My Lady Jane

by Cynthia Hand

  Pet zipped around the barn, sniffing here and there. Then, just as Jane was about to get to work, Pet ran back to the door and scratched to be let out. She looked decidedly uncomfortable.

  “You should have gone before we came inside,” Jane muttered and opened the door a crack. Alone with her horse husband, Jane set about unbuckling the girth and relieving him of his humiliation. He shook and stretched at the sudden freedom, then—to Jane’s horror—rolled on to his back and rubbed himself against the dirt floor.

  “Now that’s just ridiculous.” Jane snapped the blanket, making drops of sweat fly off, and laid it over a post to dry. The saddle followed.

  It wasn’t long before sundown, so she dropped the cloak near him and dug through the saddlebag to search for additional clothing.

  Nothing.

  Instead she found a bag of cured meat and two containers of water. She’d drunk an entire flask of water and wolfed down nearly half the meat before she realized she ought to wait for Gifford to change, and give him the bigger share. Surely he was as hungry and thirsty as she was. He’d been on his feet all day.

  “It seems we’re going to have to fight for the clothes,” Jane said. “One of us should get the shirt and trousers, and the other the cloak. As for the boots, they don’t fit me anyway, so you’ll just have to keep carrying me.”

  A burst of light filled the barn, and then Gifford said, “As you wish.”

  “G!” Jane spun around to find Gifford just pulling the cloak around himself. Impetuously she ran to embrace him, in spite of their awkward (and scandalous, though they were married, so did it really count as scandalous?) clothing situation.

  “Jane.” He wrapped his arms around her and kissed the top of her head.

  It surprised her, this sudden gesture of affection, but she welcomed it.

  “We survived the day,” she said against his chest. “We both kept our heads. Hoorah for us.”

  A laugh rumbled through him. “So we did. Hoorah.”

  She pulled away to smile up at him, and felt a paper crinkle in her breast pocket.

  “What’s this?” She vaguely remembered feeling a folded parchment in the shirt earlier, but she’d been too busy fleeing for her life to give it any attention. She took it out and instantly recognized her own handwriting.

  It was the letter she’d sent to Edward before she’d left for her honeymoon.

  “Peter Bannister slid that under my door in Beauchamp Tower.” Almost hesitantly, Gifford brushed Jane’s face and smoothed back her hair. “I thought you might want to keep it.”

  “Thank you.” All at once she felt safe, for the first time since their last night in the country house. She was tempted to snuggle back into the circle of his arms, but the letter seemed important. “Why would Peter Bannister want you to have this?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. I thought he was just giving me something of yours. To comfort me.”

  She turned the paper over. On the back there was a single word scrawled: skunk.

  Her breath caught. “This is Edward’s handwriting.”

  Gifford frowned. “Edward’s?”

  “Edward’s! I’d know his writing anywhere. You see how he shapes the s? When we were younger we had this one terrible tutor—Richard Cox was his name—and he was always going on about Edward’s ghastly penmanship. ‘You should write like a king,’ he always chided him. He made the king copy pages and pages of the letter s.” She smiled at the memory. “Poor, dear Edward.”

  “Yes, poor, dear Edward,” Gifford agreed faintly. “So what does skunk mean?”

  “I don’t know. I—” She gasped. “Our gran—my great-grandmother, his grandmother—turned into a skunk. She was banished to an old abandoned castle in the north years ago. I’ve visited her there. It’s called Helmsley.”

  “Does that mean Edward is alive?”

  “I think it does.” She hugged Gifford again, elated by the idea of seeing her cousin. “If Edward’s alive, then he’s heading to Gran’s and we can go there, too, and then everything will be all right, you’ll see, and you and I can—”

  Jane turned into a ferret.

  TWENTY-ONE

  Gifford

  Before G had time to be surprised about Jane’s transformation, something scratched at the barn door. G partly drew his sword from its sheath. (Not that he was really any good with a sword, but G was masterful at this particular bluff—to act like he could fight. Sometimes the act was all that was needed.)

