The Wizard Priest Read online

  “Quick, put some heavy things behind the wood. It wants to come in.”

  Two women barred the door with a broom and a stick. They were about to drag a bag full of firewood in front of the door when a bright glow oozed underneath the door. The very real dragon had turned back into a fire dragon. The women retreated.

  “Evil magic!” one shouted.

  The fire dragon flitted through the hall, frolicked up to the ceiling and landed in the hayloft. A shower of magic sparks blew up.

  The dragon returned to its former size.

  The sturdy woman climbed halfway up the ladder and yelled at the creature from her safe position. She still held the broom.

  “Take it back outside!” she yelled at Nellie. “It’s gone to sleep. My children sleep up there and I’m not having them in the same place as that creature.”

  “Mam, it’s a warm creature,” Anneke said. “I’m not afraid of it.”

  The girl’s mother glared first at her daughter and then at Nellie. She was a coarse, heavyset woman with a strong brow and a severe bun at the back of her head with hair that had gone grey.

  Nellie’s cheeks glowed.

  “If that creature is going is to follow you around, you can’t stay with us.”

  Mina said, “I think that’s unfair. Nellie has brought us food all the time. She says the dragon is just following her around. It’s not her fault it’s here.”

  “But she still can’t stay. It will bring us into danger, that’s why.”

  “It brought Nellie into danger to bring us food. She risked herself by taking things from the kitchen without the knowledge of the Regent. Are you going to be so ungrateful as to send her away?”

  The woman glared at Mina.

  “Nellie helped us when our life was hard. So now we will help her, dragon or no, and that is the final word I will hear about it.”

  She looked around the group. The expressions in the faces of several women were not terribly friendly, but none of them said anything.

  “So the kitten is the dragon’s real friend?” Anneke asked.

  “I think so.” Nellie spoke softly, aware that all the women listened.

  “Then I will bring the kitten upstairs.”

  Anneke picked up the kitten.

  “You will do no such thing,” her mother said. “Stay right here.”

  “But Mam, she’s a dragon tamer,” Anneke said. “She came here on the back of the dragon.”

  The woman said, “Is that so?” She gave Nellie a suspicious look.

  And Mina said, “This is Agatha, the mother of Anneke and Bas.”

  Nellie held out her hand. “Pleased to meet you. I’m Nellie.”

  The woman gave another snort. She shook Nellie’s hand, reluctantly. “I don’t do all that magic stuff.”

  “Me neither.”

  “Good. Because I want none of that near my children.”

  “She really is a dragon tamer, Mam,” Anneke said again.

  “I don’t want to hear any more about it.”

  “Can I take the kitten up to the loft?”

  “What did I just tell you?”

  “But Mam! Ewout is going up.”

  One of Jantien’s boys was climbing the ladder, peeking up to the loft to spy on the dragon.

  “I don’t care what Ewout does. Maybe his mother doesn’t mind him being struck dumb with magic. But I do. You and Bas will stay here.”

  The girl started crying and Mina took Nellie to introduce her to the others.

  “I’m sorry for creating trouble for you,” Nellie said.

  “Don’t worry about it. Agatha is a little terse sometimes,” Mina said.

  “I really don’t control that beast,” Nellie said.

  “You’ll be fine. She’ll warm up to you. Let me introduce you to the others.”

  Apart from Jantien, Nellie knew a few other people in the group.

  Emmie and Lise were a mother and daughter who both used to work in the household of a well-off merchant family. Lise was twenty, and Emmie mentioned that her greatest worry was that, because they were poor, her daughter would never marry.

  Gertie, Hilde and Josie had all lost husbands.

  “He took off with a trollop from the harbourside,” Gertie said. “A whore, that’s what she is. Her boobs are bigger than mine, but I bet she can’t even boil an egg. Men are disgusting. Be glad you’re not married.” The latter to Lise.

  Hilde’s husband had died of consumption. Like Mina’s, her children were older, but they had all left town.

