Mirrors (Curse of Lanval Book 1)

by Dodson, Rebekah

  “I don’t know,” I said. “But at least we are alive.”

  “Do we have a choice? To follow them, I mean?”

  I looked at the queen’s horse, quickly putting distance between us. “Right now, no. Follow her or stay here and die.”

  Jules didn’t answer me, but instead dug her booted heel into the side of the horse and after the queen. “Hyah!” she called. Her horse took off like a jolt.

  Gripping the dying prince, I urged my horse after her, following the two horses into the crimson of the early dawn. East, we were traveling east, and away from the only thing that could save us.

  How will we get home, Gill?

  I’d never heard her voice so small, so defeated, so terrified.

  “I’ll get us home,” I said to myself. “Jules, I’ll get us home.”

  TO BE CONTINUED…

  Read more about Gill’s story in MARIE, Curse of Lanval: Book II, available on Amazon January 2017.

  SNEAK PEEK: MARIE

  Curse of Lanval: Book II

  Soaking, covered in mud and moss, we finally made it to backside of the grand hall. As we skirted the backside of the castle, I couldn’t help but marvel at the newly constructed stone. I’d seen castles galore in textbooks and travel magazines and visited quite a few with my Uncle Richard, although not this one particular one. There was something about the shining, well, newness of this castle. Limestone, I figured, as much of the castles were built with this plentiful material in ancient England as well as France. Everyone thinks they know what castles look like, but this one, with only a hall and attached tower, was brighter more imposing than anything I’d ever seen.

  “Fucking majestic,” I said to no one in particular.

  “Shut up, Gill,” my sister whispered, while Piers looked between us.

  Our guard prodded us both in the back with something pointy, but I got his meaning that agreed with my sister.

  Like many structures of this time period, as I knew from my studies at school, the cobblestone path leading to the huge arched gateway was uneven, treacherous, as we plodded across it. In the future it would be a grass courtyard, I was sure. I stifled an ironic laugh as I imagined the safety rails and other devices this would be fitted with in the future, once the walls aged.

  I imagined on a normal day this place would be alive with trade; scattered thatched roof building surrounded the castle, so a small village was budding around the castle’s protective walls. This late in the day, however, with sun setting so early, it was deserted. The only sound was the echo of our boots on the pavement. Dismayed, I realized I was still in my dress slacks and shoes from the funeral, though my shiny shoes were caked with mud now and nearly destroyed. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to even give them up, especially when I looked at the woven cloth shoes my sister was wearing. I knew that Footlocker wouldn’t even be around for 800 years or so and oddly that made me sad.

  Shit, what I wouldn’t give for a pair of hiking boots. Or sneakers. Or something goddamn modern at least. A good pair of shoes, tailored clothes, a mocha, maybe.

  Coffee. They didn’t even half coffee yet. It was Arabic, I remembered, and didn’t appear in France for another 200 years. Tea, from China, even longer. Also notable foods missing from in this time: corn, potatoes, tomatoes. Oh shit, what did they eat? My stomach rumbled and I realized I hadn’t eaten in a little over twenty-four hours.

  On the wider road leading to the drawbridge ahead, the soldier fanned our around us, two in front, two on either side, and the rest falling behind. Jules nudged my shoulder and whispered, “Was that your stomach?”

  I nodded. “I’m starving.”

  “I want a burger,” she said softly

  I did laugh then, finally. “We’re 900 years too early for that.”

  “Shit,” was all she said.

  I had to agree.

  The long drawbridge over the entrance to the largest keep stretched out over a murky shallow moat. It was rickety, a thing of terror as we crossed it. The soldiers seemed to pay no mind, as did Piers, though he was wide-eyed and looked terrified.

  As soon as we ducked through the narrow entrance to the castle, the keep opened into a wide courtyard, and I realized where all the people were. The smell hit me first, worse than any slap to my face, more like I’d been decked by a prize-winning fighter. It was … ugh, so gross … I could almost taste it. Like an outhouse at the end of the long fair days — if both humans and animals used the outhouse, that is – and then someone had tipped it and spilled the contents over the ground. Excrement and urine were literally everywhere.

