The Medieval Hearts Series

by Laura Kinsale

  SIX

  "One...two...three...hie!" Ruck yelled, driving Hawk forward, dragging at the lead horse’s bridle as the line went taut over his saddlebow. The animals threw their heads, blowing great puffs of frost, heaving and struggling as their hooves sank half to the knee in ice water and mud.

  Easy enough for the Princess Melanthe to choose to avoid lodging on the way north. She and her attendants sat in the wagon, lumbering monster that it was, without even lifting the leather cover to watch. Ruck let the line go lax and backed Hawk again, turning in the saddle to look down the line of five blowing horses to his men wrestling with the tree limbs braced beneath the wheels.

  Her whirlicote’s proud paint and glitter was a sad sight now, covered in dirt, drowned to the axles in the ruts. His sergeant-at-arms, standing to the side and peering underneath, shook his head and straightened. He held up his arm for another try. Ruck turned again.

  "One—two—" As the whirlicote rocked thrice in time, the men chorused in with Ruck’s shout, maintaining a miserably determined enthusiasm. "Hie-uuup!"

  Hawk bowed his gray head and strained. The harnessed horse reared against the yoke and came down with a splash of frigid water that sprayed over Ruck’s leg. Shouts erupted behind him. The whirlicote pitched mightily and went nowhere.

  He twisted round and saw two of the men sitting on their backsides in ice water. He cursed under his breath, throwing the rope off his saddlebow. Turning Hawk, he rode through the mud to the front of the whirlicote and reached over, pitching back the leather curtain.

  A miserable-looking Allegreto huddled nearest the front, cloaked in furs. Her single gentlewoman sat behind him, almost invisible in her wrappings. Ruck leaned farther over. Princess Melanthe reclined on a couch placed midway back in the vehicle.

  "Madam," Ruck said, "I think, if you were to descend, your ease would be well served."

  "I’m quite at ease, kind sir," she replied tranquilly in English.

  "Then I hope you find this place pleasing, Your Highness," he retorted in the same language, "for we won’t see another, if my lady’s grace and her company of twenty stone stay within."

  "Twenty stone!" she said, with a light surprise. "Do we weigh so much?"

  "More," he said.

  In the half-light of the whirlicote he couldn’t tell, but he thought that wicked-innocent smile hovered at her lips. "Allegreto will descend," she said in French. "He fancied the journey."

  "Aye, he will," Ruck said. "I doubt this whirlicote goes any farther, laden or not."

  "You must try harder, Englishman!" Allegreto shivered and pulled his furs closer.

  "Poor Allegreto," Princess Melanthe said. "Are you cold, my soft southern pet?" She laughed, changing to English again. "Green Knight—call for my litter."

  Allegreto lifted his head. "What did my lady say?" he asked urgently.

  She only smiled tauntingly at him. Ruck turned his horse away, issuing orders. As his men set to work on the harness, he rode Hawk to the back of the whirlicote, judging how they might angle her litter so that she didn’t have to step into the muddy water to make the change. Allegreto’s head popped out from the back opening.

  "What did my lady say?" he insisted.

  "Can you ride a horse, whelp?" Ruck asked.

  Allegreto groaned.

  "It was you who’d have us come on roads out of the common way," Ruck reminded him.

  "To avoid the pestilence!"

  Ruck looked at the bleak and empty country around. The track ran along the dark edge of a forest, with not a habitation to be seen. A hard, cold wind blew off the somber line of mountains that marched away to the west, burning his face. "I think we’re well secluded from infection," he said blandly.

  Allegreto scrambled up and balanced on the wagon’s gate, the long toes of his elegant slippers, one yellow and one blue, drooping forlornly over the side.

  "I have a fine rouncy for you, whelp." Ruck tilted his thumb toward a mud-covered harness horse. The sergeant led it up. The animal squelched to a halt and blew a spumy sigh, reaching out a hopeful muzzle toward Allegreto’s blue toe.

  The youth snatched it back. He looked up at the arriving litter and then over his shoulder into the whirlicote. "My lady, my exquisite gentle lady, I worship you. I live for you. You are more beautiful than the sun, more lovely than—"

  "No, you may not ride in the litter," she said tartly. "Gryngolet will not abide you at such close quarter."

