The Jack of Souls (44 page)

She sighed, not sure why she was irritated, which made her all the more so. Harric had probably wandered off to get some time alone, but even a horse-touched wench like her knew he ought to spend some time with their host before sleep. More importantly, she’d advised Abellia to wait until Harric was present before she introduced Mudruffle to the others. She feared Willard might react badly to Mudruffle’s obvious magical nature, and reasoned that since Harric seemed as unintimidated by magic as he was by the old knight’s bluster, his presence might soften Willard’s reaction.

And yet just yesterday
, said a little voice in her conscience,
you loudly criticized Harric for that same lack of regard for Willard’s opinion.

There it was. She was a hypocrite, and that was irritating. Or maybe she was learning something new about those “gray areas” Harric navigated so smoothly—which was even more aggravating.

She growled, and grabbed a brush to work on Rag’s mane.

“Fleeing the oh-so-difficult world of humans?” said a smooth female voice behind her.

Caris whirled, startled to find a middle-aged lady of the court confronting her from the straw. Tall, proud, the lady glittered with ornaments accenting a gown of green silk. Amber hair piled upon her head in a mass of ringlets and braids in a style Caris had seen in portraits of her mother’s courtier days. Her face glowed with ashen paste, and perfect circles of rouge rode high on each cheek. At first glance she’d seemed beautiful—once had been, surely—but now only a husk remained; starved eyes, protruding collarbones, and where the neckline of her gown might once have once draped over a swelling of smooth breasts, it now revealed a prow of jutting sternum on a carapace of bone.

“So, you are Harric’s latest toy,” said the lady, in a voice soft as honey. She pursed her lips, eyes roaming Caris’s body. The survey halted on the sword at Caris’s hip, whereupon the lady let out a prim little laugh and clapped her hands in delight. “Half-witted, half brute, and mannish to boot. How he baits me! Could he have chosen a more ridiculous boor to vex me with?” Eyes shining, her laughter tinkled beneath the rafters.

Caris barely heard the words. Hairs rose on her neck as her mind flew in circles trying to explain away the obvious. Rag fidgeted, stomping and eyes showing white at the sight of the apparition that was there but not there in the straw. Caris reached into the panicked mare to calm her pounding heart, and, by focusing elsewhere, calm her own.

“Who are you?” Caris said.

“I am the Lady Dimoore,” said Harric’s mother. Bright, birdlike eyes—Harric’s eyes—scrutinized Caris’s face. “You’re only half here, aren’t you. The other half is in that horse.” Lady Dimoore’s nose wrinkled, sending a fan of tiny cracks through her makeup. “Stupid brutes, horses. They imagine snakes in shadows, lions in puddles. But they can be managed, with training, can’t they? Just like you.”

“What do you want?” Caris said. “Harric doesn’t want you in his life anymore.” Her voice sounded thick to her own ears, her words clumsy compared to the lady’s clever speech; nevertheless, they struck a nerve in the Lady Dimoore, for her eyes flashed.

“Oh? And you think he wants
you
?” she snapped. “Let me tell you something, my little brute girl. Only one lady will ever have Harric’s heart, and she took it out long ago.”

Caris clamped her teeth, wishing she could also clamp her ears. She was no good with words and glances, the sort of weapons ladies used so deftly, always piercing her useless defenses and drawing blood.
Another lady
, had she said? The words ate at her. Did she mean Lyla? Harric had gone to such lengths to win her in poker and free her, and then again to save her from Bannus. Did he love her? How stupid she’d been not to see it! On the other hand, Lyla was no more a
lady
than Caris; surely the Lady Dimoore would be just as dismissive of a commoner like Lyla. But if not Lyla, who?

Lady Dimoore’s blue-painted lips pressed in a tight, haughty smile.

Caris blinked in surprise. “You mean
you
?”

Her reaction did not please. “Who else, simpleton? Do you know anything about the hearts of men? Do you know anything about your own dull heart?”

