Never Trust a Dead Man by Vivian Vande Velde

Author:Vivian Vande Velde [Velde, Vivian Vande]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Published: 2011-11-08T16:12:00+00:00

TWELVE

Selwyn was no better off than he'd been last night, when he'd decided he had no choice but to have Elswyth magically change his appearance. No matter how far he walked, all he could figure was that he had chosen the wrong disguise. He fought the idea of yet another disguise, berating himself for a fool, urging himself desperately, "Think!" Seven years he had bargained away already. He thought back to when he'd been ten years old, to fix in his mind exactly what seven years was. A big difference, that between seventeen years old and ten. He tried to think ahead to twenty-four and couldn't.

He walked and walked, knowing he eventually had to go back to Penryth, and knowing he couldn't go back as the pest-laden, suspicion-raising, troublemaking pilgrim. Yet he could no more think how to alter his magically created disguise than he'd been able to think how to make his own disguise last night.

There was no way around it: He needed Elswyth's help.

He stopped and took a shaky breath. I will not fight it, he thought. One year more on top of all the rest means nothing.

Well, not nothing.

He took another deep breath, and this one was steadier.

The first thing he needed was to find Elswyth. But before he could do that, he had to determine where he was. He had been walking for quite a while now without paying attention, concentrating on his thoughts; and somehow or other he'd wandered off the road and was in a meadow.

The sensible thing to do was to try to find the road again, to go back up into the hills, to the back entrance of the burial caves, where he had last seen Elswyth. Once there, if he was lucky, he would be able to track her.

Not that—as a farmer—he'd had that much experience in tracking.

The sun was low in the sky after a late start and time wasted, and he realized that soon it would be the hour for bats to start stirring. With that thought, Selwyn hoped one bat in particular would wake up with the pounding headache it fully deserved. Still, that was not the important thing. The important thing was that almost one entire day had passed since he'd made his bargain with Elswyth: one day out of the week that she had allotted him. Gone. To no effect. That didn't bear thinking about. Neither did the fact that—even assuming he could again find the place where they'd parted—he'd be trying to track her at night.

What else could he do?

From where he stood in the meadow, there was no sign of the road, no matter which direction he looked. He turned around, for the reasonable thing was to go back the same way he had come, assuming the road had to be nearby, assuming he couldn't have been walking long over rough ground without noticing. And assuming he had walked more or less in a straight line.

But he stopped after only three or four steps.

Somehow that didn't feel right.

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