It stung, but instead of backing down, he rose to his feet. “Law is law.”
“Aye, it is. But laws change, and the access to them can be… chancy. Tell me this. Does that lovely stallion of yours have rights? If, say, he killed one of your villeins by accident, would you confine him, or cut his throat?”
“Of course not!”
“But did one of your villeins kill that stallion, even by accident, what would happen to the villein?”
The answer stuck in Gamelyn’s throat; it was unfair, the comparison, yet her point could not be denied. “So the forester—”
“He has a name, Gamelyn. George Scathelock. His son is Will, and Will’s mother was named Isadora. Names have power,” Eluned added. “Which is why we canna forget them.”
“Power, you say. The same sort that Scathelock, or his son, used? Magic… sorcery… to circle a man in salt and bind his soul with a damned weapon?”
Eluned’s eyebrows rose. “I see you’ve been doing some learning, milord Gamelyn.”
“Books don’t say enough, Mistress Eluned. They give rites but no reason, results but no methods. No whys.”
“You want to know why?”
“I want to know what’s happened,” Gamelyn said, and his voice shook but he no longer cared. “I want to know if my friends are in danger. If your souls are in danger.”
Eluned got a very odd look on her face, as if she was trying either to avoid crying or laughing. He wasn’t sure he wanted to know which; the sting of blood had started to rise to his cheeks, and he muttered, “You’re mocking me.”
“Nay.” Eluned was, to the sudden, solemn. “I ent, lad, that I swear to you. I understand that the matter is grave to you, very grave. But I’m afraid there is a mockery, one very strange and sad, to all of this. One you’ve been too sheltered to truly see.”
Gamelyn shook his head. “I only wish that were true.”
“Do you know owt of the old religion?” Eluned interrupted.
He blinked, thought about it for a moment. “I know… stories. My nurse used to tell them to me when I was a child. And the old women in the kitchens would give me sweetmeats if I’d listen to them.” He shrugged as Eluned raised an eyebrow. “I didn’t mind listening. I liked the stories, even when they’d prattle on about other things. And then… Marion and I have swapped stories.”
“Have you, then?” Eluned didn’t seem best pleased, and Gamelyn frowned.
“Why wouldn’t we? I’d tell her stories from the court, of knights and ladies and quests; she’d come up with just as improbable things about ghosts and little people, the old Hob that my nurse used to tell me of. Forest spirits….” He swallowed, hunched his shoulders.
Thought of the ivory stag. And dreams.
“Were your stories true?”
It brought him back to reality. “I suppose, perhaps, they might have been at one time. That’s usually how things are.”
“True enough. You canna get owt from nowt. Even a story.” Eluned gestured to the table. “Sit. I’ve a story for you.”
“A what?”
“What if every story was true, Gamelyn Boundys? What if every story—not just the ones your people deem acceptable, but all of them, from the stories of the people who come from desert lands where an undying sun has seared their skins as brown as fecund earth, to the stories of Arthur and the magic that gained him a crown, to the stories of the old religion where magic runs like water… true. Would that be a good place, then?”
Of course it would. It would be a wonderful place; how not? But it would also be a world full of infidels, heretics. Other. God would not approve; that much was plain.
Eluned was watching him; she looked… disappointed. “Sweet Lady, why do your people insist on making everything so simple? Good and evil, right or wrong, black and white… ’tis comforting, to be sure, but not real.”
“Is this your story?”
“It might be. Listen. The power of opposites is a sacred one, but ’tisn’t the whole. My boy and girl have been teaching you the ways of archery. When you shoot an arrow, it will kill, wound, or miss. Everything has three faces, Gamelyn. There’s no absolute to owt in life; what story would try and convince us there is? Unless there’s a reason for wanting t’ keep things simple.”
“I—”
“Shh.” Eluned folded her hands together, fixed her eyes upon him. “Long ago, so long that none can remember when the beginning was a beginning, there was a Wheel. No cart wheel, no spinning wheel, but a great one that turned stars and sun, moon and earth. This Wheel never stops, never spins about backwards; it just… goes and comes around. Goes and come back around. The Eternal Return.”
