Dragon's Keep (12 page)

"Nor am I.
I couldn't let the villagers burn Kit's mother!"

"So you ran off with your lady's maid,
who should have kept you here!" Her eyes narrowed. "Listen to me,
Rose. This lady's maid has led you into trouble and so—"

"You wouldn't have wanted Aliss to die,
would you?"

Mother's look wavered and for a moment she
couldn't speak. "How did you know it was she?"

"I guessed. She didn't speak of
it."

The fire cast a trembling light across
Mother, and it seemed that she was bathing in the memory of a happier time.
Kindness eased her features. I'd missed that look and nearly leaned closer to
kiss her cheek.

"Of course," she whispered,
"I'm glad that she—that Aliss lives."

"Why did you send her away?"

"She was with child, Rose, and out of
wedlock."

I thought there must be more to it than that.
"But why to Demetra?"

Mother reached into her waist pouch, pulled
out the silver vial, and sipped her poppy potion. This she did to harden
herself again, I think. But I didn't want her hardened. I wanted to cry with
her for Marn, who'd been her nursemaid and mine, to feel her holding me the way
Alissandra held Kit when the fit was on her.

"You rescued Aliss
from the frozen water when you were a
girl,"
I said. "Why shouldn't Kit and I save her from burning now?

Mother coughed and screwed on the lid.
"That's different."

It isnt.

"You risked the future of our island,
Rose."

"As
you did when you saved Aliss."

"No. I was nothing then. No one knew my
twin brother would die of the pox and that I'd be the queen."

I heard the word
nothinglike
a
sting. I wanted to correct her, say that she was never
nothing
,
that she mattered even when her brother was alive, even if her mother and
father had sent her away. But Mother went on and the sting grew worse.

"Marn came to me crying that you'd gone
to see the lepers," said Mother. "She saw your scornful part."

"She shouldn't have . . . she knew not
to ever take off my gloves."

"She spied the tear and thought to mend
them." Mother's look was winter cold. She had a way of stripping me with
her
eyes. "Well?" she said.
"What have you to say to this?" She folded
her arms across her chest, the gold threads in
her gloves sparkling
with the firelight.

I kept silent.

The flames sent a copper color all round
Mother's head. Like the golden halo that crowned the stained-glass angel in Saint John's chapel.

She broke the silence
with a sigh.
"Poor Marn.
It shocked her
so when she saw your wretched claw. It was the horror
of your deformity made her jump."

"Never!
Marn would love me if I were covered with sores from
head to heel! She would love me without hand or arm or if

my
flesh were fouled with leprosy. It was not my claw that
made her jump!"

"What, then?" asked Mother, her lip
a-twitch. "What else would drive the woman to it?"

"Marn was pushed!"

"Pushed? Who told you this?"

"No one."

"Then keep away from lies!" The
vein pounded on the side of her neck as she tugged open
her
saint's pouch. "Here," she said. "Swear on Saint
Monicas
sacred bone."

"Never.
She was pushed!"

"By whom?" asked Mother, still
dangling the open pouch so close I could see the saintly finger bone.

"Sir Magnus. Marn told Kit and me how
she came to Wilde
Island
on the ship with him some years ago. He served
out his time
in Hessings Kottle
before coming to the castle, did you know?
Sold
as a bond slave for the crime of murder.
Marn told me."

"Gossip," snapped Mother.

"It never was!" I bit my lip to
keep the tremble still.

"Sir Magnus has been with us nine years,
Rosalind. Why would he wait so long to kill Marn if she knew his crime?"

"He might have overheard Marn telling
us."

"Might?"
Mother scoffed. "When you're queen you'll have to
learn to distinguish between truth and tattle."

"Marn wouldn't lie."

"Your nursemaid was very fond of tales.
And she had a way of embellishing them."

Twas true enough. Marn loved to tell a good
story.

My head seemed to swell
and the room was astir with far too many shadows. I felt the heat of the fire
across my chest, the skin
on my face
pinching in the yellow light.

There was another hand that might have pushed
Marn into the moat.
If I could form the words that gripped me
hard about the throat.
If I could but look into my mother's face and ask
her.

Mother drank more drops of poppy potion,
closed her eyes, and breathed deeply. I saw her body grow calm. "She may
have tripped. The woman had poor vision, and I saw tears blinding her eyes when
she left me. She was so stricken by what she'd seen."

I looked down at my shrouded hands. Was it
so? Was Marn so shamed by the sight of my claw, so blinded by tears that she
fell headlong into the moat?

We buried Marn on the feast day of Saint
Peter. Mother and Father did not come because it might have been a suicide and
if that were so, Marn had shamed Pendragon Castle by taking her own life. I
fought with both of them to let me go. Nothing would have kept me from this
last hour with my Marn. And so, clad in gray, a nosegay in hand, I walked with Kit
and Sister Anne up the lane to the graveyard.

The castle servants traveled in our wake, and
behind them came a crowd of villagers.

The bearers placed the coffin by the grave.
Across from us Marn's grandchildren huddled by their mother. All in black they
were, like a nest of fledgling rooks. Marn's son, the blacksmith

Gerbert,
hovered over his brood as the service began, his face
hard as an anvil.

A robin called from the maple branch above as
Father Hugh led us in "Come the Way Over," a song that tells of
Heaven, where the blessed souls all go. Then down they lowered the coffin on
its ropes, and my heart lowered with it.

Kit flung her lilies in the grave to protect
Marn from evil. And on Marn's coffin I tossed my marigolds, remembering how
she'd said they made a sleeper's dreams come true.
I prayed as the
blossoms fell that Marn now dreamed of Heaven.

