by Patty Jansen
Did that poor screaming woman survive? What was that dreadful roar? What was that creature? Willow tales were always true. If that’s what the tree had seen, then that was how it had happened.
“Loesie—was this at your grandmother’s farm?”
She nodded and mimicked fighting.
“They’re bandits? Coming into Saarland?”
She nodded again and then formed her hands into claws and mimicked a roar.
“And demons?”
Loesie nodded again.
Except the kingdom of Saarland had been at peace for many years. There had not been any marauding bands of invaders for a long time. Certainly not magical ones.
Johanna wanted to set the basket down, but Loesie gestured for her to keep it and pointed across the marketplace.
“You want me to leave?”
“Ghghghghgh!” She shook her head and pointed more strenuously.
Nellie reminded Johanna, “We should be on our way, Mistress Johanna. We have to be back for midday—”
“Cowpats, Nellie, we have plenty of time.”
Nellie’s cheeks darkened. “Mistress Johanna. You shouldn’t say such . . . things. And in the marketplace, too, where everyone can hear it, mind you. What is your father going to say when he hears—”
“Stop it, Nellie, before I say any worse words. My friend needs help. That’s much more important than what people think of me.”
Then, spotting the crest of Saardam above the entrance to the council chambers, she realised what Loesie had been trying to say. “You want me to tell someone, like the mayor?”
She nodded, her eyes wide, while she gripped Johanna’s arm. “Ghghghgh!”
“Yes, I will.” Though what she would tell a mayor who went to church every day and didn’t believe in magic she didn’t know. She could just about see the man’s face, over his hideous ruffled collar. The wood told you there are bands of rogues about? “If I’m to make a convincing story, I need to know who these men are and where they are now.”
Loesie made a sweeping motion with her hand.
“Everywhere?”
She nodded.
Johanna looked at the peaceful market scenes, the cheese merchants, the fabric sellers, the turnip farmers, all people she knew reasonably well. No one she didn’t.
“Here?”
Loesie made a sound of frustration. “Ghghghghgh!”
“In the city?”
Loesie pulled her arm again, placing her hand flat on her chest. Then she pointed at Johanna.
“Yes, I promise I’ll tell someone.”
Chapter 2
* * *
WHATEVER HAPPENED to the nice day?
Johanna left the markets with no idea what she was going to do about the promise she’d made to Loesie. She couldn’t just walk into the mayor’s office and tell him about the magic warning.
The mayor went to church and took the Shepherd’s teaching very seriously. A few weeks ago in church, the Shepherd Romulus had given a sermon that condemned magic in the strongest possible words. Johanna could still hear his voice. There are those who adhere to the dark crafts of old, from quacks who tell the people lies about treatments that do not work, and fortune-tellers who take your money for deceit and extortion, to those who try to do evil. They tell you they see things on the wind or in the wood. These are lies. At best, the dark crafts are a fallacy. At worst, they are evil.
He let his words echo through the church.
Then there are those, at the pinnacle of all evil, who willingly engage in the black arts that are the domain of the Lord of Fire. Those who seek to possess other people, those who speak to ghosts, and worst of all, those who try to raise the dead.
A kind of shudder had gone through the congregation at those words.
Johanna remembered sitting in her pew with her hands clamped between her knees, feeling like the Triune itself would burst through the ceiling of the church and point a great shining light at her. A big voice would boom through the church, Here is a sinner and a witch and yet she sits in our church every day and she shares our meals. Who knows what she reads about you when she runs her hand over your dining table?
It was at times like this that her father’s words haunted her: that she didn’t belong in this church—which she knew because she didn’t really believe in the Triune—and that she should stop going to it.
But the church was useful. The benches made of willow wood were full of stories, which they released to her at the touch of her hands. They taught her many things she would never have known otherwise.
And everyone went to church. Everyone of her age at least. It was new, it was a good thing for the citizens, because the Verses taught that people should be sensible, compassionate, honest and frugal, all things that the Lurezian culture that had gripped the nobles of the city was not. Of course the nobles and those who wanted to be nobles disliked the Church’s teachings against blatant displays of wealth.
There was just that little problem about magic and the way the Shepherd portrayed all magic as black and evil. One day, Johanna had told herself, she was going to show the Church that magic was mostly used for good. But that day hadn’t come yet and each day the Church’s teachings against magic intensified.
Increasing numbers of people, like the mayor, believed in the evil of magic. That was because many had never seen it.
Many, many people couldn’t see things in willow wood, or hear voices on the wind, and therefore, to these people, this magic was something dark and evil. They liked what the Shepherd said about magic: that it was the mark of the Lord of Fire and those who practiced it were disciples of that evil force.
For Johanna, there was no right or wrong about magic. Magic just was. The wood showed her what the wood had seen. It re-played those images until the magic ran out. There was nothing evil about it, nothing that she could control. The magic was in the wood. She was simply there to see it.
But because the Church and the Shepherd had become popular—and because the king went to church—it meant that if she needed to warn people, there was no way that she could do so with Loesie’s story alone.
