A Strange and Ancient Name

by Josepha Sherman

  Forget the past. And rain or no, it was too late to turn back. What he’d set in motion could hardly be stopped now.

  Besides, he owed Rogier this much.

  Ah, Rogier . . . Now there had been a man truly meant for power. For all his discomfort, Raimond smiled, remembering. When he, desperate for something he could achieve, something that had nothing of his brother about it, had tentatively tried dabbling in other men’s politics, Rogier had made him welcome. And, oh God, it had been a genuine welcome, for him, not for the baron’s younger brother, the baron’s landless shadow. For the first time in his life, someone was actually willing to accept him simply as himself.

  If only Rogier hadn’t been born on the wrong side of the proverbial blanket. If only he had managed: to oust his cousin, thrice-damned Alain, Raimond knew his own life would be different. Instead of riding through the rain, imperiling himself, he would be warm and dry and happy in Touranne, his own master, dependent on his brother for nothing. He would stand at Duke Rogier’s right hand, serving him willingly as vassal and friend.

  But there had been that final battle. And now Rogier was dead, God rest his soul, and that arrogant, mealy-mouthed cousin ruled the duchy: Duke Alain.

  Raimond sneezed. God’s mercy, he’d be lucky if he got out of this without lung sickness. He bent even lower over the neck of his straining horse, hearing it panting. He knew the proper way to ride a distance was to alternate gaits: canter, walk, trot, canter. But he couldn’t waste time, he had too much ground to cover!

  Yes, but a horse couldn’t run full out for very long. Rain or no rain, the animal had needed one rest already and was going to need another very soon.

  Raimond sneezed again, and swore. They were rapidly leaving his brother’s fields; the forest encroached more closely on the baronial demesne here to the north.

  “Come on, horse,” he urged. “Just a little further. Just till we reach the forest’s shelter.”

  Off to the right curved the broad road that led to Touranne (“broad as the road to Hell,” raced through his mind), but Raimond forced the horse straight ahead, even though it was fighting him and slowing to a heavy-limbed, weary trot, down a narrow path that wound its way into the first stands of trees. As the forest thickened, the young man dodged this way and that in the saddle, swearing as a bush nearly pulled his cloak from his back, narrowly avoiding low branches that seemed all thorns, hunting for relative dryness. To one side loomed an ancient oak, broad of trunk and so thick with leaves the circle beneath them was almost dry.

  “So be it,” he told the animal, reining it in under the broad branches. “Now you can stop.”

  He dismounted, boots squelching into mud, and wrapped his arms about himself, wincing at the touch of clammy cloth, trying to get warm, clenching his fists with impatience. It was impossible to judge the time of day from the heavy sky, but he knew there was still a way to ride.

  God’s mercy, it was dark as the Pit under these branches. Dark and eerily silent, with nothing to be heard but his horse’s heavy breath and the rattling of rain on leaves. Raimond shivered, and told himself it was merely from cold.

  But this enforced stop was giving him too much time to think. Oh, yes, he had disliked that . . . Hauberin at sight, the dark, haughty little foreigner. And he should have done what he always did with disliked guests: ignored the man and gone about his own affairs. But Raimond was only too well aware how he had deliberately confronted the man, wasting precious time with that ridiculous challenge in the tilting yard—he might have killed the little fool.

  Might? God’s mercy, he had wanted to kill him! Drowning in waves of total, mindless hatred, there had been room in his brain for nothing but blood lust, almost as though someone else had been controlling him. Yes, and the night before, when he’d met with that scum of a magician, there had been that time of blankness, almost as though that someone else had spoken with his voice . . .

  Possession, Raimond thought in terror. Dear God, possession, or the result of tampering with the . . . Black Arts—no, God, please, no . . .

  But he could hardly back out now. Wearily Raimond climbed back into the saddle and gathered up the reins. The forces he’d set into action must be allowed to play their game through. And, for the sake of his honor and perhaps even his soul, he dare not be late.

  XIV

  TEMPESTS

  “My lord! Oh, please, my lord, wake up!”

  A voice was calling him, hands were shaking him, and Hauberin groaned and opened his eyes, too dizzy and sick to focus on reality at first.

