Beyond the Pale

by Mark Anthony

  It was so hard to move: Her muscles were lead. Yet somehow, ever so slowly, she tightened her arms around the knight’s chest, and pressed her body against the heaving back of the horse beneath her. This action drained the last remnants of her strength. Paralysis stiffened her limbs, the landscape around her faded away. Darkness pressed from all sides. It was neither cold nor warm, nor was there fear in its soft folds. There was only sweet and endless emptiness. Though a tiny presence seemed to whisper something to her—you can’t sleep, Grace, not now—she could not quite comprehend its words. She slipped deeper into the gently suffocating darkness.

  It appeared as a tiny but brilliant spark against the black backdrop of her consciousness. It flashed and was gone. Grace ignored it and continued her descent into the abyss. Just a little farther now and she would never be cold again.

  Another bright pinpoint flared in the dark, and another. Then there were thousands of them, small and sharp and white-hot as stars. At last she realized what the specks were. Pain. Countless pinpricks of pain crept along the surface of her skin. The sparks tore apart the darkness that surrounded her. She felt a twinge deep inside, followed a moment later by a noticeable twitch. Then, all at once, a violent shiver wracked her body.

  She opened her mouth, drew in a shuddering breath, and only then did she realize she must have stopped breathing. Pain sparkled up and down her limbs as warmth from the horse and the knight crept into them. Again a shiver coursed through her, and again. After that she could not stop shivering.

  This is a good sign, Grace, the doctor’s voice said without emotion. The reflexive action of your muscles will generate chemical heat and restore blood circulation to your extremities. The pain indicates you don’t have frostbite. You’re going to make it.

  Shiver-warmth continued to seep through Grace’s body as the horse pounded onward through the wintry day. The dullness in her mind began to melt, and she grew more aware of her surroundings. For the first time she saw the knight as something more than a dim blur before her. She sensed that if he stood, he would not be a tall man, but he was powerfully and compactly built. He gripped the horse’s reins with mesh-gloved hands, and he wore a kind of long, smoke-gray shirt, slit on the sides, beneath which Grace felt numberless small, hard, interlocking rings of metal. A black cloak hung from his shoulders, and on his head he wore a flat-topped helmet of beaten steel.

  The man glanced to one side, and Grace caught a glimpse of his profile. Pockmarks dinted his skin here and there, the legacy of some childhood disease. Ice clung to his drooping black mustaches, and his breath fogged on the air. His nose was hawkish beneath brown eyes, and creases framed the grim line of his mouth. She guessed the knight to be in his forties.

  Knight?

  Where had she gotten that word? Perhaps in her fog she had heard him use it. Or perhaps the term had been dredged out of her unconsciousness in response to the sword sheathed at his hip and the metal rings beneath his long shirt. Either way, the term suited the man. Noble, solemn, slightly dangerous. He looked like a knight should look.

  She wondered then if she had been rescued by some sort of anachronist, a mountain recluse who styled himself as a kind of medieval warrior. The more she thought about the possibility, the more it began to make sense. Although it was difficult, she forced her brittle mind to search back and remember what had happened before she had found herself on the horse, riding with the knight through the frozen forest. She could almost recall a place, a door, a voice. Then, like dark water bubbling up through a hole in an icy lake, memories welled forth.

  She remembered the orphanage. Yes, that was it. She had driven to the mountains in Hadrian Farr’s sedan, fleeing Denver, and the police, and the men with the hearts made of iron. Then she had been too weary to go on, and somehow, by chance or fate, she had ended up before the burned-out husk of the Beckett-Strange Home for Children. Now darker memories threatened to gush through the hole in the ice, but Grace forced them back. She did not want to remember those things. Not here, not now. It was already too bitterly cold.

  What next?

  An image flashed before her, of obsidian-chip eyes and a cadaverous grin. The man in black. Yes, that was right. She had spoken with the weird preacher in the old-fashioned suit, the preacher who was certainly akin to the porcelain doll girl in the park. What had the man in black told her?