  “Who’s there?” he called out, his heart hammering.

  There was an urgent whine in response.

  G opened the door and Pet flew in. She let out a couple of shrill barks, ran out the door, ran back to Gifford, ran outside, and then stared out into the night, one paw lifted, frozen.

  “What’s she trying to say?” G asked Jane-the-ferret. Jane responded by scurrying up G’s leg, then up his shirt, then snaking around his neck and ending up on top of his head.

  At this point, G realized he’d just asked a ferret what the dog said.

  With his Jane hat in place, G squinted into the darkness, trying to figure out what had gotten Pet in such a fluster. Pet ran a few yards out, turned, and panted at G. She leaned even farther away from the barn as if she would take off in that direction if only G would follow.

  “Pet,” G said. “Remember the bad soldiers. Right now is not a good time to travel, especially when I’m not a horse, and therefore we have no speed.”

  Pet darted back inside the barn, and with a flash of light, suddenly she was a girl.

  A naked girl with long, tangled blond hair.

  Naked.

  With no clothes on.

  “I caught His Majesty’s scent!” she exclaimed.

  A soft tail swept across G’s cheeks and came to rest right in front of his eyes, but G could still see the flash of light as Pet transformed back into a dog.

  He stood there for a long moment, flummoxed.

  “Did you see the . . . less formally attired girl who was just here?” he asked Jane. She dug her claws into his head. “Did you have any idea Pet was a girl? Although she didn’t look very comfortable as a girl. She didn’t make any motion to cover herself.” This time, Jane scratched his face. “Not that I noticed.”

  Pet emitted a high-pitched bark again and pointed her nose outside the barn, and it wasn’t until that moment that G remembered she had said words. While standing there. Naked.

  “You caught King Edward’s scent?” G said.

  Pet barked twice and ran back to the door.

  “We can’t go now,” G argued. “It’s too dangerous.”

  With another flash, she was the naked girl. “We have to go now! It’s already faint, and the rain will make it worse.” She flashed to the dog again. This time, Jane hadn’t had a chance to cover his eyes. How did Pet switch forms so easily, when G, and now Jane apparently, were governed by the sun?

  He’d have to focus on that later.

  “Pet, we have no supplies.”

  The dog growled.

  “All right, all right. We go now.”

  G grabbed his cloak and saddlebag, removed his lady from his head to set her on his shoulder, and they followed Pet out into the night.

  Pet was a fast tracker. With her nose to the ground, she slipped along, somehow maintaining a swift pace without breaking contact between her nostrils and the dirt. G tried to keep up. At least the moon was especially bright tonight, making it easier for G to keep from stumbling.

  They had to stop often so that G could catch his breath. During one of these rests, with ferret-Jane asleep around his neck, Pet flashed into a girl and stood before him. “Why can’t you just change?”

  G averted his eyes from her southern hemisphere, and then from her northern hemisphere, and then decided the only safe place to look was the stars.

  “I can’t control it. It’s a curse. When the sun’s down, I’m human. When it’s up, I’m a steed.” Okay, steed was probably pushing it.

&n
bsp; Pet groaned. “Get yer house in order.”

  “My house? I have no house.”

  “Not the one over there,” she said, pointing in the direction of London. (He could see her pointing out of the corner of his eye, even though his gaze was still averted.) “Your house in here.” She poked his forehead and then his chest.

  “Ow,” G said. Her fingers were incredibly strong. “Ow. How am I supposed to—”

  But she flashed back to her dog form and began running again before he could finish his question.

  They ran and rested and ran again. Breathless and panting, G longed for the sunrise, partly because it would give his human feet a break, and partly because Pet seemed thoroughly unimpressed by his long-distance running, and she refused to hide it.

  Then Pet stopped and looked around, confused. She sniffed in one direction, then the other, then the other . . . and didn’t pick one. She sniffed out every possible path, and even up the trunks of a few trees, and then she lay down and whimpered, her brown eyes drooping at the corners.

