Maze of Moonlight (16 page)

“My lord,” said the Franciscan, “it's not for me to approve or disapprove—”

“You sound just like Pytor sometimes, Jerome. Did you know that?”

Jerome sighed. “My lord, it isn't seemly.”

Christopher took the velvet cap from Raffalda and fitted it on his head. He peered into a mirror. The baron of Aurverelle. Stuffed and padded and wrapped and laced. Laughable, really. But it was a feast, and he was celebrating. Spectacle, at least, was something that he could do for Vanessa.

Christopher turned about. “Do you like this outfit, Jerome?”

“Very nice, my lord . . .” Jerome cleared his throat. “Ah . . .”

“The very picture of a baron, no?”

“Very.”

“What isn't seemly?”

“Vanessa.”

“Thought so.”

Jerome tried again. “Baron Christopher, there are noblemen all over Europe who have acquired . . . attachments to women of lesser rank.”

Christopher was deliberately preening much more than was necessary. “And occasionally to men. Right, Jerome?”

The Franciscan colored. His aversion to Martin's vice had been obvious. He had not even been willing to say hello to the lad once he had become aware of his liaison with Yvonnet. “Ah, correct, my lord.”

“You should be glad it's a woman, Jerome. When I first showed up in my beard and rags, it might well have been a horse.”

“My lord!”

Grinning, Christopher flopped down in a chair and stuck out his feet. Raffalda rummaged through a chest. “No, Raffalda. Not the
poulains
. I'm a baron, not a duck.” But he nodded to her eventual discovery of a pair of well-made boots. “Talk, Jerome,” he said as she set about squeezing his feet into them. “Tell me about Vanessa. Tell me she's a peasant. Tell me she's below my class. Tell me that—oh, dear God!—people will talk.”

“They will, my lord.”

“They talked about my madness. Nothing happened.”

Jerome pursed his lips and did not speak.

Christopher straightened up. He knew that look. “All right. What happened?”

“One of our wool shipments on the way to Ghent was intercepted on the other side of the Aleser Mountains. Near the border with Champagne. The free companies. Brigands usually stay away from Aurverelle goods, for good reason. However . . .”

“Well, perhaps we have some stupid brigands.” Christopher snorted. “Anyone daft enough to take a wool shipment . . .”

“Perhaps they were emboldened by my lord's . . . ah . . .” Jerome colored. His words had taken him a little too far.

Christopher finished the sentence. “By my lord's idiotic infatuation with a peasant girl.”

Jerome stayed colored.

“Isn't that it?”

Jerome did not speak.

“Or maybe it's the fact that she's crazy, too? Or possessed? Or heretical? Or something like that?”

Jerome looked stricken. “My dear lord, I didn't say that.”

“You thought it loud enough, Jerome.”

Raffalda grunted and strained as she pressed the tight-fitting boots onto Christopher's feet. She was damp and flushed when she rose. “Will there be anything else, my lord?” she said with a curtsy.

Christopher stood up. He thought about wearing a sword, but he did not have any really splendid swords anymore, and the occasion demanded splendor. Better none at all, then. “Thank you, Raffalda, no. Jerome and I will continue our battle alone. You can go and help Vanessa get ready.”

Raffalda curtsied again and departed, shutting the door behind her.

Jerome passed a hand across his face. “My lord, Pytor and I are concerned. The girl is a definite liability to Aurverelle. The castle folk's morale . . .”

“What about
my
morale, Jerome? When was the last time you saw me dressed up like a properly noble idiot?”

“I admit that she has had some positive effects, my lord, but I think you can see my point.”

Yes, disagreeable though the admission was, he could see. For a while, he had allowed himself to ignore the fact that Vanessa, feral and strange, had no place in Aurverelle. For a while, he had immersed himself in her care, in his own care. But there were futures to think about, both Vanessa's and his own.

He did not love her. Even had he still been capable of love, he could sooner have loved a fox, or a beech tree, or a thunderstorm as exhibit romantic inclinations towards the strange elemental creature that he had rescued from the streets of the town. Nor could Vanessa, caught up as she was in an inner pandemonium of vision and knowledge, ever love him.

But there was more to it than love. Christopher sat down, idly examining the polished toes of his boots. He had found hope. Vanessa, perhaps, could find hope, too. She would have to leave—indeed, he had himself established the nearness of her departure by removing her bandages—but maybe he could give her something before she went, something that might sustain her.

