Ladyhawke

by Joan D. Vinge

  Phillipe picked himself up from the mud and looked out into the empty darkness despairingly. “He’ll kill me,” he moaned, “he’ll kill me!”

  C H A P T E R

  Thirteen

  Isabeau rode through the darkness like a madwoman. Branches lashed her face as she forced Goliath through the undergrowth, and her wounded shoulder was on fire with pain; but the only thing that mattered now was the terrible fear inside her. The first gown that she had worn in two years hung on her like a muddy sack, nothing but an impediment. The shining light of the inn, the wonderful promise of wine and song that had shattered only moments ago, seemed to her like a hallucination. This was real—the darkness, the rain, the terror that somewhere in this forest of night the black wolf was in mortal danger.

  She slowed Goliath suddenly, seeing something ahead, two blacker shadows against the darkness. She reined in. The wolf hunter’s two horses stood tied to a tree in a clearing, their backs turned to the wind. The rain was beginning to let up, and her visibility was slightly better; but there was no sign of the hunter. She rode forward cautiously and dismounted.

  A wolf howled somewhere nearby. Her head snapped around; she stared futilely into the gloom. No! Run! Run! She wanted to scream it, knowing it would do no good. The wolf was her guardian by night, as the hawk was his by day. It would not leave her. But the wolf hunter had recognized her name . . . and so she knew with terrible certainty what he had been sent here to do. And she knew that this night could end in only one way. Reaching into one of Navarre’s saddlebags, she pulled out her dagger.

  Clutching the knife tightly in her hand, she started into the trees. She was sure the hunter could not have gone far. He hadn’t had the time—and besides, she was sure he would be waiting for them. A dead branch snapped beneath her weight. She froze. There was no answering sound, only the soft patter of water dripping from the leaves. She cursed her clumsiness silently as she started on through the woods. Her father had taught her to ride and hunt like a man . . . but he had never had to hunt by night.

  She froze again, suddenly seeing the ghostly outline of another figure just ahead. The hunter was crouched down in a tiny clearing. He raised his head, glancing from side to side like a suspicious animal. She held her breath. But he only crouched down again, for another endless moment, before he rose and disappeared into the darkness.

  Isabeau slipped across the clearing, passing the place where the hunter had been crouching. Her foot brushed the edge of the heavy steel trap he had set and hidden . . . and she passed on, unsuspecting, into the trees.

  Cezar, who always hunted by night, and had senses as sharp as any wolf’s, listened to Isabeau move past his own hiding place. He stepped out from behind a tree and quietly picked up a stone.

  Isabeau stopped again, listening, in the eerie, dripping silence. And somewhere in the forest, the black wolf stopped to listen and sniff the air. Steam curled from his nostrils into the chill and damp.

  Cezar hurled the stone. It struck the trap behind Isabeau; the jaws clanged shut.

  Isabeau spun around in terror, raising her dagger. She peered into the darkness. Silence. Only silence.

  The black wolf pricked his ears; he turned and trotted toward the sound.

  Cezar hurled another stone. Another trap clanged shut. Isabeau spun back, panting. Silence. “Show yourself!” she cried. Silence. “Coward!” she screamed. Cezar crouched in the underbrush, waiting with merciless anticipation.

  Another trap slammed shut, and a wolf screamed in anguish. Isabeau’s heart constricted; she stood motionless, paralyzed by the agony of her own horror.

  Cezar leaped up from his hiding place and ran to the trap. A large wolf lay dead in it, crushed between steel jaws that had been designed to hold a bear. Cezar grinned in feral satisfaction. He released the wolf’s body and pulled it from the jaws; then he reset the trap with deft hands. He started to rise.

  Something snarled, directly behind him. He turned, his eyes narrowing. An enormous black wolf stood watching him, its hackles rising. The wolf growled again, baring its fangs.

  Cezar spun around, pushing to his feet to flee. Suddenly Isabeau was before him, her eyes dark with vengeance, blocking his escape. She tripped him with her knee and drove him backward into the trap’s waiting jaws. The jaws slammed together, choking off his horrified scream.

