Especially since he had no idea what to do next. Just thinking about it was almost more exhausting than the actual chase had been yesterday.
His eyelids fluttered, and his breathing eased as he sank deeper into the hay. In a few hours, the light would fall directly on his face from the hatch used to let down hay. He’d wake then. He was sure of it. A few more hours, he thought drowsily. His hand jerked up, waving at an imaginary bug, and then his arm relaxed again, flopping against the hay. His head slid to the side, his breathing slow and regular.
Then he heard a sound that was not the horses, and he sat up abruptly, hand reaching for his knife. Someone was in the hayloft.
Right beside him.
“Hey!” he shouted and tried to get to his feet, the knife held out defensively before him. How could he, a hunter, allow someone to get that close to him?
“Shshshsh!” The whisper was distinctly feminine in tone. He huffed in relief and lowered the knife a little. It was the girl. In the morning light, he recognized her pale skin and narrow, bony shoulders.
“Ferenc,” she said, pointing to him, as if it were a code word.
“Ocyrhoe,” he said, almost apologetically, but still wary, nodding toward her and lowering the knife. But he did not sheathe it.
They had only gotten as far as each other’s name in being able to communicate with each other. When she began to jabber, gesticulating with quick, exaggerated movements, he had to shake his head to remind her that he had no idea what she was talking about.
“Father Rodrigo?” he interrupted, trying to slow down the torrent of words coming out of her mouth. “Rodrigo?”
She cocked her head like a dog hearing a strange sound, and frowned.
He repeated the priest’s name once more and then pointed to himself. “Ferenc.” Then to her, “Ocyrhoe.” Then, feeling apologetic for the caricature, he imitated Rodrigo bent over his horse, eyes rolling. “Father Rodrigo,” he said definitively.
“Ah,” said the girl. She crossed herself several times and hummed something like a Gregorian-style chant, her hands in a praying position. “Father Rodrigo?”
“Father Rodrigo,” Ferenc confirmed. Her emphasis was different than his, but clear enough. “Where? Where is he?”
She shook her head and shrugged. Ferenc grunted with frustration. Did that shrug mean I don’t know where he is? Or I don’t understand what you’re asking me? He couldn’t tell, and when she asked him a question, he could only shake his head and shrug in return.
A chill ran up his spine as he considered their inability to communicate. This was not an inconvenience; it was a catastrophe. He knew his own language, and what piecemeal Latin he had gleaned from Father Rodrigo during their long journey, but that was it. Nothing could have prepared him for the trek he’d just completed; never in his life, before the battle at Mohi, could he have imagined himself beyond the boundaries of his native tongue.
She sensed his anxiety, and rather than joining him in it, she very deliberately calmed herself with a gentle, long breath. She put a hand on his arm and repeated the breath, gesturing for him to do the same. He made a face but breathed with her. And he did feel calmer, although perhaps that was just her hand on his arm, a human touch.
Ocyrhoe released him and grabbed a few strands of hay. She twisted them, carefully tying the dry straw into a loose knot. “Father Rodrigo,” she said, presenting the twisted strand to him. Glancing around the loft, she spotted a short-handled pitchfork leaning against the wall and scooted across the loft to grab it. Indicating that he should put down the Rodrigo straw man, she put the pitchfork between Ferenc and the knotted strand, and then gazed at him solemnly.
It made no sense to him: if this was meant to graphically display the problem, why didn’t Father Rodrigo just slip through the openings of whatever was keeping him, like stray straw between the tines of a pitchfork? She saw the expression on his face, rolled her eyes, and grabbed the piece of straw, which broke under her angry touch.
She moved the pitchfork aside and squatted opposite Ferenc. “Father Rodrigo,” she tried again, now pointing to herself, and this time did a very good imitation of a person with hands bound, trying to break free. She pretended she was being dragged away across the loft, her leather sandals dragging a path through the strewn hay. Ferenc gasped, and when Ocyrhoe patted his arm, he let her drag him over to the loft window. She pointed to the right, and when Ferenc looked, he was shocked to realize they were still in the middle of the city, surrounded by far more urbanity than he was used to. There was little to be seen but a spreading sea of other rooftops, russet and brown and gray in the wan morning light.
“What do we do?” he demanded in frustration. If she knew he had been captured-which was obvious to him now, in retrospect-did she know where he had been taken? And if she did, then how was she going to communicate that location to him? “Can you take me there?” he asked.
She gave him an impatient frown, her meaning clear: Why do you talk to me with words you know I can’t understand? She pointed to herself and to him, clasped her hands together, and said their names rapidly: “FerencOcyrhoe.” Us.
Which was the best news he had heard yet. She wasn’t planning on abandoning him, which, of course, meant his course of action was clear as well. He nodded and echoed her compound word. FerencOcyrhoe. Together. A tiny laugh slipped out of him, spurred by an image in his mind. A cool winter’s night a dozen years from now, him telling the story of his incredible adventures around the fire pit to his awestruck children and neighbors.
She pointed out the window again, straight in the direction she’d said Father Rodrigo was. Then she indicated both of them-FerencOcyrhoe-and then pointed again, looking expectantly at him the entire time.
He blinked, his head snapping backward on his neck like a turtle retreating into its shell. “What?” he said. “Are you crazy? How can we possibly get him? What kind of place is he in? Even if we find him, where will we take him? We can’t stay in this loft. We can’t-I can’t-stay in this city-”
He was cut off by a loud, piercing whistle, courtesy of Ocyrhoe’s tongue and teeth. A moment of unnatural thunder shook the building as the horses collectively spooked at the sound and thrashed against their ropes. She waited for them to settle, and then began talking again. He held up his hands to slow her down, but she ignored him, and after a few seconds, he realized it wasn’t all gibberish. Some of it sounded like Latin; he could understand certain words but had no context for them-bona, he recognized, and malus as well, and ecclesiam and sacerdos and Summus Pontifex.
The Bishop of Rome. Yes, Father Rodrigo’s message. The one he hoped to deliver to the Pope.
He watched her face as she spoke. She was a scrappy little thing, younger than he, but he could not guess by how much. She was too bony and petite to have noticeable breasts, even if she was mature. Her hair was a color common enough in these parts, but her skin was at least as pale as a Northerner. In the hazy morning light, she looked like a tunder, a fairy of his homeland. Not a szepasszony, of course-a fair woman, the most beautiful of supernatural beings-but even the woodland fairies, although prone to mischief, treated you right if you stuck with them.
And this one had certainly already proven her good intentions-as well as, arguably, magic powers. He was not frightened of fairies. If she was, indeed, a tunder, she would eventually reveal that she knew a language he understood-the proper language of fairies.