As he followed Maddie into the cool air outside, Will smiled wryly to himself. Maddie, the royal princess, the superior, snobbish young lady of Castle Araluen, had found her vocation as a serving maid.
Might be a new career for her if Evanlyn and Horace don’t reinstate her as a princess, he thought, and gave a short bark of laughter. He paused, surprised. It was the second time recently that he’d laughed out loud, he realised. He shook his head and strode quickly to where his apprentice was waiting for him.
He stopped a few paces from her. Her face was pale and her lip was trembling. As she looked at him, her eyes welled with tears.
“Uncle Will, I killed someone,” she said.
Her shoulders began to shake and she began to sob uncontrollably. He gathered her in, wrapping his arms around her and muttering soothing noises as he did so. The fact that she had called him “Uncle Will’ spoke volumes for her state of mind. She was still a child, he realised, in spite of all her self-confidence and bravado. And she had been forced to do the most terrible thing a person could do—take the life of another. He had no doubt that circumstances had forced her to do it. He also had no doubt that she was talking about the mysterious black-clad stranger who had been found in the street.
“Hush now, my girl,” he crooned softly to her. “Hush now. I’m here and everything’s going to be all right. Can you tell me what happened?”
Gradually, between the vast, gulping sobs that were shaking her, she described how she had woken in terror to the presence of an intruder in her room. How he had threatened her, and then how the terror had been gradually replaced by anger and indignation.
“You followed him?” Will said, as she described how she had gone down the stairs, her sling ready. She snuffled back a tear and nodded.
“Yes. I thought I should.”
He had released her when he asked the question, but now he pulled her into his embrace once more.
“My god but you’re a brave girl,” he said, marvelling at her courage.
She continued with her tale, describing how the sheer chance of the stone under her bare foot had saved her life, as the quattro whirred over her head. Then she told him how she saw the man preparing another cast and let fly with her sling, a fraction of a second before he could release his missile.
“Let me get this straight,” Will said. “He threw a quattro at you. He was about to throw a second, and you retaliated, just in time.”
She nodded tearfully. “I didn’t think what would happen. I just let fly. Then I fell flat,” she said.
Will nodded sympathetically. “Of course you didn’t think. You acted as you’ve been trained to act. You reacted to a threat. There’s no blame here attached to you, my sweet.”
“But he—”
“He was obviously working with that filthy Stealer. He tried once to kill you as you came out the door. And he was trying to kill you again when you threw. And you say he had another two of those weapons in his satchel?”
She nodded, not saying anything. Will made a dismissing gesture with one hand.
“Then you acted in self-defence and there’s no blame in that. None at all. If you hadn’t, I have no doubt he would have tried again to kill you with those remaining quattros.”
“I suppose so.” She had told herself this over and over since the event. To have someone else say it, and particularly Will, was enormously comforting.
“Dry your tears now. I know it’s a horrible thing to face, but it was something you had to do. You had to do it or you would have been killed. Are we clear on that?”
She nodded, wiping the back of her hand across her face to dry her tears.
“I so wanted to talk to you. I couldn’t tell anyone and I felt so… dreadful,” she said in a small voice.
Will nodded at her, comforting her. “I shouldn’t have left you. If anyone is to blame for this, it’s me. But I want you to put this out of your mind now and don’t think any further on it, all right?”
“All right. But it’s just—”
“No. No more. Put the thoughts aside.”
“But… he had a sheet of paper on him. I think it might be important.”
Will’s head snapped up at those words. “Paper? What is it?”
“I’m not sure. It could be a map of some kind. It’s in my room.”
He took her hand and led her towards the inn. “Then let’s have a look at it.”
“But… I’ve got work to do…” she protested.
He shook his head. “Let Jerome and his wife do it. He said you should take a long break. So let’s take it.”
“What did you find out in Boyletown?” she asked as they headed for her room.
“The Storyman was there all right—a couple of days before Peter Williscroft disappeared.” Will paused, then added, “And the boy was being mistreated, just like the others.”
“By his father?”
He shook his head. “An older brother. He used to bully him continually. Nobody was surprised when Peter went missing.”
They reached the top of the stairs and he pushed the door open, standing aside to let her enter the little room.
“Now let’s see what’s on this paper you found.”
Thirty-nine
They studied the single sheet of paper, frowning as to its possible meaning. There was one word written on it: Pueblos.
And six crosses drawn, each one numbered. Will scratched his head. There was something about the arrangement of three of those crosses that looked familiar.
“What does pueblos mean?” he asked, more to himself than to Maddie.
But she answered. “I think it’s Iberian. I just can’t place it. Does it mean horsemen?” She frowned. Her schooling at Castle Araluen had included a basic study of foreign languages including Gallican and Iberian. But she hadn’t paid a lot of attention to those lessons—or any other lessons she had been taught, for that matter.
“The benefit of a classical education,” Will muttered.
Maddie was still frowning, rubbing her forehead furiously as she strained for the elusive meaning of that word. It wasn’t horsemen. It was on the tip of her tongue. It was…
“Villages!” she said triumphantly. “Pueblo means village in Iberian!”
And suddenly, Will knew why the arrangement of three of those crosses was familiar. He scrabbled in his inner pocket for Liam’s map and spread it out beside the sheet from the intruder’s satchel.
He took a stick of charcoal from his belt wallet and quickly drew lines connecting the three villages of Danvers Crossing, Boyletown and Esseldon on Liam’s map. The lines formed a narrow, oblique triangle. Then he took the sheet that Maddie had found and connected the first three villages marked there. He found himself looking at the same triangle.
“These are the villages where children disappeared,” he said, leaning back.
Maddie pointed to the sheet she had taken from the stranger. “And there are three others,” she said.
Will frowned and drew a line from village number three, which represented Boyletown, to the farthest village marked on the stranger’s chart. The line ran east of northeast. He measured the length with finger and thumb, then compared it to the distance between Esseldon and Boyletown, calculating quickly.
When Will had visited Castle Trelleth, he had obtained a detailed map of the fief. He took it out now and unfolded it, running his finger in an east-north-east direction until he came to a village that corresponded roughly with the one on the chart Maddie had found in the intruder’s satchel.
“Willow Vale,” he said.
Maddie craned over his shoulder to see the map. “Why that one? Why not four or five?” she asked.