The Marshlanders

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Contents

Chapter One: Clare's Promise..............................................3Chapter Two: William's Adventure..........................................20Chapter Three: The Brotherhood............................................35Chapter Four: A Time for Healing..........................................47Chapter Five: A Fine Day for Fishing......................................61Chapter Six: Many Meetings................................................67Chapter Seven: The Fox and the Ferret.....................................86Chapter Eight: Sheep, Sheep, Come Home....................................103Chapter Nine: Journey through the Marshlands..............................117Chapter Ten: Beaver Night.................................................140Chapter Eleven: Not as Orphans............................................153Chapter Twelve: The Green Man.............................................172Chapter Thirteen: The Straw Lion..........................................186Chapter Fourteen: Lady, Lady..............................................194Chapter Fifteen: The Wolf in the Rye......................................207Chapter Sixteen: William and the Merchant Adventurers.....................226Chapter Seventeen: Brent..................................................239Chapter Eighteen: A Weeping of Children...................................257Chapter Nineteen: The Cloak of Darkness...................................277Chapter Twenty: The Gray Mother...........................................293Chapter Twenty-One: Winds of The North....................................305

Chapter One

Clare ran like mad, dodging between the trees, leaping over fallen logs, and darting through openings in the underbrush. At a sudden dip, she plunged forward and fell flat on her stomach. The wind knocked out of her, she lay on the ground, gasping for air. Realizing she wouldn't be able to hear them coming if she was breathing so loudly, she quieted herself and listened. There was no more shouting. The thud of boots had faded away when she'd plunged from the field into the forest. Only the new leaves stirred. From far away, she heard the song of a wood thrush.

It's all my fault, she thought. That's why they got her!

"This will make a good place or you to sit while I look for the goldenseal," Mother had said, pointing to the wall along the edge of the field. "Promise to keep your eyes on the drove and whistle the thrush song if you see anyone coming."

Clare had clambered up on the wall. The stones had warmed her bottom nicely on the sunny but cool April day.

Clare's mother, Margaret, had taken a considerable risk directing her to climb up that high, but in her dun-colored woolen skirt and shawl, Clare would be hard to see. Margaret hadn't done any healing since the new Guild of Apothecaries, as they called themselves, had forbidden it four years ago. To prove their point, they had persuaded the Maxton minister to preach thundering condemnations of healers. They were devil worshipers and heretics, he had shouted. People had laughed behind their hands that he actually believed those old winter's tales.

But after his sermon, a mob hunted down an old herb gatherer culling thyme in the fields beyond Maxton and drove a stake through her heart. Their bloodlust roused, they had rushed back to the village and hung the pharmacist to whom the herb gatherer had sold her cures. They did it as a further example to the villagers.

Since then, Margaret had done very little healing in Twist. But the day before, well after dark, a mother had knocked on her door, haggard from sleeplessness. The woman had an infant in her arms, thrashing with pain. As a baby, Clare had weighed about as much as the infant the woman held-no more than five pounds-and her arms and legs had been just as thin. While examining the child's mouth, Margaret had seen the telltale ashy color of thrush, a miserable, though entirely treatable, disease of the very young.

"Did you go to the apothecary?" she asked the woman.

"I did, but he gave me medicine that frightened me. Baby went to sleep and didn't wake up for nine hours. I'm afraid to give it again, and her thrush is spreading."

Margaret decided to fetch some goldenseal, a little plant that was fond of moist ground and worked very well for such cases. Clare could keep watch.

"Tell me again what you've promised to do if you see anyone," Margaret had said to Clare.

"I must whistle the wood thrush song three times, waiting in between. I must slip down quietly to the other side of the wall and keep out of sight until I get to the brook. Then I must follow it along to where you are," Clare replied.

"Good."

But it hadn't worked out that way. The day before, Clare and her friends had played their first hopscotch of the spring. She had lost narrowly, and it had been all the fault of a round-bottomed potsy. She had been telling Mother all about it on their walk together over the fields. Clare always adored these expeditions, though it puzzled her that Mother let her babble away about her friends and their games when, in Twist, she could be so mean to Clare and treated Clare's brother much more nicely. Roger had complained about being left behind today, but it was Clare Mother trusted to sit watch because she was such an expert whistler that she could get thrushes to echo her call.

While sitting on the wall, Clare had spotted a perfect flat-bottomed stone. Keeping her eyes fixed on the drove a half mile away over the furrows, she had jumped down, grabbed it, and then clambered quickly back to her perch. It was a perfect potsy! She had gazed at her treasure in rapture, imagining herself deftly hopping her way to victory. It was just a few stolen looks, but time enough for three tall men dressed in black to appear in the field, too close for her to whistle a warning or slip down the dell to Mother.

She had tried to divert their attention by hurling herself from the wall and darting away over the field. But they must have spotted Mother, who was halfway up the dell. They leapt over the wall, grabbed Mother roughly by her shoulders, and threw her on her back. Holding her down, they had plunged their hands into her pockets. With a triumphant shout, they had brandished the goldenseal. Hauling her to her feet, they had turned her toward Clare, who had stopped to watch, transfixed with terror.

Glaring at Clare, Mother had declared, "Yes, I am a healer, as my mother and grandmother before me, but that is no daughter of mine. She's a changeling. Ask anyone in Twist! She followed me out here, but would I ever apprentice one like that? You can tell she's different by the way she runs-faster than any human being!"

Margaret had wished with all her heart she didn't have to say that, but how else was she to get Clare moving? And it worked! At her hint, Clare had taken to her heels.

The minister knew Margaret had always insisted Clare was not her daughter. But a changeling? Watching the weird child leap like a deer over the furrows, he realized that if they could catch her and cage her below his pulpit, she would provide a perfect prop for his sermons.

"After her!" he had ordered his two companions. "I can bring this one back to the village by myself."

Lying on the forest...