Magic Can Be Murder by Vivian Vande Velde Read Free Book Online Page B

"Right before
that
happened I was just telling my mother—not shouting, of course, but just maybe raising my voice, just to be heard across the length of the room—that now we would have to go back—"
    "Not
back
!" Nola's mother cried, finally taking her hands down completely from over her mouch so that she could pull on her hair. "Nola, what are you thinking? And here I was, afraid that you would be wanting to go
forward.
Again. As if that wasn't bad enough. But of course not. 'Here's a nice, safe, friendly place in Saint Erim Turi,' my Nola says to herself. 'I know what we should do: We should
leave,
as soon as we get here, that's the only sensible thing to do.' Naturally." She struck herself on the side of the head. "Why didn't I think of that?"
    "Mother!" Nola warned. To Edris, she said, "Mother is a bit overwrought. She's chinking of the sadness of the situation, and not taking into account that in this time of sorrow our poor friends shouldn't have to concern themselves with day-to-day household casks, in which we could help them."
    Edris was watching Nola's mother. From behind Edris, and from over Modig's shoulder, Nola made frantic faces at her mother that were meant to convey that she wasn't really thinking of going back to Haymarket, and would her mother, please, just for once, play along? Going back was only a pretext. For what would Edris and Modig think of them if Nola had said, "Somebody in the last town wc visited has died, and now we must move on from here because we're only a day's journey away"? It made sense that people who knew each other would come together in times of bereavement. If her mother would only realize
going back
was a ruse and stop making such a fuss. It was hard enough to think.
    Modig said, "You try to go back, and you try to go back." He thumped his cane and shook his head. "But you never can."
    What was going on at the silversmith's house—even now as her mother craned around Edris and asked Nola, "What is it you're trying to tell me, dear? I can't make it out from the faces you're making."
    "Nothing," Nola said. "I'm trying not to cry over the death of our poor friend."
    Surely, she thought, Kirwyn wasn't stupid. He couldn't expect to bash his father across the head and get away with it. Was his plan to kill the servants, too, and claim an intruder had broken in? Or would he try to set the blame on Brinna or Alan?
    On Brinna,
Nola thought, remembering Kirwyn's face through the kitchen window, and the hate she had seen there.
    But then she went even colder than she had when she'd realized she was about to witness a murder.
    Or on us,
she thought.
    How much more likely was it for Kirwyn to blame Nola and her mother for the death? Had he, in fact, already discovered the bespelled bucket in the basement? "Obviously witchcraft," he would say to che authorities, showing them the shadowform of a living man in a bucket of water. And he could claim... what? That the figure they could see had stepped out of :he bucket and killed the silversmith?
They
wouldn't know that was impossible, that Nola didn't have—and would never use, even if she did have—that kind of magic. And they would know that she was the one who had set up the spell—who else was there who could have done it? Who had recently had access to the silversmith's basement, besides Brinna and Alan? And
they
had lived in Haymarket all their lives, and everybody knew they weren't witches. Who but the two strangers, who had been asked to leave precisely for being so strange?
    And if what she had been afraid of came to pass, and the blackberry merchant from Low Beck tracked her down to Haymarket, or if somebody from Haymarket recognised his shadowform and the authorities tracked
him
down, that would not exonerate her. He would be able to protect himself. "I was at home with my family, with my field workers," he would tell them. "That creature that the witch created and placed in the bucket has a separate life from me, so I am not