Falling In (14 page)

Isabelle considered this. She wanted to go home, but she didn’t like being told she didn’t have options. “Maybe I don’t have a time or a place,” she suggested. “Maybe I’m a floater.”

“A floater?” Elizabeth sounded confused.

“A floater,” Isabelle repeated, liking the sound of it. “You know, someone who floats through time and space, going from here to there, exploring.”

Elizabeth was quiet for a moment. “Don’t think there’s such a thing,” she said finally. “Everybody’s got a time and a place. You leave it now and again, in dreams, or if you’re drawing a picture and all wrapped up in your imagination—” She paused a second. “Do you know what I mean by that?”

Isabelle nodded. “That’s a kind of floating too, I suppose.”

“I think that’s mostly the kind folks do. And then every once in a while, maybe, one or two do as you have, and fall into another world for a bit, but you can’t stay. You’ve got to go back.”

“But why?” Isabelle asked. “I’m not saying I won’t, but why do I have to?”

Elizabeth touched Isabelle on the shoulder. “Because your ma misses you.” She paused, then added softly, “She does, ya know. She hasn’t much family other than you, has she?”

Isabelle stopped short. “How do you know?”

Elizabeth grinned. “You think you’re the only one who has a bit of a gift, girl?”

“You mean magic?”

“Magic, gift, different words for the same thing. You know when folks need help, I know when folks need each other. ‘Tis a simple gift, but sometimes useful.”

And so the two girls continued walking toward the camp, one smiling, the other shaking her head.

Faint voices rang in Isabelle’s ears. She shook her head, trying to make the voices fall out, and rolled from under the layers of blankets that made up her bed. “Bed” in quotes.

They had been in the camp three days, and Isabelle was exhausted. Some of the kids seemed to be improving, true enough, especially the younger ones, who were beginning to come out of their tents and take tentative steps this way toward the fire or that way to the creek. Sugar had grown well enough to help Rat Face tend to the brewing, and Isabelle noticed that he didn’t seem half as cranky when he was making up riddles and rhymes to keep the little girl amused.

But a lot of the kids were still sick, and Hen and Isabelle were tending to them hour after hour, bringing them the teas, applying cool cloths to their foreheads, singing little songs. It felt to Isabelle like they had been there a hundred years and would be there a hundred years more, and she would never see Grete or her mom again, and there would never be a time to tell everyone there was no witch and they could all go home.

Isabelle dressed and made her way to the tent where Elizabeth was doling out the little bit of breakfast there was to be had. That was another problem: Food supplies were low.

“We’ll have to move camp,” Isabelle heard Samuel say as she walked into the tent, where Elizabeth was holding up a piece of bread in each hand, as if to show how little they had left. “We’ve barely enough to feed ourselves.”

“The children aren’t well enough to be moved,” Elizabeth told him. “Besides, it’s the season. We can’t go back now—the witch would get us for sure.”

Samuel turned to Isabelle, raised an eyebrow at her. “It’s time, don’t ya think?”

“To move camp?” asked Isabelle. “I don’t know if that’s even possible right now.”

“No, no. Time to tell this one the truth,” Samuel replied. “As the others get well, we’ll tell them, too. But we can’t stay here more than two or three more days before there’s nothing left to eat.”

Elizabeth shook her head sadly. “It wasn’t planned well, that’s the truth of it. Witch came upon us unawares. We didn’t expect the signs till much later in the spring, so when the shadow crossed the moon, no one was ready. Usually we come in with plentiful flour and soda for bread, our packs filled with potatoes. But there wasn’t time this season. She’s got us trapped now, that witch does.”

And so Samuel and Isabelle told Elizabeth about the witch, the non-witch, the complete absence of a witch in the woods. She listened closely, then said she had to think about it and walked in circles around the camp for an hour before returning and saying, “Not everyone will believe you, you know,”
before beginning to chop mushrooms to put in a soup for lunch. “You’ll have a hard time with this crowd, convincing them.”

“Have we convinced you?” Samuel asked. “That would be a start.”

“Don’t know yet,” said Elizabeth forthrightly. “I’d like some proof.”

Isabelle and Samuel looked at each other. “Bring your grandmother here,” Samuel said, and Isabelle nodded. In fact, why hadn’t they thought of that as soon as they came into a camp where everyone was sick? Why hadn’t one of them run to retrieve the famous Grete the Healer?

“It’s a risk,” Samuel said, as though reading Isabelle’s thoughts (could he? she wondered, feeling at that very second a little weary of thought reading and voice hearing and magic and gifts in general). “But perhaps one well worth taking.”

It was decided: Isabelle and Samuel would go. Isabelle ran to tell Hen, who was at the campfire overseeing the brewing of a batch of echinacea tea. She agreed she could keep watch over the children
with Rat Face and Sugar’s help, so Isabelle and Samuel started off, carrying several burlap bags apiece to fill from Grete’s stores of flour, sugar, apples, and nuts.

“I know your grandmother’s not the witch,” Samuel said after they’d gone a mile or two down the path toward Corrin, “but still and the same, it makes my bones quiver a bit to be walking in her direction.”

“Maybe if you remind yourself there was never a witch to begin with, you won’t be so scared,” Isabelle offered.

Samuel puffed out his chest. “I’m not scared,” he said. “Just a bit wary, is all. Grew up my whole life believing in a witch, you know.”

“But now you know there’s not a witch, so why worry about it?”

“Habit, I reckon,” Samuel replied with a shrug.

