Dark Maiden (2 page)

Yolande stared at it, all hopes forgotten in an instant. She sensed the earth shifting beneath her feet as the blood pounded within her temples, making her convinced the top of her skull might shatter. “Oh, Great Maria, already?” she said, unaware she had spoken aloud, crossing herself, making the sign of the cross above the crouching Geraint. The great bow across her shoulders creaked as if in warning.

So soon! I must prepare with care. If this sign is right, there can be no mistakes. Pray that I am ready. It is so soon, so soon…

He saw her face change, becoming as still as a mask.

Then she blinked. “I do understand it. My thanks to you, master Geraint. How may I aid you in return? Are you thirsty or hungry?”

“Ale is always welcome,” he answered quickly, “but for now the pleasure of your company on the road will be more than payment.”

She raised her pretty eyebrows at that. The rest of her was pretty too, if such a plain word could be used for such exotic looks. By “dark” he had expected black hair, which Yolande had—long, shimmering waves of the stuff, very clean but caught in a simple clasp at the back of her slender neck as if she had no time for any fuss. Her eyes were either brown or black—he could not be sure—but they were clear and steady as if she looked straight to the heart of things.

To the heart of me, for sure.
Geraint liked women, loved their smell and feel and their cockeyed way of looking at the world. For all her men’s clothing, Yolande was very much a woman, and a love worthy of Solomon. Her skin was a beautiful shade of bronze, smooth as polished wood, and her eyelashes were double-lashed. She had a narrow face and elegant bones but there was a strength in her, character and soul together. He could imagine her besting devils.

For the rest…the performer in him knew at once she should be in bright colors, reds and yellows and blues, not the drab serge of a thatcher. If she was in his company for long—and he intended she would be—he would tempt her into a brighter manner of dress.

For she has the glory of the evening in her. She wins me already and does not know it.

“I do not chatter,” she said, unaware of his inner tumult. “I have a way to go.”

Better still.
He admired how she did not admit where she was headed. “For today then?” He lifted his hands, palms up. “To the nearest house of honest folk, who will let you sleep by their hearth and me in their hayloft?”

“You wish to squire me to safety?”

“For the pleasure of—”

“For the pleasure of my company. Yes, Geraint the Welshman, you said that already.” But she was smiling as she spoke and he knew she would agree.

“Shall I carry this?” He motioned to the cross. “You have your bow and bag already and it will be no trouble.”

After a moment, she strode out like a youth, leaving him to catch up. Geraint admired her graceful gait and did not hurry. He wanted their day to last.

By then I may have won another day in her company.

* * * * *

At the end of their day together, Yolande slept with him in the hayloft of a new, nervous reeve in a village called Lower Something-Or-Other. Geraint had missed the name and was not interested in the shabby, defeated place anyway. He had offered to juggle and been told no, offered to chop wood and been shown a blunt axe.

Yolande, graceful and self-contained as a cat, apparently oblivious to the villagers’ stares and whispers, had paid for her lodging with gold coin. She had rebuilt the hearth fire too, with permission from the goodwife, and made flat cakes on the hearth—cakes that melted in Geraint’s mouth and exploded with spices on his tongue.

“I had the spices from a cook on London Bridge as a thank-you,” she told him when he asked how she had made them. She did not say what she had done for the cook and he knew better than to ask, at least in the hearing of others.

She had surprised him by sleeping in the loft with him but the reeve had been growing bolder through the evening, taking every chance he could to touch her. Geraint would have punched the fellow or cracked his greasy fingers but Yolande was content to put herself above such petty gropings. He marveled at her patience.

She slept, her breathing light and soft, and he was glad to hear her slumbering in the stale, sparse hay, only the stretch of a hand away from him. He had not slept and had eased the ladder up into the loft with them. He did not quite trust the reeve, although the fellow was snoring loudly enough to put a sleeping bear to shame.

It was July and in the summer night he could see Yolande, her great bow—which he meant to ask her about, oh yes—laid beside her within easy reach. She lay curled on her side, her hair wound about her long throat, her limbs twitching as she dreamed.

What do you dream of, my lady?

“So many dead, so many restless dead.”

The hair on his scalp rose as if trying to escape. Yolande was sitting up beside him, rigid as a pole. She was sleeping still, though her eyes were open.

Her voice was full of pain. “How can I help them all? This sickness is a plague and we are in the last days.”

Geraint cracked his knuckles together. He did not believe that, not for a moment. While in the monastery, he had heard of a time when men learned that a thousand years had passed since Christ had died. People had thought the world would end then but it had not.

“Rest, it is nighttime,” he said quietly. He did not want her sleepwalking like a little child, for she would be a danger to herself. “Rest, Yolande.”

She sighed and lay down again. “This place is soaked in the evil of men. Geraint senses it too. I can tell from his scent. And he does not like to touch the crucifix. He could be an exorcist, with training.”

This was news to him but he kept silent. He was startled she had noticed his reluctance to handle the ancient cross but he could not understand how that was a point in his favor.

“We must leave early. Get away before the others wake. I must gather herbs, sacred herbs. Saint John’s wort and rosemary, lavender and hyssop.”

He agreed with that, grinning as he savored the
we
. He cleared his throat, cutting off her sleepy list. “Sleep now, Yolande. I will help you with the green stuff.”

“What has possessed them?”

He did not know who
they
were and did not care. “We shall find out. Sleep, Yolande.”

“I would rest in honeyman’s arms but it would not work. Men want more, want all and I cannot. I cannot give all.” She sank into the hay, leaving him more wakeful than ever.

