Chance Page 11

  “You are now our king and leader,” said one of them at last to the young prince who stood with his lifelove by his side.

  He did not answer, but stood looking at pearl-gray bark, and in a moment he whirled and cried at Xanthea, passionately, as if it were somehow her fault, “Every year, less of us! Less of us to dance at the revels, less to make merry, less to make love for the forest’s sake. Yet, though we take root like trees we need not die and rot—but that your father sends men to hew at us! Our curse on Chance. Our curse on him and all his kindred!”

  Xanthea’s mouth had gone dry. When she spoke, her voice came out as a harsh whisper. “Yet me-seems I am blessed among my kindred, not accursed.”

  Her hand held tightly in Wirral’s hand, she said that. But the Denizen smiled darkly and quipped, “Herseems, she deems! The lady sleeps and quaintly dreams.” Like a squirrel he whisked away up the tree that stood where no tree had been before; his companions did likewise, and within the moment all had disappeared into the branches that spread above Xanthea like mighty, thick-muscled arms. The sound of trilling laughter floated down to her. “Farewell, Lady Fate!” a voice sang, and then the night stood silent.

  Halimeda and her escort had left a plain trail, and Chance followed it, afoot, to Wirral. On the way he stopped at the lodge and took from the Wirral warden food for a few days, cheese and cold meat and rounds of hard bread, and a leather pouch to carry it in. For Chance had been warden himself, and survived Wirral for many years, and though Lord Chauncey had been half mad, as befits a lord of Wirralmark, Chance was canny.

  He followed the moon-shaped marks of Halimeda’s horse into Wirral, and all his fear and hatred of the place seemed laid aside with his finery. He felt, instead, only the thoughtful wariness of one who knows well the dangers he faces. Darkness came while he had not yet ventured far into Wirral, and he lay down where he was and slept.

  The next day, and the next, he followed the trail into the penetralia of Wirral, places where even in his time as warden he had never ventured. Past the dense copse where outlaws denned in their caves. Past the fen where the corpse-white, single-eyed monster nodded. Past the deep, snake-infested dingle that might have been the navel of the forest. Past the chasms that steamed. The trail grew old, but horses’ hooves make a plain mark; he followed. Then within a stride the trail disappeared, as if the horses had turned to air.

  Chance looked around him. Many trees stood nearby, but among them he singled out a huge old oak, full of holes and hollows, the very likely abode of Denizens. He had seen none of the small folk on his way there, and only occasionally heard them snickering, a sound like that of nesting birds. But when he saw the oak he sat down facing it, laid his cudgel across his knees and watched.

  He sat thus all night and into the next day. At dawn of that day he heard the stirrings of the Denizens in the branches of the oak.

  Squirrels, he would once have told himself. Squirrels scampering. And perhaps indeed there were squirrels. But he heard a birdlike warble of laughter, and watched and listened more intently, though he did not move, and in a moment he saw the small face peeping at him.

  It was the face of his son.

  Chance shot to his feet, though he did not cry out, and the Denizens shook the small twigs of the oak with the force of their laughter. Justin laughed as well, and vanished.

  “It’s Chance again!” a piping voice sang out.

  “Once more a man!” cried another.

  “Back again where he began!”

  Chance paid no attention to the mockery. He scarcely heard it. “My son,” he breathed.

  Justin did not know him, he could tell. If the lad had recognized him, the look in those merry eyes would have been one of fear. The thought wrenched at Chance’s heart.

  “What savage fate have you doomed on me?” he demanded of the Denizens.

  They laughed, and as was their wont they did not answer directly. Instead, they sang,

  “Gift of manhead, gift of Xanthea,

  Gift of Wirral, gift of doom.

  Wirral lay with Xanthea

  In her mother’s womb.”

  Chance scarcely heard what they were chanting, for he saw a movement in the black shadow of the largest fissure of the oak, the movement of something more than a Denizen. And in a moment he could discern the figure of a man. And in a moment more the stranger who had carried off his daughter from the Masque of Misrule stepped forth.