  Josie’s husband had gone missing at sea several years ago. She had lost her first and only child through illness.

  Misfortune through hardship or illness was the glue that held these women together.

  Koby hung out with them a lot. She was twelve, the eldest child in the group, but her face had already lost all her childish softness.

  “Both her parents are dead,” Mina said in a quiet voice. “She has an uncle, but he doesn’t want to care for her. It’s very sad. I try to help her where I can, but she’s very closed to outsiders.”

  Most of the children were Jantien’s. Ewout, the oldest, still stood on the ladder gawking at the dragon, and the dragon gawked back at him. He had gone a few steps higher, and his younger sister was right below him, while Anneke and her brother glared at them from where they sat.

  Ewout said, “Yes, he likes the kitten.”

  “He?” Mina said.

  “It’s a boy dragon, hadn’t you noticed? He’s got . . .” He made a swinging motion in front of his lower body.

  The children laughed and a few declared that they wanted to see it.

  They all crowded at the bottom of the ladder. Jantien told them to take a peek, but not go to the top of the ladder.

  Anneke crossed her arms over her chest and kept glaring at her mother, and Agatha pretended not to notice.

  “And this is Zelda,” Mina said to Nellie.

  The final woman in the group to meet Nellie was of tiny stature. She wore several layers of clothing of a foreign style, with big colourful patterns. A faded yellow scarf sat around her hair. The wisps that poked out from underneath were black. Her eyes were dark brown, like those of a cow, even if she had pale and freckled skin. Her face was sharp, with a rather big nose. And were those really golden earrings that poked out from underneath her scarf?

  She looked Nellie up and down.

  “Hmph, can you work?” She spoke with a curious accent.

  “I’ve worked all my life. Depends what kind of work.”

  “Do you know anything about donkeys?”

  “Not really. I worked in households.”

  “Ha! Washerwoman. That’s all people do around here. Wash, wash, wash. No wonder the water is so foul. Do you know about plants?”

  “Herbs? A bit.”

  “Good. You can come with me.”

  “What? Now?”

  What sort of strange woman was this?

  “Ha! No. Tomorrow. We sell herbs. You come with me. It’s a good job. We have money to eat.”

  Nellie glanced at Mina, but Mina smiled and nodded. “It’s all right.”

  “Ha, all right. Of course it’s all right. I’m Zelda. I make the people better. Local woman say the herbs are good, so the rich woman believe the herbs are good. Woman feels better, gives more money. Ha.”

  “What about the dragon, Zelda?” Mina asked.

  “Dragon make us rich.”

  “I meant how can we hide it?”

  “Dragon makes poop. We can do much things with dragon poop. We can dry it, we can make it into a salve, we can make pills. Rich men will pay a lot because dragon poop makes them like a dragon, you know, in the bed. When the dragon does a poop, bring it to me, children.”

  Anneke and Bas laughed. The other children came down the ladder to see what was so funny.

  “What do we get when we bring you poop?” Ewout asked.

  “Ha! You’re getting smart already. You get poop, we get money. We can
buy sweets, no?”

  The children’s eyes shone.

  Mina still insisted, “But how can we make sure no one sees the dragon?”

  “No one will see. Dragons are lazy. They sleep and sleep and sleep. They make much poop.”

  Her straightforward attitude was refreshing, and because Zelda didn’t seem to be concerned about the dragon, Agatha let her children join the others in the hayloft. Because, apparently, the prospect of “poop” and money overcame all.

  Nellie went to check on the dragon. He lay in the hay, with his tail curled around his body. The children all leaned against his flanks, their cheeks rosy from the animal’s warmth. The kitten snuggled next to Anneke.

  With that settled, the women set about making beds in the stable. Nellie was given a blanket to share with Gertie. It wasn’t warm enough, but when they covered themselves with straw, it was quite snug. Oil for the lamp was scarce, and it was too dark for Nellie to read from the Book of Verses, but she kept her satchel close to her head. She missed her room in the palace and she feared for the coming winter, but for now she was dry and didn’t freeze.

