Chance Page 8

  She was not permitted to say that name, not even in the privacy of their wedbed, in lovemaking. She might as well have called him bastard. Lord Chauncey wanted to kill her. His strong fingers twitched as if to throttle her where she stood. Kings had killed royal wives for less. But oddly, he did not speak or move.

  “Until you are Chance and a man again,” Halimeda said to him, and she turned her back and left him with his golden cup.

  The next morning, Lady Halimeda put on her riding habit of ivy green furred with ermine, herself mounted horse and rode through the white winter day, seeking her daughter. And she rode out in like wise the next day, and the next, and many days to follow, uselessly searching as far as the fringes of Wirral, though she would not go within that vast wilderness. She did not find her daughter. Xanthea was gone.

  The lady rode a gray gelding. Being of independent mind, she rode alone.

  One day in deep winter she rode the long journey to Wirral, heedless of the cold and snow that lay deep on the cornfields. The lodge where Chance had courted her stood surrounded by cornfield. Gallowstree Lea was gone, turned to cornfield like the woodland that had surrounded it; Chance had seen to that. But Wirral yet lived, somewhere far ahead.

  At the reaches of Wirralmark the forest stood waiting, the butts felled by autumn woodcutters lying silently beneath a shroud of snow, and the many, the countless many yet standing waiting as silently for something beyond the reach of men’s dreaming and striving. On the gray gelding Halimeda picked her way through the felled boles and into the realm of the living ones. Oak, beech, chestnut loomed huge to either side of her and for miles ahead. Her horse pushed its way through snow chest-deep.

  Only a little way. Halimeda glanced over her shoulder. She would not go out of sight of the light of the cleared fields. Should she venture too far into this forest, darkness would take her.

  She looked for a likely tree, a huge old oak or elm, perhaps, full of hollows and squirrel holes. Something unspoken lay heavy between her and Chance—she still thought of him as Chance. Nor was it silence alone that dismayed her, for he had never been one to speak to her overmuch, even when he was a commoner and her secret lover. But she could sense the unspoken trouble as she sensed foreboding troubling her sleep, and she had come to beard it if she could.

  She stopped her gray at a lightning-riven oak. One of many in Wirral, but the Denizens were many, also. Likely there would be some holed in the oak. Likely they were watching all around her, and had been peering and smirking since she had approached the forest.

  Halimeda spoke. For the first time she willingly bespoke those who were never called by name. “Little ones there in the tree,” she addressed them, “come out, please, and speak with me.”

  Then she waited. No Denizen gave her answer. No large-featured faces appeared, no narrow bodies with twiggy limbs and barklike skin. But within the treetrunk she could hear the trilling and warbling of their laughter.

  “Little ones there in the tree,” she said again, humbly, “pray come out and speak with me.”

  Not in that tree, but in a beech nearby, in a comfortable hollow, the prince of the small forest people lay dallying with his longtime love. She would not live immortally as he did, but while she lived her sap would run quick and merry. She was one of the human-born ones, a dainty, chestnut-haired beauty, and her name, though she no longer remembered it, had been Iantha. She smiled in amusement, hearing not far away the humble beseeching of her mother’s voice, and she broke away from her lover’s arms to peep.

  “These foolish humans,” she grumbled, bright-eyed. But then her look turned wistful as she gazed upon the beautiful mortal woman in her garb of ivy green.

  “Very foolish,” the prince of the Denizens lazily agreed with his lover. “But the fortress lady is not as foolish as her mate.”

  With butterfly quickness Iantha’s mood turned from wistfulness to glee. She smiled, foretasting the joke. “How so?” she asked.

  “Chance has let us gift him with his own doom.”

  “Please!” Halimeda’s tone turned sharp, and she abandoned rhyme. “I want to ask you about my daughter!”

  Laughter chirped yet louder. “Which one?” a voice cried from the oak.

  Halimeda paled as white as the ermine that trimmed her sleeves, as white as the snow. Anastasia and Chloe were safe at the fortress, she told herself fiercely. The mocking questioner could not threaten them. The voice meant—no. She would not think of—that other. They could not make her think of—that other.

