Magic Can Be Murder (6 page)

Kirwyn brought the hammer down on top of his fathers head.

The silversmith fell back against the bed, the heavy box crashing to the floor an instant after his body did.

The whole washbasin seemed to take on the color of the spilled blood. Nola imagined she could smell it. Her head swam and she put her arm out to keep from falling. The basin went off the back of the shelf and crashed to the floor, shattering, taking water, and hair, and murdered silversmith with it.

In the silence of the tavern room, Nola heard her mother murmur, "I cold her to leave it. I did tell her."

N
OLA COULD HEAR
footsteps hurrying down the hall. "Don't say a word," she whispered urgently to her mother.

Her mother threw her arms up in exasperation. "Why should I say anything?" she asked. "Nobody ever listens anyway."

There was a rapping at their door—uncommon courtesy to people in their situation—and Edris called out, "Is anything amiss in there?"

Nola opened the door. "I'm so sorry," she told the tavern keeper, gesturing to indicate the broken washbasin. The spilled water looked, once more, like water, rather than blood. "I was trying to get everything settled just so, and I pushed the basin too far in and it just went over the back edge."

Edris looked only mildly annoyed. "Ah, well," she said. "Accidents do happen. I hope you're better with trays of food and drink than you are with washbasins."

"I'll be very careful," Nola assured her.

Edris's ancient father, Modig, was shuffling his way down the hall also, to see what the excitement was. "Crashes," he said, "Alarms in the night. We haven't had such a commotion since that time that man tried to sneak the goat into his room."

Edris ignored her father. "It's only..." She glanced to Nola's mother, who had sat back down on the bed, hugging herself and rocking.

She heard us arguing,
Nola thought.
She's trying to decide if we're likely the kind of people who throw things when we get angry with each other.

Modig finally made it to the doorway. "This," he said, "reminds me of the time—"

"Father!" Edris snapped. Looking straight at Nola's mother, she asked her, "
Is
everything all right?"

Nola's mother covered her mouth, one hand over the other, and said through the cracks between her fingers, "I'm not allowed to say."

"She's joking," Nola said to Edris's aghast expression. "Mother likes to tease."

Edris raised one eyebrow skeptically.

Nola sighed. "Actually, that isn't true."
She probably suspects I beat Mother regularly,
Nola judged. She said, "What really happened is that my mother just gave me some bad news. Something she should have told me this morning, before we ever came to Saint Erim Turi."

"Very bad news," Nola's mother echoed agreeably. "Death." She nodded. Then she tightened her hands over her mouth as though the words weren't already out.

"Yes," Nola said, before her mother decided to say anything worse. "Someone we know died."

"Oh, I'm so sorry." Edris made the sign of the cross.

Her father did, coo. He said, "I knew a man once who died—"

Nola continued, interrupting, determined to convince Edris that she hadn't been throwing che room's furnishings about. "I was so upset, I wasn't paying actencion, and that's when I accidentally set the basin too far back and it fell. Off the back. Behind the shelves." She realized she was repeating herself. And showing a tendency to babble. But still, she moved to stand by the shelves—as though Edris couldn't find them on her own—and she indicated the basin behind the shelves and hoped Edris realized how unlikely a throw would have been needed to make the basin end up back there. "Right before
that
happened I was just telling my mother—not shouting, of course, but just maybe raising my voice, just to be heard across the length of the room—that now we would have to go back—"

"Not
back
!" Nola's mother cried, finally taking her hands down completely from over her mouch so that she could pull on her hair. "Nola, what are you thinking? And here I was, afraid that you would be wanting to go
forward.
Again. As if that wasn't bad enough. But of course not. 'Here's a nice, safe, friendly place in Saint Erim Turi,' my Nola says to herself. 'I know what we should do: We should
leave,
as soon as we get here, that's the only sensible thing to do.' Naturally." She struck herself on the side of the head. "Why didn't I think of that?"