  “My lord!” the voice insisted. “Come, hurry, get up! They mustn’t find you here.”

  He blinked, vision already clearing. A woman . . . a glint of red hair . . . With a great rush of relief, he recognized her, and knew he was back in his right self, in his proper time. “My . . . lady baroness . . .”

  If only she would stop pulling at him! The danger he’d escaped so narrowly had been very real, but he hadn’t been hurt in mind or body; there wasn’t a magician born who hadn’t fainted at one time or another from sheer psychic exhaustion. Hauberin struggled to tell the woman that if she’d only give him a chance to catch his breath, he would be fine, but the words just wouldn’t come out right.

  “At l-least you recognize me,” Baroness Matilde was stammering. “Can you stand? Hurry, please, can you stand?”

  “Don’t . . .” Trying to elude her insistent tugging on his arm, Hauberin managed to get to his knees, head swimming. “Lady . . . please . . . don’t tug . . . I just . . . may faint.”

  “No!”

  She held something sharp-scented under his nose. Hauberin coughed and angrily tried to push her hand away, but the sharpness did seem to be clearing his head. With a great effort, he staggered to his feet.

  “Can you walk yet? Please, my lord, they mustn’t find you here!”

  “They? Who? Lady, let be! You can’t carry me.” He stared into her panicked face, fighting to control his senses. “What is this? What’s wrong?”

  “Don’t you know? Dear God, if my husband finds you here—sorcery—they’ll burn you!”

  If only she would be quiet for a moment, give him a chance to think—but now she had slipped his arm about her shoulders and was half-supporting, half-dragging him out of there. Hauberin struggled through the doorway, then pulled away from her, falling back against a dank wall, gasping. But the frantic Matilde was battling with the heavy door, and he clenched his teeth against dizziness and stumbled forward to help her.

  “Be careful, my lord! There . . . that’s it. I’ll just slide the bolt in . . . place . . . again.” She froze, staring at the shattered lock. “What . . . did you do to it?”

  “Too much enthusiasm.”

  She gave him a wild glance, eyes white-rimmed like those of a frightened pony. “No matter. We’ll just have to leave it like that and nope no one notices—oh, be careful, you’ll fall!”

  Still too dizzy to manage that slick stairway alone, he’d had no intention of trying it just yet. But somehow his overly determined guardian was forcing him down the spiral steps whether he would or not.

  “My lady wife! What means this?”

  This time Hauberin almost did fall. Wonderful, he thought wearily. The outraged husband. Just what every good farce needs. The prince could picture the scene from the baron’s viewpoint: himself disheveled and vague in the baroness’ close embrace. Just wonderful.

  “Ae!” That was Alliar, rushing up past Baron Gilbert, almost knocking the man out of the way in haste.

  Hauberin sagged gladly against his friend, wishing heartily that everyone would simply leave him alone, and tried to muster his thoughts into a coherent explanation. The baroness was quicker.

  “Please, my lord husband, don’t shout.” There wasn’t a trace of her former near-hysteria. “I thought I heard a noise, so—”

  “So you went to look, up an isolated tower, all by yourself!”

  “You’re right, husband, of course, I shou
ld have taken someone with me. I wasn’t thinking. But see, I did hear something. Our guest—these steps are so slippery! The poor man must have fallen and stunned himself.”

  That was one way of putting it. The baron, whatever he might have been thinking, could hardly have argued the point, and after a flurry of activity Hauberin found himself back in his little guest chamber, the baroness busily shooing out servants, ladies and, with the reasonably credible explanation that there just wasn’t enough room, her husband. Only Alliar, who refused to be ousted, and wide-eyed little Lisette remained.

  Hauberin’s mind had at last cleared, and he would have loved to be left alone to shudder and come to terms with how close he had come to mind-death. But for all his protests, Baroness Matilde insisted on efficiently examining his head. Alliar hovered nervously in the background, anxious thoughts quivering around the prince like so many frightened birds.

  “Stop that!” Hauberin said silently. “I’m all right, Li. I only—”

  The prince winced as Baroness Matilde touched a sore spot on his forehead. “So!” Alliar exclaimed. “You’re all right, are you?”