  Isabeau stood where she was, gasping and drained. The wolf stared at her for a long moment with inscrutable amber eyes before it turned and bounded away into the woods. Behind her she heard the loud cracking noises of someone coming heedlessly through the trees. She turned, almost past caring, to see Phillipe emerge from the forest behind her with Navarre’s sword in his hands. He stopped, staring in appalled disbelief.

  Isabeau started toward the dead wolf wordlessly, passing the hunter’s body in the trap. She stumbled suddenly as something caught her ankle. She looked down—and screamed, as the hunter’s bloody hand tightened in a death-grip around her leg. He raised his head; his lips pulled back in a snarl of defiance. His face fell forward again, and his hand slid down her foot. Isabeau did not move again for a long moment—could not; her trembling body was utterly strengthless.

  Phillipe did not move either, frozen where he stood by his growing realization of all that had happened here.

  “It isn’t him,” Isabeau said dully, as he stared at the wolf. She realized, although it did not matter, that the rain had stopped. A thin fingernail moon winked between the clouds. She looked at the dead wolf silently. She could not tell its color, but it had been a beautiful animal. The trap had destroyed its beauty, its intelligence, its life . . . pointlessly. She glanced at the dead hunter, at Evil struck down by its own tool in fitting retribution. She looked back at the wolf again; she went to where it lay and lifted its broken body as gently as she could, ignoring her own pain. Her eyes filled with tears, but they would not fall.

  Phillipe came to her side, his face questioning and uncertain as he looked at the wolf, and up at her.

  “I wish it were him,” she said, her voice raw.

  “You don’t mean that, my lady,” Phillipe protested softly. “No one can wish for love to die.”

  She looked back at him, at his boy’s face, his mooncalf eyes gazing at her with such shining certainty. Once, she had believed . . . She smiled bitterly, looking down. “Really?” she said. “And what do you know of love?” She turned away, dragging the wolf’s body toward the base of a tree.

  “Nothing, I suppose,” Phillipe murmured behind her. “I’ve . . . never been in love. I have . . . dreams, of course,” he said wistfully, “but I’ve never lived the dream.”

  She glanced up at him. “Then you’re a fortunate man.” She knelt, laying the wolf’s body down beneath the tree. She searched in the leaves for rocks to cover its body with a makeshift grave; she piled them up with sharp, desperate motions as helpless anger rose like a wave inside her. “I’ve lived the dream and I wish him dead. I wish us both dead. Tell him that.” Her voice trembled, as the past two years of living death, the grief and longing and rage that she had held back for so long, suddenly overwhelmed her. “Tell him I curse the day I met him. Tell him, in fact—I never loved him. Tell him . . .” She looked up into Phillipe’s eyes, and her own eyes suddenly overflowed with tears. Drowning in grief, she cried, “Oh, how can he go on, day after day, in pain and anguish as great as mine, and still pretend there’s an answer!”

  Phillipe blinked and blinked, his own eyes full of tears. His hands quivered, as if he fought to keep them down at his sides. At last, in a voice so small she could scarcely hear it, he said, “He . . . loves you.”

  Isabeau took a deep, trembling breath. She rose slowly to her feet, wiping at her cheeks. She nodded, barely, smiling half in embarrassment and half in profound gratitude at the gift of his words. It was as if Navarre had spoken them himself, they had touched her soul so deeply . . . She had lived so long in this lonely exile, with her doubt and fear gnawing at her like serpents, poisoning he
r heart; never daring to set them free, even to speak them aloud, because there had never been anyone to answer them, to deny them, until now. She had not spoken a dozen meaningful words to another human being in two years, until he had come into their lives . . .

  She shook her head as the past rose uncontrollably inside her. She had learned to endure silence, as she had learned to endure the rest, all the things that at first she had thought were unbearable. At first she had left messages for Navarre, and he for her. But as time passed there had been less and less to share, even that way, until at last there was only pain, and even the notes had stopped. Yet even after so long, after so much pain . . . “It’s silly, really,” she murmured, “but . . . every night, when I wake up, I expect to see him. I know he won’t be there, but somehow . . .” She closed her eyes, sighing. “I can feel the tips of his fingers, nestled behind my ear . . . coming down, so.” She lifted her own hand. “Tracing the line of my chin . . . touching my lips . . . releasing a smile . . . then covering it with a kiss.” She broke off, opening her eyes again. Phillipe’s eyes still clung to her face, bright with tears.

