Chance

by Nancy Springer

  Halimeda listened to them, and her lovely, pale face never moved. Finally her daughters had no more to say, and little by little fell silent under her stare, and felt its remoteness, as if their mother was a stranger coming in out of another time to shelter the night with them, and felt the unseemliness of their welcome to her, and sensed for the first time their own ungainliness, their noses like lumps of dough, their puff-pastry cheeks, and stepped back awkwardly. Their mother stared on. They tiptoed to a doorway, and still Halimeda stared, standing in the cold stone corridor with the March damp on her boots and dripping down from the hems of her clothing.

  Then Chloe and Anastasia perceived that their mother did not see them. Halimeda stared past and through them to something—other. And at last the pale face stirred, the gray lips moved, spoke. “Iantha,” Halimeda whispered.

  “No, mother!” Anastasia exclaimed. “It is Xanthea and Justin who are missing.”

  Her mother seemed not to hear her. But suddenly the pale, still face moved, contorted, its serenity gone like a mask that has been whisked away, and Halimeda screamed, a cry that made every servant in the fortress jump and then stand shaking, that made the horses in the stable tremble and caused the hounds in their pens to whine and howl. Again and again Halimeda screamed, and her daughters ran to their rooms, flung themselves on their beds and covered their heads with their pillows, trying to stopper their ears, and the servants came running to the lady in their dozens from all parts of the keep and courtyard, speaking soothingly to her and trying to calm her, to no avail. Halimeda screamed on, her outcries taking the form of a single word.

  “Iantha!” she screamed. “Iantha!”

  Lord Chauncey, brooding over his golden cup, was not much moved by the screaming. But the sound of that name brought him to his feet; his golden cup crashed down unheeded, spilling its wine. Enraged, Lord Chauncey ran to confront his wife, to whom he had not spoken for many weeks. Servants scattered before him, but Halimeda seemed scarcely to see him. Again and again she shrieked, “Iantha!”

  “Silence!” her lord thundered at her.

  Her face confronted him mottled red and bruise-blue, twisted out of its lovely shape, lips curled, the eyes narrowed to slits with screaming, but the slits turned on him. “Iantha!” she screamed, and the name tore at her throat like a sob.

  “Be silent!” Lord Chauncey roared.

  But she took a step forward and spat at him, for she knew only that she hated him, he had taken a babe away from her, and she ached, she wanted her babe back again. “Iantha!” she shrieked.

  Worse than ever before Lord Chauncey wanted to kill her. His hands curled, his temples throbbed, his nose and cheekbones turned chalk-white with his rage, though his face was flushed with drink. But despite wine, despite rage, something stubborn and well-hidden inside him kept his hands at his side, the words of deadly command inside his throat.

  “My lord,” spoke a chamberlain, a man perhaps braver than other men, “the lady has gone mad.”

  And still Halimeda shrieked, “Iantha!”

  “Take her to her chamber,” Lord Chauncey ordered, “and keep her there.” He turned away and went back to his own darkened room.

  The servants took charge of Halimeda, and coaxed and urged her to her chamber, and there tried in every way to comfort and silence her. But she screamed on, and her screams rang throughout the fortress in spite of closed doors, and few folk in that place ate much at that evening’s meal. Only late at night did the lady finally cease to cry out, when her voice had turned to a hoarse wail and she lay breathless and exhausted. But she ate nothing, and slept restlessly, and in the morning she began again to scream of Iantha. She did not ride out that day, or many days to follow, for her chamber door was locked, and she knew nothing of what went on around her, for she had gone quite mad.

  Anastasia and Chloe, like all others in the fortress, could not escape their mother’s constant screaming. Even on the roof, during the daytime, they could still hear her. Even with their ears muffled by pillows, at night, they could hear her yet.

  Within the first day of the harrowing noise they had taken counsel with each other, and they went to their lordly father, where he sat in his dim audience chamber with his golden cup in his hand. And they got down humbly on their knees, but their homely faces shone with their sureness, for their father had never denied them anything they had begged for in this wise. He liked to please them in all things, because they were younger daughters and because they looked so much like him.

