“Ottakar, I must speak with you.” She kept her eyes on the ground.
“You can tell me anything, Mouse.”
“You will not like what I have to say.”
“Have out with it, then.”
“After you are settled at Hluboka, I must—”
“If you are about to tell me you plan to leave, to go back to the abbey or to that Father of yours, you can stop now. I need you.”
“I do not mean to leave right away. Not until I see that you are fully out of danger. But your body grows stronger every day.” She ran her hand along his arm. “And the nightmares come less.”
He let go of her hand. “Is that all I am to you now? A patient? A man ill in body and mind?”
“You know that is not what I meant. You are . . . ” She shook her head, unable to tell him how she felt, but she pulled his head down and kissed him. He was breathless when he drew back.
“Can you tell me why you must go?”
Mouse sighed. “I cannot tell you everything that happened there.” She shuddered at the memory of the beasts in the pit, the screams of the hollow-eyed children. “Like you cannot speak yet of those weeks in the tower. Maybe someday. For both of us?”
He nodded.
“But I can tell you there is a great evil that lives at the heart of the wilderness at Houska. There is a wooden fortress built on the ruins of another fortress built on the ruins of another. For hundreds of years, people have stood guard over the evil in that place.”
“I have heard stories, but—”
“They are true. But over time, we forget. We think they are just stories, made up, and we stop watching.”
“And what happens then, Mouse?” he asked in a whisper.
“The evil slips out. Just a little at first, testing the strength of its prison, the fortitude of its guards. Sometimes the people renew their efforts and trap the evil again before it is fully free. But sometimes . . . sometimes horrible things happen.”
“Is it now trapped or free?”
“Father Lucas and I have it bound.”
“We must keep vigil, then.”
Mouse nodded. “Which is why I must—”
“No.”
Mouse started to argue, but he gently put his hand over her mouth. “I know you are more than just a girl . . . a woman. You are a healer. A soldier. My savior time and again. I do not doubt your ability to do anything, Mouse. But it is arrogance to think that you and only you can save us from evil. You see that?” He lowered his hand, freeing her to answer.
“Yes,” she said, though in her mind she knew what he did not—that she had gifts no one else had. “But I—”
“Before we make any decisions, let us talk to Bishop Miklaus. He knows the situation?”
“Mostly. He has not been there.”
“Well, he can go if needed.” He was sounding more like a king. “Let us go see him now.”
“I agree, my Lord. Houska is no place for the girl,” Bishop Miklaus said as he poured more wine in the King’s cup.
“We are not talking about her place. Her place is anywhere I will it,” Ottakar said sharply.
Mouse squirmed. “The issue is what Father Lucas needs,” she said. She knew she ought to go back; she had promised to go back, and she would as soon as Ottakar no longer needed her.
“What I want to know, Bishop,” said the King, “is if you are fully aware of the danger Houska poses. Have you been there yourself?”
“I have been rather busy here, my Lord. But I sent a caravan of supplies along with Brothers Ales and Marek, and I have written to my friend, Bishop Bansca, who is in Rome. I received a letter from him saying that he himself would be coming. He seemed singularly interested in what was happening at Houska. And, particularly, in Father Lucas’s involvement.”
Mouse straightened, about to ask what he meant, but Ottakar commanded the conversation.
“It is well that Rome involve itself in protecting my kingdom from enemies I cannot engage in battle. I do not have the means, I think, to fight the dangers lurking at Houska. But I will do what I can. We will build a proper fortress of stone with ample battlements designed to keep the enemy contained. I will draw the plans for the castle myself and send a garrison of knights to oversee its construction. I will write to the Holy Father and request a schedule of holy men, trained against such forces of evil, who will hold constant vigil at the fortress.” He turned to Mouse. “Surely with such reinforcements, Father Lucas can manage without you?”
“I—”
“Bishop Bansca writes that he means to be at Prague by Easter and will travel on to Houska soon after,” Bishop Miklaus added.