  “You have lived the dream, my lady,” he said. “And you will again—if there’s a God in heaven.” His fists clenched, as if by his own belief he could make it so.

  Isabeau reached out, touching his face with gentle fingers, proving his reality. “Even if there is,” she said softly, “promise you won’t leave us.” Our gift of hope, she thought.

  He quivered slightly under her touch, like a frightened wild thing. “I . . . asked the captain not to rely on me too heavily, you know,” he said, glancing down. He looked up at her again, with his cheerful false face on. “I told my mother I’d be back in an hour ten years ago.”

  Isabeau let her hand fall away, her own smile rueful with understanding. She tried to accept the thought that he might not stay, that tomorrow night she might wake again to years of solitude. Even to have had him here tonight was a miracle. “We’ve . . . never had someone to help us until now.” She looked away, feeling the weight of her burden settle back onto her aching shoulders.

  “Don’t you worry, my lady,” Phillipe said, his voice shaking. “After all—how else can I live the dream?”

  She looked up at him, at the tears running unashamedly down his face now, and suddenly her own tears began to fall again. He grinned, and she grinned too, holding out her arms. They held each other tightly for a long time, because they had been such a long time alone.

  C H A P T E R

  Fourteen

  Marquet led his men through the ruined abbey by torchlight. Jehan had not reported back, and when they had picked up his trail it had led them here. Marquet stood by the drawbridge while his guards searched the abbey’s interior; he was tired and filthy, and his mood was growing blacker by the moment. There was no sign of Jehan or his men, no sign that they had ever left this place again . . . but someone else had. He turned back as one of his guards crossed the ruined drawbridge to report.

  “Empty, sir. But we found this.” The guardsman held up a hawk’s feather stained with dried blood.

  Marquet squinted at it in the torchlight. A slow, ugly smile formed on his mouth. All his questions had been answered. He looked up at the abbey whose ruins had given shelter to the devil’s agent, the Bishop’s mortal enemy—and his own. He raised his hand, gesturing at it. “Burn this,” he ordered.

  They rode out again into the night. Marquet looked back in dark satisfaction as flames consumed the ruins, as the fires of hell would soon consume Navarre.

  Navarre strode into the campsite with the new day, looking up into the sky. The hawk soared high in the air, golden in the early-morning light above a snow-capped mountain peak. She came circling down as she saw him and settled onto the lowest limb of a nearby oak. Navarre looked away from her again, without a smile.

  Phillipe still slept, as soundly as a child, on the ground beside the dead embers of the campfire; he held the sheathed sword in his arms, hugging it to him like a lover. Navarre felt his mood darken further as he looked at the boy.

  He crossed to Phillipe’s side and jerked the sword free from his arms. Phillipe woke with a start and scrambled guiltily to his feet. He held his blanket around him, shivering, rubbing his eyes as if he were still exhausted.

  Navarre looked at him coldly, then away at the mountain peak gleaming with new-fallen snow. If he rode all day, he could reach Aquila tomorrow . . . “All the roads on this side of the valley are impossible. The only way open to the city is over the mountain. It will be cold. There’s snow above the timberline.” He waited for the boy’s face to fall; waited for him to begin some excuse, to refuse, to get on his horse and ride away, and take the sudden unwanted burden of his young life with him. But Phillipe did none of those things; he only stood looking at him with an uncertain expression. Navarre turned and moved away toward his horse.

  Phillipe stayed where he was, kicking at the cold ashes of the fire. “They’ll kill you. And her,” he said almost angrily. “You won’t get within a hundred yards of the Bishop.”

  Navarre hooked his sword over the pommel and swung up into his saddle. He looked back at the boy wordlessly, his face set, and dug his heels into the stallion’s sides.

  “You should listen to me!” Phillipe shouted, as he ran to his horse. “I don’t have to come along, you know! I’m still a young man! I’ve got prospects!”

