“Lizbet?” said Jesus. “Lizbet, put them back.” The host in her mouth had almost dissolved. Jesus’s voice became faint “That’s not—”
Lizbet swallowed hard. The host vanished down her throat. Jesus’s voice cut off in mid-sentence.
She was halfway to the cathedral door. Behind her, the priest yelled, “Miss! Stop! You can’t do that!” Hurrying footsteps.
Lizbet didn’t think the priest would be able to run very fast in his vestments. See, it had been smart to wear a short skirt and bloomers. She sprinted for the open door.
Outside, a sunny, chilly April morning. High above, deep-throated bronze church bells tolled the half hour. Lizbet ran across the cobblestone square in front of the cathedral, dodging between passersby, wagons, carts, beggars, and between the stalls and merchants’ stands that lined the square’s sides. No one paid special attention to a running girl in plain clothing.
She crouched behind a draper’s stall. She peeked out with one eye. The priest stood, scowling, at the cathedral entrance. He turned back and forth, his gaze searching the square.
It did not light on her. After a minute, the priest returned inside. Had he given up? Or had he gone for reinforcements? Lizbet didn’t know, and didn’t wait to find out. She hurried out of the market square, not looking behind.
Lizbet reflected that she had never even heard of anyone stealing the host before. Sins, big and small, were piling higher on Lizbet’s head. And there was one more sin to come, worse than all the rest.
She let herself in by the back door. She sneaked through her own house like a thief, stopping to listen before turning every corner. She was fearful that the Magisters of Children were already nosing about. But she found no one.
Lizbet packed a drawstring sack with extra socks and underwear, a bar of brown lye soap and a towel, a jar of quince preserves, the rest of the cheese in the larder, and a hard sausage. She also stowed two prized possessions: a book of verses and a tiny pearl from a fresh-water mussel she’d found in a creek.
Hardest to leave were her dolls. Eight in all. She’d carved wooden sticks for body and limbs, and purchased white china heads that she’d painted herself. She’d sewn their dresses with love and care. Her dolls were the friends she wished she had, the friends she wouldn’t let herself have. When she was younger she’d walk them up and down and make up conversations for them. They’d meet and share secrets. They’d talk about their gentleman friends. They’d have a spat and then make up.
Lizbet couldn’t take them with her. She hoped, hoped, hoped they’d still be here when she got back.
In Gerhard’s study she found a handful of pennies and couple of silver guilders in a pouch. His grimoire, bound in leather and polished brass, was too big to carry. There were only a few spells in it anyway, inscribed in Gerhard’s swirly handwriting filled with curlicues and swish-swashes. The spells were nearly useless. How to turn dust motes into gnats. An incantation to make noses bigger. Hengest was right. There was no real magic. All the magic Lizbet had ever heard of was small, silly, and pointless.
At the very back of the grimoire, Gerhard had scribbled one long and complicated spell over and over, with many words crossed out and replaced, as if he had been trying to discover the right words by chance. It was titled “To Conjure Gold.” Maybe this was the spell that went wrong and made sky rain mice?
Noise from the front of house. The rattle of the door latch. The creak of the front door opening. Men’s muttering voices. Whoever it was must have a key, and hadn’t bothered to knock. Lizbet’s time had run out. She pictured people rummaging through her father’s possessions and was disgusted by the thought of Gerhard’s work, silly though it might be, falling into their hands. She tore all the spells out of the grimoire and stuck them in the pocket of her skirt.
Carrying her sack of possessions, Lizbet walked as quickly and quietly as she could toward the rear of the house. She was almost to the kitchen and the rear door when a man’s voice yelled, “Little girl! You, there! Halt!”
For an instant, Lizbet stared in terror. A huge man in black robes and leather harness strode down the house’s center hall toward her. His robes swung as he walked, and his chain-mail gloves clinked with each step. A marshal of the Magisters of Children.
Lizbet darted across the kitchen, hit the door running, and half-leaped, half-fell down the rear steps, into the alley. The marshal came running after, still yelling for her to stop.