  He knew it was the same one, for no two men could have bodies so beautiful. And the face, as beautiful as the body, so comely that for a moment it stopped the shout surging to Chance’s mouth. Skin fair and fresh as the new leaves of spring, eyes feral as a wolf’s farseeking eyes, yet soft as dew on wildflowers. Browed like a hawk, yet with a mouth fit to make a maiden weep with desire. No maiden had ever wept thus for Chance. The shout hardened in him again, but he knew not what name to call the stranger.

  “You!” he roared.

  It was not necessary. Wirral had seen him and faced him from the moment of coming forth. He had come forth solely for this, to front Chance.

  “You have stolen my daughter!” Chance thundered at him. “Where is your weapon?”

  But before the other could reply, Chance turned startled eyes. Halimeda stepped forth from the oak.

  When had her long, dark hair started to silver? He had not noted it before, but now he saw the bright hairs lying among the others like threads of moonlight. Her face, nearly as pale as moonlight, but placid, smooth, every jot as beautiful as the face of the girl he had once so hopelessly loved. And the look in her eyes when she saw him, that sunrise shine, warmed his heart.

  “Chance!” she cried, and she hurried toward him, hands outstretched. He laid down his cudgel, scorning the enemy before him, took her hands in both his own and kissed them.

  “Hali,” he greeted her, “well met.”

  He tried to say a thousand things in those simple words. He tried to say them, also, with his brown eyes that met hers of dreaming sea-green. Perhaps she saw. Perhaps there was no need, already she knew, for she let the moment last only a heartbeat. Hastily, earnestly she spoke on.

  “Chance, our daughter is within, well and whole and happy.”

  Wirral spoke for the first time. “The challenge is given,” he averred. The low burr deep in his voice growled darkly, like a wolf hunting, hungry, in the night.

  Chance straightened where he stood, his eyes keen. Halimeda saw, and clutched at his withdrawing hands with her own.

  “What need is there to fight him?” she protested. “You are no longer a lord, with a lord’s overweening honor.”

  “I am yet a man,” said Chance.

  “I need no weapon, commoner,” declared Wirral.

  Chance stepped away from Halimeda, caught up his cudgel and leveled a blow at the insolent fellow’s head. Wirral eluded it easily. Combat was joined.

  Halimeda retreated to the oak and stood by it, watching, her clenched hands held to her mouth. She had not said to Chance, though she had seen it to be true, that Wirral was Xanthea’s lover. It had not occurred to her to do so, or to say that Xanthea’s heart would be broken if Wirral were harmed, for all her fear was for Chance. Wirral looked far younger, stronger, more lithe, more fearsome in every way; how could he fail to defeat the older man? And the one who came out of the oak and stood by Halimeda’s side, serenely watching, seemed to deem likewise.

  And after only a few moments, Chance began to think the same.

  The uncanny stranger came at Chance with his bare hands, and they were as hard as oak, his grip strong as a hawk’s. After tearing loose from the first grasp of those hands—the fingers left deep, bloody gouges on his shoulders—Chance knew that his only hope was to evade that deadly touch. But blows of the cudgel seemed to stagger the other only for a moment, not to stop him. Many heavy blows Chance landed on him, to no effect.

  Truly, no effect. Chance saw with a shock and a sickness of dread that he had not raised a bruise on that fair face
, or drawn so much as a single drop of blood. Sweating, he found himself scrambling backwards, floundering against trees and around them, striking out—but no blows could hold off those terrible strong hands for long. Running backward, Chance knew that if he stumbled over a root and fell, he would be finished.

  “Who are you,” he yelled out in a sort of furious despair, “that you do not bleed?”

  Without missing stride or breath the other said, “I am Wirral.”

  Then Chance felt the chill of foreboding, but also a hot, unreasoning rage. It was his old enemy. “By God, we hew at you!” he shouted, and he stood his ground beneath the oak, dropped his cudgel and snatched out his knife, slashing. The blade gashed Wirral’s forearm and bounded off it like an axe striking strong, green wood. The wound did not bleed. Before Chance could strike again, the feral-eyed man caught his wrist with a grip fit to break bone, but Chance would not drop the knife.

  “You killed my daughters!” Chance screamed, laying Chloe and Anastasia to Wirral’s account, which might not have been untrue. “You took my son!”

