Maze of Moonlight (11 page)

“The patterns tell me,” she said, nodding. “The patterns a'ways tell me. You can't escape the patterns.”

The courtiers and the servants who were in the hall, perfumed and liveried and accustomed to standing arrogantly before even the mightiest baron of Adria (with the exception, to be sure, of Yvonnet himself), had all unconsciously taken a few steps away from Vanessa. Owl-eyed, isolated in her magic circle of instinctive aversion, the peasant girl blinked and nodded.

“Ah . . .” Yvonnet groped for words. “Ah . . . excellent. Good . . . good taste, Martin.” With difficulty, he dragged himself away from Vanessa's lovely, compelling, terrifying eyes. “I'm . . .” Was she looking at him? He was afraid to find out. He turned his gaze on Martin . . . and kept it there. “I'm very glad you came to visit me. It's been years now, hasn't it?”

Martin was between Vanessa and the baron. “I'm not sure I recall, Yvonnet.”

“Ah! It's Yvonnet again! So nice to be . . .” The baron stole a glance at Vanessa. She was indeed watching him, and her eyes told him that all his obscure and mazed plans were as glass to her. She saw. She knew. “. . . ah . . . to be known as a friend.”

Vanessa was nodding again. “Just ask him, m'lord baron. He'll go wi'out trouble.”

Martin whirled on her. “Vanessa!”

She blinked. “In't tha' wha' you want, Martin?”

Yvonnet sat down in his big chair. Had he been a physically smaller man, he would have been trembling. As it was, he felt weak, dizzy. “I was looking forward to . . . seeing you again, Martin.”

“No, that's not what I want!” Martin was close to tears with fear.

Vanessa was still nodding. “And you still dan know wha' you want, do you?”

She was not mad: that was the problem. Had she been mad, she might well have been the object of laughter and ridicule. But it was painfully apparent that she was lucid, cogent . . . and just as apparent that she saw more than any human being had a right to see.

Yvonnet looked up at the ceiling. “Merciful God,” he murmured. “How is it that something like
that
can be allowed to run about loose?”

“It's na my time yet, m'lord baron,” said Vanessa. “They'll cam for me when it's time, na before.”

Yvonnet was chilled. She could, he knew, have spoken as openly and as easily about what he wanted from Martin, about what he took from Lengram. “Dam you, woman, be quiet!”

Vanessa nodded knowingly, blinked.

“I . . .” Martin groped for words. “I bring greetings from Baron Paul delMari. He sends his best wishes . . . and hopes for your continued . . . health. . . .”

And Vanessa knew what Martin would do for Yvonnet's continued health. She knew everything. And Martin had brought her straight into the Château. And, at any moment . . .

Yvonnet lifted his head and glared at the assembly in the hall. They probably knew, too, but wealth and power had silenced them. Even the priests, even the bishops. He was baron of Hypprux and could silence them all. But this lovely demon in woman's form saw . . . and spoke. And, yes, she was probably right: as was the case with madmen and prophets and sibyls throughout the ages, if death lay ahead of her, it would, unfortunately, not come soon.

“Get out, all of you,” he shouted. “Get the hell out. You damned dandies and villeins! The sight of you makes me sick! Sergeant, take care of Martin's men. Margot, give this girl a room . . . by herself. Make sure she gets supper.”

Vanessa was staring at a corner of the room as though there were someone standing there. But the corner was empty.

“
Get out!
”

Martin mustered his courtesy. “Don't be afraid, Vanessa. You'll be safe.”

“Safe?” said the girl. “Nay, I'm na worried abo' being safe. The patterns say it's safe, and you can't change the patterns. No one can.” With obvious repugnance, Margot took the girl's arm, and Vanessa turned those huge brown eyes on her. She smiled with a smile that seemed to go back too far, and Margot all but screamed.

The courtiers were leaving, likewise the servants. Yvonnet grabbed Martin's hand. “You're coming with me, little girl. And you'll do what I want.”

Martin wilted, but Yvonnet could not help but wonder whether he wilted from apprehension or from knowledge: Vanessa might well have already told him everything that was going to happen in the baronial bed that afternoon. Margot was leading Vanessa out of the room.

Those eyes . . .

