For My Lady's Heart (16 page)

She must have outslept all. Or they were still confounded by the night’s
events and sat bemused. She sighed and stretched, enjoying the soft liberty
of the furs.

Melanthe smiled as she thought of her knight, how he would lift that one
dark eyebrow, conveying utter disdain while he spoke in the most courteous
of phrases. He scorned her, this green man—scorned and still desired her.

It was a compound new to Melanthe. She was not accustomed to disdain, not
at least from the men who wanted her. She might already have pursued the
matter in some way, if not for Allegreto. And Gian.

Pulling an ermine about her shoulders against the icy air, she sat up.
There was still no sound from outside, nor any scent of toast browning at
the fire—nor even the scent of a fire at all.

The strangeness struck her. Her heart began to thump. The poisoned
cockles—had any but the hunchback eaten them? Wild thoughts possessed her.
Allegreto, nightwalker, assassin, capable of any butchery, had been driven
half to madness by the fear she had roused in him. And this was wilderness,
the knight had said, a place beyond the king’s control, resort of outlaws.

She looked quickly around—but there—there was Gryngolet, sitting hooded
and calm on her perch. Melanthe slipped her dagger from beneath her pillow
and left the furs, shivering. She broke open a chest, ransacking it for
something to pull over her nakedness. The azure wool of a heavy tunic
prickled her skin through linen. Her hands had begun to shake a little,
suddenly anticipating what nightmare she might find outside.

Covered, she knelt at the opening of the tent and listened. A horse blew
softly, champing its bit, but there was no other sound of man or beast. She
held the dagger at ready and pulled the drape slightly aside.

A few feet away she saw a man’s mail sabaton, old-fashioned, with a
blunted toe. An upright leg—through a slightly wider slit, she could see two
armored legs—he sat motionless on a half-rotted log a few yards from the
tent. She closed her eyes, fortifying her mind for any horror—a dead man
tied into a lifelike position, a decapitated torso. She lifted her head a
little and saw the hem of a green-and-silver coat of arms.

One toe moved, pushing a cockleshell a fraction of an inch, first one
way, then the other.

Relief shuddered through her. She had half expected a bloodbath and
bodies in the sand—she had not even trusted those greaves and knee poleyns
to belong to a still-living man until she had seen the faint, ordinary
movement.

It was her knight, then, fretted with her. Following on the surge of
reprieve, Melanthe felt an odd spurt of good humor. Had she slept so late
that he’d sent all the others ahead and stayed to scold her?

The idea pleased her, but she recognized the absurdity of it instantly.
He would do no such thing—it was not his nature to openly rebuke his liege,
and she had given him provocation enough. She found slippers and pulled them
on, grabbed a mantle, and pushed aside the curtain, emerging from the tent.

His war-horse, its green-dyed coat long since washed to a handsomer gray,
pricked its ears toward her as it stood by the log. The knight sat for a
moment with no expression, his breath frosting, his helm in his lap. He
looked up at her.

It was the only time in her life that any man but her husband or her
father had not risen to greet her. That jolted her, made the empty, trampled
clearing of marsh grass stranger yet, eerie in its silence and the blank way
that he looked at her.

“They have fled,” he said. Then he seemed to come to himself and stood
with a metallic sound. “My lady—I beg your forgiveness.”

“Fled?” she echoed. “All of them?”

She stared around the barren camp. The only horse was his. They had
ransacked the supplies and taken the animals, leaving bags and bundles
broken open.

“Allegreto?” she asked breathlessly.

His brows drew together. “He is gone, madam.”

She gripped the dagger, holding her hands pressed over it. “Gone.”

His scowl deepened. He nodded, watching her.

“He is gone?” She could hardly bring herself to speak. “How long?”

“I know not. Two hours I was absent, before dawn.” He made a slight
gesture toward the ground. “The tracks—they scattered apart from one
another. Your maid, also. This talk of plague—it inflamed a terror.”

She was alone. Free. She had done it. But she had not meant to do it so
completely.

She met his green eyes and saw everything he thought of her. She let him
think it. In his armor he stood perfectly still, black-haired and silent, a
solidly potent presence on this empty moor.

Allegreto was truly gone. He had left her.

