Faerie (40 page)

“I see you understand. And nay, I do not expect you to trust me not to send her into harm. You will not say what happened in the forest at Brodin. You did not argue that the lady’s accusation was false. Yet you did not help her escape, nor did you do anything to prevent the marriage. You did nothing. Yet I believe quite firmly if you thought the Peregrine were a threat to her, you would have done all you could to keep him from her. You know better, don’t you?”

This time, the boy’s face became all but contorted with inner pain. Rufus thought it more than interesting that even at this young age, the boy thought, like all men, that he did not reveal his thoughts when they were all but written on his face.

“You know better. You know why she fears him, but you also know he will not harm her. But your loyalty to her tells me I must trust your judgment. So I ask you again, are you with me? Nay, I rescind that. Sigge, son of Harald, I command you. Help me find the old woman.”

Rufus strode as if demon-driven to the gate, and with impatient gestures shoved away any who would follow him. Sigge hesitated. Rufus harrumphed—but nay, the boy was unused to royal command and didn’t know what was expected of him.

“Come on, boy! Now!” He did not wait, knowing the lad was at least smart enough to comprehend that.

Rufus’s army was encamped all over the lower bailey, and as they traipsed down the winding path to the village, Rufus became ever more impatient with those who sought to accompany them. They ought to know when the king didn’t want an escort, but it was only with great reluctance he acknowledged to himself a king without escort was a frightening thing. That was their misfortune. He could swing his sword as well as any man who rode with him.

In the village, all the peasants fell to their knees. “Up! Up!” he demanded. “Go on about your business!” But he knew they would only pretend to comply. There were things about being king that were annoying, and this was one of them.

“All right, boy, where shall we start?”

“Don’t ask them, Sire. Let me.”

Rufus nodded grimly. In no time at all, Sigge had singled out an elderly man standing close enough to an elderly woman to demonstrate she was his wife.

Sigge spoke in the English tongue, as if he were interpreter for a king who knew none of it. The truth was, though, that Rufus knew it well but spoke it only rarely, out of deference to his own position as Norman overlord of all England. He waited through the introduction, which was about as correct as he could expect from a young boy, and waited through the man’s very proper fawning. God help him, but how he hated all these little delays.

“Ask him,” Rufus said, prodding at the boy’s back.

Sigge phrased the request in careful English. Rufus watched as the fellow shook his head.

“No one knows, Sire,” old Cyne replied. “She comes, she goes. We never know when or where. ’Tis by her will, not ours.”

“Do you know if she does the same in other places?” He shook his head with a frown. That wasn’t what he wanted to know, so he might as well get to it. “Is she the Cailleach?”

The entire village seemed suddenly frozen by a gale of silence. Rufus looked around. Jaws dropped open, faces pale as ashes from yesterday’s fire. Amazing how well these people understood while all the time pretending they didn’t know the Norman tongue.

“It will be our secret,” the king said. “I must talk to her. Only she can help Lady Leonie and her husband.”

And there she was. Aye, the Cailleach, who figured so completely in the folklore of the North. This time he looked past her aged skin and thinning, brittle hair, and saw the long, slender bones so much like the Lady Leonie’s. The likeness was in her very character, even the shape of her ears. How such a young, beautiful woman had aged so far beyond her years, he could not fathom. She would have been little more than a score of years when she had first appeared to his father, yet even then she had been a hag, looking as old and weathered as God’s earth.

“You seek me, Red King?”

“I do, and desperately so, old woman.” With a fiercely waved hand, he shooed away all watchers but grabbed the boy by the neckline of his tunic when he tried to exit too.

Looking around, Rufus made sure they were alone. “Now, old woman, I tell you with God and this boy as my witness, I know your secret. And as you set up this mess, you must now help us resolve it.”

“You have lost them already, Red King?”

“No more of your taunting jokes, old woman. Tell me how to save them.”

“I have told you before, I do not know the future. I only know what must be, will be.”

“And you have ordered me about before. Why not now?”