"Mother!" Nola warned. To Edris, she said, "Mother is a bit overwrought. She's chinking of the sadness of the situation, and not taking into account that in this time of sorrow our poor friends shouldn't have to concern themselves with day-to-day household casks, in which we could help them."

Edris was watching Nola's mother. From behind Edris, and from over Modig's shoulder, Nola made frantic faces at her mother that were meant to convey that she wasn't really thinking of going back to Haymarket, and would her mother, please, just for once, play along? Going back was only a pretext. For what would Edris and Modig think of them if Nola had said, "Somebody in the last town wc visited has died, and now we must move on from here because we're only a day's journey away"? It made sense that people who knew each other would come together in times of bereavement. If her mother would only realize
going back
was a ruse and stop making such a fuss. It was hard enough to think.

Modig said, "You try to go back, and you try to go back." He thumped his cane and shook his head. "But you never can."

What was going on at the silversmith's house—even now as her mother craned around Edris and asked Nola, "What is it you're trying to tell me, dear? I can't make it out from the faces you're making."

"Nothing," Nola said. "I'm trying not to cry over the death of our poor friend."

Surely, she thought, Kirwyn wasn't stupid. He couldn't expect to bash his father across the head and get away with it. Was his plan to kill the servants, too, and claim an intruder had broken in? Or would he try to set the blame on Brinna or Alan?

On Brinna,
Nola thought, remembering Kirwyn's face through the kitchen window, and the hate she had seen there.

But then she went even colder than she had when she'd realized she was about to witness a murder.

Or on us,
she thought.

How much more likely was it for Kirwyn to blame Nola and her mother for the death? Had he, in fact, already discovered the bespelled bucket in the basement? "Obviously witchcraft," he would say to che authorities, showing them the shadowform of a living man in a bucket of water. And he could claim... what? That the figure they could see had stepped out of :he bucket and killed the silversmith?
They
wouldn't know that was impossible, that Nola didn't have—and would never use, even if she did have—that kind of magic. And they would know that she was the one who had set up the spell—who else was there who could have done it? Who had recently had access to the silversmith's basement, besides Brinna and Alan? And
they
had lived in Haymarket all their lives, and everybody knew they weren't witches. Who but the two strangers, who had been asked to leave precisely for being so strange?

And if what she had been afraid of came to pass, and the blackberry merchant from Low Beck tracked her down to Haymarket, or if somebody from Haymarket recognised his shadowform and the authorities tracked
him
down, that would not exonerate her. He would be able to protect himself. "I was at home with my family, with my field workers," he would tell them. "That creature that the witch created and placed in the bucket has a separate life from me, so I am not responsible for its crimes. She is. I always said she was a witch."

And even if—if—Kirwyn hadn't discovered the bucket and had a different plan to evade being found out, then someone—the town magistrate or representatives from the lord who held this land—would come to investigate the crime. And
they
would find the bucket. That bucket might have been—
might
have been—safe from discovery long enough to go dry if all that was going on in the silversmith's house was a wedding. But it would certainly be chanced upon now chat there had been murder done.

She and her mother would have to leave—now, tonight, immediately—and flee farther and faster than they ever had before.

She became aware that Edris had taken hold of her arm, and she jerked away, thinking that somehow Edris knew, Edris was crying to restrain her, Edris planned to hand her over to the Saint Erim Turi authorities. But Edris didn't try to catch hold of her again. She only said, mildly, "Sometimes it's best to weep and not hold it in." And Nola realized she was responding to the last thing Nola had said, that Nola was trying not to cry over a supposed friend's death.

Modig said, "You try to hold it in, and you try to hold it in. But you can't."

Nola sat down heavily, just barely making it onto the straw-filled mattress on the floor.

Edris—for all her bulk and despite being at least twice Nola's age—crouched down beside her. "I'm so sorry," she said, so sympathetically—over the wrong thing—that Nola found herself crying.

