Melanthe kept a divided watch between the mallards that still fed peacefully off the bank and the faint sway of reeds that marked the knight’s passage. It was a delicate moment: if she dallied too long, the ducks might flush and be lost before the falcon was ready, but if she unhooded Gryngolet and cast her off too soon, the anxious and hungry falcon might lose patience with waiting for her quarry to be served and rake off on her own hunt.
The reeds had ceased swaying. Melanthe saw the mallard drake glance alertly toward shore and begin to paddle away. She caught Gryngolet’s brace in her teeth and struck the hood. Lifting her arm a little, she faced the wind and gently plucked the hood free by its green feathered plume.
The gyrfalcon slowly roused, expanding herself. Melanthe did not take her eyes from the ducks, but from the edge of her vision she could see Gryngolet survey the horizon deliberately. Her feathers tightened, and she roused again. Melanthe opened her glove, losing her hold on the jesses.
Gryngolet spread her wings and bounded upward.
The ducks began to paddle faster, making wide V’s in their wakes. They would be soon out of reach of stone or yell; already they were almost too far from the bank to fear it more than the white shadow of death overhead. Melanthe glanced up, saw Gryngolet circling out wide and returning at a few hundred feet. She gave a low blackbird’s whistle.
The knight should have exploded into motion, shouting and waving, throwing stones or any other maneuver that would frighten the ducks into flight.
"Go!" she whispered under her breath.
Instead, that light sway in the reeds was silent, moving, paralleling the bank until it was directly before her and she lost sight of the subtle movement through the interlacing of coppice twigs and branches.
"God’s bones!" she hissed between her teeth. She whistled again.
Gryngolet circled idly; falling downwind as she waited, losing position. The ducks still paddled, gliding farther and farther beyond flushing. Melanthe made a faint whimper of dismay in her throat. She reached for the lure at her belt, preparing to call the falcon down before she raked away.
A boom of feathers erupted from the reeds. Like a huge ghost, a gray heron—king of river quarry—leapt into the air with a shriek, the knight yelling and waving as the bird lumbered along the edge of the reeds, running with wings outstretched, trying to regain the safety of the thick cover. The knight drew back his arm and hurled a stone, fired the second one after it with a powerful heave of his arm, sending the heron clawing upward, gaining the sky in great ringing circles.
Gryngolet snapped to business; she instantly began a kindred spiral. For a hundred beats of Melanthe’s heart the two birds circled for advantage, their flights arcing over the bank and then back above the river as they gyrated upward, Gryngolet ever gaining, passing the desperate heron, mounting aloft.
Suddenly the gyrfalcon seemed to capsize, overturning, empowering her downward plunge with three mighty strokes of her wings before she fell into her stoop. She hit the heron like Vulcan’s lightning hammer; threw upward, rolled over, smashed a daring mallard that had risen before Melanthe even perceived it, and then drove straight back up and turned head-on into the second duck as it pumped for the horizon. They met with a crack like solid stones colliding. The mallard exploded in feathers.
The two ducks dropped dead well out in the river, but the big heron tumbled and listed, shedding feathers, collapsing into the reeds as Gryngolet wheeled and followed it down. The falcon and the huge wildfowl disappeared, battling, Gryngolet shrieking defiance of her quarry’s superior size and strength. Melanthe heard a great splash as she broke out of the coppice running.
She pulled her skirts up, elbowing branches and reeds aside, racing for Gryngolet’s life. Wild splashing and screeching came from the reeds. She saw stalks fall, swept aside as if by a scythe, and despaired of the falcon’s survival of such a combat.
"Towe-towe-towe, hawk!" She cried Gryngolet to her as if she could save her that way.
She stumbled on the long toes of her boots and slid in thick mud, gained her feet, trying to run, ignoring the water that poured in at her ankles. The reeds ahead swayed violently. Suddenly the splashing ceased, an instant of silence that stopped her heart. Then Gryngolet screamed again with lunatic frenzy. Melanthe whipped the stems aside and came upon the battleground.