He knew that phrase, from the dim recesses of memory as well as of late. Marion spoke of it, often, seemingly in passing.
“When the people that would become us looked around, they saw this Wheel. In everything. In the seasons. In their own lives. In the map the stars would make o’nights. In the rising and setting of the sun and moon. In the swelling of their women’s bellies with new life, to see birth and grow old even as they did. And they found they couldna stop the Wheel, but they could hinder it. Or help. And they wanted to understand. So.” She looked at him, eyebrows raised.
“Stories. Myths.”
“Aye. What if they all are true, Gamelyn?”
“All stories can’t be true.”
“How not? Take winter, and summer. The Winterlord must craft his arrows of Holly, the Summerlord wield his sword of Oak and be born amidst the blood-berries of Winter’s reign and return to ’t. Both must live, and die, struggle one against the other and hold the honor of their Queen, the Ivy who lives the year long. She loves them both, and can have neither for long.”
“A myth to explain the seasons.”
“Of course it is. All o’ that and more. Stories start with truth. Sometimes, though, the truth gets so twisted in on itself that it becomes a smaller truth.”
“Is that what happened to the old religion, then?” Gamelyn sat forward, chin propped in his palms. “It twisted in on itself, became evil.”
“You make it sound so… simple.” And Rob was not the only one who could make a word into sibilant mockery. “All things can twist, lose their way. Everything can become a threat to someone with their mind too small to hold the vastness of all those stories. And then the truth becomes something smaller, meant for only one man. Or a few… chosen ones.”
There was a gleam in Eluned’s eyes, not unlike the one he’d seen in Rob’s when he’d reached the end of a hunt and was running down the quarry. Gamelyn straightened in his chair, no longer so relaxed.
She saw it, gave a tiny half smile. “Here’s one for you, then. Long ago—no’ so long to be a beginning, but long enough to be seen as a beginning—there were some angry men. They lived in a desert, where life was hard, harder than you and I can imagine. They had a teacher who would tell them their world was beautiful, made by a god for them to care for. They loved him, and followed him, but he had some notions they didna quite fancy. They didna care for the company he kept. They didna like the idea that beauty and bliss could be found about them; they wanted promises of something better. No blame to them, there; they’d come from a beaten people, like my own. They’d been driven into the least productive lands, their families given no more rights than beasts. They’d felt the lash of a conqueror’s whip. They had been shown a clean life, a holy path… but they wanted more. They wanted more than the life that had so punished them.
“Their teacher told ’em to heed him; his time was short, he was a god’s son, and so his blood belonged to the land. But his lessons were hard, and they were tired. They wanted something easier. So when the god’s son was given to the land by one of his own—when the Winterlord was done to death by Summer’s hand—
“You mean Jesus,” Gamelyn said, very quiet. “And Judas.”
She didn’t bat an eye. “And you doubt that names have power? That myths hold truth?”
He sat
back, drew in a troubled breath.
“These disciples, they fell to fussing over what his death meant and what he’d told them. Some said one thing, some another. Some could write, so they sat and wrote what they believed the god’s son had told them. Others went out and told stories. But, being men with voices and experiences of their own, and being angry—for some good reasons, mind—the teachings… changed. Conquered became conquerors. The ideas changed, from a world for all… a ‘kingdom that is all around, but unseen by men’… to a plan. A design, for all people like to play at godding. A set of rules for not only a decent life, but a just life. A deserved life. A life simple, and righteous… and one to make sure they can keep their anger and their place.”
Gamelyn crossed his arms, peering at her.
“Aye. You’ve heard tell of these men. We all have. Men angry enough, threatened enough—arrogant enough—to claim themselves the only ones who can know the will of a god… and in the process rive a woman from her rightful power. Their rules—their laws—are ones no loving, breathing person can possibly follow. In fact, they go against everything the gentle teacher who inspired these angry men taught them. And then they’ve laid a trip-wire, demanding there is only one way to be forgiven of those impossible things—by giving the rulers more of the power when they already have too much. And anyone who would threaten that power? Anyone who might have a power that was not under their control?”
