ONE: A Familiar Ringing

Alice would have liked to blame it all on the incident in the village, but in truth even she could recognize that the seed was planted many years ago, maybe even before she had met Tom Ward. Still, the events that occurred in that village ignited something in Alice, or maybe snuffed something out. She could not be sure of any of these things, but she was sure that she felt different when she returned to Chipenden.

Alice, as she often did, had gone with Tom on spook's business to this village. It was clear that a boggart was plaguing these people, but one ignorant man took one look at Alice – a pretty young woman with pointy shoes and a sharp sense of smell – and accused her of witchcraft. Alice had nearly laughed at the time. A grown man was stupid enough to think that she had not only been draining blood from cattle and people in the area, but that coming to the village to tend to the wounded was simply part of her cunning. Never mind that she had been days away in Chipenden while the boggart committed its grisly crimes. It all would have been mostly harmless, but that one man's accusation was enough to stir up the rest of the village men into a frenzy. By the time Alice and Tom left the village, with the boggart safely bound and many villagers saved, those men were building a pyre on which to burn her. She brushed it off in front of Tom, but the villagers' behavior was starting to wear on her, sending her a message she would rather ignore.

That was why Alice was in a foul mood, and had been for over a week, which was why she ignored the bell at the withy trees when it rang. The bell had rung in the wee hours of the morning, waking Tom and Alice from a dead sleep. Alice pretended not to hear the bell, rolling over as Tom's warmth disappeared and left her back cold. He returned shortly, just as she was starting to drift off again, whispering that a farmer's lad came to fetch him to deal with a cattle-ripper, and he would be back that evening or the day after. Alice hummed a response, nodding her head, and Tom had kissed her forehead before she slipped back into sleep.

Tom had been gone for nearly a day, and Alice had run out of ways to occupy herself. She had already taken her customary walk before breakfast, collecting calendula, elder, and other useful plants, parts of which were now drying on the windowsill in the late afternoon sun. She filled the time between breakfast and lunch well enough, finishing her self-imposed project of copying out one of the books in the library. Old Gregory may have had some outdated notions in his lifetime, but she had to agree that expanding the library was a wise idea. Now, some time after lunch, the sun just beginning to creep toward the horizon, Alice was feeling like a wild animal penned up in the Chipenden house. She felt slightly guilty for letting her bad mood prevent her from going with Tom on spook's business, especially if that cattle-ripper turned dangerous toward humans. If someone died of their injuries, it would be her fault for not being there to help.

So when she heard the familiar bell ringing, she did not even consider staying put. Setting off toward the grove of withy trees, she deeply inhaled the smell of the crisp breeze of early autumn. It smelled of apples, with just a hint of the coming winter and – something else. Something odd. Alice sniffed again, more deliberately this time. Rotting meat? While rotting meat was certainly not out of the ordinary, it smelled closer than she would expect. The boggart wouldn't let meat go bad, would it? In any case she would have sniffed that out inside the house. No, this was something else. She sniffed again and smelled only that strange rotten odor.

The rotten smell only got stronger as she continued down the lane toward the bell. With a sinking feeling like a rock falling through her belly, Alice saw a strange lump shaded by the withy trees in the near distance. When she stepped into the shadow of the grove, she saw it for what it truly was – a person sitting on the ground, leaning against the tree to which the bell was tied, his back to her. The person looked small, surely no more than a child.

"Hello?" Alice called, the rock in her belly lifting slightly. The child did not so much as stir. Had he been waiting so very long? Perhaps he rang the bell hours ago while Alice had been dozing in the armchair, and had been waiting ever since? The breeze lifted, and with it carried the smell of rotting meat, stronger than ever. The rock inside her, suddenly swollen into a boulder, dropped like an anchor as Alice made the connection.

The child was dead. The body at the bell was dead.

Alice crept forward to confirm what she already knew, the tiniest bit of hopeful human nature burning inside her like an ember. But when she turned and saw the child's face, nothing could be worse. Long since dead, the skin that was left on the young boy was a yellowy white in color, his eyes and lips eaten away by carrion birds. His throat was cut deeply, the shirtfront soaked in blood, though his head had been perfectly balanced to hide the wound and create the illusion of life from the back. Alice covered her mouth and nose, unable to allow the smell in any longer. But she could not take her eyes off of this child. He was no more than seven or eight years old, with straight sandy brown hair and plain clothes. She did not recognize him as one of the children from the Chipenden village, but that did not mean he couldn't be. The villagers weren't exactly neighborly toward Alice at the best of times; many still remembered her as Bony Lizzie's niece, as a skinny lass with threadbare clothes and pointy shoes who hissed at village boys. Alice couldn't blame them even now, and mostly kept her distance until she and Tom needed provisions.

Especially after her last encounter with villagers some miles south of Chipenden, Alice worried about this corpse so close by. The villagers would surely blame her, call her a murderer, assume she killed this young child for some dark ritual. What was she to do? It seemed too dangerous to take the body into the spook's garden, and, frankly, Alice wasn't sure she had the stomach to do so. Perhaps it would be safer – perhaps it would redirect suspicion – if she reacted as any other person would, and fetched help from the village. She could go for the butcher, she supposed. He was one of the braver men of the village, and was never outright rude to her. And he certainly was no stranger to death, though this child at the withy trees would shake even the biggest of men. Still, Alice could think of no one else barring Tom returning a day early.

So Alice set of at a run to the village. The butcher was closing up shop when she reached him, the sun gleaming low in the sky. She surged toward him with a burst of speed.

"Can you help me?" she called out to him, dispensing with any greeting or pleasantries.

"Oh!" the man looked surprised, even fearful. "Do you… do you need a doctor, miss?"

"No, I found –" she hesitated. "I found a child."

The butcher's eyes softened slightly. "Where'd you find him?"

"Spook's bell rang, and when I went to tell whoever it was that the spook's away, the child was sitting there." It wasn't a lie.

"All by himself, is he?"

She nodded. "Thought you might be able to help. Don't know what to do with him myself."

The butcher hesitated at first, then said "Certainly. Let me lock up shop and I'll follow you up the hill. Get a head start while I close up, I'll join you as soon as I can."

"Thank you." Alice was relieved, and the butcher walked fast enough to reach her before she had even crested the hill. He was a big man with big strides.

"How old do you reckon this child is?" the butcher asked, clearly in order to break the silence. If the villagers found anything worse than conversing with Alice, it was Alice in silence.

"Seven, maybe eight."

"Oh, has he said anything to you? Anything at all about where he comes from, who left him here?"

Alice blanched, nearly coming to a standstill. "No. He's said nothing."

"Nothing at all?"

Alice shook her head. Her pulse was rising. They were nearing the withy trees. The butcher would turn on her, she knew it. His scent was overpowering, all sour sweat and rusty blood. He would see the child's corpse at the bell and assume she murdered him and brought the butcher to gloat, to lord her dark power over the village. He would attack her for such cruelty, and she would be forced to fight back. She would kill him, though she wouldn't want to, and the village would hunt her down. Tom would return and defend her, of course, caught between his duty to the County and his loyalty to her and –

"Well where is he?" the butcher asked. Alice stopped.

The body of the child was no longer at the bell.

A/N: Well here I am. I have two quick things to say: 1. Reviews will make me update faster. They just will. 2. I haven't read the Starblade Chronicles and I probably never will. PM me about the first 13 books though, I have lots of things to say.