Chance (9 page)

Denizens …

“Iantha's gone!” Halimeda exclaimed.

Chance got up, numbly winding the blood-red sash around his hand. Halimeda scrambled up as well.

“Come, hurry,” she pleaded, “we must find her!”

“No,” Chance murmured, “perhaps it is for the best.” As she turned on him to protest, he pointed. “Look.”

A birdlike laugh sounded. At the outer edge of the mushroom ring a delicate beauty faced them, a fawn-gold maiden less than a foot tall. Shining red-gold hair curled down below her waist, and her large eyes sparkled vivid green, full of leafshifting woodland light. She was smiling, the sunniest of wayward smiles. Before they could do more than gape, she waved at them merrily and scampered away.

“She's gone,” Halimeda whispered, “to—”

Gently Chance hushed her. “Say no more.”

“She—she looks happy.”

“Is a butterfly happy, on the wing?”

They gathered up their things and walked away. Halimeda wept softly until they came to the lodge. There she washed her face, brushed dirt from her clothing.

“We must go to the fortress to live,” she said.

“Yes.”

“We will—have our own child, Chance.”

“I hope, more than one.” He kissed her.

“Our children will—rule after us.”

“We will have to be canny,” Chance said, “to rule so long. We will have to be hard as the trees, merciless as winter.”

Though few are the trees I will leave standing. I will make prisoners of those who disobey me, have them hew at the Wirral until it is leveled. There will be no refuge for outlaws or rebels near my realm. Or Denizens.

“A pair of tyrants, we will be, you mean,” Halimeda said.

“Yes. Old Riol did not toughen my hide for naught.”

He looked at her with a fey, changeling's smile tugging at the corners of his straight mouth, and in a moment she lifted her chin and gave him back the same wry, elfin grin. Her eyes lit with caprice, the willfulness that would save her heart from breaking, ever again. For she also had suffered.

From some hidden place in the eaves came a warbling laugh.

“Rule by the sword, Chance my lord,” the unseen Denizen sang.

THE GOLDEN FACE OF FATE

Having been conceived amid the mystic revels, within the dark mushroom ring in the midst of the wilderness called Wirral, in the center of the circling dance of those who are never called by name, and having been conceived by an act of most obscure magic, she did not make such a daughter as was customary for a lord. Even such a lord as Chauncey of Wirralmark.

Xanthea, her lady mother named her, meaning “golden,” a gift, a treasure, but she was not. She grew to be dark of hair and eyes, and tall, far too tall even for a lord's daughter, gangling and grotesque. Her face grew narrow, almost hatchet-shaped, and large-featured. From the time she was old enough to care, she knew herself to be ugly. Her father Lord Chauncey and her lady mother Halimeda knew something more of her, of which they did not speak. She reminded them of something, or some beings, and they hated to look at her.

Humbly, during her growing years, she tried to please them. But always they turned away their eyes from her face.

They were not cruel to her, though she knew, chillingly, that they could be cruel. Lord Chauncey in particular could be cruel and deadly to anyone who failed to render him proper obeisance, anyone who remembered a former name, that of a bastard commoner.

He made a proper lord, Chauncey. Half mad, as befitted a lord of Wirralmark. Arrogant, pompous, glorying in wealthy display, grinding down his people with his demands. His folk whimpered under his rule, and looked on him with wide eyes when he rode forth, and he ruled long.

They told tales of him on winter evenings. Some were the forbidden tales, whispered, of how he had been the old Lord's whipping boy and Wirral warden. Others were the plain tales, of how he hated the wilderness of Wirral. Even before Xanthea's birth he had set his serfs to cutting that forest back, back from the fortress, with great labor grubbing out the stumps and setting the wood in vast piles to rot, far more wood than could be used for fuel or building. For sixteen years Wirral had been pressed back, back, until it could not be seen even from the tallest tower of the Wirralmark fortress, and still Chance and his servants worried at it. He hated it. He wanted to destroy it utterly. Sometimes he himself rode out and took sword to it, as if in battle.

But Wirral was vast as the sea. It ebbed away before him, biding its time.