  Allegreto turned back. Ruck held onto Hawk’s reins, half expecting another fit of passion, but the youth appeared to resign himself to the limited recourse, choosing to mount rather than risk the falcon’s temper—or his lady’s. By the time her gentlewoman was transferred to a mule and the litter moved into place, Allegreto was somewhere off amid the pack train, sawing at his horse’s reins to turn it away from a donkey loaded with fodder.

  Princess Melanthe appeared at the lowered gate of the whirlicote, wrapped in a mantle of ermine and royal blue. Ruck dismounted. In spite of their efforts, there was still a gap the width of a rod across the icy lake between the wagon and the litter. He saw nothing else for it—he pulled off his muddy gloves and moved to step into the water and assist her.

  "Pray do not," she said, leaning her hand across to catch the top of the litter. She flashed him a smile and with a swift move stepped across the gap.

  The litter tilted precariously, and she gave a small squeak, holding to the roof. Ruck dove forward with a splash, catching her. Her body startled him: a brief weight, a soft lithe shape within the voluminous mantle. He hardly realized he was standing to his knees in freezing water. Almost as soon as he touched her, she left his hold, ducking into the litter and lapsing back into the cushions.

  Somehow he had her hands in his. They felt so hot that they stung his flesh. He thought: witch, to burn so—and then she held his fingers for a moment and murmured in English, "Your hands are so cold!"

  "My feet are colder, madam," he said. He hiked himself out of the ditch and walked away with his legs dripping.

  When the litter was marshaled into place and horses harnessed to it, she summoned him again to her. Even bundled in her furs and hood as she was, Ruck found it hard to look at her face. As he stood by the litter, he let the curtain sag so that all he saw were the damask cushions and her cloak.

  "What is your counsel?" she asked quietly in English.

  He didn’t know why she asked his counsel, as she had never yet taken it, not even in so modest a matter as the choice of road.

  They had avoided Coventry, they had avoided Stafford, now they swung wide of Chester. In the past ten days she had sometimes wished to go north and sometimes west, as erratic as a belfry bat. They had come so far out of the way to her lands in the north that he had begun to doubt if she had the vaguest notion of where they lay. That, or she had gone witless in her head.

  "I caution my lady’s grace, let us hurry to the nearest manor and crave harbor." He had said it before. It was what they ought to have done all along, if not for her indulgence of Allegreto’s overblown terrors. "Yewlow lies east by sunset, if we don’t tarry."

  "And what ahead?"

  "An arm of the sea. Dee quicksands and the Wyrale," he said. "It’s wilderness."

  "You know the country?"

  "Well, Your Highness."

  "Dragon hunting?" she asked mildly.

  He did not give her the dignity of an answer to that, although it was true.

  Her voice from behind the curtain held a hint of amusement. "So we need fear no attack by a fiery worm, if we advance."

  "Outlaws only, my lady," he said dryly.

  She said nothing for a moment. Then he heard her sigh. "Allegreto will be tedious. Can outlaws be worse?"

  Ruck glanced at Allegreto pounding vehemently at the poor cart-horse’s ribs. "I think my lady’s grace hasn’t much experience of outlaws."

  She gave a low, wry laugh. "And you but little of Allegreto. But your fingers are blue with cold, sir. I might be pl
eased to see you in bed at Yewlow tonight," she murmured. Where he held the curtain, she caressed the back of his hand.

  He jerked away. He remembered what he escorted, that she was hot with an unholy flame and he himself all too quick to set alight. "I don’t feel the cold, my lady," he said stiffly, keeping his eyes down.

  ’Then we press ahead without tarrying, Green Sire."

  He heard no regret in her voice, only command, leaving Yewlow and its bed a yawning crevasse of iniquity, a promise of unknown possibilities—or perhaps just a pallet by the armory fire with his men. Perhaps she didn’t know that such as he could hardly expect to be offered a bed of his own, outside of a promiscuous lady’s. Perhaps she had meant nothing by her words, and her touch had been a mischance.

  He didn’t look on her again. But he felt the deep timbre of desire in his flesh, fire beneath his skin. As he walked away, he thought mad thoughts: that she prolonged the journey on his account, to seduce him or to torture him.

