Adrienne Martine-Barnes - [Sword 02]

by The Crystal Sword (v0. 9) (epub)

  Bitter disappointment filled her heart for a long moment. It was just an old armory full of discarded weapons of some ancient war of the White Folk. She picked up a helm idly, and realized how small it was. Surely it had never graced the noble head of any of the King’s court or the Queen’s guard. Nor would it have fit upon the huge heads of their dwarf slaves. Besides, the guardmen carried only long spears tipped with glassy barbs. Had some mortal men invaded the realm of the White Folk? If so, they sang no songs of it. With a start she realized she had never seen a sword during her endless days in the Queen’s court. Tiny knifes sung out of jewels, yes, but nothing like these weapons nor anything fashioned of iron or leather.

  The gem around her throat seemed to tug her into the armory. Aenor stepped past broken swords, their jagged edges catching the hem of her long, pleated gown. Something gleamed faintly in a heap of crumbling leather chest pieces, a bit of coppery metal like a tiny plate with two bands of color twisting beneath it. She reached for it and drew out a strangely formed blade.

  It was barely as long as her arm, and its edges curved out from the point before they narrowed below the handgrip. The metal seemed green in the pale light of her gem, and was unmarred by rust or decay. It was light in her hand, and she moved it back and forth, feeling her muscles recall old, forgotten motions as fragments of memory floated in her mind. She had handled other swords, heavier ones, and she could remember the feel of smooth stones beneath booted feet and the smell of fat-smeared ring mail mixed with sweat, the scent of animal droppings in a great house of beasts. They had soft noses and warm breaths, and hard bony feet. Their name eluded her.

  There were other beasts too, things with swordlike bones growing from their foreheads; and once she had called them and they had come from the green places to bear her on their narrow backs. Aenor remembered how the air streamed across her face as she rode. Her eyes filled with moisture, then dried. The Queen had banished her tears along with hunger and thirst. She longed for release, but the spell was too strong.

  Aenor studied the handgrip, examining the glassy intertwining of blue and green across the metal. Like serpents, she decided, as she looked at the flat plate that ended the hilt. Four bits of metal stuck up like fangs and she thought there was something graven on the surface. She peered closely, and the gem around her throat flared. Her hands moved against their will, bringing the hilt end against the jewel.

  She fumbled the braided cord which held the jewel over her head, and placed the stone into the barbs around the plate. It fit exactly, and she knew somehow that the two belonged together. The jewel filled the cavern with green light, and she lifted the sword to test the balance anew. Her fingers curled around the enamelled serpents; it felt like an extension of her arm. Her mind filled with a terrible light, and power seemed to surge into her. And, far away, someone’s scream echoed through the caves and caverns.

  II

  The large blue fly buzzed and hummed and made another sortie on Dylan d’Avebury’s broad brow. Dylan wrinkled his nose and made deep furrows on his forehead, but the fly refused to leave. It walked towards one of his heavy, dark eyebrows and he shook his head to dislodge it. The great cathedral was so crammed with the nobility of Albion come to see their wild Prince Geoffrey safely tied up in marriage bonds that he could not use his hands without jostling someone. They were squeezed together like grapes in a wine press.

  His head throbbed at the sudden movement. There had been altogether too much wine the previous night, good, flinty Somerset wine, as he and Prince Geoffrey and several of their cronies had attempted to drown the Prince’s sorrow over his approaching nuptials to the plump and pale Isabeau of Flanders. He could see the bride and groom kneeling before the Archbishop, and from the bent of Geoffrey’s head, he too was suffering from a monstrous headache. Dylan should have asked his mother for some willow bark tea before the service.

  As if she had heard his thought, Eleanor d’Avebury turned her head and looked at him. Her grey eyes crinkled a little at the comers, and her lips moved silently. The fly promptly departed as Dylan contained his shock. He was quite used to his mother’s small magics—like the way she

  lit the hearth with a touch of her hand—but it seemed almost indecent somehow for her to use them in a church.