  Phillipe caught up with him inside of a quarter mile, and they rode on together. Navarre ignored the boy for the rest of the morning, as the horses picked their way steadily upward toward the pass. The trees began to thin, and soon they rode along the edge of the snowfields. The sun shone, making the mountain flash like silver above them; making Navarre think unwillingly of his home. His family’s ancestral estates lay peacefully in the mountains five days journey to the west . . . forever beyond his reach, now. He urged Goliath on impatiently.

  Navarre glanced over at Phillipe for the first time in hours, as the boy yawned once again. He had been yawning all morning, and trying to hide it. “What a night . . .” Phillipe muttered to himself.

  Navarre frowned in uneasy curiosity. “What . . . a night?”

  “Hmm?” Phillipe looked at him, startled. “Oh, nothing I couldn’t handle, Captain.” He smiled pleasantly, pulling the blanket more tightly around his shoulders, and looked ahead again.

  Navarre studied the boy with suspicion. He looked away and up suddenly, as the hawk called from high in the air. She had not come to him all morning, as if she had sensed his mood. But now she began to circle downward, and he lifted his arm expectantly.

  The hawk flew to Phillipe and landed on his arm instead. Navarre stared in disbelief as the boy caught her with an exclamation of surprise. Phillipe looked up, his chill-reddened face full of guilt. He smiled feebly, looked down at the bird again. “Nice bird . . . good little hawk . . .” He shook his arm, whispering, “Go to your master, now.” She clutched the thick folds of his sleeve with her talons. He shook his arm again. “Go on, Ladyhawke,” he said, more urgently. The bird remained locked on his arm. She bent her head and gazed at him almost pleasantly. Phillipe squirmed in his saddle under Navarre’s withering stare.

  “Tell me about it,” Navarre said, as they rode on.

  “Captain?” Phillipe asked, glancing at him with worried eyes.

  “Last night, boy.” Navarre forced the words out, an almost-forgotten emotion coiling in his chest like a snake.

  “What’s to tell?” Phillipe said nervously, looking down at the hawk. “Go on, now. Go, go, go . . .” The bird did not respond. “We . . . ran into a bit of trouble on our way to an inn, and . . .”

  “You took Isabeau to an inn?” Navarre’s frown deepened.

  “Fly to your master—fly to the one you love,” Phillipe urged, his distress growing. The bird clung to him like a burr. He looked up again, his face redder with embarrassment than cold now. “Well, you see, first we went to this stable—”

  “Stable?”
Navarre snapped, running over his words. “What did you do in the stable?”

  “We changed clothes, and . . .”

  “You changed clothes in the stable?”

  “Well, not together, of cour—”

  “You left her alone?”

  “Never!” Phillipe gasped.

  “Then you did change clothes together!”

  “No!”

  “Don’t lie to me, boy!” Navarre jerked the stallion up short, drawing his sword.

  The hawk shrieked and fluttered up from Phillipe’s arm, settling onto his own. Navarre stared at her, the haze of jealous fury clearing from his brain. Slowly he lowered his sword. To doubt the boy was to doubt her. He had never so much as looked at another woman with any sort of yearning, these past two years, unless the yearning was for Isabeau. He knew in his heart that she had been as true.

  Phillipe sighed. “She’s the most wonderful woman who ever lived, sir,” he said quietly, “and I can’t say I haven’t had my fantasies. But the truth is—all she did was talk about you.”

  Phillipe tried to look away; Navarre held the boy’s eyes as he sheathed his sword. He left his hand resting on its hilt. “Tell me what she said. Everything she said. And I warn you, boy—I’ll know if the words are yours.” He started his horse forward again.

  Phillipe followed, slightly behind, just out of range of Navarre’s vision. He heard the boy swallow, as if the words were catching in his throat. “She was . . . sad at first,” Phillipe said awkwardly. “She talked about the day you met. She . . . cursed it.”

  Navarre blinked, as if someone had struck him in the face. His heart sank like a stone.

  “And then she said to say she—” Phillipe broke off again. “To say she never loved you.” His voice strained.