  She paled, but she did not crumple. A Denizen had spoken to her. It was a start.

  “Chance thinks he can keep us away,” the prince remarked to his mate. “Cutting the trees. The more fool, he.”

  The voices in the oak had started a chant.

  “Which one, which one, which one, we say?

  Wirral will take back its own one day,

  Wirral will take back its own!”

  “And Wirral is worse than we,” the prince added darkly.

  “Tell me where Xanthea is,” Halimeda begged the forest. Though she deemed she knew. For the trouble between her and Chance was this: that both of them knew well enough where Xanthea was to be found. Xanthea, or her body. At the heart of Wirral. But neither of them would say it, or venture there.

  The prince of the denizens squirrel-leaped past his mate and out of his hollow to stand on the winter-stripped branch of the beech.

  “Where is Xanthea?” he mocked. “Where can she be?”

  Halimeda’s gray-green eyes turned to him. He vaunted and strutted on the bough where he stood, and he sang.

  “With bone of deer and outlaw’s skull

  And fur of wolf and fox she lies,

  With limb of oak and linden leaf

  And all that in Wirral dies!

  But Wirral lives.”

  Halimeda heard the taunting menace in his voice. She felt her throat fill with terror, and she turned her horse toward the fortress and fled, floundering, through the snow. Chanting voices followed her.

  “Which daughter, which one, which one?

  Wirral will take back its own, and soon!

  Wirral will take back its own.”

  Xanthea stretched her long limbs and sighed with pleasure. The canopied bed, piled with silks and furs, was soft, and sizeable enough so that her tall body need never be cramped, even with that other tall body lying beside it. From one bedpost, hers, hung a golden mask with peacock feathers streaming down. From the other one hung the furred wolf mask.

  Smiling at the masks, Xanthea remembered.…

  Fleeing her father’s great hall with the stranger. The night had not felt cold, for her blood ran so hot and strong that it seemed to her she could warm the whole wintertime world. A horse waited close at hand, saddled, with a pillion. Wirral had known when he came what he wanted, the rascal. He picked her up by the waist—and there were few men who could have done that—picked her up lightly, for he was very strong, and set her sideward on her cushion on the horse’s rump. The steed was moon-white, and comely, and splendidly caparisoned, and mannerly beyond belief: it bowed for Wirral’s mounting so that he need not pass his foot near the lady. Then, when its riders were settled, it sprang away into the air.

  With the strange excitement pounding in her blood, Xanthea was not frightened. With her arms around Wirral’s waist and the golden mask keeping the cold rush of air from her face, with peacock plumes trailing behind her and her peacock-blue gown flowing down around her feet, she rode. She looked down often to see how strange her father’s land lay far below, moonlit and starlit and rushing away beneath the horse’s hooves. The steed flew and bore her, but she felt as if she herself were flying, she, Xanthea the warrior, the falcon wings straining on her helm, flying away from the place where she had been kept prisoner, where someday she would return.… The horse had no wings. Yet it flew, so smoothly that it seemed at one with the still air, the night, the moon.

  Then the world of white came to an edge; W
irral forest lay below, and stretched dark as far as Xanthea could see. The horse flew on until the snow-covered fields lay far behind; all was darkness below, dark branches so massed, so striving that only jumbled bits of white showed between them like drunken stars fallen into a pit.

  “The size of it!” Xanthea whispered. She spoke only for herself; she had not thought the other could hear her.

  “Wirral is vast,” he replied, his voice hushed.

  It seemed immense as the sea to Xanthea, and though the horse flew swiftly she could see no end of it. But after the passing of a time, without warning the horse swooped down toward the trees, and Xanthea almost screamed, clutching at the stranger in front of her. The next moment, branches rattled against her mask. Then with dizzying suddenness she was under the canopy of boughs instead of above it, and the horse came to a stop, standing on the snowy ground. The wolf-masked stranger swung his booted foot over the white steed’s neck and slipped lithely to the ground. Then he reached up for Xanthea’s waist and as lightly lifted her down.

  Dawn was coming on. Pale light drifted down like fine snow from around the stars. Lady Xanthea and her escort stood side by side in the midst of wilderness. The horse walked away.

