“Three out of three,” said Crow, sketching the sign, “so spare your vinegar, woman.”
“Oh, it’s you who have it to spare, sir. We’re poor folk here. And ignorant,” she said, with a flash of her eyes, and led on.
She brought them to a house at the end of a lane. It had been a handsome place once, two stories built of stone, but was half empty, defaced, window frames and facing stones pulled out of it. They crossed a courtyard with a well in it. She knocked at a side door, and a girl opened it.
“Ach, it’s a witch’s den,” Crow said, at the whiff of herbs and aromatic smoke, and he stepped back.
“Healers,” their guide said. “Is she ill again, Dory?”
The girl nodded, looking at Tern, then at Crow. She was thirteen or fourteen, heavyset though thin, with a sullen, steady gaze.
“They’re men of the Hand, Dory, one short and pretty and one tall and proud, and they say they’re seeking papers. I know you had some once, though you may not now. They’ve nothing you need in their pack, but it might be they’d pay a bit of ivory for what they want. Is it so?” She turned her bright eyes on Tern, and he nodded.
“She’s very sick, Rush,” the girl said. She looked again at Tern. “You’re not a healer?” It was an accusation.
“No.”
“She is,” said Rush. “Like her mother and her mother’s mother. Let us in, Dory, or me at least, to speak to her.” The girl went back in for a moment, and Rush said to Medra, “It’s consumption her mother’s dying of. No healer could cure her. But she could heal the scrofula, and touch for pain. A wonder she was, and Dory bade fair to follow her.”
The girl motioned them to come in. Crow chose to wait outside. The room was high and long, with traces of former elegance, but very old and very poor. Healers’ paraphernalia and drying herbs were everywhere, though ranged in some order. Near the fine stone fireplace, where a tiny wisp of sweet herbs burned, was a bedstead. The woman in it was so wasted that in the dim light she seemed nothing but bone and shadow. As Tern came close she tried to sit up and to speak. Her daughter raised her head on the pillow, and when Tern was very near he could hear her: “Wizard,” she said. “Not by chance.”
A woman of power, she knew what he was. Had she called him there?
“I’m a finder,” he said. “And a seeker.”
“Can you teach her?”
“I can take her to those who can.”
“Do it.”
“I will.”
She laid her head back and closed her eyes.
Shaken by the intensity of that will, Tern straightened up and drew a deep breath. He looked round at the girl, Dory. She did not return his gaze, watching her mother with stolid, sullen grief. Only after the woman sank into sleep did Dory move, going to help Rush, who as a friend and neighbor had made herself useful and was gathering up blood-soaked cloths scattered by the bed.
“She bled again just now, and I couldn’t stop it,” Dory said. Tears ran out of her eyes and down her cheeks. Her face hardly changed.
“Oh child, oh lamb,” said Rush, taking her into her embrace; but though she hugged Rush, Dory did not bend.
“She’s going there, to the wall, and I can’t go with her,” she said. “She’s going alone and I can’t go with her- Can’t you go there?” She broke away from Rush, looking again at Tern. “You can go there!”
“No,” he said. “I don’t know the way.”
Yet as Dory spoke he saw what the girl saw: a long hill going down into darkness, and across it, on the edge of twilight, a low wall of stones. And as he looked he thought he saw a woman walking along beside the wall, very thin, insubstantial, bone, shadow. But she was not the dying woman in the bed. She was Anieb.
Then that was gone and he stood facing the witch-girl. Her look of accusation slowly changed. She put her face in her hands.