Chance (10 page)

“Go there with me,” said the stranger with the faint roughness in his voice, “for it is small love your lordly father will bear either of us in the morning.”

It was true. Yet, Xanthea knew that Lord Chauncey would not kill her. And she knew no such thing of this other, of Wirral. Still, she did not feel afraid.

“Come,” the other said, and he tugged gently at her hands.

Then Xanthea spoke, shyly, yet the words were bold and blunt. “What are you like, under the mask?” she asked. “Are you as ugly as I?”

Silence, for the span of several heartbeats. The stranger, whoever he was, stood still with her hands in his. Like him, she stopped dancing, and she did not hear the music still playing, did not see the masquers swirling around her.

“I am as ugly as you,” the stranger said at last, the words catching on the burr in his voice.

She went with him, golden-masked and regally gowned as she was, out the door into the chill of a December night, and her mother cried out, and her father shouted a command she did not heed. The men-at-arms were drunk, or perhaps acted more drunk than they were, for this was the evening they need not obey their lord. Chauncey could not rouse them. Moments went by while he roared at them. Then he ran out after his daughter himself, readied a horse and rode after her himself. But though he rode long, he could not find a sign of her.

When morning came and Xanthea had not returned, Lord Chauncey mustered his groggy retinue and searched the countryside for miles around. And he sent his men-at-arms into the Wirral, though he himself did not go there. But nowhere could the lord or any of his servants find Xanthea, or even so much as a footprint in the snow. It was as if she had been carried off on a horse of air.

No sooner had Lord Chauncey settled down with his golden cup than Halimeda swept in to confront him. “You have not brought back our daughter,” she stated, in the tone of one who had expected otherwise.

With a sour eye, too sober to suit him, Lord Chauncey looked up at his wife. He remembered a time when Halimeda had not been so strong, so apt at taking command. A time when she had needed him. A time when he would have run through storm or fire for her sake. He took a long pull at the hot mulled wine, a huntsman's due, in the cup.

“There is no sign of the girl,” he said to Halimeda.

“You have been in Wirral?”

“I sent men. They found nothing.”

“But you yourself did not go there.”

“The wench is gone,” Lord Chauncey grumbled by way of answer. “And good riddance, I say.” He drank.

“For the sake of your lordly vengeance,” his wife told him acidly, “I thought you would be eager at least to find the one who cuffed you on the head.”

Lord Chauncey colored with displeasure at the reminder, but answered her evenly. “Of what use is it to search for one who leaves no footprints?”

“Do you not feel peril in the air? Do you not wish to know your enemy?”

Chance eyed her dourly, then turned back to his cup, saying nothing. There was too much that he was not saying. Halimeda had courage. She would speak to some of it.

“You think she has gone back to—them.”

The lord looked up sharply. “Hush!” It was the worst of bad luck to mention the nameless ones, even so obliquely. But Halimeda was not so easily to be silenced.

“And you have given her up so easily? You are afraid.”

“As would you be, had you the brains of a bat,” Lord Chauncey shouted. “Which you resemble in other ways. Hush! Speak no more of it.”

“I will speak what needs to be said!”

Halimeda remembered a time when this surly man had been her strong support and savior. She remembered a night when lifelong love had pleaded in his eyes, when he had laid his head in her lap and sobbed. Even then he had been willing to put her wellbeing before his own. It was he, Chance, who had spoken truth to her, helping her see clearly, freeing them both from the twisted trammels that bound them to her brother. The memories turned in her like a knife in a wound. Now he sat lumpen before her, a foppish lord drinking from a golden cup.

“You will ride out again in the morning,” Halimeda said. Her tone, half command, half plea. “You yourself will enter Wirral.”
You will be a man again.

Her husband scarcely looked at her. “The girl is gone,” said Lord Chauncey, lifting his cup to his lips. “I will waste no more days in searching for her.”

Hot contempt rose in Halimeda, burned in her voice when she spoke. “You are no proper lord. You were more of a man when you were a castrate.”

Even as she said the word Chance sprang to his feet with a roar that sent servants scuttling and cringing as far away as the kitchen, for it was not a word that he permitted to be spoken. Castrate! It was his most hurtful secret. Beside himself, he swung a fist at Halimeda. She held her head proud and still, and his heavy hand stopped a hairsbreadth from her temple.

