Wildwing (15 page)

Came in a Box

A
t first I went to the field for the sake of the lift. But something is changing.

Each day when I rise, Beatrix brings me bread and wine and dresses me in a sturdy kirtle, good for riding. A quick visit to the castle chapel for matins, and then she and I meet William in the mews, and we’re off to the field. Sun or rain or wind, it doesn’t matter; rain beads up on Pilgrim’s feathers like pearls, and as for wind, she prefers it, facing into a gale with a special alertness. As she stands on my wrist, I sense her excitement, and it starts to fill me, too.

Each day I count how much longer until the lift is in the field: only three more days now. And as for Sir Hugh arriving, it’s clear that “sennight” of which Beatrix spoke in the wagon

was just a guess. I’m used to time being something you countby the second, to people complaining if their train is five minutes late. Here there are no minutes, no clocks ticking away. Here there’s breakfast and dinner and supper, there’s matins in the morning and the sun high for noon. And days of the week? They’d rather talk of which saint’s day it is. No one knows exactly when Sir Hugh will return. “Soon,” they say. “Soon” I wish it were never.

As I’m walking past the ovens in the bailey, I see the new boy feeding the chickens, the slap now a dull bruise across his cheek. A wave of shame washes over me. A cook has just pulled out a tray of little cakes scattered with walnuts. “May I have one?” I ask, and he practically falls over himself finding one that’s cool enough to hold and hand over. I take a single bite, then walk to the boy. “What is your name?”

His brown eyes get even larger. “They call me Tip, my lady.”

“Well, Tip, I find I’m full and I don’t want to waste this. Here.”

I’ve been hungry before.

I enter the mews. William is settling Pilgrim on her perch. Harold comes in with Lightning and does the same. Twomen, each with a great falcon, tying jesses with a one-handed knot. So smooth and easy it all is. As they step away, I follow them over to the table.

“That’s why you’re so good with them,” I say to William, glancing from father to son. “It’s in your blood.”

Harold laughs, turning his head back to look at me. “Blood? Not likely. Came in a box, he did!”

William laughs, too, and his father claps an arm around his shoulders. It’s clear they’re enjoying an old familiar joke. Even the pigeons chortle and rustle on the other side of the wall. Everyone is in on this joke but me.

“A box?” I say.

They hang up their gloves. “Care to join us, my lady?” asks Harold. We’re comfortable together, the three of us. He clears off a bench and nods at me, and once I sit, they sit and pull over some straps of leather and start oiling them, not needing a word between them.

“Well?” I finally ask. “Are you going to tell me or not? What box?”

“That’s what he said at the time,” says Harold, gazing with pride at the tall young man beside him. “Just you look at him, my lady. Thin as a heron’s leg. Straight nose, as bold as the gyr’s beak. Hair like sunlit sand, he has. He didn’t get that from me, now, did he?”

I contemplate Harold’s dark hair, his sturdy frame. “His looks must come from his mother, then,” I say.

“God bless her soul,” says Harold.

William looks up from the leather he’s working into shining suppleness. “I never knew my mother,” he says.

But he doesn’t look sad, and there’s no bitterness in his voice. And Harold is humming away under his breath, not at all like someone mourning a beloved wife.

“Tell me,” I say.

Harold lays down his work, folds his hands on the table, and leans back as if preparing for a long tale.

“It was back in the old lord’s day,” he says. “I was flying Blackthorn. Now there was a peregrine for you! Faster than the wind, she was. It was near the stream, the one as what comes down from the lake, and Blackthorn brought down a fine fat mallard. I was running over when out he toddles from the undergrowth, this one. No taller than a brachet hound, with pudgy legs and eyes as round as a falcon’s. All on his own. I called out for his people, but no one answered.

“Well, what was I to do? Got him up on the horse with me and tried to search, but I couldn’t cover much ground balancing bird and boy and reins, so I brought him back to the castle. The whole time on horseback, the two of them were like a pair of eyases in the nest. Not a ruffled feather on Blackthorn, nor a peep from the lad. Amazing it was.

“Once we got back, the women swept up the lad and cosseted and cuddled him, and I went out again with the men. We searched everywhere. Asked in town. Never did find out what happened to his people. And him so plump, he must have been well cared for.”

