by Alison Adare
His mouth tightened, and he covered his face with his free hand. “Jack,” he said, low and wretched, holding to her hand with the strength of desperation. “I’m so tired, Jack, I’ve been so tired. I can’t think what to do. Sometimes it seems so clear, and then …”
“Then let me decide,” Janet said, and when he nodded, “You need to sleep, first. Lie down.” She added, “On the dry side of the bed. As I’m sure was said in more than one chamber on festival night.”
That, miraculously, got a tiny twitch of humor from Tom as he obediently lay down.
“Now sleep,” she said, and as if she were a witch herself and her words had the force of magic to command obedience, his eyes closed and his hand went limp in hers, and he was gone, falling into the dark well of sleep with utter confidence she would not let the creatures who lived there harm him.
Janet watched beside him through the night as the fire died and the candle guttered, but he did not stir, and when he opened his eyes in the gray pre-dawn light his gaze was clear and steady.
“We have to leave,” Janet said softly. “Today.”
“All right,” Tom said and Janet bowed her head to hide her tears of relief. “But not hunting. There’s no way we could take supplies without being found out.”
They made their plans quickly, or rather, Janet made them, and Tom agreed to everything she proposed. He would announce that Steward Cooper was making a trip south before the weather turned bad. Janet would leave openly, on Masie and with the packhorse laden with enough supplies to last them both the journey. She would follow the south road, and then turn east once she was out of sight of the fort, picking up the east road when she crossed it. A day’s travel, and she would wait for Tom, who would take Nightfoot out for exercise in the afternoon and use the light of the moon to keep riding into the night until he found her.
“And here,” Tom said, going to his chest and returning with a small leather bag. “I have some coin left — mine, not Brinday’s. We’ll need it.”
Janet pocketed the bag. “All right.”
“Be careful,” he said as she turned for the door.
“And you. And don’t be late.”
She hurried down the stairs, making a list in her head of everything she needed to arrange. Bed-rolls, cooking pot, flint and steel …
As she rounded the corner and started down the corridor to the great hall a flash of movement behind her made her turn.
Pain exploded at her temple. She saw a blinding light, and then saw only darkness.
Chapter 18
For a long time, Janet knew nothing but pain. Sometimes it was sharp, pounding pulses, as if a hammer were beating in her forehead. Sometimes it was a steady tightening band, a vise being screwed tighter and tighter until it seemed her temples would burst. Sometimes it was hot aching waves that spread out from her head to envelop her whole body.
After a while, the thought slowly made its way across her mind that the pains were different, and that the difference meant different times, as well. Time is passing, she thought, and slipped back down into the dark.
When she woke again, the thought was clearer. Time is passing. It seemed like an important realization, but she couldn’t remember why.
Another thought, swimming dimly past. I’ve been hurt. That was why the pain. Was she on the battlefield? No, she lay too flat to be sprawled among the dead and dying. They carried me to the surgeon. That was all right. That was a good sign.
Darkness again, many times, pockets of blackness that she fell into without warning in between the different kinds of pain. She sometimes tried to open her eyes, or move her hand, but her body was indifferent to her commands. Sometimes a spoon was put between her lips and she tasted gruel. Sometimes after swallowing her gorge rose in her throat and she retched it back up again. Hands rolled her when that happened so the vomit could run from her mouth.
The agony of that small movement always sent her spinning back into the dark.
Then the time came that she tried to open her eyes and they did.
Searing, blinding light. Janet closed her eyes again and lay panting through the pain. A voice spoke, gentle nonsense. A cool cloth across her eyes.
“Mam says,” a child’s voice piped, “that you must lie still, and your eyes closed.”
Sound advice, and Janet was inclined to take it. “What …” Her voice was as harsh as a rusty hinge and she coughed, tried again. “What happened?”
“Someone hit you on your head,” the child said, and Janet found a name attaching itself to that voice, Emlyn, a name and a small pointed face under a wild tangle of dark hair.