  God, it shouldn’t have bothered me. I’d seen way worse as a paramedic. I’d seen people shit themselves, I’d seen babies born in the back of minivans, and I’d been puked on more times than I could count. None of it fazed me at all, I never flinched, and I never wavered. I had a job to do.

  But standing here in the courtyard, while the soldiers pushed people aside and we literally waded through piles of shit, it hit me that the middle ages wasn’t glamorous, or cool, or even interesting anymore. The awe of the shiny castle and my excitement of being back in this time period evaporated like the blackened smoke that spewed from the top of the keep in front of us.

  Christ, how did anyone live this way?

  Acrid smoke filled the air, burning my nose almost as much as the shit everywhere, followed by something burning, like the last time my mother forgot about her bread in the oven. There was nothing pleasant about this, nothing at all. Fuck, it was utterly disgusting. I started to gag, and beside me Jules did the same, her face a shade of green.

  The yard was filled with a chaos of sounds, so loud I could barely concentrate, and with my hands in shackles I couldn’t even cover my nose or ears. There were braying animals, goats, pigs, and horses, as well as screaming and harried peasants of all ages, most of them gathered around ramshackle lean-tos that were a few rough hewn planks that supported sagging clothes over the top of their wares. I spotted pottery, rows of wagons with leeks, onions, and cabbage, and some cloth things that might have been rugs. The din was so loud I couldn’t make out any specific words, but I assumed they were recovering from the recent downpour. Like us, everyone was soaked to the bone, hair plastered to dirty faces, wet clothes hanging from hunched shoulders. Everyone rushed this way and that, tying up merchandise and shoving tattered blankets around produce.

  “The sun will set soon,” Jules whispered.

  I looked at her. She was taking this crazy marketplace in stride. “They need to get back to the village,” I agreed. I realized I was glad I hadn’t eaten recently. I swallowed a dry heave, and struggled to stand upright.

  Then there was Piers, shackled next to Jules, smiling and nodding at everyone that pushed around us. Of course this is normal to him, I thought, he deals with this every day, doesn’t know anything different. Stepping in piles of poop was just another Monday for him.

  Suddenly, a hush fell over the entire courtyard, and many of the peasants fell to one knee, a sickening sound as they plopped into the piles of mud at their feet, slickened by the recent rain. The soldiers snapped to attention, standing rigid around us, but since they were all so much shorter than Jules and I, I could see what everyone was groveling for.

  A short, round man with regal blue robes, his face drawn and pinched, approached us. He looked younger than my father but older than Jules and I, so I guess maybe mid-30’s or so. He had thin lips and lines around his brown eyes, which made him look both disinterested and sad at the same time, but his eyes were kind. His head was bald, with little fringes of brown hair escaping out the sides, and a white pointed hat that sat straight up on his head.

  The large bronze cross he carried marked him as a religious leader; a bishop or something, I decided. My brain reminded me that the Catholic Church held everything in balance during this time period. I bowed my head and nudged Jules to do the same. Even Piers knew what was going on, and we all tried to bend at the waist as much as our shackles let us.
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  He raised a hand, first two fingers up, and waved the soldiers away, nodding to the one in front. The soldier’s jaw dropped but he shook his head and produced a key from the small satchel draped over his belt. He promptly disengaged the simple shackles and they fell to the muddy ground. Another soldier quickly snatched them up and disappeared behind us.

  “Archdeacon of Canterbury, Thomas Becket,” the man said, offering his hand to me. It was decked with ruby and emerald rings of all shapes and sizes.

  I panicked. There was nothing in the textbooks about how to greet a bishop or whatever he was. Remembering how the queen had offered her hand to me, I figured it was a common gesture. I took it and kissed the back of his hand. He nodded and did the same to Jules and Piers.

  I waited. I was terrified I’d address him wrong and he’d have us dismembered, or some other fucked up medieval shit. He waved the soldiers away, rattling in French too fast for me to catch. They scurried off and disappeared in the crowd of people pushing towards the entrance to the keep.

