By These Ten Bones Read online

  Maddie fell asleep thinking of the good-looking carver boy. If he had been remarkable before, he was close to perfect now. His speech wasn’t foreign, like that of the drunken Englishman. He spoke just like she did. Maybe he’d been stolen from his cradle by the wandering Travelers, and that was why he wasn’t like Ned. He might be a nobleman by birth. He might even be the son of a chief.

  But if Maddie’s thoughts were pleasant ones, her dreams were dark and grim. She wandered through her town as thunder rumbled in the swollen clouds above, and not one living person did she find. The houses were silent and abandoned, their belongings tossed about. Filth covered the dirt floors, and some of the roofs had fallen in. Everywhere was the smell of decay.

  Strewn across the weedy ground between the houses lay an untidy mosaic of bones. They glimmered white and phosphorescent in the dim twilight of the storm. Flesh still clung to some, dried and blackened. So many were underfoot that she couldn’t help stepping on them.

  The little parish church was completely destroyed, the rock walls torn apart. Gravestones were tossed aside and graves dug open, to let something in—or to let it out. Not a single creature moved in that ghastly land of death. The only sound was the sighing of the wind and the ominous growling of the thunder.

  The girl stood bewildered in the middle of her town. What could have accomplished this destruction? Human raiders would never have dug up the churchyard. Animals wouldn’t have left the bones behind. Some evil of the ancient world had descended upon this place, a thing that kept both people and animals away. Maddie froze, caught by an abrupt foreboding. That thing was still here.

  An enemy stalked the vacant houses and corpse-littered ground, hunting her as its prey. She saw nothing, heard nothing beyond the empty rush of wind. But the air grew cold, and then very cold. A black shadow fell over her.

  Maddie sat bolt upright in the box bed, her heart pounding wildly. Her mother and father slept peacefully beside her, and her town was not a welter of bones. Bright moonlight poured into the room through the open doorway, and perfect stillness reigned outside. But the room was freezing cold, colder than the bitter nights of winter, and Maddie felt a hideous presence. The enemy had not stayed behind in her nightmare. It had followed her here.

  A low murmuring came to her, a hissing, bubbling, muttering sound from the back wall of the house. Slowly it passed along the windowless wall, and she followed the noise to the storeroom. The muttering thing was moving around the end of the house. It was coming toward the open doorway.

  Teeth chattering, Maddie made the sign of the cross and knelt by the hearth in the middle of the room. Shutting the door wouldn’t help. It was nothing but a wickerwork panel covered with hide. Waking her parents wouldn’t help, either. The thing was almost here. She scraped the ashes of the hearth, hoping to find a friendly spark underneath, but the peat coals had been bedded for the night and would need coaxing to come back to life. Like a hare in a trap, she stared at the moonlit square of the open doorway, the only way out of the house. Her hands fumbled over the hearthstones and found her mother’s bannock spade.

  Colin the Smith had made his sister a spatula of iron to turn the oatcakes on the hearth. Its wooden handle felt solid in Maddie’s hand, and its thin, heart-shaped wedge came to a point. It wasn’t a knife, but it was a weapon of sorts, and Maddie felt glad of it. She clutched it and listened as the bubbling sounds came nearer.

  The square of moonlight vanished into inky blackness as a shape moved in front of the door. Maddie prayed for her life and hurled the iron weapon. A sound burst from the thing, a loud whistling shriek. When she opened her eyes, that great black shape was gone.

  “What is it?” demanded her father, scrambling up from the bed, and then Fair Sarah’s arms were around her.

  “Something outside,” she whimpered, hugging her mother. “Something big at the door. It hissed.”

  “I’ll go see,” decided James Weaver, reaching for his knife. Then he froze right where he was. Maddie stopped in the middle of a word, and her mother’s arms gripped her tightly.

  A weeping, worrying sound rose into the night from somewhere very close. It keened and whined, gaining strength, until it became a scream, wavering in the air while time stood still. As it faded away, the three huddled together, clinging to one another for support.

  “I’ll just—just—go see,” stammered her father, holding the knife in trembling hands.

  “Jamie,” sobbed his wife, “oh, Jamie, don’t go out there.”