  “Father,” spoke Anastasia, the elder, “Chloe and I are repining from being always within doors.” And Chloe attempted to look like one who repined. “Might we take a retinue,” Anastasia spoke on, “and visit for a while at the home of Lord Robley and his lovely wife? For a fortnight, perhaps?”

  Robley, the neighboring lord, his holding farther from Wirral than was Chauncey’s, had taken a young wife. Anastasia and Chloe had visited with her before. The girls looked up at their father with bright, lumpish faces, confident of his indulgence.

  Chauncey spoke. “No.” The single word.

  Nor did he seem out of temper. His face, shadowed only by the dim room. Drawn down, perhaps, a bit by recent misfortunes. Blurred by drink. All this was as nothing, a trifle, to Anastasia and Chloe.

  The younger girl spoke, as her sister had failed. “Father,” she begged, “might we then at least go outside the fortress walls for a while? To ride our palfreys in the fields a while, perhaps?” And in the pause that followed, Halimeda’s screaming came ringing through the walls.

  Both girls felt sure their second petition would be granted, since the first one had been denied. But Lord Chauncey said once again, “No.”

  “With a guard?” Anastasia tried.

  Lord Chauncey set down his golden cup, and the girls ducked their heads. They expected to hear their father roar. But not so: his voice, when he spoke, was calm, with a dryness in it and a bitter edge they had never heard before in him. “I have not failed to note,” Lord Chauncey said, “that I have but two children remaining to me, and you are they. Nor have I failed to remark the workings of some strange sort of doom. You are to remain within walls, as your mother told you long since. You are to avoid even the gardens, or anywhere there might be trees.”

  Lord Chauncey’s daughters left their father’s audience chamber in petulance and bewilderment, their mother’s shrieking loud in their ears.

  Within a few days Anastasia and Chloe took to sleeping in the same chamber, in a great four-posted bed made of strong old oak, clinging together against the sound of the screams. It was Xanthea’s bed, Xanthea’s chamber, farther than their own from their mad mother’s screaming—though not far enough. When Anastasia and Chloe could not sleep, they whispered with each other, often resentfully, keeping their voices low so that the servants would not hear. The two girls held Xanthea to blame for their annoying situation. If Xanthea had not gone off with the stranger, Anastasia and Chloe declared, then her younger sisters would not be confined within walls.

  “She’s well out of this,” Anastasia whispered sourly to Chloe, “if she’s not dead.”

  “And if she’s yet alive,” Chloe whispered back, “I’ll warrant you she’s enjoying—enjoying—” The younger girl faltered, for she was not yet certain what it was that women enjoyed with their lovers. But Anastasia replied easily enough.

  “If the stranger’s face is anywhere near as fair as the rest of him, assuredly,” she agreed with zest. “And to think he chose that ugly, hatchet-faced Xanthea! But perhaps she’s dead. Perhaps, when he unmasked her, he killed her. Folk say he is some sort of demon.”

  The girls cowered. Their mother’s screams surged, seeming to rock the room. They did not notice that the bed was moving.

  “You really think he’s a demon?” Chloe gasped.

  “I’ll warrant he killed her. And if she’s not dead,” whispered Anastasia vehemently, “I swear I’ll kill her myself. I hate her.”

  The bed clos
ed over them. Bedposts of hard old oak clutched their bodies, oak cut in Wirral years before, the strongest wood of that mighty forest. With the power of a hundred warriors’ striving muscles the oak pillars pulled the girls up against the great slab that was the headboard and gripped them there as if pressing them to its bosom, and pressed, and crushed, and their cries went unheard amidst the screams of their mother. Then, though Halimeda continued to scream, her daughters cried out no longer, and the oaken grip gave their limp bodies back to the fortress.

  In the air there drifted the smell of violets.

  The world spun on about its business. Knaves trysted with maids. True spring had come. Somewhere in woodland the violets were blooming.

