Chance (7 page)

“Changeling,” she whispered, and Chance sat stunned at her boldness, that she should have spoken so nearly of the Denizens who were never named. Even Roddarc, startled, gestured her to be silent. But she stammered on, unheeding. “They—folk say babes left in the Wirral will be taken—”

“Lady, please!” Chance exclaimed, nearly knocking her over as he blundered to his feet. She caught at his hand, and he pulled her up.

“The babe is very young,” Roddarc soothed, rising also. “She is not yet aware of us.”

Sighing, yet smiling, Halimeda placed the baby back in her cradle, and without much more speech she and Roddarc went out. Chance did not need to wonder why they had not taken Iantha back to the fortress with them. He deemed he already knew.

Whisperings had grown louder. Rumor was turning into certainty.

Some few weeks later Chance went to Roddarc—for he was no stranger to the fortress any longer, but went there often, with Iantha or without her. He found Roddarc in his chambers and spoke to him in privacy. “Louts wink at each other again. It is said that you will be overthrown before the year is done.”

The lord answered with a smile. “You had not heard ere this? The little one must be keeping you out of the alehouse.”

“You
knew
?”

“There have been mutterings since before Iantha was born. When I was in my dungeon, I bruised many a nose, it seems.”

And a few hearts
, Chance thought. “Why did you not tell me?” he asked coldly.

“Could you keep watch better than you already do?” Then, seeing the stony look on his warden's face, the lord reached out to him. “Old friend, if I had told you, perhaps you would have thought I spoke you fair only for this, that you should aid me. And it would not have been true.” He sat back, his manner quite settled and calm, almost happy. “Truth is, I do not care what happens.”

“You—what?”

“You think I left little Iantha with you out of the hardness of my heart? When Halimeda longs every day to hold her? Chance, I entrusted the babe to your care because she will be safest with you. Pay no heed to the scheming of renegades. Tend the child, and let them do to me what they will.”

“You cannot be serious!”

Roddarc laughed. “Oh, I will put up a fight, never fear! But I want you far from it, Chance.”

Chance murmured in wonder, “You really do not care.”

“Why should I care, with Riol's ghost leering over my shoulder and the smell of blood everywhere? Let some other lout take this cruel seat and rule by the sword. Why should I be lord when my folk scorn and spurn me, rule I foul or rule I fair?”

Chance could only stare at him. Taking the stare for shock or protest, the lord stood and grasped him by the shoulders, very seriously meeting his eyes. “Chance, please hear me, please trust me. I have seen the way to my redemption.”

“It is true, folk scorn Roddarc,” Halimeda said, eyes lowered. “And that is my fault.”

Chance stirred broth and snorted. “As it is the cricket's fault that frost comes?”

“Things just happen, you mean?”

“Yes,” he said, “they do.”

His glance strayed to the baby sitting on her lap. Halimeda came often to see little Iantha, talking to her and trying to teach her pattycake and singing to her in a pure, sweet voice. The little one did not respond, not any more than she responded to Chance. Unsmiling, she looked past her mother with vivid green eyes, gazing off into the distance at the treetops of Wirral, as if she heard somewhere a yet sweeter music.

“But it was when I went about huge with child, and unkempt,” Halimeda insisted, “that folk began to mutter again.”

Chance snorted. “Say it is my fault, then, if old Riol rules anew in his son.”

The lady looked at him in perplexity. “What have you done but show me kindness and care for my babe?”

“I could scarcely have let her starve!” His voice roughened, for it troubled him to remember how the babe had been fed. “And what have you done,” he challenged the lady, “but give love?”

The word resonated in her. She met his eyes; silent echoes flew about the room. Slowly she set Iantha down, turned to look at him across the width of the stone lodge.

“There is love,” she said in a low voice, “and sometimes there is lasting love.”

“Lady, you know you have it.”

She gazed at him and nodded, but pain flickered in her eyes. “I have been thinking,” she said very softly, “that manly prowess is not the most important thing about a man.”

