“And I believe my sadness is less,” said the young woman with a very small smile.
The two left. Grayling’s heart gave a happy jump. Could it be she had the skill, the power, the magic, to heal with a song?
The woman with the wart unstrapped the basket of onions from her back, sat, and removed her shoe. She rolled down a stocking more dirt than wool and pulled it away from her heel. The wart remained, large and red. She shook her head. “Belike the others were not healed but merely cheered by the singing,” she said.
“Belike,” said Grayling, and her shoulders slumped. “I have no magic, no healing spells, and no wart charms. I cannot help you.”
The woman frowned and raised a grimy fist.
Magic or no magic, Grayling would have to do something to avert evil signs or painful thumps. She reached into her basket, pulled out a broken jar with scraps of ointment that had escaped the mouse, and sniffed it. Sharp, she thought, whatever it is. Strong. Mayhap potent. “Here, take this,” she said to the woman with the wart. “Apply a drop every morning at dawn for seven days, and your wart will disappear.” By which time, I trust I will be far, far away.
The woman smelled it, and her nose twitched. “What is it?”
“My mother’s wart-removing tincture, handed down from granny to granny.” Or mayhap a tonic against coughing or a love potion or spiced plum compote for Sunday supper. “Take it.”
The old woman tossed the jar into her basket. “I have no coins,” she said, crossing her arms.
“Then it be a gift.”
She, too, left satisfied.
Grayling sang the gathering song in a small voice that grew a bit stronger as she ended:
Come—
By wax and wick,
By seed and root,
Through storms of trouble,
We gather,
We gather.
Curious folk stopped to listen, and one prosperous-looking merchant threw her a copper, but they drifted away when the song was finished, and no one approached to ask what she was about.
When Grayling left that town for another, Pook the mouse was still with her, and on they went. Some towns smelled like warm bread, others like wet dogs and old boots. Some were crowded with farmers and merchants and soldiers, and some were no more than tumbledown inn, dung heap, and swarm of starveling cats.
She was still wary of the unknown world outside her valley, and she missed her mother, but she pressed on day after day. She earned what coins she could for tending a toddler, unloading a wagon, or watching over a stall, so she did not go hungry—or, leastwise, very hungry. She dropped bits of food into her basket or her pocket for Pook, who stayed safely hidden, for towns were too busy and crowded for a shape-shifting mouse. They slept wherever it was softest and driest and safest. In each town, she sang the gathering song, softly and tentatively, but no one was summoned . . . until at last, someone was.
IV
here was thunder, and gusts of wind, and rain had begun as a drizzle when Grayling, with Pook huddled in her pocket, reached the market square of yet another town. Her hair dripped, her feet squelched in her soggy shoes, and her cloak was growing sodden. She found a place to stand under a tree near the blacksmith’s forge and toasted her back at his fire.
“Be it you who calls me?” asked a voice. Grayling turned. A woman stood there studying her, an old woman with a face as wrinkled as a raisin and grizzled hair poking from beneath a linen veil and wimple.
The drizzling rain became a downpour, and the woman joined Grayling under the shelter of the tree. “Be it you who calls me?” she asked again, shaking the rain from her broom of heather and hazel. “I have followed the singing for some days now.”
Could it be? “Are you one of the others?” Grayling asked.
“Perchance,” said the old woman a mite peevishly.
Grayling searched the wrinkled face for some encouragement behind the peevish but, finding only more peevish, took a deep breath and spoke. “Smoke and shadow fired our cottage, left my mother, Hannah Strong, rooted to the ground, and took her spell book, so she sent me to find others, if others there still be, to break the curse and discover what is afoot, but I am fearful and already was captured, and the goat also, so the mouse—”
“Slow, child, slow. You gibber like a gaggle of grouse, and my ears don’t hear as fast as once they did.” The old woman dashed raindrops from her face with her sleeve. “Like simmering soup, stories cannot be hurried. Tell me everything that befell you, but tell it slow.” So Grayling did, ending her tale with a fluttering sigh.
The woman shook her head, and her chin wobbled above her wimple. “Alas, I have seen it. Hovels and cottages and manors afire, cunning women and mages and hags transformed, spell books taken.”