  Chapter 2

  * * *

  NELLIE LEARNED the next morning what Zelda’s business entailed.

  She rose before dawn, and when the women woke up, she distributed tasks among them. For example, it was Mina’s task to cook while Lise and Emmie went to get water at the well. When they came back, they distributed the water into two pots. One was for cooking; they placed the other in the corner of the warehouse for mysterious purposes.

  After a brief breakfast of watery porridge, Zelda handed out further tasks.

  Gertie, Hilde and Josie were to go to a place referred to as “the shop” and had to work there. Before they left, Zelda handed them a wooden box that looked like a drawer from a herb cabinet. Inside lay a soft brown-orange object that resembled a large egg, but was not as evenly shaped.

  This morning, Anneke had brought this thing down the ladder, the first delivery of dragon poop.

  “Spread it out over the bench to dry,” Zelda said to Gertie. “Then put the powder in a jar. We’ll use it in salves. You might want to visit the butcher for sheep’s fat.”

  Zelda said she would look after Nellie herself. She told Nellie to get changed into something warm but not too shabby. She then took the donkey out of the pen.

  Young Koby was coming, too, but the others were all staying in the warehouse.

  The morning was freezing. An icy mist hung in the streets, turning all the buildings varying shades of grey.

  “Do you know where we’re going?” Nellie asked Koby as the two of them followed Zelda and the donkey. Zelda was not one of the most forthcoming people about her plans. When Nellie had asked her the same question, she had only said, “You’ll see.”

  “We’ll be seeing Zelda’s patients. She visits sick people at home and gives them remedies.”

  First, they went to a small workshop that lay behind an empty shop front in the main street of the artisan quarter. The building that faced the street had been empty for some time. All the windows were boarded over and the wooden door showed signs of rot.

  Many of the surrounding shops were abandoned, too.

  Inside the workshop, it was cosy and dry. The space was small—it had probably been a storage space for the shop—and the fire easily kept it warm.

  A big metal pot hung over the fire, bubbling steam.

  Gertie, Hilde and Josie were already at work at the benches. Gertie was scooping big blobs of paste from a pan into glass jars. Hilde was grinding dried leaves into powder and Josie was cleaning jars in a tub of steaming water.

  A tray on the bench held orange-brown bits of dragon poop. It was quite rough and contained little bits of what looked like chewed sticks. What did dragons eat?

  Zelda pushed a tray into Nellie’s hands, pulled many jars and bags off the shelves that filled one end of the workshop and loaded them onto the tray. When it was full, she sent Nellie to the cart that stood in the small courtyard outside the workshop.

  The poor donkey stood waiting, its ears drooping and head close to the ground. It didn’t even look up as Nellie deposited the heavy tray into the cart.

  Koby brought another tray.

  There were three boxes, and when the cart was ready Zelda came out, dressed in a woollen cape. She led the donkey by the reins out of the courtyard.

  They went into the main street and turned left toward the merchant quarter of the city.

  It was still misty—the type of air that made droplets of moisture on everything and seeped into clothes until it penetrated the warm cocoon inside and went to the bone. Nellie looked with envy at the smoke rising from the chimneys of the houses they passed. Once she had been warm and comfortable like that. She remembered standing inside and looking at the poor milkman, the poor baker’s son and the man with the grocery cart who were out in the weather every day.

  When she stopped the cart, Zelda explained about the first person they would visit.

  “This woman always complain about bad airs. She complain, complain, even if it make no sense what she complain about.”

  “So you can’t do anything for her?”

  “I still give her herbs.”

  “But if there’s nothing wrong with her—”

  “Her wrong is all in the head.” Zelda tapped the side of her head. “My medicine make her happy.”

  Goodness, what was in those jars? The only ingredients Nellie had seen were the collection of herbs.

  “Do you want me to carry the basket?” Koby said.

  She had prepared a pretty basket with a cloth lining and all manner of jars.

