Dark Maiden (6 page)

Abbot Simon nodded encouragement and Geraint said, “So have I.”

“You first,” said Yolande instantly, curious and exasperated together.

“One a warrior for fighting, one a redeemer for sinners. Both apt, I would say, in a place that needs more guarding than most against the rise of evil.” He cocked a black eyebrow at her as if to say,
I have shared, now it is your turn
.

“They are both beloved,” Yolande said at once, stung into explaining and no longer reticent. “Saint Michael is beloved of God. Mary Magdalene is beloved of Christ.” She knew she was blushing and hoped it did not show too much.

Geraint smacked his thighs with a noisy, eye-catching slap. “I think you have something there, my girl, to be sure. Two favorites, working together to protect.”

And perhaps that is a sign for me, too, that Geraint and I should work together
, Yolande thought.

Abbot Simon agreed. “There may be truth in that.”

The three of them left the orchard and began a winding climb up a steep, circular hill, the abbot leading, chanting psalms, Yolande next and Geraint last—
to keep my back safe
, she admitted, comforted by it. The hill itself rose out of the fens, visible for miles around, and the straight, needlelike tower at its summit made the whole even more striking.

Striding behind her, Geraint stepped where her shadow would have been had there been more light. “This reminds me of Glastonbury Tor,” he whispered against her shoulder. “Do we totter up here to look down on the abbey?”

“Perhaps,” Yolande agreed, sensing his unease and understanding it. “How long, Father, before it goes fully dark here?” she called ahead to the psalm-chanting abbot.

He answered between psalms. “We have time enough for several prayers and we shall return before nightfall. There is something I need you to see inside the Tower. It is only visible at this hour.” He resumed his chants.

“I would prefer to do my work in full daylight,” she reminded him.

Abbot Simon, walking with his head bowed, merely stopped his final chant and uttered a gusty sigh. “Bear with me,” he said after a space. “It will be instructive.”

“Want a push up this slope?” murmured Geraint behind her, his fingers stretching toward her rump. She hissed a “no thank you” at him and hurried on, caught between imagining what Geraint’s hand might have felt like and worrying what she was about to discover.

* * * * *

“Look.” The abbot unlocked the door to the Tower and stood back. “This appeared only this year.” Geraint made to enter first but the holy father barred the way with his arm. “You can look from the threshold,” he said.

Yolande might have grinned at the cockfighting of the two men had she not been overwhelmed.

A sticky wave of despair strangled her throat. Unknown shapes danced before her, mocking and cursing, sucking at her, raking at her face with what might have been claws or teeth. Beginning at her feet and spreading to her thighs and belly, something hideous and greedy was chewing her flesh. Her skin tightened on her bones, her body froze. She longed to fight but remained helpless, crucified by what she had seen, heard, experienced, smelled. The stink was as vicious as a blow. She staggered, dimly aware of Geraint catching and supporting her.

More curses, more bickering and now she was lying on the hillside.

“Back with us, eh?” Geraint’s voice.

“What did you see or hear, my daughter?” And the abbot.

“Let her catch her wits, man.”

“I am recovered.” Yolande sat up to prove it and the hill spun around her. When the world had steadied again, she was glad to accept Geraint’s flask of water and take a drink. She gave him a grateful glance then looked at the abbot. “I saw it.”

She had only had a glimpse before the stench drove her back but it was enough.

Scored into the stones of the Tower, written in so deeply that the last rays of the sun illuminated them like pools of blood, were the words, “They gather and begin here.”

That was it for the night. Geraint knew Yolande was in no state to fight or exorcise anything and the night was closing so fast they would probably break their necks teetering down the hill. She insisted on walking nonetheless, which thwarted the pleasant idea of his carrying her and slowed them to the shuffle of lamed jugglers.

The moon was high by the time they returned to the abbey but to his surprise and relief, Abbot Simon guided them to the guest rooms. “I will see you at dawn. You are welcome to join the services tonight.”

“Thank you, Holy Father. I will,” said Yolande before Geraint could say no.

Which meant he would need to go to the services as well, but that was no bad thing, he admitted. Some additional spiritual indulgence was always good. Abbot Simon had left them at the doorway to the guest rooms, which meant he could coax Yolande to his room, just for a little while.

“I must pray and prepare,” she said, divining his plan before he even spoke.

“I will join you for the services,” he answered, resigned.

But it did not happen that way.

* * * * *

Yolande started awake, horrified to discover she had been asleep. Seeing by the grayness about her modest chamber that it was close to sunrise, she limped to the door with burning kneecaps. She was stiff and crookbacked from having slept on her knees with her face resting against her cot.

When she opened the door to her chamber, Geraint was standing outside in the cramped corridor and juggling. He tossed three pebbles in a swift, spiraling arc and let them fall one by one at his feet.

“At last! Another few moments and I would have broken down the door. It was only because I could hear you snoring that I did not break in earlier.”

Her mouth tasted as if something had died in it. “Have you been standing out here all night?”

“Yes, and glad to, while you took some rest.” He stepped up to her and stroked her cheek. “What are those lines?”

Yolande traced the cot marks with a finger. They reminded her of what she had seen last evening. “
They gather and begin here
,” she repeated. “Who are
they
?”

“The abbot tells me he does not know. He also told me that he and the prior have searched the monastery and that tower for any token or toy of the devil and found nothing.”

Yolande, trying to ease the tendons in her neck, looked hard at Geraint. “You two are suddenly very friendly.”

