Never Trust a Dead Man (4 page)

The light came around a corner.

After a full day of total blackness, the brightness hurt, and he threw his hands up to cover his eyes, hoping if it was an angel, it wouldn't be offended, and if it was a ghost ... He was very much hoping it wasn't a ghost.

He peeked out from between his fingers.

A figure dressed in black approached, its head covered by a hood. One hand was outstretched, and the light wasn't a torch after all, although it was much too bright for a candle flame. It took Selwyn several long heartbeats to realize the ball of light hovered over the outstretched palm, not attached to anything. The figure's other hand held a corner of the hood up over the lower portion of its face.

Not hiding, Selwyn realized. Protecting its nose.

Surely an angel that was set to accompany dead souls to the afterlife should be used to the smell of death. And—Selwyn forced himself to be reasonable—so should dead spirits that walked the earth.

The figure had stopped. It was standing directly in front of him, looking down at where he crouched on the floor among all those long-dead and not-so-long-dead bodies.

The hand holding the hood dropped, revealing a long strand of white hair and the face of an old woman. This old woman said, "Truly you look terrible and smell worse. But whoever buried you obviously knows nothing about dead people."

Which didn't sound like something either angel or ghost would say.

He swallowed convulsively, though there was absolutely no moisture in his mouth. "Are you—" He had to stop, his throat constricted by thirst and terror.

"Carefully now." The old woman raised a warning finger to demand his attention. "Ask something foolish, and I
will
have to smack you on the side of the head." She emphasized this, as though they'd already discussed it.

His voice creaking with dryness, Selwyn asked, "Do you warn me beforehand what questions are foolish?"

Apparently not. And apparently that was one of them. She smacked him on the side of the head.

"Ouch."

"Well, I warned you," she said.

He decided not to risk asking her anything else. He would have backed away, if there was any place to back away to. All he could do was huddle miserably on the floor.

"Foolish questions," the old woman explained, "are things like 'Am I dead?' or 'Are you dead?' or 'Are you a ghost?'"

They all sounded like reasonable questions to him.

Perhaps she could see he thought so, for she looked prepared to smack him again.

To distract her, he asked, though it hurt his throat to speak, "What if I asked you then: 'Who, or what, are you?' I'm not asking who or what you are," he hastened to add. "I'm asking: 'Would it be a foolish question to ask you: Who or what are you?'"

It took her a few moments to work that out In the end, she smacked him again, but he saw it coming and ducked, so she only clipped his ear.

"That was for the 'What are you?' part What could I possibly be, in a place such as this, with a light such as this, seeking something from the dead?"

Selwyn gulped, although she was right It was obvious. She was a witch.

The old woman continued. "But I didn't smack you for asking
who
I am, for there's no way you could know that. My name is Elswyth." She hit him again.

"What was that for?"

"That was for not asking for water, which you obviously are in desperate need of." She set the glowing light on her head—or, rather, a handspan above her head—and unfastened what he had thought was her humped back. It was, in truth, a pack. The light dipped to follow her as she sat down on the floor, more limber than he would have guessed from her age. She searched through the bag and pulled out a wineskin, which she handed to him. It held water, musty and warm and more wonderful than anything. The inside of his throat unstuck from itself, but he didn't want to appear greedy and selfish—not to a witch who could balance a ball of light over her head and who had an inclination for hitting. "Thank you," he said, offering it back still half foil.

"Go ahead and finish," she said. "It's plain water. I haven't bespelled it"

It hadn't occurred to him to worry that a witch might give him water tainted by witchcraft. Until she said it. He finished the water anyway, for whatever harm there was in it was already done. "Thank you," he said again, much subdued.

"You're welcome."

He glanced around the corpse-lined cave and both wondered about and flinched from the thought of what she might want from the dead.

Elswyth took pity and answered the question without making him ask it. "For one of my spells, I need a lock of hair from a man newly dead. I heard that someone had died in Penryth on the other side of the wood, so I came to the burial caves." She glared at him through narrowed eyes. "I hope you're not the one they were talking about. You won't do at all.
Did
somebody think you were dead?"