“Where went he? What will happen to him?” She stared at the horizon.

“I cannot say which marks are his, Your Highness. We can wait here.
Mayhap he will grow frightened and return.”

Melanthe kept gazing at the horizon, the empty horizon.

“I would seek him for you, my lady,” he said, “but I cannot leave you
alone.”

“Do not leave me!” she said.

He dipped his dark head. “Nay, Your Highness.”

She looked about her again. It was so strange: she had never in her life
been alone—never without attendants, never with one man, not even in her
husband’s bedchamber where his pages always slept on pallets beside the bed.
The sky suddenly seemed bigger, dizzyingly huge, the moorland vast.

“God shield me,” she whispered. How beautiful it was, how quiet, only the
wind and the wild fowl speaking far off at that strand of silver light where
the sky came down to the land.

“By hap they will all come into their senses and return to us,” he said.

She realized that he was trying to reassure her. She turned to him.
“Nay—they will not, between fear of plague and retribution.”

“Then they live outlawed,” he said simply.

His plain view of things seemed oddly befitting in this place, but she
said, “I cannot comprehend Allegreto as an outlaw.”

He did not return her faint smile. In his expression she saw the truth of
what he thought of Allegreto’s prospects in the wilderness.

“What threatens?” she asked quickly.

He hesitated. “Bogs and quicksands,” he said at last. “Brigands. Poison
water.” He shifted, making that faint armor noise. “I heard wolves in the
night.”

She pulled her lip through her teeth. “Melike not to linger here,” she
said, changing to English because it somehow soothed her to hear him speak
in his own tongue, a thin common thread between them.

“I ne like it nought myseluen,” he agreed, shifting language in response
as he always did, “but we shall dwell here for today, so that they moten
come again to us if they so will.”

Melanthe shivered in the wind, pushing her hands beneath her mantle.
“Thou art too merciful,” she said. “Traitors deserven no such indulgence.”

Ruck watched her hug her arms about herself. He narrowed his eyes.
“Indulgence they shall nought have, Your Highness. But it were your lo—” He
almost said “lover,” but it curdled on his tongue. “—your courtier who
unnerved them.” It was she herself had been the one to set the seal on the
party’s panic, with her spiteful games, but he did not say so. “Away from
Allegreto, they mayen think well again.”

She stared toward the horizon. She seemed smaller somehow than she had
seemed before to Ruck, the cloak bundled around her, less elegant and
imperious.

“Allegreto,” she echoed, as if her tongue were not her own. She made a
sound of frenzied laughter, and then stopped it, biting hard on her lower
lip. Her knees seemed to give beneath her. She sat down on the ground and
stared at the horizon, rocking. Then she leapt up again. “I see him!”

Ruck turned sharply. He squinted, scanning the moor— and saw the flicker
of yellow motion. “Nay, Your Highness. It be no more than a plover bird.” He
looked back at her, but she had already sagged to the ground again. One lock
of her dark hair had escaped the golden net that confined it, flying across
her cheek in the cold breeze. He feared she was sickening in her mind for
her lover—she seemed so lost and bewildered.

“We shall not stonden here,” she said. “We shall not wait for them.”

“How wende we without an escort? My lady has nought e’en her maid.”

“I say we shall not wait!” she exclaimed. But when she looked at him, it
was a confused look, with no command in it. “I never thought—I ne meant not
them
all
to go!”

Ruck made no answer. She was no more reasonable now in her reaction than
Allegreto had been in his last night, like a wicked spoiled child who had
taunted her playmates until they fled, and now could not fix between anger
and tears. The fugitives had taken the animals but bothered to load nothing
heavy in their haste. He unpacked a wooden cup and filled it at the ale keg.
As she sat huddled on the bare ground, he squatted beside her.

“Will you break fast, lady?”

She accepted the ale, drank a few sips, and handed it back to him. He
watched her shiver inside the fur mantle. It was cold, but not so cold as to
make her shake in that way.

“It would be no great thing to finden us,” she said in a troubled tone,
glancing at the tent with its bright unnatural hues.

He drained the rest of the ale. “Forsooth, we are easy seen. It is best
in this place to hiden such color, and layen doon and watch.” He stood up
and went to the tent. He was about to duck inside when she suddenly rose,
slipping past him.

