Dragon's Keep

by Janet Lee Carey

  Marn kissed my cheek and looking down, she saw my soiled gloves and the tear.

  “Filthy!” she said. “And torn. The queen will fly into a rage!” She hovered over me, sniffed, and wiped her eyes. “I fear her anger more than dragon fire,” she whispered. And I saw in her wrinkled face that it was so.

  “Wash them,” she said to herself with a nod, and quick she tore off the gloves. Her swift action startled me and I had not time to hide my hands.

  Seeing my claw, her jaw dropped and her hand flew to her mouth. “Le-leprosy,” she stuttered. “Ah, God!” Her face went tallow colored. My gloves fell to the floor. “So that’s what drove you out. You went to see the lepers encamped in the hills! And now you’ve caught their blight!”

  “No,” I cried. “I did not go to them! This thing. This curse . . .” But already Marn was rushing to my door crying, “Leprosy!” And from the hall I heard her moan, “We’re all undone!”

  I heard Marn knocking on a chamber door as I picked up my discarded gloves and slid them back on. Leper. Leper. Leper. Marn’s cry sounded in my mind with every knock. Down the hall the door opened, then shut again, cutting out all sound. She’d gone in to Mother! I couldn’t move. Now there was only my scattered breathing caught inside my quilt and the rattle of the night wind at my window.

  In my dreams there seemed no peace that night but a swirling and a twirling, all the world going widdershins from God. Still, I would never have wished awakening had I known what dawn would bring.

  Hadn’t Marn said we would all have our punishment on the morrow? Aye, the wild girls got their punishment with the breaking of the dawn, just as Marn had warned, and it was worse than any whip.

  “Rosie!” Kit was on her knees by my bed, her hair askew, her eyes puffy.

  “What is it? Did the dragon attack?”

  She shook her head no.

  “Is it Ali? Was your mother attacked on her way to the abbey?”

  “Marn!” she choked. “It’s Marn.”

  “Is she ill?”

  Kit could not answer. I leaped from my bed and threw on my cloak, heading for her chamber, but Kit pointed down the hall.

  “Where is she?”

  I raced behind Kit, my head more full of pleading prayer than any beggar’s chapel.

  We reached the edge of the moat, where a crowd of servants gathered. Bumping into Cook, I pressed through the crowd, and I found my Marn.

  “God, no!” I screamed, falling to my knees by Kit.

  In the moat Marn was floating, her shawl still wrapped about her shoulders. A dead rat and three bright plum leaves tangled in her hair. Water swirled around her. And the morning rain pattering on the moat made ring on ring that broke against Marn’s body.

  The servants hovered behind me, weeping.

  Cook lifted her hands to Heaven calling, “She’s killed herself! What sorrow brought the woman here?”

  “Hush, wench!” shouted Sir Allweyn as he poked Marn’s hand with his pole.

  “Don’t,” I pleaded. I could not bear his poking at her so. There was the hand that had held me when I was small, picked my berries, mended my gowns, and just last eve had stroked my head. Guiding the pole with steady motion Sir Allweyn drew Marn from the moat. The chapel bells rang, and all of us were weeping.

  Cook was wrong. I knew Marn had not leaped to her death. She was a sturdy soul. She’d wept when sorrow took her. Rocked herself and said binding charms when she was sore afraid. But never would Marn drown herself. I knew this to the bone. Someone had pushed her. Some devil had murdered my Marn, and were a knife within my hand, I’d kill the one who’d done it sure as the morning. I’d slit his throat and watch his blood spill on the ground.

  Sir Allweyn laid Marn’s body on the shore. I wept over her, kissed her cheek, and pulled a bit of moss from the corner of her mouth.

  Cook leaned over Marn’s bloated face and screamed. The other servants joined in till all about the water’s edge there was a sound like the death wraiths keening.

  Sir Allweyn waved his pole and tried to hush us but on we went. We cried all together, Kit holding me as I lifted the wraith song up to the morning sky.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Her Spirit Unbound

  ALL OF MARN’S DEATH DAY, Kit and I huddled by my chamber fire, our eyes swollen with tears. The day passed outside my window, but I didn’t care to see the sun. On we sat, heavy with grief. When the sky grew purple Kit leaned in close to me and said, “Remember the day Marn told us about Sir Magnus?”

