They stopped only to eat and drink, throwing themselves onto the benches that ringed the edge of firelight.
“Sing for me,” Ottakar said, his breath tickling the back of her neck.
“Not in front of all these people,” she answered, half turning to him.
He rested his chin on her shoulder, mouth grazing the exposed skin. “I want you to sing.”
Mouse felt like someone else, careless and bold, as she skipped to the musicians and then around the circle gathering all the maids. She whispered to Gitta, who, giggling, whispered to the girl next to her. The women all held hands, the bonfire at their backs, and they danced, weaving and bowing, loose hair bouncing along their waists.
And Mouse sang.
“‘May, sweet May, again is come, May that frees the land from gloom.’” Soft and low, her voice slid out into the darkness and touched the men, touched Ottakar. She became part of the magic. “‘Every branch and every tree, Ring with her sweet melody.’”
Ottakar sat straighter still.
And then the women joined in the chorus: “‘Sing ye, join the chorus gay! Hail this merry, merry May!’”
“‘In a joyful company, we the bursting flowers will see,’” Mouse sang. Ottakar leaned forward, elbows on his knees, watching her. As the girls spun, she saw Vok watching them, too, and she blushed at the desire in his face, wondering about the object of his gaze. Gitta, perhaps? “‘Our manly youths—where are they now? Bid them up and with us go.’”
A chaotic mix of squeals and laughter erupted as several of the men answered the song’s invitation and ran to the circle, grabbing at the girls, who scattered into the woods. Mouse ran with them and Ottakar joined the chase.
The moonlight barely pierced the canopy; only splinters of light lay on a bush or branch here and there. The woods were full of curses as people stumbled on roots and bracken, then shrieks of glee as someone was caught. Mouse could hear footsteps behind her, tripping and then plodding more carefully. She eased between the trees, never stumbling because she knew the woods; she could see in her mind the layout of trees and stumps and fallen limbs. Mouse could easily have escaped, but she wanted to be caught.
When his hand grabbed her arm, she coiled into his chest. He was breathing fast from the run. His mouth was on hers before she knew that something was wrong. This was not Ottakar’s heartbeat or scent. These were not his arms squeezing her so she couldn’t breathe, not his fingers clawing at the laces on her back.
Mouse turned her face away. “Stop, Vok! Let me go!” Even in her panic she was careful to keep her voice clear of power; she would not be responsible for maiming or killing another person, no matter the consequence to herself. He must be drunk anyway, she thought, though she could smell no signs of it, but a sober Lord Rozemberk would surely not have touched her for all the world.
“The King has shared his women with me before,” he said, shoving her against a tree and sliding his hand down her back to pull at her skirts. “He will not mind if I have a taste of you.”
“Get your hands off me!” She pulled her knee up hard against his groin and pushed him back as he doubled over. Losing him in the dark woods was easy enough now that Mouse didn’t want to be caught; she hid in the cleft of a linden tree until she heard him pass, and then she walked silently back to the bonfire. Many of the couples sat on the benches again, some were dancing, some had stayed in the woods. Ottakar stood looking out over the river.
“You hid too well,” he said as she joined him.
“I did not mean to hide at all.” Her mind raced, trying to make sense of what had happened; Vok’s words came back to her, and an unwelcome thought pushed out all the others. “Did you come looking for me?”
“Of course I did.” He slipped his arm around her waist, pulling her close and kissing her.
But Mouse was wrestling with doubt. She could not imagine the formal and loyal Lord Rozemberk committing such an indiscretion without permission from his king. Yet even Ottakar controlled his desires when he was with her, respectfully letting her dictate the boundaries of kiss or touch. Mouse might not belong to the Church, but her abbey upbringing and the thought of disappointing Father Lucas kept her own lust in check. She would not be the King’s Mouse, as Father Lucas had said, until the King had given her his name.
“I thought you might want to be found,” Ottakar said.
