NaGeira by Paul Butler Page A

smiled and leaned back slowly.
    “You will be in a pit of a different kind,” he said, clasping his hands over his stomach. “No chains, no whips, no living carpet of rats. Just another mind, like yours, infected with witchery and corruption.” He gazed at me a moment longer. “If you can withstand the horrors of his imagination, I will send a satisfactory report to your parents and you might be permitted to remain on the master’s side. If he infects you with his wickedness, you may indeed be sent to limbo.” He nodded to the guard. “Take her to the playwright’s cell.”

CHAPTER NINE
    Y ou haven’t been out all day, have you?” The question comes from nowhere, burning its way through my sleep like a comet. I open my eyes to see a young girl staring down at me. My dream—and it was a pleasant dream, full of warm, safe forests carpeted with pine needles, whispering leaves, and the scent of tree bark and wildflowers—fizzles away into nothing.
    The girl is holding a candle in front of her face. Her hair is golden, her eyes green. There was a time when I used to see such a creature gazing at me from the mirror of my parents’ house in the Pale.
    I know this must be Emma Rose.
    “That’s curious, isn’t it?” she continues, while I push myself up from the mattress. I see there is a smaller child next to her. “Everyone else has been frantic.” Emma tilts her head to one side. “What do you think about that, Mary? You and I, Mother and Father, the whole settlement, have been running around, searchingand calling, driving ourselves mad while this old woman sleeps in her clothes on her stinking bed.”
    Mary looks up at her older sister, her eyes as wide as saucers. She shrinks away from me a little.
    “And I heard a curious thing,” Emma continues, clearly not expecting any answer from her younger sister. “Mother telling Aunt about something this old woman said, something about how Sara had never come to visit her. That is odd, isn’t it, since Sara told me she intended to come up here and confront the old witch?”
    “How long have you been standing there?” I ask the child, trying hard to sound more angry than frightened. But there is a quaver in my voice.
    “Long enough to tire of your snoring,” Emma answers.
    Emma, like her sister Sara, shows not the slightest sign of fear or self-doubt. Also, like her sister, she is pretty with perfect rosy cheeks. What I would not give to slap them! But I do nothing; I know she holds all the power.
    “What do you want from me?” I ask quietly.
    “Information, for a start.”
    “Information about what?” I ask.
    “Why, about the disappearance of my sister, of course.”
    “I don’t know anything about that,” I say quickly. It was convincing enough, but I can feel my heart beating. I am trapped, and merely wish for this all to be over. Burn me, hang me, but get me out of this unnatural situation.
    “Oh, I think you do know, old woman.”
    Suddenly, my sinews tighten and the fear falls away from me like water running off from a breeched awning. “It’s Sheila, not ‘oldwoman,’ and I don’t care what you think you know. Get out of my cabin.”
    Emma takes a step backwards as though reading my intentions. I was indeed about to strike her.
    “There’s no need for that,” she says, smiling. “If I’d wanted to give you away, we could have done so already.”
    “What do you want, then?” I swing my legs to the floor and raise myself into a standing position.
    “I told you. Information.”
    Emma takes a sideways step as I make for my chair. She pulls her sister with her as though she were a rag doll.
    “I told you I don’t know about Sara,” I say, lowering myself onto the chair.
    “Oh, I don’t care about that, although I have to admit I’m curious.”
    I stare at the girl’s smiling face for a moment. Mary is still frightened. She sucks her thumb and nestles into her older sister.
    “You don’t care?”
    “No, why should I?” she