For My Lady's Heart (22 page)

The bare trees and spiky bushes reached out claws to tear her. They had
yet to see a living soul, or a dead one either, only one village in deserted
ruin, but the overgrown path out of it must lead somewhere, she told
herself. What she would do when she arrived there, she had no notion, but
the hope of food and warmth was enough to move her.

Yesterday she had wished to die, but the process seemed so endless and
miserable that she had given up on it. At first light, too cold to sleep,
she had heard Allegreto rise, and had stumbled to her feet and trudged
behind him without a word, without even a prayer, until the suspicion that
she might be following a real demon to the abyss made her recite aves with
silent diligence.

He did not change shape or disappear, though he stopped and waited for
her when she fell behind. She limped up to him, and he made a face at her.
With renewed hate for him, she lifted her head and passed by.

He gripped her from behind. Before Cara could even scream, sure that this
was the end, that he would transform to a fiend and rend her to bits, he
stopped her mouth with his hand.

She felt his breath rise and fall against her back, but he made no sound.
Only when the thump of her own heartbeat slowed did she hear the chinking
creak of a harnessed animal.

A woman’s voice muttered, then gave a sharp command. The clear sound of a
blade scraping against hard soil rang through the cold morning air.

Cara exhaled relief. No bandit, then, but an ordinary peasant. She waited
for Allegreto to realize it and release her, but his body grew even more
tense. He gripped her harder. She felt a tremor grow in him.

They stood there, frozen, for endless moments.

Finally she lifted her hand and pulled his away. He did not object; he
freed her all at once, staring through the trees.

He was dazed by terror. She could see it. Like a rabbit panting beneath a
circling hawk, he was arrested in place, only the white puffs of his breath
showing life.

Cara began to laugh.

She could not help herself. The frenzied hilarity echoed about her, a
sound halfway to weeping, an echo as if someone else answered.

He was afraid of the plague. She almost pitied him.

“I’ll go first,” she said. “I don’t care how I die.”

She hobbled on, but he caught Her again. “No. Cara— wait.”

He had such urgency about him that she halted. He held her hand, wrapping
it between both of his, pressing a small bag into her fingers. “You stay
here. Use this.”

He left her standing alone with the herbal purse. With his silent ease
and muddy leggings, he moved ahead. A thicket swallowed him, as this heavy
English wood ate everything a few yards away.

Cara looked down at the bag. It was one of the perfumes against
pestilence that he had about him always—he must have taken it back when he’d
killed their bandit guard and his mistress. She threw it down. Even the
thought repelled her, made her remember stumbling over the woman’s body in
the dark as Allegreto had urged her with him, the sick shame of being
stripped of everything she wore down to her shift; the dread of worse, but
by God’s mercy the bandit’s drab had put a violent stop to that, boxing her
man’s ears and covering Cara in her own filthy rags.

The woman had treated her with an uncouth kindness, talking in this ugly
English speech, stroking the silk again and again as she paraded back and
forth between lamplit bushes in Cara’s gown, almost pretty in her awe and
pleasure in it. She must not have looked at Allegreto’s black eyes, Cara
thought, or she would have seen death watching her.

With a half-mad chuckle, Cara picked up the perfumed bag again. How
amusing, that death was afraid of the plague. How gallant of him, to leave
his charm to protect her. How courageous, to approach some poor peasant
woman only trying to plow the icy clods!

She would save this for him, his little shield. She carefully dusted off
the bits of leaf. She chuckled again, baring her teeth. God’s corpus, any
more of this reckless chivalry, and she would be like to think the Navona
loved her.

“Monteverde!” His voice from the path ahead was triumphant. She limped
quickly forward, favoring the worst of the blisters on both her heels. In a
clearing the peasant plow and ox stood abandoned. Allegreto held up a food
pouch with a grin.

“They ran before I showed myself,” he said. “By hap your laughing sounded
like some fiend out of the wood. Ghastly enough it was.”

