(eng) Patty Jansen - For Queen and Country 06 by The Necromancer's Daughter

Author:The Necromancer's Daughter [Daughter, The Necromancer's]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 13

* * *

LI FAI AGREED to come with her to check out the trees and put wards on them if possible. They left the cabin and its wonderful nutty scent for the fresh morning air.

On the deck, one of Li Han’s domestic staff, a middle-aged woman dressed in a dark tunic, stood with a bowl casting handfuls of grain into the duck pen. The birds went head-down in a frenzy, gobbling up as much of the grain as quickly as they could. The woman shouted and waved the bucket when the ducks became too eager. Then she noticed Li Fai and bowed to him, and also to Johanna.

Li Fai helped Johanna down the steep gangplank, where the coach still waited, with Anton and the driver watching without the slightest expressions of puzzlement on their faces.

Johanna told Anton that she wanted to go to the tree in the marketplace.

It was only a short ride from the quay. As Li Fai had rightly noted, stallholders were already arriving with their produce. A bit further down the canal, cheeses were being unloaded from punts and carried up to the market house to be weighed and registered.

The tree that held Alexandre’s spirit stood lonely and forlorn. The trunk was twisted, the branches grew stunted and gnarled, and the leaves were marked with ugly white patterns. It was a sickly looking thing that a gardener or farmer would have chopped up for firewood long ago.

Li Fai climbed from the coach first and did Anton’s job of helping Johanna down the awkward ladder. A gust of wind blew his jacket and shirt open, showing a bit of his soft-skinned chest. Johanna debated telling him that one of his shirt buttons wasn’t done up properly, but she might embarrass him. And maybe, if there was another gust of wind, she might see his skin again.

“That thing makes me very uncomfortable,” he said.

“Yes, me, too.”

She approached the tree slowly. It was such a weird and twisted thing, with bunches of closely spaced branches growing out of the trunk at random places, with a bark whose grain resembled the patterns made by swirls of ink dropped into water. A couple of people had stopped to look. Johanna had heard only a fraction of the rumours that went around the city about her involvement with the tree: that the tree looked like this because she knitted it together from a couple of brooms, that she used it to spy on everyone and that she could talk to the trapped spirit and it would reply.

She reached out for the trunk, but Li Fai grabbed her arm. “Don’t touch it.”

“I have to. It is how I can tell if anyone has been here and tried to interfere with the tree.”

“I can feel the evil in this tree. Have you touched it before?”

“I have.” Not very often, and not since Kylian had come to town. Last time, she had been transported to the previous day, when scores of people walked past getting their daily groceries, ordering supplies for their households, bringing cheeses.

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