"No," Selwyn assured her. "Farold is the dead man." He waved in the general direction. Farold had most definitely begun to smell, a sickly sweet odor from off to Selwyn's right. "I'm here as punishment for killing him—
not
," he added in the same breath, "that I
did
kill him. But I was accused of it." He didn't know what to make of the look Elswyth was giving him. Did she believe him? Or, considering that she was a witch, would she prefer to hear that he really was a murderer?

She said, "So your townsfolk accused you of murder and condemned you to die here alongside your victim?"

Not knowing where—if anywhere—lay hope of rescue, Selwyn nodded.

Elswyth said, "Sweat from the brow of a condemned man is an ingredient in several spells. May I?...in payment for the water I gave you? I very much believe in payment for favors granted." She was already rummaging through her pack.

Selwyn looked at her in horror. She didn't care: Murderer or innocent victim of justice gone awry, it made no difference to her. He was sweating despite the cold as she took a piece of unbleached wool from her pack and blotted his forehead with it.

"Good," Elswyth said. She folded the cloth and placed it in a small wooden box. "Fine. This will do. Now shall we discuss what you'll pay me for leading you out of here? I assume you
do
want to leave—unless you are so overcome by feelings of guilt that you believe you deserve to die this way."

"I told you," Selwyn said, "I didn't do it."

She waited, without reaction, for his answer.

"Of course I want to get out," Selwyn said. "I'll do anything you want if you'll help me."

She smacked him on the side of the head. "That," he heard her say once the ringing in his ears began to fade, "is for being too foolish to bargain. So be it. You owe me a year of your service: housework, chopping firewood, fetching ingredients for my spells, whatever I ask. For a year."

"No," Selwyn said, suddenly realizing what he might have gotten himself into.

"Too late. You already agreed beforehand. You're lucky I'm in a good mood and didn't say you owe me your entire life." She shook her head. "Foolish boy," she muttered, getting to her feet. "How was an old woman like me to keep you from following me out anyway, for free?" Just the thought of how foolish he'd been drove her to hit him again.

Selwyn saw it coming, but—seeing how foolish he'd been—he didn't even try to duck.

The witch Elswyth took a knife from her pack and once again held the edge of her cloak up over her nose. She sniffed. Once was enough to find Farold. All Selwyn's flailing about in the dark—walking into walls and risking the ire of the spirits of the dead that he stumbled over or into—had taken him fewer than a dozen steps from where the burial party had originally left him.

"Wait," Selwyn whispered in horror, looking at Farold's dangling arm. "He moved."

Elswyth sniffed again. She told Selwyn, "
You
smell terrible.
He
most definitely smells dead."

Which didn't ease Selwyn's fear at all.

Seeing his face, Elswyth snapped impatiently, "He's not moving."

"I don't mean now." Selwyn wasn't willing to come any closer. The magic light that hovered over Elswyth's head was bright enough to leave hardly any shadows, which was both fortunate and not. "But..." He pointed first at the body, shrouded in one blanket, then at the arm, which had a separate wrapping, for Farold had already begun to stiffen before the village women prepared him for burial. It was one of the last things Selwyn had seen, as the torches were being carried away: Farold bundled into the niche in the wall, his arm sticking straight out But now it hung down, still wrapped, the edge nearly brushing the floor.

Did I break his arm?
Selwyn thought, horrified, recalling how he had walked into Farold's body in the dark. Would Farold's spirit be restless because of it?

Would Farold's spirit be
angry
because of it?

Surely not as angry as it would be at whoever had killed him, Selwyn assured himself. Surely a man who had gone through murder wouldn't hold the accidental breaking of an arm against someone.

