by K. M. Grant
All the while the orange-bringer followed on close behind, but now he was nervous. Time was passing and he did not want the Old Man to sail without him. He would have to act soon. His moment came when the barge could go no farther and Will and Ellie mounted the horses again. At once, the orange-bringer bargained for a mount for himself and pressed hard behind them.
As far as the orange-bringer was concerned, the first night ashore was a failure for Will hardly slept and kept jumping up at unexpected intervals, disturbed by Hosanna, who would not settle. However, the second night, when Will had pushed the horses hard all day and sleep felled him like a giant stone, the orange-bringer managed to creep very close. The horses were loosely tied outside the deserted herdsman’s shelter into which Will had pushed Ellie, making a bed for himself in the doorway where he lay, his hand on his sword, as dead to the world as a marble knight atop a crusading tomb. The orange-bringer slid up to Hosanna, slowly drew out his dagger, and grabbed the red tail. Two seconds later, he had been kicked unceremoniously backward and Sacramenta, jerking up from her doze, heard a great and furious rumble emerge from deep within Hosanna’s chest. It alarmed her and, tugging on her rope, she freed herself. Fearing Will, the orange-bringer limped quickly over to the safety of a rock as the mare barged past him. He cowered into a cleft but though Will murmured and his hand clutched his sword hilt, he did not wake. Beyond exhaustion, his senses were dead. Inside the cave, Ellie heard nothing and turned to the wall.
The orange-bringer waited a moment or two, then tried again. Again Hosanna made a racket and the man knew at once that he would never be able even to touch the horse’s tail. Yet he could not afford to come away with nothing, so he held back until Hosanna quieted down, then slid forward once more, this time avoiding the horses altogether. Crawling on his belly, he slithered past Will and only once inside the shelter did he stand up and flatten himself against the rough stones. With senses sharp as a cat’s, he could tell at once where Ellie was and in what position she was lying. Now he grinned. With her face to the wall, his task was easy. Crouching down on all fours, his dagger between his teeth, his fingers slowly crept over the blanket until he found what he was looking for. The plait, so long and heavy, was curled like a thick auburn rope in the dirt. It felt soft and strong and the orange-bringer stroked it gently. How many years must it have taken to grow? What did the girl look like as she shook it out? His eyes narrowed and flickered quickly up and down as Ellie shifted in her sleep and he felt the sudden hot dart of temptation.
Then he heard Hosanna stamping outside. At once he focused only on his task. Ellie’s skin twitched as he delicately touched her neck and pushed his hand farther up until he was right at the root of her plait. He tested his knife’s sharpness with his tongue before, with one fluid movement, he sliced. The plait came away so quickly that he was caught off balance and nearly dropped it. Quickly he scooped it up before it could begin to unravel, extracted a thong from his pouch and tied it tightly around both top and bottom. His grin returned as he backed away, stepping quietly over Will, who slept on. At the sight of the young man’s unprotected face, the orange-bringer’s hand prickled. Success made him bold. It would be so easy to cut that Christian throat. What a pity the Old Man had wanted both Will and Ellie to remain alive. Yet … Suddenly inspired, the man turned the tip of his blade into a pen and deftly carved the dagger mark of the Assassins onto Will’s cheek. His touch was like a feather. Will felt nothing. The orange-bringer’s grin grew wider. He did not bother to approach Hosanna again and Sacramenta had disappeared. He shrugged. Maybe he could have got the tail hair from the mare. Never mind. He would get the Old Man his red fly-whisk from another source. It was the girl’s plait that was the real prize. He felt it, folded it into his pouch, and felt it again. What a thing of beauty was a woman’s hair. Then he shook himself, cast one more baleful look at Hosanna, and vanished.
