The Black Hill

by Alison Adare

  Janet drifted in and out of a cold gray haze, occasionally shocked to full, agonizing wakefulness when roughness in the road forced Nightfoot to shift his weight to keep his balance. The road seemed to flick past between eye-blinks: one moment they were passing beneath the green-feathered branches of a row of trees, the next winding through a steep-sided valley, bare of all but grass and rocks and sheep. After one such blink, she realized that Tom had mounted behind her, his arms around her waist keeping her from falling from the saddle as she nodded and swayed.

  “Look up there, Jack,” he said encouragingly. “That must be Brinday. We’re all but there.”

  Janet raised her head. The road ran along and then around a steep hill ahead of them, thickly wooded. At the top of the hill, a castle stood. A small one, as far as Janet could tell at this distance, its walls low and irregular and only one squat tower. I could take that with one Company and a trebuchet, Janet thought, and then remembered that the King before this one probably had. It was old, built no doubt in the days when besiegers had nothing to throw against stone walls but their own bodies.

  Built before our people ever came here, probably.

  Beyond the castle, craggy hills clothed in shockingly green grass rose to the sky. They were studded with what Janet thought were sheep, blinked, and thought they were white rocks. She blinked again and saw white sheep grazing amidst white rocks, a black dog tracing a long slow arc behind them. Far above, a kestrel lazily echoed the same wide sweep, gave a wild high cry and dropped away like a stone.

  “All but there,” Tom said again, and urged Nightfoot on.

  The road wound through the shadow of the trees below the castle, their thick and twisted branches stretching out to arch over them as Nightfoot walked sedately on. Without even the tentative warmth of the shrouded sun, Janet found herself shivering convulsively, even the animal heat of the horse beneath her not enough to warm her.

  “All but there,” Tom said, rubbing her arms. “All but there.”

  They came out of the shadow of the woods, the road took a sharp turn, and the gates of Brinday were before them.

  Through the haze of pain clouding her vision, Janet saw the thickness of the well-weathered gray stone walls, saw too that there were all-too-many places where they were crumbling and unrepaired.

  Men and women, small and dark, stopped and stared as Tom reined in his horse in the muddy yard just inside the gate. Around them, the walls made an irregular, five-sided shape, one point crowned with the tower Janet had seen from the road. Both the walls that led from it were thicker than the others, and from the number of window slits in them contained internal rooms, although one was so ruined Janet doubted those rooms would be usable.

  She noted what looked to be the stables, tucked against the wall to the left of the gate, and across from it, tucked against the ruined wall, a building with a cross set on its roof-beam which must be the church. A series of dwellings huddled against each other between the church and the gate, pigsty and hen-house crammed against them, while opposite, staircases swept up in one corner to the tower door and in the other to the carved wooden leaves of what could only be the formal entrance, probably to the great hall.

  There were no sheep in sight. There were chickens, though, their enthusiastic pecking in the dirt the only movement as the people of Brinday stood and stared, whether at the first sight of their new, foreign lord, or simply in astonishment at the glorious fair-haired stranger appearing among them. Or both, Janet thought, remembering the first time she’d seen Thomas Lynhurst. It had taken her several minutes to realize her mouth was hanging open.

  “Good morrow, good people,” Tom said loudly.

  His voice seemed to break the spell. One of the men stepped forward to take his horse’s reins, looked up and —

  Janet had known that they’d speak a different language here, but knowing it and feeling it were two different things, and her heart sank at the sound of the musical nonsense that poured from the stranger’s lips. Only he’s not a stranger. We are.

  Tom swung easily down from the saddle. “I am Sir Thomas Lynhurst,” he said. “The new lord of Brinday.” At the man’s look of incomprehension, he said it again, slowly and loudly, as Janet could remember him speaking to the local people over the water.

  The man nodded, and spoke again: also slowly and loudly.

