‘He’s a good lad,’ Kite murmured.
‘Are you sure he’ll be safe?’ I asked anxiously.
‘If I didn’t think so, I’d have gone myself, but anyway, the boy needs to face up to his first real fight sooner or later. Now, come on. Let’s get this over with.’
I had thought he meant to circle the field in the opposite direction from the one Snake had taken, intending to meet up with the boy as he had ordered. Instead he threw his sword onto the patch of mud in front of us and scrambled out of the water to collect it. ‘I want to do this before the lad realises what we’re doing. Now where do we need to dig?’ he asked, as he beckoned me to follow him.
Between the willows, the edges of the plot were sheer, reinforced with wooden stakes that were slimy to the touch and difficult to get a purchase on. Eventually, however, Kite and I stood together, our feet slowly sinking into the mud.
The policeman repeated his question. ‘Where, Yaotl?’
I noticed an area beside Handy’s little thatched hut where the ground appeared particularly badly churned, the mud and silt heaped up in a low mound.
‘You’ll find Spotted Eagle’s mother in there, I should think.’
Kite grimaced, hesitated, and then appeared to make up his mind. His feet made slurping noises in the mud as he strode towards the place I had indicated. When he got there he drove the flat end of his sword into the ground like a shovel.
‘Come on,’ he barked, as he threw as mass of black muck away from him. ‘Hurry up! We don’t have long.’
I bounded towards him and joined in. It was not long before we had a shallow hole, and not long after that before I felt my own improvised tool strike something other than liquid mud. I paused then to look at the policeman.
His face was ghastly. ‘You’ve found her, haven’t you?’ he asked me under his breath.
‘The boy will be here in a moment,’ I said. ‘What are you going to say to him?’
He leaned on his sword and looked down. ‘I don’t know,’ he confessed. ‘I just wanted to know before he did. For some reason I thought that might make it easier for him.’
By the time Spotted Eagle had appeared, forcing his way between the rushes close to the little shelter, we had scraped enough of the mud away to leave no room to doubt what we had found.
Partly exposed, curled up at the bottom of the hole we had made, half-submerged in black, stinking water, lay the pale form of a human body. The dark, sodden remains of a woman’s skirt and blouse clung to it. Its features were unrecognisable, with all the bloated blandness of death.
The dead woman lay just where I had thought we might find her. Her right arm ended in a stump at the elbow. Her head was crowned with a dark mass of dried blood instead of hair. There was no doubt that the corpse we had found was Star’s.
The young man stood at the side of the shallow grave in silence. Neither Kite nor I could think of anything to say to him. Spotted Eagle did not need us to tell him what we had found.
When at last Handy’s son found his voice, all he could say was: ‘So they brought her here.’
I watched the sword swinging loosely from his fingers and wondered whether I had done the right thing by leading him and Kite here.
‘How did you know?’ the young man asked in a whisper.
I looked at the policeman. He returned my gaze steadily.
‘It was a guess,’ I said truthfully. ‘I remembered from my own time living in the marshes that you have to have some sort of shelter and somewhere to sleep – somewhere to lie low, for that matter, because you wouldn’t be living here at all unless you were running away from something. But it’s not that easy: there are too many people making their living off the lake to make hiding an easy matter. And of course the sorcerer and the monster needed something more: they had to have somewhere to hide… this.’
Spotted Eagle did not react.
‘They chose their ground well,’ I went on. ‘They knew this plot was likely to be neglected for a good while after Star’s death. Handy can’t have been here in days. Quail told me he’d seen someone else digging it over, but he didn’t see who it was very clearly. It just occurred to me that there might be another explanation.’
‘The thief,’ Spotted Eagle hissed. ‘Where is he now?’
‘Obviously not here.’ I looked towards the shelter. ‘We’ll take a look in there, see if we can find any clues inside.’
‘Don’t get any ideas, son,’ the policeman warned. ‘I understand how you must be feeling. But these are dangerous creatures we’re dealing with.’
The young man looked at him resentfully from under lowered brows. ‘As if I didn’t know that,’ he mumbled. ‘But who are they?’ He glanced at the body before turning hastily away from it. He swallowed hard. We had all done very well not to be violently sick, I thought.
‘They took...’ Watching Spotted Eagle’s face, I picked my words carefully. ‘We need to think about what they took. Cactus was right. The arm is a sorcerer’s charm. The hair is a warrior’s. Perhaps we are dealing with both.’
‘You told us the thing that followed you had a sword,’ Kite reminded me.
‘True. But if that was a warrior, he didn’t look like any I’ve ever seen.’
Spotted Eagle drove the end of his sword into the ground angrily. ‘Stop it!’ he shouted. ‘It’s my mother’s hair and arm you’re talking about, not a couple of freshly-laundered breechcloths that someone’s pilfered while they were drying! Where are they now?’
Kite looked as nonplussed
