Death and the Lady (5 page)

“No mercy for him, either,” said Mère Adele, “to see them
grow old and die.” And when Lys looked at her with wide startled eyes: “No, I’m
no wiser than I ought to be. I read a book, that’s all. I wanted to know what
the stories were. He swore a vow, they said, that he would go under the trees
and never come out; not in this age of the world.”

“Nor will he,” Lys said, bitter. “Nor any who went in with
him, nor any who was born thereafter. It’s a wider realm than you can conceive
of, and this world is but a corner of it; and yet it is a prison. I wanted this
air, this sun, this earth. His vow—sworn before ever I was born—forbade me even
to think of it.”

“So of course you thought of it.” Mère Adele sighed. “Young
things never change.”

“That is what he said,” said Lys, so tight with anger that I
could barely hear her. “That is exactly what he said.”

“He let you go.”

“How could he stop me? He knew what would happen. That the
walls would close, once I’d opened them. That there’d be no going back.”

“Did you want to?”

“Then,” said Lys, “no. Now. . .” Her fingers knotted in
Francha’s curls. Carefully she unclenched them. “This is no world for the likes
of me. It hates me, or fears me, or both together; it sees me as a thing, to
use or to burn. Even you who took me in, who dare to be fond of me—you know how
you could suffer for it. You will, you’re as brave as that. But in the end you’d
come to loathe me.”

“Probably,” said Mère Adele. “Possibly not. I doubt you’ll
be here long enough for that.”

“I will not go back to Montsalvat,” said Lys, each word
shaped and cut in stone.

“You might not have a choice,” Mère Adele said. “Unless you
can think of a way to get rid of milord. We can hold him off for a while, but he
has armed men, and horses. We have neither.”

Lys lowered her head. “I know,” she said. “Oh, I know.”

“You know too much,” I said. I was angry, suddenly; sick of
all this talk. “Why don’t you stop knowing and do? There are twenty men out
there, and a man in front of them who wants a witch for a pet. Either give in
to him now, before he kills somebody, or find a way to get him out. You can
call down the moon, he said. Why not the lightning, too?”

“I can’t kill,” said Lys, so appalled that I knew it for
truth. “I
can’t
kill.”

“You said that before,” I said. “Is that all your witching
is worth, then? To throw up your hands and surrender, and thank God you won’t use
what He gave you?”

“If He gave it,” she said, “and not the Other.”

“That’s heresy,” said Mère Adele, but not as if she cared
about it. “I think you had better do some thinking. Playing the good Christian
woman brought you where you are. He’ll take you, child. Be sure of it. And make
us pay for keeping you.”

Lys stood up with Francha in her arms, sound asleep. She
laid the child in the bed and covered her carefully, and kissed her. Then she
turned. “Very well,” she said. “I’ll give myself up. I’ll let him take me back
to Montsalvat.”

Mère Adele was up so fast, and moved so sudden, that I did
not know what she had done till I heard the slap.

Lys stood with her hand to her cheek. I could see the red
weal growing on the white skin. She looked perfectly, blankly shocked.

“Is that all you can do?” Mère Adele snapped at her. “Hide
and cower and whine, and make great noises about fighting back, and give in at the
drop of a threat?”

“What else can I do?” Lys snapped back.

“Think,” said Mère Adele. And walked out.

oOo

It was a very quiet night. I surprised myself: I slept. I
was even more surprised to wake and find Lys still there. She had been sitting
by the fire when I went to sleep. She was sitting there still, but the cover
was on the fire, and her knees were up as far as they would go with her belly
so big, and she was rocking, back and forth, back and forth.

She came to herself quickly enough once I reached past her
to lift the firelid; did the morning duties she had taken for her own, seemed
no different than she ever had. But I had seen the tracks of tears on her face,
that first moment, before she got up to fetch the pot.

When she straightened herself with her hands in the small of
her back like any bearing woman since Mother Eve, I was ready to hear her say
it. “I’m going to the priory.”