  “What’s the matter, girl?” G crouched down and stroked Pet’s head.

  A flash of light, and Pet was a girl, and G was still crouched over her, stroking her hair. It was a move that definitely breached the boundaries of propriety. He leapt back so quickly he almost threw Jane-the-ferret into the trees.

  Pet-the-girl looked like she might cry. “His Majesty was traveling with one other person. I was tracking both of their scents.” Her nose wrinkled as if she found the smell of this mystery person unpleasant. “But His Majesty’s scent, it . . . it stops. Something bad happened here.”

  Before G could ask her to explain, she flashed back into a dog. She seemed more comfortable that way, as if she could better manage her despair in that form.

  G felt his little ferret shaking on his shoulder, and knew that Jane must be fearing the worst for Edward.

  “He’s okay,” G whispered, then faced the dog. “Pet, we’ll follow the second scent. If it doesn’t lead us to Edward, it will certainly lead us to answers.” His wife trembled again. “But I’m sure it will lead us to Edward.”

  Jane gave a ferrety nod and flattened herself, ready for him to start running once more.

  G wasn’t nearly as excited to be reunited with Poor, Dear Edward as Jane was, though.

  He wondered if that made him a bad person.

  Several hours later, and after a too-brief nap, G became a horse, and Jane became a girl.

  He wondered what they were going to do with no saddle (which they’d left in their rush from the barn), but Jane didn’t hesitate to climb up on his back.

  (At this particular era in time, it was scandalous for a woman to ride with no saddle. It would be considered reprehensible—and possibly justification for a prison sentence—for a woman to ride with no saddle on a horse who is really a man. Even if that man were her husband.)

  No one had ever ridden G before. It was a strange, but not entirely unpleasant sensation to feel Jane’s weight on his back, her legs gripping him around the middle.

  “Do you mind if I hold on to your mane?” she asked, in as proper a voice as she would’ve used at a dinner party when asking, “Would you mind passing the butter?”

  G held his head back toward her in response.

  She took a handful, but she didn’t hold too tightly.

  “Let’s go find Edward, Pet,” she said to the waiting dog. “This scent must lead us to Helmsley.”

  Yes, G thought a bit glumly. Let’s find Edward.

  They walked for hours, until he felt Jane slump against his neck and then slip dangerously to the side. G lurched the opposite way to counterbalance, and she was able to right herself.

  “I’m sorry,” Jane said. “I’ll hold on tighter.”

  They needed food, G thought. Neither of them had eaten more than a few bites of dried meat for almost two days. Everything from the saddlebag was gone now, and the bag itself left behind because even that small weight would slow them.

  “We need food,” Jane said, as if she’d read his mind.

  But in order to get food, they would have to forage (none of them had experience), or they would have to hunt (none of them had ever killed an animal), or they would have to head closer to civilization (where there might be soldiers who wanted to kill them). And he couldn’t do any of these things in his current state. All he could do as a horse was try to walk evenly.

  “I’ll find something,” she announced. G stopped, and she slid from his back. He waited as she wandered off, returning a few minutes later with a small handful of dark purple berries. “I gathered all I could find. They’re Dorset berries. They’re safe. I read about them in Poisonous and Nonpoisonous Berries of the Wild: the Joys of Surviving England on a Budget. At least, I think they’re the safe ones. The pictures in the book weren’t very clear.”

  With that shining endorsement, she laid the berries out on a piece of cloth, divided them up into three even groups, placed one pile in front of Pet and another in the palm of her hand. She lifted it to G’s mouth, and he ate them, trying desperately not to chomp off one of her fingers in his excitement over food.

  Jane looked at her hands, now covered with horse slobber. “Gross.” She wiped her palms down G’s flank. “You can have that back.”

  Then she ate the other pile.

  “We’ll need to go to a village,” she said, her lips stained purple.

  Again, exactly what G had been thinking.