The lady stepped nearer, voice lowered, eyes bright with cruelty. “Let me tell you a story, horse girl. Long before your mother foaled you, a certain Lady Dionis gave birth to a brute like you. Against my clear advice, she kept the creature and set out to raise her as a lady for the court. I told her the child would cause irreparable harm to the cause of women there, which the Queen had labored hard to establish. I told her that by keeping the girl in court she would make us all look like the very half-wits the Brotherhood claimed we were—a living reminder that women must be kept and managed by their men. But Lady Dionis didn’t listen. She dressed the little beast in gowns, taught her to dance and speak, and indeed the creature danced well enough, and may have liked it for aught I know.

“But when she came of age, she became strange. She fled company. When the Queen held her masques and balls or banquets, the girl would slip away, and none could find her. Of course,
I
knew where she was. Like any horse in crisis, she fled to her stable.”

Recognition hit Caris like a pole in the gut. “Mona…” she breathed.

The lady’s eyes flashed with pleasure. “Yes, Mona. Of course you know of her. She was a pretty thing, on the outside. The boys found her exterior quite appealing in her low-cut silken dresses. But like you, she was half-hearted, half-witted within.”

“Shut up. I know what happened.” Caris knew the tale by heart, a cautionary tale to horse-touched and their mothers. The image of Mona and her fate had haunted her imagination since she was small—eating at her ambitions, cutting her hopes off at the knees—until Mona became a sort of long-lost sister never known and always grieved.

“You know what happened, but do you know
why
it happened? You see, her mother ignored my advice. That was quite unacceptable. So, with a little encouragement from me, the stable lads began to woo the girl.”

“You?
” Caris’s breath choked off in her throat.

The lady smiled. “Predictably, she gave her half-heart to the first who feigned his love. And one night, while the others danced the masque, he tied her in a stall, fitted her head with training bit and bridle, and he and his friends rode her until I brought the dancers down to see her as she truly was, her false dress stripped away.”

Caris sobbed. She knew the end. The suicide hangings from the tower. First daughter, then mother. Grief and rage choked her. Memories of the insufferable gowns her own mother forced upon her—of lady lessons and the mocks of would-be wooer—jumbled in her mind with newer struggles of the wedding ring and Harric and feelings she didn’t understand.

Her hands rose to her ears, and she fled into Rag. Dimly, she sensed the lady laughing, leaning close.

“Can you imagine the extent of Mona’s ruin?” the lady whispered. “You cannot. For you can only half know anything. But that is how I shall ruin you, if you do not forswear my Harric. I shall ruin you. Cruelly. Publicly. And utterly.”

Caris couldn’t block out the words. They seemed to enter her mind without recourse to her ears. To her surprise, however, they did not send her over the edge into the blackness she experienced when words overwhelmed her. Though she heard every one, she did not curl into a ball. Indeed, she realized with surprise that she was still standing. That her head was not roaring with confusion. That something had changed in her, and though she had no idea what it was, she was not incapacitated.

Instead, she felt anger. And with anger, she could
act.

She flung herself from the wall, sword flashing from her side and whistling beneath the lady’s startled eyes.

The lady drew back, startled. “I warned you!” she hissed, and faded to air.

Caris replied by thrusting a yard of steel through the space where the eyes had been. “Coward!” she spat. “Stay and face me!” She stalked the barn, muttering curses until she was certain the ghost was gone. Finally, she stopped beside Rag, panting. Rag let out a triumphant whinny, but Caris barely noticed. Staring inward, she marveled at her own stability in the face of torment that would normally have left her rolled up in the straw, and at the revelation about the fabled Mona.

“She killed you,” she whispered. “That evil bitch raped you and killed you.”

Abruptly, she dropped to her knees, and laid her sword before her. “I found your name,” she whispered to the blade. From the dirt she pried an old shoeing nail, and with it etched
MONA
in the steel.