Father Hugh crossed himself above the grave,
and we sang another hymn, but he would not say the final prayer of releasing
because he said Marn might have killed herself.

"I'll say it, then!" cried her son,
his neck going red as coals.
"We all
here know my dear mother was half blind," he said. "It's
sure
she stumbled to her death, not knowing the moat was so close by!"

Father Hugh bowed his head. He was a good man
for it. The
father could not say the prayer
himself, for none of us there knew
if Marn had been pushed, jumped in
herself
, or only stumbled in the dark. So her son said the
releasing prayer, hard and solemn, and Marn's spirit was unbound.

Each year we celebrated Saint Peter's feast
by offering bread to the poor, killing an innocent lamb, and serving a great
banquet at our table. Cook was already roasting the lamb.

Mother came in with a golden coronet for me
to wear to the feast.

"I'll not go," I said.

"You will, Rose. And you will wear this
coronet proudly."

I was too bound up in grief to battle Mother.

"Come with me," she said to Kit.

They left me alone by the fire.

In the early eve before the guests arrived
Kit and I watched Tim the
chandler light
the
candelabrum in the Great Hall. It
held one
hundred candles, a vast expenditure of beeswax and tal
low. As Tim lit
the last wick the room was draped in honey-colored light. The glow spread along
the rush-strewn floor and up the walls, gilding the tapestry, where a line of
huntsmen chased a red fox through the woods.

I stood close to the candelabrum, wishing all
the brightness would enter me and chase the sorrow of Marn's death away. There
was
a warmth
there but it seemed to circle round me
and not settle closer in.

The guests arrived then to the sound of
trumpets; Father and Mother entered the hall. Father Hugh gave a solemn
blessing, and the guests began their meal. I had no taste for food, so the
dogs were pleased to rove beside my chair. They
bashed my legs
with happy tails as I dropped chunks of lamb to the
floor.

Kit sat beside me. From across the table,
Niies tried to cheer us up with stories of a knight's valor, but we neither one
could smile. I was worn from my sorrow over Marn, bristled from the work of
holding up my chin to keep on my heavy coronet, and angry at the guests for
being so merry on the day my nursemaid had been buried.

"I'm tired," I said. Niles glanced at Kit as we left the table

and
I wondered if Henry would ever give me that same look
when we met over the sea.

I told Kit, "I saw a loving look just
now." We rounded the corner and our shadows met upon the wall. With none
around to hear, Kit whispered, "Where?"

"From Niles Broderick."

She closed my chamber
door and said, "Sit here while I build
up
the fire."

I did as she commanded me. As Kit tossed a
shank of pine into the hearth and set to with the poker, she told me why Mother
had called her to her chamber.

She may as well have jabbed my heart with the
poker.

"The nunnery?
Never! I won't let Mother send you!"

"You cannot stop it." Kit brushed
the bark dust from her hands.

"I will! When the feast is over I'll
march to Mother's room and tell her you will stay!"

Kit sat down beside me,
the flames washing gold across her
cheeks.

"It's done, Rosie. Your mother blames me
for putting you in danger."

"But we had to go and warn your
mother."

"She won't have me here with you
anymore. She says I am not honorable."

"Not honorable?"

"Sit still," said Kit, "and
speak softer; someone may come down the hall."

Our words were circling round and round the
truth. This

wasn't
about rescuing Aiissandra but about our friendship.
Mother thought we were too close, that I might share my secret with her. And
she couldn't risk that.

"It's my
fault," I said suddenly.
Its not.

"But—"

Kit silenced me with
three cool fingers on my lips. "It's done,
Rosie. The queen won't change her mind." She leaned closer to my
ear. "Your mother must never know what happened to me in the orchard.
Promise me this, Rosie."

I didn't move.

"You know it's not safe for me here now
that I can speak.
How long before the queen discovers
this?"

"We'll keep it secret."

She tipped her head. "Think,
Rosie."

I couldn't look at her face, her eyes.

Kit unclasped the silver pin her mother had
just given her and held it out to me.

"I can't take this," I choked.

Kit shook her head and pressed it into my
glove.

The next morning I watched Kit ride away with
Sister Anne. Clouds shadowed the moat dark as stained wool as their horses
crossed the drawbridge. In ten days' time Kit and Sister Anne would reach Saint
Brigid's Abbey, where Kit's mother awaited. I clutched her pin to my breast, my
mother watching Kit's departure beside me at my window.

My breath came wild and

gulping as my bright swan shadow rode down Kingsway. And in Kit's hand I spied a slender apple
bough.

I knew the message there. "Don't be sad, Rosie. I go where
I can free my voice at last." She held the branch out bravely, the
small green leaves dipping in the wind.

The
Listing Ship

T
hrough autumn
I was wrapped in sorrow thick as a sea mist.
And when the winter snow fell I stayed by my hearth.
But no
matter how close to the fire I sat,
I never could get warm. Mother
brought more healers to Pendragon Castle. I submitted to their salves and I drank their potions, sour to sour.

I turned sixteen and no news of dragon attack
came that early spring. We were soon to find out why.

One windswept morning I quit the castle at
long last to ride again with Father. Through fields of buttercups and wild iris
we galloped till we reached Lake Ailleann. Father slowed to a trot. "I've
seen you sorrowful all season, Rosie."

"

"Aye."

We let the hoofbeats measure out the silence
between us.

"More than foul weather brought you
down," Father said at last. "Still you mourn your nursemaid."

I nodded.

"And you miss the
little lady's maid? You have a good heart,"
said Father. "I'm glad for the prince who will marry you."