Lady Anne? It was a man’s voice. And that was strange, for they’d called on the Mother, hadn’t they?
Lady Anne? The voice was anguished.
“Yes. I’m here. Who are you?”
I am nameless now, though I am Thor’s servant, first and last. But once I was the messenger of a king.
Anne was suddenly frightened. “Thor’s servant? But… you died.”
There are things to be said. I have come to say them. Question me. It is your duty.
Blindly, in the blurred, soft dark, Anne turned toward the sound of the voice. There was a shape, black on black, and a buttery thread of light was creeping, growing, outlining a head, a shoulder, an arm… Dread crawled toward her out of the dark like a living thing. Anne knew that if the thread became brighter, spread faster, she would see the man’s face, see his gaping death wound.
“What was your message from the king?”
To ask for help.
“I have said I will give all I can.”
That is not enough. You must give without hope, without count of cost, without thought of reward. Eyes where he has none, ears for what he cannot hear, a tongue to speak when all he knows is silence and betrayal.
“But I was right to turn away from him. That was the greater good.”
You must turn again. You cannot see the pattern, or the measure of the dance, but you dance just the same. You must take my place.
Cold bit at her, working its way upward from her feet, toward her heart, as the light grew brighter. Thor’s servant, dressed in red ringmail, was glowing so brightly, with such heat, that the billets of iron he held in his hands began to melt. And the thought came to her: this was a waste, for the iron could be forged into… what? A sword?
“Am I stone, that I can withstand what is asked of me?”
There was something beyond words here; something she understood but was frightened even to think about.
You must accept all that is. Acquiesce.
The cold reached her heart and, with the last of her breath, Anne screamed. But no sound disturbed the still air. She lay on the frozen ground of the oak grove, wrapped once more in her fur-lined cloak, her eyes glued shut.
Deborah chafed her hands, held her, shook her, called out: “Child! Hear me!”
Anne sensed words, but there was no sound, no sight. Just pain. And fear.
“Anne!”
Deborah’s voice burst in her ear with the percussive force of a bombard. The girl jerked upright, nauseated. Vomit hit the leaves on the floor of the grove. She retched so loudly that sleeping birds startled on the branches and flew up into the changing light, protesting.
Deborah was crying as she held Anne’s shaking body while the girl emptied bile from her gut.
“Enough of this. Enough! You nearly died!”
“But I did not.” Wearily Anne shook her head. “I have to go to the king.” It had come, this thing they both feared so much.
“Can you stand?”
Anne straightened her back and absently patted her foster mother’s hand. Poor Deborah. She had performed similar rituals all her life, but was fearful of the cost of the knowledge they brought to the living. Drawing the cloak around her body, Anne turned shakily toward the east and the growing light.
“We must go, or we’ll find the household awake.”
The two women carried the center-stone back to its hiding place in a tree hollow, then covered the quartz circle with fallen leaves and dead furze. Anne turned to Deborah. “I’ll do what the duchess asks. I’ll take her message and find a way to bring the king back to Duke Charles. I cannot escape this.”
Sometimes, when you finally face the thing you are frightened of, it seems less than it is. Deborah heard herself as she spoke—she sounded calm, she was calm. “And then?”
“I do not know.”
Was it a new beginning or an ending? Anne could not tell. Was that ignorance a blessing or a curse?
CHAPTER TEN
“Mother? Mother!”
Jacquetta woke in the dark with a jolt and snatched up the lighted candle at her bedside. “I’m coming, daughter, I’m coming.”
It was years since she’d risen to a fretful voice in the night and now, unfamiliar with her surroundings, the duchess stubbed a naked great toe on the edge of a coffer. Agony hissed out on a breath through the “lucky” gap between her front teeth, but the pain roused her from half sleep. Pulling her cloak over her shoulders, she fumbled at the door latch leading into her daughter’s room.
