Maze of Moonlight (36 page)

But when she looked up at him, smiling, it was not with strange eyes that held a mixture of forbidden knowledge and fear. Her face was clear, her eyes brown and calm, and within her he felt a wellspring of humanity and peace that nearly dropped him to his knees.

“Vanessa?”

Her smiles was genuine, open. As though to reassure him, she put an arm about his neck and kissed him. “It's me, Christopher. It's really me. See . . .” She held up her hand. “I've kept your ring. It's ne'er awa' fro' me.”

“But . . .” He stared at her. She was just a girl. Human. Wonderfully human. “But . . . what happened?”

“I cam to Saint Brigid because I thought I'd ha' a better chance here tha' i' Saint Blaise,” she said. “I wa' right. My grandma wa' dead, but a friend o' hers took me in. An' she helped me, an' the Elves helped me, too . . . and . . . and . . .” She smiled through the tears. “You were right. I dan have to see the patterns. I dan have to look, an' if I look, I dan have to let them tell me wha' to do. I can just be me.”

Christopher clung to her, filling his arms with her common, warm humanity. “The Elves?”

“The Elves, Christopher.” She was crying. “The Elves showed me.” She tried to laugh, but managed only a fresh burst of joyful tears. “They helped me, Christopher. They're good people, an' they helped me.”

Helping and healing, Natil had said. They tried. Sometimes it all went awry, but at least they tried.

Christopher held her tightly. “They helped me, too,” he murmured into her hair. Despite his grandfather, despite Nicopolis, despite his confused and shamefaced vacillation between anger and gratitude, he wanted to believe it. “Dear Lady, Vanessa, they helped me, too.”

Terrill led the way through Malvern Forest with silent, elven footsteps, but the secret path existed for twos and threes, not for hundreds, and the men and women and children of the Shrinerock estate plodded forward towards Aurverelle.

By the end of the second day, they had covered only about a third of the distance through the woods. Exhausted women gathered hungry children together as the shadows fell. The men collected bracken and dry leaves for beds and shelters. Paul's guards took the watch. Abbot Wenceslas and his monks chanted vespers and compline from memory, then helped with the sharing of a meager ration of food. On Terrill's advice, they lit no fires, for the drought had turned the forest tinder dry, and in any case the smoke would give away their position.

Paul sat down, his legs aching. “Are you actually expecting them to be looking for us?”

Terrill's eyes glittered in the falling darkness. “I do not know,” he said. “Once, I might have seen. But everything is obscure now.” He sighed, passed a hand over his face. “I see only your people, and great sadness.”

The figures of the refugees were a shadowed mélange of lights and darks: clumps and hummocks of human beings settling down amid the roots of oaks and beeches and rowans, trying to snatch what little sleep they could in the middle of a forest of trees and fears both. Paul knew their questions. He was asking many of them himself. Would they live? Would they return? What would they return to?

It was easy to see sadness. Shrinerock taken, the free companies in Adria, and the Elves fading. And . . .

He thought again of Jehan and the surprise attack, bent his head. It was inescapable. It had to have been Jehan. Terrill saw great sadness. Paul, too, saw great sadness.

“My lord.” It was Martin. Dark and lithe, the lad slid through the forest, stepping over sleeping figures and sliding through bushes and leaves as quietly as Terrill. And yet the unobtrusiveness of his comings and goings did not seem to Paul to derive so much from skill and inner harmony as from a desire for invisibility.

A stranger would not have noticed it, but Paul noticed. He could not help but notice. Martin was fearful, even ashamed, of something.

“Everyone's resting,” said the lad. “Prunella is having difficulty, though.”

Paul sighed heavily. “It's hard on the women that last month.”

Martin looked to Terrill. “I have heard, Fair One, that Elves can heal.”

Terrill's gray eyes were dispassionate. “That is true.”

“Can you help Prunella?”

The Elf was silent. “I am no healer,” he said at last, “but I will do what I can, young master.”

For an instant, almost wavering, and still with that sense of shame, Martin looked at Terrill as though he were going to ask something else, something that had nothing to do with Prunella. But then his gaze flicked to Paul, and he faltered. “I'll take you to her.”

And the two slipped away into the falling dusk.

