one who could keep her mind on the matter at hand. “He’ll do a nightjar whistle when it’s time for us to come.”
I had no idea what a nightjar’s call sounded like, which might be why Michael never used that signal with me, but it was a childhood tradition among the Sevensons. Kathy claimed she was better at it than any of her brothers.
Sure enough, the Creature Moon had moved only an inch up the sky when a fluting, three note whistle drifted out of the valley.
“He’s in,” Kathy announced, and kicked Posy forward without more ado.
I’d have preferred to dither for a few more minutes, make some last minute plans ... make a last, futile attempt to change Kathy’s mind? But Rupert was practically riding her down in his haste to reach his Meg. I looked down into Frightful’s worried eyes.
“It’s too late to be sensible,” I told him. “She’s already in.”
And I sent Tipple trotting down the giant’s gullet, after my love.
An abandoned village is always eerie. A loose shutter will bang, the scurrying of rats sounds like the ghostly echo of a woman’s skirt — until you realize what that sound really is, and then it’s worse. But even beyond the shutter and the rats, there’s an air of wistful melancholy that hangs over such places, like the dust of worn out dreams. And that’s by day.
Scoffelton
had been built in this narrow valley because the waterfall, and thus the mill, was here. They’d had easy access to the stream, and many of the men who’d lived in the ramshackle cottages clinging to the hillside must have gone out to the flatter land to plow fields and graze their stock. But even on this warm summer night, the waterfall’s mist cast a chill over the valley — in winter it would be both damp and freezing — and the constant roar only made it easier for ghosts to sneak up on you.
For all I knew, the people who’d lived here had been perfectly content with their lives. But in Scoffelton, it felt as if the abandoned dreams had been bitter ones.
If I hadn’t been showing off for Kathy, I’d have cringed and scuttled like poor Spineless.
The town was bad enough, but as we approached the old mill several lengths of rusty chain, hanging over a beam outside the door, clanked in proper ghostly fashion. I finally gave in and said, “Oh, come on. Did he actually set the scene, like a traveling player’s stage?”
Kathy had dismounted, and was striking sparks to light our two candle lanterns, while I tethered the horses. I thought about taking the dog with us ... promptly thought better of it, and left him tied to Tipple’s saddle. The last thing we needed in there was a panicked dog.
“Don’t be absurd. Someone could easily have left them—” The tinder began to catch at that moment, and Kathy stopped speaking to blow the flame to life.
“Left a chain that goes for a silver ha’ the foot?” I said. “And what would it have supported? What probably hung there was a grain sack, stuffed with straw and a few rocks to make it look heavy. Not that they needed any kind of sign when they had that.”
The great water wheel, now missing most of its cross boards and cut loose from its gears, still spun slowly under the stream’s assault.
But Kathy had both lanterns lit, and right now Rupert was afraid of only one thing.
“We’ve got to get in there, and find Meg before moon high.” He grabbed one of the lanterns, and shoved the door open. The hinges squealed so loudly we might as well have knocked. And I found the fact that it wasn’t locked more unnerving than the rattling chain.
