Ladyhawke (16 page)

Phillipe blinked and blinked, his own eyes full of tears. His hands quivered, as if he fought to keep them down at his sides. At last, in a voice so small she could scarcely hear it, he said, “He . . . loves you.”

Isabeau took a deep, trembling breath. She rose slowly to her feet, wiping at her cheeks. She nodded, barely, smiling half in embarrassment and half in profound gratitude at the gift of his words. It was as if Navarre had spoken them himself, they had touched her soul so deeply . . . She had lived so long in this lonely exile, with her doubt and fear gnawing at her like serpents, poisoning her heart; never daring to set them free, even to speak them aloud, because there had never been anyone to answer them, to deny them, until now. She had not spoken a dozen meaningful words to another human being in two years, until he had come into their lives . . .

She shook her head as the past rose uncontrollably inside her. She had learned to endure silence, as she had learned to endure the rest, all the things that at first she had thought were unbearable. At first she had left messages for Navarre, and he for her. But as time passed there had been less and less to share, even that way, until at last there was only pain, and even the notes had stopped. Yet even after so long, after so much pain . . . “It’s silly, really,” she murmured, “but . . . every night, when I wake up, I expect to see him. I know he won’t be there, but somehow . . .” She closed her eyes, sighing. “I can feel the tips of his fingers, nestled behind my ear . . . coming down, so.” She lifted her own hand. “Tracing the line of my chin . . . touching my lips . . . releasing a smile . . . then covering it with a kiss.” She broke off, opening her eyes again. Phillipe’s eyes still clung to her face, bright with tears.

“You
have
lived the dream, my lady,” he said. “And you will again—if there’s a God in heaven.” His fists clenched, as if by his own belief he could make it so.

Isabeau reached out, touching his face with gentle fingers, proving his reality. “Even if there is,” she said softly, “promise
you
won’t leave us.”
Our gift of hope,
she thought.

He quivered slightly under her touch, like a frightened wild thing. “I . . . asked the captain not to rely on me too heavily, you know,” he said, glancing down. He looked up at her again, with his cheerful false face on. “I told my mother I’d be back in an hour ten years ago.”

Isabeau let her hand fall away, her own smile rueful with understanding. She tried to accept the thought that he might not stay, that tomorrow night she might wake again to years of solitude. Even to have had him here tonight was a miracle. “We’ve . . . never had someone to help us until now.” She looked away, feeling the weight of her burden settle back onto her aching shoulders.

“Don’t you worry, my lady,” Phillipe said, his voice shaking. “After all—how else can I live the dream?”

She looked up at him, at the tears running unashamedly down his face now, and suddenly her own tears began to fall again. He grinned, and she grinned too, holding out her arms. They held each other tightly for a long time, because they had been such a long time alone.

C H A P T E R
Fourteen

M
arquet led his men through the ruined abbey by torchlight. Jehan had not reported back, and when they had picked up his trail it had led them here. Marquet stood by the drawbridge while his guards searched the abbey’s interior; he was tired and filthy, and his mood was growing blacker by the moment. There was no sign of Jehan or his men, no sign that they had ever left this place again . . . but someone else had. He turned back as one of his guards crossed the ruined drawbridge to report.

“Empty, sir. But we found this.” The guardsman held up a hawk’s feather stained with dried blood.

Marquet squinted at it in the torchlight. A slow, ugly smile formed on his mouth. All his questions had been answered. He looked up at the abbey whose ruins had given shelter to the devil’s agent, the Bishop’s mortal enemy—and his own. He raised his hand, gesturing at it. “Burn this,” he ordered.

They rode out again into the night. Marquet looked back in dark satisfaction as flames consumed the ruins, as the fires of hell would soon consume Navarre.

Navarre strode into the campsite with the new day, looking up into the sky. The hawk soared high in the air, golden in the early-morning light above a snow-capped mountain peak. She came circling down as she saw him and settled onto the lowest limb of a nearby oak. Navarre looked away from her again, without a smile.

Phillipe still slept, as soundly as a child, on the ground beside the dead embers of the campfire; he held the sheathed sword in his arms, hugging it to him like a lover. Navarre felt his mood darken further as he looked at the boy.

He crossed to Phillipe’s side and jerked the sword free from his arms. Phillipe woke with a start and scrambled guiltily to his feet. He held his blanket around him, shivering, rubbing his eyes as if he were still exhausted.