“It is not for you to do. You are merely a king. You are not the Almighty God.”

Rufus stepped back a pace, as if a blow had stung him. How dare—

“So you really are the Cailleach, then.”

“’Tis naught to you, Norman king. Go back to your petty wars. They will live or die. Neither you nor I can change it.”

“Your own child—”

“I am Cailleach now. I am mother to all my people, but can touch none. I am who I am, and you are who and what you are. But I am in debt to you and your father forever, as you are in debt to me. Do not meddle in this unless you are called to it, or you could cause irreparable harm.”

As Rufus opened his mouth to stammer out some rebuff, knowing he had none that was logical, he heard a howling of air as if they were suddenly in the midst of a great storm. In truth, aye, the wind had gone from naught but a pleasant breeze to a tree-bending violence. He turned in a full circle and realized it whirled about them, all the way around, picking up limbs and dust and swirling so fiercely it became like a dense, dark cloud.

“Run, boy!” he shouted, and the boy began to run, but the wind had become like a wall. Rufus dragged the boy back by his tunic.

“Don’t worry, Sire,” shouted Sigge against the roar. “I’ll save you!”

The last thing Rufus needed, a reckless lad laying down his life in foolishness. He dragged the boy closer, clutching his arms tightly enough to bruise, as the cloud spun about them, tightening its circle around them.

“’Tis magic,” he muttered, and drew his sword.

The old woman’s shape twisted, undulated, the dun-green color of her mantle brightening and mixing with unexpected
colors, and she re-formed. But now—she was young again. Her pale hair hung in dense, tightly waving hanks over her shoulders. Instead of her crooked staff, she held a sword, poised for battle—against the wind.

’Twas the legendary Herzeloyde.

Tighter and tighter spun the whirling cloud of dust, whipping their garments and their hair like wild, flapping pennants. So close! It tugged on the boy. Rufus pulled him close. “Hold on to me!”

“I’ll save you, Sire!”

“Sheath the damned knife, boy, before you cut me! Hold tight!”

The twisting demon wind clutched at the boy, pulling him in one direction and Rufus in another. It whisked Herzeloyde into its motion. His great weight surely could hold them to the ground.

Then it picked up speed and caught them up, ripping at their garments. His sword was yanked from his hand and his sword belt broke and spun away. The boy clung tightly. Herzeloyde spun separately, too far from his grasp.

“Save the boy!” she shouted.

That was what he was trying to do.

But how did even a king fight a demon wind?

“Don’t let go, boy! Don’t let go.”

From somewhere in the distance the sound of a baying hound shocked the morning air, penetrating Philippe’s lazy dream. He blinked as he stirred, moving his arm from Leonie’s waist where she lay beside him. She stirred and sat up, as did he. The sound of the baying hound grew louder.

“Ilse,” he said, smiling at a memory of the shaggy hound’s huge tongue lapping across his face, and wondered if he would be treated to the tongue swipe again if he lay there any longer.

“Where are we?” Leonie asked, looking around them with a puzzled frown.

Gone. The entire villa, from pillar to bath. The cushioned bed, its sheets as soft as baby’s skin, the brightly painted walls, even the mosaic floors, were gone, vanished as if they had never been. A broad, rocky valley spread out into the distance, cupped on three sides by forlorn, tall, barren hills, instead of the verdant meadow and deep-green tree-laden slopes.

Leonie got to her feet and shook out the wrinkles of her kirtle. She bent over to look down at her toes. “My boots are new. The same, but like they were when they were first made. They don’t look like they’ve been through a river and a rocky cave. And the tear in my kirtle is gone.”

“You lost your cloak, but you have it now.”

“And it looks as bright as it did the day I dyed the wool. That was two years ago.”

Philippe examined his sword and sword belt and the buckle that had broken when they jumped into the river. The steel and silver chasing on the blade gleamed and the leather scabbard looked freshly tooled and oiled—surely it had never been dunked.

“There she is!” Leonie shouted. “Ilse!”