She ignored his mockery. “There must be a village nearby,” she said. “We
can buy shelter, if you thought to recover more than your plague apple from
the thieves and got my silver, too.”

“Silver enough,” he said, looking into the pouch. “But we shan’t chance a
village.”

“Please yourself, wretched Navona, but give me my money. I don’t fear
pestilence so much that I want to sleep on the ground again tonight, or
steal food from churls. I’m going to the village.”

He glanced up at her. “Nay—you would not.”

“I will.”

“I tell you, I won’t go in amongst people!”

“Then do not, for God’s grace. We shall part here, and gladly. As soon as
you give me my coin.”

He turned a sullen shoulder. “Monteverde goose! You would not last a day
without me.”

“What is that to you, Navona?” she snapped. “I don’t even owe you thanks
for freeing me—you and yours have done me more mischief than you could ever
repay!”

“Go then!” He dropped the food pouch and strode away over the frozen
dirt. “It’s nothing to me. Nothing!”

“My silver!”

He stopped, slanting a look over his shoulder. “I don’t work for free,
carissima.
It’s mine now.”

She held the herb bag behind her. “A fair exchange. Your plague perfume
for my silver.”

“I’ll buy another herbal.”

“Without going in amongst people?”

He turned slowly to face her, a look upon him that sent a chill to her
heart. “Monteverde goose,” he said softly, “I can take it from you before
you can draw breath.”

“Then slit my throat if you must!” she cried defiantly. “And be damned
for it! Plague or murder, it makes no mind to me. I am dead no matter what I
do.” Her voice began to quaver on the last words, and she shut her mouth,
lifting her chin.

Allegreto was impossible to read, his black eyes watching her. “You work
for the Riata, don’t you?” he asked slowly. Cara tried to stare him down.
For a moment he only studied her—then something in his expression changed,
grew more penetrating.

“I didn’t see you when we found the hunchback dead.” He said it with a
voice of discovery. His hand curled over his dagger. “You were already gone
from the camp.”

She managed to keep her breathing even. If her life was over, she should
commit her soul to God, but in the moment of peril all she could do was
think that he was too young and comely to be what he was.

“And you took money with you—you knew you were leaving. You were already
running. Oh, Mary, Mother of God—” He took a step.
“Why?”

She did not answer him. She only closed her eyes and waited for him to
kill her.

“What did you do? Was it poison?” A note of panic hovered in his
question. “Did you try to poison her?”

His concern for his evil mistress sent a spurt of wild rage flooding
through her. “Yea, you harlot—I tried to poison her. And if she hadn’t
sickened for death of plague as you tell me, I would try again, God forgive
me, to save my sister!”

In three steps he had her: “Was it the cockles?”

She tried to jerk free, and could not. He shook her until her teeth
rattled and her head rang, and stopped with a jerk.

“Was it the cockles?” he asked, in a voice so quiet and soft that it
turned her limbs into water.

She nodded, trembling. He stared down at her with horror, with that same
frenzy that he had of plague.

“God save me.” He let her go and turned, breathing like a winded stag.
“She’s not dead. Oh, Mary; oh, God and Jesus, she contrived it. She isn’t
dead.” He dropped to his knees, his fists pressed to the side of his head.
As Cara watched in shock, he tore his fingers down his face, drawing blood.
“I let her fly, she’s not dead, she’s not dead, she’s not dead! My father!”
With a mortal groan he lifted his face to Heaven. “Lord God have mercy on
me!”

Thin golden chains fastened to her garters held up the long muddy toes of
Melanthe’s boots. They were not intended for the march; she could feel every
pebble and twig through the soft soles, but she barely noticed that. It was
too good to be free.

She had no fear. That was not quite rational, she knew— her knight was
plainly of the opinion that there was much to cause alarm, but such was the
disposition of any worthy watchdog. She enjoyed treading along beside him,
skirting grass tussocks and pushing branches aside, hiking her skirt to leap
little puddles and rivulets. In spite of her gown, she was not much more
encumbered than he in his armor. She guessed it must weigh half a hundred
pounds and surely affected his stride, checking him to a speed she had no
trouble to maintain.