  The lady had passed days in her chamber, sometimes shrieking Iantha’s name for hours on end, sometimes weeping and sobbing out, “Iantha,” sometimes pacing and prowling the room and whispering the name with each step, but never ceasing to keep that name on her lips, even when she slept, for she would murmur Iantha’s name in her sleep. She ate very little, and grew flower-thin, flower-frail.

  But on the day when the scent of violets drifted in the air, the lady of the fortress arose silent and calm. In her dreams she had sensed an ineffable fragrance, and the same fragrance still lay on her thoughts. She stood at her high, small chamber window, feeling the springtime air on her face. The day was fair, warmed with sunlight, fresh with breeze, and on the breeze she seemed to scent the whispering perfume of woodland violets. She knew it was impossible. Not even in the farthest distance could she see the shadow that was Wirral. But she felt Wirral reaching into her dreams, her thoughts. And far away, on the woodcutter’s road, she saw a stranger coming.

  Halimeda went and sat down and had her maids tend to her face and hair. “I will go out today,” she told the servants, and she ordered them to bring her a dress of spring-green. They obeyed her uneasily, not daring to tell her that her chamber door stood locked by Lord Chauncey’s command, and only by his command could they unlock it again.

  But Halimeda did not attempt to go out the door. Once she had been arrayed to her satisfaction, she ate, then sat serenely waiting, and the servants busied themselves about the tidying of the room, casting sidelong glances at her and at each other, puzzled.

  And before the morning was old, the door opened—though no one afterward could say how it was opened—and a stranger stood there, bearing a bouquet of violets in his hand.

  The maids admitted later that they stood stupidly gawking at him, for his extreme beauty stunned them. And the wild, glowing gaze of his eyes seemed to stop their hearts. But the lady Halimeda rose graciously to meet him.

  “Wirral sends greetings,” he told her, offering the violets, and she took them in one hand and linked the other through his arm. Together, like old friends, they went out, as if going a-Maying, and none of the servants dared to stop them for the sake of the fierce sheen of the strange man’s eyes.

  When the lady and the stranger came to the courtyard, as the servants watched, and the grooms at the stable door stood watching, the stranger stopped where he stood and loosened the lacings of his tunic, and two squirrels leaped out onto the ground, one gray and one fox-red. And they turned into a bright chestnut horse and one of dapple gray, each with curving neck and coddled mane and each bridled and saddled and ready to ride; the sidesaddle, for the lady, being on the gray. And her horse went gloriously arrayed in trappings of spring-green and violet. Lightly she mounted it, and took the reins in one hand while she carried her flowers in the other, and with the stranger at her side on the red horse she rode out the fortress gates and away, the way no one but woodcutters went, toward the forest named Wirral.

  Half the day later, Lord Chauncey missed the sound of his wife’s screaming and noticed that most of the servants had fled, for none of them came to bring him wine. And he went in search, and found Halimeda’s chamber empty, but a faint scent lingering therein. He could not at first name it, until he saw lying on the floor a single wilted violet.

  In a far turret of the fortress stood a chest wherein lay some things Lord Chauncey had long since wanted to throw away, but which Halimeda had kept. For she was one who dreamed and remembered. So her lord had permitted her to keep the things, so long as she did not speak of them in his hearing and so long as she hid them from his sight. And she had obeyed: but even so, he knew where she had secreted them.

  He stared at the violet lying, shriveled and dying, on her chamber floor, for a considerable time, and all the wine he had drunk left his head and blood, and he felt himself stark sober and face to face with fate.

  Then he turned and left the chamber, and the few servants who remained in the fortress fled away from before him as he strode along the passageways and climbed the stone spiral steps to the turret, to the hot, dusty garret room under its pointed roof.