“When you did not go to matins, he came to see why.”

“I did not hear him.” Mortified, she tried to straighten and her knees and calves screamed within her. She wanted to scream out loud.

“We fell to talking.” Suddenly he scooped her off her feet and began to massage the back of her neck. “You have some rare knots here,” he observed, working with one hand as he cradled her with the other. “Back to the cot or some demon will tie you in a bow and be done.”

“I cannot be wasting time,” she protested, but then the thin pallet met her lips and she was facedown on the bed with Geraint pinning her.

Not how I imagined any embrace between us.

“Hush now,
cariad
, and let me free your limbs. Did you fall asleep praying?”

She groaned as his supple hands swept over her back and legs and arms, kneading sensation into her body.

“Good?” he asked, stroking and circling.

“Uh…” Her shoulders clicked as the ease of a hot bath seeped through her. He ran something—a finger, a knuckle—down her calves and her legs relaxed, flopping outward. He took off her boots and rubbed her aching insteps and toes and she basked in the simple pleasure.

Only I should not be doing so—

“Easy, there.” Geraint firmly pressed her down as she reared up. “Even Christ had his feet washed and oiled and tended. I could oil your bow and bowstring too if you wish. How is it you carry that? For protection?”

“My mentor, the abbot, gave it to me.” Yolande heard her own drowsy voice and sighed as Geraint’s powerful fingers worked their calming charms across her back. “He said it would give me time.”

“Time and distance against mortal attacks, for sure, but do spirits move in time?”

“He said it is the bow of Saint Sebastian.”

“He being your mentor, yes? And this is the bow that martyred the saint? Very new it looks, for all that.”

“He—my mentor—told me it had been repaired and blessed.” Yolande yawned, her tongue lolling in her mouth. Had she ever been this comfortable?

“And a bow used to finish off a saint becomes holy and a weapon against evil? A curious contradiction.”

Geraint says what I have thought but never dared to speak.
“It works for me,” she mumbled against the rough cloth of the cot, yawning again, trying to look at him, her supple, clever Welshman.

“Then we shall say no more about it. Lie still and say the Lord’s Prayer in your father’s tongue. You know it, yes?”

She did and to honor her honeyman’s insight, she began to recite it.

Yolande’s voice became slower, ever more languid. Geraint draped a blanket over her so she would not grow cold again. He touched her crown, rubbing very gently and scrupulously not staring at her lissome shape.

You are tempted to do more
, said a voice within his mind.

“But I do not act on it,” he answered the Magdalene, whispering to her in Welsh. He traced the contours behind Yolande’s ears with his thumbs. “Who is her mentor?”

You must ask her.

“I will. And who are those that left the message in the Tower?”

Old enemies as bitter as Julian the Apostate. They are trying to come back.

Geraint’s scalp tingled and ice ran down his spine. Massaging Yolande, feeling her trust in him as she lay quiet, helped him to keep his mind clear. “How can she defeat them?”

He was suffused with warmth then, the heat and bounty of many summer days, and the scent of violets swam in his head.

Good
, said the saint approvingly.
She fears that you will spurn her in the end because, like all men, you wish to be master and act first. But a part of you already knows that, in these matters, she must be the leader. You must bow and, yes, yield to her at times.

Geraint eased another knot in Yolande’s right shoulder—her bow arm. “But how can I stand back? Does it not make me less than a man if I allow her to go first into danger?”

Not if you work with her.

Was that his thought or the Magdalene’s? Either way it made sense.

She will dream of me now
, said the Magdalene.
And of Michael. Trust in her dream, Geraint. Trust in her.

The presence withdrew and he wondered if he too had slept and if so, for how long.

* * * * *

“The first service of the day is over.” The abbot addressed Yolande from the foot of her cot while Geraint slipped off to the refectory, intent on finding them breakfast. She had not argued with him. She had dreamed peacefully between the gray first light and true dawn. When she woke, she knew what she must do.

Normally she avoided food before she began any encounter with the restless dead but today she knew she must eat. The day would be long.

Still, unless I am misled, it is not yet my final trial, not yet, not as I feared. But it will be enough, for sure.

“Will you begin now?” asked the abbot. He was understandably anxious, poor man.

“Very soon.” Yolande finished checking her arrows and rose from the cot, longing to stretch her arms above her regardless of Abbot Simon’s disapproval.

Today I am the master
, she told herself. Shrugging and stretching, she loosened her limbs in preparation for battle.

“How may we help?” asked the abbot.

The instant he had appeared outside her chamber and Geraint had discreetly withdrawn, she had told the holy father her dream. Geraint knew it already, for as she stirred, the words the two saints—Michael and Mary Magdalene—had spoken to her had poured out from her.

“Did Julian, the Roman Emperor Julian, have many followers?” she asked, leaving his question unanswered for the moment.

The abbot’s eyes glittered in disapproval. “He is forever accursed. Because of him, misguided souls turned their backs on the faith.”

“And did Julian leave many writings to his followers? A kind of gospel, if you will?”

The abbot waved her question aside. “Such things were hunted down and destroyed long ago.”

“What if some were missed?” Geraint broke in, standing on the threshold with chunks of bread and a jug of ale. “What if something has resurfaced?”

“Such an object would draw evil,” Yolande added. “Old practices are flourishing again in these times of pestilence, with so many priests dying of the sickness.”

“In the remote places, the dying are going unshriven,” the abbot admitted, reminding Yolande of the angry, lost spirit of Thorkill.