by Lisa Cach
A medium-sized one came free, and as she dragged it out of the dam and out the opening of the fissure, the other logs shifted, the ones nearest the hole she’d made beginning to slide forward on their own.
She dragged the wood the rest of the way out and let it fall to the pool below. Behind her, another log came halfway out, its end hitting the rock floor with a soft thud, water pouring over it. She went back and pulled it away, and then others, one after the next, until they covered the floor and there was nowhere for her boiled feet to stand.
The water flowed freely now, and the logs inched their way toward the opening. She scrambled on all fours on top of them, and crawled out the mouth, swinging to the side to the rope ladder. She plucked the torch from the rocks and hung there, watching, as first one and then two more logs came out, teetered on the brink, and then plunged over the edge.
She was mistress of the mount. She might be nothing else to anyone, wanted by no one, but she was, and always would be, that.
Chapter Twenty-one
George looked down at the water pouring from the spring and felt his mood drop another notch. Mist covered the pool, testament to the cozy temperature of the water. Belch lay on his beach, his inexpressive reptilian face still somehow managing to convey smug self-satisfaction.
Or perhaps that was just George’s imagination.
Disappointing as it was to see that the dam had come apart in the night, he wasn’t surprised. Nothing was going right, nothing at all.
He didn’t know how he had messed things up last night. He had tried to find Alizon after she’d run off, but as always the castle doors were locked against him, and there was no answer when he shouted her name again and again. He had retreated to the garrison room, where he found to his horror the blood of her virginity on himself.
She had accomplished that much, at least, to her own agony and to his guilt—not guilt for having taken it, but for not having made the experience better for her.
Sleep wasn’t to be his, and he had lain awake in helpless frustration, needing to hold and talk to her.
In his past experience, it was always the woman who wanted to stay and talk things out, and the man who ran away. He was getting an unwelcome taste of life on the other side. It was no wonder women got so pissed off at men, if this was what it left them feeling like.
He would give Alizon whatever it was she desired—if she would only tell him. What did she want? Things had seemed to be going so well between them.
She surely could not have wanted to deflower herself in such an abrupt and painful manner. And if she truly had, he should never have let her climb atop him. He should have paid attention to the part of his brain that said she couldn’t be ready to take him yet, instead of the part that had felt her hot wetness easing down and had urged him to do whatever she wanted.
Damned if he did, damned if he didn’t. To let her continue would have guaranteed even greater pain for her, but it was when he had thwarted her that she had gone nutso.
He couldn’t win.
He pulled the rope ladder up through the trapdoor, looping it into a heavy coil. He’d like to tie Alizon up and make her sit and tell him what was going through that impenetrable head of hers. He wasn’t a friggin’ mind-reader, for God’s sake.
He looked at the coil of rope over his arm, then over the rail again at Belch.
Old sheep-breath down there wouldn’t be able to bite his head off if he had this ladder wrapped around his snout. Visions of “Crocodile Hunter” flashed through his mind, of that crazy Australian subduing giant crocodiles with a bit of rope, wits, and brawn.
He’d need more rope than this, but it might work. He had one try left, no better ideas, and with the Alizon affair presently in shambles, he had nothing else to do with his time than prepare for attempt number three.
What a lousy morning. The only good thing had been that Alizon had neglected to lock the kitchen against him, and forgotten as well to lock the doors down to the lair. She must be seriously upset to have left them all open.
He hefted the coil over his shoulder and headed back up the tunnel to the kitchen, still stewing uselessly over what he could have done differently the night before, and what might be going through Alizon’s head.
Halfway up the stairs his steps slowed, then stopped. He had left the kitchen door the slightest bit ajar, and now through the crack he heard giggling and female voices.
Voices.
The hairs rose on the back of his neck, the white faces at the windows and that night with the wraiths coming back in bowel-loosening clarity. His heart thumped, a clammy sweat breaking out over his skin. For a long moment he stood frozen, too horror-stricken to move or think.
In the movies it was always a mistake to go check out the scary noise. The audience said, “No, no, no! Don’t go!” while the brainless character crept up the stairs to the door, a baseball bat or other useless-against-the-dead weapon in his hand.
He understood now why the character had to go. To not go was worse.
He set down the coil of rope and lodged his torch in a wall bracket. Step by careful step he quietly made his way to the door.
The voices were still going, and the giggling, and he could hear now the creaking of wood and soft thumps. He heard dishes and utensils move, the sound sending a fresh wash of supernatural dread down his spine.
He pressed his eye to the crack but could see nothing.
This was one mystery that he would solve. Whether they were the ghosts of long-dead virgins or the spirits of all the romantic partners he might have unknowingly mistreated, he would face them.
Heart thundering, sweat glands in overdrive, he put his palms on the door and shoved it open, some impulse he did not understand making him shout “Boo!” as he did so.
Five young women screamed and scattered. A sixth was caught mid-jump on the sofa and missed her landing, falling with a thump onto her stomach on the cushion. She gaped at him as her comrades fled out the kitchen archway.
He gaped at her right back. She couldn’t have been more than twelve or thirteen, and had black hair cut in a very modern, hip, ragged explosion of tresses. Her garb, though, was thoroughly medieval.
