Chance (11 page)

Dawn was coming on. Pale light drifted down like fine snow from around the stars. Lady Xanthea and her escort stood side by side in the midst of wilderness. The horse walked away.

“Tell me what you see,” the stranger said.

She stood staring about her at ferns and deadwood and towering trees, for she had never seen true forest before, or even woodlot, but only the tame walled garden of her father's fortress.

“I see …” She blinked, for she had seen the white horse turn to a white squirrel and leap up the trunk of a massive oak.

“Take off your mask,” said the stranger, “and feel the air, and breathe deep of it, and see.”

Dawn's light had turned from white to golden. Xanthea regarded her companion steadily. “You take off yours also,” she said.

He did so, and he was the most beautiful man she had ever seen or envisioned in dream.

His eyes were wild, and burning with a soft fire, and fixed on her. His hair was the color of a red fox in summer. His brows were like the wings of an eagle; his face, a warrior angel's. When he moved, he was the deer for grace and the oak for strength, and when he stood still, as he was, looking at her.… She saw nothing but that face, those eyes. Ardent eyes, brown as a deer's, and as soft, yet fierce as the yellow eyes of a wolf.

His wild beauty frightened her as nothing else could have; it made her feel small inside, and cold, with all the heat in her blood chilled. She took a step back. “You said you were ugly,” she whispered.

“As ugly as you,” the man agreed. With both hands he reached out and lifted the golden mask by gentle fingertips. Peacock plumes rustled soft as the whisper of death, coming away, and Xanthea stood bared, shrinking, like a pale mollusk bereft of its shell, biting her lip and not meeting his eyes. The chill sting of the winter air on her face made her shiver. She clenched her cold, blue-fingered hands.

“Look at me,” said the stranger with no hesitation, no revulsion in his voice. “See.”

Xanthea shook her head. “I have seen,” she mumbled, and she averted her face.

“See,” Wirral urged. “Look in my eyes. See yourself.”

The low tremor in his voice—threat, or ardor? Xanthea could scarcely believe, ardor. Still, something in his voice made her remember courage. Made her take a deep breath of the heady forest air, made her straighten her slumping shoulders and turn her head toward him. She looked straight into his soft, vehement eyes.

And in them she saw herself as Wirral did.

She saw herself in small there at first, and stared, and then saw nothing but the stranger's feral eyes and herself, in them. With a rush like heat in the blood the image filled her sight. A tall maiden with a proud bearing and long, dark hair—she had never noticed the honey-colored lights in her hair—and wearing the hair like a crested helm: a striking, strong-boned face, unlike the face of any lesser maiden, a face with flashing eyes and a wide, feeling mouth. A questing face, tender yet hawk-keen. A strange face, better than a jeweled mask for gazing on. And the hot-blooded daring that had been Xanthea's at the masque was hers once again; Wirral had given it back to her, and she no longer felt the cold.

“You see?” Wirral gazed gravely at her and took her hand in one of his, carrying her golden mask in the other. “Come.”

By the hand, held in courtly wise, he led her to the massive oak. A fissure showed in the trunk, puffy-lipped, large enough for a man to squeeze through, no more. He stood aside and let her step in ahead of him, into darkness, or so it seemed. Then he followed, and found Xanthea where she stood blinking.

Outside, their tree-shelter was a wild, warty, gouty old oak with sprouts bristling from its gnarls. Inside, it was a palace.

Halimeda was not one to weep easily. The misfortunes of her youth had hardened her. Seventeen years of holding power with Chance, and sometimes against him; several lyings in childbed, one infant boy born dead, three babies miscarried; it had all hardened her. Therefore she did not weep for Xanthea. She would not weep until the girl's body lay in front of her, ready for burial. One long-ago night at Gallowstree Lea she had been in such callow, whimpering despair she wanted to kill herself, but she had seldom wept since.

Therefore, she did not weep as she rode home from Wirral, where the Denizens had mocked her.

Moreover, she had not loved Xanthea overmuch. There had been something uncanny about Xanthea.… Halimeda searched for Xanthea, not so much because she wanted this particular daughter back as because she sensed power, being one who knows the ways of power; she sensed menace. And she loved the daughters remaining to her more. And she scorned her husband Chauncey, who would sit at his cups and see to his lordly clothing and do nothing, for fear of facing the thing that was happening.