“But… there has to be law.” As he spoke, Gamelyn realized that Eluned had brought them back around, full circle.
“What if your mother had been raped and murdered, then? What if every law in the land upheld that your mother’s say over who she would choose to give her own body to, that that choice was worth less than a man’s rights to poke his knob wherever he wanted? And then gave that man free run of a holy place, your Church? Would you not want to see him damned? To see him thrown into the deepest pit of your hell and suffer your god’s punishment? Only, your god doesna punish men who rape women; he only cares for females if they’re mares or bitches, with no voice to protest when they’re harnessed or beaten!”
“That’s not what Scripture says!” Gamelyn retorted angrily, rising up from his chair.
“Have you actually read the Christian scriptures?” Eluned merely peered up at him. “I have, Gamelyn, and not through th’ eyes of a priesthood who says they’re the only ones allowed to ken what lies there, written plain. I could recite whole passages for you, but being a clever, god-fearin’ lad, surely you know them, even if you don’t want to see ’em.”
“I could recite, verse and chapter, whatever you would ask of me!” Gamelyn protested.
She chuckled. “Aye, the pride of you, o man.”
He flinched, this time. Of course she’d no way of knowing that was the exact sin his confessor was often railing against.
“Tell me of Lot and his daughters. Not where they gave him as good as he deserved with too much wine, but before that, when he betrayed them. Where this supposed godly man was given leave by his god to offer up his daughters for a gang-shagging. We dinna know if their mam protested or no—she wasn’t deemed important enou’ to have a say. Two guests—male, of course—were more important than the rights or chastity of females. Which is saying something, considering the vast weight your Church gives to being untouched.”
Had she given him the opportunity, Gamelyn couldn’t have taken it. He was staggered.
“And magic? Sorcery? Your Bible’s not full of it? Ah, that’s right. Only magic that men perform is acceptable. Men can scry, can prophesize, can curse their neighbors and lay waste with salt and ash, can even see fit to burn their sons in offering. Yet a man goes to see a woman for advice, and she’s a witch, and damned.”
Gamelyn tried to come up with something—anything!—to counter. He could not. And all the while she sat there, cool and composed, wielding a rapier to every reasonable, careful construct he possessed.
“Funny, ent it? How Moses was perhaps the greatest magician of all time, yet as long as he too poked his staff where his god told him, all was well.”
“Why are you saying all this?” It quavered, and he couldn’t help it.
She sat forward, still eyeing him. “You sit at my board and eat my food, then tell me my people are wrong for taking what power they can from a world where they’re helpless? My people were born in the old religion before your god walked and spoke his truth. We were born with it just as much as you were born with baptism and wealth we’ll never touch. But I waint give your people the right to say that they’re the only ones who know the will of god, or even the untangling of their own tynged.”
Gamelyn kept shifting back and forth from foot to foot. Finally he said, very quiet, “Should I sleep in the barn?”
And Eluned laughed. Not just a small giggle, but a deep, cheerful thing that invited him to join in.
But he didn’t. Just stood there, shifting back and forth.
“Lad, lad.” She gave a sigh. “I’ll make a bargain with you. If you can still trust that I’m a wise woman and not ‘evil’ after what I’ve told you, then you can sleep in my house with my trust. Aye?”
“Aye,” he murmured, thinking. His brain felt full to bursting.
“Enough of this for the now,” Eluned said. “I’ve apple tarts and new milk for you before we go to bed, and I promise, no more harangues.”
Yet he’d gotten more from one “harangue” than he’d gleaned from her in the past years, and certainly more than he’d ever gotten from…. “But… Rob? When’s he coming back? And shouldn’t we wait for Marion?”
