Faerie (32 page)

She glanced to the floor beyond the bed. She gaped. Only a dark, powdery dust in a convoluted line, with her arrows scattered on the floor where they had fallen. “It’s gone!”

Philippe moved closer to the far side of the bed, horror distorting his face. “What is this? Witchcraft? I saw those arrows fly to you. I thought you were daft, but you’re not! You’re a witch!”

He closed in on her. Cold fear chilled her soul. She backed away, her fingers icy, eyes darting, with an eye on him and another for the great serpent in case it came back. Philippe closed in. She sidled to her right. He blocked her.

“Nay, Philippe, I swear to you. It was a demon, and I forced it out of my head.”

She slammed her mouth shut. This was sounding worse by the word. She’d never before done or seen anything like what had happened here.

“Demons, now? Did you call them up? Or maybe you’re a demon. Did you use demons to trap me into this marriage? How did you make it look like you were attacked, and only I could find you? You were there all along. Just how did you do that?”

Her blood turned cold as his fury grew. He’d kill her now, burned or stoned. Or with his bare hands. She backed against the wall as he caged her with his arms.

His eyes suddenly widened as he retreated a pace. “What! God’s face, what, where? Where did you go? Leonie!” He whirled around, stepping back, looking all about the chamber, then back to the wall.

He couldn’t see her. But here she was. Had she faded, like a real Faerie? That wasn’t possible. She’d never been able to do it before. She could see her arms, but he couldn’t. For how long? She didn’t even know how she had done it. She edged sideways along the wall.

He reached toward her, almost as if something told him she was there. Haps his sharp ears had heard her breathe. She squatted and waddled closer to the window, as close to the wattle wall as she could manage. If Ealga was right, that was the trick, to stay against a background like a wall, where her Faerie sense could imitate what was behind her so closely an ordinary human couldn’t tell the difference. She held her breath.

“God and the saints,” he hissed between his teeth. He ran toward the doorway, tossed the tapestry back, and disappeared to the right. “You won’t escape me, witch!”

He must have thought she’d gone through the wall. Ealga had said fading looked like that. So he’d be looking for her on the other side.

She had to get out of here, quickly, before her fading wore off, however long that was. She’d have to go out of the hall, where he was going. But to stay here was certain death, and she didn’t feel as brave about facing death as she had a few nights before. Especially not at his hands.

Now she realized a demon had mimicked Philippe to delude her, but it was too late. Philippe had never hurt her after all, but this time he would, for no one despised witches and sorcerers more than the Peregrine.

All she’d done was raise her hand above her head. She tried it again. The arrows that had slain the black snake came to her. It was like the silent singing commands to her arrows she’d used all her life. She called the quiver and bow as easily, straight to her hands. With bow and quiver slung over her shoulder, she beckoned to her cloak hanging on a wall peg, but it did not so much as stir a corner of the fabric. Weapons only, then. She shrugged, snatched the cloak, and tossed it over her shoulders.

Holding her breath for silence, she slipped past the doorway tapestry and edged along the wall. Two men answering Philippe’s calls ran past her as if she were not there. From hall, solar, and bailey, she could hear anxious voices. They might think Philippe was the mad one, but soon they would see she was missing. Then she would become a witch, whether she was one or not.

As she scooted along, back to the wattle wall, she planned her escape. Ahead of her was a small door leading from the hall out to the upper bailey. Not far from that was the temporary open kitchen. The upper bailey had numerous small buildings, but there was no route where she could stay against a wall all the time. And she’d have to leave the walls of the inner buildings to dash for the curtain wall.

By the time she sneaked into the upper bailey, it was alive with commotion, everyone running toward the lower bailey. She caught a glimpse of Philippe dashing for the rampart stairs, where he would have an excellent view of the entire courtyard. Would he see her, then, if she was not plastered as close as whitewash to whatever was behind her?

Time for another deep breath. She sidled along the outside of the hall as the upper bailey emptied. Seeing no one close, she rushed across the open space to follow the outer kitchen wall. Beyond that, some tumbledown lodgings, then to the smithy, where the open-air forge blazed as Harald’s oldest son pounded
on glowing metal. The blacksmith could little afford to drop his work until it was done. She couldn’t move past him. She was exposed.

Haps if she crawled.

Aye, if she could not be seen against a wall, then she might not be seen against the ground if she crawled very low. Nothing to be gained by waiting. She dropped to her hands and knees.

She was about to begin creeping when the sound of trumpets blared in the distance. Everyone in the castle stopped and listened. Her pulse began its rapid race through her veins again.

The king! The king’s heralds sounded like no other.

She’d heard Rufus was coming. The speculation of his arrival had been what had chased Fulk from the walls of Bosewood. Thank you, Rufus! But a king was no more likely to side with a perceived witch than anyone else.

The eerie hush only lasted until the trumpet blasts ceased, and the entire bailey burst into an uproar. Shouts and massive scurrying, the whole of the population of the castle had been caught unsuspecting with their king almost upon them.

Leonie would have laughed, but that wasn’t safe. She crawled along the ground past the smithy to the outbuilding beyond, hoping to make the postern gate while everyone else was distracted.

A small whirlwind of a boy roared around the corner of the forge and stumbled, rolling over the top of her onto the ground. Sigge.

“Ow!” The boy rolled to sit, staring at the air.

