Shroud of Shadow (36 page)

“But you're sure she wasn't a nun.”

Manarel smiled tiredly. “She propositioned me at the town gate. Said she needed money.”

Jacob stifled a guffaw. “Did you take her up on the offer?”

Manarel selected a brick, dropped it on the ground with a thump. “No, master. She was frightened. Terrified. I didn't do anything. I just gave her my purse and told her to go.”

Jacob nodded, admiring. Quite a man, Manarel. But a thought dawned on him. “Wait a moment. That nun. Round face? Little hands? Smelled like musk? Kind of a dumpling?”

“Yes, Mister Jacob. That describes her.”

Jacob had never seen the woman who had come to his room: she had entered in darkness, had departed likewise. But he had known her touch, her hands, her lips. “The whore.”

“Master?”

“Never mind, Manarel. I'm just clearing up a small mystery.” But despite his words, the mystery had, if anything, grown more opaque. What did Natil have to do with the whore in his room? “What about Furze, though?”

Manarel bent his head. “It was such a strange thing, Mister Jacob, that I've thought a good deal about it. This is the way I reasoned it out. Most likely, only a nun would have a habit, especially a worn-out one. The nun was not a nun, though, and so the habit couldn't have been hers, but it fitted her tolerably, and therefore it couldn't have belonged to someone as tall and thin as Natil. That leaves only Omelda.”

“But Furze, Manarel . . .”

The steward nodded. “It was a Benedictine habit. There's a Benedictine convent down by Furze, the only one in Adria. Natil never seems to do anything unless it helps someone else, and those bloody footprints in her room tell me that Omelda needed help, help she couldn't get from us. I think that Natil is helping Omelda return to her cloister. They started off heading south. Toward the convent. I think they've continued to head south. If so, they'll have to pass through Furze.”

Jacob lifted his head, peered again into the fire. Yes, Natil helped everyone. Runaway nuns. Whores. Even stupid old men who had gotten away with more imbecility in their lives than they should ever have been allowed. But he had trusted Natil, and she, he was sure, had trusted him. She had even made allusions to a touch of heresy—Elves, indeed!—in her family, something that she would certainly have left unsaid had she not been confident that he would be discreet. Why then would she leave his service in the middle of the night without even a farewell?

Perhaps those bloody footprints had something to do with it. Perhaps the reason lay with Omelda. At present, though, it made no sense. But, now that he considered Natil's less than orthodox affiliations, Jacob suddenly realized how truly brave she had been to confront the Inquisition of Furze over Harold's welfare . . .

. . . and how utterly insane it was for her to go anywhere near that city.

His heart lurched. He willed it back to its task. Not yet. No, not yet. But as Manarel turned to him, startled and worried by his master's sudden pallor, Jacob gripped his arm. “We've got to hurry, Manarel. We'll break camp at first light. I won't even wait for the sun to rise. First light, mind you. And then to Furze, quick as we can.”

I-25 ran straight up through Colorado amid undulating foothills that, to the east, gave way out to the Great Plains, and, to the west, mounted into increasing heights and eventually touched the sky with the cold, white fingers of the Rocky Mountains. Suspended thus between landscapes—suspended between lives—Hadden and Wheat drove north. The sounds of engine and wind escorted them toward Denver . . . and towards the turnoff where the strange journey had begun.

The world was all before them, and despite the sudden shaking of their sympathies in a little Utah town, despite the constant question that now ate at both of them—
What gets us through?
—Hadden knew (and he knew that Wheat knew also) that the promise unveiled to him in a hidden valley of the Rocky Mountains and to her in the endless fields of Montana wheat would not be broken, that regardless of trial or sadness,
something
would get them through. Nice days, maybe. Or starlight. Or an immanent sense of home that enfolded them wherever they went.

Or . . . maybe something else.

Hadden found that he was smiling. Yes, something would get them through. The universe had taken them this far. It would, he knew, take them farther. Nor would it ever abandon them.

When he looked at Wheat, he found that she was smiling, also.

“You, too?” he said.

She laughed. “Me, too. Do you want to try telepathy?”

He laughed. “I'd scare myself to death.”

They both laughed.