***

Christopher continued to grow stronger, and as May lengthened, he began weapons practice in the courtyard. He trained doggedly, swinging a sword against bales of hay and two-inch saplings until the muscles of his arms and shoulders burned, tilting at the quintain for hours in heavy armor augmented with lead weights, clashing with Ranulf until they were both dizzy.

It was something to do. Once he had realized that, because of his ignorance regarding even the most basic agricultural theory and practice, he was actually hindering his people more than he was helping them—and worrying them considerably: what kind of baron labored in the fields like a serf?—he had courteously withdrawn from direct participation in the tillage and husbandry. But without the distraction of physical labor, he had been left with free time, time which had allowed his memories of his grandfather and Nicopolis ample opportunity to rise up and obsess him; and the severity of his depression had frightened him.

He had no taste for needless hunting or hawking, and only extended and brutal combat practice, therefore, offered Christopher a daily occupation. It was a chance to forget himself in a bath of steel and sweat, a chance to lash out vicariously at those things he had come to hate: hypocrisy, folly, perhaps even himself.

But he still kept up his nighttime walks, still made frequent rounds of the fields, looked in on the mill, examined personally the oven, the stables, the cowshed, the barracks. He was still hungry, still looking for a taste of real and immediate life. He was still a ghost. And he was still prowling, snuffling after the scent of blood.

And perhaps it was that odor that made him pause outside the door to the great hall as he came slogging in from another round of practice in the heat-drenched courtyard. Otto, the owner of the Green Man Inn, was talking to Jerome. And he was upset.

“It's the legate from Avignon, m'lord bailiff,” Otto was saying. “It's not that he don't pay his reckoning—many folk don't pay till they leave. He's got expensive likes, to be sure, and it's a strain on me to have to pay for things long before I get paid for them. And like I said, he's got expensive tastes.”

Jerome, arms folded in his sleeves despite the heat, listened gravely. “If it's not the bills, Otto, then what is it?”

“Well . . . it's hard to say, m'lord bailiff. I could say that it's the way of him. But that wouldn't be saying it right. And I could say it's his men, but that wouldn't be saying it right, either.”

“My good man—” said Jerome.

“And then I could say—”

Christopher stumped into the room and flung himself onto a chair. The flies buzzing in the hot room caught the scent of his sweat-soaked mail and made immediately for him, but he was too tired to do anything about it. “What is it, Otto? Tell me.”

“He's breaking up all my furniture, m'lord,” said Otto after bowing deeply and dropping to one knee before the baron. Christopher motioned for him to get up, and he did, but he looked half ready to fall to the floor in submission as he spoke. “And I particularly don't like the way he treats my folk. He knocks the stable boys about something fierce, and they've done nothing with his horses that's any different than what they do with anyone else's. And then the girls . . .”

Christopher pulled off a glove of steel links and dropped it on the table with a loud chink. “The . . . girls . . .”

“Aye, m'lord . . . they're working girls, you know.” Another look at Jerome. “But I wouldn't have you be thinking that I get a penny of what they get from the men they entertain. I don't run that kind of establishment, and I make sure I don't know at all what they do. It's their business, not mine, and I make sure that I don't profit at all by such unholy deeds.”

Jerome cleared his throat. “Perish the thought, my son,” he said, though everybody in Aurverelle knew that Otto took a little more than a tithe from the young women who plied their trade in the common room of his inn.

Christopher put an elbow on the arm of the chair and propped his chin in his hand. Etienne had not given up. Christopher could not really blame him: Avignon was far away, embassies were expensive, and even a sycophant of the most limited persistence would make at least a token effort toward gaining an audience after a journey that had doubtless lasted well over a month. “What about the girls . . . that you don't know anything about.”

“He treats them bad, m'lord,” said Otto. “Knocks them about worse than the lads. Little Suzanne went off with a broken crown just last night, and the day before, Dolores—you know, the one with the big, dark eyes . . .”

Jerome coughed. Christopher smiled. Spies of the intellect, perhaps, but not of the body.

“. . . wound up with both of them blacked, and she thinks her nose is broke, too.”

Jerome crossed himself. “I wish that Etienne were not a fellow churchman,” he said, “so that I could justify wishing him as much ill as I do.”

Otto shrugged apologetically. “Beggin' your pardon, m'lord bailiff. I haven't told you about the rest.”

