Browncoat had already wandered away. After some inquiry, and curious looks from those they asked, they tracked the dog to a neighboring hut. The dog lay outside the door, contentedly grinding a round stub of bone.
“That’s not the same bone,” said Nora with disappointment.
“Where’s the bone you had before?” Aruendiel demanded. He spoke with a rough familiarity, as though he and the dog were old acquaintances.
The dog raised its head and looked hard at Aruendiel, mildly surprised. It thumped its tail in the dust.
“Fetch it for us, please.”
The dog stood up slowly, stretching, and then trotted away toward Massy’s hut. About halfway there, he left the path, scratched in the earth under a bush, and then emerged with a longer, more slender bone in his mouth.
“Good, very good, thank you.” Aruendiel bent down to rough the dog’s fur behind the ears. He took the bone in his hand. “Yes, human. A child’s thighbone. Where did you find this? Can you show me?”
The dog uttered a short whine.
“I don’t have any here.”
Another whine, with an emphatic tilt of the muzzle.
“Very well. But first, you take me to the place where you got the bones. Mistress Nora,” he added abruptly, “there’s some ham in my saddlebag. For our friend.”
“We’re all mad here,” Nora said to herself, going in search of the ham. “I must be, too, or I wouldn’t have come.”
When she came back, the hut’s yard was empty, but she could follow the sound of voices through the deepening twilight. Off the path to the meadow, she found a sizable group gathered: the magician, the headman, and the men from the village. She could hear the scrape of spades against soil and pebbles. The villagers on the outskirts of the crowd were muttering to one another, something about how clever wizards thought they were.
After a few minutes, a spade hit something hard. Aruendiel said something to the diggers. They knelt and began using their hands to remove the dirt. There was a sudden pale wash of light; Nora recognized the illumination spell that Aruendiel had used in the library in Semr. Low murmurs traveled through the small crowd.
“Something’s gnawed those bones. Curse these dogs.”
“Looky how that one’s cut, straight as a rule. No dog did that.”
“Something funny about the color. Those bones, they aren’t raw.”
“Horsecock, you’re right, they’re cooked. Somebody cooked her.”
The diggers piled the remains onto a piece of cloth, Aruendiel directing them not to miss anything. When he was finally satisfied, they wrapped up the bones and handed them to the magician. He and the headman turned back to the hut. The crowd, now curiously silent, trailed after them.
Nora was about to go, too, when she felt something brush against her knee. She looked down. Browncoat gazed back expectantly, his nose aimed at the greasy package she held.
Nora waited outside Massy’s hut with most of the village. Aruendiel was inside, with Massy and the headman and a few others. The children had been extracted forcibly from the hut by a couple of men and taken to their aunt’s on the other side of the village. Their wails dissolved slowly in the night air. In her mind, Nora ran over the clues that seemed to point to a horrific crime—the missing child, the hints of abuse, the bones that had been split and gnawed—and wondered how to make them add up to a different result.
At last the door of the hut opened again. The headman stepped out. He looked around at the villagers outside the hut, their faces tired and rapt, and said, “The girl’s murderer has confessed. Time for you folk to go home.”
“Was it Massy?”
“Massy killed the girl?”
The headman said nothing; confirmation enough for the crowd.
“Did she cook the kid?”
“Did she eat her?”
“Go home,” said the headman again. Two more men came out of the hut, the same men who had been guarding Short Bernl in the afternoon, but now they were holding Massy, her arms bound behind her. The crowd began to shout at her. Massy looked away, head held proudly on her slender neck, as her captors pulled her toward the village, along the same path her children had taken.
A light still burned inside the hut. As the yard emptied, Nora went inside. Aruendiel stood alone in the center of the room, rubbing the back of his neck. There was a slow, mechanical quality to his movements. Turning, he saw Nora.
“What do you want?” he demanded. Then he seemed to recollect himself. “Well, you were right,” he said in a more civil tone. “It was much as you reckoned.”
“What did she say?”
“She killed the girl. Not deliberately. The child would not stop crying. After some chiding, she began to scream—and kick—and bite. The woman, Massy, had chores to do. She hit the child again. The girl fell and bruised her head. On that iron pot.” He nodded at a black shape near the fireplace. “Mistress Massy says Irseln sat up and seemed well enough. She put the child back to bed. But the girl did not answer her when she returned. A little later, she was dead.”
Aruendiel paused and seemed disinclined to continue.
“And then?” Nora asked.
“And then Mistress Massy had four hungry children to feed, and a drunken worthless lout of a husband who was drinking up whatever wages he’d managed to earn that day.”
“That’s no excuse!”
“It was also a way to eliminate all traces of her crime. When the unfortunate Short Bernl came to the house that day, she even found a culprit for the child’s disappearance.”
Nora reached for one of the stools, which lay overturned on the floor, and set it upright. “He said he thought that Massy would give him something to eat.”
“Don’t sit there,” Aruendiel advised sharply. He went on: “Yes, he must have smelled cooking. But there’s almost nothing in Mistress Massy’s stores.”
“What do you mean, don’t sit there?” Nora asked. “On this stool?”
As if to answer her, the stool reared onto two legs, then toppled over. “Some of your magic?” she asked.
“Not at all. It’s the little girl. Irseln.”
“You’re joking!” Nora said. But there was Sova’s story. Nora looked at the stool dubiously. “Um, the little girl Gissy said Irseln pinched her, and there was no one there,” she added, in a more subdued voice.
“Irseln is still very angry about being killed and eaten by her family,” Aruendiel said drily. After a moment, he added: “Mistress Massy was resourceful enough to find her way around a truth-telling spell, which is to say nothing at all. But she found the stool’s continuing movement unsettling. That is what finally drove her to confess.”
“Oh, so you didn’t have to torture her?” Nora said, with an edge in her voice.
“Torture? Oh, you are thinking of Short Bernl. I only subjected him to some additional unpleasantness because no one in the village would have believed him otherwise.”
Nora frowned. “You didn’t have to do that.”
“They accepted his first confession, even though it was obviously false, simply because they had tortured him. That’s the problem with torture,” he added irritably. “It is practically useless unless it’s combined with a truth spell. Most people will say anything under torture, even before the irons are fully hot.”
“There are other reasons why torture is bad, but at least we can agree on that one,” Nora said. She was silent for a moment. “Did the other children know what Massy did? They told me their mother found an injured goat and made it into stew.”
Aruendiel shrugged. “The taste of goat and the taste of human flesh are quite different.”
“How would you know that?”