The gyrfalcon was mantled, her wings arched in a white canopy as she stood shrieking atop the heron’s body. The knight lay full length, facedown in three inches of water, with one arm over the heron and its broken neck between his fists.
Gryngolet had footed his elbow, seizing it with a savage shrill of anger, one claw buried in her quarry and the other in his leather-covered arm as if to fend him off. Ruck had his face turned away from her, hiding it in the crook of his other arm as he yelled muffled curses in answer to the falcon’s screams.
Melanthe pressed her fingers over her mouth. She suffocated an appalling urge to burst out laughing.
"Stand up," she said unsteadily. "Get off her dinner, and she will let you go."
Slowly, shielding his face, he humped himself to his knees while Gryngolet screamed. Water poured off the front of him and dripped on the gyrfalcon, startling her into a moment of confounded silence. Then she bated ferociously, attacking him with both feet. He stood up with her hanging upside down off his elbow, shrieking and flapping as if she were demented. Melanthe jammed her fingers harder over her mouth to contain herself, holding back hilarity with fierce resolution.
The knight gave her a look as malevolent as the falcon’s rage. He appeared to know there was nothing to be done until Gryngolet decided to let go—which she did, with startling suddenness, dropping in a delicate sweep onto her prize. She mantled over the dead heron’s body again, staring suspiciously at the knight.
He moved back promptly, shoving aside the reeds and slogging away without a word. Melanthe slipped her knife from her belt and lifted her skirt. She made in quietly, sliding her bare hand into the cold water to lift the heron’s head and cut it off. Gryngolet, recalling her manners, accepted that as her rightful due, stepping onto the gauntlet like a high-born lady.
With the falcon busy tearing feathers and skin, Melanthe stood. She dragged the heron by its feet, It was the largest she had ever seen, a weight that felt well over a full stone as she pulled it up on the dry bank.
She dressed it there, giving Gryngolet bone marrow and the heart. The falcon ate eagerly, then paused, mantling covetously over the spoils again as it stared behind Melanthe.
She turned. The knight stalked barefooted up through the reeds, soaked, wearing only linen that molded to him so perfectly he might have had on nothing at all. Every muscle showed as he moved, every feature, his ribs and chest, his waist, his thick calves and thighs, even tarse and stones. His shoulders gleamed wetly, big and straight beneath the dripping tails of his rough black locks.
She was accustomed to men who diminished by a third when they shed their armor, but he almost seemed larger, looming up over her as she knelt beside Gryngolet. He dangled the mallards by the neck in one hand, his sword and leather gambeson wadded together under the other arm. His small amulet pouch swung from his wrist, the leather darkened with wet. He did not appear amused.
He cast the ducks down beside her and stood dripping. Melanthe looked at his bare muddy feet and saw a shudder run up through his whole body. She raised her face warily.
He squatted beside her, his eyes for a moment on Gryngolet, who was rending her food with renewed energy, glancing frequently at the knight as if she were determined to consume it before he could steal it from her.
A slow grin lifted his mouth. "Little warrior," he said, smiling his rare smile. "Three in one flight!"
Melanthe watched him, feeling things in her heart that frightened her, emotion that all her instinct and experience warned her against.
She looked from his face to his body, stifling sentiment in cold observation of muck and clammy wet—and not even that could rescu
e her from folly. He was a pleasure for a woman to look upon, as elegant and fine in his body as a great horse was elegant, startling in his grace and muscle. She had been married at twelve to a prince thirty years older and courted in halls of the highest fashion—she had not until this moment understood the plain, powerful comeliness of a dripping and muddy man.
He seemed at ease, as if he thought the linen clothed him as well wet as dry. He had only to look down at himself to find his mistake—but with a rueful inner smile, Melanthe thought that even the evidence of his eyes might not convince him, if he would put his faith in such flimsy things as honor and courtesy and linen, principles as liable to evaporate under the force of reality as the cloth was prone to become transparent in water.
Another shudder passed through him. She stood, unpinning her cloak, and thrust it at him. "There—wrap yourself. And do not dispute and debate me!" she added. "Your bones rattle from the chill."
