For My Lady's Heart (18 page)

“Oyeh!” Ruck called. “Haylle, good monks!”

He had no answer, nor truly expected one. Moving quickly, he crossed the
cloister-garth, ducking through a barrel-vaulted passage that brought him
out on the stableyard behind the guesthouse and refectory.

The livestock was missing, but he saw no sign of struggle. There were
still cattle tracks in the mud, a few days old at most. A green-glazed jug
sat on a bench, full of soured milk.

Ruck swore softly on Saint Julian. He strode back through the vaulted
slype and stopped, looking hard at each window over the cloister arches. He
began an examination of the undercroft, though the doors were locked and the
narrow cracks between boards showed only blackness inside. The parchment
upon the abandoned lectern rustled lightly in the silent air.

Ruck walked to the podium. He put his hand on the parchment. He was no
scholar to have studied Latin; he read French and English, but little more.
Nevertheless he ran his gloved finger down what was clearly a letter,
scowling over each word. He skimmed the salutation, which directed the
missive to the bishop of Chester. From liturgies he recognized the words for
“humble brethren beseech you,” and “hear us,” and a reference to “after
Christmas.” With difficulty he followed a passage describing a brother—the
cellarer, he thought—a trip, the village of Lyerpool, and something about a
swine and candles.

The next sentence said that all at Lyerpool were dead or ailing.

Ruck read it again, his finger on each word.
Mortuum,
he was
certain of that.
Omnis
and
invalidus
he knew, also. He
could not translate it any other way.

A slow dread began to grow in him as he passed his finger down the page.
Miasma malignus. Pestis.

He pushed away so hard and suddenly that he overturned the lectern. It
crashed upon the stone, the dry inkpot shattered. Chickens clucked and
fluttered overtop one another in alarm. Ruck walked swiftly along the
cloister. The cemetery lay beyond the eastern range. He found admission
beside the chapter house, another dark passage that opened to winter grass
beyond.

In the open ground there were ten new graves. On the far side of the
chapter house, over a wall, he counted two more in the burying ground for
laymen. Twelve—and the others fled. He stood by the wall and put his
forehead down on his locked fists.

He tried to conjure Isabelle’s glowing features, tried to ask her to beg
God to spare His children. Or if the pestilence must come again to castigate
mankind to let it take Ruck this time, so that he would not have to watch
the whole world die around him once more. He was as wicked as any other; he
deserved affliction as surely as the next man.

And yet he did not mean it. He could not see Isabelle in his mind, not
anymore, and the willful flame of life burned stubbornly, deaf to fear and
fueled by flesh—he realized amid his despair that he was hungry. The
Princess Melanthe was in his charge, another link to human clay. She was
worldly passion, hot desire—and like enough she would be glad to eat, as
well.

He caught up Hawk’s reins, untangling them from the brush. “Come, be no
cause for us to biden here.”

He said nothing of plague. She asked naught, only looked down at him from
the pillion with strange innocence, as if she did not comprehend the truth
of their situation even yet. She held the furs awkwardly about her
shoulders, her fingers pale and stained with dried blood beneath their load
of glittering rings. Her eyes seemed sooty dark instead of clear, tiny lines
at the corners that he had not noticed before. The cold made her cheeks red,
marring their smooth whiteness. With wonder he realized that she was not now
so very beautiful as he had thought.

No longer a princess—only a woman, not even comely, but cold and
apprehensive. And instead of repelling him, it made all his senses rise a
hundredfold in response, hot greed to protect and possess her, things beyond
honor or vows.

With a sudden move he turned his face away from her. He gathered Hawk’s
reins and led the horse out of the trees down to the ferry landing. Across
the river Mercy, a mile distant, the castle of Lyerpool was a silent gray
shadow; no ships lying in the water below it; no sign of life that he could
discern on the other side.

“We moten cross while the tide runs in,” he said, halting the destrier.

He raised his arms to her. She shifted her skirts, showing a flash of her
white hose and green long-toed boots. She put her hands on his shoulders,
but he barely felt that through his armor; his mind was fastened on the
brief image of her boots and ankles, trimmed in silver and fine as an
elven’s slippers.

