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So much for the Merchant’s Daughter. What of the Nurse who loved her too much?
In days gone by this good woman had been Nurse to the Merchant’s Wife. Nurse had raised up the dear girl — from infancy through maidenhood, on into marriage and the gravid state that soon followed. Nurse was an old-believer, adept in the ways of applied magic. She knew plants for healing and fixing, charms for binding and releasing. She knew rhymes for cursing, rituals for protection, four secret daemon names, and six methods of divination. All of which had worked splendidly to keep Wife happy and healthy, until it didn’t, when she died in childbed. Nurse still grieved. She had brought up the orphaned Daughter by the same sorts of enchantments, but now Nurse faced a test of her skill.
She secured her young charge behind a door set with a spell to make it grumpy and forbidding, a minor obstacle but sufficient for an obedient girl, and Daughter had always been a compliant child. Nurse carried an ample wallet packed with tools and tinctures. She hurried out, into the bright day, onto the festival meadow, among the humming crowd, to market stalls where she bought a crock of butter and a fagot of sticks. The firewood Nurse hoisted on her shoulder, thinking with annoyance of how she appeared, an old woman bent under her load like some common hag. All the magic practiced all these ages, and not one reliable cure to keep a body young. Oh, there were tales about the blood of unbaptized babies, but only idiots told and believed them.
Then Nurse recognized a serving maid with one of the hired knights, and she hid her face by crouching under the burden. She did not want to be stopped. She had work to do.
Nurse moved through the lively scene. There was a pavilion for the better sort of ladies, fires for cooking, games of chance and archery contests, peddlers with handcarts and vendors under awnings. She saw every variety of rascal and beggar including a company of traveling Players who were building their stage with planks and barrels. The tumblers among them performed to draw an audience. Nurse saw a small boy with a one-eyed bird on his shoulder, and near him a ragged Dancing Bear hung with bells. But she passed all this by, none of it entrancing to a woman of experience.
She headed directly to the meadow’s far side. Beyond the festival lay a stretch of fallow, untended ground grown high with grass. Nurse followed an ill-trod path to a field of colossal boulders, all tossed and tumbled in disarray. Fifty horses would be needed to move one, and yet in the World’s first age, Giantesses had gathered in their aprons these very stones, had carried them to this spot where a family of monstrous sisters had built a stronghold. Now the castle and its walls lay in shambles. Regular folk avoided the ruin. Nefarious people hid among the rocks. Hungry ghosts lived inside the stones. Every few years, a festival goer would wander into its maze and never wander back out.
