Dragon's Bait (10 page)

"What?" Alys cried, her voice muffled by the bandages.

"Must you leave?" Una asked.

Selendrile took Una's hand and held it gently between his own. With a look so sincere Alys wanted to choke, he said, "After the accident, Jocko and I just left the cart upturned in the ditch by the road, with the ox tethered so it could graze a bit without wandering off. I need to return it to the farm and make sure everything's all right there. Could you please watch over my brother until this evening?"

"Certainly," Una said, which Alys knew only meant that she wanted to see Selendrile again.

Between clenched teeth, Alys hissed, "Don't you dare leave me behind."

"What did he say?" Una was gazing at Selendrile in a dreamy sort of way.

"He said you're much too kind," Selendrile said, still looking deep into Una's eyes. "And you are. You're very kind."

Una modestly looked away. "I do what I can," she whispered.

Alys was tempted to demand, "Since when?" Instead she waited for Selendrile to once again lean over her.

"I'll be back as soon as I can, Jocko." He gently patted her shoulder.

With her supposed "good" hand, she grabbed a handful of shirt and, as distinctly as possible, whispered, "I'll get you for this."

"What did he say?" Una asked.

"I don't know." Selendrile turned and gazed at her sincerely. "After that knock on the head, he hasn't been making much sense lately. I think you just need to leave him alone all day—let him rest."

"Don't do this to me," Alys begged.

Without a word, he straightened, kissed Una's hand, and left.

W
HY WAS HE
always doing this to her? Alys wondered: helping her, guiding her, tricking her into trusting him—
liking
him even—though all her instincts warned against either, and then repeatedly tossing her out on her own, forcing her to plot and make decisions and confront her enemies all by herself?

She burrowed deeper into the bedding and lowered her eyelids so that they were open only the slightest crack, pretending sleep. Una still stood by the door, shifting her gaze from her hand to the path Selendrile had taken. Wherever she looked, she wore an expression that reminded Alys of the large moist eyes of particularly loyal and brainless cows. Alys thought of the dog Selendrile had been feeding last night.
At least
it
had had the sense to be afraid. And at least
it
was getting food out of the relationship.

As though suddenly aware of what she was doing, Una cast quick looks at Alys and beyond, presumably to Etta, who was noisily setting out the breakfast meal. Apparently satisfied that no one had been watching, Una moved out of Alys's range of vision to help Etta.

"Here," she heard Una say, "go put this by him."

"But he's disgusting," Etta protested. "He's all bloody and"—Alys could just picture the wince—"dirty."

"Hush your mouth and do as I say."

Etta sneered, "
You
do it then if you're so taken by him and his brother." Then, "All right,
all right, AT J. RIGHT
," she squealed in a tone that made Alys suspect Una was twisting her ear.

Through the quivery slits between her eyelashes, Alys watched Etta gingerly approach. She stopped while still at least six feet away, then put the steaming wooden bowl on the floor and eased it somewhat closer to the bed with her foot, slopping grayish gruel over the edges.
Alys grumbled and snorted sleepily and Etta scampered away.

Eating in front of anyone was too dangerous: She'd have to loosen the bandages and they would easily see that she wasn't nearly so badly hurt as they'd been led to believe. With nothing better to do while she pretended to sleep, Alys actually did fall asleep.

When she awoke, she was alone. She could hear Gower in his shop next door hammering, a sound she had heard all her life. There was no sign of Etta, but Alys could hear Una talking outside, complaining to someone about the heat this summer. As far back as Alys could remember, Una had always complained; the weather was always too hot for her—or too cold, or too dry, or too windy, or too changeable. Possibly because she was just waking up, a wisp of laughter floated into Alys's memory. She thought of her friend Risa, who had died after stepping on a rusty nail the summer she was eight. Risa had been able to do a wonderful imitation of Una: "It's too ... it's too ... it's too
perfect
, for my taste," Risa would say, tossing her hair.

From the direction of the stream where the village women washed their clothes, Alys could very faintly hear singing, a sweet high voice that could only be Aldercy, who—until she'd put aside girlish interests and girlhood friends to get married—had been Alys's friend.