They did not speak to each other beyond necessity. Although the hunt had
seemed to Melanthe to have created some momentary degree of intimacy,
softening the edge of awkwardness between them, he had stung her with his
suspicions. She supposed that she would not look him out a wife after all.

His mail chinked in a rhythm that worked its way into her brain in the
hours of silent march. The horse’s hoofbeats changed from soft thumps to
thuds as the marshland rose to higher ground. Meadow gave way to open woods,
gray and black, straight young birch trees like a thousand cathedral columns
springing up from a strange undulating floor of hawthorns and green winter
grass.

“Tilled field,” he said, breaking the quiet. He gestured with his mailed
hand to the furrows and edges that spread like huge ripples in the earth,
the massive ghosts of peasants’ plows, birch trunks growing out of the
spines and hollows.

“Mary,” Melanthe said softly. “Abandoned?”

“Yea. Twenty year and more, hap, on measure of the trees.”

“The Death.”

“Yea, my lady. Was never a much peopled place, I think. What souls were
left—” He shrugged. “Why keep it, when they mayen find better livelihood to
the east, where men were wanted to worken easier lands?”

She nodded. So it had been everywhere, the marginal surrendered to desert
when there were barely enough people to till the richest fields. She had
been nine years old. Her mother had died and left Melanthe and her little
brother, Richard. Her father had wept, and never married again, nor smiled
as gaily—and wept once more a few years later when Melanthe set out for
Italy in the rich train Prince Ligurio had sent for her.

She had never seen her father after that day. But he had remembered her.
He had not blamed her for Richard’s death. In his will he had confirmed her
as the heiress of Bowland. She could not recall his face—Richard’s boyish
grin intruded, Richard of the fond smiles and songs for the ladies. In the
few months that Melanthe had kept him with her, she had basked in those
smiles. She had loved him so easily, known him so surely, as if they had
never been parted.

Another life. Other places.

She had been afraid. She had always been afraid, every minute, every hour
of eighteen years since she had left home.

She felt a fierce will that the plague might kill them all, Navona and
Riata, while she sojourned here in isolation and wildness. Haps she would
never return, not even to Bowland.

She and her knight would hunt dragons and battle wildmen of the woods,
and never go back to the world of human things.

Here was nothing but peace, that she could see, and what danger there
might be was her knight’s charge and not her own. She wanted peace. Even
more than she wanted Bowland.

She gazed at the silent English woods. When he had first told her what
the peculiar ridges were, she had felt a quick superstitious dread of such
eerie signs of long-dead men. But as she looked on them now, they seemed to
signify the weakness of human power in this place, where trees grew without
effort from the heart of men’s hardest labor.

“In such remote desert we moten find us a damsel in sore straits, Green
Sire, and rescue her,” she said.

“We moten find us safe haven, lady,” he said, pulling the horse on.

Melanthe picked up her skirt and came abreast of him. They climbed up a
plow ridge and went down the side. “Nay—a damsel, passing fair, and in
distress.”

“Full enow in distress is my lady, I trove. We need none other.”

She tugged her skirt free of a thornbush. “Alack, sir, art thou satisfied
with such a small aventure? Where is our venomous serpent? Our fiery worm?”

“Ne does nought my lady wish to meet a dragon, in troth.”

“Thou woundest me! I do.”

He shook his head. “Ye knows nought of what you say.”

She looked toward him, intrigued by the note of certainty in his voice.
“Hast thou seen one?”

“Yea, my lady.”

He said it in the same dispassionate tone that he might have said he
thought it like to come on rain. Melanthe pursed her lips. “Thou wilt not
fool me, Sir Ruck. My husband said that all such beasts were drowned in the
Deluge.”

He gave a faint snort and glanced at her. “I thought I heard my lady say
that she wished to war with one such.”

“Tush, I am but a woman,” she said lightly, “full of a woman’s
fantasies.”

