“That will hold him for a while,” said Mere Adele when we were back in safety again: inside Sency’s walls, under my new-thatched roof. People walking by could lift a corner of it and look in, but I was not afraid of that. Most were in their own houses, eating their dinner, or down in the tavern drinking it.
We had finished our own, made rich with a joint from a priory sheep. Perrin’s face was shiny with the grease. Even Francha had eaten enough for once to keep a bird alive. She curled in her lady’s lap, thumb in mouth, and drowsed, while we considered what to do.
“He won’t go where there’s sickness,” Mere Adele said, “but I doubt he’ll go away. He wants you badly.”
Lys’ mouth twisted. “He wants my witchcraft. No more and no less. If my body came with it—he’d not mind. But it’s my power he wants; or what he fancies is my power.”
“Why?” I asked. “To make himself lord of Normandy?”
“Oh, no,” said Lys. “He’d never aim so high. Just to be a better lord in Montsalvat. Just that. If later it should be more—if his good angel should call him to greater glory—why then, would he be wise to refuse?”
“He’d burn for it,” said Mere Adele. “And you with him. They’re not gentle now with witches.”
“Were they ever?” Lys combed Francha’s hair with her fingers, smoothing out the tangles. “It’s worse in the south, in Provence, where the Inquisition hunts the heretics still. But the north is hardly more hospitable to such as I.”
“We’re northerners,” I said.
She glanced at me: a touch like a knife’s edge. “You live on the edge of the Wood. That changes you.”
I shrugged. “I don’t feel different. Is the story true? That your king was a mortal king once, in the western kingdom?”
“He was never mortal,” she said. “He was king of mortal men, yes, for a hundred years and more. But in the end he left. It was no mercy for his people, to be ruled by one who could never age nor die.”
“No mercy for him, either,” said Mere Adele, “to see them grow old and die.” And when Lys looked at her with wide startled eyes: “No, I’m no wiser than I ought to be. I read a book, that’s all. I wanted to know what the stories were. He swore a vow, they said, that he would go under the trees and never come out; not in this age of the world.”
“Nor will he,” Lys said, bitter. “Nor any who went in with him, nor any who was born thereafter. It’s a wider realm than you can conceive of, and this world is but a corner of it; and yet it is a prison. I wanted this air, this sun, this earth. His vow—sworn before ever I was born—forbade me even to think of it.”
“So of course you thought of it.” Mere Adele sighed. “Young things never change.”
“That is what he said,” said Lys, so tight with anger that I could barely hear her. “That is exactly what he said.”
“He let you go.”
“How could he stop me? He knew what would happen. That the walls would close, once I’d opened them. That there’d be no going back.”
“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 Mere 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,” Mere 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 Mere 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.”
Mere 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?” Mere 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 Mere Adele. And walked out.
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, Mere Adele called it. It was not on her this morning. She looked no more human than an angel on an altar.
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?”