For My Lady's Heart (21 page)

A slow grin lifted his mouth. “Little warrior,” he said, smiling his rare
smile. “Three in one flight!”

Melanthe watched him, feeling things in her heart that frightened her,
emotion that all her instinct and experience warned her against.

She looked from his face to his body, stifling sentiment in cold
observation of muck and clammy wet—and not even that could rescue her from
folly. He was a pleasure for a woman to look upon, as elegant and fine in
his body as a great horse was elegant, without padding or puff, startling in
his grace and muscle. She had been married at twelve to a prince thirty
years older and courted in halls of the highest fashion—she had not until
this moment understood the plain, powerful comeliness of a dripping and
muddy man.

He seemed at ease, as if he thought the linen clothed him as well wet as
dry. He had only to look down at himself to find his mistake—but with a
rueful inner smile, Melanthe thought that even the evidence of his eyes
might not convince him, if he would put his faith in such flimsy things as
honor and courtesy and linen, principles as liable to evaporate under the
force of reality as the cloth was prone to become transparent in water.

Another shudder passed through him. She stood, unpinning her cloak, and
thrust it at him. “There—wrap thyself. And do not dispute and debate me!”
she added. “Thy bones rattle from the chill.”

He rose, sweeping the mantle around his shoulders. “Nay, lady,” he said
meekly.

She hesitated, and then said, “She did not hurt thee?”

He turned a thumb toward the pile of stiffened leather. “Before I won my
spurs, I used that for armor. Good
cuir bouilli
will turn off hard
steel.”

“N’will it turn off a catarrh,” she said. “Come back to dry at the fire,
ere thou begin to cough and croak.”

She could slit the wing-bone of a heron for the marrow, but she did not
know that green wood wouldn’t burn.

She had cut the hearts out of all the fowl, but could not clean them
without direction, ending with duck down clinging to her nose, sneezing and
struggling to bat it away. The necessity of a spit for roasting did not
occur to her until she had already plucked both mallards.

Ruck sat with his mantle and hers both wrapped about him, squinting
against the smoky fire she had built, offering advice when she applied to
him. By the time they had reached their camp, he had not been able to
control his shaking—he had to remove his wet linen. While he was encumbered
by the need to hold both mantles close about him to cover himself, she
became housewifely in her waywardness—if any housewife could be so inept at
some of the tasks as she was.

Reasoning that she would soon tire of such an arduous game, he silenced
his objections. But as the ducks roasted amid billowing smoke, burning on
one side and raw on the other, she seemed in high humor, binding the heron’s
feet to an alder branch, undaunted by the fact that she could not reach high
enough to prevent its severed neck from dragging the ground. She held
another branch curved down, trying to bend the bird’s knees over it.

Ruck watched her struggle for a few moments. “My lady—” he began.

She turned her head. The twig she was holding broke off in her hand and
the branch snapped aloft, the heron’s wings smacking her face as it passed.
It hit the top of its arc, bounced off the branch, and fell into the sand.

Ruck kept his expression sedate, as if he had not even noticed.

She sighed, bending down to pick it up by the neck. “For to be tender, I
thought to hengen the bird a day or two.”

“Is a witty idea,” he acknowledged, “but we wenden us today. I’ll tie it
to the baggage.”

She dropped the bird on the ground, as if someone else would pick it up,
and came to sit down beside him. Ruck shifted his weight, withdrawing as
well as he could without standing up to move. He was wary of her, that she
might make love to him again. He did not wish to be teased and tempted. He
could not endure it. She was a rich and gentle lady; she might be delighted
by the amusements and pleasures that men made with women in the court, but
Ruck had never partaken of those pastimes. He knew his own limits.

As she settled cross-legged beside him like a lad, he realized that she
herself had always been his armor against seduction. His true lady.

“Where go we?” she asked, turning up her eyes to him, pretty flower eyes,
witching eyes.

“A safe place.”

“How can we knowen where is safety? Even mine own castle at Bowland—” She
frowned. “Pestilence may be there, too, or in the country between. How can
we knowen?”

Such feminine uncertainty made him feel protective and suspicious at
once. His own responses to her he did not trust; how so, when he could look
at her and see that she was ordinary and yet think her comelych beyond
telling?

He scowled at the ground before him. “I have heard me, madam, that there
are some can go in the air at night—to far places, where they learn there
what they please and return ere morning.”

