Magic Can Be Murder (4 page)

Still, all in all Nola craved reassurance, and she did not regret setting up the spell and leaving it untended.

Not until it was time for the noonday meal did she regret it.

All morning Innis, his son, Kirwyn, and the servant Alan had been working in the wing of the dwelling that served as the silversmith's shop. Then Alan came into the kitchen to say the master was ready to eat and would have his meal in the shop. Brinna set the food on two trays—Alan carried one, Nola's mother the other—while Nola readied the kitchen table for the servants' meal.

She was just ladling out the last of the soup when she heard a crash from the other end of the house, followed by the sound of upraised voices. She abandoned the ladle in the pot and was faster even than Brinna in racing down the hall and into the shop.

One of the trays was on the floor, wooden bowl and bronze goblet overturned, with chunks of bread and cheese sitting like islands in the spreading sea of soup and wine mixing together. The brownish mess oozed around the leg of one of the display tables and over the jewelry and the belt buckles that lay in a heap on the stone floor, apparently knocked there by the falling tray.

Nola didn't have to wonder who had dropped the tray—whether it was her mother or Alan. She had known it was her mother even before she had seen that a tray had been dropped.

The remaining tray was set safely on one of the other tables, and Alan was just going down into a crouch, already using his hands co try co stop the flow of soup and wine from spreading over any more of the fallen silver trinkets.

Nola's mother, however, had backed against the wall, and she was holding her hands up to form a cross with her two forefingers. "Back, Death, back!" she was shouting over and over, though whether at Innis or Kirwyn wasn't clear.

"You crazy old fool!" Kirwyn shouted back at her, and the louder he got, the louder she became, so the louder he got....

"The necklace!" Innis yelled at Alan. "No, no, not the one that's already covered! Save the—" Innis threw his hands up and gave a growl of frustration as the puddle of wine-diluted soup seeped around Alan's hands and over an intricately worked piece of silver. Innis gestured for Alan to shove the remaining jewelry out of the spreading path of soup, but Alan's hands were brown and sticky and now surely it would all have to be cleaned anyway.

But Nola was not concerned with the jewelry. "Mother!" she called sharply.

Her voice didn't snap her mother out of whatever fit this was. "He's dead, dead, oh woe!" her mother said, almost in a chant now, her voice shrill and frightened. If she even recognized Nola, she gave no sign of it.

What new disaster was this? Nola's embarrassment and the slow, steady dread of discovery withered in the face of this unaccustomed behavior.

Nola had seen people slap someone who was hysterical, but she couldn't bring herself to strike her own mother. She had to fight harder to suppress the inclination to slap Kirwyn. He was continuing to berate them both—and Brinna as well for asking to hire them, and his father for agreeing.

"Mother!" Nola repeated more loudly, more firmly. Then, despite the danger that her panicked mother didn't know her and might lash out, Nola went up to her. She intentionally placed herself between her mother and the men, and put her arms around her mother, and hoped that the men would think...

What would be a good thing for them to think?

"It's all right, Mother," she said. "They won't beat you. They know it was an accident."

Could
they be convinced that her mother was terrified of being beaten for clumsiness—that they had misunderstood what she had said?

"Death," her mother repeated, but not so frantically. Even more encouraging was chat her mother appeared to know her.

"No one means to kill you," Nola said, and opened her mouth to weave a story about a time when an irate chatelaine had threatened—

But her mother destroyed any possibility of excuses by saying, "Death stands by him."

And Kirwyn, of course, picked that same moment to stop haranguing them, so that Nola's mother's words sounded loud and clear, like the clang of a leper's bell. There was no chance of anyone misunderstanding that.

"What?" Kirwyn said. Then, even chough Nola's mother had snaked her arm around Nola and was clearly pointing at Kirwyn's father, he asked, "Who?"

"You think you see Death standing by my side?" Innis asked, in a voice that was remarkably calm for the circumstances.

"Of course not!" Nola's mother snapped. "I don't have second sight, do I?"