  Open the door, child. What you see beyond is up to you.…

  That was just what she had done. She had opened the charred door of the old orphanage, and beyond the door had been … snow. The last thing she remembered was the sound of a door shutting behind her. Everything had turned white as she fell, and then—

  —then she had been here, gripping the knight as the horse galloped on.

  No, that wasn’t quite right. There had been something before that. The memory was as pale and fragile as the drifting snowflakes, but she recalled a moment when she had opened her eyes. Trees had woven their dark fingers against a white sky above her, and a shadowy form had bent over her as a deep voice spoke in wonder.

  Why, ’tis a lady!

  Piece by piece, her analytical mind began to patch together the puzzle. Of course—it all made sense. She had seen snow when she opened the orphanage’s door, but that was only because it had been snowing outside. It was hardly unusual for the mountains in late October. No doubt the flakes had drifted down through holes in the building’s ceiling. At that moment she had collapsed, an inevitable physiological reaction to stress and exhaustion. It was luck plain and simple that the knight had found her before she died of exposure.

  Grace turned her thoughts to her rescuer. She supposed he was some sort of historical re-creationist. No doubt he lived in a remote valley, rode his horse, wore his costume, and pretended he dwelled in a time long past. Certainly it would have been better if someone passing by on the highway had seen her prone form, but Grace would not complain. She was grateful to have been rescued before hypothermia stopped her breathing for good. She supposed the knight was taking her to his hut or fort or whatever structure it was he had built for his home. Once she was warm enough, and when the weather permitted, she could walk back to the highway. And then? She wasn’t sure, but she could worry about that when the time came. She remembered the card the mysterious man, Hadrian Farr, had given her. It was still in the pocket of her now-thawed and wet chinos. Perhaps she would call the number on the card. The Seekers might be able to help her decide what to do next.

  Carefully, for she was still dangerously cold, Grace parted the blanket in which she huddled, then peered around the knight’s broad back. She was curious to see if she could recognize any landmarks in the direction in which they rode. After all, this area had been her home once. Certainly she would recognize something.

  Through the gap in the blanket, she watched fields bordered by low stone walls slip by, all dusted by the snow that fell from the colorless sky. None of it looked remotely familiar. Only after a long moment did Grace realize she could see no mountains. Instead, they rode across an undulating plain. But that couldn’t be right. Maybe the falling snow had obscured her vision. She leaned to one side, in order to get a view of what lay directly ahead of them.

  She had forgotten about the castle.

  It was closer now, standing atop a low hill that rose above the horizon. Turreted towers reached toward the sky, surrounded by a wall of gray stone. With sudden certainty she knew there was not now and never had been a place like this in Colorado. And the knight was riding directly for it.

  Grace’s carefully crafted explanation shattered like so much ice.

  27.

  “Where …?”

  The word was barely a whisper and was snatched away by the frigid wind. Grace drew in a gulping breath and pressed her lips together in an attempt to warm them. She tried again.

  “Where are we?”

  This time it was something between a whisper and a croak. The knight craned his neck and glanced back at her over his shoulder. For a fleetin
g moment he smiled, displaying whiter and straighter teeth than Grace would have guessed. Then his expression grew solemn once more.

  “So, my snow lady is awake,” he said in a grave voice that was rich with a lilting accent Grace did not recognize.

  It seemed he had not understood her faint words. With great effort, she spoke the question one more time.

  The knight frowned, as if this were a peculiar thing to ask. “Why, we are in Calavan, of course.” He let out a forlorn sigh and his shoulders slumped. “But that was greatly discourteous of me, was it not? I will ask your forgiveness, though I doubt you can possibly grant it. You must feel distressed after your ordeal. Indeed, it is a wonder your mind was not completely addled by the cold, and that you can speak at all. So allow me to answer you again. We have been in the Dominion of Calavan proper ever since we crossed the old Tarrasian bridge over the Dimduorn, the River Darkwine.” He pointed toward the rapidly growing castle. “Yonder is Calavere, the seat of King Boreas.”