Powers, she could not mean it! He would not let hope rise. “Lady,” he told her, dry-mouthed, “do not let my devotion make a vestal of you. Love where you will.”

She looked at him with an odd, saddened smile. “If only I could,” she said, and she came over to him and laid a hand on his massive chest. “But, Chance, I think it will not be a matter of loving for me, after all. I deem my brother will not long be lord of Wirralmark. I have had a dream of a dragon, and Roddarc lying bloody under its claws.”

And which is the greatest tyrant, the dragon or Riol's son or love itself, I scarcely know.

“A woman taken as booty of war … there will be few enough choices for me, Chance.”

“Then stand farther from me, Lady,” he said huskily, “for this closeness brings but pain to both of us.”

She nodded, kissed her daughter and went away.

Thereafter, when she came to see Iantha, there would be a doomed dignity about her, an acceptance, that made her seem older than her less-than-twenty years. She had grown, Halimeda. There was something in her as sturdy as oak, as tough as a Denizen's skin. Not for her, any longer, a noose at Gallowstree Lea.

Often Chance would leave Iantha with her and spend hours in Wirral, searching for the haunts of the rebels, or so he let her think. He lacked courage to tell her otherwise.… Summer had reached its height. The days were long, and Chance often stayed until after dark in the forest while Halimeda tended the child.

Iantha was growing rapidly, more so than seemed natural. She had long since outgrown the applewood cradle, and slept by Chance's cot in a great wicker pannier. Already she walked, and no longer needed diapering. Though tiny, she possessed nothing of baby plumpness; she was small and graceful, with the proportions of a slender four-year-old. She did not talk or even babble, and she never smiled, not even when her mother braided her red-gold hair and whispered into the flower petal of her ear. Iantha seldom cried, but she played listlessly with the toys that were provided for her, and often for hours on end she simply sat and rocked herself or stared.

Roddarc came to see her in the evenings sometimes.

“She is so very beautiful,” he said to Chance with a touch of awe. “So delicate. Almost as if—what Halimeda said—have you ever seen such folk, Chance, in the forest?”

“Many times,” he answered promptly, facing his lord across a cup of ale. What made him divulge such truth after all the years, he could not have said, except that Roddarc truly no longer cared. And in an odd way Chance felt closer to his foster brother than ever before. Before too long, he would be meeting him as an equal, to do him the final favor.

For the time, he told him how he had first made speaking acquaintance with the Denizens. “But there is no dependable aid to be had from them. They are full of caprice, as happenstance as a puff of wind.”

“A lucky chance, eh? Well, so were you, my friend, that ever you were born.”

He said it so easily that Chance did not need to growl. The two of them sipped their ale, and in her basket the love-child slumbered.

“Have you yet arranged a marriage for Halimeda?” Chance asked after a while, just as easily.

“Powers know I have tried. I have sent missives as far as the Marches. But no noble scion has yet proved willing to take her.”

“The more fools, they,” said Chance with feeling, and Roddarc looked at him intently.

“You told me once, you would take her in a moment.…”

“Rod, all powers know I have loved her these many years.”

There. At long last it was said. Pain flooded into Roddarc's gaze.

“By my mother's bones, how I wish I had never been born,” he whispered. “Better that ill-fated spear had taken me instead of your manhood. It was meant for me.” Roddarc sprang up, hands to his head. “Chance, every step I take, it seems I am a curse on you.”

“Had you not heard?” Chance spoke lightly. “Old Riol cursed us both, on his deathbed.”

The tyrant had died on a distant battlefield, and no one had heard his last words. But Roddarc stared intently at Chance, as if for a moment he believed him. “By blood, I would not put it beyond him,” he muttered, sitting down again, limply, leaning against the table.

“Bah! If it had gone otherwise, Rod, I would have been wed to a wench. Long since.”

“Think you so? Chance, all has come to naught now, but how it would have comforted me if …”

“If?”

“Folly.” Roddarc roused himself with an effort. “I am an ass, as you have often said. Does Halimeda know of this?”

“Yes. She was so in despair, last autumn, that I told her. It cheered her.”