Without warning, Alys's eyes were suddenly full of tears.
Things weren't horrible in Saint Toby's before
, she thought.
I want to go back, I want to go back
. She wiped her nose roughly to bring herself to her senses. Her father was dead; there was no going back. Instead, she got up and fetched the bowl Etta had set out for her. She probably shouldn't have had the strength to do it on her own, but not eating could result in real weakness. She loosened the bandages. Though the meal was cold and congealed into thick lumps, she ate it in quick mouthfuls lest someone enter and find her at it.

Finished, she tied up the bandages again, lay back down, and hoped that whatever Selendrile was up to, he'd be quick at it.

Lying on the straw mattress, waiting, she thought about the years during which she had grown up in Saint Toby's, playing with her friends: the hoop games they had made with old
wheels, the games of jackstraws, and the straw dolls they used to make. And with that she suddenly knew how to trap Etta. Everybody knew that village girls weren't the only ones to make straw dolls. Witches did, too, except theirs were made in the image of a particular person. Then, when the right spell was spoken, whatever the witch did to the doll would happen to the real person. Alys got up again.

Working hurriedly, she pulled a handful of straw from the mattress and fashioned a doll, folding the straw in half and tying off the head, then braiding arms and legs. She found a rag, which she wrapped around the figure for clothes, then pulled a tin button off Etta's feast-day dress. For a long moment she held the button, knowing that it was her father's hands which had poured the metal, then shaped it. She was torn between the desire to keep it and the knowledge that putting tin on the doll would make people think it had been imaged after the tinsmith's daughter.

"I'll make them sorry, Papa," she whispered, though her father had never been the kind of man to seek revenge on anyone.

Alys fastened the button to the doll, then got
a stick from the woodpile by the hearth and fastened the doll to the stick. Hopefully, when the villagers saw this, they would think that Etta had compelled them to condemn her, to leave her tied up on the mountain for the dragon.

Seeing the completed doll in her own image, Alys felt strangely unsettled. Although she knew she had no witch's power, she whispered out loud—three times, since that was the way with spells—"Not Alys. Not Alys. Not Alys," just to be safe. Then she hid the doll under Etta's mattress and lay down. She'd worry later about how to bring it to everyone's attention.

Eventually she fell asleep again.

Eventually she woke up again.

Slowly the day passed, and when Selendrile finally returned, it was already late evening.

"Welcome back." Una scrambled up from the table where she and her family were having supper to greet him. She wiped her hands on her apron. "I hope you found everything in order back at your farm." Gower glanced up to scowl at Selendrile; Etta never stopped shoveling food into her mouth, as though afraid somebody'd eat her portion if she let her attention wander.

Alys groaned and stretched as though Una's greeting had awakened her.

"Everything's as it should be." Selendrile took Una's hand in his and smiled into her eyes.

Una blushed and acted surprised, as though she hadn't wiped her hands hoping for just this.

"And how's my little brother?" Selendrile knelt beside Alys's bed.

"I hate you," she murmured into his ear. "Without you, the plan's going all wrong."

"What?" Una asked.

"He said better, thank you, but he feels weak from lying down for so long." Selendrile grabbed her by her unbandaged arm and pulled her to her feet. "There," he said chipperly, "how's
that
?"

She glared at him. "Now I'm supposed to be able to walk?" she asked.

"You want to go for a walk?" Selendrile said. "I'm not sure that's for the best."

She started to sit back down, but he held her where she was.

"Well, if you insist. But slowly." He smiled and nodded to the others and led her toward the door.

"What are you doing?" she demanded.

"You're doing fine," he assured her.

She sighed and didn't try to get any more out of him until they were outside. They walked very slowly, with her leaning heavily on his shoulder because many of the villagers were out, pointing at her and saying, "There's the poor boy hurt when Gower's wheel failed."

Alys loosened the bandage slightly. "We're going too far," she warned. "If we talk quietly, nobody'll hear us. If I'm supposed to be half dying, I shouldn't be able to walk this far."

