The Moorchild (23 page)
Authors: Eloise McGraw
But she was sure she belonged with Tam.
Now she thought of it, he belonged nowhere, either—and seemed to like it just that way.
* * *
By dawn the old hooded cart was skreaking and rattling down the hillroad at the far end of the village in the pink-and-golden light, the goats ambling alongside and Warrior trotting behind. Tam pulled up in a thicket’s shelter, tied the pony to a branch, and lifted Lekka down. A few swift strides and he was knocking softly at Old Bess’s door.
It opened almost at once. With a muffled exclamation the old woman stepped out, stood an instant, then took the child into her arms. Little was said; little needed saying. And then Tam was slapping the reins over the pony’s rump, and the cart began its swaying, creaking journey back up the steep track over the moor in the direction of the distant town.
Old Bess waited, standing tall and still on her doorstep, holding her grandchild. She was rewarded by a glimpse of a long-fingered hand, thrust between the old leather curtains at the cart’s rear, waving. Old Bess waved back until the cart crested the hill and she could no longer look into the rising sun.
As the years passed over Torskaal, the villagers almost forgot the changeling who had once lived there, pretending to be a child. Old Bess did not, but she kept her thoughts and memories to herself. Her grandchild Leoran grew and bloomed, and spun the smoothest thread and wove the tightest cloth of any child along the street. She was prettier than most, too. Yanno looked at her and marveled at her delicacy and that he had had any part in it. Sometimes, as he worked at his skeps, with the scent of rosemary heavy on the summer air, he wished she were not so timid around the bees, and allowed his mind to wander back to other days. But he could not help being glad she feared the moor, and would never go next or nigh it.
As for Anwara, her voice had softened and her bony
shoulders grew plump and her waistline plumper yet, and her eyes were proud as she watched her daughter grow.
Only sometimes, on a still evening, or at midday when she rested from her weeding in the highfield, she fancied she heard the high, shrill wail of a piper, playing the strange, wild tunes she remembered. Once she even climbed past the edge of Torskaal land and onto the moor, half fearing, half expecting to see a familiar aproned figure with a pale bush of hair playing on Yanno’s da’s pipes. Instead she glimpsed a very small green-clad piper perched atop a rock—and next minute saw nothing at all.
And there was a time she fancied she heard the sound of two shepherd’s pipes in unison, playing, most beautifully, the same strange tunes.
But she was never sure about that.
By the same author
Tangled Webb
The Striped Ships
The Trouble with Jacob
The Seventeenth Swap
Hideaway
A Really Weird Summer
(Margaret K. McElderry Books)
Margaret K. McElderry Books
An imprint of Simon & Schuster
Children’s Publishing Division
1230 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10020
Copyright © 1996 by Eloise McGraw
All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.
Book design by Becky Terhune
The text of this book was set in Goudy
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
McGraw, Eloise Jarvis.
The moorchild / Eloise McGraw.—1st ed.
p. cm.
Summary: Feeling that she is neither fully human nor “Folk,” a changeling learns her true identity and attempts to find the human child whose place she had been given.
ISBN 0-689-80654-X (hc)
ISBN 978-1-4424-9970-6 (eBook)
[1. Fantasy. 2. Fairies—Fiction. 3. Identity—Fiction.]
I. Title
PZ7.M47853Mr 1996
[Fic]—dc20 95-34107
