Francha broke out of my arms. My Perrin, always the first to leap on anything that was new, bolted gleefully in Francha’s wake. Half a breath more and they were all gone, the babies in their pen beginning to howl, and the reapers nearest pausing, some straightening to stare.
If I thought anything, I thought it later. That the Death was not so long gone. That the roads were full of wolves, two-legged nearly all of them, and deadly dangerous. That the Wood held things more deadly than any wolf, if even a tithe of the tales were true.
As I ran I thought of Perrin, and of Francha. I could have caught them easily, a season ago. Now the stitch caught me before I had run a furlong, doubled me up and made me curse. I ran in spite of it, but hobbling. I could see well enough. There was only one figure on the Wood’s edge, standing very still before the onslaught of children. It was a woman. I did not know how I knew that. It was all in shapeless brown, hooded and faceless. It did not frighten our young at all. They had seen the Death. This was but a curiosity, a traveler on the road that no one traveled, a new thing to run after and shrill at and squabble over.
As the children parted like a flock of sheep and streamed around it, the figure bent. It straightened with one of the children in its arms. Francha, white and silent Francha who never spoke, who fled even from those she knew, clinging to this stranger as if she would never let go.
The reapers were leaving their reaping. Some moved slowly, weary or wary. Others came as fast as they were able. We trusted nothing in these days, but Sency had been quiet since the spring, when the Comte’s man came to take our men away. Our woods protected us, and our prayers, too.
Still I was the first but for the children to come to the stranger. Her hood was deep but the light was on her. I saw a pale face, and big eyes in it, staring at me.
I said the first thing that came into my head. “Greetings to you, stranger, and God’s blessing on you.”
She made a sound that might have been laughter or a sob. But she said clearly enough, “Greetings and blessing, in God’s name.” She had a lady’s voice, and a lady’s accent, too, with a lilt in it that made me think of birds.
“Where are you from? Do you carry the sickness?”
The lady did not move at all. I was the one who started and spun about.
Mere Adele was noble born herself, though she never made much of it; she was as outspoken to the lord bishop as she was to any of us. She stood behind me now, hands on her ample hips, and fixed the stranger with a hard eye. “Well? Are you dumb, then?”
“Not mute,” the lady said in her soft voice, “nor enemy either. I have no sickness in me.”
“And how may we be sure of that?”
I sucked in a breath.
The lady spoke before I could, as sweetly as ever, and patient, with Francha’s head buried in the hollow of her shoulder. I had been thinking that she might be a nun fled from her convent. If she was, I thought I knew why. No bride of the lord Christ would carry a man’s child in her belly, swelling it under the coarse brown robe.
“You can never be certain,” she said to Mere Adele, “not of a stranger; not in these times. I will take no more from you than a loaf, of your charity, and your blessing if you will give it.”
“The loaf you may have,” said Mere Adele. “The blessing I’ll have to think on. If you fancy a bed for the night, there’s straw in plenty to make one, and a reaper’s dinner if you see fit to earn it.”
“Even,” the lady asked, “unblessed?”
Mere Adele was enjoying herself: I could see the glint in her eye. “Earn your dinner,” she said, “and you’ll get your blessing with it.”
The lady bent her head, as gracious as a queen in a story. She murmured in Francha’s ear. Francha’s grip loosened on her neck. She set the child down in front of me—Francha all eyes and wordless reluctance—and followed Mere Adele through the field. None of the children went after her, even Perrin. They were meeker than I had ever seen them, and quieter; though they came to themselves soon enough, once I had them back under the May tree.
Her name, she said, was Lys. She offered no more than that, that night, sitting by the fire in the mown field, eating bread and cheese and drinking the ale that was all we had. In the day’s heat she had taken off her hood and her outer robe and worked as the rest did, in a shift of fine linen that was almost new. She was bearing for a fact, two seasons gone, I judged, and looking the bigger for that she was so thin. She had bones like a bird’s, and skin so white one could see the tracks of veins beneath, and hair as black as her skin was white, hacked off as short as a nun’s.
She was not that, she said. Swore to it and signed herself, lowering the lids over the great grey eyes. Have I said that she was beautiful? Oh, she was, like a white lily, with her sweet low voice and her long fair hands. Francha held her lap against all comers, but Perrin was bewitched, and Celine, and the rest of the children whose mothers had not herded them home.
“No nun,” she said, “and a great sinner, who does penance for her sins in this long wandering.”
We nodded round the fire. Pilgrimages we understood; and pilgrims, even noble ones, alone and afoot and tonsured, treading out the leagues of their salvation. Guillemette, who was pretty and very silly, sighed and clasped her hands to her breast. “How sad,” she said, “and how brave, to leave your lord and your castle—for castle you had, surely, you are much too beautiful to be a plain man’s wife—and go out on the long road.”
“My lord is dead,” the lady said.
Guillemette blinked. Her eyes were full of easy tears. “Oh, how terrible! Was it the war?”
“It was the plague,” said Lys. “And that was six months ago now, by his daughter in my belly, and you may weep as you choose, but I have no tears left.”
She sounded it: dry and quiet. No anger in her, but no softness either. In the silence she stood up. “If there is a bed for me, I will take it. In the morning I will go.”
“Where?” That was Mere Adele, abrupt as always, and cutting to the heart of things.
Lys stood still. She was tall; taller in the firelight. “My vow takes me west,” she said.
“But there is nothing in the west,” said Mere Adele.
“But,” said Lys, “there is a whole kingdom, leagues of it, from these marches to the sea.”
“Ah,” said Mere Adele, sharp and short. “That’s not west, that’s Armorica. West is nothing that a human creature should meddle with. If it’s Armorica that you’re aiming for, you’d best go south first, and then west, on the king’s road.”
“We have another name for that kingdom,” said Lys, “where I was born.” She shook herself; she sighed. “In the morning I will go.”
She slept in the house I had come to when I married Claudel, in my bed next to me with the children in a warm nest, Celine and Perrin and Francha, and the cats wherever they found room. That was Francha’s doing, holding to her like grim death when she would have made her bed in the nuns’ barn, until my tongue spoke for me and offered her what I had.
I did not sleep overmuch. Nor, I thought, did she. She was still all the night long, coiled on her side with Francha in the hollow of her. The children made their night-noises, the cats purred, Mamere Mondine snored in her bed by the fire. I listened to them, and to the lady’s silence. Claudel’s absence was an ache still. It was worse tonight, with this stranger in his place. My hand kept trying to creep toward the warmth and the sound of her breathing, as if a touch could change her, make her the one I wanted there. In the end I made a fist of it and pinned it under my head, and squeezed my eyes shut, and willed the dawn to come.