  Grace did her best to digest this information. She could not fathom precisely what it meant—there were far too many intriguing but unrecognizable words. However, it all seemed to confirm her suspicion this was somewhere very far from Colorado. She tried to swallow and found she could.

  “Why did you call me your snow lady?” Her voice was stronger this time.

  The knight glanced back at her again, his brown eyes somber. “Because, my lady, when I came upon you in the forest, you were as white as the drift of snow in which you lay.” He shook his head. “I feared you were dead when I found you. In truth, I half fancied you had never been a living creature at all, for your skin was as white as ivory, and when I lifted you out of the snowbank your flesh was as hard and cold as stone. But when I laid my ear against your chest, I heard the faintest sound of a heart beating. ‘Durge,’ I said to myself, ‘somehow your snow lady is alive. But if you don’t get her to the castle, and as quick as lightning, she’ll be as cold as the snow indeed. No doubt you are too late, and there is no hope, but you ought to try all the same.’ ”

  Grace’s forehead furrowed. The knight, whose name was apparently Durge, seemed a gloomy fellow. “But you did save me,” she said.

  The knight looked startled at this. “We’ll see,” he said. “It isn’t much farther now, but I imagine you cannot endure the cold any longer. I suppose it would be all the more ironic if you expired a mere furlong from the castle gate.”

  She shook her head. “I’ll make it.” A thought occurred to her. “You said you found me in the snow?”

  “That is so, my lady. There has been an early snow—a queer storm for a land so far south as this. I rode into a clearing, and there you were, lying in a drift as peacefully as a princess on her feather bed. Nor were there footprints in the snow around you. It was as if you had drifted down from the sky.”

  Here the knight paused and cast a look at her out of the corner of his brown eyes. However, if he wondered how it was she had come to be in the woods, he did not ask her. But how had she gotten from the old orphanage by the highway to a snowy forest here in … wherever this was? At the moment she had no idea, but she intended to find out.

  “It is a wonder anyone found you at all, my lady,” Durge said. “It is spoken that Gloaming Wood is a fey and ancient place. Few of the common folk will venture within its shadowed eaves. I suppose they fear the Little People. Though it is the mundane dangers—boar and bear and poison mushrooms—rather than old myths that are likely to harm them.”

  “Why … why were you in the woods?” Grace asked. The words came easier now.

  “I am making haste to Calavere, my lady,” the knight said. “A Council of Kings has been called for the first time in long years, and the rulers of all seven Dominions ride to Calavan. I have journeyed south from my homeland ahead of my liege, King Sorrin of Embarr, to make certain things stand ready for him when he arrives at the castle. At dawn I decided to cut through the fringes of Gloaming Wood, for the way is faster, and I had hoped to find a fat stag to offer for King Boreas’s table. But winter comes early this year, and game is already scarce. I found no trace of stag in the woods. Thus King Boreas will have to make do with your company instead.”

  Grace thought the stern knight had made a joke, then she reconsidered. Something told her Durge was not one for making merriment. Whoever this Boreas person was, she would almost certainly need his help to learn where she was, and it would not aid her cause if it seemed she was the reason there was no meat for his board.

  Grace lifted her eyes to the dark shape that rose before them and studied it. She had seen castles before in pictures, and had been inside replicas of them at amusement parks. However, the fortress that loomed before her was neither a crumbling relic of a bygone age nor an anachronistic recreation constructed to amuse and elicit money from tourists. Somehow Grace knew this castle was real.

  Counting, she saw the castle—Calavere, the knight had called it—possessed nine towers. None of them were alike. Some of the towers were tall and spindly with pointed roofs, while others were stout and square. Most were set into the many-sided wall that ringed the hilltop, while the largest dominated the center of the fortress. This last tower was a great, blocky structure as wide as it was tall, with narrow windows and high crenellated parapets. The haphazard towers gave the impression the castle had been built in many stages over several centuries with no common design. The result was a kind of stark and craggy majesty that seemed as natural and unplanned as the beauty of mountains.

