Never Trust a Dead Man (7 page)

"I have an idea," Farold said eagerly to Elswyth. "You could make the two of us look like wealthy merchants from the East. Give us silks and jewels and gold."

"I am not," Selwyn said, "giving up a year of my life so that you can try to impress people with fancy clothes."

"Fine," Farold said, "have her disguise
you
as a wealthy merchant, if you think no one will wonder why a wealthy merchant is carrying a
bat
along with him."

Elswyth settled the problem. "I couldn't disguise you as a person anyway," she told Farold. "You're a
bat.
You're this big." She gestured with her two hands not very far apart. "There's not enough of you to stretch out"—she spread her arms—"to human size."

"
Hmpf,
" Farold said.

Elswyth looked at Selwyn. "I could make rich-looking clothes for you, but I can't actually make you rich."

And what would a richly dressed merchant be doing, all alone, without any merchandise, in a small village like Penryth? Selwyn said, "Why don't you just give me different clothes, different color hair..." He gestured helplessly.

"Different eyes," Elswyth finished, "bigger nose, smaller mouth..."

Selwyn nodded.

"For a year's service?"

She was determined, he realized, not to give him the excuse that he hadn't actually accepted her bargain. "For a year's service," he agreed.

"People will get suspicious if you have a bat with you," Farold warned.

He just wanted a disguise, Selwyn thought. "Let them get suspicious," he said. If he was lucky, maybe somebody would catch Farold and wring his neck.

Selwyn asked for pilgrim's clothes, which made Farold—who'd been incessantly whispering into his ear, "Rich merchant's clothes"—cry out in disgust and flutter away. But Selwyn felt his choice was sensible. In all of his life, he had rarely seen strangers. Penryth was too small to attract newcomers; and it wasn't on a trade route, so even people passing through on their way to someplace else were infrequent Most of the strangers he
had
seen had meant trouble: renegade soldiers, bandits who occasionally turned up in the most heavily wooded section of the road to Saint Hilda's, the two feuding wizards—banished from the king's court for incompetence—who had been competent enough to nearly level Orik's tavern. But Selwyn remembered that when he was a child a small group of pilgrims had traveled through on their way to the shrine of Saint Agnes of the Lake. They'd worn rough-spun robes and sandals, and those who'd been on pilgrimages before had badges and emblems and necklaces of seashells to show where they'd been.

Now at the last moment he thought to ask, "And could I be a clean pilgrim, please?"

Elswyth said, "Pilgrims aren't known for cleanliness."

"They're cleaner than this," Selwyn said, mightily aware that he stank. He had gotten used—he had thought—to the smell of death. But now that he was out of the cave and within hope of once more in his life being clean, the lingering smell of death on him was becoming intolerable. "A little road dust is fine."

"We need water for the spell, anyway," Elswyth told him.

He didn't like the grin that thought brought.

The hills saw the start of several streams, which twisted and converged and eventually formed the river that turned Derian's mill wheel. Elswyth rejected two before finding one that looked especially deep and swift moving. "This will do," she said.

Selwyn eyed the steep and slippery-looking bank, thought he knew what was coming, and held his tongue. This lasted only until, rummaging through the contents of her pack, she ordered him, "Fetch a stick."

"From the water?" he cried.

Elswyth looked up at him. "If you really want," she said. "Myself, I would try to find one on the ground, or break one off one of those trees or bushes over there."

Farold swooped out of the dark to mutter, "Dumb twit," then snapped up a moth and disappeared back into the night.

The moon was bright enough to see by, even when Selwyn stepped out of the circle of Elswyth's witch light. He found a stick. In fact, he found several, and he brought them all to her—short, long, thin, thick, straight, gnarled—having no idea what she needed it for. Not a fire—for she'd definitely said
one.
He guessed she'd find all of them lacking and would call him a fool.

But she hardly glanced at them and only said, "Take one in your hand."

"Which?"

Then
came the look that indicated he was a fool. She gestured impatiently. "Any."

He held on to one and let the others drop.

