“We must ride uphill!” Quicksilver said between her teeth. “We must ride, no matter what he says!”
“All gems lose their luster, all foods lose their savor, the very salt of the sea becomes flat and tasteless when you are gone from me! Oh, turn back, turn back, turn to me, bend to me, even if only for one last kiss!”
“Keep riding,” Quicksilver grated. A haze of passion seemed to cloak her eyes, but still she bade her companions, “For your lives, ride uphill!”
“The stars fall from the sky, for your eyes are my stars, the bright beacons that guide me through life! If you take them away, how shall I know where to go? Nay, without those fair pole stars, I shall wander lost and lorn all my days!”
“Close your ears to him!” Cordelia tried to make it an angry command but was appalled to hear it emerge as a whimper. There was a strange churning inside her, a weakness in her limbs, but she said, “Heed him not, and ride on!” Then, out of the corner of her eye, she saw Alain again and let out a cry of despair.
“We have lost our way,” Quicksilver ground out. “We have turned back toward him unwittingly! Pull right rein, ladies, right uphill again!”
“I do,” Allouette said, her voice shaking, “but my mare will not answer! She tries to turn her head back toward him, and it is all I can do to hold her course straight ahead!”
“She, too, hears calls of love,” Quicksilver groaned, “the mating calls of a most desirable stallion!”
“But none of our mares are in heat!” Cordelia protested.
“They are now, and Heaven help me, but I know how they feel! If we cannot turn them away, at least hold them on course!”
So across the slope of the little valley they rode, around and around its bowl in a circle with Geoffrey/Alain/Gregory/ the stallion at its center, turning to hold them with his gaze, calling out in a tone that turned them to jelly, “The grass dies when you cease to tread upon it, the leaves fall in sorrow, the very rivers cease to flow and lie stagnant and fetid through absence of the life that you lend them! Oh, come back, come back, for all of nature shall grow dry and sere without you!”
“Come back, and when he is done with us, something in us will die,” Quicksilver groaned, “and that something is that which enables us to love our mates! Hold fast, ladies! Keep riding!”
“Aye, do,” cried a shrill voice.
Her mare tugged at the reins, trying to turn downhill to the magical stallion, but a bird fell from the sky, fluttering madly right in front of the horse’s eyes, and the mare shied away, whinnying its shock. Quicksilver fought to turn its head back uphill and succeeded in keeping the poor beast going straight ahead, across the slope. “Many thanks to that bird! But where did it come from?”
“Krawk! To advise you and your companions, chief of warriors!” The bird landed between the mare’s ears. The horse tossed her head; the bird fluttered up briefly, then settled back. “Even a birdbrain could see that you need wise counsel to avoid that fellow below.”
Blinking, Quicksilver saw that the winged one was the magpie who had been watching them from the tree. “We have seen for ourselves that we need to avoid him!”
“Aye, but not how or why,” said the magpie.
“Tell us, I prithee!” Allouette begged. “What manner of creature is this, who can be all three of our fiancés at once?”
“A creature of faerie,” the magpie answered, “for he is in truth a ganconer!”
Allouette and Cordelia gasped, but Quicksilver frowned. “What is a ganconer?”
“A cozener—a seducer.” The magpie turned its head to the side, letting its beak loll open so that it seemed to smile. “Country maids call him the love-talker and full many of them has he persuaded to his bed, to their lifelong sorrow!”
“By lies and deceptions?” Quicksilver felt the anger begin to grow.
“By that, and some strange attraction he has over females who are so foolish as to bear their chicks inside them instead of laying eggs like decent folk,” the bird answered.
“A ganconer—a love-talker!” Cordelia said with heart-rending dismay. She spun toward the young man in anger. “How many dairymaids and shepherdesses have you come upon alone and seduced, heartbreaker? How many will never know joy again or be able to truly love a living man because of your honeyed words and burning caresses?”
“Those caresses bring joy unbounded,” Alain said to her, “and if no lass could delight in a mortal man after knowing me, it is because I have shown her such heights of ecstasy as no village swain could approach. Nay, come with me, lie with me, and you will know that your whole life has been worth this one brief hour with me!”
“And my whole life would have been mortgaged for those brief minutes!” Anger came to Cordelia’s rescue. “How many women have you despoiled, how many lives ruined? But you have come upon bad luck today, love-talker, for you have encountered not one woman alone, but three allied in purpose!”
“And that purpose is now to avenge our sisters!” Memory curved Allouette’s hands into claws, memory of careless love; it brought those talons up to pounce upon the imposter in rage.
“Nay, would you turn upon me?” Gregory began to climb the hill toward her, arms still open and raised to embrace. To caress, some traitorous inner voice said, and she forced herself to look away as her anger melted in the heat of desire his voice kindled by its very intimacy as it came nearer and nearer.
Quicksilver trembled as Geoffrey came toward her, reaching up for her, pleading, “Put up thy sword, I beseech thee, sweeting, for naught should come between us.”
“Geoffrey would meet steel with steel.” Quicksilver tried to back her horse away, but the mare would not budge. “At the very least he would meet my blade with a stout staff and would knock the sword from my hand if he could.” But some irresistible force dragged at her head, trying to turn her face toward him, for every fiber of her being cried out for her love. She fought the compulsion but it made her head turn nonetheless, slowly toward him, though her inner voice fairly shouted in alarm, clamoring, Danger! Get away from him! Do not let him come near, or you will never be able to love a true man again!
CHAPTER 8
As Quicksilver’s head turned, though, the magpie came once again within her sight—but this time, its beak wasn’t open in laughter; it was holding two large pellets. It hopped onto her wrist and dropped them in her palm. “Wool, damsel! Knots of wool pecked from the backs of the finest sheep! Stop your ears with it, for when you can no longer hear the love-talker, he will lose power over you and you will be free to escape him!”
With dragging hands, Quicksilver pushed the earplugs in—and the ganconer’s voice dropped to a wobbling drone, scarcely audible at all through the pounding of her pulse.
The magpie grinned again, then was off in a burst of wings. In seconds it was back, hovering before Cordelia. Quicksilver turned to call, “Take the pellets and use them, for they will free us!”
The ganconer turned to Cordelia, beseeching, pleading, but she pushed the plugs into her ears and relief flooded her face. By that time the magpie was fluttering in front of Allouette, who took the plugs, applied them, and almost sagged as the pull on her lessened to a fraction of what it had been. She still burned for Gregory’s touch, but the buzzing beneath the thudding of her pulse was certainly not his voice, and she was able to lean forward to cover her horse’s ears so that it could follow Cordelia’s uphill, plodding after Quicksilver and her mount, ears similarly muffled.
Behind them, a voice rose in an inhuman wail of loss and regret—and anger. The women and their mares ignored it, though, and rode on up the side of the bowl. They didn’t even stop when they came to the valley’s rim but rode on, out of the little valley so pretty and so sterile, and on into a high forest of pines and hemlocks.