Smiling and nodding at someone across the way, Selendrile said, "We can always say you overextended yourself. I'll carry you back."

"You will not," Alys told him.

He smiled but didn't answer till they were beyond the last cottage. "So," he said, "what have you done all day?"

"What have
I
done?" Alys pulled away from his encircling arm and sat on a log by the side of the road. "What have
you
done?"

Selendrile shrugged. "Nothing. I've just been waiting for evening."

"
What
?"

"Nothing. I've just been w—"

"Why?"

He paused to look at her before answering. "Evenings are more romantic."

"
What
?"

He sighed, sounding annoyed, either at her limited range of questions or at her tone. "Humans find moonlight romantic, right? You want me to flirt with Una, right? Why are you getting all upset when I'm doing exactly what you told me to do?"

"I never told you..." Alys rested her head in her hand, exasperated at the loss of a whole day.

"Besides," he added, "we don't want to arouse suspicion by working too fast."

"All right," she said.

"Besides—"

"
All right
." She pulled the bandage entirely away from her face so she could speak properly. "I've been thinking more about the plan. We want everyone to believe Gower is making bad wheels, so we started with the wheel he made for us. Can you damage some of the ones he's made for other people?"

"Me?" Selendrile asked.

"Maybe by turning into a mouse and gnawing at a spoke here and there? Just a little bit, as
though Gower gouged the wood while working it and didn't bother starting over?"

Slowly he nodded.

"As for Una ... Eventually what we want is for her to leave Gower for you." Selendrile didn't react. "Slowly, over the next two or three days, we want her to fall in love with you, make a fool of herself in front of the other villagers."

His voice giving away nothing of what he thought, he asked, "Somebody falling in love with me would look foolish to the villagers?"

"No." Even in the moonlight she found herself distracted by the purple of his eyes. She looked away, suddenly confused. "No. I just mean ... a married woman, with a daughter your age..." He arched his eyebrows. "...the age you seem..." She forced herself to meet his eyes again. "It'll look foolish for Una."

"Ah," he said.

"So that when you ask her to run away with you, to meet you in Griswold, and then you never show up there, she'll be too ashamed to come back to Saint Toby's because everyone will know where she went and why."

Once more Selendrile nodded.

"As for Etta, I made a straw image of myself
and hid it in her things. Now all we have to do is get people to look—just like we did with Atherton. I thought maybe you can turn yourself into a crow and follow her around—witches always have crows."

Selendrile didn't look convinced about that one.

"And every time she has an argument with one of her friends—she's always having arguments—we can do something to the friend."

"Something like what?"

"I don't know. It didn't take much for them to believe / was a witch."

"Cause them to fall down stairs?" Selendrile suggested. He looked interested again. Maybe too interested. "Have their geese or chickens disappear? Perhaps burn down a few houses? Something like that?"

Alys squirmed. "Something like that."

"I see."

"We'll discuss it beforehand, for each person."

"Certainly," he said with a smoothness she didn't like at all.

"Maybe," Alys started, "you—"

Selendrile lunged at her.

Alys didn't have time to gasp before he had one hand on her shoulder and the other ... Suddenly she realized what he was doing: shoving the bloodied bandage up by her jaw. In another moment, even as she scrambled to tighten the cloth back around her head, she heard the sound of approaching footsteps and the jangle of metal.

The bandage wasn't as secure as it should have been when a man came around the corner from the direction of Saint Toby's. Alys tried to disguise her sigh of relief. The man was a stranger—obviously a wandering peddler: He had pots and crocks and assorted other merchandise lashed to his back and chest and belt.

"Hello, my friends, hello," he said in a loud, squeaky voice that hurt Alys's ears. He flashed a smile that showed good strong teeth despite the shabbiness of his clothes and the fact that he was dirty and had a patch over his right eye. He pointed at Alys. "You must be that young lad I heard tell about what got hurt in that farm-cart accident."

Alys nodded, holding the bandage with her hand, unsure whether it might come loose.