  I nodded. It had been three days ago when we were all alone in the walled garden. As Marn tidied the herb bed she’d told us how she came to Wilde Island as a young wife. Her husband had been banished from England for poaching on Lord Headington’s land. “Though he was innocent as a lamb,” she’d said. Then she’d talked of the great Sir Magnus, castle astrologer and counselor to my mother.

  “Thinks he’s God’s gift to the world, he does,” said Marn. “But he’s a twisted man, I say, and I know well for he came aboard the same ship I did to serve out his years of punishment here on Wilde Island.”

  Marn weeded round the rue and boneset. “And what was he banished for, my dears?” She’d tightened her lips, looked about, and lowered her voice. “Murder, I say.”

  “Murder?” I’d felt the thrill of the word churn through me as if I were milk on my way to butter. I’d sensed the man was evil, but never guessed he’d killed anyone.

  “Aye,” said Marn. “And I’m glad I’ve told ye now, for someday you’ll be queen and you’ll need to know not to trust the man.”

  “I never have,” I said truthfully. “Whom did he kill?”

  “His sweet young wife. Poisoned her for her money.”

  “We would have hanged him for that here on Wilde Island,” I said proudly.

  “Aye, and they would have in dear England, too, but some say he coin-pursed the judge and so came here instead.”

  I grabbed Marn’s arm. “Does Mother know?” I asked, but my question was drowned out by the sound of footsteps on the far side of the garden wall.

  “Who’s there?” asked Marn, startled. Kit and I climbed the apple tree. No one was below on the other side. Kit looked wide-eyed at me then, mouthing the word Magnus. Below us in the garden Marn had crossed herself.

  In my solar Kit’s cheeks were flushed as we each recounted the tale. “Magnus must have listened beyond the wall that day and overheard her telling us,” whispered Kit. I stood up, agitated, then sat again.

  “Then yestereve,” Kit went on, “when Marn was alone Magnus took his chance to—”

  “Hush,” I warned. “Someone’s coming down the hall.”

  The door opened. In stepped Mother.

  “Leave us,” she ordered. Kit quit the room, her soft gray gown rustling as she went.

  Mother locked the door. “Put these on.” She tossed a pair of her golden gloves onto my lap. I tore off my filthy ones and Mother threw them in the fire. A putrid smell rose with the smoke as they burned. I choked, slipping the new ones on. They were too large but I said nothing.

  “It is a sorry day.” Mother’s face was still scratched and bruised from her fall. I looked away, silent.

  The fire popped. A small bright piece of wood fell near my gown. Mother jumped up and knocked the cinder into the hearth again with the poker. Her sleeve fell back, showing the scratches along her arm.

  “It doesn’t matter if you speak,” she said. “I know you sorrow for your nurse, as we all do. But you left the castle unguarded with Kit yestereve.”

  “We rode to save Ali.”

  “You took this on yourself?”

  “We saw the villagers coming up the hill with torches and so we went.”

  “Did you not think to come to me?”

  I watched the shadows on the wall.

  “Such risks you take with your life, Rosalind. You know you’re not allowed to ride without an escort.”

  “You did.”

  Mother’s neck stif
fened. “I’m not a child.”

  “Nor am I. I couldn’t let the villagers burn Kit’s mother!”

  “So you ran off with your lady’s maid, who should have kept you here!” Her eyes narrowed. “Listen to me, Rose. This lady’s maid has led you into trouble and so—”

  “You wouldn’t have wanted Aliss to die, would you?”

  Mother’s look wavered and for a moment she couldn’t speak. “How did you know it was she?”

  “I guessed. She didn’t speak of it.”

  The fire cast a trembling light across Mother, and it seemed that she was bathing in the memory of a happier time. Kindness eased her features. I’d missed that look and nearly leaned closer to kiss her cheek.

  “Of course,” she whispered, “I’m glad that she—that Aliss lives.”

  “Why did you send her away?”

  “She was with child, Rose, and out of wedlock.”