  “Blame yourself for Justin,” Wirral said. “You sent him hither.”

  One of his powerful hands held off Chance’s hand that wielded the knife. The other sought Chance’s throat, and with all the force of his arm Chance could not prevent it. Nor would he writhe away; he had done with running. In a moment he would be finished—

  A heavy, dead bough fell from the oak directly onto Wirral’s head.

  It jarred the strong youth only for an eyeblink. But that moment was all Chance needed. The hawklike grip on his wrist faltered; he tore loose, leaving shreds of his skin behind; and his knife hand shot with redoubled force toward his enemy’s chest. Before the oak bough had glanced off Wirral’s shoulders and fallen to the ground, Chance’s blade had sheathed itself in his heart.

  Though, seeing what he had seen, Chance felt no certainty that it would kill him.

  Wirral fell to the forest floor along with the bough that had been his undoing. Blood, bright red blood, spurted from his mortal wound. Somewhere close at hand a woman screamed; the soft, fierce eyes sought hers. But the beautiful face showed no pain. Nor did it speak. Instead, it simply disappeared.

  There, on the loamy ground, lay a scrap of fox pelt, an outlaw’s skull, and the bones of a deer, long since weathered white. And strong boughs of green oak, and leaves, and blue windflowers, strewn and wilted and bright with blood. And a few gray hairs from a wolf. Nothing more.

  From overhead, from the place whence the oak bough had fallen, came the shrill sound of Denizen laughter.

  “We made him, Xanthea!” a birdlike voice cried. Chance looked up and saw the young prince he well remembered. The fellow seemed scarcely to have changed at all. Chance stood panting with his knife in his hand, its point sending slow red drops onto the Wirral loam.

  “We made him just for you, Xanthea!” the Denizen cried. “For you, golden lady, we made him fair!”

  “Full oft you have with Wirral lain!” called another.

  “And you and Wirral have been one!”

  “And one you twain shall remain!”

  “And now by Chance he’s slain!”

  The voices shrilled dark and gleeful.

  Slowly Chance turned and looked at his daughter. Xanthea, his firstborn child, and the only one who remained to him. He turned with a sure sense of doom, for it was for this, he knew, that the Denizens had sent the oak limb down on Wirral. To spare him for this. His own daughter.

  There beneath the oak she stood, Xanthea, yet not the Xanthea he remembered. Her body, so tall, tall with pride and a vibrant energy. Her face—for the first time Chance saw truly her startling, great-eyed face, its uncanny beauty. Grotesque beauty, quite unlike her mother’s smooth-faced loveliness. Xanthea’s was a mad, verdant, shadowed beauty, as wild as the Wirral. Xanthea’s ways, he deemed, as dark as midnight in Wirral. Xanthea, in Wirral conceived, of Wirral magic conceived and born, by Wirral bred—one with Wirral, as the Denizens had said. Xanthea was Wirral.

  With a strange, slow, hating smile she regarded him. Then, like a doomster, she lifted steady hands and put on her mask. Her golden mask. In it, she seemed to loom, tall, tree-tall, still and fearsome.

  Halimeda came and stood by her husband’s side, slipped her hand into his.

  “Wirral will take back its own.” Standing like the goddess of the forest, Xanthea decreed it.

  Chance found his voice. “It is the Denizens who have done this to you,” he protested. “They have made you their tool. And you have let them.”

  Vehemently Xanthea told him, “Lay the blame to your own account. None of this could have happened had you loved me.” Her glance through her golden mask raked them both, her mother and father standing before her. “Had you loved me at all, it would have held me, I could never have left the fortress walls. For all I have ever wanted is love.”

  Her weird lover had given her love enough to make her anew, give her selfhood she had never known. Now he lay, bone of deer and outlaw’s skull, fur of fox and oak limbs.

  “But failing that,” Xanthea said, “I shall have vengeance.”

  And though he yet held the knife in his hand, Chance could not move as she walked up to him, tall, taller than he, and took it away.

  Then she turned to the forest that waited, listening, all around. And she spread wide her long, strong arms and cried out a summons.

  “My cousins!” she called, and they came to do her bidding.