  It seemed as if they might go on that way all day, or at least until Janet gathered herself to intervene, but, blessedly, another figure came hurrying towards them, a slight man in a brown cassock with a wooden cross around his neck and his hair shaved in a rough but recognizable tonsure. “Welcome, welcome,” the priest said, and if his voice had a strange lilt and lift to it, his words were intelligible. “Welcome, Sir Thomas, we had word to expect you but we didn’t look to see you until next week. Few travel until the rains are done.” So it won’t be this wet year-round, thank Saint Scholastica. “I am Father Donnic, the Lord’s shepherd among the shepherds, ha-ha. But I see your boy is hurt!”

  “Steward Cooper,” Tom said. “Yes. We met with wolves on the road, not far from here. Is there a surgeon here? An apothecary?”

  Father Donnic crossed himself, turned to call something out in the local language, and then turned back to Tom. “The Lord’s grace that you escaped with your lives! The men have been out hunting them half the winter, a fierce pack led by the devil.”

  “Not any more,” Tom said. He strode to the packhorse and pulled the wolf-skin down, loosening the cord that bound it and letting it unroll. Sharp gasps from the onlookers, who might not know a word of what was said but could clearly recognize the massive size of the pelt, the breadth of the muzzle frozen snarling in death. “Jack put paid to him with one stroke.”

  That was not quite how Janet remembered that desperate panting struggle as she writhed in the dirt beneath the wolf’s crushing weight, but if Tom wanted to make her a hero, well, it might make things easier when she started telling the tenants to haul stones to repair the walls.

  She had more pressing concerns, however, starting with the distance between her throbbing leg and the ground. “Sir Thomas,” she said, “I’ll need a little help to dismount.”

  Donnic was talking in the singing local language, gesturing to her and to the wolf pelt, as Tom went around Nightfoot’s head and reached up to her. Janet slid gracelessly down into his arms, vision going linen white with the jolt. She gritted her teeth and swore, not caring that the priest could hear her, clinging to Tom’s shoulders until she could make her good leg stop shaking and support her.

  One of the women in the courtyard, spare and lined, with liberal streaks of gray in her hair, came hesitantly forward. She bobbed a curtsy to Janet and Tom. “Braelyn,” she said, placing her hand flat on her chest. “Braelyn.”

  Janet put her own hand on her chest. “Jack.”

  “Jack.” Braelyn gestured toward the stairs that led up to the base of the tower, and said something.

  “Braelyn has a knack for nursing the sick and hurt,” Donnic said. “She wants you to go with her so she can look at your leg.” He spoke to the man nearest him, who nodded. “Cadog will help you.”

  And Christ help me if she wants to take off my breeches to do it, Janet thought, but she knew she had to get off her feet as soon as possible or risk fainting in front of everyone. She nodded, and when Cadog took her arm, she let him draw it over his shoulder.

  He was small, but the shoulders beneath her arm were hard with muscle and he made little of her weight. Probably used to carrying sheep around all day. Janet limped towards the main entrance with him, Braelyn hovering on her other side.

  As they reached the stairs, the great door at the top opened. “Welcome to Brinday, Sir Thomas,” a woman’s musical voice said.

  Janet looked up to see what could only be Modron Bryn, the only daughter of the old lord of Brinday. No-one but the lady of this impoverished manor would wear such a gown, the green of it dyed deep and even, the wool so fine it fell around her slender
form like silk. No-one but a noble woman would wear a cloak with such a thick ruff of fur — foxtail, Janet judged. And the hand that artfully twitched that cloak apart to show the richness of the dress beneath it bore a ring with a great red stone, with gold bracelets around the wrist.

  That painter can’t have been very good. If he’d seen a fair likeness of this woman, Tom would have blushed far harder.

  For Lady Modron was more than pretty: she was beautiful, as beautiful as her betrothed in her own way. Great masses of glossy dark hair plaited and twisted and pinned back and up framed a slim face as pale as milk, eyes a curious, cloudy green. The fineness of her bones gave her an air of fragility, almost frailty, but the generous fullness to her lips — and the bosom swelling the bodice beneath the fall of the cloak — contradicted it.

  Looking up into that delicate, exquisitely pretty face, Janet had a sudden memory of what her own face looked like in a mirror, these days.

  She did not need to turn to see Tom’s expression to be able to see the future.

