“Shh!” she hissed. “We’ve a boggart loose.” She motioned for me to follow, and we headed toward the orchard.
“One of Max’s?” I whispered.
“Aye,” she replied. I wondered if Mom realized that, the longer she was in the Otherworld, the more her Irish accent returned. Before I could ask, she held up her hand. “Look, the wee beastie’s eaten itself into a stupor.”
I followed her gaze and saw that the boggart was propped up against a tree, belly swollen and peach pits scattered around its feet. With its mud-colored skin, elongated snout, and pointy ears, it looked like a cartoonist’s acid trip.
“What is it?” I asked. When she quirked a brow, I added, “You know. Is it a boy or a girl?”
“Does it matter?”
“To other boggarts.”
Mom glared at me, and then she started up with these obscure hand movements. Eventually, I figured out that all those slashing motions meant that she wanted me to find a weapon of my own. I trotted off to where the silverkin kept the firewood and found myself a sizeable branch. “Are we going to kill it?” I asked, once I returned.
“That would probably be best,” Mom replied. “We can’t have these sorts of things turning up here, making a mess of things.”
“He didn’t mean to make a mess. He was just hungry.”
“Sara, you don’t understand. Once a boggart is tied to a family, only misfortune will follow.”
“Is that why Max was cursed with boggarts when he couldn’t pay his debts?”
“Most likely.” Wow. That bookie had a cruel sense of humor. “I broke the curse upon the others, but it looks to be well and truly stuck to this one. It was probably laid on this poor creature first, so it’s strongest with him.” Mom stood and hefted the hatchet. “Well, best get it over with.”
“You mean now?” I stood and grabbed the back of her shirt. “You’re just going to walk right over there and kill it while it’s sleeping?”
“That is the plan, yes.”
“But that’s…that’s not fair!” I shrieked.
“Sara, it’s the boggart or Max’s fortune.” Mom’s eyes softened. “I know that killing a creature in cold blood is a terrible thing to do, but I must. What kind of mother would I be if I left this beast alive to torment my son?”
A sane one. “Can’t we re-curse him? Or bind his powers, or…or something?”
“Mmm.” Mom let the hatchet’s blade rest against her leg, one hand rubbing her chin. “How do you propose we bind him?”
Well. It looks like we do have options. “Salt!” I all but shouted. “A circle of salt!” Salt binds everything, right? Hopefully?
Mom stared at the boggart, her lips pursed. “If we also use a poppet, it may work,” she said. I attributed her disappointed tone to the impending work of binding the boggart, not over missing out on hacking it to bits. “But if it doesn’t—”
“Then we’ll deal with it.” Before she could change her mind and go all psycho-killer, I called for Shep. Moments later he appeared, and I asked him for a sack of salt, some old fabric, thread, and stuffing for the poppet. I figured I could manage the pins and needles as sculpting practice.
To my surprise, my nascent metal-sculpting skills wouldn’t be needed, since Shep delivered not only a sack of salt and ball of twine, but also a lump of brown clay from which to fashion the poppet. How the little guy had known that I hated sewing, I had no idea, but at least I still got to work on my sculpting. While Mom poured the circle of salt around the boggart, I carefully molded the clay into a reasonable facsimile of the creature, pointy ears and all.
When I’d considered taking up sculpting, this was not what I’d had in mind.
“Now we bind the poppet,” Mom murmured, once the salt circle was complete. Just as we’d completed winding the twine around the clay, Shep appeared with a shovel. Mom gave me a look (apparently, queens do not dig holes), and I started digging next to the tree it snoozed against. Throughout all of this, the boggart snored away, clearly the Otherworld’s heaviest sleeper.
“What are the chances of this working?” I asked, as I patted down the loose earth.
“Fair to middling,” Mom replied. “If nothing else, it should work until the poppet’s disturbed or the salt washes away in the rain. Hopefully, by then it will have attached itself to another poor soul.”
“And if it doesn’t?”
“Then I shall take care of it.” The hardness in Mom’s eyes, the set of her jaw, made me wonder exactly what she’d done in the past in order to keep her children safe. She did seem to know an awful lot about boggarts.