Navarre looked at him coldly, then away at the mountain peak gleaming with new-fallen snow. If he rode all day, he could reach Aquila tomorrow . . . “All the roads on this side of the valley are impossible. The only way open to the city is over the mountain. It will be cold. There’s snow above the timberline.” He waited for the boy’s face to fall; waited for him to begin some excuse, to refuse, to get on his horse and ride away, and take the sudden unwanted burden of his young life with him. But Phillipe did none of those things; he only stood looking at him with an uncertain expression. Navarre turned and moved away toward his horse.

Phillipe stayed where he was, kicking at the cold ashes of the fire. “They’ll kill you. And her,” he said almost angrily. “You won’t get within a hundred yards of the Bishop.”

Navarre hooked his sword over the pommel and swung up into his saddle. He looked back at the boy wordlessly, his face set, and dug his heels into the stallion’s sides.

“You should listen to me!” Phillipe shouted, as he ran to his horse. “I don’t have to come along, you know! I’m still a young man! I’ve got
prospects!”

Phillipe caught up with him inside of a quarter mile, and they rode on together. Navarre ignored the boy for the rest of the morning, as the horses picked their way steadily upward toward the pass. The trees began to thin, and soon they rode along the edge of the snowfields. The sun shone, making the mountain flash like silver above them; making Navarre think unwillingly of his home. His family’s ancestral estates lay peacefully in the mountains five days journey to the west . . . forever beyond his reach, now. He urged Goliath on impatiently.

Navarre glanced over at Phillipe for the first time in hours, as the boy yawned once again. He had been yawning all morning, and trying to hide it. “What a night . . .” Phillipe muttered to himself.

Navarre frowned in uneasy curiosity. “What . . . a night?”

“Hmm?” Phillipe looked at him, startled. “Oh, nothing I couldn’t handle, Captain.” He smiled pleasantly, pulling the blanket more tightly around his shoulders, and looked ahead again.

Navarre studied the boy with suspicion. He looked away and up suddenly, as the hawk called from high in the air. She had not come to him all morning, as if she had sensed his mood. But now she began to circle downward, and he lifted his arm expectantly.

The hawk flew to Phillipe and landed on his arm instead. Navarre stared in disbelief as the boy caught her with an exclamation of surprise. Phillipe looked up, his chill-reddened face full of guilt. He smiled feebly, looked down at the bird again. “Nice bird . . . good little hawk . . .” He shook his arm, whispering, “Go to your master, now.” She clutched the thick folds of his sleeve with her talons. He shook his arm again. “Go on, Ladyhawke,” he said, more urgently. The bird remained locked on his arm. She bent her head and gazed at him almost pleasantly. Phillipe squirmed in his saddle under Navarre’s withering stare.

“Tell me about it,” Navarre said, as they rode on.

“Captain?” Phillipe asked, glancing at him with worried eyes.

“Last night, boy.” Navarre forced the words out, an almost-forgotten emotion coiling in his chest like a snake.

“What’s to tell?” Phillipe said nervously, looking down at the hawk. “Go on, now. Go, go, go . . .” The bird did not respond. “We . . . ran into a bit of trouble on our way to an inn, and . . .”

“You took Isabeau to an inn?” Navarre’s frown deepened.

“Fly to your master—fly to the one you love,” Phillipe urged, his distress growing. The bird clung to him like a burr. He looked up again, his face redder with embarrassment than cold now. “Well, you see, first we went to this stable—”

“Stable?” Navarre snapped, running over his words. “What did you do in the stable?”

“We changed clothes, and . . .”

“You changed clothes in the stable?”

“Well, not
together,
of cour—”

“You left her
alone?”

“Never!” Phillipe gasped.

“Then you
did
change clothes together!”

“No!”

“Don’t lie to me, boy!”
Navarre jerked the stallion up short, drawing his sword.

The hawk shrieked and fluttered up from Phillipe’s arm, settling onto his own. Navarre stared at her, the haze of jealous fury clearing from his brain. Slowly he lowered his sword. To doubt the boy was to doubt her. He had never so much as looked at another woman with any sort of yearning, these past two years, unless the yearning was for Isabeau. He knew in his heart that she had been as true.