“You see,” Ottakar said, taking Mouse’s hand. “Father Lucas will have help from Rome by the time you would be free to join him. There is no need for you to go at all.”
Mouse blinked back sudden tears; Ottakar was fighting to keep her with him, not just for a little while but for always. As a girl, she had been given as an obligation to the abbey, accepted by Father Lucas and Mother Kazi, and she’d been needed as a healer, was needed now at Houska, but never in her life had Mouse been wanted. Not like Ottakar wanted her. Being wanted was the first step to belonging. She belonged with him, and the joy of it overwhelmed her. But her responsibility to Father Lucas and her commitment to keeping the demons in the pit hung heavy on her. Was she being arrogant, as Ottakar suggested, to think that it was her task alone to guard the pit as some God-made warrior? A normal life, married with children, a simple life—had she rejected these because of her pride, convinced that God had made her special to do some grand deed? Mouse shook her head, unable to see past what she wanted so she could see clearly what she ought to do.
She would write again to Father Lucas and wait for his response before she made any final decisions. In the meantime, she would get Ottakar settled at Hluboka, savoring the time with him, knowing it might be all they had together if Father Lucas summoned her.
“Seems we will enjoy the spring together, my Lord,” she said, smiling.
Her first glimpse of Hluboka came on a small rise as they rode in from Prague. The castle was all loose stone and scaffolding. Ottakar was pleased, though, at the completed battlements, the moat with water redirected from the Vltava and circling around the hill that held the fortress and the four towers that anchored the corners of the wall around the keep.
“A proper stronghold,” he said as he took a slow walk around what would be the bailey. “It may not look it now, but it will be a work of art, too, Mouse.” He took her hand, and as he talked of what would be, she began to see it, too—the high peaked roofs, the spires, the polished stone, the grand windows that would fill the hall with light, the ornate archways at the great doors, the graceful sweep of the flying buttresses. “Come, I will show you the drawings I made.”
“They will be in the East Tower, my Lord, with your master carver. Ludolf set himself up there to get some quiet, he said.” Vok laughed and Ottakar joined in—Mouse could already see the tension in him uncoiling. He loved this place.
They also settled in rooms in the East Tower since the keep was still under construction. Though much smaller than the accommodations at Prague, Mouse loved her little room that rounded at the far wall. From the arched sliver of a window, she could see out over the forest that stretched down to a lake, water sparkling in the sunlight.
Besides Gitta, no other ladies had traveled from Prague. Lady Rozemberk, at Ottakar’s request, had stayed to keep an ear to the gossip of court. At the break of winter weather, many of the nobles had left for their own estates, but a few stayed at Prague, and despite filling key positions with his own men and leaving his own guards to make sure his father stayed imprisoned in his rooms, Ottakar wanted a less official ally sensitive to temperament as well as keen to political strategy.
And so they lived simply at Hluboka—food cooked over an open fire in the bailey and eaten with the German craftsmen and servants in the open air as the weather allowed or i
n the unfinished lower hall of the keep. Raw as it was with wood unpolished, glassless windows, and bare walls, the room was stunning. The intricate carvings of faces and animals and creatures of folklore ran along the sills, columns, and the curved beams at the ceiling; they seemed more alive in the unstained wood. Mouse could not keep from touching them, half expecting them to laugh under the tickle of her fingers.
“You like my work, Lady Emma,” Ludolf said one afternoon.
“They seem alive to me.”
“To me as well. The wood, too. It tells me what it wants to be, and I work to make it so.”
“May I watch you sometime?”
He studied her a moment, the pause awkward as she had expected an easy yes. “You are an artist?” He asked the question but acted as if he already knew the answer, nodding before she spoke.
“I draw and paint. Nothing so beautiful as this.”
He nodded more vigorously. “You are an artist. I would be honored for you to watch me carve, my Lady.”