  Lord Robley, the smiling neighbor with the lovely wife, had not failed to make note of the strange goings-on at Wirralmark Manor by means of his spies. And no sooner had Chance gone away into the wilderness of Wirral than Lord Robley arrived at the head of several troops of men to take fortress and lands for himself. He met little resistance, even from the chamberlain and the household guards, for Lord Chauncey’s followers were disheartened. There had been too many horrors of late, the finding of bodies in a certain bedroom being only the most recent.

  Within a few days of his coming, Lord Robley had settled himself in power, sent for his wife and retinue, given commands. And the folk of Wirralmark accepted his commands almost gratefully. He was a hard lord, Robley, but they were accustomed to harshness in a lord. It was eerieness that unsettled them. The shadow of Wirral. And they hoped Lord Chauncey was dead and would not come back to make trouble for them all.

  Even in their wildest whisperings, even in the ghastliest of the tales told in low voices before a dying fire in deep of winter, they had never foreseen how long the shadow of Wirral would grow.

  Nor was it Lord Chauncey who came back to haunt them. It was his daughter. Chance’s daughter.

  On a moon-gray horse Xanthea came, the morning of Robley’s fourth day in power, boldly and openly, riding aside with her oak-green gown flowing down around her feet. From her saddle hung a mask of gold, with the peacock feathers trailing down, and close beside it the carved wolf-mask. On her body Xanthea wore a girdle of emeralds and gold, a torsade of gold; no armor, no weapon of any kind. But at her back rose the dust of a great army.

  A peasant boy first saw and brought the news to the fortress, running without ceremony in to Lord Robley’s presence, gasping so that he could scarcely speak, his face so mottled and twisted that at first those who saw him thought he had gone mad. When Lord Robley heard his words, he felt sure of it. But then the watchman on the platform shouted down the same report, in a voice hoarse with fear.

  Then Lord Robley himself looked, and then with small thought for anyone else he mounted the first horse he could come to, sent it out the postern gate and galloped away, though he was no coward. And all his troops who could manage it did likewise. For approaching they had seen warriors a hundred feet tall, wooden warriors with leafy helms. Trees.

  Striding along on great, trampling roots they came, oak and ash and beech and elm, and their passing made a sound like stormwind in the branches of Wirral and left the land fallow. And few were those who would stand
before them, for even the least of them, linden and rowan and cherry, a mere thirty feet tall, even these were more than a match for any man. They could be hewed, but they did not bleed. Some few brave tenants took axes and stood at the edges of their fields, attempting to turn the trees aside. Within a few moments they had been trodden into the ground, part of the earth they had tilled, and in years to come oak and ash, linden and cherry would grow out of their bones.

  Wirral had reached out to take back its own.

  Folk, even the soldiers of the fortress, screamed and ran before that army. It leveled cottages as it came. A trampling of roots, the thwacking of a few swinging limbs, and that which had taken men many years to build lay in splinters, ready to rot back into loam.

  Xanthea rode her moon-gray horse through gates swinging open and unattended, into an emptied fortress. Trees followed her. Not trees, truly, but truly Wirral, spirit of Wirral. These were Denizens, generations of the Wirralfolk, the elders who had gone before. Voiceless though they had become in form of trees, their great rage had moved them to follow Xanthea’s call. Xanthea dismounted, and took the masks in her hands, and her horse turned to a squirrel, scurried to the top of an oak. Some of the trees began to tear down the stones of the fortress walls, prying them apart with a grip fit, like the grip of roots, to crack boulders, then hurling them away as children hurl pebbles.

  “Leave the keep a moment longer,” Xanthea told them.

  She walked through the empty, echoing passages, and the stench of corpses from her former chamber did not trouble her. She climbed the stone stairs to the roof and watched the trees. All around the keep they swarmed, for miles all around, trampling away everything that bore the smell of man, just as they had trampled Chance and his lady into Wirral loam, the day before. And though they seemed as many as the midges that swarmed over the fen where the corpse-white monster nodded, Wirral had scarcely thinned by dint of this slight stretching. Some few saplings would gain more light, was all. Wirral stood as it ever had, thick and verdant and perilous.