The Blood Binding by Helen Stringer Page A

classmates. She wasn’t
wearing a jacket, for one thing, and she wasn’t clutching a copy of Mr.
Watson’s worksheets, for another.
    Belladonna hesitated for a
moment, then walked toward her. As she got closer, she could see that the girl
was the same age as her, or maybe a little younger. She was very thin and
completely sodden. Her reddish hair was plastered to her head and hung in dank
rattails down her back, half sticking to the sides of her face, and the worn
garland that crowned her head seemed sad, rather than festive. Her dress was
little more than a simple shift, and had probably been white at one time, but
was now the color of mud.
    Belladonna glanced around to
make sure no one was near.
    “Hello,” she said, softly.
    The girl looked surprised,
and instinctively turned around, as if she thought there must be someone
standing behind her.
    “No,” said Belladonna. “I
said hello to you.”
    “You can see me?” whispered
the girl.
    “Yes. You laughed at me.”
    The girl stared at her for a
moment before a smile spread across her grubby face.
    “You looked funny. Your legs
and arms all went in different directions.”
    “I’m Belladonna.”
    “Branwyn,” whispered the
girl.
    She fingered at her leather
necklace and smiled.
    “That looks tight,” said
Belladonna. “Why don’t you take it off?”
    Branwyn looked confused.
    “What?”
    “Your necklace. It looks
uncomfortable.”
    “Johnson! What the devil are
you doing over there?”
    Mr. Watson stomped across the
parking lot.
    “The fort is over there,” he
said, pointing to the walls.
    “Yes, but this is the parade
ground,” said Belladonna, turning to the page on the worksheet. “We’re supposed
to mark it off, see?”
    “Yes, mark it off, not set up
camp. You know students aren’t supposed to wander off alone.”
    “Yes, sir.”
    “Right, well. Get on with it,
then.”
    He marched off. Belladonna
glanced at Branwyn and was surprised to see that she had shrunken back, an
expression of fear on her face.
    “Is he your Seer?” she
whispered, her voice shaking slightly.
    “Our…? No, he’s just Mr.
Watson, our teacher. I’d better do as he says, though.”
    Branwyn smiled uncertainly.
    “It was nice meeting you,”
said Belladonna, a little awkwardly. It was always a bit hard to end
conversations with ghosts, as if you were abandoning them, somehow.
    Branwyn smiled briefly, brushing
her hair away from her face, which didn’t help her general appearance one bit.
    “I haven’t spoken to anyone
in a long time,” she whispered. “It was nice. I’m always here if you’d like to
talk again.”
    Belladonna couldn’t tell her
that the bus trip had taken over an hour and that it was very unlikely she’d be
able to return, but she just nodded, turned, and made her way across the
parking lot to the maze of low stone walls, roughly sculpted horse troughs and stacks
of tiles from the ancient hypocausts.
    She finished her worksheet
and joined everyone else as they headed toward the small museum for lunch,
though she couldn’t help glancing back to see if Branwyn was still sitting on
the edge of the parade ground.
    She was.
    “What is it?” asked Steve,
his voice low and his attitude nonchalant, so that no one would think he was
actually talking to the weird girl. “A ghost?”
    “Yeah, but…”
    “But what?”
    “There’s something odd.”
    “Is it a soldier?”
    “No. A girl.”
    Steve grunted and melted away
into the crush of kids trying to get through the single narrow door into the
museum.
    Mr. Watson led the way to a
small cafeteria, where everyone sat down and got out whatever sandwiches and
drinks they had brought for lunch. Belladonna usually had some strange
concoction assembled by her mother, but this time it was just a store-bought
ham sandwich in a plastic wrapper with a bottle of fizzy orange instead of
Tizer.
    Toward the end of lunch the
museum director arrived and introduced herself as Dr. Hartley. She was