Chance Read online

Still, he had to know. For Roddarc’s sake.

  “Tell me,” he whispered. “I will pay when I must.” Whipping boy that I am, he thought.

  The forest fell to silence. The brown Denizen sat down on the bough; the gray one remained standing and spoke formally, with no attempt at rhyme.

  “The rebels are gathering at Gallowstree Lea. Blake is their leader. Their numbers are small, fifty and a few, but they are clever. They will not need to penetrate the fortress. Roddarc will come to them, for they have with them a hostage.”

  “Who?” Chance demanded, though already he knew.

  “Lady Halimeda.”

  All the miles to the fortress he ran. The day was more than half spent, but, powers be willing, there might yet be time—if the forest folk had told truth. He had heard tales, and he knew they might be making a jackass of him, burbling their uncanny laughter. Or betraying him, luring him off on a fool’s errand, perhaps setting him to lure Roddarc off on a fool’s errand while Blake took the fortress. The thought burned in him.

  But instinct told him that there was truth in them this one first time. Truth to make him always hope thereafter.

  Roddarc was at the gate, at horseback, with a troop of mounted followers, just setting out when Chance ran up to him, stumbling and streaming sweat and grasping at the steed’s mane for support.

  “Halimeda is missing,” Roddarc told him tersely.

  Chance nodded. Gasping for breath, he could not yet speak.

  “What is it, man! You have news of her?”

  “Gallowstree Lea,” Chance panted, finding voice. “Blake, their leader. Fifty men. They will be expecting you.”

  Halimeda had gone on horseback and left a plain trail. Roddarc rode grimly along it, with Chance on a warhorse beside him but not armed for war. When they neared the lea, they dismounted and left their steeds and men, stalking ahead to scout the enemy’s preparations. It was not fitting that the Lord of Wirralmark should do this; Chance should have done it for him. But Roddarc had insisted that they go together.

  “I trust no one but you these days,” he murmured as they made their way softly forward.

  The lea was a meadow in the midst of Wirral, a place where lightning had seeded fire a few seasons before, now lush with grass and shrubs. Off to one side stood a surviving tree, an elm where outlaws had once hung a renegade. Cocky of Blake, to choose this place; did he not fear the same fate?

  Roddarc did not tread as silently as Chance would have liked. But it did not matter. Blake was indeed overweening. He and his followers stood chatting in boyish excitement, and his sentries heard nothing but that babble. Of course, they were not expecting spies, but a troop of men on horseback, blundering along a plain trail.

  Halimeda stood tied to the gallows tree.

  “How did they lure her here?” Roddarc wondered, whispering, very softly, directly into Chance’s ear.

  Chance knew well enough how it had been done. A message of love from Blake, an elopement planned, perhaps. Hoping Roddarc need not know, he did not answer. But suppose Halimeda stood bound merely for appearance’s sake, actually there of her own will, to watch her brother be killed … could infatuation have made her so false? Chance felt sick.

  “Go around,” Roddarc whispered, “and when you are behind her, signal me with a bolt in the air. Then I will sound the horn, and do you free her and take her to safety.”

  If Roddarc’s troop charged at the blast of the horn, all would be well. But if they tarried, Roddarc would face fifty men alone. Chance shook his head in protest.

  “Do as I tell you!” Roddarc commanded, the words soft between clenched teeth.

  The bolt, Chance decided, would be in Blake’s back rather than into the air. He made his way with all stealth around the lea to the place where Halimeda stood captive.

  And when he had stalked to a place where he could see her hands, his heart warmed with relief. She was tied, truly and firmly tied; her wrists ran red with blood from her attempts to free herself. She stood with her head bowed, her dark hair hanging so that he could only glimpse her face.

  He could not shoot Blake. Halimeda and the tree stood in the way. By no maneuvering could he manage it.

  At last he gritted his teeth, sent a bolt into the air, and heard the mighty blast of the horn. Halimeda’s head came up as if jerked by a hangman’s rope.

  Then Chance reached her side, cutting her bonds.

  And on the far fringe of the lea, Roddarc was striding forward, sword at the ready, roaring for Blake to meet him in combat.

