She walked down the hill, enjoying the sight as much as he obviously was. The Wode was beautiful, but there wasn’t this type of vista to be had in its depths. “When do they usually come to the altar?”
“After morning chores. It’s early yet, but we’ll need to keep a watch. I try to not be visible. Makes ’em nervous.” He was holding Gamelyn’s quillion dagger in his hands, playing the new sunlight up and down the blade.
Marion clambered up on the rock next to him. “Canna sleep?”
“Nay. ’M all prickles and nightmares. It’s silly, this. I know he’s well able to take care of himself.”
“He is a fine strong lad, no question there,” Marion agreed, wry, then reached out and touched the dagger’s hilt. “He’ll be back for it. He promised.”
“I know. It’s daft of me to worry. To… miss him.”
“I miss him, too.” She leaned her head on his shoulder, and he wrapped that arm about her shoulders. “I’m afraid he has you whipped all south at bed-warming, little brother. I think Gamelyn could out-heat a damp pile of compost.”
Rob chuckled. “Tell him that, then. I want to see his face.” He reached out, tugged at her hair. “Nay, this is why it’s so warm. Between the two of you, there’s freckles, red hair, and temper enough to heat the whole bloody cavern.”
“Aye, you’re outnumbered, no question. Best watch yourself.”
They fell silent, watching Arawn graze.
“Something… doesn’t feel right,” Rob finally said. “Like I’m backing an ill-tempered horse. Lady and Horned Lord, both with us, but I canna help thinking the god in particular is bound and determined to throw some storms at us.”
“’Tis what He does. You might as well as cry at the rain for fallin’. It’s all about the testing, the survival.”
“Tell me again, what She said t’ you.”
Marion had no protest to that; the words were a comfort. “To forge the links and hold to ’em. That as long as the three of us are back to back, ’tis sure nowt can touch us.”
“And here we are. Separated. I shouldna have let him go.”
“What else was there to do?” Marion sighed. “What side d’you suppose Gamelyn’s god is on?”
“Gamelyn’s god wants him back. That one doesn’t know how to share.”
“Not what his people think his god is, what he is,” Marion specified.
“Is there a difference?” Rob asked. “Really? In what we think they are and what they are? The Horned Lord told me….” He shuddered, couldn’t help it, even the memory of that power could send him to shivers. “Told me He’d not roamed the woods with such a form in ages. That I’d set Him free. Me.”
“Then perhaps Gamelyn needs to free his god.” Marion’s voice was stout.
Robin snorted, shook his head. “Bloody damn, but I miss Will. Things were so… uncomplicated with him.” He grimaced in apology, inclined his head against hers. “For me, anyway.”
“Well, they were fairly straightforward with me, also.” Marion shrugged, tucked her arm in closer to his. “And still are. This waint last forever.”
“Neither will we,” Rob said. “If we wait too long, then surely it’ll pass us by. Look at what’s happening even now.”
She tucked in closer, closed her eyes tight. It was true. True, and even though the Lady had filled her with hope, Her name was also Sorrow.
“Surely there’s a world where we can be together,” Rob murmured. “You and Will, me and Gamelyn… all of us.”
“Does such a place even exist?”
“Aye, it does. It’s around us,” he continued, slow, and as his eyes lifted, took in the Wode, there was a gleam that warmed Marion, even more than Gamelyn’s body heat. “It takes us in, cares for us. It’s all around us, Mari, and hardly a one bothers to see it. “But I see it, and I canna look away.”
Silence, again, only this time it was less than comfortable.
“Something’s happening, Mari. I can feel it.”
Marion stole an arm about his ribs; she could feel his heart against her forearm, hammering quick as a bird trammeled to ground. His breath was shallow, coming in tiny pants. He had always felt things before Seeing them, always been more prey to his instincts and senses; it had not dulled with age and time, merely sharpened.
