The Ravens of Falkenau & Other Stories (18 page)

Sigismund said nothing, but his quiet got deeper as he scrubbed off the counter.

"Don't you think that's strange?" I asked. "I thought the lady looked rich and pretty, though she was much older than Mommy."

"I think you shouldn't tell those dreams to anyone but me," he said. He didn't look up.

"I wonder who the girl was they were talking about," I said, kicking my feet. "Another kid. Someone who's in trouble." I leaned my elbows on the bar. "Sigismund, do you think we could help her?"

Sigismund looked at me sharply, his bright blue eyes flashing. "Lucia, I think you'd better forget it."

"How can I forget it? I think she's in trouble. Maybe we could help her!"

Sigismund threw his cloth in the bus pan. "Lucia, you are seven years old!" He came and bent down to me on the other side of the bar. "I'm a broken down old veteran with one arm, and you are a child. There's no good that can come of meddling in something like that. I'm sure the Lady Octavia can take care of her."

"Octavia?" My ears pricked. "Then you know who those people are?"

Sigismund threw back his head. "
Argh
! Why did I say that?"

"Who's Marcus? And who's the girl?" I put my chin in my hands, my elbows on the counter. "You believe me, don't you? You believe the dreams are real."

He sobered, and beneath his bushy eyebrows his eyes were troubled. "I do," he said. "I think you dream true. Sometimes the gods touch someone and they alone know why. But you are too young and too small for the things you're reaching for. Grownups die for meddling in this."

I looked at him levelly, though a chill ran down my back. "I'm not scared of that."

He looked away, and I thought I saw him shiver as he reached for his cloth to begin wiping the cups. "Then think about how it will affect people around you," he said. "Doesn't your father talk about why you live here?"

I shrugged. "Not really. I know once there was money, when he was a kid, but now there isn't."

Sigismund picked up a cup, bracing it against the stump of his right arm, and cleaning inside it with the other hand, his back to me. "Your grandfather was a client of Marcus Antonius. When the Antonians went down, they went down hard. Your grandfather died bankrupt, and your father works odd jobs as a clerk and lives in the Subura. If you start saying this stuff, people will think you got it at home. You could get your dad into a lot of trouble."

"Oh." I hung on to the edge of the bar while the horror ran through me. Something bad could happen to Baby, and to Lucilla who toddled around on her little feet tearing up the apartment, and to my brother Lucius, even though he was nine and could already read and figure. I wouldn't want anything to happen to them. And I loved Mommy, even if I always felt there was something strange, something wrong about having them be my family, as though they were very nice people I'd been sent to stay with for a little while. And Dad was nice too, thin and harried and always working until late. I would never want to get them in trouble.

Sigismund put the cup down, his face softening a little. "Now I served with Marcus Antonius." He gestured toward the stump of his arm. "It was Antonius himself that put his shield over me, when I lost this arm in Parthia. I've nothing in the world against Antonians. But things are what they are, and they're not going to be changed by an old veteran who runs a tavern and a little kid who doesn't come up to my waist."

"Oh." I considered this a little while, watching him wipe cups. After a while I leaned on the bar again, putting my chin in my hands. "Sigismund, do you think I'm strange?"

He looked at me, and I saw he wasn't really mad. "Why do you ask?"

I shrugged. "Mommy does, sometimes. She said I was strange the other day, when I was telling Baby a story I made up. Not like she was mad at me, but because she thought it was weird. I mean, I made it up. That's all!"

"What was the story?" Sigismund said, bracing a cup against his stump again.

"Once upon a time there was a little prince," I said. "And his evil uncle wanted to kill him. So he sent a magic snake into his room at night to bite him. But the prince's mommy had a faithful dog and cat…"

With a clatter, Sigismund dropped the cup, and it shattered on the floor. He swore.

I stopped, looking at him. "Why is that story bad? I just made it up."

Sigismund bent down and picked up the pieces of the cup. I couldn't see his face. "I heard someone tell that story to a little boy a long time ago, in a house just across the river. Twenty years ago it must be, now."

"Who?" I asked. The cold along my spine clung now, but I wouldn't not ask.

"A beautiful woman I used to know," he said, still muffled by being down behind the bar. "A woman I knew a long time ago."

He stood up, the broken pieces of the cup in his hand. "She was very clever, and very loyal, and I think the gods touched her too." He looked at me, and his blue eyes were piercing, as though some thought had suddenly occurred to him and he was weighing it for the first time. "There are a lot of strange things in the world, and who can fathom the gods?"

I swallowed. "What happened to her?" I asked, though I thought I already knew.

"She died," he said. "Seven years ago on the third day before the Ides of Augustus, four months to the day before you were born."

I couldn't look away from his eyes, and the chill ran down my arms, all the way to my fingertips. "Sigismund, do you believe that oaths are stronger than death?"

He couldn't look away either, or he would have. "Yes," he said. "And may the gods curse me if I ever betray my friends, living and dead. I'll look out for you, Lucia. That I swear on the memory of the men I fought beside who are all gone now. That I swear."

This story was written for my friend Tanja Kinkel, who inadvertently inspired Hand of Isis, and now asked me for a story about Elizabeth I of England.
 
I'm not sure this is quite the story she expected!

The great did not dare speak of it, as though saying it would compass it, or should at least render them suspect and complicit in what might then seem a crime. But in the kitchen we knew, as we had known these months, that King Edward was dying.