Her expression changed, drew stiff and harsh. “Why say thee so to me?”

“Oft have I thought me that you are a witch.” He said it outright. He was
determined to know, yea or nay, even if she should slay him for it. “How
else could you hold me so long—and still yet? If be enchantment, I pray to
God that you release me.”

She pressed her lips together. Then she lifted her arms and cried, “White
Paternoster, Saint Peter’s brother, open Heaven’s gates and strike Hell’s
gates and let this crying child creep to its own mother, White Paternoster,
Amen!” She spread her fingers. She clapped three times, and dropped her
hands. “There, tiresome monkish man—thou art released from such spells as I
have at my command.”

With a shower of sand she stood up and stalked away. Ruck pulled the
cloak up around him, leaning on his knees, watching her. She spun the
spit—the first time she had done it—and looked with dismay on the blackened
skin of the ducks.

“Mary and Joseph! Ruined!” She let go of the stick, and the awkwardly
spitted fowls fell back with their burned sides to the fire. Then she cast
Ruck a venomous look and held out her fingertips toward the fire, wriggling
them and chanting some weird garble of sound.

She lifted the spit from the wobbly supports she’d made, and one carcass
fell off into the flames.

“Well, it is no matter,” she said lightly, fishing the duck from the
coals and rolling it out onto the sand. She pushed it with a stick onto the
cloth that they ate from and picked it up. She set the half-charred fowl
before him, spreading out the cloth with great care and standing back with a
flourish. “I have conjured three fiends and worked a great incantation, and
enchanted it to be cooked to perfection.”

He gazed down at it for a long moment. “Better to have turned the spit,”
he said wryly.

“Thou shouldst have said so. I could have ordered Beelzebub to do it.”

He lifted his eyes. She looked straight at him, with no warding for
speaking the Devil’s name, her mouth set, her eyes bright with challenge.

“Allegreto said my lady is a witch. And Lancaster’s counselors. All at
court said so.”

Her lips tightened dangerously. “And what sayest thou, knight?”

He stared at her, his imperious liege lady, beautiful and plain, with her
jeweled gauntlets and her hair astray and a great black smudge of ash on her
cheek. Her own cloak he wore about his shoulders, and the duck she had
hunted lay before him. Her gyrfalcon held the soul of a dead lover, and her
eyes, her eyes, they saw through him like a lance, and crinkled at the
comers when she laughed.

“Ne do I know why I love you!” he exclaimed, sweeping the mantles around
him as he rose. “Ne do I know why I swore to you; why I ne’er accepted any
man’s challenge that might release me from it! Ne’er did I want to be
released. Ne do I nought still, if it cost my soul. And I cannought say why,
but that you have beguiled me with some hellish power.”

“Flatterer!” she murmured, mocking, but her face was terrible and cold.

He turned away from her. “I know a place safe,” he said.

“Safe from pestilence and all hazard.” He frowned at the river. “But ne
will I taken a witch there.”

“Iwysse, then there is no more to be said.” Her voice was cool and
haughty. “If a woman bewhile a man, a witch mote she be.”

“If ye says me you are nought, my lady—” He paused. Ripples blew across
the water, the cold wind stung his face. “I will believe you.”

He waited, watching the water and the dark line of trees that marked the
far shore of the Wyrale. The wind shifted, sending another sparkle of
ripples at an angle to the first set, scenting the air about him with smoke.

He turned. She stood with her arms hugged about herself, her brows drawn
together in icy disdain, black and arched, delicate as the tips of a nymph’s
infernal wings.

“Haps I am a witch,” she said. “I tell thee true, Green Sire—I have
cheated demons, and still I am alive.”

He could believe she had. He thought, were he some minor devil, that he
would look on her and be afraid. She discharged power; he could dream that
he saw it in a radiance about her, even here, even stripped of jewels and
silver trappings, if he let his imagination run away with his sense.

“Is no sin to escheaten demons,” he said gruffly. “Only to yielden
service to them.”

“My husband taught me many things. Readings from the Greek—astrology and
alchemy and such, matters of natural philosophy, but never did we call on
any power but God’s mercy that I know. Test me on my knowledge, if thou
wilt.”

“Ne haf I no command of such. Battle I know, and a sword. Naught of
natural philosophy.”