Will woke with a great start. Surely he had been asleep only for a second? He pulled himself up, hardly noticing the stinging in his cheek. He saw at once that Sacramenta was missing and that the ground around Hosanna was scuffed and trampled. Exclaiming out loud, he made sure that Ellie was still lying asleep before racing to the track up which they had ridden the evening before and gazing down it, praying to see the mare. He saw nothing and rushed back to check Sacramenta’s rope. It had not been cut. Now he felt a fool. This was his fault. He must have tied the rope too loosely, simply trusting that the mare would not test it. He did not want to call out for he wanted to find Sacramenta before Ellie woke. Instead, furious with himself, he untied Hosanna, who stamped his foot, edgy and troubled. “Find her, Hosanna, for God’s sake, find her,” Will begged. Surely she would not have wandered far? He let the horse go and Hosanna obediently moved off, but only yards. Will was right. Sacramenta had not wanted to leave the camp. She was grazing behind a tree, easily visible had Will looked in the right direction. Will sagged with relief. When he whistled, she ambled slowly toward him. He swiftly retied her and turned to find Ellie standing in the doorway of the cave.
He could not, at first, decide what was so strange about her. Her face looked different but the features were the same, except that they were expressing a degree of such shock that Will automatically moved toward her. “It’s all right,” he called, “Sacramenta’s here. She must have just got loose in the night.” Ellie glanced over to the mare briefly but without seeing her. She had no idea the horse had ever been missing. She opened her mouth, trying to say something, and when nothing emerged, slowly turned around instead.
Will’s mind simply refused to take in what he saw although his hand flew to his lips. He stood right in front of Ellie for almost a minute. “Why did you do it?” His voice, when he found it, rose high. “Why on earth did you do it?” He dared not touch her. Something in her expression frightened him. What desecration! Her hair! Her beautiful hair! He wanted to shout at her. After all, what good did she think such a sacrifice would do?
Before he could say anything more, Ellie raised her own hand and touched his cheek. Immediately, Will was aware again of the stinging. He tried to push Ellie’s fingers away but she caught his own and made him trace the thin lines of the dagger. “Do you think I did that, too?” she asked softly. Will felt black dread descending. As it folded around him, it changed from black to crimson, the same crimson as the Old Man’s beard, and Will gave a terrible groan. Now he ran his hand over the ragged remains of Ellie’s plait as if they were wounds and took her in his arms. In response, Ellie pressed her cheek against his and when they finally parted, her skin was blotted with his blood.
Will went almost off his head, crippled by what had happened and what might have happened. He cried out that he had slept like a boy when he should have been awake like a knight. His cries were loud and unremitting and Ellie could hardly persuade him to leave her side and saddle the horses. At every shadow, every noise, he rushed back, convinced that she was about to be murdered, then he ran back to the horses, convinced that they would be murdered, too.
It was Ellie who broke the spell. “Will,” she implored over and over, “Will, Will.” Eventually, she had to grab his arm and pinch it. Her voice betrayed no panic for she felt none. In fact, although the loss of her hair had given her the biggest fright of her life, the lightness of her head, now she tossed it about, was not unwelcome and although she waited for a great sadness to well up within her, it never arrived. Her hair had been beautiful but it was only hair. To her surprise, Ellie found that she did not really care. “Will, listen to me. You have to pull yourself together. Amal will have done this and I don’t think he wants to kill us. He’s just warning us, trying to frighten us away from Richard. He must have passed by. We must only concentrate on catching up to him.” She ran her fingers through the crop she had left. It stood up on end, forming a kind of halo. Then she made a funny face. “At last Marissa and I have something in common,” she said, and smiled the old smile Will had not seen for months.
The smile calmed hi
m a little and he desperately wanted to believe her but he could not think the intruder had been Amal. Shihab would surely never have arrived and left again without creating a scene. Ellie, however, displayed an endearing obstinacy. “I am going to believe it was Amal,” she said decidedly as she helped to tighten Sacramenta’s girth, “and I refuse to be frightened. You know, Will, I have felt so sorry for myself, since Kamil”—her face darkened and her voice dropped before rising again—“but we can fight back, can’t we? Amal and his Old Man may be able to do what they like and maybe we can’t guard against them as easily as we can guard against snakes but we can refuse to be turned into mice. Say we can, Will. Say it.”