“I did. By you.” It made no sense that he would offer to share something he himself had not yet enjoyed; Vok must have lied or misunderstood something the King had said.
“Would you like to play again? Slip off into the woods and I will come after you.”
Vok’s behavior might make no sense to her, but the seed of doubt he had planted about what she meant to Ottakar gnawed at her.
She shook her head, looking back over her shoulder at the woods.
“What is it? Did something happen?”
“Just a mistake, I think. Someone—”
“Someone stole a kiss, is that it? Like as not, it was no mistake. Watching you dance, your voice running over a body like warm water—you make any man want you, Mouse. Like I want you.” And he pulled her to him again, kissing her.
“Dawn is coming!” one the women cried out, and couples came from the benches and the woods, straightening clothes and combing leaves from their hair, to stand circle around the fire, straw-witches in hand.
Mouse pulled two from the small bag tied at her waist. She had made Ottakar one, but she kept the first, smeared with her blood, as her own. She toyed with the witch in her hand, her thumb running against the red. She knew the potency of blood in a spell; even if no one here chanted words, there was magic in the dance and in waiting for the first of the spring light and in throwing a sacrifice onto the flame. If the witch did soak up the year’s darkness to let a person’s light shine bright and strong, what would happen if a person had no light? Like Mouse.
Would she burn up like the witch? What if she was a witch?
“Here comes the sun!” someone cried.
And all the others answered: “Burn the witch! Burn the witch!” Their faces played upon by the firelight, streaks of glowing red and deep fissures of darkness. “Burn the witch!”
Trembling, Mouse stepped back from the circle, knowing now why Father Lucas had kept her from Teplá’s Witches’ Night festivals. The people there knew something of her oddness; some of them even called her witch. Caught up in the fervor of the night, might they have laid hands on a little Mouse and thrown her in the flames with her straw sisters?
Mouse held her bloody witch to her chest, tears sliding down her cheeks. She would not sacrifice the poor thing. She would keep her mounting darkness to herself—at least until she was sure of her own light.
As morning came, she joined the girls dancing, weaving in and out, braiding ribbons that wrapped around the Maypole, but she was terribly conscious of how she moved; she did not sing as the others took up the May Day song again. Ottakar’s assumption that the other men looked at her as he did and his lack of care troubled her and fueled the doubts Vok had seeded.
Those first days after Walpurgis Night, Vok had said little to anyone, jaw and arms clenched tight, his nostrils flared, but eventually he eased into his typical aloofness. Mouse wondered if he’d told Ottakar about the kiss; she hoped not. Ottakar had said nothing about it, and it stung to think he might know but not care.
The letter came weeks later, when the strips of colored linen they’d draped in the trees hung in tattered shreds, ripped by summer winds and bleached by the sun. The messenger arrived when they were down at the lake, the handful of Ottakar’s knights splashing and dunking each other, Ottakar and Mouse cooling their feet in the shallows near the shore. Vok had stood alone under the shade of some oaks.
Ottakar accepted the letter and read it quickly. “We are needed in Prague,” he said, already on the move back to the castle. Mouse and Vok turned at the sharpness in his tone.
“Why?” Mouse asked.
&nbs
p; “My aunt writes that my father is ill and asks for me.”
“You cannot trust him,” Vok said.
“He is my father, Vok. What would you have me do?”
“Let him die.”
Mouse found herself uncomfortably on Vok’s side. “He tried to kill you, Ottakar. More than once. How can you trust him?”
“I do not trust him. I am not a fool. But he is my father. I do not expect you to understand what that means,” he said to Mouse and then turned to Vok. “But you should.”
“What duty you owed him died when he locked you in that box the same as mine died when my father asked to have me broken on the wheel,” Vok spat back.