  If the rebels had any honor at all, he would not yet be killed.… Chance reached for Halimeda’s arm, to lead her to safety. But the look on her lovely face, the blaze of hatred, stunned him, and in his astonishment he let her snatch the long knife from his grasp. Dumbfounded, he stood with the hand that had reached for her arm still reaching, in air.

  She turned and ran straight toward Blake, the knife raised.

  There was small honor in the renegades. They were closing in on Roddarc on all sides; he held them off with mighty arcs of his sword. Running to his aid and her own revenge, Halimeda hurled herself at Blake with a harpy’s shriek, clawing at her erstwhile lover’s neck, stabbing at his back. The knife hit the shoulder blade, doing little more than startling him. He flung her off, sent her staggering with a blow.

  Chance got hold of her around her waist before she fell. Enemies were everywhere; he flailed about him with his bow, using it like a club. Halimeda raised the knife again, but not, he saw, against him; she was frightened now, and with reason. “Roddarc,” she pleaded.

  Her brother was hard beset, taking blows and wounds.

  Then the troop thundered in, clearing away the rebels from around him like so much smoke, and Roddarc seized Blake and held him at the point of the sword.

  Three days later the execution took place. By hanging, at the courtyard gallows within the fortress walls. It was as well, Roddarc said, that Halimeda had not killed Blake. Treacherous schemer that he was, he deserved strangulation, not the clean death of the blade.

  Everyone in Wirralmark was there to witness, for by longtime law all were required to be. Halimeda stood near the wooden stairway leading up to the high keep door, and Chance shifted his place, seemingly at random, until he stood near her, hard put not to look at her too long or too openly. She stood very still, very lovely, in a slim dress of oak-green velvet, the raw rope cuts on her wrists hidden by long sleeves that tapered nearly to her fingers. Threads of real gold bound her dark hair into braids and tendrils that rippled down her back. The bruise on her fair, pale face was already fading.

  Not so, Chance thought, the bruise on her heart.

  Hands bound, Blake walked out of the dungeon tower between two guards—or barely walked; they more carried him than not. The coward. There was not a mark on him except Halimeda’s knife scratch; Chance knew that. Roddarc practiced no torture in his prison, not even on traitors.

  The lord came out of the keep and stood by his sister.

  “Our father would have ripped out his tongue,” she said to him, her voice not quite steady, “and his eyes.”

  And taken away his cock as well, had he known.

  “Do you wish it done to him?” Roddarc asked, gazing at her levelly.

  “I—” her voice failed her, and she was silent.

  Perhaps she does wish they had gouged out his eyes that gaze at her so piteously. But no need to take his tongue. He is too craven to speak.

  The noose was slipped over Blake’s head, hitched to the plowhorse which would draw it tight. Halimeda looked straight at her former lover and proudly lifted her chin.

  Roddarc raised his hand and gave the signal.

  The horse walked forward, and Blake was lifted into the air. His handsome face turned to a horror. His feet convulsively kicked, and there was a stench as he befouled himself. The watching crowd burst from silence into a vengeful roar.

  Roddarc was staring stonily at his dying enemy. But Chance watched H
alimeda more than he did Blake, and he saw the pallor of her face increase, a fit of trembling take hold of her. Moving only a few inches, he slipped his strong bowman’s hand under her elbow just as she started to sway.

  Startled, she looked up at him, but did not take it amiss that he aided her. Chance was her dear and lifelong friend, like an uncle, her brother’s all-but-brother.… He did not meet her eyes. If he had answered her glance with all the compassion in his own, she would have wept, and it would not be well for folk to see her weeping. Worse yet, she might have perceived the love.…

  Blake had ceased to writhe. Halimeda took a deep breath. Her brother turned away from the dead renegade, offered his arm to his sister, and Chance eased away from her without, he hoped, anyone’s noticing. The lady walked up the long flight of stairs to the great hall at Roddarc’s side, her head held high, and Chance went back to Wirral.