He eased the seat back, wriggled his toes to loosen the stiffness, let the road rise to meet him. Pueblo came up like a sand castle. Colorado Springs was sprawling. For the last few weeks, still afraid that concrete and glass and asphalt might banish the spell that had ensnared them, they had intentionally avoided cities. But if the spell held now, if the starlight continued to gleam within them, if a faint radiance continued to suffuse their skin with something that went a little beyond mere health and youth, the urbanism they saw at least turned their thoughts to what lay ahead.

“Do you think that you'll go back to being a guard, Hadden?”

He was driving like a man with something on his mind, and he nearly laughed, because Wheat had, again, laid her finger upon his very thought. “I'm not sure,” he said. “It paid the bills.”

Odd things, bills and jobs. He found himself regarding them as though they were spoiled children.
All right. If it will make you happy, I'll play your game. All right now, stop squalling. Here you go.

“. . . but that was about all. It wasn't going anywhere. I mean, minimum wage just doesn't ever go anywhere.” But the thought occurred to him that it had been George Morrison who had not been going anywhere. In contrast, Hadden felt himself to be going everywhere. Suddenly, nothing seemed impossible: there were only differing degrees of probability.

“Promotions?” said Wheat.

He smiled. “Yeah. To a quarter more than minimum wage.”

“Ummm. Sounds almost as good as waiting tables.”

“I was going to ask you about that.”

“I know.”

They laughed again.

“I'm thinking of a fruit,” said Hadden suddenly. “What is it?”

“Apple.”

He stared at her for a moment, shifted his eyes back to the road with an uncomfortable squirm. “You're right.”

Wheat shrugged. “It wasn't hard. What's the first fruit that anybody thinks of in this place?”

In this place. They were both using such phrases now. This place. As opposed to what?

But: “All right.” Despite the flutter in his belly, Hadden went ahead with the experiment. “Try this one.”

Wheat's answer came after only a few seconds. “Hazelnuts aren't a fruit.”

He felt his eyebrows go up. “They most certainly are! They grow on trees: they're a fruit.”

“Are not!” She hesitated, drumming her fingers on the window frame. “Well, maybe they are.”

They both fell silent. He glanced at her. She was already looking at him, and he knew her thoughts just as, he was certain now, she knew his.
Let's . . . just not talk about this for now, huh?

“Anyway,” he said, “I'll probably wind up back in security, but I'm going to be looking for something else. Maybe I'll go to school. My father was a surveyor. I used to think I'd be a surveyor, and work outdoors.” He mused. “That would be nice. Maybe I'll look into it.”

Wheat was nodding. Colorado Springs dribbled into suburbs and then vanished. “And I'll be waiting tables for a while . . . but I think . . .” The scrub oak and wild clover rushed by, blurring with the speed of a homecoming that was always deepening, growing, as they plunged farther into what they were becoming. “I think I'll do the something else, too.. And you know, Hadden . . . for the first time . . . I really think that I can.”

They were silent the rest of the way to Denver. Hadden guided the van through the afternoon traffic, took the tightly curving transition ramp onto Highway 6, and headed for the mountains. After forty minutes, he saw the small dirt road, but he had felt it long before that.

Burdened down now by Wheat's possessions, the van whined up the slope in low gear. Hadden kept the wheel steady, gripped it tightly through the patches of washboarding. Wheat was staring out the window, watching the passing trees, seemingly transfixed by the sky.

“You feel it, too,” he said.

“Yes.”

And that was it. They did not speak again. Not even when the road sloped down suddenly and brought the van to the same pancake of gravel and rock where George Morrison had, weeks before, shut off his engine and set the parking brake did they utter a sound.

Now, the man who was called Hadden parked, switched off. He looked at Wheat, and she, as he expected, understood.

They got out of the van together and walked up the slope, and there the birds were singing so loudly, the sky was so unspeakably blue, and the trees and mountains were so absolutely perfect int heir beauty and their simple
being
that speech would have been either superfluous or outright sacrilege. And so they remained, standing together, holding hands, silent as the afternoon faded into evening, the slow changes of the hours and the seasons mirroring and impelling the fast—much faster—changes in their bodies and their souls.

***

Elves.