I glance at William’s lanky frame. He catches my eye; I feel my cheeks flushing.

“Robbers killed them,” he says, “and hid the bodies. That’s what they thought.”

Harold nods. “We kept asking the lad: ‘Who are your folks? Where’s your home? How did you get here?’ And all he would say is he came in a box.”

“They asked everyone who passed this way for months,” says William. “No one knew of a missing child, a murdered family. So he kept me.”

“How could I not?” asks Harold. “He kept escaping his nurse’s watch. Slipped off, and every time, I’d come into the mews and here he’d be, sitting near Blackthorn, or watching the other birds, and boy and birds as comfortable as could be. Like family. Him and me, we decided we’re family, too. Well, we’re always together, aren’t we? And him calling me Da from that first day. No, his way with birds isn’t through my blood. But it’s in
his
blood, right enough.”

“And the box,” I ask. “Was it a trunk? A wagon?”

“I don’t remember,” William says with a shrug. “And it doesn’t matter to me. It brought me to this life.”

I look at his sure, slim hands working the leather. Yes, this is the life he was born to live, even if he had to get lost to find it.

Wild

T
he next day, Beatrix heaves herself off the horse with a sigh. “Oh, my aching back! Can’t do this all that much longer, my lady.”

I wrap my arm around her and help her settle against a tree trunk at the field’s edge. “Beatrix, you’re the one who told me I can’t come without you.”

She pulls some needlework from her bag. “You’ll have a proper lady-in-waiting when his lordship returns,” she says. “Not that long now. One who’s better on horseback.”

“I’d rather you stay with me, Beatrix.”

She smiles at me warmly and pats my hand. “But it’s not quite proper, is it? For one of your position to have only a townswoman like me? You need more suitable female companionship.” She glances over at Williamas he casts Pilgrim skyward. “Well, it’s all coming soon enough, isn’t it?”

She arranges the cloak around her shoulders and looks down to her needle. Before long, she’s leaning back against the tree, mouth open, eyes closed.

As William and I walk about the field, he keeps glancing in her direction. Once she starts snoring, he calls Pilgrim down with the lure.

“There’s something I want to show you,” he says, settling the falcon on his wrist. “Because of the other day, when we talked about the wildness in Pilgrim. But we’d have to go alone, the two of us.”

I glance at Beatrix, my pulse quickening. “She’ll be fine here,” I say.

He leads the way on foot into the woods, Pilgrim on his glove. Our steps are soft on the carpet of colored leaves. Each day, the branches are barer; more sideways light slants through. The forest is sparks of orange and red and gold, like stained glass. We walk upstream, and soon I see the glint of open water ahead.

William stops. “Promise you won’t tell,” he says, his voice low.

Where is he taking me? I look at his mouth, the hint of a smile on his broad lips, and my heart starts galloping like arunaway horse. I’m thankful Pilgrim is on his fist, not mine, or she’d flap and bate for sure.

“I promise.”

He steps over a fallen tree trunk, then turns back to help me, his hand taking mine. I cross to his side, but somehow we both forget to let go, and I’m aware of the warmth of his skin as he leads me deeper, toward the stream’s source. Finally, when we can see it flowing from the lake, singing and sparkling over shining gravel, he lets go and points. A peregrine perches on a branch overlooking the water. It’s so wild and beautiful, I catch my breath.

William smiles. “I hoped he’d be here again today.”

We sit near a bush so we’re hidden by its crimson leaves. He leans closer. “I didn’t tell my father. I couldn’t bear to trap this one. I thought you’d understand.”

I understand that he’s trusting me with a dangerous secret: the son of the castle falconer, giving up the chance to own a valuable bird, so it can live wild. I understand the beauty of this lake, with the sun swirling through the last morning mist, a fish splashing, songbirds calling to one another in the trees. I understand that I’m sitting so close to his side, I feel him breathing.

The peregrine stretches his wings to the morning sun. An easy flap and he’s circling the lake, swooping so close to thebranches, the songbirds shriek in alarm, and a crow caws, “Hawk! Hawk!” Then the falcon spirals down to the graveled stream bank and plunges in, splashing up a shower of diamonds. I gasp, as if the freezing water is sharp on my own skin, as if those bright stones are tumbling under my feet.