Leonie sat up, watching the boy’s blue eyes widen so that the whites showed as she leaned away from the low wall.

“Wow, how’d you do that?” Sigge said.

“Never mind. I have to get out of here, Sigge. They think I’m a witch.”

“But you’re not, Leonie. I know you’re not.”

“Nay, I’m not. But I’m not like other people, Sigge. You can see why I can’t let them know that. They don’t understand things like this.” She leaned back and crouched to hide again.

His big blue eyes got even bigger. “I don’t think I understand either. How come I can’t see you?”

“I don’t understand all that well myself. But it has something to do with my mother. She was Faerie, and I guess I am too. Promise you won’t tell anyone.”

Sigge shook his head rapidly, still staring as if he’d found himself talking to a ghost.

“R
UFUS!”
P
HILIPPE STARED
out over the curtain wall at the royal banner appearing from the dust beyond the river. “Why now?”

Even from this burned-out palisade at the back of the castle, Philippe could see that Rufus and his guard were outpacing his army, already descending into the valley to cross the river.

What was he going to do? He had to find Leonie. What the devil had happened, he couldn’t grasp. Something was very wrong. Was she really a witch? He couldn’t believe it, yet how else could he explain it?

A demon. She’d said it was a demon. What if it was? Had she been possessed all this time? What if she still was?

He shuddered. That could be worse than being a witch. If anything could be worse than witchcraft. But she had cast out her demon and killed it—so she’d said. God help him. And her.

Beside him, Hugh squinted into the afternoon sun. “Rufus is in a hurry. He’ll want to see you right now or he wouldn’t be racing so.”

“I have to find her first, Hugh. Explain to Rufus for me.”

Hugh put his hand to Philippe’s arm. “You know better than to slight the king. You’ve already looked everywhere, Philippe, and you have no idea where she is. You’ll have to tell him the truth.”

Philippe shook his head. “I have to find her, Hugh.” But he couldn’t tell even Hugh why. He couldn’t accuse her. He knew what would happen to her. He had to be wrong.

Yet he knew what he’d seen. It was beyond imagination that anyone short of a sorcerer could have done what she did. And if there was a demon involved, how could it be anything but the devil’s work?

“Ride out to meet him, Philippe. I’ll stay here to watch for her. She has to be within the castle walls.”

Philippe swiped his dangling hair out of his eyes. He had no choice. With a frustrated sigh, he signaled his squire for his horse and walked down the slope, through the bailey gate, toward the stable near the barbican. Haps he could persuade Rufus to join in the search. The king at least understood the lady was a bit dotty.

“I have to escape the castle, Sigge,” Leonie said. “If they think I’m a witch, bad things could happen. I need to get through the postern gate while they’re all going to meet the king.”

“You can’t. The lord had all the gates blocked on account of he didn’t want you to get away. Can’t you just go through the walls?”

“It only looks like that. I can only disappear against them. It’s called fading, but I could never do it before today. But you mustn’t tell anyone. I’m afraid, and I’ve got to get out of the castle.”

“I want to go with you, Leonie.”

“Nay, you can’t. I can’t make you vanish too, just me—I think. They’d see you and then who knows what would happen to both of us?”

Sigge’s bright blue eyes narrowed down and matched with a sly grin. “I can stand watch for you,” he said.

“Only if no one ever knows. I don’t want anything to happen to you. You’d be a traitor if you helped me, don’t you see? You could never be a knight then. All your dreams would be gone.”

The boy hung his head. “Doesn’t matter. They won’t ever let me anyway. I can tell.”

“Oh, Sigge, don’t give up.”

“But I can help you and they won’t ever know.” He stood up and peered around the corner of the forge. “There’s no one in the whole upper bailey now. They’ve all run down to the barbican.”

“Including Philippe?”

“He’s down there with his horse.”

“Then he’ll ride out to meet the king. And that’s the only way out of the castle.”

“You can’t go that way. They’ll see you.”

“Or they might not. I’m not sure how this fading thing works, but if I walk along the wall, and you walk a little ways away, you can raise your eyebrows if I start to become visible, all right?”

“You mean you’ll go right through the gate?”

“If it’s the only way out.”

She could tell by the way the boy swallowed her plan frightened him. But if she could just make it outside the main gate, she could follow the wall outside to the back of the castle, then disappear into the woods. What came after that, she had no idea.

“Sigge, one thing you can do. Do you remember anything from the forest?”

His eyes grew to boulder size, pupils suddenly tiny. His jaw locked.

“You remember but you can’t talk?”

He blinked rapidly. So whatever it was, it still bound the boy.

“Sigge, somehow you must find a way to let Rufus find the truth. If not words, some other way. You’ve got to let him know Philippe is innocent.”

The boy nodded rapidly.

“But I think you know that, don’t you? Otherwise you would have been afraid of him, yet you told the king you weren’t.”

Again, Sigge nodded, and his jaw tried futilely to work.

“Oh, poor Sigge,” she said. “Try to think of something else, like maybe hunting mushrooms.”

The boy struggled, sending his eyes darting side to side, until his lips began to move again. “Swords,” he said. “I always liked swords. Peregrine’s has a big red stone on the pommel, and there’s a falcon carved in the blade.”

Leonie’s jaw dropped open. She would have never thought of that. “And the thing that looked like Philippe had a different sword.”