Faerie (43 page)

I
T TOOK
P
HILIPPE
the mere blink of an eye to decide flying should be left to birds, bats, and dragons. Beside him, Leonie’s green eyes were round and huge as her lips moved silently in the rhythm of a chant. “
Don’t look down. Don’t look down.
”

“
Aye. Don’t look down
,” his thoughts answered. It was not enough to hold the reins, and like Leonie on the palfrey, he wove his fingers through Tonerre’s long mane for fear of toppling sideways and to the ground far below. He didn’t want to know what trees, hills, and becks looked like from above. But he caught a glimpse of grey-blue expanse in the distance and recognized the sea where it spread out from the brown edge of the cliffs and pale sand beaches. The jutting rocks of Lindesfarne dared poke through the waves far off to his left.

He chuckled and pointed the sea out to Leonie, who just shook her head and fixed her gaze on the palfrey’s mane and ears.

He smiled to himself, for he was quickly becoming at ease with the flight and began to look around, absorbing the wind blowing through his hair and whipping his clothes. The lines of grey clouds looked different, reflecting brilliant, sun-like pale mirrors and forming rolling curls far out to sea. The far distant land off his right side rose higher and higher, its color shifting from the aging green and brown of autumn to the stark black and grey of the mountains beyond. He recognized them by their
shapes, yet he had never thought what they might look like from above. Haps he might like this riding through the clouds after all.

Ahead of him, de Mowbray sat high and forward in his deep Norman saddle, his bushy black curls blowing like the mane of his great black stallion. He spurred the black onward, though it was clear the stallion loved the flight as much as a lark climbing high into the sky on a summer morn.

“I don’t suppose you could explain this,” he said to de Mowbray.

The earl laughed, a wild, dark laugh that sent both chill and exhilaration through Philippe. “Ah, there’s nothing finer than to soar through the sky after my little hound, is there? ’Tis Ilse’s magic, not mine. I have none. But she was born to the Faerie and is built to chase the clouds.”

“But we seem to be doing the same.”

“We couldn’t, not even you, Annwyn King, were it not for Ilse. ’Tis much like the way you could take Leonie into a portal she couldn’t see. But Ilse has a dire task, or she wouldn’t take us with her. ’Tis to bring us to Herzeloyde, I’ll wager.”

Beside him, Leonie squeaked. If she had words to tell her thoughts, she neither said nor thought them. Philippe reached out across the air between them and squeezed her hand.

“You will not fall, my love. Ilse would not allow it.”

Leonie did not seem persuaded. Still, she raised her head high, and the magnificent curls of her golden hair flayed the wind. Courage, he knew, was facing the world with her kind of boldness. For her sake—no, now he realized the need went far beyond her and him—he had to find a way to block the curse, and more, he must destroy the sorcerer. Fulk was Clodomir, he knew now. And far more dangerous than he had ever imagined before.

He could not let the fiend take Leonie too. He would not let him take the world.

He felt the air growing warmer, and the wind stronger, as they dived through long, flat blankets of clouds. It seemed as if they flew through rain, or water, that hung in the midst of the thick, white substance. Then once again they emerged, now beneath the clouds that partially blocked the sun. Ahead of him, he saw Ilse still descending toward earth, and he began to wonder if they would collide, for they were falling now—in a way. Yet like birds they swooped low and slowed, and came to touch the ground on a rocky, gorse-covered slope.

He patted Tonerre’s neck, and the horse shook out his mane, now at a full gallop behind the giant black stallion. Had they been running over ground all this time, they would have been blown. Yet he felt no sweat on Tonerre, barely heard the horse’s steady whuffing.

The shaggy hound followed a path into a dark wood, her nose high in the air as if she had caught a scent, and she began to bay. She slowed in a wide glade, and for an instant wandered, the way a dog does when the scent is scattered. Her snuffling sound mixed with a faint whimper, then grew louder and more frantic as she whirled in a wide circle. The dog dashed about, turning to de Mowbray and barking, then went back to her odd, wild dashing about in a wide circle. She leaped into the air, barking, then ran in her wide circuit, as if chasing the air or enclosed in some invisible pen.

Philippe reined in his horse, and apiece with de Mowbray and Leonie, leaped down from the saddle.

One minute the forest beyond the glade had been cleanly sharp, black trunks and dark green branches of pines, with the gold and crimson limes and ash trees standing sharp against the thicket beyond. The next the edges of the glen hazed with a dirty fog, muting the trees as if in a heavy storm. Then, as if they all stood in a quiet, clear glen amid a deep, thick cloud, the world appeared to vanish. Philippe had the dread feeling that the cloud
was circling them, yet he could see nothing that even looked like movement, it was so dense. All was silence, save that he could hear their putrid breath and smell the stench of their death-grey rotting flesh and decaying bones.

“Gholins,” he whispered.

“Aye.” Leonie’s fingers played impatiently at the grip on her bow.

“Prepare yourself, magnificent wife. We are going to need your skills.”

A
thunk
behind him. He spun around. A sword still quivered where it had struck into the soil, its gold- and garnet-inlaid scabbard flopped beside it.

“Rufus’s sword!” Philippe shouted as he yanked it out of the earth. Rufus would have never given it up without a fight.

Another thud, then another. Fallen from the sky, a crude wooden walking stick and a dark green peasant’s cloak. A bishop’s crosier, its golden crook gleaming in the bright sun flooding into the circle of the open glen.
Clunk
again, and a small dagger.

