Chance (8 page)

“Out!” Chance raged. A cooler fury answered his own in eyes the color of woodland shade.

“Many have been the favors you have asked from us. You were told that you would pay someday.”

“Take your payment some other way!”

“We have already taken it. Iantha will come to us. Her hands will grow clever enough to tear off that rag you have tied around her—”

“Out!” Chance roared, and he drew his dagger. But luminous eyes met his, and he found he could not lift it. After a long moment, the Denizen prince turned and at his leisure took his leave.

Iantha did not cease to weep until morning. Chance held her close to his heart, and his heart wept with her.

When summer was waning toward autumn, the leaves not yet yellowing but the nights growing chill, the rebels formed their line of siege around the fortress. Their numbers were large, for nearly every man of the demesne stood among them, as well as outlaw rebels venturing from their refuges in the penetralia of Wirral. And few were the servants or warriors who remained at Roddarc's side.

After dark of that night, a starlit night of the dark of the moon, Halimeda slipped out through the postern gate and walked toward the rebel lines. Once again she went robed in black, but this time she wore it proudly, and the long flow of her dark hair was starred like the night with small gems. A larger brooch of silver and ivory pinned her mantle, shining like the missing moon.

At the points of polite spears, the rebel sentries took her to be seen by their leader.

Halimeda was very calm. Her child was safe with Chance. She had come to offer herself to the rebel leader for wedding, so that he would not be obliged to kill her on the morrow, and she expected him, whoever he was, to accept her offer. She could only hope that the man would not be utterly a lout.… A bleak prospect for one who had dreamed of love, but Halimeda faced it with wintery calm.

Her calm deserted her when she and the sentries reached the campfire where men drew lines in the dirt. The leader of the renegades was a broad-shouldered, blunt-featured man in jackboots and leathers. The heavy hobnailed boots of a war leader, but instead of a sword he wore a bow, and he held a child by his side. Dagger in his hand, stabbing the earth; he laid it down when he saw her.

“You!” she exclaimed.

Chance came and put Iantha into her arms.

“Lady,” he said, “take the little one to the lodge and wait there. When all is over, you will be ruler here, if you wish. You will wed me or not, as you wish. I hope you will not hate me.” His voice faltered for an instant, then grew firm and hard, the lines of his mouth very straight. “As for the lord your brother, I have a lifelong score to settle with him. The whipping boy has spurned the rod.”

“You—he—I do not understand,” Halimeda stammered. “After all, you hate him?”

Chance shook his head. “I hated him for a while,” he said, “when he had you so in despair, when I remembered my own despair. But it is you who should hate him now, my lady.”

Her eyes widened hugely, shadowed in the firelight, as she stared at him. Chance's voice sharpened.

“Lady, your brother is no fitting lord. He craves to be killed. Do you think I should let the neighboring lord oblige him, then hunt you like a deer through Wirral? Or some lout hack him down, carry his head on a spear and take you to wife? You are the Lady of the Mark, Halimeda! If Roddarc is too cowardly to care for his own honor, he should yet care for what is rightfully yours.”

Misfortune had made Halimeda tame, but his tone moved her. Listening to him, she felt her chin rise, her shoulders straighten.

Chance said, “For the sake of my own hatred it would have been sufficient to look him in the face and kill him. But for your sake, my lady … these many months I have planned and labored and brought folk together, since before the little one was born. The outlaws of Wirral, I knew the ways to their lairs, though it was a subtle matter to speak to them without being killed. But after we had struck bargain all was easier, for they have no desire to skulk in the woods, and there are those in the village who want their comrades and brothers back. I made promises, and received the one I wanted in return: that you should not be harmed.”

“I would rather you fought my brother for your own sake,” Halimeda said.

Chance's straight mouth quirked into a smile; there was yet some pride left in her! “Indeed, it is also for my own sake,” he said. “When I have made an end of him, I will deem myself a man again.”

“Have you ever been less?”

His face grew still and haunted. “Can you doubt it? I have always been lessened by Roddarc, and still am. Halimeda—have you not felt it, too? How he speaks you fair, and yet old Riol peeps around the corners of his deeds?”