By the time she was grown, then, Xanthea had never seen Wirral, not even from afar. Her noble parents would not allow her outside the fortress walls, though her sisters suffered no such restraint. Because she was the eldest, they told her, a saying which made no sense, for her brother would be the heir. Perhaps, she sometimes thought with a pang, perhaps they cared for her in their aloof way. Or perhaps they were merely zealous to keep her pure for a noble wedding someday. But then, why might her sisters ride forth? Perhaps they were hiding her ugly face from the sight of folk who might scoff.

Sometimes, not knowing why, she dreamed of Wirral in vague, babyish ways: trees that danced and waved twiggy hands. She thought little of the dreams and did not mention them to her mother. Dreams were unaccountable and not worth her mother's concern. In no way could Xanthea know how Wirral whispered in her blood, how Wirral reached out to embrace her, reaching into her dreams, and how, on a certain evening of her sixteenth year, Wirral would lay upon her the hand of love.

It was the first year that she was old enough to take part in the festivities of Misrule.

Longtime custom made a stronger lord even than Chauncey. He disliked Misrule—though he had liked it well enough when he was plain Chance, and a commoner—but he did not dare to proscribe it. Tradition had it that, on the night of the early-winter equinox, servants would rule and mingle with the nobles as equals. Custom, which is often wise, also decreed that the mingling should take the form of a masque. Much of what transpired on the eve of Misrule needed to be hidden behind masks.

It could still be told which masquers were the nobles, of course. They were the ones who went gloriously arrayed. Months of tiring-woman's labor went into the making of their costumes and masks.

Xanthea had taken small interest in the preparations. She had dressed for occasions before, and no amount of finery could make her look pretty or even passable. Her mother's averted eyes told her as much. Moreover, her father had often made it plain that he regarded his part in Misrule merely as an irksome obligation. Trying, as always, to please him, Xanthea took care to think likewise.

Until the moment when she put on the mask.

It covered her entirely, even her hair. Golden, or gilt, its handsome face hid her own. Long lashes made of bronze pheasant feathers framed the eyes, and at the golden temples rose real falcon wings colored like new bronze, upswept as if for flight, and at the brow curved a carved wooden crest, like the crest of a helm, but fanciful. And from it a featherfall of rare peacock plumes, bronze and green and brilliant blue, trailed down Xanthea's back and shoulders. Emeralds jeweled her bosom, her wrists, her stomacher. Her gown of peacock blue, overgowned in bronze, flowed to the floor, and she stood tall inside it, and the golden face and feather headdress rode high, and she was not her ugly self any more; she was something else. Something strong and free and wild. Something chanting and barbaric, like a blue-painted warrior.

Striding into the great hall, she saw her plain, blunt-featured sisters, Anastasia and Chloe, younger than she but better loved, their faces so much like her father's, peeping at the masquers from behind tapestries. She watched their eyes widen when they saw her. She watched her small brother, Justin, his face too much like his mother's, too delicate and beautiful for a little boy, the future lord, watched his soft lower lip tremble. She loomed tall over him, and he backed away from her in fear and ran to meet the nurse who was coming to find him and take him away to his bedchamber. The woman would leave him there unattended and join the masque herself. Justin would lie frightened and alone in his bed. Xanthea laughed aloud.

Beneath the golden mask and gold-girt dress her blood ran hot. Masquers swirled all around her, many of their mask-faces as grotesque as Xanthea knew her face of flesh to be. Some, billed like birds, some snouted like animals. Some, warted and bristled like wild hogs. Xanthea saw butterfly masks with eyes peering through the markings of their wings. There were red-lipped harlequin-painted masks of wood and elegant half-masks of fine fabric, beaded and gemmed, held in place by slender wands lifted in gloved hands. Many of them Xanthea knew from years past, when she had peeped from behind the hangings, like her sisters. Some of the masks were generations old, for the commoners, unlike the nobility, cherished the weird or beautiful things and hung them on their cottage walls as ornaments and prized possessions.

The great doors opened, letting in a long reaching arm of winter air, and Xanthea turned her head to see who it was who came late to the masque.

She stared, and many others stared with her.

The man wore a mask she had never seen before, a strange and striking mask in the shape of a wolf's head, strongly carved and wildly furred, a beautiful and feral thing. The body of the man who wore it seemed as strong and beautiful and feral as the mask, moving with a wild grace, and folk whispered each to each, for no one could guess who it was. He wore a tunic the deep blue color of the windflowers that grow in woodland, and hose of woodland brown.