  He did not take time to bring the chest down, but opened it then and there. And there in that low-raftered room he stood and ungirded his lordly sword and let it clank to the floor. He took off his tooled boots of soft russet-dyed leather, took off his fine clothes through which ran thread of real gold and tossed them aside, letting them fall where they would. He put off linen smallclothes. To the skin he stripped, and then he pulled from the chest crude leather trousers, stiff with age, and the leather vest and thorn-torn shirt and heavy shoes of a woodsman. He put the things on. He put on the unadorned leather belt that held leather sheath and long steel hunting knife. And from the bottom of the chest he took a cudgel, a weapon such as commoners carry, and he hefted it. His hands still knew the feel of it, and the leather clothing still remembered the shape of his body, though it chafed his softened skin.

  He left a lord’s finery strewn on the garret floor and went to say farewell to his remaining children. Though likely they would scarcely recognize him. In a sense, he was not their lordly father any longer. He was a common, churlish fellow, a bastard named Chance.

  Anastasia and Chloe were lazing late in their beds, it seemed. They often did that since they had been confined to the keep. There was little else for them to do. He would commend them to the care of his chamberlain and command them to stay within walls; they would be safe thus, or as safe as walls and his will could make them.

  But he did not find the girls in their chambers. The rooms stood empty. Nor could he find a servant to tell him where they were. From room to room he walked, and still the smell of violets hung in the air, filling him with an unreasoning dread. He searched until he came to the door of Xanthea’s chamber, and pushed it open, and saw the crushed and crumpled bodies on the floor. Then he stood and stared.

  Then, turning away, he descended the stairs, crossed the courtyard and walked out the gate, leaving his dead and his fortress behind him.

  Xanthea’s lover came back to her canopied bed under the light of a waxing moon, and she embraced him gladly, even more so than ever, for he had been gone from her a night and a day and half a night.

  “Come with me,” he told her when their more urgent needs were satisfied, “and I will show you what I have brought back with me.”

  So Xanthea put on her silk robe with the collar furred in miniver, and in bare feet she padded the palace ways to the room where Wirral led her. And there, under the soft glow of moonlight and fine wax candles, on a couch of green velvet, she saw her mother lying, so thin and pale that at first she thought Halimeda was dead, until she saw the rise and fall of her steady breathing.

  Xanthea gasped and reached toward her mother as if to touch or wake her, but Wirral stopped her with a gentle hand.

  “Let her sleep until something wakens her,” he said. “She is much in need of slumber.”

  “Why have you brought her here?” Xanthea whispered, glad enough to let Halimeda lie, for in truth there was not much of which she wished to speak with her mother.

  “Because of the one who will follow her.” Wirral took Xanthea’s hand. “Come, you are restless? Let us go out. The forest is beautiful at night.”

&n
bsp; They went out, and walked hand in hand under the huge butts of trees older than the fortress of Wirralmark, beneath the waxing moon, until they saw before them the stirring of small folk on the ground. Then they stopped, and Xanthea’s lips parted in astonishment. For seldom were Denizens to be seen so openly except at their revels, and never had she seen any stand as grave as did these. Among all of them she saw not a smile or a sparkling eye.

  They were the young prince and his mate, the fair-skinned beauty Xanthea had noticed at the revels. And a few others, and in their midst the elder who led them all, his skin like the gray bark of a beech, his beard like moss. He stood very straight, very still, on the loamy earth between fern frond and the heart-shaped leaves of celandine, and when he saw Xanthea he bespoke her, but his voice came out of him low and halting, as if with effort.

  “The moon waxes,” he said. “The violets bloom, and I have grown old and slow. It is the time for planting.”

  Then the young prince embraced him, though the elder Denizen did not move to return the embrace. He closed his eyes. And in a moment Xanthea exclaimed aloud, utterly startled, and felt Wirral’s hand tighten on hers to support or silence her, for she saw the graybark—taking root. His limbs cleaved together and became part of his trunk. His face smoothed into gnarls, and branches sprang from his head, and he was growing, growing, and she stepped back, for already he loomed over her head—and within a few more heartbeats there stood a mighty beech where none had been moments before, its smooth bark silver-gray in the moonlight, and the Denizens stood small and grave at its base.