The Doll's House Chapter 4.

Chapter Four.

 

The Search Begins.

 

Sophrayni left the clerk’s office with the names of five towns echoing in her mind: Wilford, Bilton, Darrowmere, Hestlewick, Siddly, and Cruxton.

One of them held the doll’s house. One of them held the spell.

She returned to the cottage and packed lightly, maps, a diary, a pouch of herbs, and a small charm Calizone had once given her for safe travel.

She would visit each town, speak to those who remembered, and look for signs of Magalan’s magic.

A doll’s house. A missing family. A place that felt… wrong.

Cruxton would be last. It had been sealed for years, declared uninhabitable. If the spell was there, it would be waiting in silence.

She mounted Shade and rode into the morning light. “Well, old friend, looks as if we’re off on our travels again.”

Shade flicked his ears.

“At least I don’t have to wear that dreadful black dress and hat anymore. I think most people know who I am by now.”

The forest watched her go.

Wilford was the nearest town, so she guided Shade in that direction. It was a quiet place, with stone cottages, a market square, and a small clock tower that rang the hours.

Sophrayni reached it before the sun climbed too high. The streets were cool and still beneath the bell tower.

That was where she saw him.

A man stood in the pillory, his head and hands locked in place. His clothes were dusty, his hair tangled, and a fly buzzed near his ear. But no one was throwing fruit. No one was shouting. No one was watching.

The townsfolk passed by without a glance, carrying baskets, leading goats, chatting about bread and weather as if the man weren’t there at all.

Sophrayni slowed Shade and dismounted. People usually threw rotten fruit, even stones, at someone in the pillory. But not here. She crossed the square, her boots tapping softly on the cobbles.

The man looked up. His eyes were tired, but not afraid.

“What did you do?” she asked.

He only said, “Everything I touch turns to fire. Leave me alone. I deserve this.”

She left him and went to the inn. The landlord gave her soup and silence. When she asked for the Kingsman, he pointed her toward a house with blue shutters and a garden full of mint.

Lord Ferdy awaited her in a sitting room, dressed in a deep green coat and sipping tea from a cup older than the town itself. He sat with one leg stretched out before him.

“Forgive me for not rising,” he said. “I injured my leg teaching my daughter to dance. She insisted on the old steps, twists and turns I haven’t tried in twenty years.”

“A noble cause,” Sophrayni said.

“Noble, but painful,” Ferdy agreed. “Peggy Thistle’s been treating me. Our local charmer. Better than most healers and twice as stubborn.”

“There’s a man in the pillory,” Sophrayni said. “No one’s watching him. No one’s throwing fruit. Why is he being punished?”

Lord Ferdy raised an eyebrow. “If you’d looked closely, you’d have seen his hands were free. He could walk away at any time.”

“He put himself there?” Sophrayni asked.

Ferdy nodded. “Three days ago. No trial. No order. He just walked up, opened the stocks, and locked his own head in. He does it often. As soon as he has money, he gets drunk, and into the pillory he goes.”

He paused. “If you want the truth about him, speak to Peggy. She knows the whole story. She was there when it began.”

“Where can I find her?”

“She keeps a cottage near the mill. You’ll know it by the lavender and the noise. She talks to her herbs as if they’re old friends.”

Peggy Thistle’s cottage smelled of mint and ash. Sophrayni found her in the garden, tying lavender with twine and humming.

“You’re here about Bill,” Peggy said before Sophrayni could speak.

Sophrayni nodded.

Peggy dusted her hands and led her inside. The kitchen was warm, with drying herbs hanging from the beams and a kettle singing softly.

“He’s a charcoal burner,” Peggy said. “Lives alone. When he sells a batch, he drinks. And when he drinks, he walks to the square and puts himself in the pillory.”

“Why?” Sophrayni asked.

“Guilt,” Peggy said simply. “Years ago, he had a wife and a daughter, Sarah. He adored her. Told stories, carved toys, sang lullabies no one else knew.”

Sophrayni listened quietly.

“Then he got in with a bad crowd and did something foolish. He won’t tell me what. Says it hurts too much to think about. I know it was somewhere up in the hills near Riddock.”

Sophrayni sat up straighter but said nothing.

Peggy went on. “One night, he drank too much. A fire broke out. No one knows how. He wasn’t sober enough to help. By the time he came to, the house was gone. So were they.”

She stirred the kettle, eyes distant.

“He never forgave himself. The pillory’s his penance. No one makes him do it. No one stops him. It’s how he remembers.”

“I think I need to talk to him,” Sophrayni said.

She found Bill still in the pillory, though the sun had shifted. She stood before him, arms folded.

“I know you,” she said.

He looked up. “Aye. I thought you might.”

“You were one of the men who tried to take me. Over ten years ago.”

He nodded. “I was.”

“I put a spell on you,” she said. “Pain, if you did wrong. It should have worn off in a week. Two at most.”

Bill gave a bitter laugh. “It didn’t.”

“You still feel it?” she asked.

“Every time I went near my daughter,” he said. “Every time I tried to hold her, or sing to her, or tuck her in. It burned. Like knives in my bones. So, I drank. To dull it. And the night of the fire…”

He didn’t finish.