He rose, sweeping the mantle around his shoulders. "Nay, lady," he said meekly.
She hesitated, and then said, "She didn’t hurt you?"
He turned a thumb toward the pile of stiffened leather. "Before I won my spurs, I used that for armor. Good boiled leather will turn off hard steel."
"It won’t turn off a catarrh," she said. "Come back to dry at the fire, before you begin to cough and croak."
* * *
She could slit the wing-bone of a heron for the marrow, but she didn’t know that green wood wouldn’t burn. She had cut the hearts out of all the fowl, but could not clean them without direction, ending with duck down clinging to her nose, sneezing and struggling to bat it away. The necessity of a spit for roasting did not occur to her until she had already plucked both mallards.
Ruck sat with his mantle and hers both wrapped about him, squinting against the smoky fire she had built, offering advice when she applied to him. By the time they had reached their camp, he hadn’t been able to control his shaking—he had to remove his wet linen. While he was encumbered by the need to hold both mantles close about him to cover himself, she became housewifely in her waywardness—if any housewife could be so inept at some of the tasks as she was.
Reasoning that she would soon tire of such an arduous game, he silenced his objections. But as the ducks roasted amid billowing smoke, burning on one side and raw on the other, she seemed in high humor, binding the heron’s feet to an alder branch, undaunted by the fact that she couldn’t reach high enough to prevent its severed neck from dragging the ground. She held another branch curved down, trying to bend the bird’s knees over it.
Ruck watched her struggle for a few moments. "My lady—" he began.
She turned her head. The twig she was holding broke off in her hand and the branch snapped aloft, the heron’s wings smacking her face as it passed. It hit the top of its arc, bounced off the branch, and fell into the sand.
Ruck kept his expression sedate, as if he hadn’t even noticed.
She sighed, bending down to pick it up by the neck. "For to be tender, I thought to hang the bird a day or two."
"It’s a witty idea," he acknowledged, "but we move on today. I’ll tie it to the baggage."
She dropped the bird on the ground, as if someone else would pick it up, and came to sit down beside him. Ruck shifted his weight, withdrawing as well as he could without standing up to move. He was wary of her, that she might make love to him again. He didn’t wish to be teased and tempted. He could not endure it. She was a rich and gentle lady; she might be delighted by the amusements and pleasures that men made with women in the court, but Ruck had never partaken of those pastimes. He knew his own limits.
As she settled cross-legged beside him like a lad, he realized that she herself had always been his armor against seduction. His true lady.
"Where go we?" she asked, turning up her eyes to him, pretty flower eyes, witching eyes.
"A safe place."
"How can we know where is safety? Even my own castle at Bowland—" She frowned. "Pestilence may be there, too, or in the country between. How can we know?"
Such feminine uncertainty made him feel protective and suspicious at once. His own responses to her he did not trust; how so, when he could look at her and see that she was ordinary and yet think her comely beyond telling?
He scowled at the ground before him. "I have heard me, madam, that there are some can go in the air at night—to far places, where they learn there what they please and return ere morning."
Her expression changed, drew stiff and harsh. "Why say you so to me?"
"Oft have I thought me that you’re a witch." He said it outright. He was determined to know, yea or nay, even if she should slay him for it. "How else could you hold me so long—and still yet? If it be enchantment, I pray to God that you release me."
She pressed her lips together. Then she lifted her arms and cried, "White Paternoster, Saint Peter’s brother, open Heaven’s gates and strike Hell’s gates and let this crying child creep to its own mother, White Paternoster, Amen!" She spread her fingers. She clapped three times, and dropped her hands. "There, tiresome monkish man—you’re released from such spells as I have at my command."
With a shower of sand she stood up and stalked away. Ruck pulled the cloak up around him, leaning on his knees, watching her. She spun the spit—the first time she had done it—and looked with dismay on the blackened skin of the ducks.
"Mary and Joseph! Ruined!" She let go of the stick, and the awkwardly spitted fowls fell back with their burned sides to the fire. Then she cast Ruck a venomous look and held out her fingertips toward the fire, wriggling them and chanting some weird garble of sound.