But he did better than simply let her watch his work. He brought her a carving knife and scraps of wood, showed her how to let her fingers listen to the wood.
“Close your eyes,” he told her, putting the piece of wood in one of her hands. “For the real artist, we see by touch, like the blind. The wood talks to your fingers, see?” He ran her other hand softly along the grain in the wood. “It tells your mind its secrets. Who it is. What it wants to be.”
“I see it,” Mouse said.
“Yes, yes! I knew you would.” The German clasped his rough hands, torn by splinters and callused by labor, over her small, smooth ones.
Mouse opened her eyes, smiling, taking up the knife ready to carve the image she had seen in her mind. And then she saw Vok watching her from across the bailey, where he and some of the knights were at swordplay; he looked grim, displeased, and she tried to think of what she might have done, but then she’d always been a source of displeasure for him. With a shrug, she turned back to Ludolf and began to shape the wood.
“Here you go,” she said playfully as she gave a wooden figure to Ottakar weeks later. Her hair spilled out on the grass, and the faces of the violet sword lilies turned down, looking at her. Beside her, propped on his elbows, Ottakar separated her long tresses into locks, coiling them into castles surrounded by walls of more hair.
They had gone out for a ride with the knights and Vok, and they had stopped by the side of the lake to picnic. The air, now almost-spring warm and heavy with the scent of pollen, lay on them like a blanket, and many of the men stretched out under the trees and slept. Vok walked along the shoreline, picking up rocks and skimming them across the water. Mouse thought it odd to see Lord Rozemberk, usually stiff and formal, toss the stones so gracefully; he looked almost like a little boy, all ease and joy.
Hluboka had been good for all of them. Ottakar slept in his chamber alone, though he still kept a candle burning in the lantern for when the nightmares came. Mouse slept lightly, always half listening for his screams, but they came less often now. A letter from Father Lucas telling her that all was well, telling her to stay with Ottakar and promising to write to her if he needed her, had freed Mouse to enjoy herself and to dream again about a different kind of future.
“My Mouse has gone wandering,” Ottakar said, pulling her attention back to the moment.
“And so I did. I am sorry. What do you think of my first efforts?” She nodded at the wooden figure he toyed with in his hand.
“It is my childhood hound, Sharpsight.” He sounded odd.
“Do you like it?”
“He looks just as he did, as if you had known him. His lopsided ear, the scars on his face just where they should be, his paw lifted as he sits just as he did when he lived.”
“You told me about him, remember?”
“Yes, but all those details? And on your first carving?” He shook his head.
Mouse grew still, her voice too steady. “Ludolf called me an artist, a natural.” But what she heard swirling in her head as Ottakar studied her was witch. “Do not keep it if you do not like it.”
She grabbed at it, ready to fling it into the lake, but Ottakar was stronger. “I did not say I did not like it.” He pulled back, rolling over and taking her with him, and they wrestled, laughing. He lay back, holding her arms against his chest. “You just keep surprising me, my odd little Mouse.”
“Good.”
He slid his hand to the back of her head and pulled her to him. She had grown used to his kisses, though they still made her heart race, her face flush, but this one was different. Hungrier. He wrapped his arm around her waist, pressing her body against his.
“A summer storm nears, my Lord. Perhaps we should make our way toward the keep.” Lord Rozemberk hadn’t even cleared his throat to announce his approach.
Mouse spun upright, pressing the back of her hand to her mouth, embarrassed.
But Ottakar only laughed. “As you will it, my Lord Rozemberk.”
“You are too intimate,” Vok said to her on the ride back.
“Excuse me?” Though a little ashamed at Ottakar’s growing appetites and her confusion about how to manage him or whether she even wanted to or not, Mouse was not prepared to be lectured on modesty.
“My Lord the King says you are a daughter of Aragon.”
That explained Lord Rozemberk’s recent change in behavior; he seemed more tolerant, less disdainful, if still critical. Mouse had thought it might be a sense of gratitude or even respect for her part in freeing him, a consequence of her seeing him tortured and helpless. But she saw now that it was merely an acknowledgment of her suspected noble blood.