“That spell was never meant to last,” Sophrayni said softly. “It was a warning, not a curse.”

“Then why did it stay?” Bill whispered.

She didn’t answer at once. She remembered something Calizone had once told her:

“People imagine I do far worse than I ever would. Their fear does half the work for me.”

Sophrayni looked at Bill again, not with anger, but with sorrow.

She left him and returned to Peggy.

“I know what he did,” she said. “He was one of a gang who tried to kidnap me. They treated my aunt and uncle badly. I punished them with pain and told them it would return if they ever did wrong again.”

She sighed. “The spell should have lasted a couple of weeks. But he still feels it.”

“I wondered what he’d done,” Peggy said quietly. “He’s a good man. Foolish, yes. But not cruel. Not wicked. Just… broken.”

Sophrayni said nothing.

“He pays me more than he should,” Peggy went on. “For the room. For the food. For the firewood. He says it’s for the silence. But I think it’s guilt. Or kindness. Or both.”

She wiped her hands on her apron.

“I think he’d marry me,” she said softly. “If he thought he deserved it.”

“Do you love him?” Sophrayni asked.

Peggy smiled sadly. “I do. And I think he loves me, in the way a man can when half his heart is ash.”

Sophrayni stood. “Thank you. For the story. And the truth.”

Peggy nodded. “If you can lift the weight he carries, do it gently. He’s held it a long time.”

“I think the pain is in his mind,” Sophrayni said. “He believes in it, so it exists. We can’t simply tell him it’s gone. We have to convince him.”

“But how?” Peggy asked. “Can’t you just magic it away?”

Sophrayni shook her head. “Magic can’t deal with feelings. There’s nothing for it to hold.”

She paced the room, tapping her teeth. Peggy watched, astonished.

“Sorry,” Sophrayni said. “I think better when I’m walking.”

She sat again. “I have an idea. Sit down. This is what we’re going to do.”

When she had explained her plan, Sophrayni returned to Bill.

He sat on the edge of the square, the pillory open behind him, his hands free.

Sophrayni sat beside him. “I’ve remembered the spell,” she said. “It was meant to fade. A few weeks, no more.”

Bill didn’t look up.

“But it stayed,” she said, “because you did something bad. And cowardly.”

He flinched.

“You tried to take me,” she said. “And then you tried to live as if nothing had happened. The spell punished you.”

“I know,” Bill whispered.

“There’s only one way to break it,” Sophrayni said.

He looked at her, hollow-eyed.

“You have to do something brave,” she said. “And good. Not for guilt. Not for show. Just because it’s right.”

          Bill swallowed. “And then?”

“Then the pain will go,” Sophrayni said. “Forever.”

They sat in silence. The wind stirred the dust. A child laughed somewhere in the distance.

Bill nodded once. “I’ll try.”

Sophrayni stood. “Don’t try. Do.”

She walked away, cloak trailing behind her, leaving the pillory empty and the man beside it full of possibility.

Peggy was gathering herbs near the edge of the woods, just as planned. Sophrayni waited nearby, hidden behind a thicket, watching for the moment.

Then came the boar.

It wasn’t wild, not truly. Sophrayni had charmed it gently, just enough to make it run and snort and look convincing. It charged through the undergrowth, tusks low, eyes wide.

Peggy cried out and stumbled back, dropping her basket.

Bill saw it from the path. He didn’t hesitate. He ran toward her, grabbed a fallen branch, shouted, waved, and placed himself between Peggy and the beast. The boar skidded, snorted, and turned. Sophrayni whispered a word, and it trotted off, calm and unharmed.

Peggy collapsed to her knees, breath shaking. Bill knelt beside her, hands trembling.

“I’m all right,” she whispered.

He nodded. “Good.”

Then it happened.

A mist rose from his skin, not light, not heat, but dust. Charcoal dust. Years of it. It lifted from his clothes, his hair, his hands. It gathered in the air, shaped like a man, hollow and grey.

Then it blew away.

Peggy stared. Sophrayni stepped forward.

“It was the choice,” she said. “You did something brave. And good. The spell’s gone.”

Bill looked down at his hands. Clean. Steady.

Peggy took them in hers.

Later, Sophrayni explained it all to Peggy.

“I took the charcoal dust,” she said. “That’s all. He needed to see it leave. He needed to believe it was gone.”

Peggy smiled. “And now?”

Sophrayni looked toward the cottage, where Bill was lighting the fire.

“Now,” she said, “he can begin again. And I can find what I came to Wilford for in the first place.”

She left Peggy and Bill sitting together in the kitchen, saying nothing, just happy in each other’s company.

Back in the Kingsman’s house, Sophrayni asked about the model.

Lord Ferdy shook his head. “I haven’t seen that in years. My daughter used to play with it until she lost interest in toys and became more interested in boys.”

He rang a bell and asked the footman to fetch his daughter. She nodded when asked about the doll’s house.

“I used to play with it all the time. It’s in the old stables now, I think. Do you want to see it?”

Sophrayni shook her head. “No, thank you. I just needed to know there was nothing strange about it.”

The girl grinned. “Nothing strange about it at all. Just a rather posh doll’s house.”

Sophrayni wrote in her diary:

“The doll’s house has no spell.
Bilton is next.”