For My Lady's Heart (30 page)

In the deserted clearing they dismounted. Gryngolet was flustered and
hungry, and Melanthe felt likewise. Sir Ruck reached for the bag of
foodstuffs. “Sit you, my lady, if you will, and take refreshment.”

He nodded toward a thronelike seat that had been cut out of a tree stump.
Melanthe perched Gryngolet there on the tall back of it, tying the leash to
a heavy shoot that had sprouted from the old roots. He brought the bag and
handed her a piece of rolled fustian.

“I did steal something of Henry after all,” he said. “Two cockerels fresh
from a hen’s nest, for the bird.”

Melanthe accepted the packet, drawing a deep breath. “Almost were we
without need of food for her.”

He shrugged. “With a choice betwixt the two of you to bringen out of
there—” He hesitated. “In faith, I reckon that a wife warms me more
pleasantly than a falcon, my lady.”

Immediately he turned away, as if he shied from his brash speaking. He
squatted down and held the food bag open, scowling into it.

Melanthe felt the touch of shyness, too. She laid one of the cockerels
across her glove and offered it to Gryngolet, then sat down on the edge of
the tree stump, taking refuge in a pragmatic tone. “We could have ransomed
her back, if that little marhawk of a lord could have retained her long
enough.” She made herself look at him, though his head was still bent over
the food. “Sir Ruadrik, I have been in consideration of our nuptial
contract.”

His hand arrested in his laying out of bread and cheese. Then he went on
with the task, saying nothing. He rose and bent knee before her, offering
food on a white cloth. Melanthe took it on her lap.

“There are many matters to be studied,” she said. “My dower and thy
courtesy, and—how best to reconcile the king that we have married without
his license.”

“My lady wife.” He stood up. “I ne haf thought on naught else all this
morn. If ye wish it—” He stared past her at the ground, his face grim and
empty of emotion. “There was no witness on earth to our vows. Nill I nought
hold you fast to your words, do you think on them today, that they were said
in haste or to your harm. It is a poor cheap for thee, such a marriage. All
the advantage be mine, though I seek it nought. I ask nothing of thy wealth;
I will have none of it, and yet still I know that the king may in his anger
strippen thee of what is rightfully thine. Therefore, I will release thee
from any duty or avowel to me, if thou wish it so.” He raised his eyes to
meet hers, his jaw firm-set. “As for myseluen—if be so much as high treason
that I haf married thee, then I will die for it, but ne’er will I forswear
it.”

“How then could I do less for thee?” she asked softly.

He turned away to the horse, removing its bit so it could graze. With his
back to her he said, “God save us both.”

“Amen,” she said. “Have a little faith in my wits, too. I have me more
than the king.”

He remained gazing at the horse and then looked over his shoulder with a
slight smile. “My lady, look what you come to—” He shook his head, opening
his arms to take in the clearing. “A stump for a chair and me for a husband.
There be peahens with greater wits than yours.”

“A poor comment on the king,” she said.

He turned, with a serious look. “When I haf my lady safe, I will go and
supplicate of him at any price, that thou moste nought be disseized of thy
possessions and title on account of me.”

“Nay, leave the king to me.” She frowned thoughtfully at the black mound
of a decaying charcoal kiln. “I think His Majesty may be appeased, if the
thing is laid before him deftly. And even should he not, or someone else
make trouble—well, I have searched on the matter in my heart.” She took a
deep breath. “I have said that my estates are of no great concern to me. I
will sweepen the hearth myself if I mote.”

He laughed aloud, a sound that rang in the little clearing— the first
time Melanthe had ever heard his uncontained amusement.

She turned in indignation. “Thinkest thee I would not?”

He was grinning at her. “I think me thou wouldst maffle the business
right royally, madam.”

“Pah.” She flicked her fingers and ate a bit of cheese. “How difficult
can it be?”

He came to her and took her face between his bare hands. “Ye ne were born
to sweepen a hearth. I’m nought so poor that my wife mote be a chare woman,
but n’would I haf thy property reduced one shilling by cause of me.”

“Think again on it. The favor of kings be not meanly bought. For such a
crime as this, gifts and presents moten be spent to appease him.” She lifted
her brows. “Lest thou wouldst rather forswear this marriage thyself, so that
I may keep all.”

His gaze traced her face. “I have said that I will nought, for my life.”