“Oho,” he said, and nothing more.

They walked along in silence. Melanthe freed herself from another thorn.

She listened to the steady chink of his mail. They went up one side of
the ridges and down the other, up and down and up and down again. She
slanted him a sideways look.

“So, knight—where didst thou beholden this dragon?”

He nodded in the direction that they walked. “To the north. Not far from
here.”

“Fye upon thee! Thou undertake to frighten me!”

“Hah! My lady hatz no proper dread, nought of wolves nor outlaws.
Wherefore should I wist a firedrake might make you shrink?”

“No firedrake abides in Britain yet,” she insisted. “My husband said me
so. They are now all in Ethiopis and India and hot places.”

He walked steadily onward. “Haps I slayed the last one,” he said. “Haps
it were nought the last, though I’ve seen none since. I ne wit that your
lord husband could know so much of it, lest he spent the years that I haf
done in the hunting of the beasts.”

“He read deeply. It may be that thou wast mistaken in what animal thou
slayed. ‘Tis said the likeness of a dragon can be forged on the carcass of a
great ray.”

He halted and turned with an exclamation of disgust. “It were nought a
fish!”

Melanthe stopped, facing him, her curiosity fully roused. “Descrive it
me.”

“N’ill I,” he said, turning to go on.

She put her hand on his arm. “Sir Ruck, if it thee like and please,” she
said, with her best coaxing grace, “tell me of thy dragon that thou slayed.”

He began to walk. But he glanced aside at her and did not pull away from
her touch. “It was in a hard winter,” he said. “The bulls came and bears,
and boars from the high fells. Only a man outlawed would occupy such a
wasted place as this. But the warring did nought wrathe me as the winter, so
much. Shed the clouds sleet, and I sleeped, my lady, on the raw rocks,
rigged in my arms, with hard icicles henged over my head like serpents’
teeth. It was too terrible to say a tenth of it.” He nodded toward the grass
that carpeted the undulating forest floor. “Nought as now.”

“But say me of the dragon.” She walked beside him, balancing on the top
of a ridge while he went in the furrow, her hand resting on his shoulder.
“How did it appear?”

“My lady, if ye would discover what manner of beast it was, then would ye
nought knowen its habitation, and what weather likes it? So I am telling
you.”

“Ah. I crave thy pardon. The winter was a harsh one, then, that drove the
wild creatures down from the hills. Dragons, I’ve read in the beastiaries,
dwell in sweltery places.”

“Swelter did I nought, my lady, that eventide. For harbor I halted in a
hollow below cliff, where the stones sloped down perilous steep. I fettered
Hawk, to forage for his fodder, could he finden it, but I broke nought e’en
hard bread to brace me. Black night befell us, of all brightness wanting.”
He stared ahead as he walked, his eyes narrowing, as if he could see it.
“Thus in pain and plight full unpleasant in troth, I dropped down as were
dead and lifeless, but that I shivered and shooken, sore with cold.”

Melanthe pulled her mantle closer about her as they came to the end of
the curving ridge. At the base of it a tumbled wall of stone was succumbing
to hawthorn, and beyond that the furrows lay perpendicular to those they
traversed. He turned along the wall, taking Melanthe’s arm and prompting her
to walk before him down the trench.

“Weary sleep shunned me, I say you, my lady. Blew aghlich airs out of
that black atmosphere, tolling awful tunes to terrify a hunter.” A
freshening breeze swept the bare branches above. He raised his eyes,
watching them. “I believe it was the breath of the beast.”

Melanthe glanced up. The shadow of new clouds raced across the woods,
throwing a chill into the wind. At her feet she realized there was a subtle
dirt track in the bottom of the furrow, as if theirs were not the only feet
that passed this way.

“Were there lightnings?” she asked. “Haps it were an unseasonal storm,
far off.”

“Yea, there were lightnings, my lady,” he said from behind her.
“Lightnings and luminaries as the long hours passed. My bed of boulders grew
to burn me. Sat I straight up, with my skin blistering, smarted by hot steel
where skimmed my armor. And I heard then a hiss, my lady, so hideous and
vast that my heart haled to the heels of my feet.”