The falcon flies back to the branch in the sun, and begins preening with beak and claw.

“There’s a part of me loves the wildness in them best of all,” William says softly. He pauses, as if trying to decide whether to tell me something. Then: “This spring I was climbing the cliffs and came on a scrape with three peregrine eyases. I sat and watched the tiercel bring back his kill, the falcon soar out to him, turning upside down in flight to grasp the prey. It was pure song. And as I watched”?his voice is almost a whisper now—”I heard them speaking, one to the other.”

“Speaking?” I say, filled with the strangeness of it.

He leans closer, confiding, until his shoulder is touching mine. “Oh, it was bird tongue, chirrups and cries, but I swear they understand each other, the same as you and I. And I swear, yes, I swear they feel love, though the priests would call it sacrilege to say so.” He looks at me, his blue eyes intense as flame. “How can love be sacrilege?”

Sacrilege. In this world, that means he’s trusting mewith his life, to say such thoughts out loud. I shiver, and I don’t know if it’s because of his trust, or the danger, or the awareness of his body so close to mine.

I only say, “Did they fly free?”

He nods. “My father saw them then and hoped to catch them, but we never did. He would call it madness, not taking them when I could. And perhaps I am mad, for they were worth a fortune.” He sees the doubt in my eyes. “Truly, a fortune. Say a peasant stole a peregrine eyas, tried to sell it on the sly for a purse of gold? He’d pay with his life. And as for a gyrfalcon, not even Sir Hugh, with all his lands and riches, could afford one such as Lightning.”

The wild bird draws my eye with a rouse. The glistening feathers lie smooth to his body, as sleek as an otter’s pelt. He lifts his head, tests the air with his wings, then rises with a few powerful strokes above the trees.

William stands and holds down his free hand to help me up. But Pilgrim’s head turns sharply to the side, and William freezes. “Wait,” he whispers, sinking back into a crouch. “Quiet.”

A moment later, my ears catch the sound of horses riding through the woods. William must not want the men to see us without Beatrix. I nod and settle back down as still as can be.

But the four men who ride to the lake have blue tunics, not green, and the sun sparks off chain mail. These aren’t Sir Hugh’s men.

The horses lower their heads to drink. The riders don’t say a word; their silence is tangible, almost solid, and their heads keep turning from side to side, looking, listening. There’s a rustle in the trees, and to a man they reach for the hilts of their swords?but it’s only a crow, hopping from branch to branch. William and I pull farther beneath the red leaves. His hand is tight around mine. On his other arm, Pilgrim is absolutely still.

When the horses are done drinking, one of the men raises his hand, motioning to the others, and they slip back into the trees, as stealthily as they came.

“William,” I whisper, but he shakes his head, and I’m silent. Every part of him is aware, ready to spring, his face so alert, it frightens me. Finally, after a long minute, he stands and whispers,
“Go!”

I wait until we reach the trail, and then I ask, “Who were they?”

“You don’t know? They wear the blue of Sir Giles. His men, on Sir Hugh’s land, and meaning no good, by the looks of them.”

I breathe in, and the air is sharp with danger. Suddenly I picture Beatrix, alone, asleep, completely vulnerable. “Hurry!” I cry, taking off down the trail.

William is close at my heels. “As soon as we have her, we’ll gallop back to warn the castle,” he says. “They’ll send out a search party, put everyone on alert.”

“No!” I stop, turning around to face him. “Don’t tell!”

He stares at me in disbelief. “But there’s danger about. We need to be prepared.”

“Only four men. That’s not enough for an attack, is it?”

He shakes his head. “But if it’s a scouting party, more might come later.”

“And they might not,” I say urgently. “For God’s sake, William, don’t you see what will happen if you tell? I’ll never get to come out here again. Never! I’ll be trapped inside the castle walls, and there’ll be no more flying Pilgrim. No more being here, with you.”

We both glance at the trail ahead, and then we’re running again, his hand holding mine as if to keep me safe. Along the stream, back to the edge of the field—

And there’s Beatrix, snoring as safe as can be under her red and golden tree.

He turns to me, a question in his eyes.

“Let me be free,” I whisper.

Slowly, very slowly, he nods, deciding to take the risk.