“Be silent!” he thundered at her.

Halimeda looked steadily at him, into his eyes, facing and studying the thing that hurt her most. “Never fear,” she told him bitterly. “I will not speak to you until you are Chance again, and my husband.”

She was not permitted to say that name, not even in the privacy of their wedbed, in lovemaking. She might as well have called him bastard. Lord Chauncey wanted to kill her. His strong fingers twitched as if to throttle her where she stood. Kings had killed royal wives for less. But oddly, he did not speak or move.

“Until you are Chance and a man again,” Halimeda said to him, and she turned her back and left him with his golden cup.

The next morning, Lady Halimeda put on her riding habit of ivy green furred with ermine, herself mounted horse and rode through the white winter day, seeking her daughter. And she rode out in like wise the next day, and the next, and many days to follow, uselessly searching as far as the fringes of Wirral, though she would not go within that vast wilderness. She did not find her daughter. Xanthea was gone.

The lady rode a gray gelding. Being of independent mind, she rode alone.

One day in deep winter she rode the long journey to Wirral, heedless of the cold and snow that lay deep on the cornfields. The lodge where Chance had courted her stood surrounded by cornfield. Gallowstree Lea was gone, turned to cornfield like the woodland that had surrounded it; Chance had seen to that. But Wirral yet lived, somewhere far ahead.

At the reaches of Wirralmark the forest stood waiting, the butts felled by autumn woodcutters lying silently beneath a shroud of snow, and the many, the countless many yet standing waiting as silently for something beyond the reach of men's dreaming and striving. On the gray gelding Halimeda picked her way through the felled boles and into the realm of the living ones. Oak, beech, chestnut loomed huge to either side of her and for miles ahead. Her horse pushed its way through snow chest-deep.

Only a little way. Halimeda glanced over her shoulder. She would not go out of sight of the light of the cleared fields. Should she venture too far into this forest, darkness would take her.

She looked for a likely tree, a huge old oak or elm, perhaps, full of hollows and squirrel holes. Something unspoken lay heavy between her and Chance—she still thought of him as Chance. Nor was it silence alone that dismayed her, for he had never been one to speak to her overmuch, even when he was a commoner and her secret lover. But she could sense the unspoken trouble as she sensed foreboding troubling her sleep, and she had come to beard it if she could.

She stopped her gray at a lightning-riven oak. One of many in Wirral, but the Denizens were many, also. Likely there would be some holed in the oak. Likely they were watching all around her, and had been peering and smirking since she had approached the forest.

Halimeda spoke. For the first time she willingly bespoke those who were never called by name. “Little ones there in the tree,” she addressed them, “come out, please, and speak with me.”

Then she waited. No Denizen gave her answer. No large-featured faces appeared, no narrow bodies with twiggy limbs and barklike skin. But within the treetrunk she could hear the trilling and warbling of their laughter.

“Little ones there in the tree,” she said again, humbly, “pray come out and speak with me.”

Not in that tree, but in a beech nearby, in a comfortable hollow, the prince of the small forest people lay dallying with his longtime love. She would not live immortally as he did, but while she lived her sap would run quick and merry. She was one of the human-born ones, a dainty, chestnut-haired beauty, and her name, though she no longer remembered it, had been Iantha. She smiled in amusement, hearing not far away the humble beseeching of her mother's voice, and she broke away from her lover's arms to peep.

“These foolish humans,” she grumbled, bright-eyed. But then her look turned wistful as she gazed upon the beautiful mortal woman in her garb of ivy green.

“Very foolish,” the prince of the Denizens lazily agreed with his lover. “But the fortress lady is not as foolish as her mate.”

With butterfly quickness Iantha's mood turned from wistfulness to glee. She smiled, foretasting the joke. “How so?” she asked.

“Chance has let us gift him with his own doom.”

“Please!” Halimeda's tone turned sharp, and she abandoned rhyme. “I want to ask you about my daughter!”

Laughter chirped yet louder. “Which one?” a voice cried from the oak.