  “The queen has requested your presence in the great hall,” he said in halting French. With a flourish of his robe he spun around and strode towards the gates of the towering keep before us. The crowd molded around us, each peasant pausing to bow and scrape out of Becket’s way.

  Jules looked at me. I shrugged, briefly translated, and motioned for us to follow him. There was something strange about his French. It sounded almost…English. Translating had been difficult at best, but I knew Becket’s words would be even more of a challenge. He had used the word swene for queen, instead of rienr, beagsale instead of the French salle for hall. I already knew my translations would need translations! I knew French had changed greatly over the years, but I had no idea it was this much. In fact, as I listened to the shouts and cries of the peasants behind us, they seemed to speak a form of English and that almost closer to Latin than to French.

  Gill, you are in way over your head, I thought. How in the world do you translate the bastardized form of modern French? Some of the words were very similar, but some so foreign I only had to guess at context. I was an alien dropped in a strange nation where no one could really understand each other. I never longed for English as much as I did at this moment.

  As we followed Becket into the keep, it opened into a grand hall, filled with such luxury that it made the courtyard outside look like a prison camp.

  “Sweet baby Jesus,” Jules breathed next to me. “Look at this.”

  Red and green tapestries hung from every window, tacked back by nails to let the remaining sunlight in, through stained-glass windows. Even some of the stone work across the walls had red and green dyed bricks. The stone floors shone crimson and yellow light from the windows. Above the windows, an intricate painting of men at war, women at court, and even children and dogs at play lined the walls, the gold and tan weaving illuminated by the last rays of the sun. At the far end of the main room sat a wide table about forty feet long, complete with carved and ornate chairs. Between the table and us, however, close to a hundred people milled about, talking hushed tones behind slim hands that occasionally pointed our way.

  We were no match for the level of royalty in the room.

  They were all dressed in the same finery of the queen – women in blue and gold etched gowns, their hair in ridiculous, unnatural forms and stretched into beaded, triangular hats adorned with fur and feathers both. Older men had fur lined gowns as well, rounded loose fitting hats. A few younger boys around my age wore loose shirts with wide, puffy sleeves and short pants, shiny boots with pointed toes. It looked like a bad costume party where the participants had picked the most outlandish outfits they could find. I chuckled. I could imagine the ladies and men dressing for this event: Does this match? No? Great, I’ll wear it to greet the queen!

  Odd, I thought, that the queen had just arrived moments before us. Why would court be held, without a royal present? Had they known she was coming?

  Well, shit, I couldn’t figure it out, and at this point, I didn’t really give a flying fuck, or a normal one, for that matter. I was exhausted, dead on my feet, dressed in a dingy and dirty peasant shirt, black pants torn at one knee, and shoes I knew they had never seen before. My sister at least fit in a little better, even though her dress hung from one shoulder and was ripped across the other arm. Piers, of course, was still dressed like the page he was, or something. It occurred to me I didn’t even know what he was, really. His clothes were a little better shape than the rags worn by the peasants, but still pretty bad. A tan sack over tight pants and fitted with a belt, he was only elevated slightly above that of serf.

  The crowd parted for Becket, who strode through with the air of the religious figure he was. The queen was nowhere in sight. “Boy, there’s food in the kitchen,” I heard Becket say softly to Piers, his thin finger pointing to the arch on the other side of the room. Piers face lit up at the suggestion and disappeared to the kitchen. Becket stopped by a doorway at the end of the hall on the right, motioned us to follow him, and ducked through the arch.

  Jules tugged on my arm, and we hurried through the court, skirting around much like a courtyard, carefully avoiding mangy dogs and random piles of shit. Court wasn’t as glamorous as the books had led me to believe, I thought. It was literally a game of playing at being royal, and these people had no idea how to play it. Of course court was still in its infancy, I reminded myself. Jules followed Becket under the arch.

  Then, I saw her.

  My lady in red.