Paul received bread and nuts and a fragment of cheese from the hand of one of the monks—“
Benedicamus Domino.
” “
Deo gratias.
And thank you also, Brother.”—and settled down to take what comfort he could from his dinner . . . alone. True, he was surrounded by the men and women of his estate, and Isabelle came from helping with the children to cuddle and hold hands with him for a short time before sleep, but Paul was nonetheless alone. He was the baron, and these were his people. They looked to him for help and for protection.

He felt his impotence. He did not have a castle, he did not have a sword, he did not even have a son. Jehan was gone. In fact, Jehan . . . Jehan might be a traitor.

Isabelle slumped against his leg, asleep. Paul signaled to a guard, and they stretched her out on a bed of bracken and covered her with her cloak, but Paul did not sleep. He was still thinking of Jehan, and of Martin.

Jehan, prideful and demanding, had turned his back on his father and his family because he had not been given immediately what he wanted. Martin, though, had never asked for anything. Ever conscious, it seemed, of his social position, he had not thought to be so forward. Paul had hinted about knighthood, but Martin had shied away almost with a kind of fear, as though he wanted nothing more out of life than to fade into faceless and unremarkable obscurity.

And now, Jehan had betrayed Shrinerock, and Martin was apologizing for his existence with every word he offered, every gesture he made, every expression of his dark face.

Ashamed? Of what? Paul did not know. He had never seen Martin like this save . . .

His back to a tree, he lifted his head and regarded the darkening sky through a screen of heat-gilt leaves. Never . . . save once.

It had been a few years ago, at Yvonnet a'Verne's coming of age party. Martin had disappeared in the course of the evening. With Yvonnet. And when he had turned up after an absence that had lasted several days, he had been touched with the same aura of shame that now clung to him. For a long time after, he had not been able to look Paul—or anyone else—in the eye. There had been a sense of damage about him.

Yvonnet . . .

Paul considered. Martin had visited Yvonnet again in the course of his journey home with Vanessa. Odd. And now the shame again.

My son. My son: what happened to you?

He must have fallen asleep then, for when he opened his eyes, it was quite dark, and only the faint glint of a waning moon filtered down through the trees. He heard voices nearby, recognized Martin's tenor and Terrill's firm, factual intonation.

“My thanks, Fair One, for your help.”

“We do all that we can, Master Martin. While we have strength, we will continue to labor.”

The camp—if such a straggling line of refugees could be called a camp—slept. Snores. Mumbles. The voices of Terrill and Martin were hushed, but Paul sensed that Martin was struggling with something. The night was tense with it.

“Fair One . . .”

Terrill's form was lithe and taut in the moonlight, and Paul, his elven blood stirring into uneasy wakefulness, saw the soft, pervasive shimmer that surrounded him. “What would you, Master Martin?”

Martin still struggled. “You helped Prunella,” he said. “Can you . . .” Paul felt the lad's tension. “Can you help me?”

“You know what I mean. You know about me and . . .”

Paul's hands clenched on his knees. He was beginning to guess. Martin's shame . . . and Yvonnet. There were rumors about the baron of Hypprux. Yvonnet's position kept him safe from inquiry, but Martin could find safety only in absolute obscurity.

My son.

He wanted a son. He had been dispossessed of a sister and castle and lands, but he would settle for a wife and a son. But Martin and Yvonnet . . .

“Do not tell me unless you wish me to know,” Terrill was saying.

“I'm a sodomite.”

Terrill was silent.

Martin's voice was hoarse. “Elves can heal, Fair One. Will you heal me?”

Paul was weeping. Silently, soundlessly, the tears streaked his face, dampened his beard. He shut his eyes to the swirls of light that were all that was left of the stars.

Terrill's silence continued. In his mind's eye, Paul could see the Elf searching, examining, evaluating Martin. What did Terrill think? Was he disgusted with the depravity of the vices to which humans clung like drunkards hanging on their flasks? Was he sick with the knowledge that it was to such as these that the Elves had been forced by time and circumstance to yield their world?

And still he wept.
My son.

“I cannot heal you,” Terrill said at last.

“I . . . understand.”

“You do not understand,” said the Elf. Neither reproof nor repugnance touched his voice. “I say that I cannot heal you, for that which is not sick cannot be cured.”

