Maze of Moonlight (24 page)

Which left Baron Ruprecht of Maris and his allies.

But the storms lasted through September, and by the time Christopher and his people had salvaged the fields, winter had closed in with the October snows. Roads disappeared beneath a blanket of white, Malvern settled into a muffled sleep, and travel was out of the question.

Christopher chafed at the forced inactivity, and since the idle time gave him the opportunity to reflect on the words of Amos the scribe, he chafed all the more.

Madness. It was simply not acceptable. Attributing Roger's reformation and subsequent behavior to madness was something like saying the sky was blue because it pleased God for it to be that way. While God's pleasure might be acceptable to the theologians and the doctors of the Church, it did not satisfy Christopher delAurvre any more than did madness.

But who believed in Elves? Was that not madness? And now Christopher had discovered not only that Roger's belief in the legendary immortals had begun well before his sudden change but also that the old man had, in effect, blamed the collapse of his plots against the Free Towns on them.

Worse and worse.

Christopher wished frequently that he had been able to examine some of the old records kept in Yvonnet's library. Roger had been chamberlain of Hypprux: surely something had been documented—letters, transcripts, maybe even something about that escaped witch—that might reveal the genesis of his change. But Christopher had not had time to look, and now he was very sure that he did not want to sample any more of Yvonnet's hospitality. Dear cousin, indeed!

And the question nagged at him. And he chafed.

“Roger was a good man, Natil. I can't ignore that fact.” A December storm was throwing snow against the shuttered windows of Castle Aurverelle, and the cold drafts were only marginally damped by the hangings and the tapestries. Christopher was sitting in an arm chair in his bedroom, his bare feet stretched out toward the hearth, warming himself after a trek through the town. Nothing special, really. Just making sure that everyone was all right. “He was a bit of a bear, even when I knew him, but he was a good-hearted bear. If you know what I mean.”

“I do.” The harper smiled. She was sitting on a pillow on the floor, tailor fashion, her harp on her lap and her gown tucked neatly in about her toes. She seemed much as she always had: sweet and kind, always willing to play and sing, helpful . . . and tranquil in her helpfulness.

And yet Christopher knew her also as someone who was perfectly willing to climb about on the outside of a fortified castle and hold a knife to the throat of the chamberlain of Hypprux, or to ditch and dredge in the fields alongside the men. A strong, fearless woman, as loyal as he had ever seen. And so, though some of her comments and actions seemed to be as cryptic as her past, he liked her, trusted her, and eventually had been moved to confide in her about his grandfather.

“I always liked him when I was a boy,” he said. “He took me fishing. And he taught me how to hunt, and how to fight. Manly things. He didn't seem mad at all. He seemed . . .” He fell silent. The storm battered at the shutters. “He seemed considerably more sane than I.”

Natil's eyes were on him, seemingly reflecting more light than came from the fire.

“I mean, he didn't go about throwing fruit at people. Or climbing up drainpipes. Or acting like a bear.” He felt himself grow warm, but not from the fire.

The harper sighed softly, regretfully. “You bear your grandfather . . . like a burden, my lord.”

The old wounds twinged. “What am I supposed to do, Natil? Roger was first a failure at being a human being, and then he was a failure at being a delAurvre. He started it all, my father thrashed about like a fop until the plague got him, and then I—damn my eyes—continued the fine old tradition. Roger failed with the Free Towns. I failed at Nicopolis. Roger acted like a fool. I act like a madman. And now every rag-tag bunch of robbers thinks that they can just ride off with a sack of Aurverelle wool. And they're right, too.”

“What . . .” Natil seemed to be choosing her words carefully, her eyes flickering with firelight . . . and something else. Again, she reminded Christopher of Vanessa. But if Natil saw too much, she did not blench. “What did you hope to accomplish at Nicopolis, my lord?”

He glared at the fire. “Redemption.”

“For yourself?”

Christopher kept his eyes on the fire. “For myself, for being a delAurvre. And for my grandfather, for being a . . .”

Natil's eyes were luminous, compassionate. Christopher felt their gaze, tried not to look at them.