The queen struggled to heave her bulk upright when she heard her mother. She lay on a narrow bed in a narrow room—the abbot’s own personal cell—and the mattress was thin and lumpy as a sack filled with acorns. As a poor Lancastrian widow she’d slept on worse, but that was a very long time ago and now the deposed queen of England was frightened. What if this was all that was left to her? What if the rest of her life was to be this uncomfortable, this bleak? This hopeless.
“Mother, where are you? I can’t see you. I’m frightened!”
“Now, child, all is well. I am here.”
Elizabeth reached out and gripped her mother’s hand. Jacquetta yelped. The ague in her finger joints was pain itself in this cold season. The queen wailed suddenly and covered her face, tears seeping between ringless fingers. “The baby… I have the gripping pain. He wants to be born, but I will die and he will die, and the king will never see his son.”
The duchess heard the panic in her daughter’s voice, but there were no courtiers now to flurry ’round and soothe her. Jacquetta held her candle higher. “Look at me, Elizabeth!”
Her voice was harsh and it shocked the queen. She gulped back tears and her voice trembled. “Why are you not kinder to me, Mother?”
Jacquetta’s irritation with her difficult daughter ebbed away. Once she’d been an enchanting little girl, a child who’d laughed and kissed her mother sweetly. Occasionally, as now, the vulnerability of that child flickered still in the eyes of the adult she’d become. Jacquetta sighed and huddled down beside her daughter.
“Because that will not help you or me, or the baby. Come, let me aid your sleep. You need strength for the time that is coming. Do you not remember what I taught you? Concentrate… here, follow the flame… follow the flame as it moves.”
The queen clutched the turned and patched sheets around her cold shoulders and did as she was told, sniffling. In the dark, her pupils grew to a great size, so great the blue was drowned in black and a reflection of the candle flame wavered in their depths.
“Yes, that’s better, my daughter. Much better. Now, you will listen to me and repeat what I say.”
“Repeat what you say.”
Jacquetta smiled. “Good, very good. Watch the flame, keep watching the flame. The baby is well and so am I…”
“The baby is well and so am I…”
“He is not yet ready to be born, so I can sleep…”
“He is not yet ready to be born, so I can sleep…”
The queen, eyes fixed on the small flame, suddenly yawned and her eyelids fluttered. The tense lines of her face softened.
“All will be well. I know this to be true…”
“All will be well… I know this to…”
Elizabeth Wydeville sighed and the last of the words drifted away. She slept, one hand placed protectively across her belly.
Looking down at her daughter, Jacquetta expelled a long breath. Every weary year of her life was written on her own face, yet once she’d been as lovely as the queen. To be beautiful was a useful thing, but also dangerous. Gently, she tucked Elizabeth’s other hand under the counterpane.
“All will be well, my daughter.”
The duchess looked over to the abbot’s unadorned prie-dieu in the corner of the room. She resisted the urge to kneel on it and ask for help, for reassurance. At moments such as these, friendless and nearly alone while the enemy roamed the streets of the capital, it was hard to believe God even existed.
A blasph
emous thought. And in the abbot’s own cell. She would be punished for this sin.
Fearfully, Jacquetta hauled at the chain around her neck, pulling out the crucifix that hung from it. Kissing the body of Christ, she knelt beside her daughter’s bed and prayed to a God she did not believe in for relief and comfort that had never truly been hers, in all her long life. As self-administered penance, she decided to give up the warmth of her own bed. And somehow her resolve, formed by guilt, kept terror at bay as the weary night wore on and she listened, telling her beads, to the deposed queen, her own daughter, as she groaned in her sleep. If there was a God, he might hear her as she prayed this long night. What did she have to lose? What did any of them have to lose that was not already gone?