  A shadow fell across the doorway again, and Maddie gave a gasp. “James,” called Black Ewan’s voice, “is all well with you?”

  “Yes,” answered the weaver, shaking off his family. He wrapped his woolen blanket around his waist and shoulders, and he and the farmer walked away into the moonlight. Maddie and her mother heard the voices of neighbors calling from house to house, the bawling of cattle, and the wailing of children.

  Fair Sarah knelt by the hearth and built the fire, whispering over the spent coals the morning prayer to the Trinity. The frightened girl followed her lead, starting her chores, and the night began to brighten into the dim gray of early dawn.

  They heard the men coming back, talking loudly, their voices strained and excited. “Did you find it?” demanded Fair Sarah anxiously, going to the door. “What was it? Did it get away?”

  The men came up to the house. Black Ewan and Colin the Smith were carrying something heavy, but Maddie couldn’t see what it was.

  “It got away,” said her father. “We don’t know where it went. But it found that young wood-carver on the path near the castle, and we don’t know if he’s going to live.”

  4

  They brought the wood-carver into the house and laid him on the floor by the hearth. Maddie couldn’t even see him for the crowd around him.

  “His shirt’s in ribbons.”

  “Look at those claw marks! That’s a big animal. It stood up to attack. The wounds start at the shoulder.”

  “I can’t believe a claw could do that. They’re as neat as knife cuts.”

  “He’s burning up with fever.”

  “Maddie, run fetch water.” That was her mother’s voice. Maddie snatched up the wooden pail, edged her way to the door, and ran across the wet grass to the little stream. When she came back, most of the neighbors were gone, checking on their livestock or hunting the attacker. Maddie ducked under the low door frame and stepped into the room to find Fair Sarah and Father Mac kneeling by the unconscious young man and sewing him up industriously.

  “Find a needle, lass,” boomed Father Mac. “There’s work for everyone. No, no, I’m only joking,” he added as her mother looked up in concern.

  Maddie set down the pail of water and looked at the object of their handiwork. The wood-carver lay on his back, his blood-soaked tunic in a ball beside him. Long red wounds raked diagonally across his pale chest, clustered in lines of four. Bright blood still ran from them and dripped down onto the dirt floor. Her mother kept dabbing the wounds with the tattered tunic so she could see where to stitch.

  “It’s not as bad as it looks,” said Father Mac. “Most of the cuts are shallow. The deepest one is this gash here on the arm. Probably he threw a hand up to defend himself and caught the full force of a claw.”

  “It’s not the wounds, it’s the fever that worries me,” confessed Fair Sarah. “He’s as pale as flax from the blood loss, but he’s blazing with heat. And to take a fever so quick after an injury!”

  Father Mac nodded in agreement. “Aye, that has me puzzled, too,” he rumbled. “It’s uncanny all the way around.”

  Maddie knelt down by them, her attention caught by a faint line under the slashes. She traced a semicircle of scars making its dim purple track across the wounded shoulder.

  “He’s been mauled before,” observed the priest. “That’s some kind of bite. It’s a risk of the traveling life, I suppose, but nothing like this attack.”

  “Did you know he can talk?” asked Maddie.
“Not like that old man he travels with—he talks just like us.”

  “So he’s one of our own folk,” mused Father Mac. “I suspected as much from his craft. He’s no coward, either; he faced the intruder fair and square. There isn’t a single claw mark on his back.”

  The pair stitched and bandaged while Maddie made breakfast and hurried through the gray morning to take the meal to Lady Mary. All the men were out, urging on Black Ewan’s pair of dogs. They had already been through the castle with torches, but they hadn’t found anything. Lady Mary was supremely annoyed at their intrusion.

  “The wood-carver is badly injured,” Maddie told her, spooning the porridge from her wooden bowl into Lady Mary’s silver one. “They don’t know what attacked him.”

  “You’re late,” answered the contrary woman. “I can tell your mother didn’t cook this egg.” And she pretended not to be interested in the news.

