Knights (7 page)

Dane stood alone in the room where, as a green and besotted boy, he had once sat at his sister-in-law’s feet, listening as she played the harp or sang merry songs or told marvelous stories of wizardry. How he had loved those tales of hers—full of magic and mischief they’d been—and he remembered them now, not word for word, but dream for dream. He felt a compelling need to be near Elaina, though of course he knew that, in her madness, she could not lend him
comfort as of old. Stories would not help him now, nor songs and harps.

He encountered Edward, who had no doubt been lying in wait, at the bottom of the courtyard stairs. The boy was peeling a pear with a thin-bladed knife, and Dane wondered, forcing back a smile, if the stripling fancied himself a fearsome figure.

“Hello, Edward,” Dane said. “I go to pay respects to the lady Elaina. Will you join me?”

Edward looked surprised, though whether it was the invitation that had caught him off guard or Dane’s patent refusal to explain his encounter with Gloriana in the solar, Dane could not guess. Nor, in point of fact, did he care.

“Elaina?” Edward echoed, as though he had yet to hear the name. “But she’s mad.”

Dane was already striding in the direction of the second bailey and the stables therein when he replied. “Perhaps,” he allowed. “Or perhaps our sister-bymarriage is merely wiser than all the rest of us.”

“But she sees things that aren’t there,” Edward scrambled to point out, taking two strides for every one of Dane’s, “and they say she hears voices.”

Dane shrugged and kept walking. “Mayhap it is we who are blind, and deaf,” he said. He spoke thoughtfully this time, wondering if those terms did not apply to him in some ways, at least where Gloriana was concerned. “In any event,” Dane went on, shaking off a sense of mild dismay, “I have no fear of the gentle Elaina.”

Within the stables, Dane found Peleus and saddled the great stallion himself, as he generally did. The beast was headstrong and had trampled more than one hapless groom in the brief time Dane had owned him. Edward, who had apparently elected to make the
short ride to the abbey along with him, led a respectable gelding out into the sunlit yard. Dane recognized the worn saddle and smiled slightly.

“I would speak of Gloriana,” Edward said, as they rode slowly through the outer bailey toward the gates, which stood open despite Gareth’s alleged problems with Merrymont.

“And I would not,” Dane answered, as the hooves of their horses clattered over the ancient timbers of the drawbridge. “Soon you shall be made a knight, Edward. Let us talk of that instead.”

The road that curved beyond the empty moat was lined with oak trees, and their leaves made pleasant, moving patterns of light and shadow. Despite his dilemma, a quiet joy burned within Dane’s bosom, the knowledge that he was home.

“I will be a mercenary,” Edward said. “Like you. Perhaps I will go and fight the Turk.”

Horrific images rose before Dane’s eyes, like specters, things he had seen done by and to the muchfabled Turk, but he forced them back behind the mental walls he had erected to contain them. He’d had much practice, since he’d gone soldiering, at putting such memories aside. “It is your life,” he said simply, “to do with as you will.” He saw Gloriana’s face in his mind, wearing an ironic expression that said the same was true of her.

“Would you do it again?” Edward asked. “Leave Kenbrook Hall, I mean, and England to fight for gold?”

Leather creaked as Dane turned in the saddle to assess his young brother anew. “When I have worked out the answer to that question for myself,” he said, “I will share it with you. War is not a sport, Edward, like the scraps you have with other boys who fancy
themselves knights, nor is it a game, like chess. No, it is a grim and ugly business, the making of war, and I am weary of it.”

“You are old,” Edward said, as though that fact dispensed with all else.

Dane laughed, then recalled that he had thought the same thing about Gloriana, that she would be a crone, with withered skin and bad teeth, if she had teeth at all. What a naive fool he’d been, for all his traveling and fighting, no wiser, in some ways, than Edward. “Yes,” he replied, knowing no argument would serve, in the circumstances. “I am old, and fit for nothing but lying on my belly before the fire, like an aged dog with too many hunts behind him.”

Edward was silent for a time, which was a mercy, to Dane’s mind. A soldier, a commander of men, Dane was not used to idle talk, and he did not relish it. He was beginning to hope they would gain the abbey gates without exchanging another word when the lad spoke again.

“I would court Gloriana,” he said, with a note of glumness in his youthful voice. “She is beautiful and kind, full of spirit and joy. She is quick-minded, in the bargain.”