  The cathedral was stifling in a sudden warm spell that covered the land in late April, as if nature herself rejoiced in Prince Geoffrey’s wedding. Dylan knew Geoffrey well, since King Arthur had made Eleanor godmother to his firstborn, and they shared a natal day. Geoffrey was younger by two years, and seemed to have been bom with a gift for mischief. He had spent many summers at Avebury, learning woodcraft and swordwork from Dylan’s father, Doyle, and manners from Eleanor. He had also seduced, or tried to, every pretty maid in the district, and had fathered his first bastard at the tender age of fifteen, when his beard was still something a cat might lick off. He had even tried to tumble Dylan’s three sisters, though not very hard. Dylan suspected that his sister Rowena might have been willing, if she had not known perfectly well that Geoffrey was notoriously inconstant. The royal wedding now being performed promised to be a perfectly miserable marriage, for the Prince had taken a great dislike to his bride-to-be, and only Arthur’s pigheaded determination to have his son wed into a house that was both regal and advantageous had forced the situation. The Flems alone on the Continent were free of the terrible plague of Darkness that Arthur had driven out of Albion, and they were merchant partners as well. A Franconian Princess would have been better, but communication between the two nations was sparse and irregular. The Albionese ambassador, Giles de Cambridge, wrote nothing but letters begging for funds and filled with dreadful news concerning the state of Franconia. Dylan knew him vaguely from his tedious term as a page in Arthur’s court, and considered him something of a fool. He felt glad that he was rather a nobody and that he would never have to deal with the alliances of nobles and Kings.

  Dylan sighed. He was twenty, and his life stretched before him as unbroken tedium. Albion prospered under

  Arthur, and he secretly longed for some adventure such as his mother had undertaken before his birth. The Fire Sword she had once wielded to save Albion from the Darkness hung from the King’s slender waist. Soon he would be forced into marriage with some boring female like the squinty-eyed daughter of Trent who stood beside him now, thrust there by her ever-smiling mother with a loathsome smirk. He would hunt deer in the forest, a pursuit which gave him little pleasure for he admired the beautiful creatures, attend the occasional joust which Arthur permitted to keep his restive chivalry from too much mischief, father a brood of squinty-eyed brats, and die without regret.

  He glanced at his mother’s straight back in front of him, then at Rowena, his eldest sister, who stood on his left, her face expressionless as she watched the ceremony. He suspected his sister was fonder of the Prince than she showed. Dylan wanted to hug her and tickle the solemn expression off her handsome face but that would have been too shocking in church. She turned her head slightly and arched her eyebrows elegantly in silent query, her grey eyes twinkling a little. She was very like Eleanor, a bit taller and her hair not quite so dark, but with the same stem features which turned to beauty when she smiled.

  That was the problem, he decided. He was spoiled for women by his mother and sisters. Perhaps it was some quality she had brought with her, for Eleanor d’Avebury had come from another time and place, a far future where men drove horseless carts and flew through the very air, or, perhaps, that she commanded magics great and small. She was a scholar, and wherever she travelled in Albion she pestered folk for strange tales and wrote them down in a fair hand, until she had volumes of them at Avebury. Now she was trying to persuade the King to let her endow a chair at the university at Oxford to preserve and study these stories. He tried to imagine Amelia of Trent telling tales round the hearth and almost laughed aloud. He wanted a quick-witted woman, and not some simpering female who thought of nothing but gowns and babes. I shall molder
into a crabby old bachelor, he thought glumly, and be an uncle to my sisters’ brats. If they ever marry, either. He could not imagine Rowena or Beatrice or little Eleanor tied down to some beef-faced squire who cared for nought but his horses and his dinner. Dylan felt one of his black moods begin to settle on him like an inky cloak. It was not fair. To be the son of a famous father and even more famous mother was almost too much to bear. Why, minstrels even sang songs about them. / could drink the Thames dry and they would not sing of me! His crossness began to fade as he tried to decide where one might start such a task. On London Bridge at high noon seemed plausible, and he decided he was not quite sober yet.

