Death and the Lady

by Tarr, Judith

  “Did you want to?”

  “Then,” said Lys, “no. Now. . .” Her fingers knotted in Francha’s curls. Carefully she unclenched them. “This is no world for the likes of me. It hates me, or fears me, or both together; it sees me as a thing, to use or to burn. Even you who took me in, who dare to be fond of me—you know how you could suffer for it. You will, you’re as brave as that. But in the end you’d come to loathe me.”

  “Probably,” said Mère Adele. “Possibly not. I doubt you’ll be here long enough for that.”

  “I will not go back to Montsalvat,” said Lys, each word shaped and cut in stone.

  “You might not have a choice,” Mère Adele said. “Unless you can think of a way to get rid of milord. We can hold him off for a while, but he has armed men, and horses. We have neither.”

  Lys lowered her head. “I know,” she said. “Oh, I know.”

  “You know too much,” I said. I was angry, suddenly; sick of all this talk. “Why don’t you stop knowing and do? There are twenty men out there, and a man in front of them who wants a witch for a pet. Either give in to him now, before he kills somebody, or find a way to get him out. You can call down the moon, he said. Why not the lightning, too?”

  “I can’t kill,” said Lys, so appalled that I knew it for truth. “I can’t kill.”

  “You said that before,” I said. “Is that all your witching is worth, then? To throw up your hands and surrender, and thank God you won’t use what He gave you?”

  “If He gave it,” she said, “and not the Other.”

  “That’s heresy,” said Mère Adele, but not as if she cared about it. “I think you had better do some thinking. Playing the good Christian woman brought you where you are. He’ll take you, child. Be sure of it. And make us pay for keeping you.”

  Lys stood up with Francha in her arms, sound asleep. She laid the child in the bed and covered her carefully, and kissed her. Then she turned. “Very well,” she said. “I’ll give myself up. I’ll let him take me back to Montsalvat.”

  Mère Adele was up so fast, and moved so sudden, that I did not know what she had done till I heard the slap.

  Lys stood with her hand to her cheek. I could see the red weal growing on the white skin. She looked perfectly, blankly shocked.

  “Is that all you can do?” Mère Adele snapped at her. “Hide and cower and whine, and make great noises about fighting back, and give in at the drop of a threat?”

  “What else can I do?” Lys snapped back.

  “Think,” said Mère Adele. And walked out.

  oOo

  It was a very quiet night. I surprised myself: I slept. I was even more surprised to wake and find Lys still there. She had been sitting by the fire when I went to sleep. She was sitting there still, but the cover was on the fire, and her knees were up as far as they would go with her belly so big, and she was rocking, back and forth, back and forth.

  She came to herself quickly enough once I reached past her to lift the firelid; did the morning duties she had taken for her own, seemed no different than she ever had. But I had seen the tracks of tears on her face, that first moment, before she got up to fetch the pot.

  When she straightened herself with her hands in the small of her back like any bearing woman since Mother Eve, I was ready to hear her say it. “I’m going to the priory.”

  I went with her. It was a grey morning, turning cold; there was a bite in the air. This time I had on my good dress and my best kerchief, and Claudel’s woolen cloak. They were armor of a sort. Lys had her beauty and my blue mantle that I had woven for my wedding. She had a way of seeming almost ordinary—of looking less than she was. A glamour, Mère Adele called it. It was not on her this morning. She looked no more human than an angel on an altar.

  oOo

  Messire Giscard met us a little distance from the priory, up on his big horse with a handful of his men behind him. He smiled down at us. “A fair morning to you, fair ladies,” he said.

  We did not smile back. Lys kept on walking as if he had not been there. I was warier, and that was foolish: he saw me looking at him, and turned the full measure of his smile on me. “Will you ride with me, Jeannette Laclos? It’s not far, I know, but Flambard would be glad to carry you.”

  I fixed my eyes on Lys and walked faster. The red horse walked beside me. I did not look up, though my nape crawled. In a moment—in just a moment—he would seize me and throw me across his saddle.