“Your familiarity with the servants, with the craftsmen, with Ludolf—”
“And Ottakar,” Mouse added.
Vok’s mouth was a thin line of disapproval. “How the King chooses to interact with you is his business, not mine.”
“But?”
“But the way you talk to the servants, like they are your equals, and the way you let Ludolf hold your hands like—”
“He was showing me how to carve! And besides, he is old enough to be my father.”
“And for all we know, he could be.”
Mouse’s face stung. Turning her back to him, she leaned low against the horse and whispered, “Run.”
Ottakar thought it a race and so it was. They raced back to Hluboka, all of them laughing and windswept by the time they reached the keep.
All of them except Vok and Mouse.
TWENTY-THREE
The beginning of the spring marked the end of everything else.
Gitta pulled Mouse out of bed before dawn. “We must go make the witches, my Lady!”
They had slipped between the old linden trees, massive roots arching above the earth and entwining like fingers, the woods thick with mist. Mouse had come to love this forest that stretched out from the keep; she took long walks through the pathless wood, often with Ottakar but sometimes alone for the first time since the attack that had left Luka blind. Here she could climb the low branches and nestle herself among the limbs that held her like a hand. She could wonder at being descended from kings in a faraway land she had never seen or twist her loose hair as she thought about who her father was and where she might find him. She dreamed about her future with Ottakar, which, in her mind, centered here at Hluboka. Ottakar planned to call the castle Deep. Mouse wrapped herself in the joy of days spent hidden from the world with him.
The morning music of the song thrush greeted Mouse and Gitta as they broke into the clearing where the other girls—some servants at the castle but most from the little village near the Vltava—sat among the tall grass, skirts encircling them like blooms. They were weaving in the dawn light.
“Let me show you, my Lady,” one of the village girls said as Mouse dropped onto the ground beside her. “You take a handful of grass, see?” The girl gathered a bunch in her hand and cut it. “Fold it over with a bit of loop at the top. For the head, you under
stand?” The girl nodded to her own question. “And then grab a bit more of the grass and wrap it around the witch’s neck so. Tie it and let the ends hang loose.” She held up the grass witch for Mouse to see. “You got a head and some arms and once you fluff it a bit, a skirt.” She handed the figure to Mouse. “A witch. For burning. Now you make one.”
No one at the abbey had celebrated Walpurgis Night. Some of the lay brothers and sisters might go down to the fires at Teplá, but Father Lucas never allowed Mouse to go. Tonight would be her first time to dance around the flames that drove out the dark and celebrated the coming spring, full of light and life.
Mouse sunk her fingers into the tall grass, letting it slide along her palm, grasping it and then cutting through the thick bottom stalks with her knife. As she ran her hand along the strands, smoothing them, a blade of grass sliced her finger; when she bent the stalks as the girl had shown her and tied it off and fluffed the skirt, a smear of blood lay just below the witch’s neck.
“What do I do with it now?”
“You toss it on the fire later, at just the last bit of darkness before the spring starts to rise.”
“And I get my wish?” Mouse asked skeptically.
“No, no wishes, my Lady. But the straw-witch soaks up whatever darkness has clung to you over the year and the fire burns it up, you see? Then your light shines like the spring sun.”
At sunset, they gathered at the river. The water caught the reflection of the bonfire and the nearly full moon and the shadows of the couples dancing around the flames; Mouse and Ottakar were simply black shapes among the others, hands entwined as they huddled by the fire. The darkness and the wild wood, the gentle hum of the river, the touch of moonlight and the music mixing with the sounds of the night animals lifted them all from the mundane into something magical. Mouse understood why the Church frowned upon such festivals—not only because they anchored the people to the old ways and pagan tradition, but because they effaced the boundaries of positions and titles as rules and expectations blurred into the communal reverie of the night.
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