“. . . a coward.” He struggled with his bitterness. Natil's questions had lanced a festering boil, and the pus came eagerly. “For my entire family, for being a bunch of mean-spirited, single-minded brutes without a shred of compassion or decency.”

Natil was looking at him, he thought, in much the same way as he had looked at Vanessa. “And yet you condemn your grandfather for showing compassion and decency.”

“I didn't say that it would make any sense.” Christopher picked up the poker, prodded at the burning log. Fire. This was what they used to burn witches. And, if the old stories held any truth, Elves, too.

Elves. The word kept surfacing. Christopher would have preferred madness.

“Let me tell you about something,” he said, giving the log another shove. Sparks flew up like stars and mounted into the chimney. “Years ago, I went to Paris with my grandfather. Mother and Father were dead by then, and Roger took me everywhere with him. He more or less raised me.” He grinned at the heat from the flames. “Fitting, eh?”

Natil said nothing.

“The reason for the Paris trip was the coronation of Queen Isabeau. Roger was only distantly related to King Charles, but Charles was determined to have a fine show, and so he invited everyone. Roger went, so I went. I was already having doubts about the old man, though. I'd grown up worshiping him. Roger could do anything. Roger was God. But then I'd started hearing stories—people talk, and all that—about what he was like . . . before. The people he'd hanged. The girl he'd chained to his bed and left to die. And then I heard about the Free Towns . . .”

And Vanessa was in the Free Towns, safe, because Roger had failed. Christopher fought the thought away, for it made his throat ache with her absence.

“. . . and suddenly I didn't worship him any more. All his gardening and all his quiet little ways just seemed to me then to be the marks of a man who was a failure. So I tried to ignore the fact that I was with him. Roger of Aurverelle: the man who had lost the Free Towns . . . and his nerve. As far as I was concerned, I was there on my own.”

Natil nodded but did not speak. Her harp was on her lap, and she had folded her hands on it and rested her chin on her interlaced fingers. Her eyes were gleaming, and for a moment, Christopher wondered whether he saw a hint of radiance about her.

“The festivities w3ere wonderful, of course,” he said. “There were plays and pageants and processions . . . even a fountain that spurted white and red wine. People dressed up like angels and all that. Ostentation, you know, but I was impressed by that sort of thing back then. But what really struck me was something that happened that evening. You see, they'd strung a rope from the tower of Notre Dame Cathedral all the way across to the top of the highest house on Pont Saint Michel, and an acrobat walked that rope in the darkness. He held a lit candle in each hand. He was singing. It was . . . beautiful.

Natil smiled.

“I wanted then . . .” Christopher's jaw trembled. “I wanted to be like that. Here was this man, walking a tightrope high above the earth, carrying lights in his hands . . . and singing.” Christopher sighed. “And I wanted to carry light into the darkness, too. I wanted to be valiant. I wanted to be brave. I wanted to accomplish something. Instead . . .” He shook his head, stretched his feet a little closer to the fire, snatched them back when a log crackled and sent a spark flying toward his toes. “Instead, I turned out much like my grandfather.”

Natil's face mirrored only compassion, and she was silent for a time. Then: “And do you not carry light?”

Christopher blinked.

“You saved Vanessa's life. She was a peasant girl, but you saved her. And now you offer aid to all the people of Adria. Something that the barons of Aurverelle . . .” And there was a sudden flicker of pain in Natil's eyes, deep pain. “. . . have never done before. You chose that course of action, and you chose it freely, just as Vanessa freely chose not to speak of what the patterns said to her . . . and it was you who first showed her how to keep silent. Do you not call that the bearing of light? Is that not valor?”

Though he wondered how the harper knew so much about Vanessa, he could not argue with her. But he still had questions. “But . . . but what happened to grandfather?”

“Does it matter?”

“Yes, it does.” Christopher got up and paced about the room, his bare feet padding across thick bearskins and oriental carpets. “There was a reason for it all. There had to be. I'm not him. All right. Fine. But until I know what happened to him, whether it was a harper playing for him, or an acrobat holding candles, or . . . or Elves or witches or God knows what else, I won't be satisfied. And I won't be free.”

Natil nodded slowly. “I . . . understand. . . .”

Christopher turned around abruptly. “You're a harper, Natil. You know all the legends.”

