Chance

by Nancy Springer

  Frantic, Chance bundled the baby warmly and began to stride through Wirral toward the distant demesne of a neighboring lord. He would be a renegade to Roddarc thenceforth. He had thought it would be a while yet before that happened; Iantha was upsetting his half-formed plans. But he could not let Halimeda’s daughter die.…

  “We will feed her, Chance Love-Child!” a voice piped from the beech tree at his elbow.

  Chance stopped short, but he looked doubtfully at the twiggy female Denizen who had spoken. Great-breasted she might be for her size, but the whole of her was no more than half the length of the infant, and maybe a quarter the mass.

  “How?” he demanded, and the woodswoman gave him a dark smile. She was greenish gray as well as brown, with hair that hung in airy tendrils like liana, and Chance realized suddenly that her tough, narrow face was both grotesque and beautiful.

  “Simply, as the sap rises in the tree. Take me up in your hand.”

  He did so, conscious of his own daring—he had never touched a Denizen, and he found this one dry, cool and pleasantly hard, almost like a lizard. He held her beside the baby’s head, and she gave the breast. Her entire dug fit into the infant’s mouth.

  For a moment Iantha did not respond. Then she began to suck greedily, and she sucked at length.

  “Is she being nourished?” Chance asked doubtfully.

  “Does earth nourish yonder beech?” the small woman retorted. “Open her mouth; I must change breasts.”

  Chance pried apart the infant’s lips with a fingertip, and Iantha bellowed angrily, a strong sound that was good to hear. Sucking on the second breast, she fell warmly asleep. Chance took the Denizen and set her back in the tree.

  “Many thanks,” he said, hoping thanks were warranted, for he felt a stirring of misgiving even as he spoke. The woodswoman did not speak to the thanks. She seemed exhausted.

  “Take the babe back to your dwelling,” she said, “and we will tend her.” She turned, slipped away, and Chance did as she had said.

  When Iantha woke and cried, some hours later, another great-breasted Denizen slipped down through a gap in the eaves, between rafters and thatch, climbed nimbly down the stones of the wall and gave the breast to the babe in the applewood cradle.

  So it went for the space of many snows. A different woodswoman came each time; Chance never saw the same one twice, to his knowledge. Nor were his nursemaid visitors ever the lovely dancers he had seen, the ones shaped like the most lissome of human damsel, but always the bark-brown, twiggy-limbed females. The others would be too delicate, Chance decided, their breasts too small and fine. But he would not have minded seeing one of them again. They were in their way nearly as beautiful as Halimeda.

  Of the lady, he heard nothing. She kept to the fortress. Presumably, she yet lived.

  Sometimes he carried little Iantha with him as he made the rounds of Wirral or went to speak with certain folk he met within the forest for secrecy’s sake. Sometimes he left her sleeping in his lodge, and the Denizens cared for her. Often he shirked his duties, but he always turned in a semblance of a report. In the evenings, and often during the day as well, he would hold baby Iantha in his arms and lull her and hum to her in his husky voice. No one from the fortress troubled him; if it was known that he harbored the babe, nothing was said of it.

  By the time the snowmelt came, Iantha was drinking cow’s milk and eating mush, and the Denizens no longer came to her.

  Spring warmed. In Wirral glades the violets were blooming.

  One day of soft rain, as Chance stirred porridge and rocked the little one in her cradle, his door opened and Roddarc strode in. By his side walked Halimeda, more lovely than the violets, robed in a dress of amethyst velvet, her hair looped up in braids plaited with thread of gold.

  If Roddarc had come alone, Chance would have challenged him. But as it was, he simply stood and stared at Halimeda, porridge dripping from the spoon in his hand. The lady seemed well, her bearing grave but quiet, as if she had settled something within herself. She stood gazing at her daughter, and her smile shifted Chance’s glance there also. Roddarc knelt on one knee by the cradle, putting his finger into the infant’s tiny fist.

  When his eyes came up to meet Chance’s stare, his look was full of shame. “Ten thousand thanks,” he said in a low voice.