  “Yes, carry it to the door. Then you wait, look after donkey.” Zelda pointed at Nellie. “You come with me.”

  “But I know nothing about herbs,” Nellie said. “I just know some of the minor remedies. I don’t know anything about salves and potions.”

  “Don’t worry about that,” Zelda said. “Your part will be easy. Let me do talking. When I ask you question, you answer question.”

  They went up the steps, where Koby was already halfway with the basket, to the door which was painted in rust brown. When Zelda knocked, a fresh-faced young maid opened it.

  The girl smiled at Zelda. “Come in. The mistress is waiting for you in the parlour.”

  They entered the house. It was strange. At one point Nellie would have been that maid.

  She didn’t know the people who lived in this house, but she knew the type. They were merchants who had recently come into some money and wanted to show it off. The house was every bit as elaborate as Mistress Johanna’s had been, but all the furniture was new and had not yet been passed through the generations.

  The maid opened a door to the left and led them into the parlour. It was a splendid room, with glass-fronted cabinets containing porcelain statues, beautiful matching chairs and a couch with green and white striped fabric with tiny pink embroidered roses, and huge paintings on all the walls, depicting idyllic forest scenes and a castle by a river.

  The lady of the house sat on the couch next to the fire. She was rubbing her hands as Zelda and Nellie came in.

  “Oh, Zelda. I am so glad to see you. You have a new helper.”

  “Yes madame. Did you remember that I was talking about well-known local herb woman? You told me that you would rather use local remedies, so I found someone for you. She has even worked in the palace. Well, this is her.”

  The merchant’s wife regarded Nellie with renewed interest.

  Nellie’s cheeks glowed.

  She definitely did not agree with this. What was this about doing the talking?

  She opened her mouth to protest, but one sharp look from Zelda stopped her.

  Zelda settled the row of jars she had taken from the shelves that morning and explained what each of the concoctions was for. Every now and then, she would ask Nellie a question to which only yes or no would be inappropriate answer, like is that right? Or didn’t
you tell me so this morning?

  The woman looked Nellie, but never once questioned Zelda’s implausible stories.

  And there were many.

  Nellie had seen what Gertie, Hilde and Josie were doing in the workshop, and hadn’t seen any of the ingredients that Zelda claimed to have put in.

  Not only that, but Nellie knew for certain that chamomile extract did none of the things that Zelda told the woman it did.

  But the woman listened to all of it.

  Zelda’s so called secret ingredient was a tea, which supposedly cured everything.

  It consisted of several herbs. When Nellie took it to the kitchen to have the servants prepare the extract, Nellie recognised bits of chamomile and dandelion and some other local herbs which grew plentiful in the surrounding meadows and road verges.

  There was no secret ingredient in any of it.

  When she carried the teapot back into the parlour, she almost felt like throwing it into the hearth.

  This was the reason so many people distrusted wayfarers like Zelda. Because this was not proper herb medicine. It was a swindle.

  But the merchant’s wife drank the tea, and she said she already felt much better.

  Then the time came to leave, and Zelda flapped her hand at Nellie to pack all the jars and go into the hallway to wait there. Nellie did so, anger growing inside her. She wanted no part in this quackery and didn’t want to be the “local woman” face to Zelda’s business. She wondered if Zelda had tried the same trick with the other women.

  As Nellie waited in the hallway, the maid came past and opened the door to the room. Zelda crouched on the carpet at the merchant wife’s feet, while the woman counted out coins. Nellie spotted at least two silver florins. Quite a lot of money.

  Nellie didn’t see what Zelda did with the coins, but presumed she put them in her coat pocket before coming to the door, bowing profusely and stating that she would come back next week.

  Then it was on to the next patient, only a few houses down the street. Here they met another woman complaining about sore feet. Her feet did indeed look terrible, red and blue and swollen, but Nellie had a suspicion this had more to do with the expensive shoes she bought which turned out to be a bit too small.