“Do you hate Vanessa for being strange, Jerome?”

“Why . . . no.”

“Is she damned, do you think?”

“I confess I don't know, my lord.”

“Could you care about someone, Jerome, even if that someone was damned?”

The friar stood, speechless.

Christopher propped his feet up on the chest. “When I was still taking the sacraments, I heard a great deal from the priests about the Kingdom of God. About how it included everyone from the lowliest peasant to the greatest monarch. But what about Vanessa? What about all the people like her? They didn't make any choices about what they became. They didn't have any choices to make. Does the Kingdom not include them?”

Jerome's eyes were on the floor. “I . . . am not sure that I am equipped to speak of such things, Baron Christopher. Perhaps the learned Doctor of Aquino might have been able to answer your question.”

“But he's dead.” Christopher stood up. “So I'll answer it myself.
My
Kingdom included Vanessa.
My
Kingdom includes all the Hobs and Jakes and Tims and Toms, all the madmen and all the seers . . . maybe even the bears and the horses. Because, you see, that's all we have. Each other. Those people kept me alive with their black bread and beans, and I helped them in their fields and slept in their ditches and picked them up out of the street and put them to bed in my castle. And that's what I call the Kingdom of God.”

Jerome bowed low.

“Vanessa will leave when she's healed a bit more, Jerome.”
When I'm healed a bit more.
“She has her life, and I have mine. But I'll tell you: as much as you condemn her, as heretical as you might think she is, she's helped me. She's given me something to believe in, and she'll always have a place in my Kingdom.”

And at dinner that night, with David's brilliantly decorated and splendidly served foods adorning the table like so many edible gems, with Pytor and Efram providing the humble entertainment by singing carols throughout the evening, Christopher found that his belief was beginning to be justified; for though Vanessa was as wide-eyed and feral as ever, she spoke in measured words about . . . commonplaces. The weather. The books she had read. The flowers in the garden.

She complimented Pytor and Efram on their singing and thanked them over and over again, her dairyland speech contrasting quaintly with her glittering gown; and when Christopher offered her his hand for a dance, she accepted with tears in her eyes. Yes, there was belief. Yes, there was hope. The patterns only indicated, they did not compel. She could learn to keep silent. Maybe . . . maybe she could learn other things, too.

Not even when Christopher felt the first, queasy stirrings of nausea did she say anything. The baron's stomach, confronted with rich sauces, sugar, and fat after a six-month diet of northing more extravagant than black bread, beans, onions, and water, was beginning to rebel, but he continued to eat and be merry. He saw that Vanessa sensed his distress and knew the inevitable outcome, but he saw also that she did not speak of it.

And so, later that night, though he was racked by alternate fits of vomiting and diarrhea, Christopher did not mind the discomfort in the least. Sitting in the privy as the chapel bells tolled lauds, holding a bowl full of half-digested grease and bile in his lap, he felt, instead, rather triumphant.

Triumphant though it was, the banquet marked the end of the charade. Vanessa was well. She had been well, in fact, since Mirya and Terrill had healed her, but the baron, caught up in h is pursuit and a vicarious and less physical healing, had been content to follow the strange physicians' instructions to as much of a letter as his inborn willfulness would allow.

But now it was over. Vanessa would be leaving. Indeed, she had to leave, for though Christopher had made inroads into her fatalism, a few weeks appeared to be too short a time for any real change, and she was still convinced that her destiny lay in Saint Blaise. He tried to console himself with the fact that she had begun to get control over her tongue, but the fact remained that Vanessa was not free. And therefore Christopher was not free. As tied as she was to the inner visions that forced her into patterns of cause and effected created by others, so he himself was still constrained by his past, his heritage . . .

. . . his grandfather.

“There was nothing subtle about grandfather,” Christopher told her as they took their last walk together along the peach avenue. “At least not at first. He brawled and raped and taxed and plotted through forty years of his life. And then, just as he was about to succeed beyond even his own expectations, he gave it all up. Overnight. As if by mag—”

His voice caught. He recalled Vanessa's sudden, miraculous healing. And what powers, really, were there in Adria or anywhere else in Europe that could accomplish such a thing? Legends and stories that no one really believed anymore told of some of them, and Roger had maundered on about them toward the end, but Elves and the miraculous transformations they wreaked were the stuff of children's meals and the repasts of senile old men. They had no place at Christopher's table.