  The Wyrale lay before them, a wild place, afforested and forsaken—better to avoid it and backtrack to Chester, but if that was not to be, then in two days’ travel they could be across. He had a dozen men, well-armed and passably horsed; without the wagon they could make far better speed. He turned to the sergeant-at-arms, charging him to have the vehicle unloaded while the rest of the party moved on.

  Then he mounted Hawk and rode back into the train. Catching the reins of Allegreto’s packhorse, Ruck yanked the animal around, shouting orders to the company to fall into line. With Allegreto clinging and bouncing and complaining on his rotund mount, Ruck pressed both horses into a mud-splattering canter and took the lead.

  * * *

  They camped on the banks of the great tidal mouth of the river. Eerie vapor lay so heavy in the dawn that his men were sound without sight—he heard their quiet murmurs, voicing fears that they wouldn’t have spoken knowing he was near. Through the mask of the sergeant’s discipline, Ruck hadn’t fully realized how ready they were to abandon the Princess Melanthe without regret. This wild country made their minds easy prey to dark rumors about the lady and all the fears of feeling themselves far too small a defensive party. The mountains of Wales were invisible, but the weight of them loomed heavily, rebel-haunted as they were even in these latter days of peace. He wouldn’t have put it past his men to bolt, but Ruck held the simple mastery of having yet paid only a token of their promised wages.

  He’d dealt with such before, and set to work dealing with these, rallying them out of their doubt with an order to breakfast with white bread instead of rye. He followed that with a gathering at a little distance from Princess Melanthe’s tent, appealing in a quiet voice first to their vanity—ten of them were worth twenty of any others he’d encountered; and then to their greed—an heiress of Princess Melanthe’s stature would be generous indeed with her escort, and there were few to share the sum. He refrained from naming a figure, merely conveying the modest opinion that it would be more money than any of them had ever seen in their lives.

  They grew better hearty at that, and he set them to polishing the mud off their weapons in preparation to awe the countryside. Though the mist showed no sign of lifting, Ruck sent Pierre off laden with an offering of a fur to the hermit of Holy Head who acted guide across the sands for those too poor—or mad—to use the king’s ferry near to Chester.

  The mist hid the water, but the nearness of the sea brought a drizzling chill, seeping through Ruck’s mantle, dampening his skin. He’d already walked down to the strand, judging the tide. They must be ready to move as soon as the hermit arrived, but there had yet been no sigh of stirring from his liege lady—who was no early riser, he had found.

  He saw the gentlewoman leave Princess Melanthe’s tent, but the maid disappeared into the vapor before he caught her eye. Ruck wavered, standing before the emerald fabric. The maid had left the flap caught back, showing scarlet lining, the only blossom of color in the gray atmosphere.

  He coughed to reveal himself, and chinked his mailed hands together, and rattled his foot against a pile of shells, with no response. He moved back a little, turning half away, and stole a surreptitious look inside to see if she were yet awake.

  She was not. Amid a pile of featherbeds and furs she slept, with the whelp’s arms tight around her. Allegreto rested his cheek against her netted hair, his lips curved in a sleeper’s smile.

  Ruck turned full away. He stood staring into the blank mist toward the sea. He felt obscurely angry, and lonely. It was not a new feeling; he’d felt it half his life, since he’d left his home and found no place for himself in the world, but not for a long time had it been so keen and envious.

  He was disgusted. He would have run himself on an enemy’s lance before he would live as Allegreto lived. But it was not the warmth, not the soft place in a silken tent, not even physical possession of her that he most craved. Nothing of the truth of Princess Melanthe. What he wanted was that false and beguiling picture: a slow familiar awakening, sleeping close, trusting; easy smiles and union.

  He wanted his wife.

  For ten and three years he had believed God had taken Isabelle for good and sufficient reasons. Sometimes he caught himself wishing that she’d been taken in truth, that she was dead instead of in a nunnery, so that he could marry again and cease wandering in this limbo where his body tortured him and his heart hungered even after such as Princess Melanthe. He couldn’t tell that he was becoming better for it; he was becoming worse—he felt himself sinking toward that subtle offer of a bed in Yewlow.

