The Case of the Spellbound Child by Mercedes Lackey

Author:Mercedes Lackey
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: DAW
Published: 2019-12-02T16:00:00+00:00

11

ELLIE had gotten all of the beds cleaned and restuffed with clean straw; she’d washed what passed for blankets, and everyone’s clothing, at least once. Odd, she had never done so much hard work in her life, yet somehow she was getting it all done, and feeling all right when she went to bed, not utterly exhausted. Maybe it was that she was doing it to make all the others feel better. Or maybe it was because Simon was chained up in his corner and not making twice as much work by undoing half of what she did and wasting the other half of her time by skylarking around.

Once, and only once, the Dark One had stopped her. “Tha’s doin’ a mort of work for them,” with the emphasis on them as if her fellow prisoners were beneath her, and an unspoken implication that they weren’t worth her time. But she didn’t take its bait. It was clearly trying to get her on its side, pitting her—and possibly about to dangle the bribe of getting better treatment and better food before her—against them.

As if she’d believe it. As if chopping off her finger and making her as much a prisoner here as they were was worth its table scraps! So she’d just looked down at the ground, her legs shaking, and replied, “Ev’un needs ter sleep an’ eat good so they’s strong. Tha’ needs ’em strong.” And when she got no answer, she looked up, and saw that it was just . . . staring down at her, apparently as astonished as if it had heard a toad talk.

So she’d left it standing there staring, and went back to the washing.

One huge advantage of doing all that washing was that she was cleaner than any of them. She’d always hated being dirty, and before she started doing this, she’d wanted to claw her skin off.

Her hard work paid off; the others were all looking better, stronger as she had hoped, and not quite so much in despair. They had energy and the inclination to talk, and even to help her with the chores in the prison room, which gave her more time for the other things she was doing. And on the one hand, that was more than good, it was excellent.

On the other hand . . . it meant the Dark One was sending them into the Dark Sleep a lot more often, and now it didn’t even bother to shut her out of the room when it did so.

But on the third hand . . . that meant that it was leaving after supper a lot more often. And it was coming back with things, as she would discover in the morning. Mostly those things were only for its own comfort, but it seemed to have decided that treating the prisoners better meant it was getting more of what it wanted from them. So when it came back from wherever it went, sometimes things appeared piled in front of the prison door in the morning.

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