She lifted the spit from the wobbly supports she’d made, and one carcass fell off into the flames.
"Well, it is no matter," she said lightly, fishing the duck from the coals and rolling it out onto the sand. She pushed it with a stick onto the cloth that they ate from and picked it up. She set the half-charred fowl before him, spreading out the cloth with great care and standing back with a flourish. "I have conjured three fiends and worked a great incantation, and enchanted it to be cooked to perfection."
He gazed down at it for a long moment. "Better to have turned the spit," he said wryly.
"You should have said so. I could have ordered Beelzebub to do it."
He lifted his eyes. She looked straight at him, with no warding for speaking the Devil’s name, her mouth set, her eyes bright with challenge.
"Allegreto said my lady is a witch. And Lancaster’s counselors. All at court said so."
Her lips tightened dangerously. "And what say you, knight?"
He stared at her, his imperious liege lady, beautiful and plain, with her jeweled gauntlets and her hair astray and a great black smudge of ash on her cheek. Her own cloak he wore about his shoulders, and the duck she had hunted lay before him. Her gyrfalcon held the soul of a dead lover, and her eyes, her eyes, they saw through him like a lance, and crinkled at the corners when she laughed.
"I don’t know why I love you!" he exclaimed, sweeping the mantles around him as he rose. "I don’t know why I swore to you; why I never accepted any man’s challenge that might release me from it! Never did I want to be released. I do not still, if it cost my soul. And I can’t say why, but that you’ve beguiled me with some hellish power."
"Flatterer!" she murmured, mocking, but her face was terrible and cold.
He turned away from her. "I know a place safe," he said. "Safe from pestilence and all hazard." He frowned at the river. "But I won’t take a witch there."
"Well, then there is no more to be said." Her voice was cool and haughty. "If a woman bewhile a man, a witch must she be."
"If you say me you’re not, my lady—" He paused. Ripples blew across the water, the cold wind stung his face. "I will believe you."
He waited, watching the water and the dark line of trees that marked the far shore of the Wyrale. The wind shifted, sending another sparkle of ripples at an angle to the first set, scenting the
air about him with smoke.
He turned. She stood with her arms hugged about herself, her brows drawn together in icy disdain, black and arched, delicate as the tips of a nymph’s infernal wings.
"Perhaps I am a witch," she said. "I tell you true, Green Sire—I’ve cheated demons, and still I am alive."
He could believe she had. He thought, were he some minor devil, that he would look on her and be afraid. She discharged power; he could dream that he saw it in a radiance about her, even here, even stripped of jewels and silver trappings, if he let his imagination run away with his sense.
"It’s no sin to cheat demons," he said gruffly. "Only to yield service to them."
"My husband taught me many things. Readings from the Greek—astrology and alchemy and such, matters of natural philosophy, but never did we call on any power but God’s mercy that I know. Test me on my knowledge, if you will."
"I have no command of such. Battle I know, and a sword. Nothing of natural philosophy."
She lifted her chin. "I make no protection-spells."
He did not wish her to be a witch. In his heart he longed to prove her innocent. But he said stubbornly, "By logic, that’s no more than evidence that you desire not to make them."
She narrowed her eyes. "Then what proofs will you have, if you’re so prudent? Will you bind me and throw me in the river, or have me to clasp a red-hot staff?" She pointed at his sword. "Heat it in the fire, then, and test me! And then perhaps I’ll test you the same; Sir Ruck of No Place, for neither do I know why I took notice of you and gave you jewels in Avignon when you were but a shabby stranger to my eyes! Perhaps you worked a charm on me and stole my gems by magic craft!"
"Not I!" he uttered. "I’m no—" He stopped, his hands tightening in sudden realization.
She remembered. Embarrassed heat suffused him, thinking of the raw youth he had been, of how he had let Isabelle be taken from him—of the nameless lady of the falcon and her accusation of adulterous lust against him. "A strong memory, my lady has," he said grimly.
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