“Does the lady return your sentiments?” Dane asked. The high abbey gates were shut, and he bent from Peleus’s gleaming ebony back to grasp the latchstring. Another sign, he thought, of either carelessness or a zealot’s belief in peace that admittance could be gained so easily.

“Gloriana believes herself to be devoted to you,” Edward answered, with a directness Dane could not fail to admire. “She will get over that, as time passes.”

Dane recalled the lady’s admonition that he go “to hell … and roast there on a spit,” and smiled sadly
as he rode through the open gateway. She’d gone a long way, had the lady Gloriana, toward putting her “devotion” behind her. Why did that cause him sorrow? he wondered. Surely it was the best that could be hoped for, that Gloriana should cease caring for him and resign herself to a quiet life in the seclusion and safety of an abbey such as the one he and Edward entered now.

The abbess, Sister Margaret, swept into the small courtyard, clad, as were all the members of her order, in a plain gray kirtle and wimple. She beamed at the sight of Dane, and the motion sent wrinkles spreading gently over her face, like cracks in brittle ice.

“So,” she said, as Dane dismounted. “What we have heard is true—you have come home to Hadleigh Castle at last.”

Dane raised his eyes to the gloomy hulk in the distance. “I have indeed come home,” he answered, “but to Kenbrook Hall. I will reside there, once I have attended to a few difficult matters.”

Edward uttered a small, disdainful grunt, but offered no other comment.

“How fares the lady Elaina?” Dane asked. Sister Margaret had given him her hand, and he had squeezed it slightly, for their affection for each other was great.

Sister Margaret sighed and turned to lead the way across the crumbling stones of the courtyard. The abbey, like Kenbrook Hall, was old, with a history that reached far back into the mists of history, beyond the things that had been recorded on scrolls and pages of parchment and into the realm of legend. “She claims to have truck with the fairies,” the abbess answered, “and it’s certainly true that Lady Hadleigh seems to grow younger, while the rest of us age. I
think, now and then, that her fancies are not fancies at all, that she not only knows the little people but is somehow one of them and privy to their most cherished secrets.”

“Perhaps you have attended our brother’s wife too long,” Edward observed.

Dane gave the lad a withering look over his shoulder, and Edward was suitably chagrined, though the effect would probably wear off all too soon.

Elaina sat, bathed in sunshine, in a corner of a small courtyard. Her face was raised to the light, a small smile played upon her mouth, and her eyes were closed. Her hair gleamed like burnished gold, and her kirtle, made of some gossamer fabric, moved softly in the breeze and seemed, in its own way, as alive as the grass or the birds or the fluttering green leaves of the oak trees.

She opened her eyes and gazed upon her visitors without surprise. Her countenance was placid and serene, and Dane thought, as she got up and glided toward them,
If Elaina is mad, then so am I
.

“Dane,” Elaina said, and stood on tiptoe to kiss his cheek. “You’ve grown since I saw you last. And there are no scars—at least, not visible ones. I suppose that is good.”

“Milady,” Dane replied, by way of greeting, and would have bowed if she had not gripped his shoulders and prevented him. She searched his face and saw the tears he would not permit to come to his eyes.

“My Dane,” she said, with affection, “you grieve for me, but you shouldn’t. I am the happiest of women.” Elaina turned briefly to Edward, who stood beside the abbess and the open gate, looking as though he would bolt. “Go, Edward,” she said. “You
are uncomfortable here.” It was not a complaint, this last, but a simple statement.

The boy left the courtyard willingly, and the abbess followed, closing the metal gate behind her.

Dane embraced his sister-in-law and planted a brotherly kiss on her forehead. Her hair and clothing smelled pleasantly, as Gloriana’s did, of summer herbs and fresh air and oil smoke. “Why do you stay in this place?” he asked. “You are no more mad than any of the rest of us.”

Elaina turned away at this and hugged herself, as if struck by a chill. “This is my lot, and I am content with it, for the most part.” She lowered her lovely head briefly, bowed by some secret grief, and then rallied, turning to face him again with shining eyes. “How did you find my husband? Is he hearty?”

“Gareth is well. He misses you, as do we all.”

“Yes,” Elaina answered thoughtfully. “I suppose he does, though he has his Irish mistress, you know—the lady Annabel.”

Dane opened his mouth, but before he could utter some foolish platitude, Elaina came to him and silenced him with the light touch of her fingertips.