What a nickname! Even the little you give me, lady, stirs me.
“Honeyman,” he said aloud, and smiled.

* * * * *

She woke him before dawn, just as the birds were stirring. “If you are still with me, we have a long way to travel and should go,” she whispered. “I will leave more gold by the hearth.”

Swiftly, he gathered their things. Whatever she had said in her sleep last night about his senses, his wits were nagging him to leave and leave fast.

She lowered the ladder and, before he could stop her and go first, she vanished into the swirling half-light, her bow rattling softly on her shoulders. He followed by swinging down from the loft, the pack on his shoulders bouncing painfully, the crucifix stabbing into the small of his back.

She was at the door, wrestling with the rope hasp. Figures ’round the banked fire were sitting up, shouting. There was the glint of a drawn knife.

Geraint scooped up her gold coin from the hearth, ran to the door, cut the rope with his dagger and dragged her outside with him. They pelted through the reeve’s garden in a shower of thrown pebbles and curses, crushing beans and peas, sprinting to outrun the lumbering pursuit.

Yolande ran ahead of him into a field of tall wheat. She hooked him off his feet and dragged him into cover below the bobbing heads of wheat and corncockle.

“Here.” He offered her the coin but she put a finger to her lips. Silent, they lay in the field, waiting for the searchers and hearing only a skylark high overhead.

“Those people gave up quickly,” she said after a moment.

“No energy for a chase.”

Her eyes narrowed into slits. “I can fight for myself. I am no helpless child.”

Except at night, when you rise and talk in your sleep.
“Right. Next time you can open the door.”

She chuckled, her brief anger vanishing like summer fog. “They have gone, have they not?”

“They have never come here,” he replied at once. She was testing him again, seeing what his senses told him. To cover his amusement, he jumped up, cut a caper and drew her to her feet. She was light, her fingers warm against his. He wanted to squeeze them a little before he let her go but wanted to win her trust, so released her at once.

She led the way and, with Geraint content to protect her back and watch her womanly dip and sway as she walked, they set out again.

Yolande was not surprised when Geraint remained with her, even passing through a walled town where he could have stayed on and juggled and earned good money. He admired her, she knew, for his eyes were always bright when she caught him watching her. It was the kind of gentle, interested way her father had looked at her mother and it warmed her.

She knew his attention, however flattering, was also dangerous. The crucifix was a sign she dared not ignore and she would need her full attention on what she must confront. Yet the Welshman intrigued her.

He does not ask about journey’s end, about where we are going. Never have I known a man so easy about not being the master.

She knew why, of course. Geraint could take care of himself.

But I must work alone when the time comes. Will he accept that?

He caught her eye and grinned. “Wondering about me, Yolande, I hope? I am unmarried, unbetrothed, not widowed, not plighted—”

“Enough!” she said, waving him to silence, although she was pleased.

“You wear a ring. It saves you questions and trouble, I suppose?”

By an effort of will, she did not glance at the narrow gold band on her wedding ring finger. He had a touch of the fey about him, this Welshman, and saw too much. “I do not lead people on,” she admitted, keen he should know this about her. “I cannot offer a man a house, or dowry…or myself.”

“Very proper,” he said, grave as a priest, which made her want to tickle his feet to make him laugh. He had bare feet, tough and brown as hide, but she wagered she could find one spot to make him itch…

There was muffled shouting behind her, several voices, but it was the sudden stench of sulfur that made her gag. She turned toward the voices and raised her arms in a protective cross before Geraint. Behind her, the Welshman ripped a clod of earth and grass right out of the ground and hurled it with a massive shout. The smell fell back a little.

“How did you know to do that?” she asked.

“My mam taught me to scare off crows and other rubbish. Come on.” He seized her arm, shoving her forward with his shoulder.

“I face what comes.”

“But choose your ground, right?”

And the cursed thing was, he was right. Geraint was right even before the group of men broke cover from a sunken way, bursting onto the larger track a sword’s length away from them.

Something else is with them too.

Geraint said something in his own tongue and yanked her back so strongly her feet left the ground. She stumbled, gripped his hand and ran straight off the track, making for higher ground.

Higher ground is usually sacred ground.

Geraint yelled more she did not understand but she saw the pale alarm in his eyes and spun ’round, striking out with her bow. The tip cut across a leering face and there was a howl. She let the bow sweep out to the farthest reach of her arm and another man screamed.

A heavy boot scraped down her calf and her whole leg burned but she did not stop sprinting. With her quiver clashing across her back, beating her up the weed-infested slope, she panted and urged the fleeing Geraint, “Come on, on!”

“I slow for you, woman!” he roared, and then he too turned and threw a volley of pebbles at the closing group—no, not pebbles, but coins and bits of metal.

More howling behind them. She and Geraint pulled farther ahead of the pack. Their sanctuary was a single oak tree that marked a field boundary and once—she knew it in a chilly, flinty instant of insight—had swung with sacrifices long ago. She reached it first by a fingertip and set her back against the bark, her throat dry, her lungs wheezing and her body shuddering.

“By the God and good within this tree, protect us,” she croaked, slipping her bow off her arm. Another breath, another moment and the arrow was notched and released.

A man gargled, the arrow twitching in his shoulder, and fell away, rolling down the slope. Geraint yelled and drew a long dagger from his sleeve.

Suddenly the odds of the attack had changed. The rest of their assailants hesitated, slowing, looking at each other.