"Then what—," Nola and at least two of the others in the room simultaneously started.

"
Abbot Dinsmore
has second sight," Nolas mother said, obviously exasperated with all of them. "Abbot Dinsmore started saying the Mass of the Dead. For him." Again her finger shook in Innis's direction.

Nola smacked her mother's hand away, hoping that she gave the appearance of only raising her own hand to reassuringly caress her mother's check.
Who in the world is Abbot Dinsmore?
she wondered. But even as she wondered she knew. She'd never heard the name before, but she knew.
Not a new voice, not now.
It was always worst when a new voice started: "They keep pushing and shoving for room," her mother would complain, smacking the side of her head. "Stop shouting in there—I can hear you perfectly well."

Now, still trying to save the situation by covering it over with a babble of words, Nola said innocently, "Abbot Dinsmore? You mean that poor demented pilgrim we met along the way, who mumbled away in Latin half the time, and..."—she partially turned to address Innis—"he thought he was a priest, though I doubt he ever was, and he was saying snatches of novenas and—"

"Nola!" her mother rebuked her. "We
never
met anyone like that. What gets into you?" And she sounded perfectly rational, except that she pointed to her head and said, "I'm talking about Abbot Dinsmore who lives in here with the rest of them, of course. And he gets glimpses into the future, and as soon as he saw che silversmith over there, he began to say the Mass of the Dead."

And how could anyone cover up a statement like that?

To Innis, Nola's mother said, "I'm
so
sorry to hear you're going to be dying soon."

"Perhaps," Innis said, only somewhat shakily, "it would be best if you left—both of you."

It was Alan who stood up for them. "She's just an old woman whose wits have begun to wander," he said.

Nola nodded vigorously. "She means no harm."

"I realize that," Innis said. "But practically on the eve of my wedding..." He shook his head. "Ir isn't lucky."

How could she begin to argue with that?

"But they've worked all morning." Now it was Brinna who protested. Brinna, who would once more be on her own to prepare the house for the new bride.

Innis said, "They may eat before they go."

Even Kirwyn, who had whined so of their hire, had a good word, of sorts. "How will Brinna ever manage on her own before Sulis arrives?"

"I have spoken," Innis announced.

And chat was the end of that job.

***

B
ESIDES GIVING
them lunch, Brinna packed food for them to take. "I know what it is like to be hungry," she told them.

So Nola and her mother once again walked all night-fall, and when they stopped they were in the town of Saint Erim Turi, which was bigger than four or five of Hay market.

Nola liked big towns. People of wealth who were disinclined to hard work often congregated in such places, and it was usually possible to find someone to take them in.

It was also easier, she comforted herself, to lose yourself and not have people notice you.

She began to relax, confident at last that they were far enough away and in a big enough town chat no one would come cracking them down—not Innis, who in any case did not seem apt to, nor the blackberry farmer from Low Beck.

The blackberry farmer from Low Beck.

Standing in the middle of the street as they looked for a good place to spend the night, Nola thought for the first time of the bucket in the silversmith's root cellar, the bucket bespelled with a strand of che blackberry man's hair in it, and everything che blackberry man did acting out in the water there.

Oh no,
she thought.
Oh no, oh no, oh no.

"What?" her mother asked, for Nola had stopped so suddenly that her mother had to come back to fetch her.

"Nothing," Nola managed to breathe out.

"Oooo," her mother said. "If that's nothing, I'd hate to see your face when somebody walks over your grave."

This was not a settling thought, no matter how you looked at it.

Calm down,
Nola urged herself.
No need to panic.
Nobody was likely to see the bucket set up where it was, or hear the sounds that came from it.

Not overnight,
Nola berated herself.
Not for a few hours. Not for a day.

But eventually.

Eventually.

How long before someone stumbled across it? The silversmith's new bride, perhaps, exploring every little corner of her new home?

Unlikely,
Nola tried to convince herself. Innis's bride was starting a new life. There would be so much else to see, so many other demands on her time.