  “Tell me what you see,” the stranger said.

  She stood staring about her at ferns and deadwood and towering trees, for she had never seen true forest before, or even woodlot, but only the tame walled garden of her father’s fortress.

  “I see …” She blinked, for she had seen the white horse turn to a white squirrel and leap up the trunk of a massive oak.

  “Take off your mask,” said the stranger, “and feel the air, and breathe deep of it, and see.”

  Dawn’s light had turned from white to golden. Xanthea regarded her companion steadily. “You take off yours also,” she said.

  He did so, and he was the most beautiful man she had ever seen or envisioned in dream.

  His eyes were wild, and burning with a soft fire, and fixed on her. His hair was the color of a red fox in summer. His brows were like the wings of an eagle; his face, a warrior angel’s. When he moved, he was the deer for grace and the oak for strength, and when he stood still, as he was, looking at her.… She saw nothing but that face, those eyes. Ardent eyes, brown as a deer’s, and as soft, yet fierce as the yellow eyes of a wolf.

  His wild beauty frightened her as nothing else could have; it made her feel small inside, and cold, with all the heat in her blood chilled. She took a step back. “You said you were ugly,” she whispered.

  “As ugly as you,” the man agreed. With both hands he reached out and lifted the golden mask by gentle fingertips. Peacock plumes rustled soft as the whisper of death, coming away, and Xanthea stood bared, shrinking, like a pale mollusk bereft of its shell, biting her lip and not meeting his eyes. The chill sting of the winter air on her face made her shiver. She clenched her cold, blue-fingered hands.

  “Look at me,” said the stranger with no hesitation, no revulsion in his voice. “See.”

  Xanthea shook her head. “I have seen,” she mumbled, and she averted her face.

  “See,” Wirral urged. “Look in my eyes. See yourself.”

  The low tremor in his voice—threat, or ardor? Xanthea could scarcely believe, ardor. Still, something in his voice made her remember courage. Made her take a deep breath of the heady forest air, made her straighten her slumping shoulders and turn her head toward him. She looked straight into his soft, vehement eyes.

  And in them she saw herself as Wirral did.

  She saw herself in small there at first, and stared, and then saw nothing but the stranger’s feral eyes and herself, in them. With a rush like heat in the blood the image filled her sight. A tall maiden with a proud bearing and long, dark hair—she had never noticed the honey-colored lights in her hair—and wearing the hair like a crested helm: a striking, strong-boned face, unlike the face of any lesser maiden, a face with flashing eyes and a wide, feeling mouth. A questing face, tender yet hawk-keen. A strange face, better than a jeweled mask for gazing on. And the hot-blooded daring that had been Xanthea’s at the masque was hers once again; Wirral had given it back to her, and she no longer felt the cold.

  “You see?” Wirral gazed gravely at her and took her hand in one of his, carrying her golden mask in the other. “Come.”

  By the hand, held in courtly wise, he led her to the massive oak. A fissure showed in the trunk, puffy-lipped, large enough for a man to squeeze through, no more. He stood aside and let her step in ahead of him, into darkness, or so it seemed. Then he followed, and found Xanthea where she stood blinking.

  Outside, their tree-shelter was a wild, warty, gouty old oak with sprouts bristling from its gnarls. Inside, it was a palace.

  Halimeda was not one to weep easily. The misfortunes of her youth had hardened her. Seventeen years of holding power with Chance, and sometimes against him; several lyings in childbed, one infant boy born dead, three babies miscarried; it had all hardened her. Therefore she did not weep for Xanthea. She would not weep until the girl’s body lay in front of her, ready for burial. One long-ago night at Gallowstree Lea she had been in such callow, whimpering despair she wanted to kill herself, but she had seldom wept since.

  Therefore, she did not weep as she rode home from Wirral, where the Denizens had mocked her.

  Moreover, she had not loved Xanthea overmuch. There had been something uncanny about Xanthea.… Halimeda searched for Xanthea, not so much because she wanted this particular daughter back as because she sensed power, being one who knows the ways of power; she sensed menace. And she loved the daughters remaining to her more. And she scorned her husband Chauncey, who would sit at his cups and see to his lordly clothing and do nothing, for fear of facing the thing that was happening.