Rising, she held the blade before her. A power and freedom moved through her that she’d never felt before, as if the spirit of Mona entered the blade to give it wings, and she knew it was right, and it was purpose, and that she herself was Mona reforged in tempered steel.

“You warn
me,
lady?” Caris angled the blade so its new name glinted in the dying light.
“I warn you.
Mona is back. And she knows her killer’s name.”

—Arkendian Proverb

The Witch’s Creature

I
t was more
than an hour before Harric brought Holly to a stall in the barn beside Rag. Since she’d gorged in the meadow, he left her only water and a handful of hay, before plodding up the stairs and into the tower.

The base of the tower formed a single, spacious circular room, with stalls for animals and barrels below and heavy timber beams above, and a central pillar of stone that Harric deduced encased the base of the thunder-rod. Stairs curved up the circumference to the right. He climbed toward the sounds of conversation above, and wondered how Abellia managed such stairs when he could barely lift his feet to make it.

He emerged onto a landing with a single doorway, through which came smells and sounds of pleasant cooking and conversation, and he stepped through into a high-timbered hall with windows as big as doors. Lush Iberg rugs blanketed the wooden floor, and two high-backed stuffed chairs faced each other before the hearth. The window shutters were flung wide to admit the western breeze and the last evening light. Brolli, Willard, and Caris lounged upon pillowed benches with their host in a cozy alcove before the western window, watching an orange sunset over the ridges. They’d washed and combed and each enjoyed a pint of something frothy that Harric imagined must be cool and refreshing.

Beside them he felt sweaty, and dirty, and mightily abused.

No one noticed him standing in the doorway. Abellia seemed to be in the middle of a story of Caris’s first visit to the tower.

“It gave a horrid wet storming in the sky that day, so she must stay.
Mio doso!
She looking like the poor wet cat!” The old woman cackled, and beamed at Caris. Caris put on a smile, but Harric could see she was distracted, worried, or upset—probably with him for being so late.

When he shut the door behind him, Caris’s eyes snapped to him. He expected her to scowl, but found instead all the signs of urgent worry in her face. Not surprisingly, though she seemed anxious to speak to him, she had no words to gracefully excuse herself from the table.

Willard noted the intensity of her gaze, and followed it to Harric. “Boy! By Bannus’s stinking socks, where have you been? Get cleaned up. I can smell you from here.” He pointed to a door on the opposite side of the hearth and said, “Bathing room.”

The old knight’s armor had been removed and replaced with a worn brown doublet and hose. He’d girded the doublet with a clean bandage, over which his considerable guts hung obscenely. It embarrassed Harric to see him out of armor. He felt like he’d walked in on the old man naked—arms and chest strong as fire-cone roots, but the belly grotesque, and the old legs spindly and weak, like a hermit crab plucked from its shell. More bandages wrapped his ribs beneath both arms, and another embraced his left wrist, but all were clean, without seepage.

“Good to see you in repair, sir,” Harric said, but in truth the medical attentions appeared to have taken their toll; the old knight’s face seemed sunken, and the already pale cheeks had lost all trace of color. The sight made Harric ashamed of his self-pity.

“Molly swallowed Idgit, sir,” Harric replied, with his best manservant imitation. “I had a bit of a time making her cough her back up, and when she did, I had a worse time calming Idgit.”

The table laughed, and the joke had the desired effect of diverting attention from Caris’s obvious need to speak with him in private.
She is useless keeping secrets,
Harric noted, amused.
An open book for all to read. Even Willard.

He started for the bathing room, but stopped when he noticed a shadow shifting by the side of the hearth. A figure moved there. A child? Whatever it was stood no taller than half the height of a man. It stepped from the shadows and walked with a jerky sort of stride to Willard’s discarded armor, where it swept needles and twigs from the blackened steel into a little dustbin. Not a child. Not even human, Harric realized. From a distance it looked like a walking hat rack.