She couldn’t tell anyone of the bloodcurdling scream from that woman or the demons, because she couldn’t explain how she had seen them.
A plain warning that some people crossed the river would not bother anyone, because people in the border regions crossed the river all the time. Yet if Johanna spoke of the demons, they’d say that this was a hallucination by an unstable woman, unmarried and frivolous. The Church would consider her evil, too.
But she knew what the wood had shown her was true.
Who could these invaders be?
Saarland had been at peace for longer than Father had been alive.
She didn’t think the royal family had offended anyone. They preferred trade with the neighbouring countries. Father’s sloops, the Lady Sara and Lady Davida and the smaller ones, went up and down the river all the time. Father met with the Estlanders at Aroden castle and went as far as the rapids where the Saar River came down from the mountains in Westfalia, far beyond the borders even of Gelre. He’d never said anything about threats or bandits. It just made no sense.
There was only one thing to do: she needed to find out if someone else had seen anything.
Johanna said to Nellie, “You go ahead. Tell my father I’ll be home soon.”
“But Mistress, what are you going to do? It’s almost midday.” And midday was dinner and heaven forbid if she was late for that, even if only with her own father. Do you ever not think about what’s proper, Nellie?
“I won’t be long. There is something I have to do right now.”
“Your father will be so angry if you’re late. And what with you wearing your clogs to church—”
“Please, Nellie.” Johanna held up her hands.
“Your father wants me to keep you—”
“Out of mischief and on the right path, yes. I’m not going to do anything sil
ly. I just need to talk to someone.”
Nellie glared at her and an unspoken warning hung between them.
It had something to do with the time last month that Johanna had borrowed a looking glass and wanted to see how the Moon would take a bite out of the Sun, as Jan Dieckens, who was the lighthouse keeper but who spent a lot of time looking at the stars, said.
But it happened at dusk and the sun was so low that Johanna couldn’t see it from her bedroom widow, or the garden, so she’d climbed up on the roof through the attic window in the drying room. Before going out there, she had taken off her dress because it was too cumbersome for climbing on roofs, right?
But it so happened that her father had wanted to see her, and not finding her in her room, he had asked the servants, and none of them knew where she was. Then they all started looking, and getting more concerned until the gardener—a man no less—found her on the roof wearing only her drawers. What a scandal that had been!
“Please yourself, Nellie. You can go home, or you can come with me, but I am going. And the sooner I go, the quicker I’ll be back.” She turned and walked away.
Nellie ran after her. “Where are you going?” The words to the roof in your drawers? hung in her voice.
“To Father’s office.”
Nellie’s eyes widened. Apparently she had expected something entirely different. Some of the tension went out of her posture.
The merchant office of the Brouwer spice merchants was along the harbour, in one of the stately buildings on the quay. The front window looked out over the harbour, and the ships, the sails, the masts and the activity that came with the many different kinds of ships.
There were big sailing vessels that went over the ocean, which went to places as far as the Horn and beyond, and brought back exotic spices and silks. There were the trusty river barges such as Johanna’s father owned, which lay, ugly and plain, side-by-side in the glittering water of the harbour. A ship’s boy was jumping from one boat to the other. A couple of quay workers were unloading fat cheeses onto a cart. With their greenish hue, they were Estlander cheeses, made from sheep’s milk. That was what Father did: he took the exotic spices and silks to the inland cities of the east, and brought back their cheeses and dainty cabbage sprouts. He’d said not long ago that the company had enough money to invest in a seafaring vessel, but no one would dream of setting sail without guards to protect the vessel against pirates on the open ocean, and mercenaries did not work for common citizens. And the nobles wouldn’t accept Father as one of them.
It was all very silly and frustrating.
A few herder boys in rowing boats were taking a group of sea cows across to the barns on the other side of the harbour. The sunlight glistened on the animals’ hairy backs. They could probably already smell the cabbages and carrots in the water. The Brouwer Company’s barn was somewhere amongst the boathouses perched on stilts over the water. This was where Loesie would sleep. Johanna would come back tonight and check on her.
As she squinted into the light, she noticed that there was an unusual sloop in the harbour. With its dark-painted sides and large cabin, with real glass windows and red curtains, it didn’t look like a cargo ship. In fact, it looked like some rich person’s private ship.
A few men sat on the deck of the Lady Sara, the Brouwer Company’s flagship, smoking and drinking coffee, and waved as Johanna passed.
“Good morning, Mistress Johanna.”
She stopped. “Good morning, Adrian. How’s business?”
“We delivered the cheese to the Hendricksen warehouse. The Lady Davida should be back tomorrow with the wheat.”
“Make sure the hold gets cleaned out properly. The Lady Davida will be taking a shipment of fine food to Estland, and I’m sure Lord Aroden won’t like finding weevils in his biscuits.”
“Sure, Mistress Johanna.” Adrian snorted, no doubt thinking of that weevil incident.
She nodded at the black barge. “Do you know who that ship belongs to?”
“The black one?”
“Yes. Whose is it?”