“I do understand,” Mouse said, her eyes stinging. “He may not be my natural-born father, but I have a Father all the same. I know duty.” She swallowed the bitterness as she thought about her own choice to stay with Ottakar rather than return to Houska. “Sometimes other needs outweigh that duty. Your people, you owe them protection and sound leadership. You owe them your life, do you not? How can you risk it then for someone who has done you and them such ill?”
For a moment, Ottakar considered what she said as he lowered himself to the grass beneath the trees, but then he found his argument. “My father’s plotting was part of the sickness in his mind. My aunt seems to think he has come back to himself, his mind healing even as his body grows weak. And I do trust her.”
Vok sighed with disgust. “They should have both hung, your father and mine, for what they did to us and to Damek. He was certainly innocent in all this, whatever crimes we may have committed as sons.”
“And I believe we might lay another innocent life at your father’s feet, Ottakar, and one that smells of malice rather than insanity.” Mouse spoke softly, unsure of how he might react to her suspicions and unsure of her own motives for sharing it; she liked having him to herself here in Hluboka, and she hoped her selfishness was not blinding her.
“What do you mean?” It was Vok who asked it.
Ottakar was staring out at the lake.
“I see you already suspect it,” she said to Ottakar.
“Say it anyway,” Ottakar answered.
“Watched as closely as she was, how could your mother get your father’s hunting knife unless it was by someone else’s intent? And where did she find such will to act? A grieving woman who had not even enough determination to get out of bed on her own? How could she summon the courage to kill herself?” Mouse knelt beside him, laying her hand on his arm. “And why would she? Her only living son—a son she had raised to protect the weak, to fight for honor following the code of the knight—was riding, victorious, to claim his throne. She knew you would never do harm to your father; you are too good for that. If she was aware at all, Ottakar, she was proud of you! Why would she kill herself unless someone preyed on the weakness of her mind and convinced her that you were doomed, that she would live to see another son dead, perhaps at the hand of his own father? Perhaps by the man who slipped her his own knife to do the deed he bid of her.”
“Have you any proof, Mouse?” She heard the hope in his voice.
“No.”
“Nor do I, though our thoughts run the same.” He looked up at her. “Would you have me believe that my father bears the mark of my mother’s blood? How could such a truth console me? She is dead. He is all I have left.”
“The truth might not offer consolation, my Lord,” said Vok, “but it will keep you on your guard.”
The King looked up and his eyes were fierce. “I will never drop my guard again, Vok. I swear it now as I swore it to Damek’s widow and orphaned son. I will surely again lose men in battle under my command, but I will not take another life from my own stupidity.” He sighed. “A show of reconciliation with my father will serve to heal the damage we have done to the country. And it will make my rule easier. Besides, I must return to Prague at some point. I cannot hide away here forever. We will leave within the week.”
Despite her misgivings, when it came time to leave, Mouse was more than ready. She’d had her own unexpected letter from Father Lucas. This one was filled with quotes, but not as part of their usual game. He worked them into the body of his letter, making them seem natural—admonitions for her spiritual well-being, Scripture, the words of St. Norbert, lines from St. Francis. But they were anything but natural; they were code. It took her less than an hour to decipher it, though she was sure no one else would have been able to do it—just as she was sure someone else had read the letter before her.
Father Lucas was in trouble.
He seemed to think that she might be in danger as well. His message warned her: Tell no one about what happened at Houska. Tell no one about the code she had broken or the books they had read. Tell no one about her gifts. Show no one what she could do.
She wondered if Bishop Bansca was still at Houska and if he was the source of danger. Mouse felt safe enough from the reaches of Rome—what would they care about some no-name girl—and surely her connection to Ottakar offered some protection. It was Father Lucas who was truly in jeopardy; the Church saved its Inquisitions for its own. Had they found the Book of Enoch and the Watchers’ book with Father Lucas? Books denied by the Church—would that be enough to accuse him of heresy?
Mouse meant to get answers from Bishop Miklaus and then travel to Houska as soon as possible.