Halimeda returned to Wirralmark at nightfall and gave commands. Then she called her daughters before her.

“Anastasia, Chloe. Until I tell you otherwise you are not to venture even so far as the village. You are to stay within the fortress walls.”

Their plain, blunt faces congealed, like hardening dough, to show their displeasure, for Anastasia and Chloe had been petted since birth and did not lack for boldness. “Mother,” Chloe objected, “it is not fair.”

“You ride out every day,” said Anastasia.

“No longer will I do so,” Halimeda told them.

But that night she dreamed a strange, dark dream of trees. Oak and ash and elm and linden, birch and beech and fir, all mingled like a masqueing crowd, all danced, tossing their leafy heads, and she stood tiny in their midst, trying to evade the huge tramplings of their roots, and then she knew with terror that they were not unaware of her. For their branches swung out and seized at her, their boughs became hard, twiggy hands that clutched at her, and they were so strong, she could not escape them, she was flung like a toy from one to another, and somewhere near at hand she heard the growl of a wolf.…

She awoke in her cold bed—for Chance slept elsewhere except when he came to her to service her, as happened seldom enough, any longer—Halimeda awoke shaking and lay awake until morning.

Then she had her daughters summoned to her again. “You are not to venture out of the keep,” she told them. “You are not to venture even into the fortress gardens, or any place where there are trees.”

Anastasia and Chloe were aghast. “Mother!” they protested.

“Go to the rooftop,” Halimeda snapped, “if you need air.” Then she did what she had told them she would not. She called for the saddling of her gray, and she rode out again.

At dusk she returned, her face pinched and shadowed. That night no trees groped and clutched in her dreams. But in the darkness of sleep she sensed a nightmare far worse to her, an ineffable, flowerlight touch, a presence like a song long pressed out of mind springing up once again from the dark soil of dream: the gossamer fragrance of violets.

Halimeda awoke nearly screaming, for there were things she had taken care not to allow in her mind for sixteen years, and this soft touch held for her far more terror than the hard hands of Wirral trees. She did not sleep again, and rode out at the first light of dawn, and was gone until dark. The next day she rode out again, and the next day, and every day, that long winter. Nothing came of it except that her face grew ever more thin, and taut, and pale, until even her daughters, petulant though they remained at being confined indoors, felt concern for her.

“Mother,” Anastasia urged, “stay home one day, warm yourself by the fire, rest. You look like a wraith.”

Halimeda stared straight at the girl with a gaze that seemed to look through her, as if sturdy Anastasia were herself a wraith.

Chloe added her plea. “Stay home tomorrow,” she begged.

Halimeda spoke, and her voice sounded hollow as the voice of winter wind. “Iantha is gone,” she said.

The two girls stared at her in perplexity. It was a name they had never heard. “You mean Xanthea,” said Anastasia gently.

“Iantha is gone,” repeated Halimeda woodenly, and she rose from her place by the fire and went to her chamber, where she would sleep a few hours until some dream awoke her. She rode out again on the morrow.

Lord Chauncey sat with his feet sprawling and his golden cup in hand, regarding the delicate-faced boy who stood cowering before him.

Lord Chauncey was a man of two passions, a man whose thoughts ran two deep courses, like the deeply worn ruts of a well-traveled road. One was that he should not be scorned. He dressed splendidly, lived lavishly, strove in all things to make folk forget that he had been born a commoner and a bastard; and therefore, he never could forget it himself. The more he turned his back on his past, the more it sniggered and giggled behind him, like Denizens taunting him from their hidden places in the forest trees.

The other was that he hated and feared Wirral. That forest knew his secrets. Wirral knew, and the small folk who lived in Wirral knew, and the outlaws denning in its penetralia, the nodding monster in its fens, they all knew the most hidden thing about Chance. Likely the Denizens were still singing it in rhyme from the treetops. Chance the castrate, scarcely man, Chance the castrate, ran and ran through Wirralwood in search of balls, and found them there, and found them good.…

The Denizens had gifted him with manhead, and he hated them for it.