  The untarnished image of the lady he served had once sustained him, but it held him no longer. Nay, she drove him now toward infamy herself. The vision of Isabelle alone had never been enough to bind him; he’d needed his liege lady of the falcon to serve, governing himself for her honor. When he tried now to put Isabelle in her place instead, he found an abyss of anger opening up beneath his feet: anger at Isabelle, at the archbishop who’d let her leave him, at God Himself. Without his liege lady, his defense crumbled against the endless question of why, why, why he must live without a wife.

  He raised his face to the gray sky and found no answer there. The archbishop had declared his vow before Isabelle invalid, but taken her anyway—leaving Ruck in an impasse he could only understand as God’s intention to hold him fast to chastity, archbishop or no.

  It seemed too pitiless that he should only be given a few weeks of love in his life and never permitted to seek it again. He had no calling for holy orders, of that he was certain. He felt no urges to preach to the Ninevites—he wouldn’t have known what to say to them if he had. He heard no voice telling him to wear sackcloth against his skin or wall himself up as an anchorite.

  He was only an ordinary man, and ordinary men were suffered to marry instead of burn, to have sons and daughters, to have a bed and a fire and a wife waiting at the end of the journey.

  Without his liege lady to fortify his resolve, he could only cleave to his bitter perfection, hating Isabelle and God...or surrender honor and hate himself. He had never thought truly of yielding before, but he thought of it now. He felt the tent and the deep furs behind him, and the whisper of hellfire on the nape of his neck.

  * * *

  Melanthe felt that today might be the time. Or tomorrow, perhaps. She waited for Allegreto to wake—or perhaps he was awake already: she thought he must sleep no more than she, always on the edge of consciousness, aware of her every move as she was aware of his. They had come to this compromise, that they slept so close that neither could move without the other heeding. She could feel his suspicions growing in the tightness of his arms about her.

  To Cara, Melanthe had said this journey would end at an English nunnery, but that was to be kept secret from Allegreto. To Allegreto, she had declared they traveled to her castle at Bowland, and that was to be concealed from Cara. Melanthe herself waited for the moment that she could rid herself of both of them. They didn’t know the country; they couldn’t speak to the English me
n-at-arms, and she had kept them strictly away from her knight. She had directed the Green Sire in a fickle course, invoking the fox to confound pursuit, leaving no scent in such places as towns and cities, winding and turning toward the safety of a strong and secluded earth.

  She worked upon Allegreto’s fears of plague. Like his fear of Gryngolet, it went beyond his reason—Allegreto, who had killed a man before his tenth birthday, would weep at her feet to protect him from plague.

  So she thought. Sometimes she feared it was only another illusion, that he and his father were always ahead of her in their intrigues. Gian Navona had his own intentions, driven by passion and mystery, as he had always been.

  But the safe earth of Bowland was almost within her reach. Already she had left the whole of her retinue behind in London—they hadn’t anticipated that, for Melanthe traveled always in great state, however quickly she might move. She couldn’t disperse her Italian household entirely yet without suspicion, but to organize their separate journey to Bowland, she’d appointed her most hopelessly incompetent and aimless attendant, to be certain they did not arrive ahead of her—if ever, considering Sodorini’s truly wonderful lack of efficiency.

  Only Allegreto remained. And Cara. Innocent-eyed Cara, who slept in Melanthe’s tent and brought her food; who would not be left behind, her devotion to her mistress was so very ardent. This sudden display of mulish loyalty confirmed all suspicions of the girl. Allegreto was right—the Riata had subverted her.

  It made no matter. Melanthe was going to be free of her; free of Allegreto; free of any threat of Riata or Navona or Monteverde. Within the walls of Bowland no foreign strangers could pass unnoticed, no Italian assassins could slip past the gate. She had only to arrive there before any enemy, and live enclosed by a fortress of Englishmen loyal to her alone.

  Cara returned to the tent. Melanthe pretended to wake, turning and stretching. She sat up, and Allegreto jerked a little, caught half-drowsing before he was full awake the next instant, like a cat. He rolled away and made a dismayed mutter when he saw the foulness of the weather outside, catching up his pestilence-apple and holding it to his nose as he left the tent.