“Dance with me,” Clovermead repeated. “I learned how to dance from Saraband. Take my hand, and you’ll know how your daughter dances.” She put her fingers around the Abbess’ tiny hand. “Please, Abbess.”
“In the temple?” The Abbess tried to pull her hand away, but Clovermead wouldn’t let her go. “I haven’t danced in years.”
“And I’ve never really learned to dance properly. Saraband says I don’t have the patience.” Clovermead lifted up the Abbess’ hand and bowed low to her. “Abbess, will you do me the honor of dancing the Kite Hall galliard? I know you can. Saraband told me you taught it to her.”
“When she was six.” The Abbess looked at Clovermead and she laughed. “You can barely walk, Demoiselle! How will you manage a galliard?”
“Like so,” said Clovermead. She kicked forward with her left foot, stepped down, kicked again. She glanced at her wounded right leg—shrugged, and stepped high with her left foot again. “I’ll pivot, Abbess. You dance.”
Wordlessly the Abbess kicked forward with her right foot. Her nun’s robes rustled as she moved back and forth, following an inaudible tune. She swirled in a clockwise circle around Clovermead, brushing near the Pool. Clovermead stamped her good leg against the floor, in time with the same unheard music. The Abbess stumbled once—her face twitched with annoyance—and then she danced perfectly.
Her eyes flicked over Clovermead’s foot and leg. “She did teach you,” said the Abbess. “I recognize her footwork.” She glanced down at her own robes. “My footwork.” She smiled. “You’re too harsh on yourself, Demoiselle. That’s not bad. And you’re dancing on one leg!”
“Saraband’s a good teacher.” Clovermead shifted to a more leisurely step. “Gavotte, Abbess? My leg’s starting to hurt.” The Abbess nodded, and she slowed to match Clovermead. “She likes sappy, romantic poetry. She’s memorized all of ‘The Troubadour.’ ‘Whenever you see the moon at night, / Remember I will be / Gazing up at the same dear moon / Without a thought but thee.’” The Abbess wrinkled her nose, and Clovermead laughed. “It wasn’t to my taste either, but I’ve come to like it. She recites it better than I do.” Clovermead looked down at her shirt and trousers. “You can’t tell now, but I did actually have a few dresses back in Chandlefort. Saraband helped me shop for them, and she told the seamstress just how to cut them. We have a matching pair of silk dresses, gold for me and silver for her, each of them cut outrageously low down the back, and slit up past the knee. We looked marvelous in them at last winter’s ball. Saraband would have looked marvelous anyway, but she made me look good too.”
“She is beautiful,” the Abbess whispered. She whirled slowly around Clovermead. “I saw. So much like Athanor.” She smiled. “I would never have let her wear that dress. No daughter of mine should appear in public like—” She stopped midsentence. She and Clovermead danced in silence for another minute. The Abbess wept silently as she cycled through the gavotte.
“Folly on folly,” said the Abbess. She wiped the tears from her cheeks with the back of her hand. “How can she forgive me?”
“You’ll just have to find out.” Clovermead smiled.
The Abbess stopped dancing. She slumped, tiny and still. “She broke my heart, Demoiselle,” she whispered. “Your words, your dancing, they don’t change that.”
“I don’t suppose they do,” said Clovermead. She shrugged. “And?”
“Indeed.” The Abbess laughed raggedly. “Yet for thirteen years my answer has been ‘I cannot.’” She gazed upward at the moon. “Lady, give me strength,” she muttered. She turned back to Clovermead. “Saraband is in the room next to yours?” Clovermead nodded. “Excuse me, Demoiselle. I’d best hurry to my daughter before I forget how to say ‘I can.’” She bowed stiffly to Clovermead and walked quickly from the temple.
“And I don’t even get a thank-you from her,” said Clovermead reflectively. “There’s gratitude for you! And she’s a nun.” She smiled wryly. “I suppose she was distracted. And while I’m on the subject of gratitude—thank you for the inspiration, Lady. I didn’t think that was going to work. I just hoped and prayed. Don’t let the Abbess change her mind in the next few minutes.”
Clovermead rested for a moment. Then she turned and limped from the temple into the cloistered garden. The rain was now a fine mist whose damp haze filled the courtyard. The mist was gentle on Clovermead’s face. When she looked up at the moon, it had acquired a fuzzy corona around its soft edges. Clovermead smiled, and inhaled deeply from the garden’s green aroma. “It’s a lovely night, Lady,” she said. “Thank you for giving me the chance to enjoy it.” Then her leg twinged, and she frowned. “Ach, are you still bothering me? Hurry up and get well!”