She took off down the alley. Behind came the marshal. Two other men were with him. At the alley’s end, Lizbet turned and ran down the Street of St. Therese. She dared a glance behind. The marshals were catching up. Lizbet’s sack was heavy. It swung back and forth as she ran, throwing her off balance and slowing her down. Her heart crying out in despair and loss, Lizbet dropped the sack and sprinted away.
Pope Venomous the Third Avenue. Hog Alley. Redcrosse Square. Lizbet was a good runner, with an adolescent’s strong wind and limber frame. Unburdened, she gradually outdistanced the panting marshals in their heavy gear. On Redcrosse Square she slipped into a sacramental supply shop. Standing back from the entrance, she pretended to browse through a rack of prayer cards which depicted the Virgin Mary being stabbed through the heart with swords. Lizbet covertly sneaked glimpses though the shop’s front window.
Minutes passed. There was no sign of the marshals.
Lizbet was safe for the moment, but she had won a Pyrrhic victory. She had lost all her favorite things. She had lost the food and clothes she thought she might need on her journey.
She didn’t cry. Maybe she had used up all the tears she had last night.
She ventured out of the shop. The marshals were not to be seen. As wary as a highwayman with a price on his head, Lizbet headed west.
The city of Abalia clung to a hillside, one of the foothills of the great Montagnes du Monde. To go west in Abalia was to go downhill. Lizbet descended westward, down the Avenue of Famous Virgins. The houses on either side by degrees became more humble, and the passersby on the street more shabby. At last Lizbet arrived at the end of Abalia and stood at the top of the Wall of Virtue.
The Wall of Virtue was a granite cliff face in the mountainside. A single stone staircase traversed it. The Wall of Virtue separated Abalia from its wicked stepchild below, Abalia-Under-the-Hill. No one from Abalia went into Abalia-Under-the-Hill. Although, Lizbet thought as she descended the staircase, the steps seemed awfully well-worn for steps that no one ever used.
At the bottom of the Wall, a street of gray mud continued steeply down the hillside. A foul-smelling open sewer ran down its center, carrying along garbage, dead rats, bones, and worse. Buildings on both sides were timber and peeling stucco rather than stone or brick. Tethered goats bleated and scrawny chickens scratched in dooryards. Lizbet looked behind her: up on the hill, the gray mass of Abalia proper glowed in the early afternoon sun. Above the city rose the spikes of its towers and steeples, like the spore stalks of a vast and dismal gray mold. At the bottom of the hill in front of her, a dark forest spread out. This was Lizbet’s goal.
A group of men lounged on the porch of a tavern by the road. As Lizbet passed, their gaze lighted on her. One young man rose from his seat. His coat was unbuttoned, his shirt half out of his pants.
“Hey there, pretty thing!” he called.
Lizbet hurried down the hill. To her dismay, the man hopped over the porch rail and followed after her. So did two others.
“Where you needing to get to, all so hasty, my love?” the man called out from behind her.
Lizbet’s foot slipped in the mud. She fell onto the road. Her hands and knees were an inch deep in the mud. She struggled to her feet, but her fall allowed the man to catch up with her. He took her right arm in his, and his left arm went around her back and gripped her waist. “Such a fall, darlin’!” he said. His breath had the rotten-lilies stink of used-up alcohol. “Won’t you tarry fo
r a spot of victuals with us? This is a dangerous neighborhood for a tender young body such as yourself. Best you stay with us a while.”
“No!” Lizbet said. She dug her feet into the mud and pulled away. One of the other men grabbed her left arm, but she pulled free of him too and plunged down the hill, running, barely keeping her balance on the steep, slippery ground. Her heart pounded with effort and fear.
“Grab her, Carl,” one of the other men yelled. “She’s no business here. Let’s have some fun with her.”
Pounding footfalls and heavy breathing behind her. Lizbet ran as fast as she could without falling.
She reached the bottom of the hill. The road and buildings gave out. The forest, dense and dark, loomed ahead. Even though spring growth was just starting to leaf out the trees, their limbs were so tight and tangled she could not see into the shadows. She searched the wall of tangled vines and saplings for an opening.
