“I can stop and start rain, send clouds scudding away. I have at times even called snow, but how might that be helpful?”
“What if you smote the metal-nosed man with lightning? Were he struck, the rest might run.”
“Lightning,” said Auld Nancy with a shudder. “I have never been adept with lightning.” There was a long pause. Grayling felt a niggle of hope. Finally Auld Nancy said, “I will try, although I fear my skills, while dazzling, are imprecise. I once set fire to a lady’s wig, which she cast off, revealing herself bald as an egg.”
“Auld Nancy, please.”
Auld Nancy began to chant in a rumble so low Grayling had to struggle to catch every word.
O spirits of the storm,
Let wind meet clouds
And fire meet earth.
Let a storm spring forth
And shafts of fire come down
To assault our enemy and strike him low.
I call wind and water, earth and fire.
So might it be.
Dark clouds filled the sky, crashing and slamming into each other, and rain poured down. As Auld Nancy chanted on, jagged streaks of lightning split the sky. Great shafts of blinding light struck a cart full of cabbages, two hay wagons, and a signpost, and set them ablaze with tongues of fire. The soldiers’ horses whinnied and scuffled. Thunder crackled, but the rain doused the fires, and the warlord with the metal nose, untouched and unharmed, laughed a laugh that chilled Grayling’s heart.
“Take them,” he shouted, and the soldiers, hiding behind each other, succeeded in pushing Auld Nancy and Pansy into the cage with Grayling. They closed a wooden door, fastened it with a lock of iron, and turned away.
The company started toward the town, the metal-nosed man on the fine horse in the lead, followed by the horse-drawn wheeled cage carrying Grayling and her companions. After a while they turned off the road onto a broad trail that led up and up and up. The wheels thump thumped on the rough and rutted path and clattered over a bridge. Grayling slumped in a corner of the cage as they shook and jounced on the rough road, wondering where they were headed and why.
VI
he company slowed as they passed beneath a towering arch of stone as dark as the start of a nightmare. Night had fallen when they came to a stop. Candles shone from the windows of a great house, but the yard was lit only by the sliver of moon that escaped the clouds.
Grayling stood and pressed her face against the branches that served as the bars of their cage. She could see little in the moonlight, but she could hear the bustle of their arrival. Horses clopped and whinnied and huffed, footsteps rang on stone or squelched in mud, soldiers called back and forth to each other, and no one paid attention to the prisoners.
Thus ends the first day of our trek together, thought Grayling, captured and caged like dancing bears. If only Desdemona Cork had not left them! She could have enchanted the soldiers—perhaps even the man with the metal nose, if such could be enchanted. The captives would likely be in a fine house right now, supping on partridge and elderberry wine, instead of in a cage in the cold with their bellies woefully empty.
Then there was silence, until a man’s voice said, “You stay here and guard them.”
“Why me? Be you afeared of them witches?” another voice asked.
Scuffle, scuffle, Grayling heard, and then there was quiet again except for the snuffling and spitting of the man who had lost the scuffle.
Auld Nancy moved to Grayling’s side. “I found a bit of spider web for your cheek,” she whispered. She clucked in concern as she gently applied the web to Graylings’s cut with her warm hand.
“You,” said a voice both cold and stony. “You witches, I have use for your magic.”
“We,” said Auld Nancy with an impatient sigh, “are not that kind of witch.”
The voice came closer, and so did the speaker, the warlord with the nose of metal. He thrust his face against the branches of their cage and shouted, “I need witch magic, and but for you three, I find no witch, no magician, no wizard abroad in the land!”
“Aye, we know,” said Auld Nancy. “’Twas an evil force took them, and we think we can set it to rights if you would but free us.”
“Free you? Nay! I need gold, and I need more armed men. You will use your spells, your curses, your powers, whatever you possess, to see that I get them.” A tiny ray of moonlight shimmered off the tip of his nose, and Grayling shuddered. “I need the Earl of Whetstone’s soldiers to turn and run. And the earl himself I wish gone—whether he dies or leaves the kingdom or just, whoosh, disappears, it is up to you, but I want him gone.” He slowly paced the breadth of the cage and back, his steps echoing through the courtyard like funeral drums. “I want a cloak of invisibility, a binding spell, and an assortment of poisons that act quickly and surely.”