  I thought there must be more to it than that. “But why to Demetra?”

  Mother reached into her waist pouch, pulled out the silver vial, and sipped her poppy potion. This she did to harden herself again, I think. But I didn’t want her hardened. I wanted to cry with her for Marn, who’d been her nursemaid and mine, to feel her holding me the way Alissandra held Kit when the fit was on her.

  “You rescued Aliss from the frozen water when you were a girl,” I said. “Why shouldn’t Kit and I save her from burning now?”

  Mother coughed and screwed on the lid. “That’s different.”

  “It isn’t.”

  “You risked the future of our island, Rose.”

  “As you did when you saved Aliss.”

  “No. I was nothing then. No one knew my twin brother would die of the pox and that I’d be the queen.”

  I heard the word nothing like a sting. I wanted to correct her, say that she was never nothing, that she mattered even when her brother was alive, even if her mother and father had sent her away. But Mother went on and the sting grew worse.

  “Marn came to me crying that you’d gone to see the lepers,” said Mother. “She saw your scornful part.”

  “She shouldn’t have . . . she knew not to ever take off my gloves.”

  “She spied the tear and thought to mend them.” Mother’s look was winter cold. She had a way of stripping me with her eyes. “Well?” she said. “What have you to say to this?” She folded her arms across her chest, the gold threads in her gloves sparkling with the firelight.

  I kept silent.

  The flames sent a copper color all round Mother’s head. Like the golden halo that crowned the stained-glass angel in Saint John’s chapel.

  She broke the silence with a sigh. “Poor Marn. It shocked her so when she saw your wretched claw. It was the horror of your deformity made her jump.”

  “Never! Marn would love me if I were covered with sores from head to heel! She would love me without hand or arm or if my flesh were fouled with leprosy. It was not my claw that made her jump!”

  “What, then?” asked Mother, her lip a-twitch. “What else would drive the woman to it?”

  “Marn was pushed!”

  “Pushed? Who told you this?”

  “No one.”

  “Then keep away from lies!” The vein pounded on the side of her neck as she tugged open her saint’s pouch. “Here,” she said. “Swear on Saint Monica’s sacred bone.”

  “Never. She was pushed!”

  “By whom?” asked Mother, still dangling the open pouch so close I could see the saintly finger bone.

  “Sir Magnus. Marn told Kit and me how she came to Wilde Island on the ship with him some years ago. He served out his time in Hessings Kottle before coming to the castle, did you know? Sold as a bond slave for the crime of murder. Marn told me.”

  “Gossip,” snapped Mother.

  “It never was!” I bit my lip to keep the tremble still.

  “Sir Magnus has been with us nine years, Rosalind. Why would he wait so long to kill Marn if she knew his crime?”

  “He might have overheard Marn telling us.”

  “Might?” Mother scoffed. “When you’re queen you’ll have to learn to distinguish between truth and tattle.”

  “Marn wouldn’t lie.”

  “Your nursemaid was very fond of tales. And she had a way of embellishing them.”

  ’Twas true enough. Marn loved to tell a good story.

  My head seemed to swell and the room was astir with far too many shadows. I felt the heat of the fire across my chest, the skin on my face pinching in the yellow light.

  There was another hand that might have pushed Marn into the moat. If I could form the words that gripped me hard about the throat. If I could but look into my mother’s face and ask her.

  Mother drank more drops of poppy potion, closed her eyes, and breathed deeply. I saw her body grow calm. “She may have tripped. The woman had poor vision, and I saw tears blinding her eyes when she left me. She was so stricken by what she’d seen.”

  I looked down at my shrouded hands. Was it so? Was Marn so shamed by the sight of my claw, so blinded by tears that she fell headlong into the moat?

  We buried Marn on the feast day of Saint Peter. Mother and Father did not come because it might have been a suicide and if that were so, Marn had shamed Pendragon Castle by taking her own life. I fought with both of them to let me go. Nothing would have kept me from this last hour with my Marn. And so, clad in gray, a nosegay in hand, I walked with Kit and Sister Anne up the lane to the graveyard.

  The castle servants traveled in our wake, and behind them came a crowd of villagers.