As he held back the drape, she emerged with the gyrfalcon on her
gauntleted wrist. Her gestures had slowed; she moved softly with the bird as
she transferred it. “Bring the block. Gryngolet will keepen watch.”

Ruck obeyed, approving the idea. He shoved the spike of the cone-shaped
block firmly into the sand.

Princess Melanthe established the falcon, crooning as she removed the
hood. “ ‘Ware for thy favorite,” she murmured. “ ’Ware Allegreto.”

The gyrfalcon stretched her wings wide, milky white, her bells tinkling.
The bright, dark eyes focused briefly on Ruck and then beyond, fixing on the
distance.

“Is a noble bird,” he said, in spite of himself.

“Grant merci, sir.” She seemed more composed now, not so shaken as she
had been but a moment before. “I had her gift of a Northman.” She glanced at
Ruck. “He were near as tall as thee, but fair.”

Her slanting look at him seemed to hold some message. This tall, fair
Northman had been another of her lovers, he reckoned. He felt irritated and
runisch. To give her a gift of such value had not occurred to him.

“He died in bed by a bodkin knife,” she said, as if it were a piece of
light gossip. “I believe his soul went into Gryngolet.”

Ruck crossed himself in reflex at the blasphemy, but he did not rebuke
it.

“If Allegreto comes, Gryngolet will knowen,” she added enigmatically.

“Well for it.” Not only her witch’s familiar, the falcon, but a jealous
lover, too. He grabbed the handle of the chest inside her tent and hauled it
out. “I can turn hand then, and gear us to wenden when we will.”

Ruck went about his work moodily, with half an eye to the horizon. He
rolled her furs and piled them on the chest outside, then kicked each of the
tent pegs loose in turn. As the bright pavilion fell in on itself, he pulled
off his gloves with his teeth and stuffed them under his arm, grimacing at
the taste of metal and sand. He squatted and began to untie the ropes.

He looked up to see Princess Melanthe huddled at the other side of the
cloth, engaged on the same task.

“Fie, madam,” he said in astonishment, “I shall do the labor.”

She was having little success with the tight knot. He stood up and caught
the rope, pulling the stake from her hands.

“Your Highness, it be nought seemly,” he said, vexed. He caught her elbow
and drew her up. With a little force he guided her away from the tent,
releasing her immediately.

“I ne like not this waiting,” she said, holding her fingers clasped tight
together. “When mayen we go?”

“If they return nought by morn, then we depart.” He spread her furs on
the log, searched inside her chest, found a book, and handed it to her. “One
night be enow to spenden alone in the Wyrale.”

He bent knee briefly before her, then stood up and went back to work,
releasing the pegs and pitching the corners of the tent toward the middle,
folding it together into a tight package. From the corner of his eye as he
secured the ties, he could see her sitting upon the furs. The shivers caught
up with her sometimes, making the open book shake.

“We wait for naught,” she said suddenly. “If so be they have lost their
fear of plague, they fearen their punishment too well to comen again.”

He rose from binding the tent. “They fears, right enow. But in the cold
light of morn a man reflects that he hatz both wife and child, and cares
nought to liven outlawed from God and home.” The corner of his mouth lifted
as he stood straight, setting his hand at his waist. “Wherefore, my lady, he
bethinks him of a story, of how the others fled, but he alone among them
watz a brave man, and ran after, to bringen them back. But he lost his way
in the darkness, and only now comes to us again as fast he may find us.”

The reluctant shadow of a smile crossed her features. “The duke did say
thou art a master of men.”

He gave a slight shrug. “It is what I would do, were I one of them.”

“Nay,” she said. “Green Sire, thou wouldst not—for thou didst not run
away to begin.” She laid the volume aside. “But a gift thou hast, to read
the hearts of lesser men.”

He did not trust her compliments. “They are soldiers,” he said. “More
like to me than to my lady’s grace.”

She turned her eyes to him, her eyes the color of purple dusk, and gazed
at him as if she were only just seeing him for the first time. She had
looked at him so once before, as she had prepared to lead him into
tournament, a glance that wished to see through to his heart. She had asked
him his name then—as if she cared what it might be.