Magic Can Be Murder Read Online Free PDF Page A

lazy, they were clumsy. So when they broke che jug that carried the water I had so thoughtfully left with them, they ran away rather than be held accountable for the replacing of it."
    Still, all in all Nola craved reassurance, and she did not regret setting up the spell and leaving it untended.
    Not until it was time for the noonday meal did she regret it.
    All morning Innis, his son, Kirwyn, and the servant Alan had been working in the wing of the dwelling that served as the silversmith's shop. Then Alan came into the kitchen to say the master was ready to eat and would have his meal in the shop. Brinna set the food on two trays—Alan carried one, Nola's mother the other—while Nola readied the kitchen table for the servants' meal.
    She was just ladling out the last of the soup when she heard a crash from the other end of the house, followed by the sound of upraised voices. She abandoned the ladle in the pot and was faster even than Brinna in racing down the hall and into the shop.
    One of the trays was on the floor, wooden bowl and bronze goblet overturned, with chunks of bread and cheese sitting like islands in the spreading sea of soup and wine mixing together. The brownish mess oozed around the leg of one of the display tables and over the jewelry and the belt buckles that lay in a heap on the stone floor, apparently knocked there by the falling tray.
    Nola didn't have to wonder who had dropped the tray—whether it was her mother or Alan. She had known it was her mother even before she had seen that a tray had been dropped.
    The remaining tray was set safely on one of the other tables, and Alan was just going down into a crouch, already using his hands co try co stop the flow of soup and wine from spreading over any more of the fallen silver trinkets.
    Nola's mother, however, had backed against the wall, and she was holding her hands up to form a cross with her two forefingers. "Back, Death, back!" she was shouting over and over, though whether at Innis or Kirwyn wasn't clear.
    "You crazy old fool!" Kirwyn shouted back at her, and the louder he got, the louder she became, so the louder he got....
    "The necklace!" Innis yelled at Alan. "No, no, not the one that's already covered! Save the—" Innis threw his hands up and gave a growl of frustration as the puddle of wine-diluted soup seeped around Alan's hands and over an intricately worked piece of silver. Innis gestured for Alan to shove the remaining jewelry out of the spreading path of soup, but Alan's hands were brown and sticky and now surely it would all have to be cleaned anyway.
    But Nola was not concerned with the jewelry. "Mother!" she called sharply.
    Her voice didn't snap her mother out of whatever fit this was. "He's dead, dead, oh woe!" her mother said, almost in a chant now, her voice shrill and frightened. If she even recognized Nola, she gave no sign of it.
    What new disaster was this? Nola's embarrassment and the slow, steady dread of discovery withered in the face of this unaccustomed behavior.
    Nola had seen people slap someone who was hysterical, but she couldn't bring herself to strike her own mother. She had to fight harder to suppress the inclination to slap Kirwyn. He was continuing to berate them both—and Brinna as well for asking to hire them, and his father for agreeing.
    "Mother!" Nola repeated more loudly, more firmly. Then, despite the danger that her panicked mother didn't know her and might lash out, Nola went up to her. She intentionally placed herself between her mother and the men, and put her arms around her mother, and hoped that the men would think...
    What would be a good thing for them to think?
    "It's all right, Mother," she said. "They won't beat you. They know it was an accident."
    Could
they be convinced that her mother was terrified of being beaten for clumsiness—that they had misunderstood what she had said?
    "Death," her mother repeated, but not so frantically. Even more encouraging was chat her mother appeared to