  Just before the archway where Becket had disappeared, the crowd dispersed and revealed a young woman, sitting at a slanted make shift desk that was build into the side of the wall; it more closely resembled an easel. Even the seat of her chair, plain and wooden, was slanted. Both certainly stood out in the room of royal fashion, and didn’t match the brightly painted, squared, simple chairs around the table. Her desk faced the raised dias set behind the table, the one where a throne would normally sit, I thought. Her face was turned away from me, so as we approached, all I could see was the crimson gown she wore, much darker than Becket’s, but somehow more glorious than any of the women in the room. The sleeves were attached with leather thongs, and a white headdress covered every inch of her hair – a wimple, my brain screamed at me, which startled the fuck out of me.

  “Hello,” I greeted her in French, stopping and curtsying in front of the lady as we turned towards the arch. What the fuck? I had done a lot of bowing lately. I never bowed. The world was my goddamn oyster. Yet surrounded by relatives of the king and queen, or barons or dukes or some shit, I found myself acting a complete fool. “I am Sir Guillaume, at your service.” I hoped she understood my awkward attempt at old French.

  She blinked up at me, and I saw the ragged quill in her left hand paused about the parchment in front of her. The letters she had been scribbling were most decided Latin, I saw. Latin? In the French court?

  “Marie,” she said, ducking her head and picking up her quill again.

  “Marie,” I repeated back, rolling the name around my tongue. The delicate almost ethereal name didn’t match her face.

  Okay, so first of all, when I got sight of her, I saw she wasn’t pretty. She wasn’t a butterface, but she was just, well, plain. She reminded me of a bit of Bethany, a girl I went to high school with. Bethany transitioned from a shy girl in thick glasses and mousy brown hair our freshman year to a dark and brooding goth by the time we were sophomores. Her pale cheeks and lifeless blue eyes had looked like death under white face paint, black lips, and heavy dark ringed makeup around her eyes. Marie looked a bit like Bethany; pale and tired, but without all the black make up everywhere: what Bethany looked like before her transition.

  I remembered when I’d shoved Bethany into a locker the last week of school my freshman year, because Jessica, the girl who I’d lose my virginity to that very next week, asked me to. Jessica, her little evil fucking minions, and I had laughed at Bethany when she dropped her books, glaring at us as we
stood across the hall, making fun of her coke-bottle glasses. She had glared at us, which made us laugh even more. After summer ended and her transformation was complete, however, no one fucked with her. We thought she’d cast a spell or some shit on us, and no one ever teased her again. I remembered the rumor she had turned one of the football players into a frog for the day, just to teach him a lesson.

  “You’re staring,” Marie said, breaking my concentration on memories of Bethany. She was still looking at her parchment.

  “Excuse me,” I said awkwardly, again surprised that my suave failed to engage. “What are you writing?”

  “Gill,” Jules said, poking her head around the corner. “Gill, you have to come.”

  “Just a second,” I snapped at her in English, a little harshly. She frowned and disappeared again. I turned back to Marie. “You were saying?”

  “A lais,” she said softly. She looked up at me finally, and I was surprised to see dark brown eyes tucked under long, delicate lashes. Her face was soft and round and a half-smile played on her face, but was gone in an instant. Her lips were stained a dark crimson, almost black, a start difference from the other courtiers that wore no makeup at all. She was young, I realized, about my age, much younger than any of the others at court. The red dress she was wearing buttoned up to her chin, shining pearls for buttons, with white fur around the edge of her collar.

  Like I said, she wasn’t beautiful, but there was something I couldn’t quite put my finger on.

  “A what?” I asked her.

  “A story,” she said, frowning. She stared at me, her head cocked to one side. “A poem, if you will.”

  “What is it about?”

  She gripped the quill in her right hand now, and hastily covered the parchment with her left. “Nothing of interest to you, Sir Knight.”

  “Try me,” I said.

  She sighed. “Of something you would know nothing about, Sir Knight.” She tucked the quill into her red robes and carefully rolled the parchment, tying it shut with a piece of red ribbon. “Excuse me,” she said, standing. “I have duties to attend.”