Phillipe sighed. “She’s the most wonderful woman who ever lived, sir,” he said quietly, “and I can’t say I haven’t had my fantasies. But the truth is—all she did was talk about you.”

Phillipe tried to look away; Navarre held the boy’s eyes as he sheathed his sword. He left his hand resting on its hilt. “Tell me what she said.
Everything
she said. And I warn you, boy—I’ll know if the words are yours.” He started his horse forward again.

Phillipe followed, slightly behind, just out of range of Navarre’s vision. He heard the boy swallow, as if the words were catching in his throat. “She was . . . sad at first,” Phillipe said awkwardly. “She talked about the day you met. She . . . cursed it.”

Navarre blinked, as if someone had struck him in the face. His heart sank like a stone.

“And then she said to say she—” Phillipe broke off again. “To say she never loved you.” His voice strained.

Navarre looked down at the hawk; she looked back at him with yellow, inhuman eyes. He shut his own eyes against the pain.

“But then she remembered a . . . gesture of yours—the way you had of running your fingers down from the back of her ear . . . tracing the line of her chin . . .”

Navarre opened his eyes to the vision, felt them burning with his unshed tears.

“. . . touching her lips . . .” Phillipe went on, with such tenderness that he might actually have known that moment too, “. . . and her eyes glowed—no,
she
glowed—the entire person—as she remembered you . . . ‘releasing a smile . . . then covering it with a kiss.’ ”

Navarre looked down at the hawk again. She gazed into the wind, searching the sky for signs unknowable to a man, while he searched her eyes for the things she would never comprehend. And yet, always the hawk was drawn irresistibly to him, as the wolf was drawn to her. He looked back at Phillipe, his smile filling with sorrow. Even their wild, uncomprehending animal selves were not called to their own kind, but only to a human mate, who could give them no solace. “Did you know that hawks . . . and wolves . . . mate for life?”

“No,” Phillipe said. His eyes darkened with understanding.

“The Bishop didn’t even leave us that, boy,” Navarre said wearily. “Not even that.” He looked ahead again, reined in suddenly. His face hardened.

Imperius sat in a mule-drawn cart, blocking the path ahead. His eyes were clear, and perfectly sober. “Still planning to kill His Grace?”

Navarre’s hand went to his sword hilt again. “You’re the one I ought to kill, old man,” he said. “And I will, if you keep following me.”

Imperius lifted his head. “Follow
me
, then. To Aquila. Where two days from now you can face the Bishop in the cathedral, with Isabeau by your side—and watch as the Evil One claims his reward.” He turned his mule cart up the slope.

Navarre’s hand tightened over his sword. He would not listen—he would not let this guilt-crazed old man ease his own soul by stretching out their agony for even one more day. “I’ll be in Aquila tomorrow,” he said, his voice as bitter as the wind. “One way or the other—there will finally be an end to it.”

Imperius turned to Phillipe imploringly. “Tell him he’s wrong! Tell him to give me a chance!”

Navarre glared at Phillipe. The boy looked down at the ground, clearing his throat. “One day more or less . . . what could it matter? Why not give him a chance?” he murmured.

Navarre felt the last small corner of human warmth inside him freeze. “You too,” he said in disgust.

Phillipe looked up at him, stung; held his gaze with pleading eyes. But the boy said nothing more, as if he already knew that it was useless. The icy wind whistled across the snow, curling around them like a lash.

“Stay here, then,” Navarre said at last. “With the old man. Drink—and delude each other with dreams.”

Phillipe shook his head. “I’m coming with you.”

“No,” Navarre said. He saw the boy stiffen with stubborn defiance. “There will be too many at my front to have to watch my back as well.” He wheeled his horse around, so that he did not have to see the stunned hurt that filled Phillipe’s face, and spurred away up the hill.

Phillipe sat unmoving on his horse’s back, staring down at the snow, his mouth tight.

“You did the honorable thing, little thief,” Imperius said quietly. “You spoke the truth.”

“I should have known better.” Phillipe looked up with bleak eyes, shivering as the wind pulled at his flapping blanket. “Every happy moment in my life has come from lying.”

Navarre rode alone, a stark black figure lost in an immensity of white. He was glad to be alone, relieved that he had shaken off the last of the obstacles that stood between him and his fate . . . the last of the people who could be destroyed by it. He had lost all control over his life; but at least his death would be his own choice.