It was a warm morning, a few clouds in the sky, a handful of sparrows flitting through the trees over their heads. After days spent in stuffy tents, Isabelle enjoyed being outdoors. She could smell honeysuckle
and thought she might grab some if she saw it. Grete could make some honeysuckle tea, and maybe some cookies, or a cake, a couple gallons of soup. . . .

Isabelle’s stomach growled.

“I could use something to eat myself,” Samuel agreed, and plucked a piece of grass from the side of the path to chew on.

After they’d walked for an hour, Isabelle heard something strange, and then realized it wasn’t what she was hearing that was strange—it was the fact she didn’t hear anything at all. No voices crowded her head, no moans and groans jostled for a place near the front of her brain. It was quiet as a garden at night in there, only the occasional chirp of one of Isabelle’s own thoughts disturbing the air.

Isabelle smiled. It was nice to have a break. Maybe when she’d had more practice at being magic, she’d be able to control the noise in her head a little better, organize it, give each troubled thought its own little room in her brain. Maybe, too, she could learn how to pick up happy thoughts. Why limit herself to cares and woe? It might get
depressing after a while, if all she heard were people’s problems. How about their wishes? What if she could learn the sort of magic that would help her make wishes come true? Could a half changeling do that? Or was the wish-granting market cornered by fairies?

But for now, sweet silence, a beautiful spring morning, a walk through the woods, every step taking them closer to food—

Isabelle came to a sudden stop.

Something was in her head.

It was a voice so faint as to be a hundred miles away, at the farthest, darkest, most distant part of Isabelle’s thoughts. It took her a minute, but then she recognized it. Grete. Grete was in trouble. Isabelle froze, panicked. She could feel it, feel the pain in her bones, the dizziness swirling around her brain. Grete was sick. Grete was—

No. No, no. Isabelle’s heart thumped against her rib cage. Her breath was trapped in her lungs. Nothing bad could happen to Grete, Grete who was not a witch, but a healer, Grete who took care of
people, Grete who needed Isabelle, Grete who wanted everyone to know the truth—

Grete who was Isabelle’s grandmother.

“We have to run!” Isabelle grabbed Samuel’s hand and pulled hard. “Fast! Now!”

“Where?” cried Samuel, already moving, already breaking into a sprint. “What?”

“Run!” came Isabelle’s only reply. “Run!”

Like lightning, like wind, like their feet were on fire—

They ran.

Now, you don’t know Jacob, and neither did Isabelle or Samuel, or Grete for that matter. So how could you tell just by looking at him that he could make such a mess out of things?

Answer: You couldn’t.

Oh, little boys. Eight-year-old boys, boys old enough to come up with elaborate plans, young enough to completely flub them.

But imagine poor Jacob. There he is, on the way to the Greenan camp, running off from Hen, a total lark—honestly, he had no intention of actually losing her. Hen was always in trouble with Mam as it was, the way she let the boys wrestle in the mud and couldn’t for the life of her put a braid in Sugar’s hair.
Jacob didn’t want to make things worse for Hen. He just wanted to have a little fun.

So he reaches camp, sends off little Pip (only two, but amazingly self-sufficient) and Sugar and Artemis and Callou to the creek to play with the others, sets up the tents—without Hen’s help, thank you very much (if there’s one thing Hen’s good at, it’s putting up tents and tying knots, outdoors things; it’s only with kids that she’s hopeless), and where
is
that Hen, anyway?—and counts the blanket rolls, one for each. Every few minutes he looks up expectantly, sure that Hen will be standing right behind him, her arms folded across her chest, ready to box his ears for leaving her behind.

But there’s no Hen, and there’s no Hen, and then again, no Hen. Two hours, four hours, and then all the little ones getting nervous, like little chicks who’ve lost their ma.

Jacob had sat up half the night waiting, and by morning it was clear to him what had happened: They’d left Hen behind, and the witch had nabbed her! Not a doubt in his mind about it, and now it
was up to Jacob to save Hen from certain doom. As soon as the morning broke across the horizon, Jacob was off to the woods, in search of the witch’s lair.

How easy it had been to find it too! Well, maybe “easy” was the wrong word, if you counted the blisters that had brought his hike to a halt only two hours out of camp, what he got for so much walking about in two days’ time, he supposed. He’d stopped by the creek’s edge to soak his feet and had fallen asleep, and by the time he woke up and recalled what he was doing, the sky was already growing dark. And maybe “easy” doesn’t describe the second day either, when he’d gotten terribly lost and after a half day’s hike realized he was back at the Greenan camp. He peeked through some bushes to see if Hen was about, and when it was clear she wasn’t, he moved on.

It was a fortunate thing that Jacob was the son of a traveling peddler and that he’d spent more than one summer sporting about from town to town with his father. He knew how to find food in the woods and where to find the freshest water and how to
steal a cooling pie off a windowsill when need be. All these skills came in handy as Jacob became more and more lost in the County of the Five Villages, stumbling into Drumanoo and Aghadoc and then finding himself on the outskirts of Corrin after five days. Lucky then that he knew a good mushroom from a poison one and could recognize the tail end of a ramp sticking out of the dirt. One yank and dinner was served. After five days of a mushroom and onion diet, however, he was tempted to go home. Then he thought of how mad his mam would be if he showed up without the others and kept going.

It was on the eighth day of his misbegotten journey, following the creek north again, that he came upon the house in the woods, saw the old woman through the window, and knew he’d at last found the witch. What kind of old woman lived in the woods by herself, he wondered, except a witchy one? He looked up in the trees for the nets filled with bones, and felt almost entirely, positively, halfway sure he saw two of them hanging from the highest
branch of a twisted elm. Yes, he had most certainly found the witch, and the hairs on his arm prickled with the news.