She was glad it wasn’t so with her. “Shh,” she coaxed. “What’ll happen will happen, if we but wait for it.”
“Sometimes,” he said, “the waiting is not good.”
HE WAS barely aware of the waiting. Barely aware of anything but the press of stone and the half arch of sky and green just beyond.
The moon had risen, was sinking into the west. Gamelyn watched it, desolate and dry-eyed, felt the light of it spill over him, cold and pure. He was curled up on the wide stones of his narrow window ledge, legs folded and propped against the opposite side from where he sat, arms wrapped close. His eyes and mind roamed where his body could not: up into the cloud-wreathed stars, across the fields, into the trees, every thought and feeling he possessed fanning outward, a mixed swath of terror and longing.
What he hoped for, he had no idea. The moon’s light traced pewter ghosts across the black trees. The bailey below was quiet, not even a fire’s crackle to break the stillness. The guards stood idle on the gatehouse and walls. There was something in him, tiny and forlorn, hoping for an answer to a question he could not bring himself to ask, yet there was nothing. No curl of breath, no deep, enervating heat-stoke of flame-tinged voice. No feelings of belonging, of completion… of escape. Even the forest spirits had deserted him.
It was all he was worthy of, surely.
“I’m sorry, Papa,” Gamelyn whispered. “I never meant to hurt you. I never meant it to happen like this. If only”—he hesitated, kept going—“if only you knew him. If only you could... understand why.”
He could see them both when he closed his eyes. Rob and Marion would have eaten by now and piled into the furs, back to back like comrades-in-arms.
He hoped they slept.
He had to get word to them. Somehow.
He had to convince them to stay away until this was all over.
He could only hope… pray… that it would be over.
Oh, God. He laid his head back against the stone, mute. If only he could pray. If only he could find answers.
There is no sin that He does not know…. To despair is to turn your back on God….
“Which one?” he half laughed, half choked, and knew, then, that he was truly damned no matter which way he turned.
Why had he expected anything different? He had come into this world through the death of his mother; why should it be surprising that ill fortune should dog his steps, that the demon upon his left shoulder should have a more powerful whisper than the angel upon his right? Even the dreams he’d had, portents of destruction and pain more powerful than any Eden could seek to conquer. Too sullied for a fae son of the Shire Wode. Certainly, by now, too sullied for the God’s son of his own kind.
Eden, out of reach. He had been rived from it by force, thrown and tied down upon the stones of his own place, his own people. They loved him, they wanted to save him from himself; his father was dying while he himself had only just learned to live. He revered and feared them as he revered and feared the treacherous shoal of his own new-wakened self. They meant him no harm, only good, only what was true and honorable and Godly.
He had eaten of the tree of knowledge and found sustenance only fit for the son of God, had drunk in the forbidden enchantment of the garden, had found a love that seared his soul and filled his heart and could… not… be. He had committed sin after sin, mortal and venial and everything in between; he had not been shriven from any of those. He deserved nothing more than this chamber and whatever privations his lord saw fit to cleanse him, and….
And all he could think upon was how to get back.
TWO MORE mornings dawned, and still no sign of Gamelyn.
On the third morning, Rob came back from the
hillside altar with a strange hesitation to his gait. His face was ashen, and he held one arm against his chest. He seemed dazed.
“Rob?” Marion knew her voice was somewhat shrill. She didn’t care.
He waited until he gained her side, held out his hand. Dangling from his fingers was the leather cord of a making-charm… or it had been. The charm was unrecognizable, bits of clay crumbled against the crushed wooden core.
Marion cradled it in her hands. Even destroyed, it had tiny, lost vibrations of magic wisping about it. Instinctively, she reached for them with her own talent, untangled them as she untangled the lanyard from Rob’s trembling fingers, grounded and set them free….
Recognized them. She raised her face, met Rob’s white-rimmed ebon eyes, and understood. “Gamelyn.”