Melanthe dropped her gaze. “Speak not of such cost; I dislike it.” She
reached up and pulled him down toward her. “Enough of heavy words. Sit by
me, beau knight, and let me feed thee milk and honey with my own fingers.”

He sank down cross-legged beside the stump, leaning his shoulder on it.
“Hard cheese and havercake, it looks to me.”

“Ah, but I have said a great spell and turned it to honeycomb.” She
passed him down a lump of cheese and broken bread.

With his thumb he splintered a bite from the dry edge of the cheese and
ate it. “Nay, hard and sour as e’er.” He turned, stretching out a leg, his
back against the tree. “This is poor witchcraft, wench.” He laid his head
against her hip. “I’ve seen better at the market fair.”

“Dost thou know why I love thee?” she asked.

“In faith, I cannought believe that you do, far the less why.”

She curled her forefinger in his hair and tugged. “By hap one day I shall
tell thee.”

He was silent. She felt him turn his head, and looked down. He was gazing
toward the edge of the clearing.

“I hear a hound,” he said.

He rolled to his knees and held still, listening. Melanthe heard it then,
too, a far-off bell.

“That lymer.” He threw himself to his feet. “Christus.”

They did not stop for dusk or night, only a short rest and feeding for
the horse, with oaten bread and the tough cheese for themselves, and water
from a stream where they rode down the middle until it was too dark to be
safe. At first Melanthe had not believed that experienced hunting hounds
could be coaxed to track them—they were not deer, or even coney, but she
remembered the lymer and the gallant’s game with a lady’s scarf—that
chestnut-haired carpet knight it had been, the one she’d cut, and Melanthe
could well believe he would be glad to turn his sport with the hound to
account against her.

Sir Ruck’s mantle, dropped in the yard, must have the scent of herself
and him and the horse all thick upon it. The whole pack would follow the
lymer’s lead. And even had she not believed it, the persistent music of the
hounds, distant, sometimes lost, but coming always from the trail behind,
would have convinced her.

Ruck had hours since turned Hawk west to the sunset, away from the course
to her castle, away from Torbec and the hounds. The coast would lie before
them, she knew not how far, but she did not question him. Indeed, by
nightfall she was too weary of holding to him and supporting Gryngolet and
listening for the hounds to think beyond fear and aching muscle. It was a
thing of peculiar horror, to be hunted so. She clutched tight when they came
to a stretch of road and galloped, and then strained her ears to hear over
the heavy breath of the horse when he let Hawk drop to a walk and turn into
the woods again. She feared coming to the sea, being trapped between water
and hounds. She feared that the destrier was slowed, that its strength could
not hold against its double burden. Ruck halted for another rest and without
a word untied the baggage behind her pillion.

They abandoned it, food and all. They mounted again with only Gryngolet
and what they wore—his armor and her gown and cloak, and the hawking bag
strapped over Melanthe’s shoulder. The big horse went on into the darkening
night with its flanks moist and smelling of sweat.

She lost all track of time, jerking awake and dozing, so that it all
became a ghastly dream, in which the voices of the hounds got confused with
the wind, and she thought she heard them howling so close that she gave a
start and a low cry— and felt herself in a black roaring confusion, until
her mazed mind recognized that they had come out of the trees onto a shore
swept by a dry tempest, the waves like a great slow heartbeat, showing long
pale lines in the blackness.

She held Gryngolet in her lap, hiding her face behind his shoulders to
escape the stinging wind. She could no longer hear the hounds; she could
hear nothing but the gale and the sea. The horse rocked beneath her, a
steady surge, and she fell asleep again—drifting, sleeping, riding into an
endless baying nightmare.

Ruck thanked God who had led him in the right direction. When they had
reached the strand, he’d not known how far north or south they might have
come. But he had not taken time to wonder and guess; he just prayed—and Hawk
had plodded on a loose rein through deep sandhills, veering away from the
worst of the wind to the right instead of left, and so they had gone north
looking for what Ruck meant to find.

He had found it. The steady creak and groan of a shuttered window made
Hawk prick his ears. The night was moonless, but the sand and clouds
reflected back on one another, showing the vague outlines of pale things and
black massive shadows.

He dismounted, and the princess wrenched upright, mumbling, “I hear
them.”