“Hush,” she said. “Do not court damnation by speaking lies. I cannot begrudge Gareth his poor comforts—he was always kind to me, though I have been no sort of wife to him. Do you think she will ever bear him a child?”

“I cannot predict the future,” he answered gently, “but I think not. Such women profit by their barrenness, and surely know how to maintain the advantage.”

“It makes me sad to think that Gareth may never have children,” Elaina confessed, and again she seemed to hear some silent piper, some tune just beyond
the ken of Dane’s ears. “He would make a fine father.”

Dane nodded. “Gareth has been a good brother to Edward and me, as near a thing to a father as we’ve had.”

Elaina returned to the bench where she had been sitting when Dane first entered the little courtyard with Edward and Sister Margaret. She folded her hands in her lap and looked as pure and peaceful, sitting there, as an angel indulging in a daydream. “I had despaired of you, Dane,” she said, just when he thought she’d forgotten his presence entirely. “I wondered if you would ever return and be a husband to your lovely Gloriana.”

“You know her, then.” It was all Dane could say in that moment.

“Of course I know her,” Elaina scolded, laughing, and she was herself again, her old self, when she met his eyes. “Gloriana has lived in or near Hadleigh Castle since she was twelve, after all. How old was she when she became your bride, Dane?”

“Seven,” Dane admitted. “It’s barbaric, this marrying of children to children. I will not countenance such a thing when I have sons and daughters of my own.”

Elaina arched an eyebrow and smiled. “Beware of rash vows, Kenbrook,” she warned, in a teasing tone. “Fate is tempted by words like ’never’ and ’always’ and invariably seeks to make a mockery of whoever uses them. Anyway, in this case the match was a good one, made in higher kingdoms than our own.”

Dane sat beside her, uttering a heavy sigh as he did so. “I believe I love another woman,” he said. Even that morning, before prayers, he would have said he loved Mariette without qualification, but now he
wasn’t so sure. He had been seared, however much he wished it weren’t so, by Gloriana’s peculiar fire. He had never expected such beauty, such spirit, such exquisite nobility.

“Goose,” Elaina said. “Gloriana is your destiny, and you are hers. I knew it when she first stepped through that gate, just there.” She pointed, and Dane saw an ordinary portal and was reminded of why his sister-in-law lived in the abbey, rather than at Hadleigh Castle with her husband. “Do you know what lies on the other side of that gate, Dane?”

He shook his head, deeply saddened. “No, sweet.”

“Another world,” Elaina replied. She was very pale, and he saw fragile blue veins pulsing beneath the soft flesh of her temple. “It is a passageway into the world ours will one day become. And there are other gates, other thresholds and corridors, that lead to still other—”

Dane had taken her hand; he raised it to his lips and kissed the knuckles lightly. “
Shh
,” he whispered, heartsick, “You grow weary, Elaina. I have tired you, and you must rest.”

She nodded. “Yes,” she said, and tears pooled in her lashes as she rose from the bench and pulled free of Dane’s grasp. “Yes, I must lie down. I can hear it, you see.” Elaina raised both hands to her ears, as if to shut out some dreadful din. “Such a wretched, hurried place, full of carts without horses to pull them, moving fast and trumpeting to each other, like a thousand stags in a thousand forests—”

Dane prayed she would leave the courtyard, before he broke down and wept for her. “I will come again,” he promised, for it was all he had to offer. Though he had bought splendid gifts for Elaina, they were in his
chamber at Hadleigh Castle, for he had not thought to fetch them before leaving his brother’s keep.

“Send Gloriana to me on the morrow,” Elaina pleaded, hesitating at the gate he and Edward and the abbess had used, as wraithlike and fragile as a child. “I must see her.”

At his nod of acquiescence, which she waited to see, she vanished.

Dane lingered a few moments, recovering himself, and then strode into the larger courtyard, where he found Edward and the abbess, waiting with the horses. There was no sign of Elaina, for she had no doubt retreated to the chapel or her cell.

Dane took a coin from the leather bag tied to his belt and pressed it into the abbess’s callused palm, shutting her bony fingers around it. He did not ask Sister Margaret to look after Elaina, for that would have been an insult, since everyone knew she was devoted and made every effort on Lady Hadleigh’s behalf. Instead, Dane simply mounted Peleus and reined the great, impatient animal toward the outer gate.