Celine thought about it. I held my breath. Finally she nodded. “I’ll take Perrin and Francha to Mere Adele. And tell her you’ll come back. Then can I go play with Jeannot?”
“No,” I said. Then: “Yes. Play with Jeannot. Stay with him till I come back. Can you do that?”
She looked at me in perfect disgust. “Of course I can do that. I’m grown up.”
I bit my lips to keep from laughing. I kissed her once on each cheek for each of the others, and once on the forehead for herself. “Go on,” I said. “Be quick.”
She went. I stood up. In a little while I heard them go, Perrin declaring loudly that he was going to eat honeycakes with Mere Adele. I went into the kitchen and filled a napkin with bread and cheese and apples, and put the knife in, too, wrapped close in the cloth, and tied it all in my kerchief. Mamere Mondine was asleep. She would be well enough till evening. If I was out longer, then Mere Adele would know to send someone. I kissed her and laid my cheek for a moment against her dry old one. She sighed but did not wake. I drew myself up and went back through the kitchen garden.
Our house is one of the last in the village. The garden wall is part of Messire Arnaud’s palisade, though we train beans up over it, and I have a grapevine that almost prospers. Claudel had cut a door in it, which could have got us in trouble if Messire Arnaud had lived to find out about it; but milord was dead and his heirs far away, and our little postern was hidden well in vines within and brambles without.
I escaped with a scratch or six, but with most of my dignity intact. It was the last of the wine in me, I was sure, and anger for Francha’s sake, and maybe a little honest worry, too. Lys had been a guest in my house. If any harm came to her, the guilt would fall on me.
And I had not gone outside the palisade, except to the fields, since Claudel went away. I wanted the sun on my face, no children tugging at my skirts, the memory of death far away. I was afraid of what I went to, of course I was; the Wood was a horror from my earliest memory. But it was hard to be properly terrified, walking the path under the first outriders of the trees, where the sun slanted down in long sheets, and the wind murmured in the leaves, and the birds sang sweet and unafraid. The path was thick with mould under my feet. The air was scented with green things, richer from the rain, with the deep earthy promise of mushrooms. I found a whole small field of them, and gathered as many as my apron would carry, but moving quickly through them and not lingering after.
By then Sency was well behind me and the trees were closing in. The path wound through them, neither broader nor narrower than before. I began to wonder if I should have gone to fetch the Allards’ dog. I had company, it was true: the striped cat had followed me. She was more comfort than I might have expected.
The two of us went on. The scent of mushrooms was all around me like a charm to keep the devils out. I laughed at that. The sound fell soft amid the trees. Beeches turning gold with autumn. Oaks going bronze. Ash with its feathery leaves, thorn huddling in thickets. The birds were singing still, but the quiet was vast beneath.
The cat walked ahead of me now, tail up and elegantly curved. One would think that she had come this way before.
I had, longer ago than I liked to think. I had walked as I walked now, but without the warding of mushrooms, crossing myself, it seemed, at every turn of the path. I had taken that last, suddenly steep slope, and rounded the thicket—hedge, it might have been—of thorn, and come to the sunlit space. It had dazzled me then as it dazzled me now, so much light after the green gloom. I blinked to clear my eyes.
The chapel was as it had been when last I came to it. The two walls that stood; the one that was half fallen. The remnant of a porch, the arch of a gate, with the carving on it still, much blurred with age and weather. The upper arm of the cross had broken. The Lady who sat beneath it had lost her upraised hand, but the Child slept as ever in her lap, and her smile, even so worn, was sweet.
I crossed myself in front of her. No devils flapped shrieking through the broken roof. Nothing moved at all, except the cat, which picked its way delicately across the porch and vanished into the chapel.
My hands were cold. I shifted my grip on my bundle. I was hungry, suddenly, which made me want to laugh, or maybe to cry. My stomach lived in a time of its own; neither fear nor anger mattered in the least to it.
I would feed it soon enough. I gathered my courage and stepped under the arch, ducking my head though it was more than high enough: this was a holy place, though not, maybe, to the God I knew.
The pavement had been handsome once. It was dull and broken now. The altar was fallen. The font was whole, but blurred as was the carving on the gate. A spring bubbled into it and bubbled out again through channels in the wall. It was itself an odd thing, the stump of a great tree—oak, the stories said—lined with lead long stripped of its gilding, and carved with crosses. Here the roof was almost intact, giving shelter from the rain; or the ancient wood would long ago have crumbled into dust.
She was kneeling on the edge of the font, her dark head bent over it, her white hands clenched on its rim. I could not see the water. I did not want to see it. I could hear her, but she spoke no language I knew. Her tone was troubling enough: pure throttled desperation, pleading so strong that I lurched forward, hand outstretched. I stopped myself before I could touch her. If she was scrying her lover, then she was calling him up from the dead.
I shuddered. I made no sound, but she started and wheeled. Her face was white as death. Her eyes—
She lidded them. Her body eased by degrees. She did not seem surprised or angered, or anything but tired. “Jeannette,” she said.
“You left,” I said. “Francha cried all night.”
Her face tightened. “I had to go.”
“Here?”
She looked about. She might have laughed, maybe, if she had had the strength. “It was to be here first,” she said. “Now it seems that it will be here last, and always. And never.”
I looked at her.
She shook her head. “You don’t understand. How can you?”
“I can try,” I said. “I’m no lady, I grant you that, but I’ve wits enough for a peasant’s brat.”
“Of course you have.” She seemed surprised. As if I had been doing the doubting, and not she. “Very well. I’ll tell you. He won’t let me back.”
“He?”
“He,” said Lys, pointing at the font. There was nothing in it but water. No face. No image of a lover that would be. “My lord of the Wood. The cold king.”
I shivered. “We don’t name him here.”
“Wise,” said Lys.
“He won’t let you pass?” I asked. “Then go around. Go south, as Mere Adele told you. It’s a long way, but it’s safe, and it takes you west eventually.”
“I don’t want to go around,” said Lys. “I want to go in.”
“You’re mad,” I said.
“Yes,” she said. “He won’t let me in. I walked, you see. I passed this place. I went where the trees are old, old, and where the sun seldom comes, even at high noon. Little by little they closed in front of me. Then at last I could go no farther. Go back, the trees said to me. Go back and let us be.”
“You were wise to do it,” I said.
“Mad,” she said, “and wise.” Her smile was crooked. “Oh, yes. So I came back to this place, which is the gate and the guard. And he spoke to me in the water. Go back, he said, as the trees had. I laughed at him. Had he no better word to offer me? Only this, he said. The way is shut. If you would open it, if you can—then you may. It is not mine to do.”