Natil was dreaming of them again, dreaming of the reawakening. Evening turned to night in Colorado, the stars blossomed, the moon flowered, and Hadden and Wheat, changing, stood together, hand in hand, rooted by their vision of a world made forever different by their presence. It could happen. It
would
happen.

And then the vision shifted, and again she saw the tree: forked, rain swept, streaming with preternatural light, standing like an icon of absolute mystery.

Is it real?

The tree was a dream, and dreams were not real. But Hadden and Wheat were a dream, too, and Natil was unwilling to allow the slightest shred of doubt to cloud her certainty of their future existence. And therefore . . .

It must be real.

And the Lady, she felt, was close, very close. To Hadden and Wheat. To Natil herself. And to that tree.

The tree must be real.

Still it stood proudly in the rain, its twin trunks leaning outward from a central bole, the cleft streaming with light as though a sun had kindled just on the other side of . . .

. . . of whatever.

The sky was gray when Natil awoke: the day would be damp and hot. Not good, not good at all, for Omelda was still fevered, and though Natil shook her gently awake, bathed her outward wounds, and fed her morsels of bread and dried meat, it was obvious that she was growing worse. She was weak, disoriented, and she now lapsed continually in and out of awareness. She moaned and mumbled unintelligible syllables, her voice rising and falling as though in a sinister parody of melody, and Natil—despite herbs and attentions—could do nothing for her.

Listening to her curiously iterative babblings, then, the harper broke what meager camp she had made and, with difficulty, hoisted Omelda up from the ground and half carried, half dragged her along the overgrown path that led to the forest edge. Perhaps the young woman might find healing at Shrinerock Abbey, perhaps she might only find death. Regardless, Natil had promised to take her back to the only home she had ever known on earth, and that was one promise she refused to break as long as she had a will to call her own.

She was an Elf. Elves did not break promises.

When the trees thinned, Natil could see Furze. The Malvern River flowed coldly a short distance away, and though a long immersion in the river helped Omelda a little, her fever, aided and augmented by the stifling heat of the day, returned quickly, too quickly.

Beyond the water, the former pastureland was rank and unruly with weeds and neglect. It made travel difficult, and Omelda's condition deteriorated steadily. Natil knew what was happening, was powerless to prevent it: Omelda was dying from the inside out.

“Just two leagues, beloved,” the harper whispered, though she did not know whether Omelda heard. “Just two. We will come to Furze, then, and maybe Paul Drego or James or one of the others will remember me and help.”

Gripped in delirium, Omelda moaned and twitched, stared glassily at the distant town. “Unnh . . . unnh . . .”

“Just a little farther. Then you can rest, and after that I will take you home.”

“Unnh . . . unnh . . .”

They reached the city in the late afternoon. The gate guards watched suspiciously as Natil paid the toll. “Look here, now,” said one, “she dan't have the plague, does she?”

“She does not, sir,” said the harper. “She is ill with a fever. I must find help for her.”

“Wha' do you intend to do in Furze?”

“I intend to find help for my friend, sir. Can you direct me to the house of Paul Drego? I do not know the way from here.”

The guard suddenly looked interested. “Paul Drego? Of the wool cooperative? Wi' do you want to see him?”

“He is . . .” Natil wondered at the brightness of his eyes, the eagerness of his voice. “. . . a friend.”

“Oh, surely.” The guard cast a look at his companions. “A friend.”

“Just so, sir. Can you tell me where he lives?”

Omelda stirred, flailed, mumbled frantically in a singsong voice that bore a faint resemblance to plainchant. But it was random, broken, fragmented, the Latin syllables slurring into one another and forming a melange of grunts and nonsense.

The guards backed away. “She's possessed.”

“She is ill,” said Natil firmly. “Will you deny her a chance to be healed?”

The blunt question slapped him into sense. “Nay . . . nay, nat at all.” He pointed through the gate, gave her the directions quickly, shooed them both along. “On with you. On with you.”

Omelda was still flailing as Natil took her into the narrow and squalid streets. The young woman's eyes rolled, her mumbled chant rose and fell. Natil heard the church bells tolling, though, and at last understood it. It was time for vespers, and Omelda, pursued by her inner voices, was being spiritually compelled, sick though she was, delirious though she was, to stand alongside her fellow monastics.