Wildwing (19 page)

Away

I
pour the potion into the morning’s wine. “You must be thirsty, Beatrix.”

She nods. She’s always ready for a good swig after tromping up all the stairs.

I got it from her last night. I said I was nervous about the wedding and needed something to help me sleep, like the concoction she gave me the first day I came. Her eyes were so full of concern, I almost felt guilty. Almost. But I pretended to drink the potion, and I set it aside, and now it’s mixed with the dark red wine in the goblet I hold out to her.

“Go ahead, finish it,” I say. “I’ve had enough.”

She gulps the wine down eagerly before she even notices it tastes different. Her eyes open wide in sudden realization. “My lady! You wouldn’t…”

Her words are already slurring, her shoulders slumping. I barely get her over to the bench—the bed would be softer, but it’s too high to lift her—and I settle her down, covering her gently with a blanket. I wait until she starts snoring.

The air coming through the window is warmer than usual, but it’s my sturdiest kirtle I put on, struggling to tie the laces at my sides. I pull on my thickest stockings and drape my fur-lined cloak over my shoulders. Today may feel like summer again, but it will be winter soon enough, and I’ll need these clothes against the bitter cold to come.

I open the trunk to get my gloves, and there, staring at me from atop the jewel box, is the mermaid, her two tails pointing in different directions. My hand drifts down, then stops, hovering in the air. I shouldn’t take it, it’s wrong… . But I harden my heart. I’ve been poor, and there are no guarantees in life. I turn the clasp and lift the ivory lid. Before I can hesitate again, I grab the jeweled cross on its heavy gold chain and shove it into the purse at my side.

I’m taking too long! By the time I run down the stairs and cross the bailey, the sun is already shining on the door to the mews. I knock gently and enter.

Will lifts his head from Pilgrim’s perch. He strokes the bird’s wing, saying farewell, then walks to the table and grabs the biggest field bag.

“Beatrix?” he asks.

“She’s asleep. And your father? Did you tell him we’re going for longer than usual?”

“He won’t stop us. Nor will Sir Hugh.” There’s a sharp edge to his voice. “His lordship came in at first light and said he’d take out the gyr or he’d have himself a new falconer. It wasn’t so bad when they left, but now”—he looks out the window as if he could see far beyond the castle walls?”the air feels wrong. And we haven’t been flying the gyr.” He pulls his eyes back to the room and starts filling the bag: bread, cheese, strips of dried meat, apples. A sturdy, sharp knife. “But what’s done is done.”

“What if they see us?” I ask.

“Then we’re only searching out good hawking for the king.”

At the stables, the groom has three horses ready, like he does every morning. I tell him Beatrix won’t be joining us because she isn’t feeling well. As we ride toward the portcullis, a guard calls from above, “Why, where’s your old nursemaid?”

“She’s meeting us in the field shortly,” I call back. “Good work, soldier.” He puffs out his chest, proud to have been so alert. He’ll be off duty before he has a chance to wonder.

And then we’re away. The sun filters through the branches, and we hold the horses to a steady walk, sashaying down the trail; but my pulse is racing as if whole armies were galloping after us. I glance at Will. He’s not as relaxed as he’d have me believe. His mouth is more determined than I’ve ever seen, and his eyes are as alert as a falcon’s, watching everywhere at once for any shiver of movement.

I throw my cloak back over my shoulders. Will sees me and stops.

“Go ahead, take it off,” he says, removing his own cloak as he scans the sky. “The day is too warm. I don’t like it.”

“Better for us than storms,” I say.

“Better for us; bad for my father. Look.” He points up where a crow sails, high and buoyant. “Do you see that? No flapping, just riding the warm air. A soaring day, when a falcon can fly forever, never looking back at all.”

“Never looking back,” I say. “Like us.”

“Like us,” he echoes, suddenly smiling. And we’re off again at our steady pace, into the thickness of the woods.

We’ve skirted the road to town, and now we’re in the hills on trails I’ve never seen before. Will says there’s another village down the coast, where there’s little chance anyone will recognize us. He has coins in his purse. We’ll buy passage on a boat and sail where they’ll never find us, he says. We’ll start a new life, the two of us. Together.