  “It’s nothing. I must have bumped my head against the wall when I collapsed—”

  “Collapsed!”

  “It’s nothing. I’m fine. Alliar, please, I’ll tell you the whole story later.”

  Judging from the twin frowns on being and baroness, a rather spectacular bruise was starting to form on his forehead, but neither of his determined nurses would accept that he really wasn’t hurt.

  “Are you dizzy?” Baroness Matilde asked briskly.

  “Not any more. I—”

  “Sleepy?”

  “No. My lady—”

  “Is your vision at all blurred?”

  “No. But—”

  “A moment more, if you would, my lord. Lisette, dear, send someone for my herbals.”

  “The wormwood for headache?” The girl was stealing shy, sympathetic glances at Hauberin. “And comfrey for the bruise?”

  “And the lavender and—Lisette! Where are you going?”

  As she scurried off, the girl flashed a quick smile. “To fetch it myself, my lady. A servant would take so long—I know where everything is kept.”

  “Lisette!”

  She was already gone. The baroness sighed, flicking a glance at Hauberin. “I do think the maid is taken with you, my lord.”

  “She’s very young.”

  “Yes. Marriage will settle her down.” The woman glanced up at the nervous Alliar. “Until Lisette returns, I trust you will serve as sufficient chaperon. At least as far as my lord husband is concerned. Just the faintest hint of sarcasm edged the words. “Oh, and you, my lord,” she added to Hauberin, who was chuckling softly, “should be in bed.”

  An undercurrent of panic still raced beneath the woman’s apparent calm, and Hauberin glanced up from his chair, noting how she shied from meeting his gaze. “I’ll be all right where I am,” he said shortly, all at once totally weary of the endless fussing. “Truly.”

  He felt Alliar’s thoughts brush his again, and added for the sake of both worriers, “Look. I can stand, turn, bend; I’m quite myself again.”

  The baroness had been nervously biting her lip. “Whatever that self may be.”

  “What—”

  “No, my lord, I—I don’t want to know. I don’t want to know why you’re here, or what you want, but I will trust your word that you mean us no harm.”

  “You weren’t so frightened of me up on the ramparts, or in the chapel. Why now?”

  “I . . . worry over the safety of my husband’s guests.”

  “Commendable. But, lady, how did you know where I was?”

  “You heard what I told my husband. I heard the sound of your fall.”

  “Over the roar of the storm? And through all those stone walls?” Hauberin paused, thinking of the mind that had pulled him back to true time, wondering . . . Oh no, that was ridiculous! Surely there had never been a human less attuned to magic than this woman. Bemused, the prince asked softly, “Can there be more to you, I wonder, than you seem?”

  “What manner of question is this?”

  “And what was all that panic about ‘They mustn’t find you here’?”

  She turned away. “That’s for you to answer, my lord.”

  “Don’t play games, lady.”

  “The bolted door thrown ajar, my lord, the shattered lock—”

  “The lock,” Hauberin said, delicately skirting falsehood, “was ancient. Any pressure might have broken it.” He moved to face her again, blocking her path. “Whatever you may think, I assure you, I am no sorcerer.”

  That hardly seemed to comfort her. “I . . .” she began, but then her face brightened with relief. “Ah, Lisette!”

  Wordlessly, the baroness began to tend Hauberin’s bruise, her chilly fingers never flinching from the touch of his skin, her face impassive. Wordlessly, Hauberin submitted.

  “My Lady Baroness,” he said at last, when she seemed done, “is there a building of . . .” Aie, what was the name the Lady Alianor had mentioned? It was there at the edge of memory, if only he could snare it. “St. Denis,” Hauberin burst out in triumph, “near this castle? Soft golden stone, twin spires, a glowing circle of color set between them?”

  The baroness frowned slightly. Lisette cut in, shy and eager, “That sounds like the church of St. Denis in Touranne, our good duke’s city.”

  “It does.” The woman’s voice was carefully toneless, but she could hardly have missed Hauberin’s start. “If that is where you wish to travel, my lord, I’m sure my lord husband will happy to provide a guide for you tomorrow.”

