I looked at her. She was thinner than ever, the weight of her belly dragging her down. “Why?” I asked. “Why do you want to get in? It’s madness there. Every story says so.”
“So it is,” Lys said. “That was why I left.”
There was a silence. It rang.
“You don’t look like a devil,” I said. “Or a devil’s minion.”
She laughed. It was a sweet, awful sound. “But, my good woman, I am. I am everything that is black and terrible.”
“You are about to drop where you stand.” I got my arm around her before she did it, and sat her down on the font’s rim. I could not help a glance at the water. It was still only water.
“We are going to rest,” I said, “because I need it. And eat, because I’m hungry. Then we’re going back to Sency.”
“Not I,” said Lys.
I paid her no mind. I untied my kerchief and spread out what I had, and put in a fistful of mushrooms, too; promising myself that I would stop when I went back, and fill my apron again. There was nothing to drink but water, but it would do. Lys would not drink from the font, but from the spring above it. I did as she did, to keep the peace. The cat came to share the cheese and a nibble or two of the bread. She turned up her nose at the mushrooms. “All the more for us,” I said to her. She filliped her tail and went in search of better prey.
We ate without speaking. Lys was hungry: she ate as delicately and fiercely as a cat. A cat was what I thought of when I looked at her, a white she-cat who would not meet my eyes.
When we were done I gathered the crumbs in my skirt and went out to the porch and scattered them for the birds. I slanted an eye at the sun. A bit past noon. I had thought it would be later.
Lys came up behind me. Her step was soundless but her shadow fell cool across me, making me shiver.
“There is another reason,” she said, “why I should stay and you should leave. My lord who is dead: he had a brother. That one lives, and hunts me.”
I turned to face her.
“He wants me for what I am,” she said, “and for what he thinks I can give him. For myself, too, maybe. A little. I tricked him in Rouen: cut my hair and put on a nun’s habit and walked out peacefully in the abbess’ train. He will have learned of that long since, and begun his tracking of me.”
I shrugged. “What’s one man in the whole of Normandy—or one woman, for the matter of that? Chance is he’ll never find you.”
“He’ll find me,” Lys said with quelling certainty.
“So let him.” I shook my skirts one last time and stepped down off the porch.
I was not at all sure that she would follow. But when I came to the trees, she was behind me. “You don’t know who he is. He’ll come armed, Jeannette, and with his men at his back.”
That gave me pause, but I was not about to let her see that. “We have walls,” I said. “If he comes. Better he find you there than in a broken chapel, beating on a door that stays fast shut.”
“Walls can break,” said Lys.
“And doors?”
She did not answer that. Neither did she leave me.
After a while she asked it. “Why?”
“You’re my guest,” I said.
“Not once I left you.”
“What does that have to do with it?”
She started to speak. Stopped. Started again. One word. “Francha.”
“Francha.” I let some of the anger show. “God knows why, God knows how, but she has decided that she belongs to you. You went off and left her. Her mother is dead, her father died on top of her; we found her so, mute as she is now, and he begun to rot.” I could not see her, to know if she flinched. I hoped that she did. “I took her in. I coaxed her to eat, to face the world, to live. Then you came. She fixed the whole of herself on you. And you left her.”
“I had no choice.’
“Of course you did,” I said. “You had to have known that the way was shut. He exiled you, didn’t he? your cold king.”
“I exiled myself.”
Her voice was stiff with pride. I snorted at it. “I believe you, you know. That you’re one of Them. No one but a soulless thing would do what you did to Francha.”
“Would a soulless thing go back? Would it admit that it had erred?”
“Have you done either?”
She seized my sleeve and spun me about. She was strong; her fingers were cruel, digging into my arm. She glared into my face.
I glared back. I was not afraid, not at all. Even when I saw her true. Cat, had I thought, back in the chapel? Cat, yes, and cat-eyed, and nothing human in her at all.
Except the voice, raw and roughened with anger. “Now you see. Now you know.”
I crossed myself, to be safe. She did not go up in a cloud of smoke. I had not honestly expected her to. That was a cross she wore at her throat, glimmering under the robe. “So they’re true,” I said. “The stories.”
“Some of them.” She let me go. “He wants that, my lord Giscard. He wants the child I carry, that he thinks will be the making of his house.”
“Then maybe you should face him,” I said, “and call the lightnings down on him.”
She looked as shocked as if I had done as much myself. “That is the Sin! How can you speak so lightly of it?”
“Sin?” I asked. “Among the soulless ones of the Wood?”
“We are as Christian as you,” she said.
That was so improbable that it could only be true. I turned my back on her—not without a pricking in my nape—and went on down the path. In a little while she followed me.
When the threshing was done and the granaries full, the apples in and the windfalls pressed for cider, my lone proud grapevine harvested and its fruit dried in the sun, and all of Sency made fast against a winter that had not yet come, a company of men rode up to our gate. We had been expecting them, Lys and I and Mere Adele, since the leaves began to fall. We kept a boy by the gate, most days, and shut and barred it at night. Weapons we had none of, except our scythes and our pruning hooks, and an ancient, rusted sword that the smith’s widow had unearthed from the forge.
Pierre Allard was at the gate the day milord Giscard came, and Celine tagging after him as she too often did. It was she who came running to find me.
I was nearly there already. All that day Lys had been as twitchy as a cat. Suddenly in the middle of mending Francha’s shirt, she sprang up and bolted. I nearly ran her down just past the well, where she stood rigid and staring, the needle still in one hand, and the shirt dangling from the other. I shook her hard.
She came to herself, a little. “If he sees me,” she said, “if he knows I’m here …”
“So,” I said. “You’re a coward, then.”
“No!” She glared at me, all Lys again, and touchy-proud as ever she could be. “I’m a coward for your sake. He’ll burn the village about your ears, for harboring me.”
“Not,” I said, “if we have anything to say about it.”
I tucked up my skirt and climbed the gate. Pierre was up there, and Mere Adele come from who knew where; it was a good long run from the priory, and she was barely breathing hard. She had her best wimple on, I noticed, and her jeweled cross. The sun struck dazzles on the stones, white and red and one as green as new grass. She greeted me with a grunt and Lys with a nod, but kept her eyes on the men below.
They were a pretty company. Much like the one that had taken Claudel away: men in grey mail with bright surcoats, and one with a banner—red, this, like blood, with something gold on it.
“Lion rampant,” said Lys. She was still on the stair below the parapet. She could hardly have seen the banner. But she would know what it was. “Arms of Montsalvat.”
The lord was in mail like his men. There was a mule behind him, with what I supposed was his armor on it. He rode a tall red horse, and he was tall himself, as far as I could tell. I was not so much above him, standing on the gate. He turned his face up to me. It was a surprising face, after all that I had heard. Younger, much, than I had expected, and shaven clean. Not that he would have much beard, I thought. His hair was barley-fair.