the window, and all I could see was water, moonlight reflected on water. Couldn’t get back to sleep after that. Too dark to read the case notes, which I’d neglected to do back at the farm. But I remembered the basic facts from the briefing. These jobs are all the same, anyhow. Piece of cake.
The coach threw me out just after dawn, at a crossroads in the middle of nowhere. Somewhere up on the moors; I’m a valley boy myself. We had cousins up on the moor. I hated it when they came to visit. The old man was deaf as a post, and the three boys (mid- to late thirties, but they were always the boys) just sat there, not saying a word. The mother died young, and I can’t say I blame her.
They were supposed to be meeting the coach, but there was no one there. I stood for a while, then I sat on my bag, then I sat on the ground, which was damp. I heard an owl, and a fox, or at least I hope it was a fox. If not, it was something we never got around to covering in Third Year, and I’m very glad I didn’t see it.
They arrived eventually, in a little dog-cart thing; an old man driving, a younger man and the Brother. One small pony, furry like a bear.
The Brother did the talking, for which I was quite grateful. He was one of the better sort of country Brothers: short man, somewhere between fifty and sixty, a distinct burr to his voice but he spoke clearly and used proper words. The boy was the younger man’s son, the older man’s grandson. He’d been fooling about in a big oak tree, slipped, fell; broken arm and a hideous bash on the head. He hadn’t come around, and it had been a week now. They had to prize his mouth open with the back of a horn spoon to get food and water in; he swallowed all right, but that was all he did. You could stick a needle in his foot half an inch and he wouldn’t even twitch. The swelling on the back of his head had gone down—the Brother disclaimed any medical knowledge, but he was lying—and they’d set the arm and splinted it, for what that was worth.
I thought, better than killing the restless dead. One of my best subjects at the Studium, though of course we did all our practicals on conscious minds, with a Father sitting a few feet away, watching like a hawk. I’d done one about eighteen months earlier, and it went off just fine; in, found her, straight out again. She followed me like a dog. I’d been relieved when Father Prior told me; it could’ve been something awkward and fiddly, like auspices, or horrible and scary, like a possession. Just in case, I’d brought the book. I’d meant to mug up the relevant chapter, either at the farm or on the coach, but I hadn’t got around to it. Anyway, it had to be better than that empty place.
It was quite a big house, for a hill farm; sitting in the well of a valley, with a dense copper-beech hedge on all four sides, as a windbreak. Just the five of them in the house, the Brother said: grandfather, father, mother, the boy, and a hired man who slept in the hayloft. The boy was nine years old. The Brother told me his name, but I’m hopeless with names.
They asked me, did I want to rest after the journey, wash and brush up, something to eat? The correct answer was, of course, no, so I gave it.
“He’s in here,” the Brother said.
Big for a hill farm, but still oppressively small. Downstairs, the big kitchen, with a huge table, fireplace, two hams swinging like dead men on gibbets. A parlor, tiny and dusty and cold. Dairy, scullery, store; doorway through to the cow stalls. Upstairs, one big room and a sort of oversized cupboard, where the boy was. I could just about kneel beside the bed, if I didn’t mind the windowsill digging in the small of my back.
The hell with that, I thought, I’m a qualified man, a professional, a Father; a wizard. I shouldn’t have to work in conditions you wouldn’t keep pigs in. “Take him downstairs,” I said. “Put him on the kitchen table.”
They had a job. The stairs in that house were like a bell tower, tightly coiled