With Emlyn came Brinday, and she knew she was not in the surgeon’s tent in an army camp. “Who?”
“No-one can say,” Emlyn said. “The young lord said you had left on his business. Then he went out riding and got lost. It was a tumult and commotion looking for him. Those are new words Father Donnic taught me.”
“Very good words,” Janet said. She tried to remember leaving Brinday, tried to remember what business Tom had sent her on, but it was all blank. “And Tom?”
“He came back very late. And then the next morning Glyn was looking down from the walls, and he saw you, dead. Well, he thought you were dead. And while he was going down to see Lew found Masie without her clothes cropping grass in the valley, and when Lew told him that, Glyn thought it best to bring you here, to Mam, not into the castle.”
Janet tried to push the pieces of it into a shape that made sense, but they kept escaping her. There was something … something important, she was sure of it, something …
Darkness again.
She woke suddenly and completely and knew what the important thing was. How long? How long have I been lying here?
Ignoring Braelyn’s instructions she opened her eyes. This time the light was only painfully bright, and when she squinted against it she could see it came from a fireplace and a candle. She tried to sit up and her stomach turned itself inside out, leaving her hanging over the edge of the bed coughing bile onto the floor.
Braelyn came running, softly scolding. “Sorry,” Janet said, then managed to say it in the right language. “Sorry. Braelyn. When is it?”
“Night,” Braelyn said.
“No, when, how long, how much —”
“Four days,” Emlyn said.
“Christ’s cod!” She tried to sit up again, failed. Braelyn pushed her gently but firmly back to the pillow. The young lord rode out … he came back very late. Rode out to meet her, Janet knew now, and God’s blood, what did he think when I wasn’t waiting for him? That I’d left him? That I’d taken his coin and fled? “I have to get to Tom. There can’t be much time left — Braelyn, help, the young lord, he —”
“I know,” Braelyn said. “There is time. You must rest.”
Janet wanted to protest but the darkness was drawing her down again …
The next time she opened her eyes, the light was bearable, although it still made her vision spark and splinter. The ache in her head had subsided to a steady throb and though her head spun when she tried to raise it from the pillow, her stomach stayed where it was supposed to.
Braelyn was stirring something in a pot over the fire. Janet said her name, and the wise woman turned. “Tell me,” Janet said. “Tell me about Idwal ap Bryn.”
Braelyn shook her head, and said something Janet couldn’t understand.
“I know little words,” Janet said slowly and carefully. “You could tell me with little words. But you don’t. Lew wants me to know. Davith wanted me to know. I think you want me to know. No-one tells me. Why?”
Braelyn scooped gruel from the pot into a bowl and brought it to Janet. “Eat,” she said, giving her a spoon.
Janet raised herself on her elbow and did, surprised to find herself actually hungry.
Before she had finished Braelyn said softly, “Lew makes. Davith sang. I …” She shrugged.
Davith sang a song about Brinday’s dragon. Lew carved roses and
Tom’s face. Neither of them had said a clear word to her.
Neither of them said a word against Lady Modron.
“Then let me say what I think,” Janet said, letting the spoon rest in the bowl. “I think that there is no dragon in the woods, Braelyn. I think there is a …” She searched for a word. “Beast there. A beast which goes on two legs, and wears a skirt.”
A long pause, and then Braelyn nodded.
“People fear to go against the beast. Even to speak her name. Perhaps they can’t. And every seven years the beast kills. Always a man. A young man. Seven years ago it killed Idwal.”
Another nod.
“And this year, it will kill Tom. Everyone knows it, don’t they? Emlyn told me people said he should never have come here. She said you said …” The translation of crying shame eluded her. “That it was bad. And you know when, because you told me I had time. How much time, Braelyn?”
“Two days,” the wise woman said at last. “Two days, on All Hallows’ Eve, the young lord marries. He is safe until then.” She touched the bowl in Janet’s hands. “Eat. You will need to be strong.”