She and her mother would never, she knew,
absolutely never,
be able to outrun the storm that would break out in Haymarket if that bucket was discovered. She said, and this time she meant it, "We must go back." If the bucket hadn't been seen yet, she must make sure it never was.

Her mother said, "None of us thinks you should go."

Edris, misunderstanding, thinking that Nola's mother was including
her
in the sentiment, said, "I don't know." She shook her head, to indicate she didn't know the situation, and in truth she
didn't
know the situation, much more than she could ever guess. Still, she pointed a finger at her father to warn him not to take sides, and she repeated, unwilling to get between mother and daughter, "I don't know."

Annoyed with herself, Nola wiped her eyes. They
had
to go back. Yet how could they—when she knew Kirwyn had already killed once? How could they go back when everyone would blame her mother because they had all heard her say that Innis would die?

That
thought made Nola's mind stop going in the same circle. How had her mother known? Of course. Some abbot had told her, some abbot who had found his way into her mother's head. Well, he hadn't exactly told her. Her mother had overheard him saying the Mass for the Dead. But since when had her mother's voices been real—never mind been able to tell the future?

It was a coincidence, Nola told herself. An awful co-incidence that could get the two of them killed. The
three
of them, she wryly corrected herself, if you counted the abbot.

And surely she would be as mad as her mother if she took her mother back to Haymarket. Ic would cake twice as long co get there, and people would be twice as apt to notice them, and things were twice as likely to go awry.

But Nola had to go there.

And how could she
not
take her mother? What other choice was there—to leave her here?

Nola looked at Edris and Modig, who had come running—well, come as fast as each of them could—when they thought there was some trouble, who had asked pointed questions to make sure Nola's mother was not being harmed, who were—contrary to all expectation—friendly.

I can't leave her here,
Nola thought.
What would ¡he say, what would she do, what trouble would she get into without me?

But it was safer than taking her to Haymarket. Wasn't it? Where both a murderer and the authorities were?

It was a
terrible
plan. But there was no other choice.

To her mother, she said, "I can travel much faster alone." To Edris, she said, "Would you ... Could it be possible ... Is there any way—"

"I would very much like for your mother to stay here," Edris said, as though the idea had come to her first, "if that would be convenient for you. My father so much enjoyed talking to her this evening."

Modig thumped his cane. "Listens better than anybody. I haven't met such a good listener since the old blacksmith died."

Edris said, "You mean Deaf Harold?"

"The very one," Modig agreed.

Nola's mother got a distant expression on her face. "Harold," she said thoughtfully. "Harold..."

Nola rested her face in her hands, but in the end her mother said, "No. No Deaf Harold. Of course, there
is
Abbot Dinsmore, whose hearing isn't very good, on account of all those monastery bells ringing."

"I think," Nola announced to everyone, "it would be best if I start tonight."

"But it's dark out," Edris protested.

That was the whole point. Nola hoped to get to Haymarket before the new day started, before things went too far. "It will be best this way," she assured Edris.

Edris shook her head but didn't argue. "Let me pack a breakfast for you."

It was the second time in a very long day that someone had taken trouble co see that she would have a meal. She was unaccustomed to the concern. "Thank you," she said.

As she followed Edris out of the room, she heard Modig tell her mother, "I knew an abbot once who was so determined to prove he was the holiest man in Christendom that..."

And Nola hurriedly shut the door behind her.

N
OLA PLANNED TO
walk all night. But two days of almost steady walking and near-constant fear, separated by only one short night of rest in the silversmith's house, had left her drained, And obviously, she chided herself as she accidentally strayed off the path and stepped calf-deep into a cold stream, making one bad decision after another. Her legs wobbling under her. It would be safer, she told herself, to rest during the darkest part of che night. Arriving in Haymarket at dawn couldn't be that much better than arriving midmorning, while arriving too exhausted to think straight would be considerably worse.

As she lay down in a grassy hollow formed between the massive roots of a huge oak, she just hoped that the situation wasn't already far beyond what she and her wits could handle.