The air’s stillness feels slow and heavy. I wish one of those wild autumn winds would come tugging and pushing, sending our horses flying as fast as they can go. Away from Sir Hugh, from Eustace and his prying eyes.

We’ve been riding for hours when Will pulls up in a glade and we dismount. He spreads his cloak and we sit.

“Not what you’re used to for dinner,” he says, cutting a slice of cheese. As he passes it to me, our hands touch. We pause, looking down where skin brushes against skin. Then he leans forward, and he kisses me, softly, sweetly, as if for the very first time. And in a way, it is. I barely recognize the person I am. Not a maid anymore, or a lady—just me, Addy, running off through the woods with the one I love.

“Can’t stop too long,” he says.

We gulp down the bread and salty cheese. Then we remount, and he leads us on, taking every turn without hesitation, pausing only to note the angle of the sun. I never came this far from home in my own time, and the countryside is as foreign to me as if we’d sailed across the ocean. I don’t know this curve of hill, that crag, this last patch of crimson leaves clinging to a bush. It feels like wilderness.

Will keeps scanning the sky.

“What are you looking for?” I ask.

He shrugs. He’s always looking, taking everything in.

It’s how he is in the world, completely aware, all his senses alive. It’s one of the things I love about him. And when we kiss, those senses are focused on nothing but me. I’m what he sees, hears, feels, smells, knows. I’ve never been so seen, so understood as me… .

Or who you pretend to be
, says a little voice in my head.

But I’m not his lady anymore, am I? So what does it matter? We’ll settle into a town, where he’ll find work easily with those strong arms, that quick eye. And me …

Will pulls on his reins, coming to a sudden stop. His eyes have latched onto something, and I don’t like the tension in his shoulders. What does he see? Harold and Sir Hugh? Men-at-arms in blue tunics? Robbers?

I follow his gaze to a wooded copse on the next hill. Something is jerking in a tangle of branches near the top of a tree. Something white. And then I hear the thin, clear chime of a bell.

“God’s blood!” curses Will, kicking his horse. The next instant he’s galloping over to the copse. Because it’s Lightning up there, the king’s gyrfalcon, her jesses snagged far above the ground, where the branches are thin and the twigs as tangled and knotted as briars.

But I don’t move. I can barely breathe. How could Lightning be here, hours from the castle, on the very pathwe’ve taken? It’s almost as if she were sent for us to find. Like the peregrine that greeted me in the field, led me to the shipwreck, made my lie of a vision become truth … I shiver. The lift that brought me here was science, not magic; but this feels like something beyond human ken.

Then I shake my head, hard, to clear it. What am I thinking? It’s a coincidence, that’s all. One huge, mad coincidence. I kick my horse into a gallop and race toward the copse.

By the time I pull the reins and leap off, Will is already scrambling from the broad lower branches to the thinner boughs above. Higher he climbs, and higher, until he reaches a bough that looks far too slender to hold him. He starts inching out, murmuring to the gyr in a low, soothing voice. A few inches more—I catch my breath as the limb swings wildly. It won’t hold his weight! Will starts to shimmy back toward the trunk, cursing again.

Then he looks down and sees me unlacing the side of my kirtle.

“Addy, what are you—”

“I can’t climb a tree in this heavy thing,” I say. “My shift will be better.”

“What?”
He leaps down nimbly from branch to branch and lands at my side. “You’re not going up there! You sawhow weak that limb is. It could break off beneath you, dash you to the ground!”

“I weigh less than you do.”

I pull the kirtle off over my head. Will stops, staring at me in my shift.

I walk to the trunk and put my hands on its rough bark, trying to gauge the best way to climb. “Give me a boost to this first branch,” I say. “I can make it from there.”

“No. It’s too dangerous.”

I stare at him in disbelief. “More dangerous than you up there? More dangerous than running from Sir Hugh and his soldiers?” When he doesn’t reply, I exclaim in exasperation, “Do you want to free Lightning, or no?”

