‘Husband, when the belle soeur worked her will on us – and made us whole-’ She paused, remembering the moment, and trying to grasp a little of the glory she had felt. The sense of release. She kissed him. ‘She cracked your curse, or shattered it. I can feel this.’
The King put his head on her chest. ‘If only you might be right,’ he said.
He fell asleep, and she lay awake, running her hand over his chest and trying to find the jagged ends of the curse, but the breaking had happened too long before, and she felt only the edge of the wound that the curse left in the world.
Later he awoke, and they made love.
And when she awoke with him, it was a day nearer Christmas, and she thought that perhaps everything would be healed.
A hundred rooms away, the Sieur de Rohan laid Lady Emota on a bed, and she sighed.
‘It is sin,’ she said. She pushed him away. ‘Can’t you just kiss me?’
‘What sin, when two lovers make one soul?’ he asked. He ran a tongue lightly across the top of her exposed breast, and she clenched her hands on his shoulders, which were hard with muscle – and he slid into the bed next to her, warm and solid and smelling only of cinnamon and cloves.
She kissed him, and breathed in the scent of him. And let his hands roam.
It was beautiful – and then it wasn’t.
He put a knee between hers and she didn’t like that. She pushed him away – hard.
‘Make way, slut,’ he said. ‘You want it.’
He pushed her down. She bit him, and he struck her.
She tried to fight him.
She cried.
He laughed. ‘What did you think you were here for?’ he asked her.
She turned to weep into the pillow, which smelled of him, and he slapped her. She pulled the bed clothes around herself, and he pulled them off again. ‘I’m not done with you yet, ma petite.’
‘You!’ she managed. ‘You – false-’
‘It is no crime to fuck a whore,’ he said.
She choked.
‘Like mistress, like maid,’ de Rohan said. ‘Don’t worry, my little putain. When the court finds out what your mistress has done, no one will even notice your fall from grace. Besides – you have a body made to satisfy a man.’ He cooed over her, using warm love terms again.
For a little while.
N’gara – Mogon and Bill Redmede
The woods were full of snow, and there was something else there – something that moved at the very edge of Redmede’s senses, something too fast to see, too small, or too quiet.
Mogon ran east, her heavy feet carving great triangular holes in the snow. The elk ran lightly, and sometimes he skimmed the surface of the snow. They would stop from time to time, and Redmede would hold the amulet in his hand and watch the fire in its depths. They followed the spark – east and north.
After full dark, they crossed tracks that showed clearly in moonlight – tracks of a man with a hand sleigh. Redmede rubbed his beard. ‘That’s Nat Tyler,’ he said. ‘I know his tracks.’
Mogon waggled her mighty head. ‘It is too cold for me to think well, man. Does this other man mean something?’
‘No idea,’ Redmede admitted, but when he tested the amulet, he found that Tyler’s tracks diverged at a sharp angle from the true line to Tapio.
They ran on.
By the height of the moon, Redmede estimated it was midnight by the time they found Tapio. His body hung high in a tree, because he was impaled on one of its shattered branches. His blood flowed down the old oak.
‘Sweet Christ,’ Redmede said.
‘Very like,’ Tapio whispered. ‘Onssse again, Man, I will owe you my life.’
Mogon shook her head. ‘What will we do?’ she asked. ‘I can manipulate the powers. But how to reach him down from the tree?’
‘Can you lift him?’ Redmede asked. ‘With sorcery?’
Mogon nodded. ‘If I can make my sluggish brain work, yes.’
In the end, Redmede climbed the tree and cut the branch that impaled the Faery Knight while the red blood flowed over the old wood and didn’t freeze. He put the irk – tall as a man but light as air – across the rump of the great elk, who grunted.
‘Can’t carry the both of ye. Sorry.’
Redmede got his rackets off his saddle and put them on his feet. He already missed the warmth of the beast.
Tapio raised his head. ‘You both have my thanksss.’
Mogon bowed her head. ‘It was Thorn?’
Tapio Haltija laughed, and something bubbled in his chest. ‘We must go quickly if you two care to sssave my worthlesss carcasss. It wasss not Thorn. It wasss the ssshadow of Asssh.’
Mogon growled and made a fearful growling deep in her throat that raised the hackles of Redmede’s neck. ‘So – my brother was correct.’
‘Ash?’ he asked.
Mogon shook her head. ‘We have twenty miles to walk before we find warmth and safety, and this night is full of terror, even for one such as I. Let us go.’
Redmede could never recall more than the impression of enormous fatigue and the cessation of warmth. They walked, and they ran – when he lost feeling in his feet, he ran for a while until they hurt, and then he walked again. The woods around them snapped and cracked in the dense cold which came down like a hermetical working, vast and suffocating, and sat over the whole of the forest.
When the first light showed in the east, Redmede was so tired he wanted to lie down on the snow and sleep, but he knew where that would lead.
It was the great Warden, Mogon, who flagged first. She began to wander – in fact, she appeared drunk, and she wove about and made little grunting noises.
Tapio, who had not made a sound in many miles, raised his head. ‘Man! ’ he hissed. ‘She needs fire, or she will die. Very – suddenly.’
Redmede knew how to kindle fire. And the threat seemed to ignite him – he gathered wood as fast as his feet would carry him, and he found a birch tree, down and dead and still clear of the snow, and he pulled off his mittens, hung them around his neck, and froze his hands stripping the bark. He stripped a mountain of bark, and he piled it under all the branches he’d found – where two dead spruce trees lay across one another at the end of a clearing.
Mogon was keening, and otherwise immobile.
Up to you, Bill Redmede. Fate of the world. Smile when you say that. Tinder box – there it is. Char cloth – good. He laid a piece of the black cloth on his flint and snapped it along his stele. They were warm from being carried next to his body, and the sparks flew.
The char cloth lit. He thought of Bess, that night in the wet woods, and he blew on his sparks and his glowing embers and pressed them into his dry tow. It was cold – but it was dry – and in a moment, he had fire.
He threw the whole burning clump onto his pile of birch bark.
There was pungent smoke . . .
For a moment, he thought that it wasn’t going to light.
And then the birch bark’s resin thawed enough to catch, and light and heat exploded into the world – the only magic that Bill Redmede knew how to make, except perhaps a little with a bow. The fire rose and licked at more bark.
‘Nice work, boss,’ said the elk – even as it shied away. Nothing in the Wild loved fire.
The two dead spruce trees caught from the branches and the bark and the fire rose.
Redmede finally had to take Mogon by the hand and lead her to the fire. She would barely stir.
But in minutes, she was herself again.
‘Be sure and roast Tapio on both sides,’ she said.
The elk turned and presented its other flank to the fire – and then Mogon shook her head.
‘One more effort. Thank you, man. You are a useful ally. I missed my moment. I should have built a fire, and I-’ She shook her head again. ‘Do you know that fire scares me? I cannot remember when I have been this close to one, naked to it.’