~o~
Janet ate. She slept. She ate again. She found herself strong enough to sit up, and to swing her legs over the side of the bed.
Standing, though, sent her sprawling to the floor. She pounded her fist on the dirt in frustration. Two days.
She tried again and again until she could stand, wobbling and tilting as the room swayed, but on her own two feet. Then she set herself to cross the room, clutching the walls for balance like a drunkard. Then without support, walking back and forth, back and forth, until her knees were trembling and her muscles fluttering with fatigue.
And then there was no more time.
Janet had tried, in the intervals between struggling to force her body to obey her and lying limp with exhaustion at the effort, to work out a plan of attack. At first she’d thought to confront Modron in the church — interrupt the ceremony, make Tom listen to her, rely on the protection of holy ground to stop Modron working any dark spells. Show everyone the bible, the names …
But what, then, would she do if Modron’s allies in Brinday tried to stop her with force? She was as weak and wobbly as a new-born lamb. Lew would stand with her, Glyn would. The two of them against how many?
She could walk up to Modron and put a knife in her belly, but the woman was a witch and likely couldn’t be killed except by fire. Because surely, if it were that easy, someone would have done it by now.
In the end, she decided her only chance was to catch Tom alone. He’d been ready to flee with her before. They had neither money nor supplies, but those were problems that could be solved once they were outside Brinday’s malign influence, away from Modron and her dark powers.
So before dawn on the morning of his wedding day, she dressed herself again in Jack Cooper’s clothes, breasts bound flat, and with the support of a thick stick, made her way slowly up to the fort, missing the comforting weight of the sword on her hip and the familiar faint friction of her Saint Sebastian’s medal beneath her tunic. But they were gone: neither had been on her when Glyn found her, Braelyn had said.
She had to wait for the gate to open, and then slipped through with the household servants coming in to start the day’s work. There were more of them than usual, for the wedding no doubt, and the feast afterward, and Janet kept her head down and managed to pass unnoticed among them.
She had to give up the support of her staff for the next part of her plan. In the laundry, she took a fresh towel and laid it over her arm like a page. In the kitchens, she appropriated a steaming kettle, and then walked calmly across the great hall and down the corridor that led to the tower, doing her best to look as if the floor was steady beneath her feet and as if her heart wasn’t pounding with the knowledge that Modron was just on the other side of a wooden door.
She was gasping with effort by the time she reached Tom’s door, opened it, and stumbled inside.
Tom was already up, standing by the window, and for a moment all Janet could do was stand looking at him. For all Braelyn had told her he was safe until this day, it was not until she could see so with her own eyes she knew it to be true.
After a moment she set the kettle gently down on the floor. “Tom.”
He turned fast and she was shocked at how bad he looked, eyes shadowed, cheeks pallid. The lines at the corners of his mouth had become grooves.
And she was shocked, too, at the utter horror in his face.
“Jack!” he said. “What are you — you’re supposed to be miles away — Jack.”
“Not quite,” she said. She touched her temple gingerly. “Someone cracked my head for me. I’m sorry I wasn’t there when you rode out to meet me.”
“Gog’s sweet mother,” Tom said. He crossed to her, touched her arm. “I thought I’d missed you, that you’d gone on … I never thought that something might have —”
That hurt, a little twisting pain in her chest that made the dull ache in her head insignificant. “You thought I’d make off with your coin and leave you here to that witch’s mercy?”
“Masie was gone, your chest was empty.” Tom raised his hand, fingers hovering an inch from her forehead. “That could have killed you.”
“It nearly did. I wager they thought it had. I’ve been abed since then, nursed by Braelyn. Tom, we have to go. Right now, before you wed. Never mind about coin and supplies, we’ll work something out, but we have to go.”
“I can’t,” he said softly.
“Tom, you won’t see tomorrow’s dawn if you marry that woman.”