  “Oh, come,” he said in his light, princely voice. “I’m not as wicked a devil as that. If I do fancy you, and you are well worth a man’s fancy—what can I do you but good? Wouldn’t you like to live in a fine house and dress in silk?”

  “And bear your bastards?” I asked him, still not looking at him. “Thank you, no. I gave that up six years ago Lent.”

  He laughed. “Pretty, and a sharp wit, too! You’re a jewel in this midden.”

  I stopped short. “Sency is no man’s dungheap!”

  I was angry enough to dare a glance. He was not angry at all. He was grinning. “I like a woman with spirit,” he said.

  His horse, just then, snaked its head and tried to bite. I hit it as hard as I could. It veered off, shying, and its master cursing. I let myself laugh, once, before I greeted Sister Portress.

  oOo

  “I will go back with you,” said Lys.

  We were in Mère Adele’s receiving room again, the four of us. This time he had his sergeant with him, whether to guard him or bear witness for him I did not know. The man stood behind his lord’s chair and watched us and said nothing, but what he thought of us was clear enough. We were mere weak women. We would never stand against his lord.

  Lys sat with her hands in what was left of her lap, knotting and unknotting them. “I’ve done my thinking,” she said. “I can do no more. I’ll give you what you ask. I’ll go back to Montsalvat.”

  I opened my mouth. But this was not my place to speak. Messire Giscard was openly delighted. Mère Adele had no expression at all. “You do mean this?” she asked.

  “Yes,” said Lys.

  Messire Giscard showed her his warmest, sweetest face. “I’ll see that you don’t regret it,” he said.

  Lys raised her eyes to him. Her real eyes, not the ones people wanted to see. I heard the hiss of his breath. His sergeant made the sign of the horns, and quickly after, that of the cross.

  She smiled. “That will do you no good, Raimbaut.”

  The sergeant flushed darkly. Lys turned the force of her eyes upon Giscard. “Yes, I will go back with you,” she said. “I will be your witch. Your mistress, too, maybe, when my daughter is born; if you will have me. I am an exile, after all, and poor, and I have no kin in this world.”

  His joy was fading fast. Mine was not rising, not yet. But Lys had not surrendered. I saw it in her face; in the fierceness of her smile.

  “But before I go,” she said, “or you accept me, you should know what it is that you take.”

  “I know,” he said a little sharply. “You are a witch. You won’t grow old, or lose your beauty. Fire is your servant. The stars come down when you call.”

  “Men, too,” she said, “if I wish.”

  For a moment I saw the naked greed. He covered it as children learn to do. “You can see what will be. Aymeric told me that.”

  “Did he?” Lys arched a brow. “He promised me he wouldn’t.”

  “I coaxed it out of him,” said Messire Giscard. “I’d guessed already, from things he said.”

  “He was never good at hiding anything,” said Lys. “Yes, I have that gift.”

  “A great one,” he said, “and terrible.”

  “You have the wits to understand that,” said Lys. “Or you imagine that you do.”

  She rose. The sergeant flinched. Messire Giscard sat still, but his eyes had narrowed. Lys came to stand in front of him. Her hand was on the swell of her belly, as if to protect it. “Let us make a bargain, my lord. I have agreed to yield to your will. But before you tak
e me away, let me read your fate for you. Then if you are certain still that I am the making of your fortune, you may have me, and do with me as you will.”

  He saw the trap in it. So could I; and I was no lord’s child. “A fine bargain,” he said, “when all you need do is foretell my death, and so be rid of me.”

  “No,” she said. “It’s not your death I see. I’ll tell you the truth, Giscard. My word on it.”

  “On the cross,” he said.

  She laid her hand on Mère Adele’s cross and swore to it. Mère Adele did not say anything. She was waiting, as I was, to see what Lys would do.

  She crossed herself; her lips moved in what could only be a prayer. Then she knelt in front of Giscard and took his hands in hers.

  I saw how he stiffened for a moment, as if to pull away. She held. He eased. She met his eyes. Again he made as if to resist; but she would not let him go.