And she was thoroughly human.
She regained her wits before he did, and rolled off the sofa onto her feet. She dipped into a deep curtsy. “Saint George, I am pleased to meet you. I am Pippa.”
He made a noise in the back of his throat.
She peered at him, delight in her eyes, a mischievous smile on her lips. “Did you make this thing?” she asked, gesturing to the sofa. “It is wonderful fun.”
“Who … ?” he managed.
“Pippa. Pih-pah.” She tilted her head toward the archway. “Those were Joye, Kit, Malkyn, Braya, and Ysmay. We didn’t know you were down there. Mistress will be very upset that you have seen us, but I’m glad. We were so tired of only watching and never getting to talk to you!”
“How many … ?”
“Of us? Including mistress, twelve.”
“Where … ?”
She skipped across the floor to him and grabbed his hand. “Come, come!”
He let her pull him out through the archway and across the corridor. She gave a series of raps to the double doors, and he heard a bar being drawn back.
“Is he gone—” someone started to say, and then there was a yelp, and the door started to close.
“No, no, it’s all right!” Pippa cried, and shoved the door back open.
He followed her into a great hall that was nothing as he had imagined.
There were the women, for one thing. With Pippa there were eleven of them, staring at him with big eyes, their ages ranging from Pippa’s to the mid-twenties. They were wearing gowns in rich colors, their hair—except Pippa’s—in thick braids down their backs or looped beside their ears, ribbons woven through.
One of the women had a harelip, and one looked like she had been badly beaten long ago, and the damage never repaired.
“Wh
o are you?” he asked them.
The answer came to him before anyone had a chance to explain. With Alizon, there were twelve. It had been twelve years since she had gone to the dragon.
She had never sent the virgins to start new lives in a town up the coast. They had been here, locked away in this castle, like lost princesses in a fairy tale.
Then he noticed the tapestries on their frames, a half-dozen of them in various stages of completion, silver mirrors on the walls behind them. Did the women weave all day, seeing shadows of the world in their mirrors, like a dozen ladies of Shalott?
“This is Joye,” Pippa said, dragging him to the first young woman. She was a pretty girl, with big breasts and a dimple in her cheek when she smiled a flirtatious greeting.
He barely noticed.
“This is Braya, and Ysmay. She is Sisse, that’s Reyne, then there’s Greta over there, Lavena, Kit, Malkyn, and this little one here is Flur.”
The “little one” looked eleven or twelve, with a fairy’s petite build and fine, flyaway blond hair. She gazed up at him with big blue eyes. “Are you going to kill the dragon? I miss my mama and want to go home.”
“Flur!” one of the women scolded. She was a broad-boned woman with a rough voice.
Flur’s little jaw set in a stubborn line, and she turned on the woman. “I don’t care what any of you say, I want to go home. I. Want. To. Go. Home!”
“You can’t, and you know it, so hush!” the woman said.
George did not want to believe that anyone could have sent that little girl to die in Belch’s jaws. He imagined Gabby being torn away from Athena and sent to a similar fate, and it became harder still to fathom it.
His eyes went to the woman with the battered face. He remembered Alizon’s story, about the girl who had tried to go home. This must be she.
The woman turned slightly, so that the less-damaged side of her face was toward him.
There was no question that Alizon had saved eleven lives, and provided well for them, but at what cost? Eleven women, locked away weaving, never to leave this tiny island. Never to marry or raise children. Never again to see their families or friends.
“Why?” he asked through his confusion. “Why are you all here?”
They looked at one another. The buxom one named Joye answered with a shrug. “We have nowhere else. They tried to kill us once in Markesew and would do so again.”
“Why have you not gone to some farther town, where no one knows you?”
She shuddered, and there was a whisper of distress through the room. “Go where, and do what?”
“Work. Marry. Anything.”
“We work here,” the rough-voiced woman said. “Come, look!”
“Yes, look!” Pippa said, and grabbing his hand again pulled him over to the nearest tapestry frame.
The two women who had been working on it, blushing, explained to him how the picture of women in a garden would look when finished. They were timid in their description, but there was also a certain pride in their voices.
And there was reason for it.
He had seen machine-woven tapestries once or twice, hanging in hotel lobbies or on the walls of a friend’s house, but he had never seen anything like this. He leaned closer and closer to the finished portion of the hanging, astonished by the detail and the fine gradations of color.
Pippa tugged his hand. “You are looking at it from the wrong side. We work from this side, which is why we need the mirrors.”
He looked questioningly at the women, and one of them pulled the frame away from the wall at one end. He peered around at the other side, and his breath stopped. What had been lovely on the back side was heartbreakingly beautiful on the front, the vibrantly colored threads blending into a smooth surface that from a short distance away would have looked like an oil painting. He had never known that it was possible to do work like this with strands of wool.
“Mistress taught us,” one of the women said modestly, seeing his amazement. “Like any girl, I knew how to spin when I came here, but that was all.”
“Surely you could ply your trade elsewhere in England, now that you have learned it?”
“I could not leave my sisters,” she said.
He turned to the group. “You could all go. Together. Find a town far from the dragon and set up shop.”