And time—Nola tried to reassure herself—might as easily be an ally as an enemy. There hadn't been that much water in the bucket. And—in one of those everyday kinds of magic no one could explain—water left out eventually went dry. How long would it take for this particular water to go away, taking the dancing shadowforms with it? A week? Two? Three? Four? The bride—Sulis was her name, Nola remembered—Sulis wouldn't even arrive for almost a week. And surely Brinna and Alan would be coo busy with wedding preparations to notice a bucket with a bit of water in it beneath a rag under the stairs of the root cellar.

You're a fool,
Nola told herself,
a fool And you deserve whatever happens to you for being such a fool.

But she didn't really believe chat.

She became aware that her mother had put her arms around her. Her mother was rocking Nola, humming the same calming lullaby that she used for the baby in her forefinger. People were watching them with various expressions, the most friendly of which was wryly amused.

"I'm fine," Nola assured her. But of course she was lying.

T
AVERNS WERE LIKELY
places to find work. On busy nights a tavern keeper was often happy to trade meals and a bed for help in preparing or serving food and drink, or for cleaning up. Even on slow nights many tavern keepers could be convinced to let someone eat what food was left over and sleep in the stable.

Of course, Nola knew from experience that tavern keepers were more eager to hire serving girls her own age than her mother's. And she told herself she was not in the least bitter that they were most eager of all to hire a serving girl if she had—for example—hair the color of ripening wheat, as Brinna did, rather than hair more the color of dried grass, the way certain other people did. Such a girl was likely to be popular among the men being served. With such a serving girl the men might stay longer and order more drinks, which would make the tavern keeper happy and more inclined to keep the girl on, and perhaps her odd mother, too. And men might give rips to such a girl, which she and her mother might save for leaner days.

But it also meant fighting—without looking as though you were fighting—to keep men's hands off you, and all in all Nola preferred not to put on a glamour of soft golden hair anc a magically enhanced figure. Better to look like her own drab self—though her mother, of course, insisted she wasn't drab. But everyone knows mothers can't see straight when it comes to their daughters.

Nola and her mother stopped at a tavern with the unlikely—and, Nola thought, unlucky—name of the Witch's Stew. Still, it was well situated and appeared to be busy and lively. Almost every stool and bench was taken, and people were continually calling, "Edris, more mutton here," or "Edris, my cup is empty." Edris had to be the large but brisk and efficient woman who seemed to be in charge. The clamor itself was encouraging; even though che woman was handling things well, the pace had to be exhausting.

"Excuse me," Nola said in a moment of relative quiet. "Your name is Edris?" Not a brilliant opening, but adequate. Before the woman had a chance to say more than "Aye," Nola continued. "My mother and I, we've heard good things about your establishment—"

There was an old man she'd already noticed sitting in the corner by the hearth, his gnarled hands clutching a cane as though he was about to stand, though he looked too frail to get far. Now he showed he wasn't nearly as fragile as he looked; he thumped the cane on the floor and corrected her, "
My
establishment. I built this place with my own two hands when there was nothing here but a road through the forest."

The woman, Edris, rolled her eyes, though Nola couldn't guess why. "My father," Edris said, "Modig."

Whoever had built the place, Edris was obviously in charge now, but before Nola could continue talking to her, the old man went on: "This was after the floods in the south that came in the year of the pestilence, but before the war between the king and his brother, the one who had no sense about women."

Nola didn't know anything about the king, but she certainly thought she would have heard about a war. She wondered if the man was talking about the previous king. Still, she quickly saw she couldn't spend too much time trying to work out every specific thing that the tavern keeper's father said, because then she could never keep up. Already he was saying, "So I said to myself, 'Here I have been in the king's army'—because he had called us up to help in the city, what with the bodies stacking up faster than they could be buried, and the water rising, so of course he sent for Lord Gimm's men, of which I was one because my father had put me in service as he himself had a back that gave him trouble ever since he was a child, harking back to the time the barn door fell on him because his own father had been drinking the day he put the barn up, and—"