“The wind might make such a noise.”

“Came it out of the cliff, from a cavern deep, and a wind with it as you
wis, my lady, wrothly reeking.”

“Of burning brimstone, I trove?”

“Nay—” He paused, and then said thoughtfully, “More like to the smell of
a siege in the summer heat—when the bodies of the dead grow bloated and burn
with the sack of the city.”

“By God’s self,” Melanthe murmured. “How pleasant.”

“My lady has read of some beast with such a breath?” he asked.

“Several might have such,” she said. “A manticore, a griffin. They are
found in Ethiopis. The basilisk of India may kill by no more than its
smell.”

“Ne slayed by the scent of this serpent was I. I shocked out my sword
from the sheath, my lady. The rocks rained down about me, for rattled the
earth itseluen. The air grew ardent, and out of the opening, coiling and
curling like a cable, a great serpent came—colored comelych blue, and
carried into the sky.”

She stopped, holding up her skirt as she looked around at him.

“O’er the wall, my lady, if it please you,” he said in an ordinary tone,
with a slight bow of his head.

Melanthe looked down and saw that the faint dirt track made a turn at a
place where the stones were broken down. He gripped her arm to steady her as
she stepped across, and then tugged the horse after them through the gap.

As its last great hoof cleared the stones and thumped down into a bed of
damp leaves, she said, “It was colored like the sky?”

“Yea, but shining, my lady. In the night it nigh glared.”

“Shining!” She frowned. “The serpent called the Scytale glows, so that it
may stupefy its victim by its splendor.”

“Bedazzled was I to beholden it, my lady.”

“And the air about it grew hot?”

He made a heartfelt sound of assent. “Heat such as Hell mote hurl, my
lady. All my iron afflicted me, as if afire was I. By what work I wielded my
sword, I wot nought. Marks it made upon my palm for months thereafter.”

She chewed her lip. “A basilisk might cause such. They have been known to
burn people up. I read naught of their color as blue. They’re striped in
white. But they have wings and might fly.” The slope of the land rose as
they walked. She followed the path over another ridge and furrow.

“Wings it wore, yea,” he said, “but it wafted as if the air arched it
aloft, like autumn leafs, for its bulk was too big to bravely fly on wing.
It shrieked as the sound of... as the sound of...” He paused for a long
moment. “I know nought. I ne can think of no word. As the sound of...”

Melanthe kept walking, scouring her memory for what she had read of these
things in the beastiaries, barely listening to him as he repeated the phrase
beneath his breath.

“As the sound of—a scythe on a whetstone!” he exclaimed, with the tone of
having solved some puzzle. “It shrieked as the sound of a scythe on a
whetstone.”

She tripped over a root and caught herself. As she looked up she realized
that the ridges and furrows ended here. A darker forest lay ahead, the
trunks older, thick and gnarled. She hesitated.

The steady beat of the destrier’s hooves came to a halt behind her. “Will
my lady riden now?” he asked.

Melanthe was not so certain that she wished to lead the way afoot into
this woods. She nodded. He put his hands at her waist and lifted her up to
sit aside on the saddle next to Gryngolet. For a moment he looked up at her,
a phantom of his uncommon smile in his eyes.

It was an impossible thing to resist. She smiled back, but he cast down
his look, moving away to lead the horse into the deeper wood.

They traveled steadily, following a muddy path that skirted bogs and
roots, as sinuous as his dragon. The rhythm was brisker now, for she
realized that he was after all not so weighted down by his armor that he
could not stride along at a far more active pace than hers. She ducked
branches, deep in thought as she listened to him, unable to conceive of what
beast he had actually slain. His description was detailed enough: its size
immense, its scales blue, its breath fetid, and the air about it scorching;
its aspect like a great serpent, but head broad and flat, more like to a
lizard with the teeth of a wolf, wings too small to hold it aloft.