  Halimeda came with a rustle of velvet, as if she could not longer restrain herself, gathered baby Iantha up and cuddled her, conversing with her in the private way of mothers. Roddarc stood up, and Chance scowled at him, more than a little uncomfortable.

  “Do you want me to go away?” Roddarc asked him.

  Chance kept silence, undecided what to do. The lord’s diffident manner both touched and annoyed him.

  “I have hurt you,” Roddarc said, speaking awkwardly, “and I have hurt Halimeda more. So much, both of you, that I doubt if I can ever make amends. But I want you to know—I am sorry.”

  Chance flung the spoon into the porridge pot. “Gaaah! Sit down,” he growled, not wanting to hear any more. “What woke you out of it when all my shouting could not?”

  “My own misery.” Roddarc sat. “But it is a hard thing to face.… Chance, I am more like my father than I knew. My methods differ, but the venom is the same.”

  “It served him well,” Chance said curtly. Powers, can we make this limp worm into a man again?

  “In the long war, you mean? Then I am worse than Riol. He turned his poison against his enemies, but I vented all of mine on my sister and my only true friend.”

  “Gaaah!” Chance exploded again. “Be done!”

  “There are things that need to be said. I know I still have your loyalty, Chance, but I know I cannot expect—”

  I should say not. Though you do.

  Roddarc swallowed. “I cannot expect your friendship. I cannot blame you if you hold it against me, what I have said, what I have done.”

  Chance looked over toward Halimeda, where she whispered to her baby, swirling about the room and rocking the little one to the imagined melody of a carole. “Does your lady sister hold it against you?”

  “Halimeda is more noble than I can comprehend.”

  Chance wondered, but he could not disagree. With a grunt he sat down across from Roddarc at the hearth.

  “If you can forgive me,” the lord said to him, “it will be blessing far more than I deserve.”

  “Would you stop that!” Chance roared at him.

  Halimeda looked over at them with a smile, came over and crouched by them, still holding tiny Iantha.

  “She does not know me,” the lady said wistfully.

  Iantha gazed solemnly up at the three of them. Though she was but a fourmonth old, already her features were delicate, her pale fawn skin very fine and scarcely touched with pink, her eyes of a startling green. The wisps of hair on her head were reddish gold, very bright and true. When Halimeda caressed her cheek, she did not answer the caress, not even with her glance. She looked skyward with a mien at once innocent, knowing and very old.

  “She is the same with me,” Chance told Halimeda, meaning to comfort her. But the lady clutched her daughter in alarm.

  “Changeling,” she whispered, and Chance sat stunned at her boldness, that she should have spoken so nearly of the Denizens who were never named. Even Roddarc, startled, gestured her to be silent. But she stammered on, unheeding. “They—folk say babes left in the Wirral will be taken—”

  “Lady, please!” Chance exclaimed, nearly knocking her over as he blundered to his feet. She caught at his hand, and he pulled her up.

  “The babe is very young,” Roddarc soothed, rising also. “She is not yet aware of us.”

  Sighing, yet smiling, Halimeda placed the baby back in her cradle, and without much more speech she and Roddarc went out. Chance did not need to wonder why they had not taken Iantha back to the fortress with them. He deemed he already knew.

  Whisperings had grown louder. Rumor was turning into certainty.

  Some few weeks later
Chance went to Roddarc—for he was no stranger to the fortress any longer, but went there often, with Iantha or without her. He found Roddarc in his chambers and spoke to him in privacy. “Louts wink at each other again. It is said that you will be overthrown before the year is done.”

  The lord answered with a smile. “You had not heard ere this? The little one must be keeping you out of the alehouse.”

  “You knew?”

  “There have been mutterings since before Iantha was born. When I was in my dungeon, I bruised many a nose, it seems.”

  And a few hearts, Chance thought. “Why did you not tell me?” he asked coldly.

  “Could you keep watch better than you already do?” Then, seeing the stony look on his warden’s face, the lord reached out to him. “Old friend, if I had told you, perhaps you would have thought I spoke you fair only for this, that you should aid me. And it would not have been true.” He sat back, his manner quite settled and calm, almost happy. “Truth is, I do not care what happens.”