  By the time Maddie returned, Father Mac and Fair Sarah were finished. They had brought the settle out of the storeroom and moved it to the wall by the door, making it into a bed for the wood-carver. The settle was long, like a bench, but it had a wooden back like a chair. The injured young man lay on it with his eyes closed, wrapped in a blanket and not moving at all.

  “Fresh bloodstains,” said her mother briskly, picking up the shredded tunic. “He’ll not wear this again, so we’ve no need to waste salt drawing the stain. Cold water will take out most of it. Maddie, do you take this to the stream and wash it well. We’ll use it for more bandages. He’ll be needing them, I’m afraid.”

  Going out with the tunic, Maddie stumbled over something and spied the bannock spade lying at her feet. She picked it up and hefted it, remembering the feel of it in her hand. A smear marred the tip of the iron, and Maddie rubbed it. Nothing. She licked her finger and rubbed again. There was blood on her finger now.

  “Black Ewan, Dad,” she called, coming over to the men, and she showed them the bannock spade. She told them what had happened while they passed the tool from hand to hand.

  “It came around from the back of the house,” Black Ewan said. “Around which way?”

  “Past the storeroom,” she answered.

  “Against the sun,” observed Little Ian, his sharp fox’s face sharper with excitement. “The wrong direction. It’s an evil spirit.”

  “That’s why the dogs aren’t picking up a scent,” said Gillies, one of Black Ewan’s farmhands. “They keep running around in circles. They can’t find anything at all.”

  “But what about the blood?” asked Maddie’s father. “Spirits don’t bleed.”

  “It must be the Water Horse,” suggested Little Ian, “and she drove it away with the holy metal.”

  “The Water Horse here among our houses!” exclaimed the smith. “It’ll drag us all down into the loch.”

  The townspeople couldn’t do much to defend themselves against the Water Horse. Strong doors they didn’t have, nor city walls with gates. But they pulled the big, cumbersome swords and battle-axes out of the storerooms and made sure they had an edge, and Father Mac went from house to house, blessing the hearths with holy water. At noon the priest led a solemn procession around the perimeter of the town, and then the people went back to work on the harvest, feeling that they had done what they could. As they worked, they mused over the disquieting event. The Water Horse didn’t often come among human dwellings. Some evil was drawing it close.

  Maddie ran errands to the fields all afternoon. Off and on, as she hurried by her house, she stopped inside the doorway to look at the unconscious wood-carver. She wanted him to open his eyes and tell her what had happened, but he didn’t move all day.

  Walking back bone-tired in the evening, she saw her pretty cousin Bess sitting on top of the wall of her uncle’s house. Bess was the daughter of Colin the Smith, and she and Maddie were the same age, but whereas Maddie was her parents’ only child, Bess was the oldest of seven.

  The thatch on the smith’s house was old, and green weeds grew abundantly over it. The family’s two milking sheep were grazing on the roof, with a string tied to a back leg of each so they couldn’t jump away in a panic and tumble to the ground. The string was tied to Bess’s belt, leaving her hands free to spin thread.

  Bess’s distaff was a thick wooden rod a couple of feet long, covered with loosely wrapped wool fibers. She held the distaff tucked under one arm, pulling fibers from it into a long strand. The other end of the strand was attached to a short stick weighted with a stone ring, a spindle. Bess dropped this spindle, twirling it, and it twisted the fibers into a thread. Then she wound the thread around the little spindle and pulled more wool loose from the distaff, keeping the chain of fibers from one to the other even, so that the thread would not break.

  “Daddy says it’s a shame that the Water Horse attacked that poor carver boy,” said Bess. “Daddy says he’s just a harmless halfwit.”

  Maddie clambered up to sit beside her cousin on the low house wall. “He’s not a halfwit,” she said with a frown.

  Bess dropped her spindle, giving it a deft twirl. She and Maddie had been spinning thread for years. It was one of the most important activities women did, and they did it whenever and wherever they could.

  “He doesn’t even know how to talk,” she retorted.

  “He can talk,” countered Maddie. “He talked to me last night, but he was afraid someone would see him. The old man probably beats him when he talks.”

  “Why would anyone do that?” Bess wanted to know, hauling on the strings to pull the sheep back from the house ridge. The small brown sheep always wanted to eat whatever was out of reach.