  Lady Modron spared Janet barely a glance as Cadog and Braelyn helped her up the rest of the stairs and through the door. Janet could hardly blame her: she well remembered how hard it was to look anywhere else when one had one’s first sight of Thomas Lynhurst.

  You knew he was coming here to be married, she reminded herself as the long, impossibly long, corridor ahead darkened and swam before her gaze. Be glad for him that she’s not cross-eyed and pox-marked.

  There was never any possibility he’d look at you as he’s looking at her right now, and that’s by the choices you’ve made as well as the circumstances you didn’t.

  He’ll love her, and marry her, and, God willing, father sons to hold Brinday after him.

  Her stomach roiled, and she told herself it was just the pain in her leg.

  The corridor ended finally, and as Cadog half-carried her through the door Janet was relieved to see it was someone’s quarters. Perhaps mine. There was a desk, a chair, a chest for clothes.

  Most importantly, there was a bed.

  Janet lowered herself down into it gratefully and lay staring up at the ceiling, waiting for the throbbing in her leg to ease enough for her to think.

  Then hands touched her, tugged at the points of her hose, and she sat up fast, seizing Braelyn’s hands. “No!”

  The woman frowned, said something, and tried again.

  Janet fended her off. “I’ll do it,” she said. Christ’s cod, what are the customs here? How suspicious is it if I refuse to be naked in front of her? She undid the laces on that side, rolled the leg of her hose down to her knee, and hiked up her breeches to show the blood-spotted bandage. “There. I’m not hurt anywhere else.”

  Braelyn undid the bandages and studied the puffy wounds. Unexpectedly, she bent over and sniffed at Janet’s thigh, then made a noise of surprise and disgust. She sniffed the bandages and scowled. Holding them at arm’s length, she carried them to the fire and threw them in, scolding Janet — at least, it sounds like she’s scolding — all the while.

  Cadog came back, panting with haste, carrying a basket. Janet saw jars, rolls of cloth, small pouches and —

  She swallowed as Braelyn lifted a small, sharp-looking knife.

  When the woman had measured something from a clay bottle by drops into a cup, she added wine, and held it to Janet’s mouth. Janet smelled honey and unfamiliar herbs. She sipped cautiously. As the wine touched her tongue, her mouth was flooded with a foul taste and she jerked her head back from the cup. Poison. Christ’s cod, Tom said it. Braelyn offered the cup again, and Janet shook her head.

  “What’s that?” Tom asked from the doorway.

  “Something noxious,” Janet said.

  He strode across the room and held out his hand. Braelyn put the cup in it, and he sniffed it, then raised it to his lips.

  “Don’t!” Janet cried.

  He took the merest sip. “Dwale,” he said, and grimaced. “Gog’s hat, it’s worse than I remembered.”

  “And what is it, when it’s at home with its mother?” Janet asked suspiciously.

  “A sleeping medicine, when it was home with my mother.” He looked at her leg, the bared wounds red and swollen, and then held the cup out to her. “I wished I had it when the surgeon cut that crossbow bolt from my arm. Drink it, Jack, you don’t want to be awake for what’s coming.”

  She remembered his face, white and drawn as bone, the screams he choked down to groans as the surgeon poked and pried, how he’d fought and writhed against her grip as she struggled to hold him for the knife … “Aye,” she said, and took a swallow of the disgusting stuff, and then another, and sat waiting for it to work.

  It was only when the cup slipped from her numb fingers that she realized it had. Hands laid her back on the bed, and she tried to co-operate but her limbs were strangers to her, numb and dead as logs of wood. Her head swam as faces loomed above her, drifting in and out of a darkness shot through with flames. The bed’s afire, she thought, tried to say it but found her lips thick and numb. Be easy, Tom said from the middle of the flames, while on her other side a bush of wild, white roses stretched out a branch and sank thorns into her leg as a great black wolf snarled and slunk in the shadows which grew and gathered and finally swept over her completely.

  Chapter 4

  Janet smelled vinegar, felt a cool, damp cloth on her face. She opened her eyes to see Braelyn looking down at her. The woman smiled, the expression deepening the grooves that bracketed her mouth but making her look younger at the same time, and patted Janet comfortingly on the shoulder.