I went with her. It was a grey morning, turning cold; there
was a bite in the air. This time I had on my good dress and my best kerchief,
and Claudel’s woolen cloak. They were armor of a sort. Lys had her beauty and
my blue mantle that I had woven for my wedding. She had a way of seeming almost
ordinary—of looking less than she was. A glamour, Mère Adele called it. It was
not on her this morning. She looked no more human than an angel on an altar.

oOo

Messire Giscard met us a little distance from the priory,
up on his big horse with a handful of his men behind him. He smiled down at us.
“A fair morning to you, fair ladies,” he said.

We did not smile back. Lys kept on walking as if he had not
been there. I was warier, and that was foolish: he saw me looking at him, and
turned the full measure of his smile on me. “Will you ride with me, Jeannette
Laclos? It’s not far, I know, but Flambard would be glad to carry you.”

I fixed my eyes on Lys and walked faster. The red horse
walked beside me. I did not look up, though my nape crawled. In a moment—in
just a moment—he would seize me and throw me across his saddle.

“Oh, come,” he said in his light, princely voice. “I’m not
as wicked a devil as that. If I do fancy you, and you are well worth a man’s
fancy—what can I do you but good? Wouldn’t you like to live in a fine house and
dress in silk?”

“And bear your bastards?” I asked him, still not looking at
him. “Thank you, no. I gave that up six years ago Lent.”

He laughed. “Pretty, and a sharp wit, too! You’re a jewel in
this midden.”

I stopped short. “Sency is no man’s dungheap!”

I was angry enough to dare a glance. He was not angry at
all. He was grinning. “I like a woman with spirit,” he said.

His horse, just then, snaked its head and tried to bite. I
hit it as hard as I could. It veered off, shying, and its master cursing. I let
myself laugh, once, before I greeted Sister Portress.

oOo

“I will go back with you,” said Lys.

We were in Mère Adele’s receiving room again, the four of
us. This time he had his sergeant with him, whether to guard him or bear
witness for him I did not know. The man stood behind his lord’s chair and
watched us and said nothing, but what he thought of us was clear enough. We
were mere weak women. We would never stand against his lord.

Lys sat with her hands in what was left of her lap, knotting
and unknotting them. “I’ve done my thinking,” she said. “I can do no more. I’ll
give you what you ask. I’ll go back to Montsalvat.”

I opened my mouth. But this was not my place to speak.
Messire Giscard was openly delighted. Mère Adele had no expression at all. “You
do mean this?” she asked.

“Yes,” said Lys.

Messire Giscard showed her his warmest, sweetest face. “I’ll
see that you don’t regret it,” he said.

Lys raised her eyes to him. Her real eyes, not the ones
people wanted to see. I heard the hiss of his breath. His sergeant made the
sign of the horns, and quickly after, that of the cross.

She smiled. “That will do you no good, Raimbaut.”

The sergeant flushed darkly. Lys turned the force of her
eyes upon Giscard. “Yes, I will go back with you,” she said. “I will be your
witch. Your mistress, too, maybe, when my daughter is born; if you will have
me. I am an exile, after all, and poor, and I have no kin in this world.”

His joy was fading fast. Mine was not rising, not yet. But
Lys had not surrendered. I saw it in her face; in the fierceness of her smile.

“But before I go,” she said, “or you accept me, you should
know what it is that you take.”

“I know,” he said a little sharply. “You are a witch. You
won’t grow old, or lose your beauty. Fire is your servant. The stars come down
when you call.”

“Men, too,” she said, “if I wish.”

For a moment I saw the naked greed. He covered it as
children learn to do. “You can see what will be. Aymeric told me that.”

“Did he?” Lys arched a brow. “He promised me he wouldn’t.”

“I coaxed it out of him,” said Messire Giscard. “I’d guessed
already, from things he said.”

“He was never good at hiding anything,” said Lys. “Yes, I
have that gift.”

“A great one,” he said, “and terrible.”

“You have the wits to understand that,” said Lys. “Or you
imagine that you do.”

She rose. The sergeant flinched. Messire Giscard sat still,
but his eyes had narrowed. Lys came to stand in front of him. Her hand was on
the swell of her belly, as if to protect it. “Let us make a bargain, my lord. I
have agreed to yield to your will. But before you take me away, let me read your
fate for you. Then if you are certain still that I am the making of your
fortune, you may have me, and do with me as you will.”

He saw the trap in it. So could I; and I was no lord’s
child. “A fine bargain,” he said, “when all you need do is foretell my death,
and so be rid of me.”