  Soon enough they hit a road, and it was only a little while after that they came upon a small town, centered around a giant tavern with a wooden sign above its door that bore the silhouette of a mangy-looking dog. It was nearly dusk and the three weary travelers had no money and nothing to trade with, so they stayed at the edge of the forest to come up with a plan.

  Jane loved coming up with plans.

  She climbed down from G and put the cloak over his back, anticipating the change. Then, she crept up behind a tree and peeked around the edge of the trunk to survey the village.

  The sun touched the horizon. In a flash, G was a man. He held the cloak around him and jogged over to Jane.

  There was a brightness in her eyes and a smile on her face that made his heart lift.

  “There’s a storehouse in the back of the tavern,” she said excitedly. “I saw a man loading dead rabbits and cured beef inside.”

  “Oh. I’m sure they lock it up. We’d have better luck if I broke into a house.”

  “We’re not going to steal it!” She shook her head, as though she couldn’t believe he would suggest such a thing. “I just meant they have food. And we can get some. By we, I mean you. You’ll have to go in there and do something in trade.”

  G imagined standing in the corner, reading poetry for a different group of strangers, a ferret riding on his shoulder. He imagined the ferret biting him if she didn’t like the poem. Not that he’d had a chance to prepare anything. Or bring a page with anything. The first time he’d read for a crowd, he’d meant to recite the poem from memory—he’d gotten to “all the world’s a blah” before his mind went blank—and he’d mumbled a few words that vaguely rhymed and then fled.

  “I’m not sure that’s the best course,” he said. “My skills are somewhat limited, thanks to my daily horse diversion, and I haven’t— In a while— I mean—”

  Jane blushed bright red. “Anyway, we’re married. And do you think anyone would really pay you for that?”

  G blinked a few times before it hit him. She meant—ah—consummation. And that no one would pay him for it sounded something like an insult, but there was no time for offended feelings now. “Oh, ah, I don’t— Rather, I haven’t—”

  “Never mind that.” Jane waved the topic away. “Don’t do whatever you were thinking about doing. Just clean some tables or scrub the floor. Taverns always have dirty floors, don’t they? What with the sloshing ale and the vomiting.”

  Jane seemed rather overcritical of taverns in general.

  “
I see. I can do that.” He started down the hill, but she stopped him. Probably good. He was wearing only the cloak, he realized.

  “Wait! I’m going with you.”

  “But you’re about to change,” he pointed out.

  “I’ll go as a ferret. In your boot.”

  “Jane,” he protested. “This could be dangerous. We don’t know what to expect in there. I won’t be able to concentrate if I’m worrying about you.”

  “But—”

  “Please. Stay here and stay safe.”

  She frowned and looked like she was about to protest, but then with a flash of light, her clothes fell to the ground and she was a ferret.

  G took the clothes and dressed. They were still warm from the heat of her body, and still smelled of her faint perfume. He was tempted to take a moment to breathe it in, but Jane-the-ferret was edging toward his boot. “No, darling. Stay here. I’ll come right back. I promise.”

  She stopped, let out a long ferret sigh, and deflated until she was lying flat on the ground. She looked unbearably bored.

  “Consider taking a nap,” he said. “You’ve earned it.”

  The inside of the tavern was well lit and filled with men and women in plain but sturdy clothes, most covered with some kind of fur, as though everyone worked with animals. They didn’t have the look of farmers. An odd stink rode under the scents of roasted meat and bread, but the food made his stomach grumble loudly. It was all he could do to keep from launching himself onto the nearest plate.

  Conversation died as everyone stopped what they were doing and turned to look at him.

  “Ah, hello.” He gathered his courage. This was just like reading poetry, but subtract poems and add people casually placing hunting knives and daggers on their tables. One of the women was filing her fingernails into sharp points, like claws.

  Just like reading poetry.

  G regathered his courage and strode to the far end of the room, toward the bar. He had to squeeze in between two burly men with tear-shaped scars on their faces. They all smelled vaguely like wet dog. A young man at the end of the bar leaned forward and smirked at him in a decidedly unpleasant manner.