At that he sets his jaw and comes over to make a stirrup of his hands, boosting me as easy as a feather. I pull myself up to the first branch, and it’s steady and solid as the ground itself. Now I stand, one hand on the tree’s great trunk, looking for handholds and footholds. It’s just like climbing the castle ruins a lifetime ago, but instead of smooth stone, the bark is rough and biting, and bits of lichen flake off in my hand. The ground is soon very far below me.

The branches grow thinner and springier. I pause, waiting for one to stop bouncing beneath me.

“Watch your feet!” cries Will. “Slow down!”

And there I am, at the base of that slender bough. From the far end comes the silvery chime of Lightning’s bell. I start scooting out. “There now,” I murmur to the falcon. Closer I come, and closer. “Never you worry. I’ve got you.” Once I would have been terrified to reach my hand toward that brutal beak, toward talons that pierce flesh as easily as a needle slides into silk. “Soft now,” I say, reaching for the jesses.

“Don’t try to unknot them!” shouts Will. “Jerk them free, shove the bird under your arm!”

And I grasp and jerk and shove all at the same time, just as there’s an earsplitting
crack!
The limb is falling away beneath me, and I’m plunging through air, brushing past branches, rocketing downward so fast I think my last moment has come—but instead of a crash, there’s a thud as Will catches me, and a second thud as we tumble together to the ground.

We lay there panting, our chests heaving up and down, splintered twigs and branches strewn about us in a rough carpet. We stare wide-eyed at each other, and at Lightning, still trapped under my arm. Then Will cracks a smile, and I follow, and the next moment we’re laughing in relief and exhilaration.

Finally he says, “Give me the gyr.”

Once I hand over the bird, I stand and turn around, making sure everything works: feet, legs, arms. I reach for my kirtle. Will’s eyes linger on me as I slip it back over my head.

“Look to Lightning,” I say, starting in on the laces.

He spreads her wings, starts fingering the long flight feathers. “You had her good and tight,” he says. But when he examines the tail, his mouth narrows. “Two tail feathers broken. Too bad I can’t imp them for her. I’m sure these are ones we have from the moult.”

I look at his hands, so sure, almost instinctive. I look at his face, completely alive, connecting with Lightning like—what was it Harold said in the mews that day?
Like a pair of eyases in the nest
.

“I would have liked to leave her with something to eat,” Will says. “But we’ve already lost too much time.” He glances at the afternoon sun, three-quarters of the way across the sky.

A pair of eyases
… I hear Harold’s voice, easy, comfortable; I see him, his hands as quick and wise as Will’s, his eyes warm, his arm wrapping around his son’s shoulders.

“Will,” I say quietly, and he turns at the new tone in my voice. “What happens if Lightning doesn’t return to Berringstoke?”

A shadow crosses his face; he doesn’t answer.

“That day at the lake, you said a man that harmed thelord’s falcon might pay with his life. That a gyrfalcon is the most valuable of all. And Lightning belongs to the king.”

Will stands. “It’s late,” he says, hard as granite, not wanting to hear what I’m going to say. Already knowing what it is.

And I don’t want to say it, either! I want to keep running! And it will be even more dangerous now, returning after we’ve been out this long, let alone trying to escape again, unseen, before the wedding.

“I’ll cut off Lightning’s jesses, and we’ll be on our way,” says Will.

But that bloody huge new space inside me has opened room for realizations that are bigger, far bigger, than I want to make. I find myself saying, “When the king arrives to collect his gyr, what happens if she’s gone?”

There’s a battle going on in his eyes.

“Someone will pay with his life for a loss like that,” I say, forcing my voice to be firm. “Two men went out with the gyr: Sir Hugh and your father. You tell me which one will pay the price.”

Before, when Eustace slapped Tip so hard it left the mark of his hand for days, I didn’t say anything, do anything. But this time I realize I don’t have that choice. I can’t live with the knowledge that Harold’s life was in myhands and I threw it away. And I could never do that to Will.