  My hands were fists. My heart was beating. There were no bolts of lightning, no clouds of brimstone. Only the slender big-bellied figure in my blue mantle, and the soft low voice.

  She read his future for him. How he would ride out from Sency, and she behind. How they would go back to Rouen. How the war was raging there, and how it would rage for years out of count. How the Death would come back, and come back again. How he would fight in the war, and outlive the Death, and have great glory, with her at his side: ever young, ever beautiful, ever watchful for his advantage. “Always,” she said. “Always I shall be with you, awake and asleep, in war and at peace, in your heart as in your mind, soul of your soul, indissolubly a part of you. Every breath you draw, every thought you think, every sight your eye lights upon—all these shall be mine. You will be chaste, Giscard, except for me; sinless, but that you love me. For nothing that you do shall go unknown to me. So we were, Aymeric and I, perfect in love as in amity. So shall we two be.”

  For a long while after she stopped speaking, none of us moved. Messire Giscard’s lips were parted. Gaping, I would have said, in a man less good to look at.

  Lys smiled with awful tenderness. “Will you have me, Giscard? Will you have the glory that I can give you?”

  He wrenched free. The sweep of his arm sent her sprawling.

  I leaped for him, veered, dropped beside her. She was doubled up, knotted round her center.

  Laughing. Laughing like a mad thing. Laughing till she wept.

  By the time she stopped, he was gone. She lay exhausted in my arms. My dress was soaked with her tears.

  “Could you really have done it?” I asked her.

  She nodded. She struggled to sit up. I helped her; gave her my kerchief to wipe her face. “I can do it to you, too,” she said. Her voice was raw. “I can hear everything, see it, feel it—every thought in every head. Every hope, dream, love, hate, fear, folly—everything.” She clutched her head. “Everything!”

  I held her and rocked her. I did not know why I was not afraid. Too far past it, I supposed. And she had lived with us since Michaelmas; if there was anything left to hide from her, then it was hidden deeper than I could hope to find.

  She was crying again, deep racking sobs. “I was the best, my father said. Of all that are in the Wood, the strongest to shield, the clearest to see both how the walls were raised and how to bring them down. None of us was better fit to walk among human folk. So I defied them all, brought down the ban, walked out of the Wood. And I could do it. I could live as the humans lived. But I could—not—die as they died. I could not.” Her voice rose to a wail. “I wanted to die with Aymeric. And I could not even take sick!”

  “Oh, hush.” Mère Adele stood over us, hands on hips. She had gone out when Giscard took flight; now she was back, not an eyelash out of place, and no awe at all for the woman of the Wood. “If you had really wanted to cast yourself in your lover’s grave, you would have found a way to do it. There’s no more can’t in killing yourself than in killing someone else. It’s all won’t, and a good fat measure of Pity-me.”

  Lys could have killed her then. Oh, easily. But I was glad for whatever it was that stopped her, can’t or won’t or plain astonishment.

  She got to her feet with the first failing of grace that I had ever seen in her. Even her beauty was pinched and pale, too thin and too sharp and too odd.

  Mère Adele regarded her with utter lack of sympathy . “You got rid of his lordship,” she said, “and handily, too. He’ll see the back of hell before he comes by Sency again. You do know, I suppose, that he could have sworn to bring the Inquisition down on us, and burn us all for what you did to him.”

  “No,” said Lys. “He would not. I made sure of that.”

  “You—made—sure?”

  Even Lys could wither in the face of Mère Adele’s wrath. She raised her hands to her face, let them fall. “I made him do nothing but what he was best minded to do.”

  “You made him.”

  “Would you rather he came back with fire and sword?”

  For a moment they faced one another, like fire and sword themselves. Mère Adele shook her head and sighed. “It’s done. I can’t say I want it undone. That’s a wanting I’ll pay dearly for in penance. You—maybe you’ve paid already. You never should have left your Wood.”

  “No,” said Lys. “I don’t think that. But that I’ve stayed too long—yes.” Mère Adele started a little. Lys smiled a thin cold smile. “No, I’m not in your mind. It’s written in your face. You want me gone.”

  “Not gone,” said Mère Adele. “Gone home.”