“I have come to an enemy encampment in the night,” she said, her voice hard, “offering my body to save my life. Yes, I feel it, how once more my brother has had no thought for me. This indifference is what he calls forgiveness.”

“There is food in the lodge,” Chance told her, for though Roddarc had taken no thought for her, Chance had. “Enough for you and the child for some days. Go there, bar the door and wait.”

There were not enough men within the fortress, Chance deemed, to hold the shell, the circular outer wall of the stronghold. Though all the next day they did so, for Chance preferred to spare his followers and take Wirralmark by degrees. Not for him, the piling of bodies in the ditch outside the wall. He and his outlaw archers picked off defenders one by one until nightfall stopped them. During the night four more of Roddarc's followers deserted to join the ranks of the challengers, and at daybreak Chance found the shell deserted. Roddarc's force had fallen back to the keep, the square tower where the lord made his home, and they had knocked away the wooden steps that gave entry. The only door, heavily barred, stood well above the level of a man's head.

Chance and his rebels spent that day battering at the thick stone of the corner buttresses, hoping to knock a hole, stretching ox-hides over the laborers to fend off the many deadly things hurled from the parapets above. Chance took his turn with the maul and wedge, but for the most part he watched from the shelter of the dungeon tower, waiting. Once his men had succeeded in loosening a stone, it was only a matter of time. In any event, Roddarc's overthrow was only a matter of time.

They made their entry, and widened and defended it during the night, and on the third day they stormed the keep. Roddarc met them at the top of the first spiral of stone steps.

“Chance,” he breathed. “They told me, but I did not believe them.”

“Who else? Would you wish an enemy to have the slaying of you?”

“Mischance, I will have to call you now.”

Roddarc raised his sword, and Chance struck with his cudgel, the commoner's weapon of choice. All around them men fought hand to hand, with staffs and daggers, the renegades forcing the defenders back, opening the high, barred entry so that those outside could put up the scaling ladders to it; more rebels poured in by the moment. And Chance had not yet succeeded in touching Roddarc, nor had the lord harmed Chance, but with swift strokes of his sword he killed rebel after rebel as he and his few remaining men gave way. He was splendid, magnificent, as magnificent as he had been at Gallowstree Lea. Flung back at every charge, Chance could not come near him. Only sheer press of numbers forced Roddarc back.

One more stone stairway led to the upper chambers, the lord's last refuge. Roddarc leaped to a vantage on the stairs, planted his feet in the fighter's stance and waited there with bloodied sword at the ready, and for a moment no rebel came near him.

“Why!” the lord panted at Chance. “That is all I want to know; just tell me why!”

Chance's anger rose up in him like the one-eyed monster in its fen at the center of the Wirral.

“Tyrant!” he roared. “You yourself are the rod that has always scarred me the worst, son of Riol! You with your sniveling and your so-called friendship—be an honest tyrant, would you, or no tyrant at all!”

Rage flushed Roddarc's face to the hairline, twisted his mouth, blazed in his eyes, and those who watched stepped back as if they had seen a revenant; for a moment it seemed as if Riol stood there.

“Where are your balls, whipping boy?” the lord taunted, and Chance lunged.

Up that spiral stairway they fought, and this time Chance took cuts, and the lord took blows. Roddarc fought on alone; the last of his followers had been captured or slain. He slashed Chance on the head and nearly toppled him, but others stood ready to steady their leader, to drive back the lord; Chance and the others drove him back to the head of the stairs, then quickly halfway to the wall. But at the center of his lordly chamber Roddarc let his sword fall with a clash to the floor, kicked it toward Chance.

“I'll not be taken in a corner, like a brawler,” he said, standing lance straight. “Take that and use it, whipping boy.” The sword spun on the stone floor, then came to rest with a clatter against Chance's feet. Chance stood as still as Roddarc, and a ring of rebels formed, watching.

“Take it, bastard, and my dying curse on you! I'll not be slain with a commoner's weapon.”

Chance picked up the sword, hefting it, accustoming his woodsman's hand to the feel of this unfamiliar weapon. “And what is the curse?” he asked mildly.

