Gathering Blue - Lois Lowry [49]
"The little singing girl," the woman said, her voice a hoarse whisper. "She be tooken. They tooken her away."
She turned away abruptly and disappeared into the shadowed interior of the cott. Her children began to cry and to claw at her for food.
The gnarled tree was dying, split almost to the ground and rotting. Perhaps it had once borne fruit. But now its limbs were broken, dangling at odd angles, punctuated by occasional wisps of brown leaves.
The small cott behind the tree looked damaged and neglected too. But there were voices inside: a woman speaking roughly and a sharp-tongued child answering her in an angry, spiteful tone.
Thomas knocked. The voices became quiet and finally the door opened slightly.
"Who you be?" the woman asked abruptly.
"We're friends of Mart's," Thomas told her. "Is he inside? Is he all right?"
"Who be it, Mum?" the child's voice called.
The woman peered at Thomas and Kira silently, not answering. Finally Thomas called to the child, "Is Matt at home?"
"What's he done now? What you be wanting him for?" the woman asked, her eyes glinting with mistrust.
"He runned off! And tooken food too!" A tyke called to them; his head, thick with tousled, unkempt hair, appeared beside the woman. He pushed the door open wider.
Kira looked in dismay at the cott's dark interior. A pitcher, overturned on a table, lay in a puddle of some thick liquid through which insects crawled. The tyke at the door picked his nose with one finger, scratched himself with the other hand, and stared at them. His mother coughed wetly and then spat something to the floor.
"Do you know where he went?" Kira asked, trying not to show how shocked she felt at the condition of these people.
The woman shook her head and coughed again. "Good rid to him," she said. She shoved the tyke to the side and pulled the heavy wooden door closed.
After a moment, Kira and Thomas turned away. Behind them, they heard the door open. "Miss? I know where Matt goed," the tyke's voice said. He emerged from the cott despite his mother's scolding voice and came to them. He was clearly Matt's brother. He had the same bright, mischievous eyes.
They waited.
"What you gimme?" His finger went into his nose again.
Kira sighed. Life in the Fen was apparently a series of barters. No wonder Matt had become such a clever manipulator and entrepreneur. She looked helplessly at Thomas.
"We don't have anything to give you," she explained to the tyke.
He eyed her appraisingly. "How about that there, miss?" he suggested, pointing to Kira's neck. She touched the thong from which hung the polished stone.
"No," she told the tyke, and her fingers curled protectively around the stone. "This was my mother's. I can't give it to you."
To her surprise, he nodded as if that made sense to him. "That there, then?" He pointed to her hair. Kira remembered that she had tied it back that morning, as she often did, with a simple leather cord of no value. Quickly she pulled it loose and held it out.
The tyke grabbed it and thrust it into his pocket. It seemed to be a satisfactory payment. "Our mum, she thrashed Matt so hard he was horrid bloody, and so him and Branchie, they goed on a journey and they not be coming back, not to the Fen," the tyke announced. "Matt, he got friends who be taking good care of him, not thrashing him never! And they give him food, too."
Thomas laughed a little. "And they make him take baths," he added, though the tyke just stared, not understanding the word.
"But he meant us!" Kira pointed out. "We're the friends he meant!" She was concerned. "If he tried to come to us, where is he? It was two days ago that he left here, and no one's seen him since. He knew the way to —"
Matt's brother interrupted her. "Him and Branchie, they goed someplace else first. He be getting a giftie for his friends. That be you, miss? And you?" He looked at Thomas.
They nodded.
"Matt,