  The real problem, he admitted to himself, was that his mother did not wish him to go adventuring. Two years before, Arthur had mounted an expedition against the bands of Reavers, the terrible changeling folk who still terrorized the mountains of the north, and though he was a belted knight, Eleanor had forbidden him to accompany the King. If he sneezed she forced foul-tasting brews upon him. Dylan heartily wished some willful god or goddess would snatch him from his bed and set him down in a strange land to slay a monster or two at least, as St. Bridget had done to his mother. Sometimes he almost choked on her constant fussing.

  He pushed these unhappy thoughts aside. They were not proper in this house of the Almighty, and those other deities his mother told so many stories of were damned elusive, even Saille, the Lady of the Willows, who resided in Silbury Hill near Avebury.

  Dylan remembered a day when he had been hunting rabbits amongst the willow trees around the foot of Silbury Hill. He had been about ten, and the day had been charged with a golden light that was so splendid, so different from any he had ever seen that he had sat down by the winding stream to feel it. There was a little pool, almost still, which reflected the willows in their spring glory, and he felt himself in a waking dream. He studied his face in the mirrorlike surface of the pool and wondered when he would have a beard like his father. After a moment he saw another face reflected in the silvery water, a white face with great grey eyes and dark red lips. It did not surprise him overly much to find his mother wandering here, for such was often her custom, until he remembered that when she had departed that morning Eleanor had been about to set out for a visit to St. Bridget’s Priory, some thirty miles away.

  “Hullo, Mother. Did you decide not to go?” Dylan looked up at the face and went chill in the warmth of the day. This was most certainly not his mother, though they had a striking similarity. The face was a bit more oval, the eyes wider set, the mouth less generous.

  “I . . . beg your pardon, my lady. I mistook you for another.”

  “Nay, child. There is no sweeter word you can call me than mother, nor any soul I hold more dear than dear Eleanor’s.” The lips curved in a smile and Dylan saw sharp white teeth. “1 will not bite you, I promise.” She paused. “Do you like my pool?”

  The words were like honey, and he found he wished to run away and could not move.

  “Yes, it is very nice, but ...”

  “But?”

  “Well, this land is part of our holding, so the pool is my mother’s. And my father’s,” he added hastily, although he knew perfectly well that against all custom Avebury Hall was his mother’s property, not his father’s. The King himself had given it to Eleanor for her service to the crown.

  “It was mine before it was hers. Shall we call it ‘ours,’ then?”

  Dylan decided that this woman was gently mad and ought to be humored. “As you wish, my lady.”

  “Do I look like a lady?”

  He considered her question seriously. She wore a plain blue gown without a scrap of decoration, her hair unbound into midnight billows, and her feet were bare. She did not look exactly like anyone he had ever seen before, not like Queen Marguerite, who always wore a necklace of amethysts, nor like any of the elegant women he had met in London the year before, Countess Brent and Duchess Amelie. He couldn’t imagine them barefoot in any woods. They must have been born shod and hosed. But there was something very grand about this strange woman, something more regal than any duchess or Queen he had ever seen.

  “Yes and no.” He recalled an evening a few days before when his mother had been absent from the hall until well after nightfall and his father had paced before the fireplace like a sullen bear. She had finally come in, cheeks a little rosy from the chilly air, eyes alight with some special pleasure.

  “Where have you been?” Doyle had growled.

  “Out watching the stars with the Lady of the Willows, love, as you perfectly well know.”

  “I sometimes think I would prefer it if you were putting horns on me with one of the shepherds.”

  “Oh, Doyle, stop acting like an Irishman. You know I love each of you, just differently.”

  Dylan had watched them embrace and crept back to his bed aware that he had eavesdropped when he was supposed to be asleep. He recalled other times when Eleanor had been absent—once for several days—while his father terrified the servants and spoke in monosyllables to his children. Dylan struggled to comprehend what ruffled the usually loving relationship of the two people he loved most in the world and dropped off into uneasy sleep.

  “Yes and no,” the woman repeated.

  “Not ‘my lady,’ I think, but the Lady. I do not think my father likes you.”

  “No, he doesn’t. He’s not one to wear the willow.” She chuckled over her own joke and Dylan found himself smiling too.