“How can I say it when I don’t feel it?” cried Will. “If I were to lose you, what would be left for me?” He couldn’t help it. He had never felt so helpless, so in the grip of forces against which he had no weapons.
Ellie came over and took his face between her hands. She made him look up but he didn’t want to for he could not get used to her new appearance. Without her hair she was a little girl again while he felt so old. Nevertheless, he did not move away. “William de Granville,” Ellie said, forcing him to meet her gaze, “you are a knight of England. Your king needs you. Hartslove needs you. The memories of all the people you have loved and still love need you. Old Nurse needs you. And”—she looked straight into his eyes—“I need you. Don’t you see? You are doing just what the Old Man wants. He doesn’t care about killing bodies. He wants to kill souls. This dread is his victory. Throw it off, Will. If you can, then I can, too. We can do it together. We have the horses and we have each other. If we can’t be brave now, then we really are lost and I don’t want to be lost, Will, and if I don’t want to be lost, you can’t be lost either.” As her words died away she held his face tighter, took a deep breath, and kissed him. It was a kiss filled with everything they had ever shared, filled with their present fears and their future hopes. It was not delivered as a reward or in expectation of gratitude: Ellie gave it because it felt as natural as breathing.
Will never forgot that moment. It was not a moment of joy or of triumph or of reassurance. He did not realize at once what it really was. The kiss was not fleeting, nor was it passionate. It was firm, almost severe, and was full of something deeper and more durable than a sudden impulse. It seemed somehow at odds with Ellie’s new, almost childish looks but he knew it could only have come from a heart that beat for the same things as did his own. It did not dispel his worries about either Ellie’s feelings for him or their situation yet he no longer felt helpless. The kiss gave him a new kind of courage he had not felt before. He no longer felt alone.
Afterward, they did not speak but mounted quickly. Hosanna set the pace and the two horses sped on, side by side. Occasionally Will looked over at Ellie and saw her face set with the effort of keeping up. But he did not need her to look at him. Even as they galloped, though his fears were as sharp as ever, the crimson pall of dread began to lift from his shoulders. Hosanna felt strong underneath him and when the horse flicked back his ears to hear his master’s words, Will found his heart glowing.
It did not glow for long, for almost at once the weather became their enemy. Struggling against gales strong as a slamming door, the horses were battered half to death. At night they shivered and more than once even Ellie’s new hopefulness was not enough to keep them cheerful. Sometimes Will imagined Amal already at Speyer and Kamil’s knife already lodged between Richard’s ribs. Sometimes he could already hear men muttering Kamil’s name and his own with loathing. Then he depended on Ellie’s encouragement and Hosanna’s keenness as never before. On many icy dawns, humans and horses would gather together, leaning on each other to pool their collective strength.
Then the weather changed again. Now they traveled through countryside turned eerily magical by a winter sun sparkling with an edge unknown in England. The snow was pristine and the trees star-studded with frost. The vista was so bright that it stung Will’s and Ellie’s eyes. Life was difficult for the horses as the snow balled in their feet. Will endlessly had to climb on and off to dig it out. At first they preferred this to the slush, but as the days dragged on, the brittle otherworldliness of it all sickened them and they longed for something duller and less piercing. As the clouds once again began to gather they at last heard news of the silver horse. Seeking hospitality from a farmstead, they learned that she had passed through two days before. Will began to panic again. They must go faster. It would be worse to be nearly there and still to fail. He asked more of the horses, hardening his heart as Ellie and Sacramenta visibly drooped. When they finally reached the Rhine and found another barge for the last lap, they all collapsed onto it with gratitude.
This river journey, however, was far from peaceful. The bargeman asked questions all the time and Will had to make up increasingly evasive answers. Indeed, the bargeman’s questions were so pointed that Will and Ellie feared that he was another of the Old Man’s spies. Once this thought had taken hold, they could stay on the barge no longer, and early one morning they slipped overboard and were away.