Roddarc smiled, a hard, dark smile. “Riol have you,” he said.

Chance killed him with a single blow of the sword.

Chance came to Halimeda in twilight, with a bloody wrapping on his head. The lady came out of the lodge and stood beneath an oak tree to meet him, the child in her arms, a question in her gaze. He met her eyes and nodded.

“Roddarc is dead,” he said, “and he died well. The women are preparing his body for a lord's burial.”

“I thought it more likely, the men would have put his head on a pike,” she said.

“That, too.”

Laughter like the shouting of birds fluttered out of the foliage of the oak. A rustling like that of squirrels, and small woodland folk by the dozen stood on the spreading limbs, broad smiles stretching the tough skin of their faces. Halimeda gasped and clutched at her child, but Chance merely rubbed his nose in annoyance.

“What do you want?” he demanded of the Denizens.

Despite himself his glance shifted to the child. Having not seen her for a few days, he saw Iantha anew. The beauty of her—but how pale and thin she had become, the little girl so quiet in her mother's arms.

The Denizens trilled with laughter and did not answer his demand. Instead, they chanted at him. “Well, indeed, Chance! And you've become like us, as hard as trees, as fickle as mothflight; was it happenstance? Or mischance, Chance?”

“What do you
want
?” he asked them fiercely.

“Why, to honor you, Chance.” It was the russet-brown prince who spoke. “The lady and thee. Come to the dance. A revel for your bridal.”

He gave a single snort of laughter. “A quaint revel you'll have from me!”

The prince of the Denizens beckoned. “Come.”

There had been no time to talk with Halimeda concerning bridals. Nor was there now much choice. “It is best to do as they say,” Chance told her in a low voice, and she nodded, only her widened eyes showing her fear. He took the child from her, shielding the small head against his shoulder.

Leaping and scampering atop the branches, the Denizens led them through the darkening forest. A new moon, rising, gave not quite enough light. Chance and the lady stumbled over logs, felt their way through thickets, fending off twigs that seemed to search for their eyes. Iantha slept in Chance's arms. By the time they reached the meadow and the mushroom ring, Chance and Halimeda felt weary enough to sleep as well. They sank to seats on the tussocky grass. Chance laid Iantha down, wrapped his mantle around her.

All that happened that night seemed like a dream.

The music, humming and buzzing and piping amidst insect music and birdsong in the moonlit darkness. And the whirling and circling of hundreds of tiny dancers within the luminous ring, the mushrooms that glowed like small yellow moons amidst the grass. And wine served in acorn cups. And a heat in the blood.… Chance dreamed that he took Halimeda by the hand, led her within the moonglow circle, danced with her there, and she came with him willingly, and he danced with a nobleman's skill. Later, he dreamed that he was lying with her there, her warm, womanly body close to his. And the passion, the sensations he had thought long gone, long dead and turned to dirt and worm on a distant battlefield, his once more. Dreaming … but such a blessed, vivid dream. Hands moving, and Halimeda's mouth meeting his, and soft importunity of her breasts, and the welcoming, sweet, warm haven under her skirt. He entered it. Reverent, nearly weeping with joy, home coming, he entered it.

With sunrise he awoke, blinked, gazed. Her face lay close to his, her hair in disarray, and her tender smile matched his own. His mantle covered both of them. Around them grew a ring of yellow mushrooms.

“Chance,” she whispered, “darling Chance, you rascal, will you never stop surprising me? There's nothing amiss with your manhood.”

“But—Hali, I've not deceived you—” Hope growing in him like passion itself, but still he hardly dared to believe.…

“I know.” She kissed him. “I felt it happen. The healing. Wirral magic.”

Healed. He was whole, entire, a man again, as he had not been for many years. He hugged her wildly, shouted aloud in joy. From somewhere close at hand, someone laughed.

Chance started to jump up, but something jerked him back. Looped from his wrist to Halimeda's, and knotted around each, lay a bright red sash. He untied it and fastened his clothing in haste, all the while glaring around him, but even as he did so he knew that it had been no human laugh, no human trick played on him, no human joke. He had nothing worse than Denizens to face.