Natil was suddenly cautious. “I know . . .some of them, my lord.”

“What do you know about Elves? Roger talked about Elves. He was obsessed with them before his change, and he talked about them after. He'd say . . . odd things . . . when I knew him—nothing ever definite—and he even mentioned them on his deathbed.” He felt a little ashamed: confessing Roger's obsession with fantasies was much the same as revealing that a cousin was a sodomite, or a grandfather a habitual rapist.

Natil had been caught off guard. “I know a little.”

“Are they real?”

It was a rhetorical question only, something by which he hoped to satisfy himself once and for all that fantasies and delusions would remain fantasies and delusions. But Natil looked away quickly, and Christopher realized that his sudden, impulsive question had actually disconcerted her.

Her reply, though, disconcerted him just as much, if not more. “They are.”

He stared. He did not doubt her. If Natil said it, it must be true. But if it were true . . .

What had happened to his grandfather? Elves? But that
was
madness!

There was a sudden scrambling at the windows, a frantic clawing and scratching and hammering. Startled, Christopher at first blinked in astonishment, then, his hand on his dagger, cautiously approached and unfastened one of the shutters.

It was pulled open from the outside, and a grotesque head was thrust into the room. Beetle-browed and pop-eyed, it was rimed with frost and snow, and it gaped and gibbered at Christopher for a moment before the baron realized that it was the renegade, fruit-throwing monkey.

A muffled shout from the hallway. “This way! We've got him now!”

His eyes stinging from the blast of driving snow, Christopher stared at the frightened, half-starved, half-frozen creature that clung to the slippery shutter, its eyes pleading for warmth and protection.
Poor thing
, he thought, for he himself was just as desperately looking for an escape from another kind of cold.

Elves? Was that supposed to be an escape?

“Master! Master!” cried Pytor from outside the door. “The monkey! Is it there?”

“Yes . . .” said Christopher, not really sure whether he was referring to the monkey or to himself. “It's here.” And, not knowing what else to do, he allowed the beast to force its way into the room. Screeching and gesticulating, it bounded through the window, up the bedpost, and along the hangings as Christopher grappled with the shutter and managed to fasten it shut against the wind.

He turned around, dripping, to find that Pytor and a number of castle guards had entered the room. One man slammed the door, and the rest spread out to surround the monkey.

Christopher watched. In just such a manner had Yvonnet and his men closed in upon the baron of Aurverelle.

The monkey was weaponless, friendless, trapped, and its eyes were wide with the knowledge of its imminent death. Pytor and the men were unmoved. All of them had taken too many pieces of fruit in the face. “Ranulf,” said the seneschal.

“Aye, m'lord. It's time we made an end of this pest.”

But Natil laid aside her harp, unfolded her long legs, and rose. “A moment, please.”

Turning, she stretched out her arms to the monkey. The beast stared as though seeing her for the first time, and then, with a bound, it threw itself into her arms, at once shivering with cold and quaking with fear.

Pytor and the men stepped forward. Natil turned around, her eyes flashing. Pytor and the men stopped short.

“Leave them alone,” said Christopher.

“But, master . . .”

“Leave them alone.” but he was himself staring. The monkey was huddled in Natil's protecting arms. Just as . . . in the Château . . .

Natil peered into the monkey's face. “You have been throwing fruit and making a nuisance of yourself, have you not?”

The animal covered its eyes, tried to hide its face. Christopher thought of all the apples he himself had flung.

“Will you promise not to do that anymore?” The harper's voice was kind.

Christopher could not be sure, be he thought he saw the monkey nod. With a growing sense of horror, he found that he was nodding also.

“Will you be a friend to those in this castle?”

Again, a nod. Christopher was shaking.

“Then the hand of the Lady be on you, child,” Natil said as she touched the monkey's forehead. “Be healed, and be at peace.” She looked at Pytor. “My lord seneschal: some food for this prodigal?”

Pytor stared.

The monkey fumbled at Natil's hair, reached beneath the black and silver tresses, and tugged at her ears. “Now, now,” she said, laughing. “Not that!”

Pytor found his voice. “Mistress Harper,” he said, “that monkey . . .”