“Nay, we’ve left the hounds behind,” he said, though he knew that he
might be wrong. He believed that the sand and wind would scour their scent,
but he wasn’t certain. “Hold here.” He pushed the reins into her free hand.

She took them. Ruck hoped that at least she would not fall off if she
went to sleep again. Hawk stood with his head down, his tail sweeping up
against his haunches, as if he did not care to take another step. Ruck left
them there and slogged through the sand toward the salterns, taking care to
squint ahead and avoid the pools and trenches of the saltworks as he made
his way to the single hut.

Things seemed to Melanthe to happen in disconnected scenes, the hounds
and the wind and the shore in the freezing darkness, and then a strange
figure, shagged and silent, barely seen, a woodwose, a wildman of the
desert, mad rocking and water and a sturdy boat—and colder, colder, wet
spray that made her huddle into her cloak—she did not have Gryngolet, but
somehow she remembered that all was right; Ruck said so, when she asked—then
the first light of dawn, the world a sickening sway of wind and wave.

Sea loathing and lassitude and cold kept her immobile, hunched in the
tiny cover for the endless voyage, while the woodwose shouted
incomprehensible orders at Ruck and they worked together against the wind
and spray, sailing and hauling upon the ropes, manning oars to point the
vessel over waves that seemed too tall for it, carrying her she knew not
where, nor hardly cared. Hawk stood with his head encased in armor, his legs
braced and his nose lowered to the deck.

Near sunset the awful rocking abated. She found the strength to open her
eyes and crawl from the small shelter into the open, looking Wearily upon an
unfamiliar shoreline, crystalline with black trees that somehow glittered,
mountains behind them, rising to ponderous heights dusted a spectral white.

She came a little more into her wits as they landed, the boat sweeping
and bobbing on the swells that rolled into a protected inlet of a small bay.
They had to disembark onto a sandbar. It thrust out into the inlet from
overhanging trees, their lower limbs drooping down near the water, every
twig and branch encased in clear ice to form strange white cascades against
the dark wood.

Sir Ruck hurried her, lifting her bodily onto the sand and glancing often
toward the opposite shore of the bay. The horse came calmly off the grounded
boat, as if it splashed from vessel into shallow water half the days of its
life. Without a word the woodwose, as coarse and savage-looking in the day
as in the dark, handed over Gryngolet, her body encased in a falconer’s
sock, and pushed off his craft with an oar.

Ruck slapped the destrier’s rump, sending it into a heavy trot ahead of
them. The horse thudded toward the trees, a pale form in the failing light,
and vanished in the space of a blink.

Melanthe looked over her shoulder, squinting her gritty eyes at the other
shore. A mile off or more across the sands, she thought she could see low
buildings and signs of active cultivation. But he did not allow her to
linger and study.

“It is the abbey land,” he said, with a soft contempt in his voice. “The
house of Saint Mary. N’would I nought haf us apperceived.”

“Where go we?”

He held her arm and looked into her face as if he would speak—then gave
her a light push, turning her ahead of him. “Into the forest,” he said.
“Make haste, my lady.”

Though they had left the hounds of Torbec far behind across open water,
he mounted them upon the horse again and did not stop to rest. They rode all
night—or if they didn’t, Melanthe knew nothing of it. Poor long-suffering
Gryngolet lay secured behind the pillion, girded in her linen sock with her
hooded head emerging from one end and her feet and tail from the other.
Melanthe held onto the high back of the saddle. She kept falling asleep and
starting awake as she lost her balance, until he said, “Lay your arms about
me.”

She slipped her arms around his waist and leaned her head on his back. He
held both her hands clasped securely under his. It was cold and
uncomfortable, with only his surcoat to pad the hard backplate of his
cuirass, but Melanthe must have slept long and deep there, for when next she
roused, the slant of the ground had steepened, and dawn light filtered black
into gray around them.

The forest itself was so dark and thick that it seemed the horse was
plowing through massive brambles and hollies without a path or sign of
passage. And yet, none of the thorns pricked them, or even caught her cloak.
The destrier stepped steadily ahead, turning often, making into dark caverns
of winter foliage like tunnels, finding easy degrees up a cliff where
icicles hung down from rocks directly over their heads. The horse labored,
blowing puffs of steam, its iron shoes ringing sometimes on hard stone and
other times thudding on moss. The sound of the wind in the branches overhead
grew stronger as they gained height. Melanthe could look down and see dusts
of gritty snow on every tree and evergreen, but no sign of where they had
come.