  The prince was hard put not to laugh aloud in sudden hope. It was real, this church, no fancy of an overtaxed brain, and it still existed in the here-and-now! Gambling his life, his sanity, had been worth the risk. For if his grandmother’s letter was still safe in the church treasury (Powers grant it be so!), this outlandish name-quest was almost over. “Ah, yes, lady, that would be wonderfully kind.”

  “For today, though,” the baroness added, getting to her feet, box of herbs tucked under her arm, “you must do nothing strenuous. Tell me at once if you feel dizzy or overwhelmingly sleepy. Now I—I must rejoin my husband.”

  Trailed by the bewildered Lisette, she all but ran from the room.

  ###

  Halfway down the stair from the guest chamber, Matilde brought herself to a determined halt. Though her heart was still racing with panic, she managed to force her face into its customary mask of calm. Ignoring the terrified child she’d been sobbing in her mind, the young woman descended the rest of the stairway with careful dignity, to be met at the bottom by a nervous manservant: the Baron Gilbert was waiting in their solar.

  From one crisis to the next, she thought, and obeyed the implicit summons.

  As Matilde entered the solar, steeling her nerves to quiet, she found her husband seated in a high-backed chair by the fire, staring into the flames. She cleared her throat, and he glanced up. “Well? How does he?”

  The steadiness of the baron’s gaze would have stared down a basilisk. Matilde forced a smile and moved to sit across from him, fighting to keep her voice light. “Well enough, Husband. He has a nasty bruise on his forehead, but I don’t think any serious harm was done.”

  “You must be glad of that.” His voice was just too carefully neutral, and Matilde tensed in sudden anger.

  “Of course I am. He’s our guest.”

  “Ah.”

  “My lord Husband, we’ve been wed now for four years.” The words exploded from her. “Have I ever in all that time, given you one moment’s cause for jealousy? Well? Have I?”

  “Don’t be foolish.”

  “Then surely you know I wouldn’t think of—of staining your honor with a . . . foreigner . . .” Her voice faltered. Foreign. Dear God, just how foreign . . . ?

  The baron’s steady gaze dropped beneath the heat of her fury. He muttered something placati
ng, then added, “He will be healthy enough to leave us tomorrow?”

  “I don’t doubt it.” Matilde took a steadying breath. “My lord Husband, he wishes to travel to Touranne. To the church of St. Denis.”

  The man’s eyebrows shot up. “I thought he wasn’t of our faith.”

  “So did I. Maybe he—he’s planning to convert, or—” Ach, she was starting to babble. Matilde cut herself off in mid-sentence, suddenly overwhelmed. If she had to spend one more moment sitting here trading platitudes while all the time her heart was racing like a panicky rabbit, she was going to scream. “At any rate,” Matilde said, very carefully, “all is well. And now, my lord Husband, if you will excuse me, I . . . must go and see to the restocking of our larder.”

  ###

  It hadn’t been a false excuse; as baroness, she was the castle’s overseer. As she met with her husband’s steward, checking the supply of bread and meat and wine, as she spoke with butler or pantler or maidservant, Matilde forced herself to act the perfect, competent chatelaine, and prayed that no one guessed the emotions surging behind the mask.

  Saints, oh saints, how could she tell anyone? It wasn’t as though Hauberin had actually done or said anything wrong. It wasn’t even so much what he was, or . . . might be.

  Matilde stifled a humorless laugh. Despite what Baron Gilbert might think, what Hauberin roused in her wasn’t anything as blatant, as relatively safe, as lust (though, God help her, she did find him attractive). It was terror, pure and uncomplicated.

  Terror of herself.

  All at once Matilde had to turn aside into a shadowy corner of the kitchen, away from the bustle of cook and underlings, clenching her teeth in anguish, remembering . . .

  The child-Matilde had had no idea why all the folk had gathered in the town square that market day, or why her parents were arguing as to whether or not she should be with them; whether it was right for a child of noble blood to watch. Adults were always sending children away whenever there was something really interesting to watch. Angry at her parents, she had insisted, “I want to stay.”