“More than cheered her, I think.” Roddarc looked at Chance steadily. “And a dolt I may be. But I like to think that somehow—had a spear struck differently, Chance, I would have found a way to give you your heart's desire.”

Chance woke with a start in the mid of night to see little Iantha out of her basket and pattering toward the door.

“No!” In a few steps he had overtaken her and gathered her up. The tiny child did not cry, for she rarely cried, but he felt the stiff protest of her body as he carried her back to her bed. He knew she would not go back to sleep at once.

For his own part, he pretended to.

There had been a dream of voices, he remembered, before he awoke. Voices like those once heard in an autumn storm.

This time there was no wailing of wind. Instead, the small urgings, when they came, chanted and whispered amidst the insect chatter of a late summer's night.

“Come away, little one,

Come away, Violet!

Dance in the ring

And all mortals forget.”

Once again, dreamily, intent, the child got out of her bed and started toward the door, and once again Chance sprang up and grasped her.

“No!” he shouted at the night. “You shall not have her!”

All that night until sunrise he sat holding the child, with his arms locked tightly around her. When the day had begun and folk were about, he went to the village and spoke with an old woman. Then, carrying Iantha and a length of vivid red cotton, he went to the fortress keep.

“My lady,” he hailed Halimeda, and she left her morning meal to greet him and the child.

“I need a drop of your blood,” he told her in a low voice.

She looked somber, but asked no questions—the less such uncanny matters were spoken of, the better. She took the dagger he offered and stabbed her fingertip with it. Chance blotted up the blood with the wadded end of the blood-red cotton cloth.

“Some of yours,” Halimeda told him, “on the other end. You are like a father to her.” For she knew the blood was for Iantha.

Chance looked at the lady a moment, then did as she had said. When his blood had moistened the cloth, he folded it into a sash and tied it around Iantha's waist, knotting it firmly in the back.

“There,” he muttered to the child, “you're blood bound to this mortal world.” The child stared up at him, great-eyed and soundless.

“Leave her here with me for today,” Halimeda said, and he did so, but went to get her again before nightfall.

He made Iantha wear the sash at all times, even in her bed. And when, a turning of the moon later, the voices sounded again in the night, he did not get up, but lay watching.

“Come away, little one,

Come away, Violet!”

Iantha also lay still for a while. Then she struggled up, but her baby steps were slow. Staggering, she made toward the door. But before she reached it she slowed to a stop and, standing as if abandoned in the middle of the floor, she began a terrible weeping.

Chance hurried to her and put his arms around her, picked her up and rocked her against his broad chest, whispered to her, calling her by all the names of love. But all his comforting failed to soothe her.

“Let her go, Chance!” commanded a stern voice close at hand. The Denizen came in through the eaves, stepped out on the chimney ledge to confront him. Their young prince, he of the massy cock and the wide, fey smile, but he was not smiling on that night.

“You shall not have her!” Chance shouted wildly at him.

“But she is already ours! One of us! Let her go! You are hurting her.”

It was true; his heart smote him, knowing it was true. “And you,” he railed, “gentle one, have never done hurt.”

“Not to my own kind!”

“Go away!” Chance roared. But the Denizen came closer, his look grave.

“Chance, the child belongs to us. She has suckled on our sap. Many of us gave up their lives for her sake, drained dry. Noble was their willing sacrifice, for we need not die.”

The words only made Chance clutch the child more fiercely. “And why do you want her?” he challenged.

“For the wellbeing of our race! We do not die, but—listen to me! We become rootbound, voiceless, with age. We become immobile, like trees. If we did not quicken our blood from time to time—”

“So you want her for breeding.” Harsh anger in the words. The Denizen creased his brow at the sound of them.

“She will not be unwilling, believe me! Chance, if it will comfort you, I will give you a promise to cherish her as my own. She will be my bride.”

Iantha stretched out her arms toward the woodland prince and gave a gulping wail. Chance swore, suddenly blind with anger.

“You cockproud buck!” He snatched up a butchering knife from the table and hurled it. Startled, the Denizen dodged, and the knife clattered against the stone.