Terrill had said it. It had to be true. But still Paul wept.
My son.

“Then I'm lost,” said Martin bitterly. “I'm surely lost.”

But, abruptly, Terrill had turned toward the east, back towards Shrinerock. “Something is wrong.”

And Paul suddenly noticed a tang in the air, a piquant scent of wood smoke and burning leaves. The east wind, which had slackened this last day, now returned, freshening, roaring through the treetops in whirling song. The odor increased.

“
Ai, Elthiai.
”

“What is it?”

Paul knew before Terrill answered. Malvern was burning. Angry, vengeful, desperate to kill the refugees and the baron who led them, the free companies had fired the forest.

***

Christopher wanted to be angry. He wanted to rage, to shout, to vent a frustration that mingled so inextricably with fright that he could not even begin to say where one left off and the other began.

The Elves had struck his grandfather, sending him into a mild little life of peach trees and gardens, sending Christopher himself on a fool's journey to Nicopolis and disaster. It was a terrible power they had, one that could alter the very substance and soul of a man. And yet their regret at what they had done—an immortal regret, continuing undiminished throughout the years—had caused them to work for Christopher's healing, to save his life, to undo, as much as was within their power, what they had done.

And now Christopher held Vanessa in his arms again, and had found that the patterns that had battered her life into a hell of borderline madness had been quelled. Again, by an elven hand.

“It wa' Mirya who helped me,” Vanessa told him. “She wa' the one who healed me in your castle. She can heal minds as well as bodies . . .”

Christopher thought of his grandfather, tried to fill himself with Vanessa's calm brown eyes. Healing? Was that healing?

“. . . but she could na do it wi'out my permission and help. An' so we went out among the patterns together, an' we danced wi' them, and she helped me to reweave them. They can be woven, you know, like a piece o' cloth. An' together we wove them, and now I only see patterns whan I want to.”

Changed, like his grandfather. Struck by magic . . . and happy in being so stricken. What, he wondered, had Roger felt? Relief? Had his grandfather's rage and arrogant disregard for anything resembling common humanity been a burden for him, one to be put off with the same rejoicing that Vanessa now exhibited for her own newfound clarity?

Peach trees. Christopher wanted to throw some fruit.

Natil—wisely—vanished for the rest of the day, and Christopher had a chance to hold Vanessa, meet and thank those who had taken her in and befriended her, learn something of her life in the village. But when, after dinner, the harper reappeared to ask permission to return to the forest to recuperate from her efforts at Shrinerock, he gave it to her curtly, trying to make up in appearance for anger that smacked of the illegitimate. “Go. Go on. Go find someone else to meddle with.”

His words disappeared into Natil's calm like a stone thrown into a lake: a plash, a ripple, and then . . . nothing. “I will come at need,” she said, and then she bowed deeply, touching her hands to her forehead, picked up her harp, and departed soundlessly into the darkness.

Christopher looked after her. “It's mad,” he whispered to the deserted streets. “It's all mad.” The monkey perched on his shoulder mumbled reproachfully, and Christopher glared at it. “You're forgetting who's the monkey around here, sir,” he snapped, and then, out of an irony that had become habitual, he forced a wan grin. “You run Aurverelle. I'll throw the fruit.”

But Christopher had not come to greet Vanessa's friends: he had come to warn them. That night, the town council gathered in the house of Abel, the smith, who, though dark and hairy as a savage out of an old tale, formally and courteously introduced Christopher to a room crowded with the descendants of those whom old Roger had once thought to conquer.

They were not entirely unprepared for his news about Shrinerock. Rumors of the catastrophe had been filtering through the southern part of Adria for the last two weeks, and the council had ordered the defenses of the town strengthened. The gates, long in disrepair, Abel had mended himself, and he and the other men had also reinforced the walls, deepened the surrounding ditch, and had installed the encircling palisade of fire-hardened saplings. Saint Brigid was no Maris, to be sure, but neither was it a helpless, undefended village.

Christopher, though, suspected that the preparations would prove useless. Berard had several thousand men with him, and judging from what was left of Ypris and Furze, they possessed, in addition to armor and weapons, siege machinery and several heavy guns.