The baroness crooked a finger toward me, and I leaned down to hear her. She whispered, “Thank you for bringing me this sunlight, into a room so dark.”
I felt better than I had in a long time as I stood there, listening to the bird speak, and seeing the wan smile upon the old lady’s face. Alienora looked at me as if I had just given the most wonderful gift she had ever received. A single tear, what must have been a diamond of grief and joy mingled together, rolled down her cheek. I stood there by the bedside into the night, speaking with the baroness about the Great Forest, and of the birds and the marshes.
8
By the time I reached the age of seventeen, in the estimation of many I had risen too high. A mud lark was not meant to be a falcon. The others grew jealous of this peasant boy who had come to wear finer things, who trained the falcons most beloved by the baron, who had even trained a falcon that was sent as a gift for a foreign prince, and was now called Falconer. I had lost much of my childhood as I consciously tried to become what I felt was a better person. Although I still sent food to my mother and her children, I did not spend time in the field seeking them out. I had grown cold and a little empty, and my hatred of Corentin ruled my heart at times more than my burning but unrequited love for Alienora.
I could feel the jealousy of some of the others my age, when I was called to care for the baroness’s bird, or when, on the hunt, I rode on a horse beside the lead huntsman, two falcons on my arms at the ready. Kenan Sensterre had remained aloof from me during those years, but none could deny my abilities on horseback and with the falcons, and so he remained a distant but approving presence in the hunt.
In those years, superstitions about country people were on the rise, and as the village grew, a wall of stone was built between it and the field, further separating families like the one I’d come from and those who were of a better class, despite the general poverty of the area.
I do not like what I remember of myself then: I had turned to stone in order to gain favors, to build what career a youth might in that cutthroat terrain where one might be executed for a stolen loaf of bread. I had once been a boy full of love and life, the boy who loved his storytelling grandfather, who spoke to birds and loved them and the Forest as well. I had become a product of the household, of walls, of chambers. I had grown dishonest in the way that those do who follow rules too closely—I was ready to blame others for minor sins, quick to bend before a better in order to rise up beyond my station. I worried at times that my soul had begun to erode as I sought to escape my origins. I had begun to forget that I had ever come from the woods and the marshes at all. I cannot judge that youth too harshly, for he lived in a world of rats and lice disguised as noblemen and ladies, of servants who would slice him open if it meant a crust of bread and a mat near the fire. The boy named Aleric—the one I had been and the one I had become as I approached manhood—had lost the Forest and its verdant life for the gray and the brown, the dead wood of the castle, the place of infestation.
And yet I saw it as beautiful and wonderful then, for I had a nearly full belly at times, and the company of those who had fine garments and spoke a language that had been unheard in the outer world.
It was only when I met a boy two years younger than I, named Ewen Glyndon, that I remembered where I’d come from. Like me, he was of the field, but he had become a shepherd to the household, as a debt from his father who owed much to the baron. He was handsome and strong, but seemed in desperate need of protection. A night came when I saw Corentin begin to treat him as he had once treated me years before, and Ewen had no defense in him.
I crossed Corentin then and there, and whispered in his ear, “Should you hurt that youth, I will find you one night, in your sleep, and tear you open with my bare hands. And when they execute me for your murder, I will be happy that I watched your face as pain poured from you.”
It was enough, that threat, for Ewen to remain free of Corentin’s darkness. After that, Corentin did not bother Ewen, and the young man followed me whenever he could as if he owed me his life, though I reassured him that he owed me nothing. But from this we became fast friends, and when I opened my heart to him about my secret longing for Alienora, he grinned broadly, slapping my shoulder, and whispered, “She does not deserve one so fine as you.”
9
Since the incident of the speaking bird, Alienora had stopped me in my duties now and then to ask a question about birds, or about fish, or about the Great Forest, or about why the marshes stank during the spring. I detected that, beneath the question, she offered a spark of interest in me.
Still, she kept some distance, and I did not approach her to speak but merely waited for her to come to me. She had become as pious as her older sisters, each of whom had married but whose husbands were off in wars. Rarely seen without her Bible, Alienora read it aloud in Latin in the morning, in the courtyard, with her older sisters. We began to talk of her faith and her blessed purity, those of us who saw and admired her. I suspect that seeing her transformation from beauty to saintliness changed even Corentin, who watched her nearly as close as did I. I learned from Corentin himself that her piety stemmed from the death of the man to whom she’d been betrothed. He had died in the north, on his way to meet his future bride for the first time. Alienora was to have married him in her fourteenth year, but this had been delayed because of wars and troubles beyond our little country. Now, at eighteen years of age, Alienora had decided to go to the convent to live. Soon enough, she would have to bid farewell to the castle forever, in exchange for the nunnery that existed to the west of the Great Forest, its chapels and rooms carved into the belly of the Earth itself by an anchoress who had seen a vision of the Holy Mother in the rock.