A voice screamed a little ways distant. There was a heavy thump.
That sounded like the Abbess, thought Clovermead. Ice clutched at her stomach.
She yelled, with a bear’s roar, and she was running as fast as she could through the cloisters. Distant voices murmured at the sound of her bellow, and Clovermead hobbled around a cloister wall into the garden that led to the dormitory where Saraband waited. The Abbess lay crumpled on the ground, unconscious, while blood dripped from her forehead. A nuns’ man crouched beside her and held her wrist between his fingers, feeling for her pulse.
“Thank Our Lady you’re here, Demoiselle,” he babbled in a high singsong as Clovermead limped to him. He had a Selcouth accent. “I found her lying here. Someone’s attacked her. What should I do?”
“Close the gates,” said Clovermead. “We just parted a minute ago. Her attacker must still be on the grounds.” She turned to the nuns’ man. “Did you see anyone—”
The nuns’ man smiled. Bronze teeth gleamed in the moonlight. He was bald—
Heavy metal bashed into Clovermead’s head, and she crumpled to the ground. “I told you it would be an unfair fight, girlie,” said Lucifer Snuff. “Now it’s my turn to scourge you.” Blood trickled from Clovermead’s mouth, and her skull was on fire. In his left hand Snuff held a necklace with a broken chain. “I’ll have to kill you quickly,” said Snuff, and Clovermead couldn’t tell if he spoke regretfully or with relief. He lifted high a fist covered in steel mail—and somebody yelled nearby. “Ursus’ Jaw,” Snuff swore. “Here come those gibbering nuns.” He yelped with sudden laughter. “Next time you get to ply the whip, girlie.”
The bear-priest loped away as blackness swallowed Clovermead.
Chapter Twelve
Falling Statues
Under a red sun, in haze and dust, Clovermead strode with heavy steps north from Garum. Bear-priests bowed down before her as she walked. “Lord Ursus,” they cried; “Hail, Lord Ursus!” They chanted the name with awe and trembling, with fearful love, with the blood-thickened familiarity of a dog for a huntsman. A ring of bears escorted her, puppets at her command as she twitched the blood-net. Each pulled a cart that carried half a dozen prisoners bound hand and foot. The earth trembled beneath her.
She was fifty feet high and a hundred long, with fur as black as night—save where it was spattered with old blood. Sometimes her legs were long shadows that stretched a thousand feet; sometimes her head brushed the tops of the mountains. Her eyes were dark holes. The full moon caught her attention, a pale circle of bone in the scarlet flush of the afternoon sky, and she snapped at it with her jaws—but it was far away, beyond reach. As always.
Lord Ursus daydreamed, and Clovermead saw the rose walls of Chandlefort drown in a sea of blood. She saw the bodies of Yellowjackets strewn on the streets, for her bears to eat. She saw the human Clovermead tied onto an altar, saw a bear-priest lower his knife into her chest as she screamed. Clovermead within Ursus tried to close her eyes, but the bear’s grotesque dream continued to the end. Ursus growled his satisfaction.
Ursus’ eyes fell to the ground below, where Boulderbash padded by his side. She was tiny compared to his enormous shadow. “Are you happy, Mother?” Ursus rumbled. “Our triumph will come soon.”
“I am satis
fied, Son,” growled Boulderbash. She looked up at Ursus with agonized love, with disgust, with pity. “Don’t ask more of me.”
Ursus rumbled at her affectionately, leaned down, and rubbed his blood-smeared cheek against hers. She shuddered as gore rubbed onto her fur. “I only ask you to love me. I have always loved you.” He smiled. “Now we will be together forever.”
“I can’t see your eyes,” said Boulderbash. She looked up at him, and she roared her sadness. “I miss them.”
Ursus growled angrily, and blackness jetted from his empty sockets. “Don’t you see how beautiful I am, Mother?” Boulderbash was silent, and she dropped her head. “You will,” said Ursus, but he was dissatisfied. He bent down toward the nearest cart, seized a screaming prisoner in his jaws, and broke him between his teeth. As the man died, Ursus gulped him down, blood and flesh. They briefly satisfied the darkness inside him, and he felt a surge of power. He began to walk more quickly. The bears had to race to keep up with him. “Soon all the world will know my beauty.”