Rob nodded, slowly. “One of John’s house-bound friends found it when they were sweeping out Sir Ian’s solar. She knew it as John’s work, brought it to him.”
“John?”
“He’s the one made it. He’s a stable lad.”
This John held the tynged for such making after a more powerful fashion than any Marion had seen, including their father. Rob nodded, as if discerning her thought.
“John said he was told Gamelyn’s locked in his chambers. Talk is he was found wandering. The nobles are talking sorcery.”
“Oh, Rob….”
“He said he’d help.”
“Who? John?”
Rob nodded. His face was just as leached of color as before, only now it was grim, set. His eyes were blazing.
She knew that look. “Nay, Hob-Robyn. You’ll never get into the castle… and if you do,” she said, overriding what comment he was going to make, “you’ll never get Gamelyn out.”
“So I just leave him there?”
“Rob.” She had to go carefully with this; he wasn’t going to take it well no matter how she phrased it. “It’s his family, Rob. He’s part of them—”
“His brother doesn’t need any excuse to knock shit out of him—”
“I understand… believe me, I do. But he’s no stroppy peasant in danger of being whipped.” She raised her hand to his back, traced the scars there. “He’s not some villein who’ll have his hand lopped off for poaching where he’s no rights.”
“Their kind burns witches, Marion!”
“They waint turn on their own—”
“You think? D’you really think the nobles waint rend their own young, that they just save it up for us and never use it otherwise?”
“Oh, Rob.” She kept tracing her hand along his back—this was going to be even harder to say. “Are you more afraid they’ll punish him for going against their ways, or that he’ll decide they’re right?”
And Rob… crumpled. Head down, eyes dimming, just curled in on himself until Marion wished she’d kept her tongue behind her teeth, possibility or no.
“You don’t understand,” he said, miserable.
“I do—”
“You’ve not heard all the things he’s said to me, all the ways he’s cut little pieces from himself. Every time we lie together, even… he feels he doesn’t deserve any of it. Like it’s wrong. Like he canna have an honest feeling in his soul without some price exacted—”
“Nothing’s free, little brother—”
“But not like this! It’s twisted all wrong. They’ve raised our Summerlord in a cage, Marion, feeding him rotten meat and moldy bread like they’ve the right… and now they’ve bunged him up again, set to poison him anew!”
“Rob, what’s in Gamelyn’s heart is a lovely thing; his faith is part of what we love about him.”
“His faith. What’s in his heart, not what they’d twist his heart into.” Rob shook his head, paced over to the cavern, and shrugged into his overtunic, his fingers lingering on the nubs and dips of coarse-woven wool. “He was sleeping. I woke him. And now I’m just to let them sing him back to sleep, and him screaming while they do it? Not bloody likely.”
Marion followed him. “You canna go off half-cocked to that castle. If they know what Gamelyn has been up to, then they likely know with who! They’ll kill you!”
Rob smiled, fleeting and dangerous. “They’ll have to catch me first, aye?”
GAMELYN KNEW he was waiting—for what, he wasn’t sure—but when the knowledge paused before him, would inform him, it almost immediately whirled past and out of reach. Time was passing him up, things happening around him of which he had little to no grasp.
He hadn’t been paying attention, and the lack was swamping him now. His thoughts, usually so pristine and orderly, were chaotic, unbiddable. Had been since he had scanned every inch of his chambers and realized that he was thoroughly and completely buggered. If someone set a fire alight at his door there was only one way out—straight down, out the window, four stories down to the stone cobbles. He didn’t even have a rope.
It was then he started to stalk the floor akin to a caged beast.
The sun was beginning to set as the bolts were thrown and the door creaked open. Gamelyn stopped pacing as the Abbess entered, her acolyte, as ever, behind her. This time the novice bore food on a tray.
“The servants say they bring you food, yet you do not eat,” the Abbess said, softly. “Your father is worried. You need to eat, and keep up your strength.”