  Halimeda returned to Wirralmark at nightfall and gave commands. Then she called her daughters before her.

  “Anastasia, Chloe. Until I tell you otherwise you are not to venture even so far as the village. You are to stay within the fortress walls.”

  Their plain, blunt faces congealed, like hardening dough, to show their displeasure, for Anastasia and Chloe had been petted since birth and did not lack for boldness. “Mother,” Chloe objected, “it is not fair.”

  “You ride out every day,” said Anastasia.

  “No longer will I do so,” Halimeda told them.

  But that night she dreamed a strange, dark dream of trees. Oak and ash and elm and linden, birch and beech and fir, all mingled like a masqueing crowd, all danced, tossing their leafy heads, and she stood tiny in their midst, trying to evade the huge tramplings of their roots, and then she knew with terror that they were not unaware of her. For their branches swung out and seized at her, their boughs became hard, twiggy hands that clutched at her, and they were so strong, she could not escape them, she was flung like a toy from one to another, and somewhere near at hand she heard the growl of a wolf.…

  She awoke in her cold bed—for Chance slept elsewhere except when he came to her to service her, as happened seldom enough, any longer—Halimeda awoke shaking and lay awake until morning.

  Then she had her daughters summoned to her again. “You are not to venture out of the keep,” she told them. “You are not to venture even into the fortress gardens, or any place where there are trees.”

  Anastasia and Chloe were aghast. “Mother!” they protested.

  “Go to the rooftop,” Halimeda snapped, “if you need air.” Then she did what she had told them she would not. She called for the saddling of her gray, and she rode out again.

  At dusk she returned, her face pinched and shadowed. That night no trees groped and clutched in her dreams. But in the darkness of sleep she sensed a nightmare far worse to her, an ineffable, flowerlight touch, a presence like a song long pressed out of mind springing up once again from the dark soil of dream: the gossamer fragrance of violets.

  Halimeda awoke nearly screaming, for there were things she had taken care not to allow in her mind for sixteen yea
rs, and this soft touch held for her far more terror than the hard hands of Wirral trees. She did not sleep again, and rode out at the first light of dawn, and was gone until dark. The next day she rode out again, and the next day, and every day, that long winter. Nothing came of it except that her face grew ever more thin, and taut, and pale, until even her daughters, petulant though they remained at being confined indoors, felt concern for her.

  “Mother,” Anastasia urged, “stay home one day, warm yourself by the fire, rest. You look like a wraith.”

  Halimeda stared straight at the girl with a gaze that seemed to look through her, as if sturdy Anastasia were herself a wraith.

  Chloe added her plea. “Stay home tomorrow,” she begged.

  Halimeda spoke, and her voice sounded hollow as the voice of winter wind. “Iantha is gone,” she said.

  The two girls stared at her in perplexity. It was a name they had never heard. “You mean Xanthea,” said Anastasia gently.

  “Iantha is gone,” repeated Halimeda woodenly, and she rose from her place by the fire and went to her chamber, where she would sleep a few hours until some dream awoke her. She rode out again on the morrow.

  Lord Chauncey sat with his feet sprawling and his golden cup in hand, regarding the delicate-faced boy who stood cowering before him.

  Lord Chauncey was a man of two passions, a man whose thoughts ran two deep courses, like the deeply worn ruts of a well-traveled road. One was that he should not be scorned. He dressed splendidly, lived lavishly, strove in all things to make folk forget that he had been born a commoner and a bastard; and therefore, he never could forget it himself. The more he turned his back on his past, the more it sniggered and giggled behind him, like Denizens taunting him from their hidden places in the forest trees.

  The other was that he hated and feared Wirral. That forest knew his secrets. Wirral knew, and the small folk who lived in Wirral knew, and the outlaws denning in its penetralia, the nodding monster in its fens, they all knew the most hidden thing about Chance. Likely the Denizens were still singing it in rhyme from the treetops. Chance the castrate, scarcely man, Chance the castrate, ran and ran through Wirralwood in search of balls, and found them there, and found them good.…