Leonie dashed up and bent to the dagger, not a man-sized blade, and roughly sheathed. “I gave it to Sigge,” she said, pulling it from the sheath.

And the walking stick was the one the old crone had carried. The bishop’s crook was obvious.

De Mowbray looked upward, then around, his nostrils flaring. The horses shied and whinnied with the fear of the unknown, as only horses could truly understand. But Philippe felt the same deep chill slide down his spine as he watched the earth-colored fog condense and tighten around them.

Philippe surveyed the ground around them for clues, his gaze expanding farther out toward the trees. Ilse whimpered as she sniffed the tufts of dry grass and lumps of hardened dirt.

“Somehow they’ve captured all of them. How could they snatch Rufus from inside Bosewood?”

“The bishop was easy, I’ll vow,” said de Mowbray. “He was already taken in. But Herzeloyde? How could they capture her?”

“Haps the same way he almost caught me,” Leonie replied. “I thought he was turning me to stone.”

Thunks, screams, yelps, as more objects hit the earth, this time farther away.

The fog thinned. Greyed, faint shadows of human forms splattered before them, then began to rise to their knees. One by one, they took more shape and color.

“Sigge!” shouted Leonie.

Aye, ’twas the little boy, struggling to his knees.

“Leonie!” he shouted back. But with bound hands and feet, he could not stand.

Leonie stepped toward the boy, but pure gut instinct forced Philippe to take her arm and hold her back.

Next appeared Rufus, without his battle gear, similarly bound, fighting against his own rotund shape to right himself onto his knees despite his bonds. And the Bishop of Durham, who cried out, holding up his tied hands in supplication when he saw the group before him. Some unseen force shoved him back to his knees.

“Peregrine!” shouted the king. “By God, now we’ll slay these bloodless bastards!”

A club came out of the mist behind the king and struck him upside the jaw. Rufus wavered but stayed on his knees, stocky legs widespread, rage seething in his red-as-beef.

And there, bound like the others, not the crone, but a pale, beautiful woman, utterly the slenderest woman he’d ever seen, her thick, tightly curled hair almost white.

“Herzeloyde.” De Mowbray breathed the name, almost as silent as a gasp.

“Mother!”

It could be no other. Now Philippe understood what it was about the woman that held de Mowbray and the villagers in such thrall. But no time for that now.

“Don’t move,” he said beneath his breath. “The gholins are there, guarding them, so attacking could get them killed.”

“Where?” She drew four arrows to place in the hand that gripped her ivorywood bow.

“They’re there. I can hear them. A complete circle of them.”

“S
O CLEVER OF
you, Peregrine.”

The voice reverberated through the glen, deep and ominous. The thick, dirty cloud turned to misty fog and began to swirl in bands first grey and white, then deepening into red, violet, and hazy blue, before the swirling bands slowed and became a mist. In a whoosh, the remains of the grimy mist swirled upward and vanished in the air, revealing an army of the gholins, with choking ropes on their captive’s necks.

Philippe pressed Leonie behind him, but she moved back to his side. Nay, she was right. It would take all of them at their best to win this fight.

“Four heads,” he said.

“Four arrows,” she replied. “Now.”

Faster than he could determine her movements, she nocked and shot each arrow, and sang them on their way, each striking the bare neck bones of the gholin guards. The severed heads plopped to the ground and the gruesome skeletons crumpled to the grass.

Behind him, Ilse growled and lunged at a gholin that had appeared from nowhere. As de Mowbray whirled around, the gholin swung its club, catching the Black Earl in the head. He groaned and fell forward, face into the grass, blood streaming from the back of his head. Philippe whirled. Others of the ghoulish creatures advanced from all around.

“Defend me!” Leonie shouted as she threw herself to her knees beside de Mowbray, her left hand spreading over the wound to the back of his head. Her right arm extended outward and her hand whirled in the air, fingers splayed out to call her arrows back and sending them flying to their prey around the circle. The gholin backed away from Philippe’s swinging sword, but Leonie called back her arrows and struck again while rising from beside de Mowbray’s sprawled body. God help them, he hoped she succeeded. They could not afford to lose the man now.

All around them the gholins held back, some again falling to Leonie’s arrows.

“You have no chance, Peregrine,” said the disembodied deep voice again, echoing as if it bounced off walls.

Philippe swung his gaze around but saw naught. But a smudge appeared, stretched long and tall, darkened. Human features. A Norman helm. Legs and body in mail, covered by a dark tabard, long black cloak tossing as if in a storm, yet there was no wind. From the dark hood, he could at first see no face. But he needed no face to know who this fiend was.

“
Fulk. Clodomir.
” It was Leonie’s thought. She stood again beside him, and he could hear de Mowbray groaning and shuffling as if he might be able to rise.

“
Aye.
” Odd, he thought, that the gholins attacked only de Mowbray. They wanted the earl dead, but not him or Leonie. Nor the four prisoners by the trees.

As Leonie drew the sword de Mowbray had given her, Philippe sent up another prayer to the Almighty that her Faerie skills would extend to the cutting edge as well.

“You have no chance,” Clodomir growled out like a wolf. “Submit to me or your king will die. And the witch as well.”

“I think you will kill them anyway.”

The sorcerer’s laugh roared like an ominous wave sweeping over a ship’s bow. “You need not worry. I have uses for them. But I will dispose of them if I find it necessary.”