Halimeda knew Lord Chauncey's secret. And since the matter of Xanthea, Halimeda scorned him; he felt it. Sometimes even before the matter of Xanthea she had scorned him, and he never failed to sense it, though she said not a word. Halimeda was proud, and would not rail.

The boy standing before him bore Halimeda's face.

He loved her. Hidden, like his secrets, pushed out of sight, like his past, was his love for her; but it held him and entrapped him as did his memories. He lived trammeled, helpless in the grip of that love. It was the reason he had not killed her for her scorn. It was the reason he had not killed her long ago for the secrets she knew.

He suspected she had been riding to the edge of Wirral, but he would not ask her, though he had heard her footsteps as she came in. He had not spoken to her, or she to him, for these many weeks. The winter days were lengthening toward springtime. It must be late, that she had returned. The room seemed dark. No one had lit the lamps or offered him supper. Lord Chauncey did not care, so long as someone kept his cup filled.

The boy Justin stood shaking in the chill of the damp and darkened room. Justin. What a weighty name for such a waif. The face was Halimeda's, but the boy's thinness reminded him of Roddarc at that age. It was a reminder Lord Chauncey did not like.

“Bow,” Lord Chauncey commanded.

Eight-year-old Justin bowed, promptly and low, though he had already done so upon entering the audience chamber to stand before his father. Perversely, Lord Chauncey was not pleased by the boy's compliancy. He would have liked to toughen Justin by beating him. Lord Chauncey remembered his childhood as a whipping boy sufficiently so that he kept no whipping boy in his own court. But he also remembered, proudly and bitterly, that the whipping boy had become the lord. And he knew a lord only held power as long as he was hard and cruel. He knew he should beat Justin.

Instead, he drank from his golden cup, as he had been doing for some hours. “Justin,” he said.

The boy looked up at him with Halimeda's eyes.

“It is a shame on both of us that you, the heir, cower here in the keep when your sister is missing, Justin. Where is your valor?”

The gray-green eyes widened. The boy had never in his life done anything valiant. He had never done anything but what he was bid. And like his sisters, he had been bid to keep within walls.

“Someday you will be a man.”

The scrawny child had thought it hardly possible, but his father said it was so. Justin listened intently.

“It is time you began to think like a man.” Lord Chauncey lifted a hand unsteady with drinking. “It is time you began to act like a man.” The hand wobbled through an imperious gesture. “Go. Ride to Wirral. Find your sister.”

With great difficulty Justin moved his lips to wet them with his tongue. He swallowed and spoke. “May I have my supper first?” he whispered.

“No whit.” Chauncey felt annoyed at the thought of anyone's having supper when he had not yet had his. He was the lord, was he not? His fierce glare sent the child a step back from him. “Go! At once.”

Justin bowed, backed awkwardly away from his father's presence, then turned and ran.

Down the stone corridor toward the courtyard door he ran. Was there permitted enough delay to fetch his cloak? His father would be angry. He had not said “Yes, Father.” He was supposed to say, “Yes, Father,” when Lord Chauncey commanded him something, but his mouth was always so dry that he could scarcely manage the words, and he was always so terrified he forgot. Better not risk taking time to find the cloak. God only knew what Lord Chauncey would do to him if he dawdled. He felt no assurance, such as Xanthea had, that he would not be killed.

In tunic and breeches, with no other covering, Justin ran out into the snowy courtyard and across it to the stable.

“Saddle Ebony,” he ordered the first groom he found. His voice sounded clear. He was not afraid of servants.

The man raised his eyebrows. “Young my lord, it is growing dark! You'll not be riding out now.”

“My father commands it,” said Justin.

This was not a saying lightly to be questioned. The man looked anxiously at the sky, at the snow lying thick on the ground, at Justin's bare head and cloakless shoulders, but he brought the pony Ebony. It was not truly a black pony, though Justin, who had named it, liked to think it black as a black knight's warhorse. But in fact it was sooty brown, round, short-legged and sour-tempered, and so small that its back rose not much above the groom's waist.

He saddled and bridled the beast, and the young lord mounted. The pony balked at leaving the stable, for it wanted its supper at least as much as Justin wanted his. But the boy was determined, and set his slender lips in a hard line, and kicked and urged Ebony for all he was worth, and rode out at the postern gate. Night had fallen, very clear, full of frosty stars, and very, very cold.