Elswyth shook her head at him, as though all his thoughts were written on his face. If she had been standing close enough, she probably would have smacked him yet again. Pressing the cloth of her cloak even tighter against her nose, she used her knife to cut open the seam the village women had sewn to close Farold into the blanket She wrinkled her face on seeing the two-day-old corpse, which made Selwyn think better of her. Then she picked up the dangling arm and folded it over Farold's chest, as if she, too, believed in decorum. "Dead bodies go stiff," she told Selwyn. She wiggled the loose arm. "And then they relax again. There's nothing to fret about here, except that in another day the body will start leaking, and we'll want to be away by then."

And except, Selwyn thought squeamishly, that she seemed to have more experience than anyone should with dead bodies.

She leaned over and cut off a lock of Farold's light brown hair, then wrapped it in another piece of unbleached wool cloth from her pack. Finished, she tucked the blanket back under Farold's body as carefully as a mother tucking in a sleeping child.

"I'm finished here," she told Selwyn, "unless you wanted to steal some of the knives or rings or other possessions these people were buried with."

"No," Selwyn assured her hotly. But then, for the first time, he considered that perhaps not all her suggestions were meant to be taken seriously. "No," he repeated more calmly.

And she did smile.

"Come." She swept the light from its place a handspan above her head so that it once more rested not quite in her palm. "Your service to me begins now. You will start by carrying my pack."

"Elswyth," he called. It seemed overfamiliar, considering the vast difference in their ages, considering the power she had. But he wasn't sure how one addressed a witch. Obviously not
My lady. Your Unholiness?
But she had given the name Elswyth, whether or not that was truly her name.

She turned back to look at him, with an expression that didn't seem annoyed with his familiarity but that warned she was prepared for—and willing to deal harshly with—any nonsense he might be planning.

He spoke quickly. "I'm worried about my family."

She glanced around the burial cavern. "Are they here?" But her tone was suspicious.

"No," he said hurriedly, before she became too distrustful of anything he said. "But they know I was put here."

Elswyth obviously didn't see the connection. She gestured for him to continue speaking, motioning with the hand that the light followed, which was dizzying to watch.

"They won't realize that you've..." He hesitated, then said, "rescued," and she snorted. He took a deep breath. "They won't realize that you've rescued me." He drifted off, unsettled.

"Then they'll have a pleasant surprise a year from now, won't they?" she said in a tone that hinted she didn't entirely believe that would be the case.

Selwyn spoke quickly, for she'd started to turn back around. "But my father ... I'm worried about my father. That he might do something hasty and foolish. That he might try to rescue me himself, or go after Bowden, who sentenced me to this fate. And then they might do the same to him, or kill him outright."

She was regarding him blankly.

"I'm worried that if my father doesn't know I'm safe, he may do something rash that will endanger his own safety."

Elswyth said, "Are you trying to ask something?"

She was a witch, Selwyn reminded himself. Despite the fact that she looked like somebody's grandmother, she was not used to the love and concern of families. "I'm asking if my service to you can begin tomorrow. I'll carry your pack out for you," he assured her hastily. "I'll accompany you wherever you want to go. But I want to stop by home first, and let my parents see I'm unharmed, and let them know I'll be coming back in a year."

"But you won't," Elswyth pointed out "For surely your villagers would take your continued existence badly."

"Oh." Selwyn was embarrassed he hadn't thought of that. "Then, I'll tell my parents that I'm unharmed, but that, obviously, I won't be able to return home. They'll be satisfied with that, if they have to be, so long as they know I'm safe."

Elswyth was shaking her head. "If
you
suspect that your father might attempt rescue or vengeance, surely others will have the same thought. They'll have set up a watch on him."

The hard part was knowing she was probably right.

"Then," Selwyn said desperately, "can
you
send word to them?"

"Would that be before or after your father tries his rash scheme and is punished for it?"

"Well, what do you suggest?" Selwyn cried out in frustration.

"That you let the world take care of itself," Elswyth said.

"We're not talking about the world," Selwyn said. "We're talking about my family."

Elswyth looked at him with that face of hers that gave away nothing of what she was thinking.

Selwyn tried to control his ragged breathing. "I need," he said, "to prove that I didn't kill Farold. That's the only way I'll ever be able to return. That's the only way my family can ever go back to being what it was."