“Don’t know, Mistress, but I wager it’s someone important. They arrived last night and there was a big to-do with folk on horses and carriages. All of it after dark, mind. Didn’t see who came in, but it musta been important. Master Willems saw them too and said they might be guests for the royal family.”
Oh, that dratted ball again. Now there were important foreign guests, huh? Wonder what outrageous things they would be wearing?
Pardon the sarcasm.
She looked at the boat and its immaculate shiny deck and she couldn’t begin to figure who this important person would be. She would have recognised the Estlander flag if they were people from the Estlander royal family. But it wasn’t the Estlander family standard. It was a blue flag with a small yellow emblem in it that depicted something complicated, like a flower or a frilled dragon, but was too far away for her to see.
“What company does that flag belong to?”
He shrugged. “Something Burovian. Heard a rumour that it belonged to some religious order’s sanatorium. Dunno if that’s true, mind . . .”
That didn’t sit well with her. The Church—a religious order—a sanatorium. People from a Burovian religious order invited to the ball? King Nicholaos had become so obsessed with religion recently—religion which forbade magic. Magic, which she could not help having. Church, which she attended because everyone did, but where she didn’t completely feel at ease.
She shivered. “Thank you, Adrian.”
He waved and she continued on to the office of the Brouwer Company. The bells above the door clanged as she stepped inside, onto the familiar wooden floor where she’d played as a child, the familiar desk, now empty, where the office clerk usually sat, and the shelves with samples on the back wall. Even the smell was familiar. Tobacco, curry, nutmeg, cinnamon.
Nellie followed her and closed the door, shutting out the harbour sounds.
Master Willems, fresh-faced and red-cheeked, in black over-dress and white ruffled shirt, came out of the door to Father’s office.
“Good morning Mistress Johanna. Good morning, Nellie.”
It was still morning. Only just.
He must have been ready to go out to the Church midday service because he held a thumbed copy of the Book of the Triune in his hands. He was Reader at church and would stand to the side of the altar and read out passages of the Verses.
“I haven’t finished the Pietersen account yet,” he said. “I’m sorry, I know I promised your father but I’ve been—”
“I didn’t come for the Pietersen account. I want to talk to you.”
“Oh?” He raised one blond eyebrow. One corner of his mouth quivered. He wasn’t handsome, exactly, but trustworthy and dependable. If it hadn’t been for his piousness, Johanna might even have liked him. “Me? Well, Mistress Johanna, I’m not sure that I—” He looked more puzzled now.
“It’s about the wind.”
“What wind?”
His face went blank, but by the way he gripped the edge of the table, Johanna figured he knew what this was about. He looked from her to Nellie, as if he wanted to say, how much does she know? and then jerked his head at the back office. They went inside, leaving Nellie in the front room.
Inside, by the hearth, big velvet-covered chairs took up most of the space. Account books lay in tottering piles on the heavy wooden desk in the corner. This used to be her father’s desk, but her father hardly came in anymore, preferring to do his work from the comfort of his chair by the fire at home.
The air in the room smelled of fresh tobacco and an array of spices that were laid out on the table. He must have had a visiting buyer this morning.
Johanna sat down in one of the chairs, Master Willems in the other, smoothing the folds of his robe. He still held the Book of the Triune, and clutched it to his chest, nervously.
They sat there in silence for an uncomfortable moment before Johanna asked, “Have you seen anything on the
wind lately, Master Willems?”
He froze, the book of the Triune in his hand. She had never spoken of magic, much less that she knew he could read wind magic from the way he stood at the end of the pier, letting the wind buffet him.
He pursed his lips, and eyes looked at her as if she was something disgusting washed up on the shore. “Of what do you speak, Mistress Johanna?”
He knew very well of what she spoke.
Johanna spoke in a low voice. “This can stay between us. You and I both know I have no great love for people who sow fear amongst the citizens for something they have no control over. The magic is in the wood and in the water and the wind. We do a lot of good with it. To blame those who can see it is not fair, and I cannot believe that any benevolent deity would agree to shame law-abiding citizens.”
He gulped a few times.
She continued, “I do not care what you believe privately, but for the safety of our country, tell me if you’ve seen anything.”
“Why . . . why should I have seen something . . . if I could see . . . things on the wind?” He wiped sweat from his upper lip.
Johanna put her newest basket on the table.
“Touch the willow wood, Master Willems. Can you tell me if you see anything?”
He did, and shook his head. “Do you see something. . . ?” His voice was no more than a whisper.
Johanna nodded. “I got this basket from a seller at the markets. I’ve known this woman for some time. She is a bit odd and she gets teased a lot, but she can also see things in willow wood. This morning when I saw her, something dreadful, something I think is dark magic, struck her mute—”
“That’s because she is an evil practitioner of magic!” He held up the book, as if using it to ward off evil that emanated from Johanna.
“Oh, cowpats!”
His eyes widened. His mouth quivered. He looked like he wanted to say something about language, but couldn’t possibly offend the daughter of his boss.
Johanna went on, “The woman gave me the basket. This is the only way she could tell me what happened to her, or what happened at her farm. See, this is how ‘evil magic’ is used for good, because she can’t read or write.”