  Durge nudged the flanks of his soot-colored mount. “Come now, Blackalock. This is no time to dally.” The horse stretched its legs to gallop faster, yet the stallion’s gait remained smooth, even careful, and he rolled his eyes back to glance at the passenger who rode behind the knight.

  In minutes they reached the base of the hill on which the castle perched. Durge guided Blackalock onto a broad path that wound in a spiral up to the summit. For the first time they encountered others on the road, and the higher they went the more people they passed. These were all on foot, dressed in drab but warm-looking clothes cut of rough cloth. Some pushed wooden carts filled with peat or firewood, while others carried bundles on their stooped backs or prodded flocks of goats with willow switches. To Grace they all looked curiously old: their limbs crooked, their faces weathered. All except for their eyes, which seemed too young for the rest of them.

  A memory crept into her mind, of old men in patched overalls sitting on a rickety front porch. Only they hadn’t been old, had they? She had seen people like this once before, while on a vacation in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. In Appalachia there were places where people still lived under the same primitive conditions their ancestors had three centuries before, in ramshackle cabins that lacked refrigerators, running water, and electricity. Most of them had looked years older than their twentieth-century counterparts—wrinkled, gnarled, toothless. Something told Grace these people here were a similar case.

  Peasants, the word drifted from her subconscious. With great effort, she dredged up dusty recollections from her undergraduate world history course. Didn’t every castle have peasants who paid tithes of goods and labor to the lord in exchange for protection? Except, according to the course professor, the feudal system had vanished over six hundred years ago. At least on Earth, a disconnected voice in her mind added. However, she was still too cold to consider the implications of that. She tightened the blanket around herself and tried not to stare at the people who trudged along the road.

  They came to the castle gate. This was a high arch in the wall flanked by a pair of square towers. Massive doors of iron-reinforced wood stood open to either side. The knight slowed his horse to a walk and followed the stream of people into the opening. Beyond was a dim corridor. The sounds of people and animals echoed off the stone walls. At the far end of the passage was a raised iron grill. Grace craned her neck and saw dozens of holes in the ceiling. Their purpose was clear. Intruders who broke through the first
gate would be stopped by the second and caught within the tunnel while defenders rained down arrows or boiling lead from the murder holes above. Whatever this place was, it certainly was not unfamiliar with the concept of war.

  Two men stood at the far end of the tunnel, clad in mail shirts, swords belted at their hips. Like the peasants, they were small but powerful-looking, with weathered faces and young eyes. The men-at-arms collected a copper coin from each of the peasants who passed through the far archway. The knight nudged his mount forward. One of the men-at-arms looked up, then saluted, fist against chest.

  “Where will I find King Boreas’s seneschal?” Durge asked.

  “In the king’s stable, in the upper bailey, my lord,” the guard said and gestured through the archway.

  Durge nodded and guided Blackalock toward the opening. As they passed, the guard’s eyes widened. The man elbowed his companion, who affected a similar expression. Durge kept his gaze fixed ahead. Grace cast one last glance back and saw the two men-at-arms make some strange sign with their hands. Then the horse passed through the archway and into the space beyond.

  It was a courtyard. High walls enclosed an area as large as a city block. The courtyard—or bailey, to use the guard’s word—was ringed all around by stone buildings of myriad shapes and sizes, each built with its back against the castle’s outer wall. Smaller buildings of wood were scattered throughout the courtyard. It looked as if some sort of market or fair were in progress, for the entire bailey bustled with peasants and various castle folk. The hooves of livestock and the wheels of carts had churned the ground into a mire. There was as much to smell as see, and Grace’s nostrils were assailed by the odors of smoke, manure, and roasting meat. Any last doubts this place was anything but real were erased from her mind.