Halimeda paled as white as the ermine that trimmed her sleeves, as white as the snow. Anastasia and Chloe were safe at the fortress, she told herself fiercely. The mocking questioner could not threaten them. The voice meant—no. She would not think of—that other. They could not make her think of—that other.

She paled, but she did not crumple. A Denizen had spoken to her. It was a start.

“Chance thinks he can keep us away,” the prince remarked to his mate. “Cutting the trees. The more fool, he.”

The voices in the oak had started a chant.

“Which one, which one, which one, we say?

Wirral will take back its own one day,

Wirral will take back its own!”

“And Wirral is worse than we,” the prince added darkly.

“Tell me where Xanthea is,” Halimeda begged the forest. Though she deemed she knew. For the trouble between her and Chance was this: that both of them knew well enough where Xanthea was to be found. Xanthea, or her body. At the heart of Wirral. But neither of them would say it, or venture there.

The prince of the denizens squirrel-leaped past his mate and out of his hollow to stand on the winter-stripped branch of the beech.

“Where is Xanthea?” he mocked. “Where can she be?”

Halimeda's gray-green eyes turned to him. He vaunted and strutted on the bough where he stood, and he sang.

“With bone of deer and outlaw's skull

And fur of wolf and fox she lies,

With limb of oak and linden leaf

And all that in Wirral dies!

But Wirral lives.”

Halimeda heard the taunting menace in his voice. She felt her throat fill with terror, and she turned her horse toward the fortress and fled, floundering, through the snow. Chanting voices followed her.

“Which daughter, which one, which one?

Wirral will take back its own, and soon!

Wirral will take back its own.”

Xanthea stretched her long limbs and sighed with pleasure. The canopied bed, piled with silks and furs, was soft, and sizeable enough so that her tall body need never be cramped, even with that other tall body lying beside it. From one bedpost, hers, hung a golden mask with peacock feathers streaming down. From the other one hung the furred wolf mask.

Smiling at the masks, Xanthea remembered.…

Fleeing her father's great hall with the stranger. The night had not felt cold, for her blood ran so hot and strong that it seemed to her she could warm the whole wintertime world. A horse waited close at hand, saddled, with a pillion. Wirral had known when he came what he wanted, the rascal. He picked her up by the waist—and there were few men who could have done that—picked her up lightly, for he was very strong, and set her sideward on her cushion on the horse's rump. The steed was moon-white, and comely, and splendidly caparisoned, and mannerly beyond belief: it bowed for Wirral's mounting so that he need not pass his foot near the lady. Then, when its riders were settled, it sprang away into the air.

With the strange excitement pounding in her blood, Xanthea was not frightened. With her arms around Wirral's waist and the golden mask keeping the cold rush of air from her face, with peacock plumes trailing behind her and her peacock-blue gown flowing down around her feet, she rode. She looked down often to see how strange her father's land lay far below, moonlit and starlit and rushing away beneath the horse's hooves. The steed flew and bore her, but she felt as if she herself were flying, she, Xanthea the warrior, the falcon wings straining on her helm, flying away from the place where she had been kept prisoner, where someday she would return.… The horse had no wings. Yet it flew, so smoothly that it seemed at one with the still air, the night, the moon.

Then the world of white came to an edge; Wirral forest lay below, and stretched dark as far as Xanthea could see. The horse flew on until the snow-covered fields lay far behind; all was darkness below, dark branches so massed, so striving that only jumbled bits of white showed between them like drunken stars fallen into a pit.

“The size of it!” Xanthea whispered. She spoke only for herself; she had not thought the other could hear her.

“Wirral is vast,” he replied, his voice hushed.

It seemed immense as the sea to Xanthea, and though the horse flew swiftly she could see no end of it. But after the passing of a time, without warning the horse swooped down toward the trees, and Xanthea almost screamed, clutching at the stranger in front of her. The next moment, branches rattled against her mask. Then with dizzying suddenness she was under the canopy of boughs instead of above it, and the horse came to a stop, standing on the snowy ground. The wolf-masked stranger swung his booted foot over the white steed's neck and slipped lithely to the ground. Then he reached up for Xanthea's waist and as lightly lifted her down.