She must have had an endless supply of wool squares, for she took another one from her pack and placed it on his head. "
Now
" she told him, "you get to go in the water." It was no use protesting. He knew he winced, but she continued, "Go into the stream, sit down, lie down—whatever is necessary to be totally covered by the water—hold on to the stick, hold on to the wool, count to five—"
That
gave her a moment's hesitation. "Do you know how to count?"

"I can get to five," Selwyn assured her, stung. A farmer needed to be able to count at least well enough to time things.

"And then come out again," she finished.

He was sure at least half of this was simply to torment him.

The stones on the edge of the stream were wet and flat and very slick. He almost slipped twice, jerking and flapping his arms and scrambling with his feet, but still keeping hold of both stick and wool head-covering. The third time he wasn't as lucky. The cold water closed in at about waist level—leaving him momentarily breathless.

"That isn't deep enough," Elswyth called, as though he was stopping there, as though he didn't know the difference between the water being up to his waist and the water covering his head.

He got up and waded to about midstream, but the water didn't get much deeper. He had to sit in it, and it still didn't cover his head, so finally he had to lie back in the water, and then it closed over his face.

Onetwothreefourfive,
he mentally counted in the space of about one heartbeat. But he didn't want to have gone this far for nothing—to have her send him back, saying, "Do it again, slower." So he counted more slowly on his own, pausing between each number.
One. Two. Three. Four. Five.

Except she had said, "Count." Now he suddenly wondered,
Did she mean count out loud?

Sure he was going to be the death of himself, Selwyn counted out loud. His pace was faster than his second mental counting, but slower than his first. "One, two, three..." By the time he reached "four," he was out of breath, the air gone out of him in the same bubbles that carried his voice. He just barely managed "five," then sat up, gasping, hating himself, hating Elswyth, wondering how she talked him into these things.

He got to his feet, leaning on the stick, which—surprisingly—didn't break under his weight, and which—amazingly—was tall enough to support him even standing. He looked down and saw that it had become a thick, smooth walking staff. His clothes had changed, too: Shirt and breeches had become a brown rough-spun robe, and under his hand the square of wool had changed shape and material. He lifted it and found a straw hat.

"Get out of the water before you get soaked," Elswyth yelled at him.

And, incredibly, he realized that the part of him that was out of the water was totally dry. He made his way to the bank, and the water that had covered him ran off, the way water runs off metal.

"I thought you said you knew how to count to five," Elswyth berated him. "You stayed in there so long, I thought you'd drowned."

She didn't, he noted, say anything about being worried, or about coming in to get him. He didn't explain that he'd become confused about her instructions but only said, looking at the hat and staff, "I didn't understand about the cloth and the stick."

"Magic can't make something out of nothing," Elswyth said. "That's why I said I couldn't give you gold. What—did you think I was just being difficult?"

Selwyn decided it was safest not to answer that question. He saw that the hair on the back of his hands was thick and dark, and that his hands were much broader than they had been. The dunking she had inflicted on him had changed his appearance, as well as his clothes, making him stocky rather than just small, and darker, and—he felt his face—hook-nosed. He said, "Thank you. This will work out well."

"I doubt that," she snorted.

Farold landed on his shoulder. "The pilgrim and his bat are ready," he announced, "and doesn't that make a foolish-looking picture? A pilgrim and his dog makes much more sense."

"Six months for a dog," Elswyth said, making the offer to Selwyn—since he was so lucky—and not Farold. "And it will be a small dog."

"A bat is fine with this pilgrim," Selwyn said.

"Then I will see you," Elswyth said, "in seven days. Actually, now that you've wasted so much time, six and a half."

She didn't even wish him luck.

Elswyth went, and finally there were no more reasons for Selwyn to call her back. He wavered between relief and alarm: relief because he no longer needed to protect his head and arms from her attacks and because he was in no more immediate danger of bargaining away more years of service to her; alarm because he was on his own. Being with Farold was no discernible improvement over being alone.

He gathered what wild berries he could find in the dark, which left him still starving but no longer faint with hunger.