From behind, a voice broken by panting yelled, “She’s going in the damned Grove of Frenzy! I ain’t going in there after her.”
The voice of the first man, whom the other had called Carl: “Then you’re out of luck, she’s all mine!”
“And you can have her, and the witch as well.”
There! An opening in the green wall of forest, and a path leading in. Lizbet headed for it.
A dozen yards into the forest, she stopped. Darkness engulfed her, as if she had run into an unlighted cellar. The air was so humid and thick it stuck in her throat. When the souls of children were blown out of their bodies by a high wind, sometimes they blew into the woods and haunted the dim glades, lost and confused. The awful fancy came to Lizbet that she might breathe in these lost souls. The air was heavy with scents of vegetal growth and decay.
Heavy footsteps behind. Lizbet forced herself to walk forward again, deeper into the forest. As her eyes adjusted to the dimness, Lizbet could see the pale trace of a path between the mossy rocks and ferns. She hurried on as fast as she dared, frightened she would trip on a vine or stone.
Behind, she could hear Carl’s heavy boots, and heard him cursing at the darkness, the rocks, the hanging vines. Still, he came on.
Ahead, the path branched.
Lizbet was at a loss for which direction to take. Tales said a witch lived in this wood, a witch who ate babies, who compounded magical potions of great power and expense, who flew through the air, who was lascivious with devils. A witch of high whimsy and mercurial temperament, who might conjure you up a prince’s ransom or metamorphose you into one of her milk cows, as the mood took her. Or so people said. No one actually admitted seeing her, speaking with her, or asking her for a boon. Some swore she was naught but a tale.
The Margrave’s rage when Lizbet mentioned the witch had given Lizbet faint hope. All her other choices gone, she had resolved to find the witch and ask her for her help.
That the witch might be hard to find was a complication that had not occurred to Lizbet.
Right or left?
Right was good. Left was bad. If the witch was evil—was there any other kind of witch?—maybe she lived at the end of leftward-branching paths. Lizbet took the left-hand fork.
Within fifty yards, the path branched again. Again, Lizbet turned left, but her hope ebbed a little. Who knew where these paths led, or whether there was a witch at all, anywhere in the wood? To make matters worse, she could hear Carl’s footsteps still behind her. She looked down. Her boots were making imprints in the moist earth anyone could follow.
She thought of running off the path, into the forest’s dim depths. But she was fearful of becoming even more lost. A path must mean at least that people did come this way. Even if there was no witch, maybe there were woodchoppers who lived in this forest and could help her. She ran on.
Left, left, left, left, left, left. The path branched and branched again. Lizbet took every left fork. The woods became thicker, darker. Sometimes Lizbet thought she saw movement in the tangled depths, or the flash of watching eyes. Vines, dripping with moisture, hung like nooses across the path, and she had to push them aside. Behind, she could hear Carl panting.
Lizbet’s legs were weary. Her breath was short. Her head spun with worry and exhaustion. It came to her that there was a problem in just picking the left-hand path: it might simply lead you in a circle.
At that moment, the woods gave out, and Lizbet found herself at the edge of a clearing. Across a patchy lawn, a gaggle of gray geese regarded her skeptically, and honked. A couple of pigs rooting in the turf paused to look up, snort, and paw the ground with their trotters.
Just ahead of her, at the end of a mossy stone walk, stood a house.
It was like no house Lizbet had seen before. It rose three stories, or three and a half, or four, or perhaps four and three-eighths: dormers, gables, roofs of slate, tile, thatch, or tin piled on top of one another, until the eye was confused, and she couldn’t tell where the building ended. Emerging from the clutter of rooflines was a forest of tiny towers, spires, smoky chimneys, and even a widow’s walk. The house was partly stone, partly brick, and brightly painted wood, and stucco, and wattle and who knew what else. It was as if dozens of other buildings had been chopped up and recombined into one. A score of poles of brightly painted wood or enameled metal leaned into the house’s walls and corners like a cathedral’s buttresses, as if the whole structure might come tottering down without them. Flags sewn with peculiar devices fluttered from angled flagstaffs.
