This one seemed unusually lively. A crowd of at least fifty people were gathered around a wooden framework in the village square. As Nora and Aruendiel rode closer, Nora figured out what the frame was for. A rope dangled from the top beam. The prisoner crouched at the foot of the gibbet, bound with ropes.
“They are having some sport,” Aruendiel said, spurring his horse forward. When Nora caught up, he was already talking to a man in brown with a small, tight-featured face like a pebble. The village headman, Nora gathered as she listened.
He gave short, reluctant answers to Aruendiel’s questions. The prisoner had been condemned to death for murder. A little girl, missing three days. No, they hadn’t waited for the magistrate.
“This village is the possession of Lord Olven Obardies, is it not?” Aruendiel asked. “Lord Olven is my vassal; I am Lord Aruendiel of the Uland. He would not be pleased to have one of his peasants put to death without proper authority.”
“The bastard confessed already, your lordship. And it’s good riddance. No kids are safe around him.”
“Yes,” said Aruendiel, glancing at the prisoner huddled beside the gibbet. “I see he lost a hand. The left hand, so it was not theft.”
“We caught him pawing a boy, two years since. We should have hung him then.”
“Remarkable that he managed to kill a child with only one hand,” Aruendiel observed. “How did he kill her, by the way?”
“We can’t say,” said the headman, a note of exasperation entering his voice. “We can’t find her body, and the maggot won’t tell us.”
“You have not loosened his tongue enough.”
“We’ve tried, your lordship. The stones and irons both. But she wasn’t either of the places he said. We thought we’d have another go with the irons before we hang him.”
“Leave him to me,” said Aruendiel. “It’s my right and obligation to examine him, and he will not lie to me.”
The man in brown looked thoughtfully at the prisoner, then back to Aruendiel. “They say you’re a wizard, as well as a lord. You have spells to make him talk?”
“A magician. I have spells that will pluck the truth from him as fast as the ravens pluck the flesh from a hanged man’s carcass.”
The man in brown seemed pleased by the simile. He nodded at the two men who stood guard over the bound man. They yanked the prisoner to his feet, his face brocaded with blood and dirt, as Aruendiel slid off his horse. He studied the man for an instant, then touched his forehead.
The prisoner jerked back as though he had been burned. He screamed once and fell to his knees, heaving for air, pawing uselessly at his throat with the stump of his unbound arm. Interested, the crowd pressed closer. Nora looked away, then back again in time to see a new, bright stream of blood trickling from the prisoner’s nose.
Enough, Nora said to herself. Over the heads of the crowd, she called out to Aruendiel to stop, then realized that she was speaking English. Even when she switched to Ors, Aruendiel gave no sign of hearing her. The people around her did, though; she was collecting unfriendly looks.
Suddenly the prisoner broke into speech. “No,” he howled. “No. I didn’t.” Another scream, and then, more clearly: “No, I didn’t kill her. I went to the house because I was hungry. I thought Massy would give me something to eat. The little girl wasn’t even there.”
“He’s lying, the bastard,” someone else said. Angry cries of assent rose from the crowd.
“He’s gone back on his story,” said the man in brown, in deep frustration. “I thought you said you’d get the truth out of him.”
“He’s telling the truth,” Aruendiel said. “He lied to you before, when he said that he killed her. He did not kill her, and he does not know who did. You can let him go.”
The two men on either side of the prisoner looked from Aruendiel to the headman and back again.
“I said—” Aruendiel began.
The man in brown evidently came to the end of a quick calculation. “Let him go, boys,” he said. “You heard his lordship. Let the sheepfucker go. He didn’t kill the little girl, his lordship says. His lordship’s magic says.”
The guards began to untie the prisoner’s bonds. Discontent buzzed through the crowd.
“We don’t know who did kill the little girl, your lordship,” the headman said. “Now that you’ve told us who didn’t kill her.”
“Where did she live?” Aruendiel asked.
The house was smaller than most of the others in the village, a one-room wooden hut in a yard of brown dust. An ancient apple tree grew by the front door, bare and dead except for one last green limb. As they approached the house, a middle-aged man stood up uncertainly from where he had been lying in the meager shade of the tree, and called out something unintelligible.
“Too drunk to go see his own daughter’s killer hanged,” said the headman disgustedly.
The girl’s mother led them into the house. She had been standing next to the gibbet, Nora recalled, a slight woman in a black shawl. The headman called her Massy. Along one wall was a fieldstone hearth; on the other side of the room, a rough bedstead and a pile of straw, covered by a blanket. A trio of low stools stood in the middle of the dirt floor.
Aruendiel prowled around the room, peering into earthenware crocks, sifting the hearth ashes through his long fingers, while a group of children straggled into the hut. The missing child’s siblings, evidently: a boy around six, two smaller girls, and a half-naked toddler. The children milled about with a shy restlessness. Massy wrapped her arms protectively around the boy’s shoulders until Aruendiel told her to sit down. “When did you last see the child?” he asked.
There was a hesitant, almost grudging tone in Massy’s voice as she answered, but slowly the story emerged. The girl, Irseln, had been feeling poorly that day. A stomachache. She had stayed inside the house while the other children went out to play. Massy had been doing the wash. Coming back from the well with a load of water, she had seen Short Bernl behind the hut, near the shed. She didn’t like seeing him there. Everyone knew Short Bernl was filth. She asked him to leave. After he left, she did the wash in the yard. Only then did she go inside and see that Irseln was missing. At first she thought that the girl must have felt better and gone out to play. But when the other children came home, Irseln was not with them. Massy gave them supper and went out to find the child. There was no answer to her shouts.
“Where was your husband during all this?”
He got home late that night and went right to sleep, Massy said. “Fat Tod and Pirix say he was with them all day,” interjected the headman. “Helped them take some goats to market and then drink up the proceeds.”
The next day, presumably more sober, Irseln’s father had found bloodstains inside the shed.
“I see,” said Aruendiel. He looked at the children clustered around their mother. “Mistress Nora,” he said sharply, “take the children out of here.”
“Me?” said Nora, disappointed. She had been following Massy’s story with close attention. “Take them where?”
“Anywhere—but well away from here.”
Massy looked as though she would like to protest, but said nothing. With some difficulty, Nora managed to herd the children out of the house, carrying the toddler in her arms. The older boy stood defiantly beside his mother until she told him in a low voice to go look after his sisters.
Behind the hut was a small clearing with the remains of a vegetable garden, a tangle of thirsty, yellowing leaves and vines. To one side was the shed that she had already heard so much about, a small, fragile structure of weather-roughened boards.
“Irseln got killed there,” said the older girl, pointing at it. “Want to see the blood?”
“No,” said Nora untruthfully. “Also, I don’t think we should disturb your father.” He was slumped against the side of the shed, snoring gently. Man and building seemed to be propping each other up.
“He’s not my father,” said the boy contemptuously, tossing his hair out of his eyes.
“That Irseln pa,” said the smaller girl.
Nora looked at the children more closely. It was true that none of them bore much resemblance to the heavy-framed sleeping man; they were all fine-boned and slender, like their mother. Painfully thin, in fact, like a