  “You—what?”

  “You think I left little Iantha with you out of the hardness of my heart? When Halimeda longs every day to hold her? Chance, I entrusted the babe to your care because she will be safest with you. Pay no heed to the scheming of renegades. Tend the child, and let them do to me what they will.”

  “You cannot be serious!”

  Roddarc laughed. “Oh, I will put up a fight, never fear! But I want you far from it, Chance.”

  Chance murmured in wonder, “You really do not care.”

  “Why should I care, with Riol’s ghost leering over my shoulder and the smell of blood everywhere? Let some other lout take this cruel seat and rule by the sword. Why should I be lord when my folk scorn and spurn me, rule I foul or rule I fair?”

  Chance could only stare at him. Taking the stare for shock or protest, the lord stood and grasped him by the shoulders, very seriously meeting his eyes. “Chance, please hear me, please trust me. I have seen the way to my redemption.”

  “It is true, folk scorn Roddarc,” Halimeda said, eyes lowered. “And that is my fault.”

  Chance stirred broth and snorted. “As it is the cricket’s fault that frost comes?”

  “Things just happen, you mean?”

  “Yes,” he said, “they do.”

  His glance strayed to the baby sitting on her lap. Halimeda came often to see little Iantha, talking to her and trying to teach her pattycake and singing to her in a pure, sweet voice. The little one did not respond, not any more than she responded to Chance. Unsmiling, she looked past her mother with vivid green eyes, gazing off into the distance at the treetops of Wirral, as if she heard somewhere a yet sweeter music.

  “But it was when I went about huge with child, and unkempt,” Halimeda insisted, “that folk began to mutter again.”

  Chance snorted. “Say it is my fault, then, if old Riol rules anew in his son.”

  The lady looked at him in perplexity. “What have you done but show me kindness and care for my babe?”

  “I could scarcely have let her starve!” His voice roughened, for it troubled him to remember how the babe had been fed. “And what have you done,” he challenged the lady, “but give love?”

  The word resonated in her. She met his eyes; silent echoes flew about the room. Slowly she set Iantha down, turned to look at him across the width of the stone lodge.

  “There is love,” she said in a low voice, “and sometimes there is lasting love.”

  “Lady, you know you have it.”

  She gazed at him and nodded, but pain flickered in her eyes. “I have been thinking,” she said very softly, “that manly prowess is not the most important thing about a man.”

  Powers, she could not mean it! He would not let hope rise. “Lady,” he told her, dry-mouthed, “do not let my devotion make a vestal of you. Love where you will.”

  She looked at him with an odd, saddened smile. “If only I could,” she said, and she came over to him and laid a hand on his massive chest. “But, Chance, I think it will not be a matter of loving for me, after all. I deem my brother will not long be lord of Wirralmark. I have had a dream of a dragon, and Roddarc lying bloody under its claws.”

  And which is the greatest tyrant, the dragon or Riol’s son or love itself, I scarcely know.

  “A woman taken as booty of war … there will be few enough choices for me, Chance.”

  “Then stand farther from me, Lady,” he said huskily, “for this closeness brings but pain to both of us.”

  She nodded, kissed her daughter and went away.

  Thereafter, when she came to see Iantha, there would be a doomed dignity about her, an acceptance, that made her seem older than her less-than-twenty years. She had grown, Halimeda. There was something in her as sturdy as oak, as tough as a Denizen’s skin. Not for her, any longer, a noose at Gallowstree Lea.

  Often Chance would leave Iantha with her and spend hours in Wirral, searching for the haunts of the rebels, or so he let her think. He lacked courage to tell her otherwise.… Summer had reached its height. The days were long, and Chance often stayed until after dark in the forest while Halimeda tended the child.

  Iantha was growing rapidly, more so than seemed natural. She had long since outgrown the applewood cradle, and slept by Chance’s cot in a great wicker pannier. Already she walked, and no longer needed diapering. Though tiny, she possessed nothing of baby plumpness; she was small and graceful, with the proportions of a slender four-year-old. She did not talk or even babble, and she never smiled, not even when her mother braided her red-gold hair and whispered into the flower petal of her ear. Iantha seldom cried, but she played listlessly with the toys that were provided for her, and often for hours on end she simply sat and rocked herself or stared.