“Jack,” he said. His fingers brushed her temple and he winced as if the touch pained him, not her. “This is something I must do, as lord of Brinday. I know you don’t understand, but I have no choice.”
“God’s blood, you’re right, I don’t understand,” Janet said. She seized his shoulders. “She’ll kill you. She’ll kill you.”
The muscles beneath her hands hardened to iron. “I’ll not hear a word against my betrothed.”
“No,” Janet said. She closed her eyes. “They can’t speak, and you can’t hear. Oh, Tom. Come with me. Come with me. Don’t go to her. I don’t care what the lord of Brinday must do, Tom, be Sir Thomas Lynhurst and live.”
He covered her hands with his own and held them and she knew he’d agree, knew he’d come down the stairs with her, across to the stables and then away, far away, safely away —
Tom lifted her hands from his shoulders and stepped back. “No.”
Janet put her back to the door. “I won’t let you do this! I won’t move from this door, and if you get past me I’ll trip you on the stairs and I’ll follow you to the church —”
“If you force me to put you under lock and key, I will, Jack,” Tom said steadily. “Your wits are addled from that lump on your head. I won’t have you embarrassing me and humiliating my lady before the altar.”
“You agreed!” Janet cried. “Not a week past, you agreed when I said we had to go!”
Tom ran his fingers through his hair. “I was tired. And you … you’ve long known my weaknesses. But I’ve seen sense.”
“She’s bewitched you. She’s a witch, Tom! Are you so sure there’s only been wine in your cup, these long months? Are you so sure that —”
The crack of his hand across her face was more shocking than the force of the blow. Janet staggered, clutching her stinging cheek, staring at him. He looked steadily back, and when he spoke his voice was low and even. “I must do this, Jack. You must not stop me. I won’t allow you to stop me.”
When his hand touched the door Janet shook off her shock and flung herself at him, throwing her arms around him and trying to drag him back. For a moment they grappled, and then as Tom twisted and turned in her grip Janet felt his movement dislodge the band of cloth she’d tied, not tightly enough this morning, around her breasts. Pressed together as they were, if it gave he’d undoubtedly be able to detect that her body was not a man�
�s, would in that instant understand that she had been lying to him all along.
She tried to put a little distance between them, freed a hand to try and tug the band up again through her shirt —
Tom wrenched himself from her grasp and was gone. The door closed behind him.
As Janet pulled her breast-band straight again and hurled herself at the door, she heard the key turn in the lock.
Chapter 19
Janet jerked at the handle in the vain hope the tumblers hadn’t engaged, but the door held fast.
Stomach churning, she leaned against it, eyes closed. He locked me in here rather than listen to what I said. Her eyes prickled with tears. Once she had comforted herself that, though she could never be to him what she wished she was, at least she would always be his good friend, the friend he trusted above all others, who understood him as no-one else could. But now he finds it easy to imagine I’d steal from him, abandon him … now he sees me as an embarrassment.
Am I so very wrong? Is this all some fancy I’ve brewed up out of envy and imagination?
She set her jaw. No. The names in the bible, Tom’s face on the crucified Christ, Davith’s song … If he weds her, he will die. Opening her eyes, she straightened. Tom might have thought a locked door would hold her, but I am not a locksmith’s daughter for nothing.
Her hands were less steady than she would have liked, and it took her far too long to work the lock with the poor tools of a quill and knife she found on Tom’s desk. By the time it clicked open, the sunlight had crept over the windowsill, across the floor, and reached the foot of the bed. Janet staggered as she rose to her feet, legs cramped from long kneeling, stumbled on the stairs and hurried on. I’ll be in time. I’ll be in time. I must be in time …
But she was not. When she reached the door of the tower, the courtyard was full of the tenants, all looking towards the church. Janet hastened down the last steps to the ground, pushing and shoving her way through them, not caring about concealment now. What she’d do when she reached the church, she didn’t know, except that she would stop this wedding, she would save Tom from whatever evil the witch had planned, whether he wants me to or not —