It was lucky they did, for through the dawn mist the following day, Ellie saw Shihab’s tail, unmistakable as it swung away through trees in the distance. Ellie called out to Will, who had been conscious of nothing, his face dead with the monotony of the pace. He stood up in his stirrups and came back to life, whooping, hoping that the mare would hear and slow down. But a brisk breeze blew his words back to him and though they hurried on, they did not catch her. In the next clearing, however, in front of a rough forge, they found a farrier, his arms folded and his head full of gruff complaints. Yes, he had seen a silver horse and the rider had not stopped even though the animal had lost a shoe. He felt insulted when Will did not hide his joy at this news. “That animal’ll be hopping lame soon enough,” the farrier said sourly.
“Poor Shihab!” Ellie whispered, but she could not condemn Will’s glee.
They pressed on and on but, much to Will’s frustration, never caught sight of Shihab again. Soon Will stopped asking for he reckoned they must have fewer than a hundred miles to go. “If we go as fast as the horses can carry us, we can get to Speyer in under two days,” he said to Ellie. “We will have to push them very hard but it will just be for that short time. When we get there, they can easily recover.” He found that he himself could not rest at all. All the time he saw Amal raising the dagger for the fatal thrust. Even the slightest delay was unthinkable.
About three hours after dawn on the last day of January, they at last passed through the gate of the town. Neither Will nor Ellie had any strength left to cheer and while Hosanna was still sound, Sacramenta was limping badly as they ground to a halt in the shadow of the great cathedral. Bone-tired, the horses’ hooves dragged. Will slumped off, his ears still reverberating from the endless galloping beat and his muscles throbbing. But even as his body tried to readjust, his mind was asking why their haphazard arrival had been completely uncontested. The town seemed sleepy, and not just with the sleep of a winter’s night. Where were the soldiers, the retainers, the wagons and horses, and all the great gaggle of imperial hangers-on who should have been jostling for space in the streets? Where were the men from England and from the Angevin lands who had made the journey to see Richard? Where was Queen Eleanor, who must surely be here by now? Big as the cathedral was, they could surely not all be living inside it? Will gazed about him, uncomprehending. Any moment now, the place would come alive. It would. It must.
But it did not. Nobody appeared until a group of women emerged from a small door. Their heads were covered and they walked with that special gliding movement that marked them out from field-plodding peasants. Will stared at them. Nuns. He shook his head. He didn’t want to see nuns. Maybe he had made a terrible mistake and this wasn’t Speyer after all.
The women stared back disapprovingly from under their veils. They too were expecting visitors but of quite a different nature. They instinctively moved to the other side of the r
oad and would have passed by swiftly and in silence if Ellie had not addressed them directly. When the girl called out, the nun at the head of the small procession jumped, pretending that she had been too cocooned in prayer to notice the dirty travelers for she did not like to be thought lacking in Christian charity. But she need not have worried. Ellie was too tired to feel anything other than relief when she spoke French and was understood. “We are seeking King Richard of England.” Ellie was suddenly very conscious that she looked like a gypsy. She could not imagine what these women made of her hair or her shaking legs. “We must see him. Where is he?”
The nun was taken aback. She had been expecting demands for food or money. Such a question could be answered easily and at once. “Why, he’s not here,” she said. “All the imperial court has moved up the river and the prisoner king with it.”
Will fell to his knees. “But he was to be here!” His voice was a wail. “He was to be here.”
A young nun standing behind her superior and wanting her breakfast, shrugged and began to walk on, pushing her sisters before her. “Come on, Petronilla,” she urged. “You have answered their question.”
“Just wait, Hersende,” said the older woman, clicking her tongue. “Our breakfast will not run away.” She turned back to Ellie, a little more expansive now, thinking to teach the greedy nun a lesson. “King Richard was here,” she said, “but there was trouble—squabbling—and the emperor decided to reconvene the court in Mainz. It was the English king’s men who wanted this,” she added, sensing that Will was about to say something unflattering about the emperor, which she did not wish to hear. However, Will could think of only one thing. “But now we must carry on,” he cried, “and our horses are so tired.”