Ahead, the woods seemed brighter, the trees smaller, driven into hunted
shapes by the wind. Sharp rocks made huge flat-sided teeth, as if a dragon
of the earth bared its fangs. The destrier heaved up over a shelf and passed
between two huge masses of slate, the gray slabs angling down to the ground
like a great V-shaped gate.

The sound of the wind suddenly dimmed. Hawk’s iron shoes echoed in the
defile. They emerged into a little dark snow-spattered wood hidden in the
cleft. Beside a mountain tarn, purplish black and still beneath a clear
sheen of ice, Sir Ruck halted the blowing horse at last.

“We will letten the horse rest and drink,” he said, helping her down.
“Are ye thirsty?”

She shook her head, wrapping her cloak tight about her, and sat down on a
rock. He produced a havercake from some unknown pocket and offered it to
her. As Melanthe crunched on it glumly, he led the horse to the tarn and
broke the surface with his heel. The sound cracked against the cliffs and
reverberated back as jags of white splintered across the pond. There
appeared to be no exit from the coombe, and no entrance, either, though she
stared at the place she thought they had come in.

“Where are we?” she asked, brushing crumbs from her cheek.

He looked up, weariness written in all the lines of his face. With a
faint smile he said, “In the fells beyond the frith, my lady. None can
follow here.”

The horse plunged its nose into the water and sucked. Melanthe thought of
the pathless forest they had passed through so easily. She gazed at the bare
branches around the tarn—and suddenly saw the pattern in them, the felled
trunks and interwoven framework, one twig pulled down and anchored beneath
another, a third twisted about its neighbor, a pair spread open, braided and
pruned and pinned to the ground to start a new shoot, all growing together
into a wall of thorn and wood.

“Avoi,” she breathed. “It is a
plessis
barrier.”

“Yea. And ancient, my lady. Since before the northmen came to this coast,
before anyone remembers, hatz been kept so.”

She looked at him. “What does it protect?”

He came to her and held out his hand. Melanthe took it, rising. He led
her to a place that seemed impenetrable: only when he stepped into it did
she see that she could follow. They walked through a dark hollow, skirting
the downed trunks of trees. He climbed ahead of her into another cleft in
the rocks, and offered his hand.

Melanthe gathered her skirts and let him hike her up. The space was
barely large enough for both of them, with wind whining through the fissure
of slate. He flattened himself to the towering sheet of rock and let her
sidle in front of him, pulling her back against his chest so that she could
see through the rent in the cliffs to the open country beyond.

“There,” he said, and pointed.

The mountainside fell down so steeply from where they stood that she
could not see the tops of trees except far below, where the forest swept to
the valley floor. Ragged mists moved across, forming and fleeing, rising in
wisps to flow up the cliffsides, blurring her view. At first she thought the
valley empty, only more forest, and more, with the hint of a river running
along the bottom and frozen waterfalls on the far side. She scowled against
the wind-tears in her eyes, trying to follow where he pointed.

She blinked. What she had thought to be a waterfall seemed to be a tower;
she blinked and it was a waterfall again, its lower cascade hidden by the
spur of a ridge—but it had a strange slate formation at its source.
Triangular; and another, a little lower, dark cones of stone, each with a
bleeding white tail at its base ... the mists drifted and broke apart, and
suddenly, for one instant, she saw a castle, bleached white, turrets with
battlements and slate-blue conical roofs, the glint of golden banner
staves—and then it was only a misted cliff marked by icefalls once more.

“Do you see it?” he asked, bending close to her ear.

Melanthe realized that she had drawn a sharp breath. “I cannot say—is
there a hold? The mist befools me.”

“There is a hold.” He put his hands on her shoulders. “Wolfscar.”

“Depardeu,” she said as the mist cleared again. “I see it!”

“This is mine, from six miles behind us to that second peak, to the coast
on the west and the lakes east. Held of the king himself—and a license and
command to fortify it with a castel.” His voice held a note of defiant
pride, almost as if he expected she might disagree with him.

Melanthe turned away from the icy wind. “Thou art a baron, then!”

“Yeah, we haf a baron’s writ, to my father’s grandsire and before. Did ye
think me a freeman, my lady?” he demanded.