"What are you doing?" Farold demanded in his irritating little voice as Selwyn began to look for a comfortable place to sit—to, perhaps, catch a little sleep.

"Looking for a place to rest until morning," Selwyn said. He'd spent the last two nights in a mass grave, sleeping fitfully when exhaustion got the better part of terror, so he wasn't fussy; he settled down on a grassy area and tossed away only a couple sharp-edged rocks.

"Oh, that makes sense," Farold told him. "Pay the witch by the hour, then first thing you do is take a nap."

"Excuse me," Selwyn said. "You've been comfortably dead for the past three days. I've had to live through them."

"Dying takes a lot out of you," Farold argued. "I won't even mention the strain of some dumb twit bringing you back as a bat. Let's see if you do better when it's your turn to die."

Selwyn was uncomfortably aware of just how close he'd come to having it be his turn. Rather than quarrel with Farold, he explained, "But I can't just walk into Penryth in the middle of the night. You know them. They'd be convinced I was a thief or ruffian of some sort and run me off for sure."

Farold didn't say anything—which likely meant he agreed but didn't want to admit it.

Selwyn said, "This will give us the opportunity to talk."

"I'm not allowed to tell about the afterlife." Farold took hold of a nearby branch and hung upside down from it. "That's one of the conditions, before people are allowed to leave."

"All right," Selwyn agreed slowly. Now that he thought about it, he couldn't believe that he'd spent all this time with someone who had actually died and come back, and never once had he wondered to ask what it had been like—a question that had nagged at people throughout the ages. He had been too caught up in his own concerns. Farold gave him a self-satisfied, self-important smirk—Selwyn could recognize the expression even on bat lips, even on bat lips hanging upside down in the predawn dark. "All right," he repeated, disappointed—now—that he wouldn't be able to ask the questions he had previously not thought to ask. He went back to what he'd been going to say. "Then let's talk about your enemies."

"I don't have any. Everybody liked me."

"I didn't," Selwyn pointed out. "And somebody killed you. Or did you stab yourself in the back? Was it suicide after all?"

"
I
didn't like
you,
either," Farold snapped. "I'm constantly reminded why."

"This bickering is getting us nowhere. Who would have wanted you dead?"

Farold, upside down, shrugged.

Selwyn said, "I think it could have been Linton."

"Linton is my cousin," Farold protested. "Why would he want me dead?"

Selwyn refrained from saying, "
Because
he's your cousin," and instead said, "To get the mill." Linton was the oldest of Derian's sister's children, and for the past two years he had been helping at the mill.

"Then he would have killed Uncle Derian, too." Far old seemed suddenly to realize the full implication of this. "Will he? Do you really think he killed me? Do you think he plans to kill Uncle Derian?"

For the first time, Farold sounded concerned about someone other than himself. "I doubt he would kill Derian," Selwyn reassured him. "That would be very obvious. People would suspect him if
both
of you died suddenly."

"But he could wait two or three years," Farold said, getting into the full spirit of suspicion, "and then kill him."

"If he waits two or three years, Derian is likely to die on his own," Selwyn said, "old as he is."

"Well, you certainly are the personable one, aren't you?" Farold snapped. "Don't you ever worry about other people's feelings?"

It was hard to think of a sarcastic little bat as having feelings. Selwyn told himself he would have done better and been less blunt if Farold had been in his old shape. "Sorry," he said.

"My uncle Derian raised me, you know"—Farold continued complaining—"from the time I could barely walk or talk—when my aunt Sela said her hands were already full with Linton."

"Sorry," Selwyn repeated. "I didn't mean anything." He didn't bother to point out that Farold must have been awfully slow if he was just barely walking and talking when his parents had died. Selwyn and Farold were the same age, which would have made Farold five the night part of the old mill burned, killing Earm Miller and his wife, Liera, and their three older children. Selwyn and his family could smell the smoke from their house, seven farmsteads away. Derian had not only raised Farold, he had been the one who had rescued him from the flames. "I wasn't thinking," Selwyn said.