Behind her, the crunching of Carl’s footsteps approached. Whoever lived in this crazy house, Lizbet had to take a chance with them. She ran up the walk, up six stone steps, to a big red door. The doorknocker was brass, shaped like a grotesque face sticking out its tongue, and as big as Lizbet’s head. With effort, she lifted it and let it drop. Its clang made her ears ring. “Please let me in!” she yelled. “There’s a man after me!”
No response.
She lifted the knocker again and slammed it down against its brass anvil. And again. And again. Its noise echoed off the house, and off the forest all around. “Please!” Lizbet yelled. “Please open the door!”
“There you are! What a din you’re making. You’ve run me a pretty mile this morning, sweetheart! What do you intend to give me in return?”
Carl stood at the edge of the yard, his hands on his hips, breathing hard. He noticed the house, and his gaze rambled over it. “What have we here? What a trash heap of silly rubbish! Looks like it was tinkered together by some drunken simpleton.”
“It is not!” Lizbet said.
“Uh?”
“This house is not silly rubbish! It’s beautiful. I like it.”
For a moment, Carl was struck dumb. Of all the things that Lizbet might have said at that moment—begging Carl to leave her alone, praying to God, or just plain crying in fear and frustration—defending the beauty of some stranger’s most peculiar house was probably not what he had expected.
Lizbet said it because she was tired of running. Tired of feeling lost and afraid. Whatever was about to happen—and she feared the worst from Carl’s grubby hands and beery mouth—the very least she could do was not to cooperate with it. The least she could do was tell the truth.
And it was the truth. Lizbet was used to Abalia’s maze of twisty dark streets, where houses were forbidding cliffs of gray flint jammed together, looming over the street to shut off all light. This ridiculous, lawless house, made of a thousand different things, awkward and gangling and teetering to fall down, was the funniest and best house Lizbet had ever seen.
Carl recovered himself. “You’ll like me more, lassie,” he said, and strode toward her.
Lizbet had run out of time and choices. Why wouldn’t the people here open the door for her?
Then the thought came to her: Why didn’t she open the door herself? Maybe it was locked. But maybe it wasn’t.
She put both hands on the brass doork
nob, turned it, and pushed. The door swung inward so easily she almost lost her balance and fell.
Within stood a woman. The most beautiful woman Lizbet had ever seen.
“Hello, dear,” she said. “I’m Mrs. Woodcot. My word, I thought you’d never stop pounding on the door. I actually thought of opening it, just to ask you to quit. No need to come in. Just leave your baby on the doorstep.”
Chapter 4
Folk of Abalia were fair-skinned, like most northern folk, but Mrs. Woodcot had a complexion as pale and translucent as icicles. Her lips were narrow and expressive, her eyes gray and lively, her eyebrows as thin and delicately arched as the wings of a hawk. Her bosom emerged from a lacy decolletage as round, white, pretty, and cold as two scoops of vanilla ice cream.
But what was this about a baby? “I don’t have any baby,” Lizbet said.
“No baby? You’ve come alone? Oh, that’s too bad, love. If you’ve no baby for me, you must go in the press yourself. That’s the rule. But do tell me your name first?”
“My name is Lizbet Lenz,” Lizbet said. “That man’s after me. Can you help?” She turned and pointed at Carl, who was now just outside, a few steps away. His mouth hung open slightly. He stared through the doorway at the pale and beautiful Mrs. Woodcot.
“So you haven’t come alone, after all,” Mrs. Woodcot said. “That’s lucky for you!” She beckoned to Carl with a crooked finger. She smiled at him. Lizbet caught just a glimpse of that smile. It warmed her through like laudanum. Mrs. Woodcot’s smile made you feel that everything in the world was all right, even things that weren’t all right at all.
Mrs. Woodcot spoke to Carl. It took a moment for Lizbet to realize that she didn’t understand what Mrs. Woodcot was saying. Although she spoke what seemed like normal syllables, with the rhythm and lilt of ordinary speech, Lizbet couldn’t get the syllables to fit together properly into words. They were like a song with music but no lyrics.
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