  He had an inkling what tumult was in Halimeda. He thought of her as he walked in the shadow of the forest. And on toward dusk he made his way to the place where Wirral groped nearest the fortress, where he had a clear view of the postern gate, and there he waited.

  And there, when day had nearly turned to dark, she slipped out and came running as if hounds of hell were after her.

  He met her as she plunged into the forest, tears already shining on her face, and he blocked her way. “Lady—”

  “Oh, Chance, let me be!” she wailed, trying to make her way around him. He knew what she was thinking. She had spent a long day withstanding the gaze of all the world, denied even the wretched release of tears. And now this big, bumbling fool of a warden was keeping her from entering her only refuge, the wild place where she had thought no one would see her weep.

  “Lady, no, you cannot! There is danger. Listen to me, Halimeda!” He took her by the shoulders, met her eyes; she could not see much in him now, not in the dying light. “There is no need to hide your grief from me. I know you loved Blake.”

  She stood still, gazing up at him. “You—you know?” Her voice rose on the final word; she sounded glad.

  “I know much of what happens in Wirral,” he said, then winced and tried to soften it. “Couples walking—clasped hands—”

  She did not care what he had seen. She was weeping freely, and for all that caution cried out to the contrary he gathered her into his arms so that her head rested against his shoulder. Words joined her torrent of tears.

  “The—more—fool I—”

  “You couldn’t know he was a liar,” Chance said.

  “Handsome—liar. He—made a laughingstock—of me.”

  “No one is laughing.”

  “They—will be.” She raised her head, tears clinging to her face. “Chance, you don’t—know all.”

  His heart froze.

  “He—I—I am with child.”

  A spasm afflicted his arms so that he pulled her yet closer to him, rocked her against his chest. “Could you be mistaken?” he begged when he could speak.

  “No. I am—sure.”

  She grew still with a despair too deep for weeping, turned away from him and spoke numbly.

  “He sent for me, and I went riding out to meet him like a—like a—”

  “Brave and loving lass that you are,” Chance told her.

  “Happy,” she said with a bitter wonder. “I was so happy, all the way, I had such news for him. When I reached the lea, I ran to him, he kissed me. And I told him I was bearing his baby—I could scarcely speak for happiness. Then he was laughing at me, and there were men all around.”

  Anger was boiling up in Chance. “I did not see him laugh when you came at him with the knife,” he said.

  She turned her face to him with a grim smile. “I wish I had struck more true! I wish I had done it sooner. But I could not believe what I was seeing, hearing. They were leering, and telling me that I was going to help them kill my brother and take his lands.”

  “The scum,” Chance raged. “The piss-proud dregs! And they needs must tie you to that foul tree, like a felon—”

  “Not then, not yet! It was worse. Blake—Blake seemed to think that I would stay with him willingly, that I was so much besotted—”

  Choking on the words, she wept again.

  “So much his toy, that you would betray your own brother,” Chance said huskily. “Well, the more fool Blake, for thinking so.” And I, for thinking it even for a moment. He put his arms around her, and she wept wearily against his shoulder.

  “Roddarc was—so magnificent—”

  Chance nodded. Roddarc had indeed been splendid. His feat capture of Blake and his outlawing of the remaining rebels had made him shine in the eyes of his troops and his people. Trouble was behind him, for the time.

  “How am I—ever to—tell him.”

  His despair matching hers, Chance had no answer for her.

  The Denizens danced in the mushroom ring.

  A place of great antiquity, this, where the revels had been held time out of mind. All the woodsfolk came, swarming in their hundreds, as thickly as tadpoles in a rainpool. Not all were like the first ones Chance had met, with their sapling bodies and twiggy limbs, their smoothbark skin and the gall-like swellings between their legs. Many were like them, and there were females like them, too, with tough brown protuberant breasts that reminded him of oak apples. But some of the females were miniatures of the most lovely of human maidens, so slender, so dainty, that they seemed nearly transparent. Looking at them, Chance thought achingly of Halimeda.