“Do you remember when we rode on an ice cake?” asked Boulderbash wistfully. “You were very young. You were so lovely then.”
“I have never forgotten,” said Ursus, and the world dissolved into kaleidoscopic fragments. When Clovermead could see again, she was still in Ursus, but he was a black cub. He gamboled by Boulderbash’s side, and she was four times his size. They wandered in the night on an icy shore. Cold sand lay in front of them, tundra and short grass to their right, and to their left, stretching endlessly to the north, lay the jigsaw blocks of ice that covered the ocean. The blocks gently swayed above the black water’s swell.
Boulderbash and Ursus wandered out onto the ice, and Ursus romped and played, ran and skidded on the great white block tinged with glacial blue. The full moon shone down on him, and he was an ebony spot in a world of cobalt and ivory. His joy was infectious, and Boulderbash leaped after him and tussled with him gently. They laughed and rolled—and then there was an enormous crash behind them, as the ice cake ripped free from the shore.
Ursus looked down at the dark salt water opening between them and the shore. It was a bottomless pit. The moon’s reflection rode on the water’s surface, but even that brilliant sphere seemed to be sinking irretrievably into the black depths. The ice was slippery, and Ursus felt himself slide toward the iceberg’s edge. He whined, and jerked back from the precipice. His heart hammered. He looked up at the distant land. It shrank by the minute, as the water grew ever wider.
“Isn’t it a beautiful sight, little one?” Boulderbash looked down at Ursus fondly. “And look at you in the moonlight! I can see every strand of your fur. Do you know you aren’t just one shade of black? There’s a host of different colors in you—onyx and ebony, sable and jet. There are even more colors in your undercoat—cinnamon, cream, and russet brown, a little gray, and even a few white tufts to show you really are my son. You can see them all in the moonlight. And look at those eyes of yours! They’re so bright, so warm, so loving. Oh, Ursus, you are the most beautiful little cub.”
I’m so scared, thought Ursus as he stared at his mother. The dark waters lapped all around them. “How will we get back to land?” he asked out loud.
“Don’t worry,” said Boulderbash cheerfully. “There are plenty of other ice cakes out here. We’ll bump into one, and we’ll walk from there back to the shore.” There was a great crunch. “See? We’ve hit one already. Come with me, little one. We’ll be back on the beach soon.”
“Yes, Mother,” Ursus said, and they began to trot alongside each other toward the neighboring ice cake.
“So beautiful,” said Boulderbash fondly, still looking down at her son.
So deep, thought Ursus. So dark. The lapping of the ocean was louder now, an avalanche in his ears, and terror rose in him, rose in Clovermead. She moaned in fear, and she fled from the Bear’s memories. She plummeted into darkness—
Lucifer Snuff played on a flute. In the moonlit night he danced along the parapet of Cindertallow Castle. Behind him a trail of bears followed, prancing on their hind legs. The music was manic, seductive, and feverish. Clovermead felt her toes tapping, and she was hard-pressed to keep herself from joining the mob of capering bears.
“Don’t be a wallflower, Clovermead!” cried Snuff. He came to the statue of a gargoyle, and he whirled around its stone wings. “Music makes you feel so good to be alive.” He twirled at the very edge of the parapet. “What are you waiting for?”
“We have to get down,” said Clovermead. She looked over the brink, into darkness, and a wave of vertigo swept over her. She stepped back—and a bear growled at her. She yelped, and took a hop forward. The music caught at her feet, and now she was trapped in the dance. “I don’t want to do this. Let me go.”
“Don’t worry,” said Snuff. “We won’t be up here long.” He put the flute back to his mouth, the music skirled faster than ever, and Clovermead’s feet jerked forward. Snuff led her into the forest of statues on the Castle roof, among the mermaids and griffins and satyrs. The line of bears wound among the marble figures, and now they clapped their paws and roared roughly to the tune. The flute sounded a gusty note. Clovermead looked at it, and she saw it was a hollowed-out thighbone. Snuff’s fingers flickered over the holes as he piped his melody. Behind Clovermead the bears roared, and pushed her forward in their eagerness to follow the music of the flute.
“Mother, where are you?” cried Clovermead. “Father, help me! Is anyone here?”