I am no one in particular, Dickon my name, and I am a groom who would be a man at arms, would that I were a man, not a boy of sixteen. But that will come in time, mother says, as it always does, barring evil. It may be that I do talk like a magpie, but I can hold my tongue when need arises, and that is the cause of this tale. Otherwise I should just be one more boy about court, enthralled by the fine horses and the bright swords, slipping up to the gallery that I might lie on my stomach and look through the rail at the bright masques as I did last Christmastide, when the masque was King Alexander and the Queen of the Amazons. I do love such, and perhaps I should be a player instead of a man at arms, did I speak better and less!

But I can hold my tongue at need. Though I do not know how Cecil should know this. It is said that he has the measure of men, which I believe, because before that day I do not think we had exchanged three words, save over the mounting of a horse which I held for him, and how I shortened his stirrups while he waited.

My mother knew of course that the King lay dying, and she wept and prayed for him in the kitchen. It was sad, she said, to see a boy so close to her own in age, him being but a year my junior, who she had known from infancy die so long and painful, and with none who loved him to mourn him, only ambitious men who already plotted and planned. His Popish sister Mary would not mourn him. And the other sister — well, none had seen the witch's daughter in a long time. Who was to know what she might do? Perhaps it was she who cursed him to wither away, though my mother said such talk was foolishness.

There was less to do in the stables than might have been that night. With the king ill, there were no hunts or pageants, and the great lords in attendance had brought grooms of their own, so I had not so many horses to have a care of. It was raining, thunder shaking the sky, and I went into the kitchen as soon as I was able and stood about warming my backside at the fire while my mother had one of the girls take up a bowl of thin gruel and milk that the king might eat. It was quiet enough. In a bit, my mother went up herself, to talk to the nurse and see if she might how the gruel had gone, and if an egg
posset
would be welcome. I sat down on the hearthstone. A great gray cat had wandered in from nowhere, and stood purring before me.

"There now, Puss," I said, petting her. She looked fat and happy, and I supposed my mother fed her, as well as there being good hunting in the storerooms. I should have gotten up and gone back out, but she climbed into my lap, kneading, and I thought I should stay a while. Her green eyes blinked at me.

There was a clatter on the stairs, and Cecil plunged in, his somber doublet out of place in the kitchen, black velvet like a Spaniard. He looked about a moment only, and his eye fell on me as I came to my feet right enough, dumping the cat on the floor.

For a moment I thought he would go back out again, but instead he raised one eyebrow, as though he were neither surprised nor pleased. "You, boy. Your name is Dickon?"

"As it please your lordship," I said.

"Do you know the way to Hatfield House?" he asked.

I nodded. "I do, my lord." Which was falsehood, but I can find anywhere, right enough. And how hard could it be?

He shoved a piece of paper into my hand, folded but not sealed. "Take this there, now. Give it into the hand of no one save Mistress Ashley's charge, and say nothing of it. If you do, I shall call you liar."

"Yes, my lord," I said, and took it, putting it safe in my jerkin against my breast. "I'll be off now, storm and all."

"Good lad," he said, and pressed a coin into my hand. Like a shadow, he was gone as though he had never been in the kitchen.

I read it of course, in the stable. You'd not think the likes of me could read, but I'm cleverer than I look, and all in all it was a simple thing, three lines long, the ink trailing off across the page on the last word, as though strength had given out.

Sister

Do not come. They will kill you.

Love

Standing in the warm stall beside a good mare,
Rosamund
, I felt a chill run down my spine, for now I knew all. As I saddled
Rosamund
up for our run into the night, I knew I carried the King's last word to his sister, handed by Cecil to a man he knew nothing of. Inside, there were men who would pay for this piece of paper, but I do not think I truly considered it. He was my king, you see, a boy my own age who my mother loved, and though I was no knight or gentleman, and he should never know my name, I should do what I had promised.

How hard could it be to find Hatfield House?

"North on the Great North Road. Ye can't miss it." The directions sounded simple, but less so in the face of the storm. I had never seen the like. It had been only a bit past ten when I left, but the night seemed to go on forever. Soon London was left behind in the mud flung from
Rosamund's
hooves. Once we were out of the city I let her go, and she ran as if the hounds of hell themselves were behind her. Perhaps they were. In the driving rain and the thunder, perhaps they ran behind us.

It would have cost nothing to have stopped and waited out the worst of the storm, but I could not, and she caught my urgency. We must ride. We must outrun whatever it was that followed. Another messenger? Messengers bearing tidings of the king's death? Death itself? I did not know, but we ran,
Rosamund
and I, through the night and the storm.

There was no one else on the road, cutting clear and straight through the forest, unnaturally so. Even the ruts only went a few inches deep in new laid mud, and here and there I heard the ring of her hooves on stone. Old ways, my mother called them. Roads laid imperishable from the beginning of time.

Lightning cut across the sky, a single flash illuminating. In the middle of the road ahead there stood a massive black dog, his mouth opened in a snarl.

Rosamund
shied, and I fought to stay on her, her distress bugled to the sky. The dog growled and charged.

And then we did run as though the hounds of hell followed us, off the road and into the underbrush.

I fought her. "Get back on the road!" She did not heed me, running panicked through the trees, and it was all I could do to stay with her.

Behind, the hound bayed, calling the others of the pack, and I heard the huntsman's horn echoing over the crack of thunder. The Wild Hunt, in full pursuit.

I should have prayed. I should have … something. But all I could do was hold to
Rosamund
, and hope to stay on, and hope that she would not fall.

The sound of the hounds was louder, and I almost felt their breath as a dog snapped at my ankles, barely missing in his leap.
Rosamund
spun about, darting like a deer down some track. Her hooves left the ground as she jumped a fallen tree, and still I clung to her, my cloak half over my face.

The hounds bayed after.

And why should they, some part of me wondered. It was not one of the dangerous days. None of those were in July. What had roused the Wild Hunt? Surely nothing less than the passing of a king.