“I don't think I want to hear it,” said Jerome.

“Nor do we have to,” said Christopher. He was angry. This was Aurverelle. This was
his
town. If Etienne had for some reason made a practice of going swimming in Malvern River with a feather stuck up his ass, that would have been his own business, but when he insisted upon involving the people of Aurverelle in his idiocy and excesses, he would have to deal with Christopher delAurvre.

For a moment, the baron recalled his grandfather. And had Roger not done exactly what Etienne was doing? What kind of a man was that? But what kind of a man spent the last forty years of his life planting an avenue of peach trees?

Christopher shook his head, finding that, because of his inability to decide what he disliked most about his grandfather—his excess or his reformation—he hated Etienne all the more.

“Might he be leaving soon, Otto?” he said.

“Nay, m'lord. He looks to have made himself at home. Looks to be staying for a long time.”

Jerome nodded. “He's determined to see you, Baron Christopher.”

Christopher laid a hand on the grip of his sword. The family sword, the one with the jewels in the hilt and the relics in the pommel, was lost now somewhere between Nicopolis and Aurverelle, vanished as completely as his faith and his belief. This was a plain sword, without any special meaning; and though Christopher no longer believed that heaven heard anything at all, relics or not, the habit of taking hold of the weapon when registering an oath persisted. “Oh, he'll see me, Jerome. He won't like it, but he'll see me.”

The company that arrived from the north was one of the strangest that Otto had ever seen. On the surface, to be sure, there was nothing particularly remarkable about a young man, a young woman, and a few guards. But while the young man was as richly dressed as a lord's son, he bore himself with the humility of one who was dressed in borrowed finery, and he sported two black eyes and numerous bruises. The guards were much like guards everywhere, but the girl was markedly a peasant. She spoke with a thick dairyland accent and gave Otto a chill every time she opened her mouth.

“Aye,” she said as she and the lordling followed Otto up the stairs to look at rooms, “aye . . . this is it. This is the place.”

“The place?” said Otto. He did not want to know: he asked only out of a kind of terrified fascination.

“Vanessa,” Martin said softly. “Please.”

“The place . . .” said Vanessa. And she nodded meaningfully, blinking enormous brown eyes that were filled with too much light. “Ah . . . I understand.”

Otto licked his suddenly dry lips, as uneasy about her as he was about Etienne of Languedoc, who, after two weeks of laying diplomatic siege to Castle Aurverelle, had not yet gotten past the front gate. In accordance with custom, though, the churchman was certainly doing enough damage to the peasantry!

Even now, his voice was drifting up from the common room, shrill and impatient. “He won't? Damn him again! A pox on these delAurvres!” A muffled voice. “What? You don't like my opinion of your baron? Well . . .”

There was a crash and a cry below. Otto winced. Martin Osmore shook his head. “My father has ambitions to live like that,” he said. He grinned, his blackened eyes crinkling up into dark slits. “My mother won't let him. Who is that, anyway?”

“Etienne of Languedoc,” said Otto as he fumbled with his ring of keys. “Now, I'm not disagreeing with Baron Christopher at all, and I won't have you be thinking that I am, but I can't help but wonder whether it might be better if m'lord baron gave the monsignor what he wants.”

“What does he want?”

“He wants to talk to the baron. And m'lord Christopher insulted him and told him to go sleep in the kennel with the dogs! Can you believe that? Baron Christopher is certainly one like his grandfather, surely!”

Martin looked alarmed. “His grandfather? The one who hanged travelers in Malvern?”

“Well . . . not quite like his grandfather, perhaps. . . .” Otto found the key, opened the door. “Now, here you are, m'lord. A sitting room with a big window, and separate bedrooms.” Otto still could not figure it out: separate bedrooms? And a lord and a peasant traveling together?

Martin was nodding. He removed his gloves, and Otto could see rope burns on his wrists. He shuddered, made the mistake of looking at Vanessa, was transfixed by a pair of eyes that harrowed him on the spot.

“Fine, fine,” Martin was saying.

“I'm . . . glad m'lord is pleased.”

“Don't call me lord,” said Martin. “I'm a commoner. I'll always be a commoner.
Master Martin
is good enough for me.”

Awash in confusion, Otto bowed. Below, Etienne was still shouting abuse, but a footstep in the hall made them all turn.