He released her instantly, but she did not move away, only took hold of
his sword belt and stood beside him. The furs dropped to the ground.

He reached up and yanked the ties free on the bags, searching out her
cloak. The emerald wool came loose in a puff of breeze as he dragged it
down.

She still held to his belt, as if loath to let go. The shock of her
lover’s death, the sudden transition in circumstances from rich comfort to
cold peril—he would not have blamed any woman who succumbed to distress. But
since the fit had left her, she seemed subdued, even sleepy, indifferent to
time or destination.

When she made no move away from him, he stepped back, disengaging her
hand from his belt as gently as he could, careful not to crush her fingers
in the metal of his gloves.

“Be nought fearful, lady,” he said. “Put on the cloak and go aboard.”

She seemed not to hear him. He swept the cloak around her shoulders and
caught her up in his arms.

The raft was near to floating in the rise of the tide. His stride cleared
a half yard of shallows as he sprang onto the boards. He set her on her
feet, holding her muffled female figure steady as the casks and boards
rocked beneath them.

“My lady—” He kept his hands on her shoulders. “Are ye ill?”

“Nay,” she said remotely. “Where do we go?”

“Across the river, Your Highness.”

“The monks—” Her eyes came to his, wide and dark. “Were they dead?”

He hesitated for a long moment. “Yea, madam. Dead or departed.”

She seemed bewildered at that, like a child that had been asked an
incomprehensible question. She turned away from him and sank down into a
huddle on the boards.

Ruck watched her for a moment. “I will keep you, lady. I swear it.”

He jumped ashore to unload their meager baggage and toss it onto the
raft. Experienced in water passages, Hawk made no objection to being led
into the shallows and onto the unsteady surface: the horse put his big hoof
on the boards and pulled it off again, then came in one great splattering
lunge that tipped the raft, grounding it at one corner. He stood
splay-legged and wild-eyed, until Ruck dressed the horse in his
chaufrain,
with its blinding pieces that narrowed his vision.

Hawk calmed immediately, as if what he could not see did not exist. Ruck
led him a few steps, refloating the grounded casks by shifting the horse’s
weight.

The princess sat with the baggage. Ruck cast off the hempen line, took up
a pole, and shoved, pushing them away from the shallows. The raft spun
gently. He walked to the other side and poled there.

They drifted into open water. He unlashed the great oar that propelled
and steered the unwieldy vessel, letting it swing loose between the thole-pins.
When he looked up to make certain of the princess, he saw that she had
settled herself against the bags, her cloak wrapped about her. She was
gazing into the water.

He grasped the thick paddle with both hands and put his back into rowing.
The next time he looked toward her, she had fallen fast asleep.

* * *

The raft spun slowly across the river, carried sometimes upstream on the
tide, and sometimes downstream on a wayward current. Ruck could not guide
the vessel with the skill the monks had used: even with the great oar, the
casks drifted at the mercy of the water, so that it took a long time to
cross. The incoming stream and a wind off the sea overbore the current,
propelling them up the estuary, away from Lyerpool and the priory. Ruck
thought he saw a figure moving in the village, but he could not be sure, and
soon enough even the castle was lost to sight.

He took a landing where it came. Along a shoreline of coppice and reeds,
the raft hit bottom. He poled it in as close as he could, and still had to
wade through a spear’s length of shallows.

The princess seemed reluctant to wake, huddling herself closer when he
knelt and spoke to her. He pulled off his glove and pressed his hand to her
forehead, but she was cool, her skin chapped with wind, not fever. “Ne may I
sleepen?” she mumbled plaintively when he touched her. “I want to sleepen a
little while.”

He did not disagree, just picked her up and carried her again. The motion
seemed to revive her a little; she sat in the sandy clearing he’d chosen for
their camp with her arms clasped about her knees. She watched him silently
as he slogged back and forth, moving the bags ashore.

Then, as he knelt to fetter Hawk, she turned sharply, her eyes on the
shoreline of the Wyrale. “Listen!”

Ruck hurled himself to his feet, grabbing his sword. As he stood, he
heard bells, dreamlike and soft; and at the same moment saw the white speck
flash against dark trees.