Furtive glances were exchanged, and weight shifted from foot to foot. No one spoke.
“Come, look at the other tapestries,” Pippa said, and dragged him onward.
He knew she was trying to distract him, but from exactly what he did not know. Why didn’t they want to leave?
Or was it that they couldn’t for some reason he didn’t yet understand? It was like the unknown curse upon the Lady of Shalott, keeping her caught within her tower.
The other tapestries were as remarkable as the first, but it was the last one Pippa brought him to that sent a quiver of eerie recognition through him. Déjà vu made the hairs stand up on the back of his neck, yet he had the paradoxical certainty that he had never seen this exact image before.
It was of St. George, killing the dragon with a spear. And in it, he was unmistakably the saint. Alizon stood some distance behind, gowned in pink and ermine, her curling red hair flowing over her shoulders. The virgins were crowded together, looking eagerly over the parapets of a castle in the background.
“This is Mistress’s,” Pippa said.
“When did she start it?” he asked, barely finding his voice. He stared at his face done in wool. The features weren’t exact replicas of his own, and yet something in the cast of the countenance captured
the essence of who he was.
“Many months past.”
Long before he himself had arrived on Devil’s Mount. Long before Alizon had ever seen him. It was an impossibility easily enough explained if he still wanted to tell himself that this was all happening in his head.
But he couldn’t.
He looked again at the figure of Alizon, her dark eyes intently focused upon the battle waged beneath her. Mysterious, brave Alizon, who was so fiercely protective of her hidden virgins and of her own fragile heart.
A dragon, he could have dreamed up. A castle. Bad food and old armor. Even Milo, he could have dreamed up. But not eleven virgins and a hall full of tapestries.
Not Alizon, with her contradictions and complexities.
And not the aching feeling for her that was spreading through his chest, of mingled respect and pity, admiration and frustrated adoration. What he felt was real.
Alizon was real. She had to be.
He thought he should be shocked at such a realization, but he wasn’t. It was as if he and Alizon had a bond that transcended time, and he had been waiting all his life to come here and find her. Part of him had started believing in the reality of this world as soon as he’d crossed the causeway to Devil’s Mount, but he hadn’t had the nerve to face it.
He touched his fingertips to the woven dragon, the black and green scales undulating with evil. This dragon had devoured helpless innocents and had kept the virgins locked away from normal life. It had to be destroyed, and it was his job to do it and to do it right. There could be no more goofing around, taking the task only as seriously as a video game.
If there was any chance a man had to prove himself worthy of a woman’s love, this was it.
Pippa saw his intense interest in the tapestry and leaned closer, examining it. “Marry! It is you!” She turned to the others who hovered nearby. “Look! Look! It is the saint! Mistress knew he was coming. It is a miracle! He truly is Saint George!”
George stepped back as they crowded around, exclamations of “Marry!” and “Jesu mercy!” whispered between them. The glances they gave him were even more shy than before—almost shamefaced. Cheeks turned pink with embarrassment. It was like being surrounded by teen fans.
Pippa met his eyes for a moment, then glanced away.
Joye, her face a deep scarlet, curtseyed before him. “We are sorry for spy
ing on you. We should never have done such a thing to a saint.”
“I am not truly a saint,” he said. “And there was no harm done.” What had they seen, anyway? Just him walking around, or talking to Alizon.
Then he remembered his baths out on the terrace, and Alizon’s frequent suggestions that he wash in the kitchen, instead. He felt heat suffuse his own cheeks.
“Mistress told us you were merely a man, and we believed her,” Joye said. “But such cannot be true.”
George almost contradicted her again, but then thought of the baths yet to be taken, and remembered the dream of lying naked while spirits wailed around him. Spirits? Virgins, gawking while he lay ill and helpless!
Better that they think him a saint, if it would preserve his privacy. He was suddenly feeling uncomfortable around these “innocent” young women.
He was, as well, beginning to feel a stirring of anger that Alizon had been willing to sleep with him, but had not shared such an enormous secret with him as the presence of these virgins. What was he, just a piece of meat to be used and enjoyed?
Alizon was going to have to give up the secrets of her heart to him before she had any more of his body, and that was a promise from the Saint.
“Where is your mistress, anyway?” he asked.
Alizon stirred, coming half awake. A feeling that there were things she did not want to remember nudged her back toward sleep, the same as it had several times already this morning.
A noise beside her bed dragged her fully awake. She forced open her eyes a slit, then widened them completely.
George was sitting on a stool, watching her.
She gripped her sheet and pulled it tight against her neck in maidenly surprise. “What are you doing here? How did you get in?”
“Pippa led the way, but Joye and Braya seemed equally eager to show me where to find you. Greta, I’m not so sure about, nor the others, except Flur. She’s a darling girl, is your Flur. It’s a pity she will spend her youth locked away in this castle, weaving tapestries.”
“Jesu mercy …” she whispered, and felt her world crumbling down around her.
“Yes, pray for mercy, but you’d be better to ask it from me rather than Jesus.” He looked away for a moment, breathing deeply as if to control his anger, then met her eyes. “Why the hell couldn’t you be honest with me?”