  He sat off to one side in the starlight and firefly glimmer of dusk, watching the swirling and strutting of the dance with a quiet half-smile, listening to the wild skirling of reed pipes and squirrelgut strings. If the small folk had taken a fancy to invite him to their vernal revels, it was hardly his place to refuse, but he would not be drawn into that ring of yellow mushrooms. Knowing the Wirral Denizens better day by day, nevertheless he knew only that they were changeable, as likely to mock him as greet him. Or as likely to harm him as help, he deemed. If Blake had bespoken them fair, perhaps he would be alive and Roddarc dead. Perhaps they would have aided him instead of Chance. None of this would Roddarc have believed had Chance told him, so Chance told him nothing of it, though he disliked having even so small a secret from his lifelong friend.

  Halimeda’s secret was the heavier one.… She was pale and silent whenever he saw her, and there were whispers among the people; what ailed her? But her secret would not keep much longer. It was blossoming in her, as spring blossomed into summer.

  When the dancers in the starlit ring began to pair off into couples and slip away amongst the ferns, Chance rose and took his leave. He smiled wryly, walking back to his lodge. No lover awaited him there, but the Wirral would grow lush this year.

  Roddarc sat waiting in the lodge when Chance came in.

  “Are you a werewolf,” he asked tartly, “that you have taken to roving under the moon?”

  “Have I bitten you?” Chance retorted. He lighted a lantern and looked at Roddarc, then sat down with him by the cold hearth.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  “What is what?” Roddarc snapped.

  It was the chilling anger in him that Chance meant, anger such as he had never seen in his friend. But he did not say so. “What you came to tell me,” he said instead.

  “Halimeda.” Roddarc hurled the name out as if it were a curse. “She is with child.”

  Chance stared. Perhaps Roddarc took the stare for shock. It was shock indeed, but at the lord’s rage, not at the tidings.

  “I looked at her today,” Roddarc went on with a terrible fury, terrible because so cold and controlled, “and I saw the swelling of her belly. It is just beginning, but I knew. So I made her tell me the truth of it, and name a name, and I did not take tears for an answer.”

  So there had been shouting, ugliness. And Halimeda was disgraced. Chance felt ill at the thought.

  “You must have guessed some of it before now,” he said stupidly.

&nbs
p; “Of course I guessed. What sort of fool does she take me for? She goes about all ribbons and smiles before Gallowstree Lea, and then she turns into a wraith afterwards; how am I not to guess? I knew she was lured there. And who would her lover be but that calf-faced, honey-tongued Blake.”

  “Whom she tried to kill for your sake.”

  “She tried to kill him because he had betrayed her,” Roddarc said coldly, “using her as bait to bring me to him. If he had confided in her, belike she would as readily have killed me.”

  “Rod! You cannot believe that!” Chance spoke with a force that gave Roddarc a moment’s pause.

  “What am I to believe?”

  “All good. She is ardent, innocent, betrayed. She has suffered. She came to your aid, and stood by you bravely while you exacted a lord’s vengeance on a traitor.”

  “If she is so brave,” said the lord in cutting tones, “then why did she not brave my ears and my presence with some words of truth?”

  “She was afraid of hurting you. I’ll warrant she thought to spare you pain as long as she could.”

  “Spare me pain?” Roddarc laughed harshly. “As if it were no pain to wonder! I guessed from the first, and my heart went out to her, and I wanted nothing more than that she should confide in me. More than once I asked her in all gentleness what was wrong, and she would make no reply, only look at me and weep. After a while I grew annoyed with weeping.”

  Chance said nothing. He knew Roddarc, or so he thought. Heartfelt gentleness was painful for the lord to sustain; annoyance, far easier. But perhaps, after he had vented his spleen, gentleness would return.

  “If only she had spoken with me,” Roddarc railed, “trusted me, I could have forgiven her. Even though her foolishness means the disgrace of us both. But she was afraid to tell me. Afraid! I, who do not practice torture even on felons and traitors, what was I likely to do to her? I, who do not use the lash even on my horses and dogs?”

  “Lady Halimeda is no coward,” Chance protested, but Roddarc seemed not to hear him.

  “Child and youth, when I had done wrong I had to stand before my father and endure his wrath—”

  “Which was visited on my body!”