Nonetheless, without question, Vanessa had been healed, and so he had been willing to accept the dish. But now the spell was breaking. Vanessa's belongings, with the addition of suitable gifts of money and clothes, were packed: the bundles were waiting up in her room. Ranulf was readying the horses. When the morning mists burned off just a little, she would be leaving for Saint Blaise. And now Christopher was wondering.

“As if by magic,” he said. “Suddenly he was entirely different.”

Compared with her former, wide-eyed owlishness, Vanessa seemed almost self-possessed this morning. “It wa' the Free Towns he wanted.”

He glanced at her, but she shook her head. “I din't look to know, m'lord. I've heard talk o' the Free Towns.”

“Yes, it was the Free Towns,” said Christopher. Magic. It had to be magic. But he pushed the thoughts away lest she should see. “Suddenly, he was actually
protecting
them. He thwarted several spurious annexation attempts, and even led a hundred lances against the men of Bishop Clarence a'Freux. Entirely different.”

“Maybe that wa' for the good in the end,” said Vanessa. “I'm going to the Free Towns.” She blushed. “I'm being selfish. It's good for me . . . I guess.”

Christopher offered her his arm. She took it. Self-possessed. Almost.

“You're not selfish,” he said. “You're frightened. There's nothing wrong with being frightened, is there?”

She shrugged. “I suppose na.”

“I could . . .” It was an absurd request, but he had to make it. His grandfather had let the Free Towns go without a whimper. He could not let Vanessa go without trying to force the futures in another direction. “I could ask you to stay.”

She shook her head. “I can't stay, m'lord. E'en wi'out the patterns I know tha'. I'm a country girl, an' I belong among my kind. Wha' place would I ha' in Aurverelle? I've . . .” She even laughed a little. “I've already frightened e'eryone.”

He bent his head. “Did I help, Vanessa?” he said. “Or did I merely prolong the pain?”

“I dan know.” There was warmth in her smile, but it was human warmth. “But, m'lord, you've been good to me, an'—“

He lifted his head, laid a finger on her lips. “Call me Christopher.”

She blinked at the familiarity, and again he saw the fear in her eyes. He had made a sudden, impulsive decision, and he had acted upon it immediately. The patterns had not, could not have forewarned her.

“You see,” he said. “We make the choices.”

Slowly, thoughtfully, owlishly, Vanessa nodded.

“I hope I helped a little, Vanessa,” said Christopher. “I just wish I could do more.” The thought of her making her way down to Saint Blaise and entrusting herself to the care of Matthew Osmore and his mercenary disinterest panged him. She was defenseless, and there was nothing he could do about it.

But he stopped, pulled off his signet, and put it on her index finger. His hands were small, hers were strong: the ring fitted her tolerably. “Take this. If you ever need anything, if you ever need someone, I'm there. It isn't a chain to bind you. It's a talisman of protection. Everyone in Europe knows not to stir up the delAurvres . . .”

He suddenly recalled the free companies and their attack on the wool shipment. Perhaps not everyone. He would have to do something about that. For Vanessa's sake.

“. . . but even if you never need it to keep you from harm, whenever you feel that you're all alone and haven't a friend in the world, you look at that ring and remember Christopher delAurvre, your friend. And believe in that.”

She believed it. He knew she believed it. She smiled, and his eyes misted at the sight. If he had done nothing else right in his life, he had helped Vanessa. This, indeed, was his Kingdom.

“Thankee, Christopher,” she said. “But you need sa'thing, too.” She put up her hands and unfastened a chain from her neck. “My da gave it to me before I left. I dan know wha' it means, but it's cam to remind me too much o' him . . . too much o' a' the bad times. So I dan think I wan' to keep it. But maybe it wi' remind you o' me.”

Vanessa had her family and the patterns, Christopher had his grandfather and Nicopolis. He took the pendant from her and held it up. Moon and rayed star conjoined, it glittered in the soft morning air. The workmanship was exquisite, the style unlike anything he had ever seen. How Vanessa's father had come by it was beyond reckoning, but the baron of Aurverelle bent his proud head to let her fasten it about his neck.