“No,” she said. “It’s not your death I see. I’ll tell you
the truth, Giscard. My word on it.”

“On the cross,” he said.

She laid her hand on Mère Adele’s cross and swore to it. Mère
Adele did not say anything. She was waiting, as I was, to see what Lys would
do.

She crossed herself; her lips moved in what could only be a
prayer. Then she knelt in front of Giscard and took his hands in hers.

I saw how he stiffened for a moment, as if to pull away. She
held. He eased. She met his eyes. Again he made as if to resist; but she would
not let him go.

My hands were fists. My heart was beating. There were no
bolts of lightning, no clouds of brimstone. Only the slender big-bellied figure
in my blue mantle, and the soft low voice.

She read his future for him. How he would ride out from Sency,
and she behind. How they would go back to Rouen. How the war was raging there,
and how it would rage for years out of count. How the Death would come back,
and come back again. How he would fight in the war, and outlive the Death, and
have great glory, with her at his side: ever young, ever beautiful, ever
watchful for his advantage. “Always,” she said. “Always I shall be with you,
awake and asleep, in war and at peace, in your heart as in your mind, soul of
your soul, indissolubly a part of you. Every breath you draw, every thought you
think, every sight your eye lights upon—all these shall be mine. You will be
chaste, Giscard, except for me; sinless, but that you love me. For nothing that
you do shall go unknown to me. So we were, Aymeric and I, perfect in love as in
amity. So shall we two be.”

For a long while after she stopped speaking, none of us
moved. Messire Giscard’s lips were parted. Gaping, I would have said, in a man
less good to look at.

Lys smiled with awful tenderness. “Will you have me,
Giscard? Will you have the glory that I can give you?”

He wrenched free. The sweep of his arm sent her sprawling.

I leaped for him, veered, dropped beside her. She was
doubled up, knotted round her center.

Laughing. Laughing like a mad thing. Laughing till she wept.

By the time she stopped, he was gone. She lay exhausted in
my arms. My dress was soaked with her tears.

“Could you really have done it?” I asked her.

She nodded. She struggled to sit up. I helped her; gave her
my kerchief to wipe her face. “I can do it to you, too,” she said. Her voice
was raw. “I can hear everything, see it, feel it—every thought in every head.
Every hope, dream, love, hate, fear, folly—everything.” She clutched her head.
“Everything!”

I held her and rocked her. I did not know why I was not
afraid. Too far past it, I supposed. And she had lived with us since
Michaelmas; if there was anything left to hide from her, then it was hidden
deeper than I could hope to find.

She was crying again, deep racking sobs. “I was the best, my
father said. Of all that are in the Wood, the strongest to shield, the clearest
to see both how the walls were raised and how to bring them down. None of us
was better fit to walk among human folk. So I defied them all, brought down the
ban, walked out of the Wood. And I could do it. I
could
live as the humans lived. But I could—not—die as they died. I
could not.” Her voice rose to a wail. “I wanted to die with Aymeric. And I
could not even take sick!”

“Oh, hush.” Mère Adele stood over us, hands on hips. She had
gone out when Giscard took flight; now she was back, not an eyelash out of
place, and no awe at all for the woman of the Wood. “If you had really wanted
to cast yourself in your lover’s grave, you would have found a way to do it.
There’s no more
can’t
in killing
yourself than in killing someone else. It’s all
won’t
, and a good fat measure of
Pity-me
.”

Lys could have killed her then. Oh, easily. But I was glad
for whatever it was that stopped her,
can’t
or
won’t
or plain astonishment.

She got to her feet with the first failing of grace that I
had ever seen in her. Even her beauty was pinched and pale, too thin and too
sharp and too odd.

Mère Adele regarded her with utter lack of sympathy . “You
got rid of his lordship,” she said, “and handily, too. He’ll see the back of
hell before he comes by Sency again. You do know, I suppose, that he could have
sworn to bring the Inquisition down on us, and burn us all for what you did to
him.”

“No,” said Lys. “He would not. I made sure of that.”

“You—made—sure?”

Even Lys could wither in the face of Mère Adele’s wrath. She
raised her hands to her face, let them fall. “I made him do nothing but what he
was best minded to do.”