  Lys closed her eyes. “Sweet saints, to be home—to live within those walls again—to be what I am, all that I am, where my own people are—” Her breath shuddered as she drew it in. “Don’t you think I’ve tried? That’s why I came here. To find the door. To break it down. To go back.”

  “You didn’t try hard enough,” said Mère Adele. “Won’t again. Always won’t.”

  “Not my won’t,” said Lys. “My king’s.”

  “Yours,” said Mère Adele, immovable. “I can read faces, too. Are they all as stubborn as you, where you come from?”

  “No,” said Lys. Her eyes opened. She drew herself up. “Some are worse.”

  “I doubt that,” said Mère Adele. “You’re welcome here. Don’t ever doubt it. But this isn’t your world. We aren’t your kind. You said it yourself. You love us, and we die on you.”

  “You can’t help it,” said Lys.

  Mère Adele laughed, which made Lys stare. “Go on, child. Go home. We’re no better for you than you are for us.”

  Lys was mortally insulted. She was older than Mère Adele, maybe, and higher born. But she held her tongue. She bent her head in honest reverence. If not precisely in acceptance.

  III.

  The Wood was cold in the grey light of evening. No bird sang. No wind stirred the branches of the trees.

  Lys had tried to slip away alone. She should have known better. This time it was not my fault, not entirely: I had followed Francha. So we stood on the porch of the ruined chapel, Francha with both arms about her waist, I simply facing her.

  “If the walls can open at all,” Lys said, careful and cold, “your mortal presence will assure that they stay shut.”

  I heard her, but I was not listening. “Are you going to leave Francha again?”

  Lys frowned and looked down at the child who clung to her. “She can’t go, even if I can get in.”

  “Why not?”

  “She’s human.”

  “She can’t live in this world,” I said. “She was barely doing it when you came. When you go, she’ll die.”

  “We are forbidden—”

  “You were forbidden to leave. But you did it.”

  Lys had her arms around Francha, almost as if she could not help it. She gathered the child up and held her. “Oh, God! If I could only be the hard cold creature that I pretend to be!”

  “You’re cold enough,” I said, “and as heartless as a cat. But even a cat has its weaknesses.”

  Lys looked at
me. “You should have been one of us.”

  I shivered. “Thank God He spared me that.” I glanced at the sky. “You’d best do it if you’re going to. Before it’s dark.”

  Lys might have argued, but even she could not keep the sun from setting.

  She did not go into the chapel as I had thought she would. She stood outside of it, facing the Wood, still holding Francha. It was already dark under the trees; a grey mist wound up, twining through the branches.

  Lys’ eyes opened wide. “It’s open,” she said. “The walls are down. But—”

  “Stop talking,” I said. My throat hurt. “Just go.”

  She stayed where she was. “It’s a trap. Or a deception. The ban is clever; it knows what it is for.”

  Francha struggled in her arms. She let the child go. Francha slid down the curve of her, keeping a grip on her hand. Pulling her toward the Wood.

  She looked into wide eyes as human as hers were not. “No, Francha. It’s a trap.”

  Francha set her chin and leaned, putting all her weight into it. It was as loud as a shout. Come!

  “Go,” I said. “How will you know it’s a trap till you’ve tried it? Go!”

  Lys glared at me. “How can humans know—”

  I said a word that shocked her into silence. While she wavered I pushed, and Francha pulled. Dragging her toward the thing she wanted most in the world.

  Later it would hurt. Now I only wanted her gone. Before I gave in. Before I let her stay.

  She was walking by herself now, if slowly. The trees were close. I could smell the mist, dank and cold, like the breath of the dead.

  “No!” cried Lys, flinging up her hand.

  Light flew from it. The mist withered and fled. The trees towered higher than any mortal trees, great pillars upholding a roof of gold.

  The light shrank. The trees were trees again, but their leaves were golden still, pale in the evening. There was a path among them, glimmering faintly as it wound into the gloom. It would not be there long, I knew in my bones. I braced myself to drag her down it. What would happen if it closed while I was on it, I refused to think.