“Nay, there’s no sense in waiting up for either of them; they’re both like to be late returning. Best to have your snack then get some sleep; you’ve had a long ride today and another one likely tomorrow. I’ll make up a nice meal to break our fast, and you can have your time for visiting during and after.” She smirked. “Show my lad that nice shiny dagger you’ve got.
“For now, let me set you up a nice pallet up the loft. It’s not what you’re used to having, I’m sure, but you’ll be comfortable, I’ll make sure of that.”
Later, after they’d each scoffed up two tarts and Gamelyn had consumed two mugs of creamy milk, he helped her with his bedding, up and down the ladder with light blankets and a withy mat. Across the pallet from him, she flipped the blanket into place then reached across and gripped his chin in one hand, raised his face to hers.
“’Tis what’s to be, you being here,” she said, then added, somewhat cryptic, “It might not be so comforting for the rest of us, but we’ll see your father’s last days in comfort, that I promise you.”
THE ONLY other time Gamelyn had stayed an entire night had been when Diamant had dumped him in the middle of the woodlands. He’d been less than aware, then, of his surroundings. Now, he couldn’t put any of it from his mind enough to sleep.
The flooring beneath his withy mat was sturdy, but Gamelyn discovered there were places he could see through, ones where the wood had shrunk and expanded unevenly, leaving gaps. He had no thought of spying, but Rob’s empty bed kept claiming his attention. That, and how Eluned kept puttering. When she finally settled down by the hearth coals, Gamelyn realized he was not the only one waiting for Rob’s return.
But Gamelyn was tired, and napped on and off, fitful in the strange surroundings. The final time he woke, it was to voices. He nearly bolted upright, halting it just in time, then lay there, trying to reorient himself. It was Rob’s voice that had woken him, and Eluned’s answers. More than that he didn’t know.
Rolling over, ever so slow, Gamelyn peered through the flooring. Eluned was still by the fire—it hadn’t burnt down very far, so he’d not slept that long—and Rob’s head was in her lap. She kept combing her fingers through Rob’s hair. Rob’s hands were seized to her kirtle, and his head was bowed, his words muffled.
Eluned spoke, urgent, and tugged at Rob’s hair. When he ducked his head lower, she shook her own and put both hands under Rob’s chin,
lifting his face to meet hers. His eyes glittered in the candlelight, a starless, endless night; his hair was another, inky spider’s tangle over those eyes, and there was a look on his face—something Gamelyn had never seen there, something raw and simple and exposed—that fisted an enormous knot in Gamelyn’s chest.
Then he saw the tears, spilling silk-wet and gleaming, down Rob’s face.
A self-conscious heat stole over Gamelyn’s cheeks. He closed his eyes, gritted his teeth, and looked away.
The next time he looked up, Rob was gone. Eluned was also nowhere in sight. Sucking in an almost silent breath between his teeth, Gamelyn rose to his hands and knees.
He couldn’t do this again. Something was dreadfully wrong, and Gamelyn couldn’t just stay behind while Rob went… wherever it was that Rob was going.
The flooring seemed to conspire with him, not even a creak as he rolled to bare feet, nudged into his tunic and breeches, and grabbed up his boots. Tucking the latter under one arm, he began a slow descent of the ladder. At the bottom rung he twisted, stepped down—then halted in his tracks.
Eluned was just outside the doorway, her back to him, arms wound close about her. As he watched, in an agony lest she turn and see him, she went to the edge of the small porch, on the topmost step.
The window nearest him was an adequate exit, and on the opposite side of the front door. Gamelyn headed for it, slung one leg up to crawl through, spared another quick glance to the front door… and froze, one leg still across the sill.
Eluned was in the doorway, watching him, backlit by the moon.
“Come down, Gamelyn Boundys. Use the front door, if you’re set on leaving.”
He obeyed—not that he had a lot of choice—and walked over to her, eyes anywhere but on that shadowed face. “I’m not… leaving.”
“You saw Rob. And now you’re going after him.”
He hesitated, nodded.
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