Gamelyn wasn’t hungry. His every nerve was twitching, rasped raw akin to a blade being whetted with a too coarse stone. Everything seemed… slow. As if he had been kicked slightly askew of time’s normal flow. It made him alternately feverish-frantic and leaden-sick. In fact, the sight of the relatively simple fare on the tray made him as queasy as contemplating the rich sight of a full banquet.
Instead Gamelyn forced himself back within the happenstance of now. “How is he?”
“He is not well, Gamelyn. I am sorry. I counseled your brother to be cautious in this matter, that it was unwise to disturb your father so, but he was determined—”
“As were you,” Gamelyn retorted, just as softly. “Neither of you were thinking of anyone but your own designs. With Johan, it was shaming me. With you?” He considered her. “What do you want, Reverend Lady? What can you possibly gain from all this?”
She peered at him for a moment, compassion gone cold. “It was not I who dishonored my father and my family by bellying a peasant boy.”
And so, she was not as untouchable as he’d imagined. It was strangely comforting. “I thought,” Gamelyn replied, “that I was under a spell.”
“There was weakness in you, else you would not have fallen prey to such a spell.”
The statement scraped too close to his own insecurities to be lightly heard; Gamelyn gritted his teeth and looked aside.
Toward the window.
He closed his eyes.
“I am disappointed in you, lad. There was a… light about you. A faith, a strength. A purity that any of us would long to have nestled in our souls. And you… you merely cast it aside! Treated it as cheap and unholy as the sins you sunk yourself into. Tell me again, Gamelyn Boundys, that I was the one thinking only of my own designs.”
Again, the words didn’t just pink, they scored blooded furrows. This time Gamelyn looked down at his hands. “Will my father recover?”
“He has refused to have the leech attend him. I will not lie to you, Gamelyn, it does not bode well.”
“I want to see him.”
“And you shall. After you make your confession.” She seemed nonplussed as he backed a step. “That is why I’m here, lad. At your father’s request. He wants to know you have had confessional and taken Holy Communion. He wants this purged from you. Only then will he consider seeing you.”
It was as though Gamelyn was breaking into tens of tiny, friable pieces. “I have a confessor. Brother Dolfin.”
“And he has done such an exemplary job so far.” The sneer was slight, but all the more cutting for it.
“I will make my confession, as my lord father requests. But I have the right to request my own confes
sor.”
“That you do.” The Abbess seemed unperturbed. “But your father has requested this of me, Gamelyn. Are you so lost in the spell of this creature?”
Creature. It jabbed Gamelyn in every soft place he possessed. “If I was as bewitched as you say, then surely God will understand.” He could scarce believe the words were coming from his mouth even as they escaped.
“Gamelyn.” It was stern. She walked over to him, and there was something in her demeanor that suggested caution.
Of course. He was not any mere sodomite, but an enchanted one. And the odd thing? Only over a fortnight ago, he might have agreed with her.
“It is plain you are not yourself. The lad I have come to know, he never would have even had the desire to dishonor his father’s wishes.”
But then, you don’t know me. At this moment, I don’t know me….
“Do you really intend that I should leave this room, go to your ill father and tell him his most-beloved son has not only lied to him and committed sodomy, but refused confessional of it?”
He gritted his teeth and looked out the window, felt tears inexplicably burn behind his eyes. “No,” he whispered.
“Gamelyn, it’s all right. It will be all right.” A hand laid on his head, a grave, compassionate weight.
Nay, it won’t. Can’t you understand? Things will never be all right again.
“It wasn’t your fault. I’m sure it wasn’t, and Sir Ian will come to an understanding with that. I know that you never would have done such a thing on your own.”
Remorse swamped him, took his footing from him and battered him with doubts.
You deserved this. You asked for it. You knew it was wrong… not only wrong but evil… and you dove in headfirst into one sin after another. He’s a pagan. He doesn’t know any better, but you do. You. Do.
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