It seemed a tragedy to me that such an angel should lock herself away. I wanted to be near her constantly when I wasn’t working. I began to go more frequently to the chapel to stand in the doorway and watch her pray beneath the altar and statue to Mary as well as that of Saint Blaise. Alienora’s purity had seduced me, finally. God’s Heaven showed through her face, and in her eyes, I saw the light of eternity.
I had no lust. I had no desire.
I simply did not want ever to live in a world where I could not watch Alienora pray or recite Latin or stand at the parapet watching the horizon, as if waiting to see God Himself in the setting sun.
By my eighteenth year, I would take unholy advantage of that fair maiden, I would face a terrible truth, and the worst that might happen to any I loved would come to pass. That one year would set the course of my life and start me along the path that led to my soul’s damnation.
But the most terrible moment of my mortal youth happened early in my seventeenth year, when an official of the village had my mother arrested on charges of sorcery and consorting with the Devil.
Chapter 5
________________
THE ACCUSED
1
The village had grown by leaps and bounds in the years since I had first burrowed beneath the baron’s largesse. Shambles of houses topped the earthen-and-wood palisades of its gate. Beyond it, and yet somehow surrounding it, the abbey itself loomed like a very different castle. It was full of monks and the priests and who tended to the sick and the poor as well as the rich and mighty. The road broadened within a few years, and we had pilgrims from foreign climes, and even the bishop from Toulouse came once to bless the Barony of Whithors, as we were now called.
The stories of war were always on the tongue, for battles to the north and south and east and west raged, yet our Forest home was untouched by much of this in those days. Knights rode out, or rested in the Great Hall of the baron, and young men like me went to be the foot soldiers of the Heroes, as we called the men of wealth who went to fight the Saxons or Norsemen or Spanish or those of the Southern Heresy. But I was not called to fight, for my value with the hunt was great. Although I had learned a bit of swordsmanship, poor boys such as I would not wield a sword but a spear or a bow. I had no real skill for warf
are, and my only weapons of excellence were the sling and the dagger.
On my trips outside the baron’s household, to take grains to my mother, or what were then called mint-sweets to my little brothers and sisters, most of whom I barely knew, I began to notice how merchants from Normandy and the south had come and brought to us the promise of foreign goods. My mother’s home, however, was the same as it had always been—an earth hut, with thatch for roof and only a little wood to create structure to it. When I entered it, I saw a dark, smelly rat hole, and felt that if I could, I’d try and bring my remaining siblings into the service of the baron. It made me happy to think I might do so, and I made plans for ways of shepherding them into work in the castle or grounds. The older children from my family had all left, and either had begun their own families nearby, farming as tenants and subsisting on a small portion of what they were able to produce from such efforts, or, like my brother Frey, they had just disappeared into the night, no doubt to seek their fortunes in war. My mother had a total of eleven children, and I barely saw a reflection of her face or mine in any of them.
My stepfather stopped returning from his trips to the sea, and my mother had become exactly what I was afraid she would. She slept with too many men, and her payment for these beddings had gone from food to drink. She was often sick, and I could look in her eyes and see that she was not a woman who would live much longer. She told me that she often went to Mere Morwenna for cures, for she had bouts of fever and a foot that would swell up often after she’d been bitten by a venomous spider. I am ashamed to say that I felt no real love for her but an obligation and a duty to console her when I could. I spoke to the local abbot and priest about possibly allowing my mother into that order of nuns that lives to the west, in caverns, anchoresses. There she might find peace and the arms of the Lord before her death. But these men of the Church were not sympathetic and believed my mother’s soul had already been lost in the battle of righteousness. I saw men in the Church who had taken their liberties with my mother, and yet they still retained their piety, while she had been cast from God’s saving grace.
I had told my mother that she should not see the Forest women so much, that the world had changed since her girlhood, when the midwives and the herbal teachers were part of the village. I could tell that the tide was changing as I saw the priest speak out against the Devil in the midst of what he called the “ungodly wood,” and although there were not yet accusations, I had heard of men and women of the country claiming that witchcraft had begun to curse the crops, and that the Devil had killed a child sleeping in its cradle.
When news reached me that one of the Forest crones had been arrested on the charge of fortune-telling, I was not at all surprised. Relief passed through me when I learned that it was not Mere Morwenna, but some hag whom I did not know. But I was startled at the way the abbot dealt with this old woman, for she was bound and thrown in the marshes. Being an old woman, she died there, for it was winter, and they had not clothed her.
But when my mother was accused and arrested, it was a shock to my system so deeply felt that I flew into a rage when I first heard.
2
“How do you know this is true?” I asked my companion, Ewen.
“Corentin told me,” he said. “He was at the abbey, bringing with him the pups from the baron’s litter as gifts for the monks. Your mother is held there, against her will.”
“They will release her,” I said.
“They say she murdered a child,” Ewen added, and he said it with such compassion that I nearly wept. “I am sorry to be the messenger of this news, Falconer. I could not keep it from you, for you have been my friend since I arrived here. But if I had known it would make you suffer like this, I would have held my tongue.”
“No, thank you, my friend, my only true friend,” I said, and embraced him in goodwill. “You are right to tell me that I might go change the course of this terrible mistake.”