  “Father Mac said he probably doesn’t want the boy to sell his own carvings. Otherwise, he’d keep the goods for himself, and then the drunkard couldn’t afford his drink, and serve him right.”

  “You should have seen the old man this morning with the cattle,” chuckled Bess. “Mad Angus was trotting back and forth just like he always does, and he was stumbling along after him and cursing until he was hoarse. I brought the children out to watch, and they had such fun they didn’t give me a bit of trouble the whole time.”

  “The poor carver hasn’t opened his eyes all day,” Maddie said. “I wonder what he was doing out so early. The Travelers were staying in the bottom level of the castle, but Dad said he was on the path right by the houses.”

  “Maybe he saw that you were in danger,” suggested Bess. “He must have seen the Water Horse at your house and run out of the castle to fight it. It probably screamed because he stabbed it and saved your life.”

  Maddie was thrilled. “Do you really think he fought a monster for me? He couldn’t have killed it. They didn’t find the body.”

  “Then it crawled away to die,” declared Bess, with the air of one who has an answer for anything. “I’ll bet it crawled back into the loch and sank right to the bottom.”

  The next morning was windy and cloudy. Maddie’s parents were both out in the fields, but Fair Sarah had told the girl to stay at home so she could keep an eye on the sick wood-carver. He tossed and turned in delirium, muttering strange sentences and crying out in pain. Maddie brought her work and sat by him, putting wet rags on his head, but the fever was so high that the rags dried out almost at once. When Fair Sarah came home to check on him, she couldn’t think what else to do. She was sure they were losing the fight.

  “Do you fetch Lady Mary,” she decided. “She’ll know something to help him.”

  If Lady Mary had been their real kin, the townspeople never would have minded the keeping of her, and even if she had acted like a normal old woman, they wouldn’t have minded her then. But she wouldn’t spin thread or watch the little ones while their parents did the work, and she didn’t cook dinner for them when they labored in the fields. They had to cook for her. She didn’t even walk among them if she could help it, and she never once came into the church. She just sat in her great, gloomy hall day and night and read books or worked on her embroidery.

/>   The only thing that Lady Mary did do for the townspeople was curing the sick and the injured, and Maddie tended a patch of healing herbs for her up on the hillside. But of all the strange things about Lady Mary, this was the strangest. She always seemed to know just how to cure an illness, and that was white witchcraft. If she could cure, she could probably harm, too. That was black witchcraft.

  Lady Mary stepped into the weaver’s house and knelt down by the settle to examine the carver. “His fever is very high,” she reported, “but there is no flush to his cheeks. A poison is locked deep inside his chest, drying up his blood. The element of water must counteract the dry fire, or soon water and wood will be consumed, and only earth will remain. I’ll make you a mixture of herbs to brew and pour down his throat. Force him to drink as much water as you can. It will push the poison out through the skin and restore a balance to the humors of the body. Once it begins to work and you see him perspiring, keep the fire hot and pile blankets on him. Change the bedding frequently and wash it in clear water to dissipate the poisonous exudations.”

  “I knew you would know what to do,” sighed Fair Sarah in relief.

  That night they kept the peat fire burning hotly and didn’t bank it with ash. Maddie curled up in the box bed, listening to the wood-carver groan and mutter. But she woke the next morning to hear her mother talking to him, and over breakfast, Fair Sarah was elated.

  “Lady Mary’s brew is working wonderfully!” she whispered to them while the young man slept. “His fever is down, and he’s in his own mind. I’m calling him Carver.”

  “And he’s talking, Sarah?” inquired the weaver before Maddie could ask the same question.

  “Well, no,” admitted his wife. “He’s back to his old tricks. But he drank his brew and a big mug of water when I asked him to.”

  Maddie hurried off to morning Mass and delivered Lady Mary’s breakfast. Then she hunted for eggs, took water to the reapers in the grain fields, and gathered sheep’s wool. The sheep were shedding their thick winter coats, rubbing the wool off on trees and stones. She filled two egg-shaped wicker baskets with wool and carried them back to the house. She laid more peat blocks on the fire and tiptoed over to the settle to check on Carver.