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Louis XI, king of France, had courtiers who swore he was the most handsome man on earth. He knew they lied and sometimes, if he was feeling cheerful, it amused him to see how far their obsequiousness would extend when they wanted his favor. And as they all wanted his favor all the time, when he asked them to describe his appearance, they frothed that he was an Adonis, a veritable Apollo. Unfortunately, the game palled quickly, for while Louis delighted in human stupidity, since it conveyed advantage, eventually he became annoyed by their implied contempt. Did these fools not understand he knew exactly what he looked like? He did not enjoy the sight of his own face and, for that reason, avoided mirrors. It was the length and size of his nose that particularly offended him, but what could one do about such things? The nose he had been born with would accompany him to the grave—unless leprosy took it from him. He had a morbid fear of leprosy among many other such terrors. At the thought, the king crossed himself and touched the finger bone of St. Louis, his own ancestor, which hung around his neck in its little green malachite box bound in gold wire. Unlike others—Edward Plantagenet, for instance—Louis was not greatly troubled by lust, yet he was a man as others were. And as his wife did not greatly attract him, he, as most men did, risked disease from the occasional women he consorted with.
If any of his courtiers had been brave enough to point out to Louis that the source of his ever-present desire to crush his two chief enemies—Edward Plantagenet and Charles of Burgundy—might be caused more by envy of their famous good looks than by lust for their territory, well, the king would have laughed heartily, ironically, and changed the subject. But, of course, it was true. Louis—secretive, pious, clever Louis—was jealous of his rivals, of their looks, their famous, radiant charm; and, since he’d schooled himself to a cold heart and low expectations of the behavior of those around him, he had no problem convincing himself, his court, and his allies that Edward the Usurper and Charles, the traitorous duke, his cousin, both deserved to be utterly destroyed. It was simple: they opposed his will, the will of the sanctified king of France and of the French. And there had never been a better time than now to scoop up both of them in the one mighty net. Edward had been driven from his kingdom, and Charles was thus fatally weakened by the loss of his chief ally against the French. That was good. That was very good, yet Louis felt no real or lasting pleasure in these facts, though he’d personally worked hard, and his servants harder still, to bring them about. In truth, he had little pleasure in anything. Life remained wearisome and annoying, just as it always had been.
“This is intolerable! I have ash in my eye!”
November had arrived and with it dark winds from the far north. Louis angrily furled his robes more closely around his body and bellowed for men to fix the smoking fire. Famous for his restless year-round processionals through the kingdom of France, Louis was currently roosting in the primitive—at least by Parisian standards—castle of his provincial capital, Reyns. His bored and fractious courtiers were heartily sick of the lack of even basic comforts as winter settled over the land. They were desperate for distraction of any kind to break the endless monotony of their days.
At last it arrived. Rumor swept the drafty old castle: a messenger had just ridden in, was being ushered, exhausted, into Louis’s presence. Perhaps the news he brought would be a distraction to the king, lifting his petulant gloom. His courtiers certainly hoped so. If the news was good, entertainment might be ordered and that would cheer them all. But Louis was not thinking cheerful thoughts; pessimism was his native mood and nothing had happened to shake that so far today. He drew down his long upper lip and sniffed hard; smoke from the stubborn fire made his eyes stream tears and his vision blurred as he inspected the man before him.
“Enough!” he commanded the tribe of servants fussing with increasing panic over the fire. “I shall conduct this audience and then dine. By the time I return to this chamber, I expect the fire to be working. Properly. Now, go!”
It was miraculous, really. A certain tone in his voice and men scattered like leaves. Louis found the effect gratifying, even after a reign of nine years, but odd that his least word was taken so seriously. It would be far too easy to take it for granted, but one had only to think of the fate of others—Edward Plantagenet, for instance, or his own father—to remember that even the mighty, even a king, could fall. One must be on one’s guard for treachery all the time. Tedious, but necessary.
Louis turned to the slightly higher flames in the chimney breast and rubbed his hands together in their feeble warmth. “Well, man, speak. What do you have for me?”
The glassy-eyed messenger, Riccard of Polignac, was exhausted and dazed from his long and freezing ride. Now, ushered into the king’s presence, terror oozed down his back seeking his twitching sphincter, and turned his legs to boneless sacks of flesh. The sound of his heartbeat filled his ears and he yearned for the moment when he could exit the Presence and sink back into the obscurity of the guard command in Paris. That was, if he survived the news that he carried.