I went first to seek out Corentin. He seemed to be at the center of any base untruth, of any evil doing, and I had become the protector of the other boys against his wickedness. He by then was held in too-high esteem, both by my master and by the baron himself. I would not believe a word he said, but I needed to face him and discover exactly what he knew before taking this up with my master.
I found him in the stables, not working as he should have been, but atop some hapless milkmaid. I drew him up by his elbow and pushed him against the wooden slats. “What do you know about this vile gossip?”
He seemed a little frightened, then began laughing. The girl ran off, out into the yard. He said, “What in the Devil?” Then he boomed, “How dare you, Mud-hen, come in and demand of me.” He had a blade sheathed in a short scabbard that had been a gift from some lady. He drew it out and held it in the air between us. “Do not come near me, or I shall ruin that pretty face.”
“My mother has been accused of witchcraft,” I said. “What do you know of this?” I used language then that I’d held inside myself. Curses and oaths that I had not yet uttered in life. They flew from my mouth like locusts in the air.
“I am sorry, Mud-hen,” Corentin said, but there was no sorrow in his voice. “I am sorry. This fate should not befall even you. Your mother and a midwife of the Forest have been taken into the abbey. They are accused of sorcery and murder.”
“Did you cause this to happen?” I asked.
His eyes widened. He slashed his dagger in the air before me, so close that I could smell its metal and the filth of his hand, yet it never touched my skin. “Go to your mother, Mud-hen. Do not waste your time with foolish chatter. If she is a servant of the Devil, they will find it out soon enough. If she is innocent and Godly, that, too, will reveal itself.”
He held the dagger up in front of my face until I turned and left the stable.
3
I could not simply rush to the abbey to see my mother. I had to wait until work was done. I went to the small chapel in the household to seek solace and find an answer through prayer. The chapel was dark, but flickering with candles.
Alienora knelt near the front of the chapel, deep in prayer. When she saw me light a candle and place it at the Virgin’s feet, she came up to me and put her hand on my shoulder.
“I feel the Holy Mother’s presence here,” she said softly. “What troubles you, Falconer?”
When I looked into her eyes, I felt the maternal warmth of her being. Her face was like an arc of light in my dark world.
I told her of my troubles, and she took my chin in her soft, warm hand. “Have faith. If your mother is as you say, then she will be found innocent in the Lord’s eyes. Our priest and abbé know what is of Heaven and what of Hell.”
“You do not understand,” I whispered. “And I dare not tell you more.”
“Please,” she said. “Please tell me.”
“If I tell you, will you promise not to be angry with me for this? For the telling?”
She nodded. “On the Blessed Mother’s womb,” she said. Then she went and kissed the statue of the Virgin, first at the feet, then at her womb, as was then the custom of maidens who sought the Virgin’s protection.
She brought me to kneel on the hard stone floor. We clasped our hands together in prayer.
“Tell me,” she said. “What strikes fear in your heart?”
“You have lived in comfort,” I said. “You have, since childhood, known no want. You have known no care. When you are sick, you are healed. When you are sad, you are made gay. When you desire meat, it is cooked for you. Drink, it is there. You adorn yourself with jewels and fur, at which price someone must go hungry, but you have not met whoever hunts the bear or barters for the gemstones or captures the wild boar and slaughters and dresses it for the feast. I am one of those who pay that price. I have known a different life.
“When I was a child, there were days of hunger. Long nights of fever while I watched a sister die slowly, and without any help, except from the Forest crones. Here, in your home, it is
warm in the wintertime. Where I lived, we simply froze. We slept with dogs and each other for warmth, upon straw thrown on the frozen ground. My mother is old before her time. My life, to her, seems like the life of a prince, and yet I sleep in a place where even your hounds would not venture.
“If you were accused of this crime of sorcery, your father would pay tribute to the abbey, and you would soon be released. But my mother does not have a father to protect her. She does not have powerful friends. She has no influence in the village, and she has been kept from Mass on too many occasions. I dread saying this at the foot of the Virgin herself. But she is a whore, and has many children to still care for. She is not someone who, like you, would have others to speak for her or to pay the jailer’s bribe. I am afraid that she will die.”
Alienora leaned forward and kissed me gently on the cheek, right where a tear had fallen. Her lips must have tasted that tear, for when she drew back from me her lips shone with it, and her cheeks were flushed with red where they had been snow-white a moment before. “Your love for your mother is strong,” she said. “I will help you. I will help her.”
She reached up to her neck and drew a pendant over her head. She asked me to open my hands, cupped. I did so, and she placed the pendant in them. “This was brought to me by the man I was to wed. He died in the Holy Crusades, but it was a gift he sent before his death. They call it an encolpion.”
I looked at the image on the medallion. It was the face of the Virgin Mary, Mother of God. Above her, to her right, a small white dove. It had a Byzantine cast to it, and gold filaments within the metal. On the other side was a picture of Our Lord, surrounded by gold, holding the Bible in his left hand, his right hand raised up. There were strange figures written below this, and Alienora told me that it was a prayer for safety and glory.
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