“No one but me, Demoiselle,” said Snuff. He laughed, and now they had come to the first of the statues of the Ladies Cindertallow. Snuff’s tune was more sprightly, more agitated, more compelling than ever. The bears pressed against Clovermead, and she couldn’t slow down. Snuff lashed out with his foot against the first Lady. The statue rocked back and forth, then toppled into the darkness. The statue wailed in fear as it fell, until it smashed far below. “One,” said Snuff. He giggled, and danced forward to kick the next statue over the edge. It, too, fell screaming. “Two.”
“Stop!” cried Clovermead. Now she struggled forward, trying to get past the bears between her and Snuff.
“Five. Six.”
Her feet twisted beneath her, drawn away by the music, and the huge bears buffeted her.
“Ten. Eleven.” Snuff laughed and played, played and laughed, and he kicked statue after statue into the darkness. “Fourteen. Fifteen.” Snuff incorporated the wail of falling Ladies into his murderous tune. “I can’t be stopped,” said Snuff. He kicked a Lady into the darkness, while bears roared. “I have my master’s power in me, Demoiselle. You might as well give up now.” Another Lady plummeted. Few of them remained. “Sixteen. Seventeen. Eighteen. What number is your mother?”
“You can’t take her from me!” cried Clovermead, and now she was changing shape, growing huge and furred. She wrestled her way past the last of the bears and leaped at Snuff. He swayed out of her way, and she rolled ahead of him.
“Ah, hello, Milady. I know you.” He bowed to a statue of an old, weathered, rail-thin Lady—and his foot shot out and sent her toppling over. She, alone of the Ladies, fell in tight-lipped, fearless silence. “Nineteen,” he said in farewell. Now he was up to the last statue. “Hello, Melisande,” said Snuff.
“Help me, Clovermead,” her mother’s statue begged. “Don’t let me fall.” Her marble arm stretched out toward Clovermead. “Please,” she said, and stone tears rolled down her white cheek.
“I will,” roared Clovermead as Snuff kicked her mother. The flute played more madly than ever, and Clovermead leaped and caught her mother’s hand in her paws as the statue toppled. Clovermead kept hold of it as she rolled to the parapet’s edge. She was half over the brim. Her back legs scrabbled for purchase while her front half balanced over darkness. “Keep hold of me. I’ll pull you back up.”
“My hand is stiff,” said her mother’s statue. “I can’t keep hold of you.” Panic filled her voice. “Clovermead, I’ll smash down there.”
“I won’t let you go,” said Clovermead. She tightened her hold on the marble hand—and the rock crumbled in her grip. Cracks spread around her mother’s wrist, the statue screamed, and then her mother’s wrist split all through. Clovermead pulled up her mother’s hand, while the rest of her mother’s statue fell screaming into the darkness. “Mother!” cried Clovermead. “Mother, no!”
“That’s number twenty,” said Snuff above her. “Now for twenty-one.” But then the flute fell from his mouth, and for a long moment the old bear-priest stared at Clovermead. “I wish I could stop,” he said. He stood a moment longer—then moved like lightning as his foot slammed into Clovermead’s ribs. She lost her grip on the parapet, she roared in fear, and she fell. Above her she saw Snuff put the flute to his mouth once more. The music started up louder than ever as the ground rushed up to meet her.
Chapter Thirteen
Bed Rest
Clovermead’s head hurt. She groaned, and she opened her eyes. She saw a white plaster ceiling. There was a blanket over her body and legs, and a pillow beneath her head. She tried to sit up—and she yelped as blinding pain lanced the back of her head.
“Don’t move,” said Saraband. Clovermead heard footsteps, and then her cousin walked into view. “You’ve a nasty habit of getting sliced open by bear-priests. One day it’s your leg, and the next day it’s your skull. Doubtless I’ll have to sew up your arm next week. You’ll be glad to know you have a lump the size of an egg behind your ear.”
Clovermead tried to speak, but her mouth was dry. She swallowed, and tried again. “How long ago was I hit?”
“Just last night. Your roars woke all Silverfalls, and half the nuns in the Abbey rushed to the cloisters. They found you and Mother bleeding on the ground, and they raised an alarm. Sorrel and Lord Wickward and a whole troop of nuns’ men went to chase after whoever attacked the two of you, but they came back early this morning. They’d lost his tracks. Do you know who it was?”
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