Hamish rolled his eyes and looked around for his staff and bundle.
'Where are you taking them?' Toby asked gently.
She bit her lip, staring at him, and then seemed to decide to trust him. 'To Montserrat, senor. There is a great tutelary there, just north of Barcelona. My sons asked me to deliver them to the spirit in the monastery at Montserrat.'
'You are traveling alone?' he asked incredulously.
With a little more hesitation, she said that, yes, she was traveling alone.
'This is a most fortunate coincidence. We are going to Montserrat. Will the senora permit us to escort her?'
She gave him a smile as warming as a blazing fire on a winter night. 'So that is why they told me to wait!'
'Who told you, senora?'
'My sons, of course!'
'Toby!' Hamish was glowering.
Toby shrugged apologetically. He could not possibly let this poor child go wandering off alone again! It was a miracle she had managed to come this far without being molested.
But Hamish's practical soul was much less impressed by this damsel in distress. 'Tell us how you work this conjuration with the wraiths.'
'It is not your concern!'
Toby said, 'It should not be, senora, but if we are to be traveling together, then it might become so. The Inquisition, for example, might—'
She froze, staring at him. The color drained from her cheeks.
'We disapprove of the Inquisition,' he added hastily and sensed Hamish shuddering at this indiscretion.
'I have no dealings with demons!' Gracia cried.
'Nor we, I assure you, but it takes only a whisper to start the Inquisition asking questions, and we all know how they ask questions.'
She looked down at the floor and spoke very quietly. 'After the soldiers left Madrid… I was the only one left, senor. They overlooked me at the end, when they slew the women. I hid under the bed where… it was not my bed. I was the only one left, the houses were burning. I went to the shrine, and the spirit did not answer, so I knew they had taken it. I hunted everywhere for my husband and my sons, to bury them. All day I searched and could not find them. But that night my sons came to me. Their wraiths stood beside me — not as I had known them but as the men they would have been, tall and strong and handsome. They wept because their lives had been so short and they would never grow to that manhood. They wept more because they must evermore remain wraiths with no spirit to cherish them. They told me to take a bottle and gather up the souls, theirs and all the others, and carry them to the tutelary at Montserrat, for it would take them in and care for them always as if they had been its own people. That is what I have done, senor. There and anywhere else I found death. Is this a wickedness?'
'No, indeed. It is a virtuous thing.' He did not know if what she claimed was possible, but he certainly did not know that it was not. He dared not look at Hamish. No doubt Hamish could quote books on the subject.
Gracia was relieved to have his approval. She smiled wistfully, her eyelashes glistening. 'They still speak to me sometimes. Here I found much death, and it was hard for me to make the wraiths understand, because of the language. My sons told me to keep trying, to stay here for a while. They must have known you were coming, senor, a strong man to escort me through the troubled lands. But I think I have gathered all the souls in this town now. I shall go out again tonight to make sure. There may still be a few of the very little ones, I fear, who find it difficult to understand. They will not trouble you.' She looked at him like a wounded plover.
'I believe you. I shall sleep here tonight, then, with your permission.' The hob would defend him, but it might not worry about Hamish. He stole a quick glance at his friend.
'And I,' Hamish croaked loyally, although he looked as if he could see the room full of ghosts already.
CHAPTER SEVEN
He had a lot more to say later, when the two of them were alone in the poky bedroom Gracia had appropriated for her use during her stay in Onda. The bed was too short for Toby and would not be wide enough for both of them anyway. He spread his blanket on the floor.
'Toby, I thought you agreed we were not going to go to Barcelona?'
'We can't abandon that child!'
'Child? She's borne two children — or thinks she has. She's crazy!'
'All the more reason to be kind.'
'Ha!' Hamish hurled the last of his clothes down and scrambled into the bed. 'Kind? Child? She was dropping broad hints that she didn't really have to go out if
'You're imagining things!' Toby stretched out on the floor and rolled himself up.
'She wanted you to share her bed, and you weren't exactly ignoring her yourself. This is no time to start falling in love with a demented—'
'You are being ridiculous and evil-minded!' Toby sneezed several times as his efforts to get comfortable raised dust from the ancient boards. 'I am certainly not falling in love! I'm sorry for her, that's all.' Memories of last spring… Jeanne in the springtime… disaster at Mezquiriz… Agony in his throat. Never, never fall in love! Love was not for a man possessed. The dust was making his eyes water.
'And you promised we wouldn't go near Barcelona.' Hamish sounded aggrieved.
'We can go around it. We'll cut overland, avoid the coast. That'll be just as safe as heading for Navarre. And if we find a convent, we'll leave her there, all right? Or some town with a tutelary that will care for her. Besides, I'm not convinced she's crazy at all. The wraiths don't seem to have molested her.'
'How could they?' Hamish said glumly, moving the candle closer and balancing a huge leather bound tome on his chest, a history of Aragon. 'She was crazy before she arrived.'
'Is what she thinks she is doing possible?'
'Not without gramarye, I shouldn't think. Ah, me! Demons last night, ghosts tonight? You won't mind if I read awhile?'
'Not as long as you don't laugh too loudly.'
'If I cut your throat in the night, don't blame me for it.' It would take more than a few hundred wraiths to distract him from a good, meaty book, but after a moment he said, 'Toby? I realize that your vision, or whatever it was… that your vision of Barcelona was pretty bad. I know you suffered. That doesn't mean you have to prove anything.'
'Prove what?' Toby asked his blanket.
'Prove that you're not scared, I mean. I know you're brave.'
'Huh?' He could still smell that odious cellar, see the barbarous implements of torture, feel those cold manacles scraping his flesh. How long could a man endure being chained to a wall like that? How long survive in the cold and the dark? How long endure without sleep? And what happened after he broke, when he begged for release, telling everything, promising anything at all…? 'What do you mean? That's an absurd backward way of thinking! Why would a frightening vision make me
Hamish grunted. 'You needn't shout. Go to sleep, you big ox.'
Toby was awakened in the morning by a delectable odor of fresh-baked bread. Gracia was clattering pots downstairs. The candle had burned itself out, and Hamish lay fast asleep, the book pitched over him like a Gothic roof.
Soon after that, the three of them walked out of Onda and headed north, over the hills.