She lifted her chin. “I make no protection-spells.”

He did not wish her to be a witch. In his heart he longed to prove her
innocent. But he said stubbornly, “By logic, that is no more than evidence
that ye desires nought to maken them.”

She narrowed her eyes. “Then what proofs wilt thou have, if thou art so
prudent? Wilt thou bind me and throw me in the river, or have me to clasp a
red-hot staff?” She pointed at his sword. “Heat it in the fire, then, and
test me! And then haps I will testen thee the same; Sir Ruck of No Place,
for ne do I know why I took notice of thee and gave thee jewels in Avignon
when thou wert but a shabby stranger to mine eyes! Haps thou worked a charm
on
me
and stole my gems by magic craft!”

“Not I!” he uttered. “I’m no—” He stopped, his hands tightening in sudden
realization.

She remembered. Embarrassed heat suffused him, thinking of the raw youth
he had been, of how he had let Isabelle be taken from him—of the nameless
lady of the falcon and her accusation of adulterous lust against him. “A
strong memory, my lady hatz,” he said grimly.

“I recall every evil deed I’ve done in my life,” she said. “No great
difficulty is it, to rememberen a good one.”

“A good deed, lady? To shame me before the church? To name me adulterer
in my thoughts?”

She paused. And then her lips curved upward gently, as if the
recollection pleased her. “Yea ... I remember that. I saved thee.”

“Saved me!” With a harsh chuckle he pulled the woolens close about him.
“My lady saved me of a wife and a family, so did she, and set me for to
liven alone as I do. He swept a stilted bow. ”May God grant you mercy for
such a favor!“

“Wee loo, what a sad monkish man it is.”

“I am no monk!” he exclaimed in irritation, turning his shoulder to her.

“In faith melikes to hear thee know it.” Her tone had warmed. “If I
caused thee aught such injury as to compel thee to liven alone, Sir Ruck—I
will repair it and looken about me in my household for a suitable spouse to
comfort thee.”

He whirled back to face her. “Mock me nought, my lady, if it please you!”

Her brows lifted at his vehemence. “I mean no mockery. I bethought me
just this morn that I would looken out a goodwife for to cherish thee.”

“You have forgotten,” he said shortly. “I haf me a wife, my lady.”

For a clear instant her startlement was palpable. Then she gave him an
accomplished smile, of the kind that court ladies excelled in. “But how is
this? I had thought thee a single man.”

It seemed impossible that she did not remember, if she recalled the rest.
But her face was puzzled and attentive, a faint shadow of question in the
tilt of her head.

“My wife tooken nun’s vows.” Ruck inhaled cold air. His breath iced
around him as he let it go. “She is—a sister of Saint Cloud.” A little of
the wonder and agony of it always crept into him when he spoke of Isabelle,
thinking of the radiant image that forever knelt and prayed in his mind.

“Is she indeed?” Her voice became vague as she knelt beside the
half-burned carcass of the duck. “And is she well there?”

“Yea,” he said. “Very well.”

“I am pleased that she writes good word of her health,” she said in an
idle way as she pulled the wing of the duck between her thumb and
forefinger, examining the scorched area.

“She ne writes me nought,” he added stiffly, “for her mind is fixed on
God.”

“Iwysse, I am sure thy wife is a most holy personage,” she said,
inspecting the duck with immoderate concentration. “She married thee, did
she not?” she murmured.

His mouth grew hard. “I send money for her support each year. The abbess
would advise me if aught were ill.”

“For certes. There is no doubt of it.” She looked up at him with a
brilliant smile. “Now say me true, Sir Ruck—dost thou suppose this duck can
be saved?”

He stalked away from her, leaning down to sweep up the heron from the
sand as he passed it. “I’m dry now for to dress. I’ll wash this when I’m
geared, and roast it, so that we may eaten ere we starve of hunger.”

In the thin peasant clothes, without furs or camelot, Cara could barely
move her fingers. All night she had lain on the bare ground, the cold
seeping up through her. She had not been able to curl tight enough to warm
herself. It seemed that she ought to have died, but it was worse to be alive
in this horrible country, with this dreadful companion, in these hideous
clothes, and no other choice that she could fathom. If Allegreto felt the
cold as she did, he had some way to conceal it. He never shivered. She
wondered if he was a demon.