Music was starting. Someone took Xanthea's hand, and she danced.

At the far end of the room she saw her father, resplendent in cloth-of-gold under a smiling mask. She paid him no heed. She did not see her mother, nor did she look for Halimeda. She danced. Relieved from the awkwardness of being the lord's ugly daughter, her body danced with zest and grace. It did not matter to her that she stood taller than her partners. All was part of the masque. She was an Amazon. She wished her headdress stood a foot taller, bristling high like a crested bird-of-paradise. She wished she carried a golden bow and a quiver of silver arrows. Her eyes followed the wolf-masquer as he wound his way through the circling pattern of the carole. Something about him seemed to call to her. She felt her heart pounding. She loosened the lacings of her gown so that the white swell of her breasts showed beneath the emerald pendant.

Dances passed. Folk made shift to drink without showing their faces. Eyes gleamed whitely out of masks as if no more real than the masks themselves, as if made of clamshell. Some of the evening's customary ugliness began. Men ordered Lady Halimeda to bring them drinks and beat Lord Chauncey with bladders, trying to humiliate him. They knew better than to venture too far into vengefulness, however good their disguises. But the unknown man in the wolf mask went up to him and cuffed him on the side of the head as if cuffing a bastard.

Then the same bold rogue came to Xanthea and clasped both her hands in his, like a lover, drawing her close to him to dance.

Folk stared, for they knew the man would die within a few days, when the festival of Misrule was over and as soon as Lord Chauncey found out who he might be. And someone was sure to betray him, or many would die instead of just the one.

But Xanthea took no thought for her father, because the stranger was speaking to her. She could not tell whether under his mask his mouth moved. The words seemed to sound close to her head, as if he held his lips against her ear, though he did not. And his voice was low, with a faint burr in it, as if it might mask a wolf's growl.

“Greetings, Lady Xanthea,” he said. “I am Wirral.”

Beneath her golden mask she felt full of bold excitement, and she answered saucily, laughing. “But how can you be Wirral? Are you made of wood? Wirral is a mighty forest.”

“The mightiest of forests, Lady,” he told her. “You speak rightly. And I am Wirral.”

Her sauciness left her, and though she did not feel afraid she did not know how to answer him. And she noticed for the first time that he stood taller even than she.

Speaking to her silence, he said, “You do not believe me? But all that I say is true. I will never tell you anything but truth.” His voice seemed to come yet closer to her, though he himself had not moved closer, holding her at half the length of his arms and swinging her through the dance. “I will show you the ways of Wirral, so that you may know I speak truth. I will show you things you have never seen, and I will sing to you the songs you have never heard.”

And he sang to her in his low, husky voice, and the words sounded right inside her mind.

“Come to the mushroom ring,

Xanthea, our oddling;

Come to the revel ring,

Xanthea, our own!

Wirral will take back its own, we sing.

Wirral will take back its own!”

And his voice was no longer the low voice of the stranger, but it was the birdlike voices of many, of the unseen many who are never called by name, but spoken of only as the Denizens. From the trees all around her they sang. For she was seeing Wirral, seeing it inside her mind, more plainly than her dreams could ever show it to her; she might as well have been standing in the midst of that vast wilderness. The glades where felons roamed. The briars, the bracken, the huge, old, watching oaks. The fens, with corpse-white stubs looming. The rank wild meadow grass, and the ring of luminous mushrooms.

She stood dancing in that ring with—what, or who? But in that instant the vision faded. Back in her father's crowded great hall, dancing to the music of lutes and viols, with the wolf-masquer holding her closer than Lord Chauncey liked, she blinked, her lips parted beneath the golden mask.

“Go there with me,” the one who held her said.

Something mad and shadowed moved in Xanthea. No longer was she a blue-painted warrior or an Amazon. She was something yet stronger and wilder, more animal, more drawn by the calls that can scarcely be voiced in words. Images of Wirral danced within her eyes; the twisted, ivy-strangled trees … she was something reckless, daring, not afraid of them, of anything. Yet she did not speak.