  Roddarc came to see her in the evenings sometimes.

  “She is so very beautiful,” he said to Chance with a touch of awe. “So delicate. Almost as if—what Halimeda said—have you ever seen such folk, Chance, in the forest?”

  “Many times,” he answered promptly, facing his lord across a cup of ale. What made him divulge such truth after all the years, he could not have said, except that Roddarc truly no longer cared. And in an odd way Chance felt closer to his foster brother than ever before. Before too long, he would be meeting him as an equal, to do him the final favor.

  For the time, he told him how he had first made speaking acquaintance with the Denizens. “But there is no dependable aid to be had from them. They are full of caprice, as happenstance as a puff of wind.”

  “A lucky chance, eh? Well, so were you, my friend, that ever you were born.”

  He said it so easily that Chance did not need to growl. The two of them sipped their ale, and in her basket the love-child slumbered.

  “Have you yet arranged a marriage for Halimeda?” Chance asked after a while, just as easily.

  “Powers know I have tried. I have sent missives as far as the Marches. But no noble scion has yet proved willing to take her.”

  “The more fools, they,” said Chance with feeling, and Roddarc looked at him intently.

  “You told me once, you would take her in a moment.…”

  “Rod, all powers know I have loved her these many years.”

  There. At long last it was said. Pain flooded into Roddarc’s gaze.

  “By my mother’s bones, how I wish I had never been born,” he whispered. “Better that ill-fated spear had taken me instead of your manhood. It was meant for me.” Roddarc sprang up, hands to his head. “Chance, every step I take, it seems I am a curse on you.”

  “Had you not heard?” Chance spoke lightly. “Old Riol cursed us both, on his deathbed.”

  The tyrant had died on a distant battlefield, and no one had heard his last words. But Roddarc stared intently at Chance, as if for a moment he believed him. “By blood, I would not put it beyond him,” he muttered, sitting down again, limply, leaning against the table.

  “Bah! If it had gone otherwise, Rod, I would have been wed t
o a wench. Long since.”

  “Think you so? Chance, all has come to naught now, but how it would have comforted me if …”

  “If?”

  “Folly.” Roddarc roused himself with an effort. “I am an ass, as you have often said. Does Halimeda know of this?”

  “Yes. She was so in despair, last autumn, that I told her. It cheered her.”

  “More than cheered her, I think.” Roddarc looked at Chance steadily. “And a dolt I may be. But I like to think that somehow—had a spear struck differently, Chance, I would have found a way to give you your heart’s desire.”

  Chance woke with a start in the mid of night to see little Iantha out of her basket and pattering toward the door.

  “No!” In a few steps he had overtaken her and gathered her up. The tiny child did not cry, for she rarely cried, but he felt the stiff protest of her body as he carried her back to her bed. He knew she would not go back to sleep at once.

  For his own part, he pretended to.

  There had been a dream of voices, he remembered, before he awoke. Voices like those once heard in an autumn storm.

  This time there was no wailing of wind. Instead, the small urgings, when they came, chanted and whispered amidst the insect chatter of a late summer’s night.

  “Come away, little one,

  Come away, Violet!

  Dance in the ring

  And all mortals forget.”

  Once again, dreamily, intent, the child got out of her bed and started toward the door, and once again Chance sprang up and grasped her.

  “No!” he shouted at the night. “You shall not have her!”

  All that night until sunrise he sat holding the child, with his arms locked tightly around her. When the day had begun and folk were about, he went to the village and spoke with an old woman. Then, carrying Iantha and a length of vivid red cotton, he went to the fortress keep.

  “My lady,” he hailed Halimeda, and she left her morning meal to greet him and the child.

  “I need a drop of your blood,” he told her in a low voice.

  She looked somber, but asked no questions—the less such uncanny matters were spoken of, the better. She took the dagger he offered and stabbed her fingertip with it. Chance blotted up the blood with the wadded end of the blood-red cotton cloth.