  The bearers placed the coffin by the grave. Across from us Marn’s grandchildren huddled by their mother. All in black they were, like a nest of fledgling rooks. Marn’s son, the blacksmith Gerbert, hovered over his brood as the service began, his face hard as an anvil.

  A robin called from the maple branch above as Father Hugh led us in “Come the Way Over,” a song that tells of Heaven, where the blessed souls all go. Then down they lowered the coffin on its ropes, and my heart lowered with it.

  Kit flung her lilies in the grave to protect Marn from evil. And on Marn’s coffin I tossed my marigolds, remembering how she’d said they made a sleeper’s dreams come true. I prayed as the blossoms fell that Marn now dreamed of Heaven.

  Father Hugh crossed himself above the grave, and we sang another hymn, but he would not say the final prayer of releasing because he said Marn might have killed herself.

  “I’ll say it, then!” cried her son, his neck going red as coals. “We all here know my dear mother was half blind,” he said. “It’s sure she stumbled to her death, not knowing the moat was so close by!”

  Father Hugh bowed his head. He was a good man for it. The father could not say the prayer himself, for none of us there knew if Marn had been pushed, jumped in herself, or only stumbled in the dark. So her son said the releasing prayer, hard and solemn, and Marn’s spirit was unbound.

  Each year we celebrated Saint Peter’s feast by offering bread to the poor, killing an innocent lamb, and serving a great banquet at our table. Cook was already roasting the lamb.

  Mother came in with a golden coronet for me to wear to the feast.

  “I’ll not go,” I said.

  “You will, Rose. And you will wear this coronet proudly.”

  I was too bound up in grief to battle Mother. “Come with me,” she said to Kit.

  They left me alone by the fire.

  In the early eve before the guests arrived Kit and I watched Tim the chandler light the candelabrum in the Great Hall. It held one hundred candles, a vast expenditure of beeswax and tallow. As Tim lit the last wick the room was draped in honey-colored light. The glow spread along the rush-strewn floor and up the walls, gilding the tapestry, where a line of huntsmen chased a red fox through the woods.

  I stood close to the candelabrum, wishing all the brightness would enter me and chase the sorrow of Marn’s death away. There was a warmth there but it seemed to circl
e round me and not settle closer in.

  The guests arrived then to the sound of trumpets; Father and Mother entered the hall. Father Hugh gave a solemn blessing, and the guests began their meal. I had no taste for food, so the dogs were pleased to rove beside my chair. They bashed my legs with happy tails as I dropped chunks of lamb to the floor.

  Kit sat beside me. From across the table, Niles tried to cheer us up with stories of a knight’s valor, but we neither one could smile. I was worn from my sorrow over Marn, bristled from the work of holding up my chin to keep on my heavy coronet, and angry at the guests for being so merry on the day my nursemaid had been buried.

  “I’m tired,” I said. Niles glanced at Kit as we left the table and I wondered if Henry would ever give me that same look when we met over the sea.

  I told Kit, “I saw a loving look just now.” We rounded the corner and our shadows met upon the wall. With none around to hear, Kit whispered, “Where?”

  “From Niles Broderick.”

  She closed my chamber door and said, “Sit here while I build up the fire.”

  I did as she commanded me. As Kit tossed a shank of pine into the hearth and set to with the poker, she told me why Mother had called her to her chamber.

  She may as well have jabbed my heart with the poker.

  “The nunnery? Never! I won’t let Mother send you!”

  “You cannot stop it.” Kit brushed the bark dust from her hands.

  “I will! When the feast is over I’ll march to Mother’s room and tell her you will stay!”

  Kit sat down beside me, the flames washing gold across her cheeks.

  “It’s done, Rosie. Your mother blames me for putting you in danger.”

  “But we had to go and warn your mother.”

  “She won’t have me here with you anymore. She says I am not honorable.”

  “Not honorable?”

  “Sit still,” said Kit, “and speak softer; someone may come down the hall.”

  Our words were circling round and round the truth. This wasn’t about rescuing Alissandra but about our friendship. Mother thought we were too close, that I might share my secret with her. And she couldn’t risk that.