“Gryngolet,” she whispered, with her eyes fixed on the distance.

Almost as if it heard the longing in her voice, the pale falcon soared
upward, turning black against the sky, and dipped into a wheeling curve
toward them. It skimmed across the river with powerful fast beats, striking
upward again, spiral-ing above them until it was naught but an atom in the
winter-blue heights.

“She waits on us!” The princess sprang to her feet. “The lure—before she
rakes away!”

Ruck dropped his sword. Both of them pounced upon the bags, tearing
through them for the falcon’s furniture. Ruck found the hawking-pouch,
proffering it with a muttered prayer of thanks that he’d brought it. She
snatched the prize from his hands.

White leather it was, embroidered in silver and jeweled like all the rest
of her possessions. Emeralds caught the sun and sparkled on her gauntlet as
she thrust her hand into the heavy glove. Even the lure itself was decorated
with tiny gems at the ring and fastened along the shafts of the heron’s
feathers, with one splendid diamond blazing on the body.

She looked up. Ruck watched her face as she followed the falcon’s tower.
He had thought her not so beautiful in the unsparing light of day, but he
found himself mistaken again. Witchlike, she had transformed herself to
loveliness once more, as the falcon changed its nature from earthbound to
sky-free in one leap.

He turned to find the bird and could not see it, the black speck gone so
high it was beyond sight. Her hand swept upward. The sun took the lure as it
arced over their heads, scattering brilliant light. Hawk pricked his ears at
the faint rush of the cord and feathers spinning through the air. The
princess kept her face to the sky, her arm outstretched against the blue,
her gauntlets sparkling, green fire and silver flying from her fist.

She called her falcon, spinning the lure; a carol of love, half
laughter—and the bird came, dropping hard from the sky.

Ruck heard the stoop before he saw it. The bells screamed one long, high
note as the falcon hurtled downward, a prick on the blue that became a dot,
a lancet, an arrow bolt, a scythe, its wings bowed close in two thousand
feet of fall. The lure rose to it, aflame with emeralds.

At the instant of strike, a fan of white burst open, wings spread wide
against the glitter as the hit sent a crack of sound echoing across the
water; the lure shot downward and the falcon threw up into the air, jesses
dangling. The lure impacted the ground, spraying sand, and sailed off again
under Princess Melanthe’s hand on the cord.

They began a dance, the woman and the bird, a swinging and sweeping dance
that defied the compass of the earth, marked by the flash of emeralds, the
bells, and the white glory of the falcon’s twisting flight as it drove and
stooped and chased the toll. Around and around the lure spun, beckoning and
evading, mercurial, up and down and doubled back, the falcon keen and nimble
in pursuit—an eternity— and yet before Ruck could take his eyes from them,
before he could imprint the picture on his mind, before he could overcome
the irresistible rise of his heart at the sight of the falcon’s dance, it
was over.

She ended the flight in a fashion he had never seen. Instead of letting
the toll drop onto the ground for the falcon to take, she swung the lure up
and caught it into her other hand, lifting it like a pagan priestess calling
to the sun. The bird shot past, chopping once at the feathered toll with her
talons. Then she swung wide and slanted back, checking hard.

With wings outspread the falcon came to the glove, silvered talons open
to grip fast. In a regal sweep she settled, folding her wings and reaching
greedily for the lure.

“Poor Gryngolet!” The princess was breathless, laughing and weeping at
once. “Poor Gryngolet, my beauty, my love! ”Tis a foul trick, I vow. We have
no garnish for your reward.“

The falcon spread her wings again, screaming angrily and striking the
meatless lure at this injustice, but her mistress had a secure hold on the
jesses that Ruck had severed to cut the bird free. The falcon’s complaints
ceased as the princess deftly slipped a hood over its head.

Now that the moment was over, Ruck found his heart thudding in reaction.
He could not believe what he had seen, that tremendous stoop from such a
height and the dance that followed. The gyrfalcon sat quietly, unresisting
as the princess caught the braces, drawing the gaily plumed hood closed.
One-handed, she tied the shortened jesses to the glittering varvels and
leash, using her teeth to finish off the tightening of the knots.