“Sire, the success of your campaign in Picardy and the Maconnais is glorious. Your troops mass on the borders of Burgundy itself even now and await your word to advance. But I have urgent news concerning the fate of the former king of England.”
As the man spoke, Louis breathed in too deeply, trying to mask his tension, and took a great freight of smoke into his lungs. For a moment, he could not speak but his face turned a deep brick red and sweat stood out on his forehead as he tried to catch clear air into his mouth.
Without thought, Riccard lunged forward and thumped the king heartily on the back. That was a shock to both of them and, for a moment, each man stared at the other in terror. The messenger had laid hands on the scared person of the monarch. He could be expected to die a nasty and protracted death for such effrontery.
Understanding instantly the graveness of his offense, Riccard slumped to his knees, hands covering his head, eyes wild. “Ah sire, your pardon! I beseech your pardon!” He knocked his forehead so energetically on the flags that a bloody smear was left on the limestone.
The king regained his breath and marveled at the absurdity of it all. Of course he’d flinched when the man rushed at him—he could have been an assassin—but as the lurching thump of his heart returned to normal, he was glad of the messenger’s service, for the fear had squeezed his chest, driving out the smoke.
“Get up. Get up, you fool!”
Riccard, still dazed, stumbled as he tried to stand and grasped at the edges of a tapestry on the wall for support. With a ripping groan, the rotted arras parted company with its hooks and soon the messenger was completely engulfed by Moses Parting the Red Sea, a heaving, twitching lump of foolishness at the feet of the king.
“What is the message?” shrieked Louis. “Tell me, or I swear you shall join your ancestors’ bones in the pigsty they reside in. Speak!”
Poor Riccard. If instant death would have eased his plight he would gladly have obliged the king, but it was not to be. Closing his mouth against the dust of years trapped in the cloth, he found a way toward a little patch of light and slithered out from beneath the arras on his belly. Heaving himself free, he saw the terrible eyes of the king upon his own. For a moment he had n
o voice but then it came in a rush and he blurted his message as fast as hail drumming on a roof.
“The English king, sire, or the earl of March as he is now—he is in the Ridderzaal with the Lord de Gruuthuse, governor of Holland. The earl is the governor’s prisoner, but does not know it.”
Louis was not without pity, though he rarely showed it. Therefore he kept his eyes trained like an arrow on the bowed head of Riccard of Polignac, ignoring the blood dripping onto the floor at the man’s feet. “And? There is more?”
The man’s voice trembled. “Yes, sire. But it is contained in this cipher which will need translating. I was entrusted only with the outline of the facts.”
Riccard held up a stoppered brass tube in one shaking hand. The king leaned down and snatched it. “And I can see why,” he snorted. “A greater fool I have rarely encountered. Out of my sight! Go!”
The king’s merciful release of him confused poor Riccard. He had heard that Louis was very cruel and that his favorite pastime was hanging prisoners in metal cages from the battlements of his castles. They were left there in all weathers, with no food, no water, until at last they died and their bones swung in the wind, sometimes for years and years. Riccard backed, hobbling, from the king’s presence before Louis could change his mind.
The king, watching the oaf depart at speed, permitted himself to smile briefly, naughtily, as he stroked the small canister containing the promised cipher. Perhaps, at last, he was beginning to corner his dear cousin Charles, but the fate of the erstwhile English king was very much in play. Divide and conquer, divide and conquer, Louis thought. A sound maxim for which he thanked another monarch, though a Roman one of ages past. What he needed now was for his Doctor of Divination to cast a chart, perhaps the chart of England itself, to see what the future held. Yes, that might help him decide what to do next.
Was it possible that the Fates, those three implacable sisters, had ordained that he, Louis de Valois, would be their instrument in the ultimate downfall of Edward Plantagenet?
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