She slipped back from the crevice, down into a wider and quieter space
between the rock walls. He came behind, the familiar chink of his mail
compounded by the ring of steel as his scabbard hit the stone with each
step.

She stopped and turned, smiling. “Nay. Bast son of a poor knight. ”Twas
Lancaster thought thee a freeman.“

He bristled, his eyes narrowing. But before he could speak, Melanthe
said, “Why should we imagine more of thee, Green Sire? When thou wouldst not
name thyself.”

“I cannought,” he said. He gazed at her grimly, his eyes dark in the
shadow of the walls. He shrugged. “The letters patent be lost. My parents
died in the Great Pestilence. The abbey—” His mouth curled. “They were to
holden my ward in my non-age. And they forgot me! I went there when had I
five and ten years, for I ne’er heard word nor direction, nor had aid of
them. And the monks said I was an open liar and in fraud of them, that this
land escheated to the abbey in the last reign, and ne’er watz revoked by the
king. Ne did they e’en know of the donjon—” He set his fist on the stone.
“My father’s castel, that was seven years abuilding! To them is naught but
impassable forest, and all else unremembered!”

His indignation at that seemed greater than at being disavowed himself.
But Melanthe saw instantly the heart of the blow. “Thou canst not prove thy
family?”

He leaned against the rock face, his heel braced on it. “They all died.”

“All of them?”

He contemplated his knee, his head down. He nodded, as if he were ashamed
of it.

Melanthe frowned at him. They were of an age—if his kin had perished in
the first Great Death, he would have been no more than seven or eight when
he was orphaned. “But—from then, till thou went to the monks at ten and
five—who cared for thee?”

He looked up, with his trace of a wry smile. “My lady— come thee now and
greet them, if thou wilt deign.”

Plunging into the valley of Wolfscar, carrying Gryngolet on her wrist
once again and clinging to Ruck with the other arm, Melanthe felt a stir of
superstitious wonder. She had traveled with him in wilderness and desert, so
she had thought—but this place seemed farther from church and humanity with
each step.

The way down was a slide and slip into murky trees that groaned with the
wind in their tops. She stiffened as she heard the distant howl of a wolf—or
was it a woman’s scream? The shriek went on and on, changing pitch from low
to high, growing louder as they descended, but Ruck gave it no notice. They
made a sharp turn and abruptly the wail was a roar; the wind through a pile
of slate teeth, transforming again to a living screech as they passed it.

“God save us,” she said below her breath.

He squeezed her wrist. She was glad that he had tightened his hold on
her, because in the next twisting in their progress, she looked up over his
shoulder and near leapt from the pillion in her recoil.

It was a huge face; thrice taller than the destrier, staring at her with
baleful black eyes out of the depth of the tree-shadow. She made a choked
sound in her throat, but neither horse nor master made a sign of fear; they
moved steadfastly downward, and at a different angle the face became stone
and bush and branch, an illusion of reality.

She remembered the strange fusion of dream and waking of the night
before, the silent woodwose they had sailed with, the boat that seemed too
small to bear them and the horse safely ... she began to doubt what sort of
guardians watched over him.

The ground became gentler. A cold mist enfolded them, a sudden pale
blankness, with only the next bush, the next tree trunk looming out of it
and vanishing. The horse put its head down as if it smelled its path the way
a hound would. Melanthe shuddered, hiding Gryngolet under her cloak as the
mist sent the chill to her bones.

As she sat huddled as close within her mantle as she could, her fantasy
began to imagine that she heard music. She told herself that it was the
wind, another illusion like the scream she could still hear from above them.
And yet it had form and melody; it was a song that she knew, or thought she
knew, sweet and sad and beguiling. The horse’s hooves beat in time to it.
Ruck said nothing; his head seemed to nod in the same rhythm, his hand
loosened on hers—she thought that he was falling asleep, the direst lapse of
all with such enthralling spirits.

She grabbed his shoulder and shook him hard. “Wake!” she hissed. “In
God’s name, wake up!”

“Avoi!” He started upright. He lifted his head and jerked it back, neatly
smashing her nose as he reached for his sword.

Melanthe yelped, squeezing her eyes shut against the pain. She put her
hand over her face, blinking back tears. When she got her sight back, the
forest was silent but for the high wind and the sound of Hawk’s hoofbeats.