  She raised herself on her elbows and looked down at her leg, freshly bandaged. It hurt, hurt more when she moved it, but it was an endurable pain. She pushed herself to a sitting position and shoved the leg of her breeches down over the bandage, then, gritting her teeth, bent her knee to reach the top of her hose. Braelyn put a hand on her shin and stopped her.

  “I can’t go about half naked,” Janet said, aware she was effectively talking to herself. “I’m going to need a stick, as well.” She mimed using a walking-stick. Braelyn shook her head, pointed at Janet, then slapped her hand on the bed emphatically. “Stick,” Janet insisted. Much good I’ll do Tom flat on my back. She swung her feet to the floor, prompting a flurry of what sounded like objections from Braelyn, at least by the tone. “Stick, Christ’s blood, stick!”

  “She says,” Father Donnic said from the doorway, “that you’re to stay off it for three days at least, or she won’t be answerable, although she can see you’re too much of a fool to do what’s good for you after that poisonous muck you rubbed into the wounds.”

  “That salve cost good money,” Janet said. “And the apothecary swore by it.”

  Donnic translated, and Braelyn screwed up her face and then spat into the fireplace. The priest laughed at her next words. “A fool and his money are soon parted, then.”

  “I can’t stay abed,” Janet said. “Sir Thomas told you, I’m his steward.”

  “You’ll be his crippled steward if you don’t listen to Braelyn,” Donnic said. “I’ve seen her mend men worse hurt than you’d think they could survive. She’s a special gift for it. Sent by God, of course,” he added hastily.

  “Of course,” Janet said, eying Braelyn. So she’s a witch, only none will say it. I saw her turn into a rose bush with my own two eyes, with a wolf as her familiar … but that was a dream, surely? There had been such women among the army’s camp-followers — women whose teas eased pain better than a skinful of wine, whose poultices kept wounds sweeter than any apothecary’s concoction. So long as she doesn’t fall down and start worshiping the Devil in front of me, I suppose … there were many men in the army who swore there’s such a thing as white witches, good Christians despite their uncanny powers. “Tell her — please tell her, Father Donnic, if you’d be so kind, that I have to be up and about, as grateful as I am for her warning. I promise I will keep my weight off the bad leg as much as I can. Tell her that in deference t
o her … gift, and gratitude for her care, I am asking politely, as Jack, rather than firmly, as Steward Cooper.”

  Eventually, after quite a bit more back-and-forth between Janet and Donnic and Braelyn, Cadog went and fetched two crude crutches, while Braelyn drew up the leg of Janet’s hose and helped her lace the points.

  “She wants to know, did you and your lord lose a bet?” Donnic said as Janet maneuvered herself to her feet with the support of the crutches. “To be dressed as you are.”

  A shock of cold ran through Janet’s veins and her heart seemed to stop beating. To be dressed as a man, that meant. She saw something, somehow … undressed me further while I slept … Christ’s cod, did Tom see? “I —”

  “I told her it must be the fashion, where you come from,” Donnic said. “You’ll not see any men here with coats so short and trousers so tight, though.”

  Janet began to breathe again. Fashion. She was talking about fashion. “Oh,” she said. “Well. I imagine it’s colder here, for one thing.”

  The crutches were made for someone much shorter than Janet, which is hardly surprising given the height of the people here, and awkward to use. It was fortunate the great hall was not far, and even so, by the time they reached it, her back was aching and her brow damp with sweat.

  As she hauled herself through the door, Janet was faintly disappointed. She had expected something grander, somehow, despite Tom’s comments on the poverty of the manor — fine carpets laid over sweet rushes, a soaring ceiling, ornate wall-hangings, perhaps even glassware on the table and Tom on a suitably decorative throne.

  Instead she made her way over a rug made of undyed sheepskin set over scattered straw to a well-made but not elegant table bearing earthenware cups and plates. Tom sat at the head, but his large chair was far short of a throne. The ceiling was further above her head than it would have been in her father’s house but it hardly soared and if the wall-hangings were ornate, the scarcity of candles made it impossible to tell. Hounds, sprawled by the fire, lifted their heads a little at her approach, watching her closely.