  “Then you are the one she comes to see—at night.” “Your mother has a loving heart, and a loyal one as well. It is a shame she has to love a pair of bitter spirits like me and Doyle.”

  Dylan didn’t understand that. “Why do you disturb them? My father never did you any harm.”

  “No, he has not. But it is not my choice. It is your mother who draws me to her, not the other way around. And your father knows it. Well, I am a little selfish too. I was so lonely before Eleanor came into the world. She gave me her love so freely, and I had almost forgotten how precious a thing love was.”

  Dylan felt her pain and loneliness. It was such a great thing that it seemed to fill every part of this young body. It was an endless ache, an unheeded hurt, and he knew that if his mother had ever felt it, she would not rest until she had attempted to cure the pain.

  Heedless of his boots, Dylan walked across the pool and flung his arms around her neck. “Poor willow woman. Do not be so sad. I will be your friend too, and then you will not feel so alone.” He planted a wet kiss on one smooth cheek, and felt a warm, bitter tear touch his lips.

  She hugged him back, laughing and crying at the same time. “I suppose it is all right. Eleanor thinks of me as her mother, so that makes you my grandson, doesn’t it?” Dylan, who had long been conscious of the absence of any grandparents in his life—or uncles, aunts, or cousins— and had felt somewhat forlorn at the want, nodded. “I do have a grandmother somewhere in Hibernia, but I have never met her.” The strange woman’s embrace was comforting and he leaned against her shoulder. She smelled faintly of earth and the bitter scent of broken willow leaves and not like a person at all, but it did not matter.

  “Your father isn’t going to like this, I think.” She ruffled his hair. “He will probably accuse me of stealing your affections as I did Eleanor’s.”

  Dylan was tom between his love for his magnificent father and the desire to sit in this woman’s lap forever.

  “Then I will not tell him,” he said finally.

  He never had, even when he grew older and learned the marvelous tale of his mother’s exploits, and that his Hibernian grandmother was a great serpent (a part of the story he did not quite believe) an how the Fire Sword became a treasure of the House of Plantagenet. He knew now that the grave Lady of the Willows was old, older than he could imagine, a goddess from an earlier time, but she remained only a treasured friend and a secret. It did not trouble him to speak to a goddess, for like most of the country people of Albion he worshipped the One God on S
undays and did not bother about him the rest of the week. The Church wisely did not trouble itself over peasants dancing around pagan fires a few times a year, as long as they made their tithes and brought their infants to the ritual of baptism.

  He had not conversed with her, except in strange dreams, for over a year. The dreams troubled him, and he wished he could consult with his mother about them. Unfortunately, he was fairly certain she would fly into a proper Hibernian fury, for the goddess seemed to be trying to send him upon a journey to the east, where the wide continent of Europe lay in Shadow. If Eleanor d’Avebury would not let him go hunting Reavers, she would certainly prevent him crossing the Channel to Franconia. And perhaps the dream was only a wish, a desire for adventure, and not a message from the lady at all. Dylan bit his lip and decided to speak to his father. They were not close, for Doyle was somewhat distant with him, but he had found his father’s advice upon the bedding of women and the drinking of wine to be useful in the past.

  Relieved by this decision, Dylan returned his attention to the Mass as the Archbishop ended the ceremony and Prince Geoffrey planted a tepid kiss on his bride’s cheek. Isabeau smirked like a placid ewe, and Dylan had a wicked vision of her sheep-rich father’s carnal relations with his flocks. He was tempted to share the jest with Rowena, but thought she might find it too ribald. Such thoughts in church, he chided himself, and knew that the One God seemed too abstract and distant to him for true reverence. Saille was real, but poor Jesus was just a device for getting money out of peasants and fools.

  Prince Geoffrey attempted to abandon his bride at the altar, signalling Dylan over the heads of the crowd, for both were very tall, but two grim-faced equerries urged him back into line as the doors of the cathedral opened and the procession began to exit. The King followed his son, looking thoughtful, and Dylan bowed as he passed.