TWENTY-FOUR
They rode out early one morning later that week. They spoke little. A chill rain began to fall as they came over the hills and saw the dark shapes of the towers and town. Vok kept rubbing at his forehead as the water collected in his hair and dripped onto his face.
They had reached Prague after nightfall, so immediately after Mass the next morning, when Ottakar went to see Vaclav, Mouse visited Bishop Miklaus to demand permission to go to Houska.
“Why would you want to go there?” he asked as he settled himself in his chair.
“I want to see Father Lucas.”
“But he is not there.”
“Where is he?” Cold dread ran through her.
“With Bishop Bansca, I imagine.”
“And where is Bishop Bansca?”
“The last I heard from him, he was at Houska, but he wrote of plans to travel on elsewhere. That was some weeks ago.”
“Travel to where?”
“I am sure I do not know.”
“You are lying, Bishop.” She had seen the dart of his pupils, heard the skip in his heart. “Now tell me where Father Lucas is.”
“Or what? What will you do?”
The fear in his face and curiosity in his voice put her on her guard. He knew something. He had been in the hall when she quieted the bear with a word and a touch, but what else did he think he knew?
“Did I tell you that Brother Jan has been named abbot at Teplá?” he said, smirking.
“That is Father Lucas’s position.” She willed her trembling body to be still. If Brother Jan was the bishop’s source of information, she and Father Lucas were in serious jeopardy. Brother Jan would most certainly talk about them breaking the law of cloister, but what else did he know? Like everyone at Teplá, Brother Jan knew about her general oddness, but he had never seen her use any of her gifts.
“Father Lucas forfeited his position so he could continue with his travels. He felt guilty that the abbey was left so long without leadership.” He was lying again, and Mouse was done playing games.
“What I will do, Bishop Miklaus,” she said, “is ask the King to pursue this with you. If you will not give me the information, I am sure you will give it to him.”
“My Lord the King has little purview in matters governed by Rome.”
“I will be sure to tell him that you find allegiance to his sovereign rule to be in doubt, Bishop. And what interest would Rome have in the doings of a simple Norbertine like Father Lucas?”
“As you well know, things are never as they seem, my Lady.”
When Mouse found Ottakar in the bailey, his high spirits did not m
atch her own mood; worry ate at her. If anything had happened to Father Lucas, the guilt of it lay on her shoulders: she should have gone back to Houska.
As Ottakar hefted sword and shield, training with his knights, she could see no sign of the damage done to him here just months ago. In some ways she wished he had more than the scars on his fingers to remind him of what his father had done, especially when he started to speak so happily of Vaclav’s recovery.
“The rest has done him well. He speaks plainly, his mind sharp.”
Mouse thought a sharp-minded Vaclav sounded more dangerous than ever, but she kept the thought to herself. She needed Ottakar’s help and didn’t want to risk offending him. “I am happy for you.”
“Are you?”
“I wish him no ill, Ottakar. I only want you to be safe.”
“I know.” He took her hand. “His body is ill, though. The physicians here have done him no good. Would you be willing to look at him, Mouse?”
The request caught her off guard. “I . . . I cannot imagine that your father would want me anywhere near him.”
Ottakar let go of her hand. “I am sorry I asked.”
“No, please. I will gladly see if there is anything I can do for him, Ottakar, but have you asked him if it is what he wants?”
“I want it. He will agree.” He stood. “Now I must return to training.”
“I had something I would speak with you about, too, if I may?”
He stopped to listen but did not sit.
“I cannot find Father Lucas.”
“Is he not at Houska?”
“Bishop Miklaus assures me he is not, but he will not tell me where they have gone.”
“They?”
“He believes the Father is with Bishop Bansca.”
“Well then, you have your answer.” And sighing, he turned to go.
“But he will not say where they are. Could you ask the bishop? He might answer you.”
“I will try to remember to ask when I see him next.” He took a few steps toward the ring of knights still at swordplay, but then paused, turning back to her. “What do you mean he might answer me?”
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