The dog loped toward them, her long ears flying.

In the distance, the silhouette of a rider appeared on a horse. It would be de Mowbray, and far behind him like small moving dots near the horizon, his knights. Few horses could run as swiftly as de Mowbray’s giant, wild-tempered black.

Philippe broke into a run, Leonie keeping pace. They met the shaggy hound, which jumped first at Leonie then at Philippe, licking first one then the other in the face, then back again as if she couldn’t decide who needed it more. Philippe laughed at
Ilse’s dancing and prancing, and at Leonie’s excited greeting as she futilely dodged the slurping tongue. From the beginning the dog had preferred Leonie, and he laughed, seeing Leonie receiving about three times as many swipes with the wet tongue as he did. He didn’t really mind.

De Mowbray’s black warhorse raced like the devil drove it, its flying mane flailing the air in rhythm with its rider’s thick black curls as they rode up. De Mowbray reined in to an abrupt halt and threw himself out of the saddle.

“By God and the saints!” The man strode up, sweeping a quick bow to Leonie. Almost at the same time he clapped Philippe on the shoulder hard, then grabbed him by both arms. “Where have you been?”

“We were hoping you’d tell us,” Philippe replied, grinning, and slapping de Mowbray’s back in kind, “since we have no idea.” Mild surprise struck him as he realized he had never thought the day would come that he would be so delighted to see this man.

“You’re but a few miles north of Bamburgh Castle, lad. I would never have looked for you here, but Ilse would hear of naught else this morning.”

“How would she know?” Philippe asked, still chuckling at the bouncing dog with her happily lolling tongue. “If her nose is that good, I’ll be begging a pup out of her.”

“She’s tasked to look after Lady Leonie, I think. She is Herzeloyde’s gift.”

Philippe exchanged wary glances with Leonie.

“When?” Leonie folded her arms and glared at the earl.

“Now, lass, let’s not go into that again. I’ve told you what I can.” De Mowbray turned his horse loose to drink at the brook, watching it with one eye lest it overdrink, or haps, Philippe suspected, to avoid Leonie’s intense gaze. “I found your horses north of Bosewood,” he said, “and I found signs of a skirmish. But ’twas strange after that. The dog can follow any trail, but it was as if you
disappeared from the earth, and she would go no farther, until today. I went back to Bamburgh, and it’s there I left the horses. We’d all but given you up for dead.”

“So soon?” Leonie frowned back at the man.

De Mowbray’s bushy black brow furrowed in the middle. “You’ve been missing eight days. Rufus is beside himself. His ruddy face has turned as pale as his father’s ghost.”

Philippe shook his head, sidling a glance at Leonie. “It’s not possible. It was only two days ago I left.”

De Mowbray eyed them both as if they had lost their minds. “And where have you been that the sun does not set?”

Philippe frowned, puzzled. “Well, in a cave,” he said.

“And in the Summer Land,” Leonie added.

“Summer Land? You cannot go there. ’Tis forbidden to humans.”

“And I’m Faerie, and you know it.”

De Mowbray shifted his startled gaze back and forth between them, not once, but several times. “He knows, then?”

“He knows. Stop avoiding me, Lord Northumbria. I want the truth.”

“Lass—” The black eyes that were so fierce in battle, so wicked in scheming, were soft and pleading in the face of Leonie’s determination. Philippe felt like laughing, but that would not help her cause.

“Tell her.” Philippe folded his arms in unity with Leonie. “It’s long past time for secrets. She deserves to know.”

Ilse sat at the earl’s side, panting happily, watching her master’s every move. De Mowbray bent and fondled the dog’s ears, then turned, pacing, and patted his black steed’s mane. He ran his hand over the dark red leather saddle and played with the bridle and reins as if he contemplated jumping into the saddle and fleeing. He ran his hand through his bushy black hair. “’Tis not—”

He huffed, turned away, turned back, then started again. “’Tis not because you’re not wanted, lass. But a human can’t go there. Things happen, and they’re not good things.”