For My Lady's Heart (23 page)

She allowed for exaggeration—what hunter did not make his boar larger and
fiercer with the telling?—but the more she pressed him for particular
attributes, the more she began to think that he had killed a very large
basilisk. Until he showed her the scars beneath Hawk’s coat, three long
ridges full two inches apart, that the monster had made as it fell upon the
horse from its fiery height. Then her opinion wavered.

“A griffon hates horses,” she speculated. “But sayest thou its head was
like to a lizard? Not an eagle?”

“Nay, my lady, nonsuch like. But my horse hatz the heart of an eagle.
Sprang he up with a scream, striving to kill. Such strength did he spend
that he splintered his chain. His loose fetter he flung, to flay as if were
a weapon. He smote the serpent and slashed it in its loathly eye. The dragon
rebounded with a roar, ripping his hide.” He laid his hand on Hawk’s
shoulder over the old scars, passing his palm down the horse’s coat as he
walked. “I plunged to impale the paunch that it bared. Mother Mary blessed
me, I believe, and abetted me in that moment, for my sword struck the scales
and slipped betwixt. Bright blood boiled forth, but the creature coiled
about my cuirass, choking my breath, wringing life from my limbs and light
from my eyes. I descried my sword divided and dragged from my hand. I felt
the fetid air as the fangs locked upon my feet, in the way that a snake
feeds on a field mouse.”

He stopped speaking. Melanthe realized that her hands clenched the
saddle, gripping it as if she could throw off the deathly coils herself.

“What didst thou do?” she asked, loosening her grip.

“I submitted my soul to Mary’s sweet mercy.” He glanced back at her.
“Next I knew, I lay near dead. Beside me the beast was buckled, embedded
with my sword in its breast, its lifeblood all about me. My sabatons it had
sucked off my soles and swallowed my legs to the knee. I wrenched free and
withdrew, and bowed down to bear thanks to God the Almighty. And thus in
another day this aventure betided,” he said. “I abidingly thereof bear
witness, my lady.”

“Depardeu! What became of the creature?”

“I will show you, my lady.”

“Wee loo! Show me?”

He nodded ahead. “My lady sees before us, through the trees? There is a
chapel. Peraventure, the creature’s bones lie there yet.”

She slid from the saddle even before he could help her down. In the
afternoon shadow the little chapel was a dark smudge against the boggy
woods, an old and unadorned rectangle of slate, windowless. With an echoing
scrape of wood on stone, the knight pushed open the door and stood back to
let her pass.

She saw it immediately. The skull lay in the shaft of light from the
door, enthroned upon a wide bench below the crude altar. It was huge, and
nothing like a basilisk’s eagle head. Just as he had said, a long and
pointed snout, with great eye and nostril hollows and vicious teeth like no
living creature she had ever seen. Remains of its spine lay scattered in a
rough line down the bench. A fan of thinner bones, like an enormous hand or
a wing, was assembled carefully on a nearby table.

“It is a dragon.” Melanthe strode into the church, stripping off her
gloves, leaving the knight leaning upon the door to hold it open. She bent
over the skull.

In the half-light it was bleached bone, the sunken eye holes deep caverns
of black. But at the first touch, Melanthe sucked a hissing breath.

Stone. No real skeleton, but heavy and hard, solid inside where a skull
would be gaping. The eye hollows, the backbone, the teeth—all white lime
rock, impossible to misjudge.

She whirled to face him. He was still leaning on the door, his arms
crossed, the faintest suggestion of an upward curve at the corner of his
mouth.

“Thou lied to me.” She narrowed her eyes at him. “Is naught but a rock!”

His mouth twitched.

“Thou lied to me!”

“My lady wished a firedrake.” His hidden smirk became a grin.

“Thou knew that I believed thee. Thou took delight in it. Thou lied to
me!” Her vehement words returned, fierce whispers echoing against the walls
and floor,
lied-lied-lied.

“Lied?” The door scraped as he pulled back his weight in the face of her
sudden advance. “A tale, my lady, that I made for your pleasure. In verse—”
He gave a modest shrug. “Of a kind.”

“Verse! I—” She stopped. She remembered him searching for a word to
describe the dragon, repeating the phrase under his breath, until he came
out with the same sounds echoing and compounding through the sentence,
rhyming at the head of words instead of the tail, like the old poetry. In
the peculiar convoluted idiom that was his normal English, she had barely
noticed.

He was still smiling at the floor. He thought it amusing. In a voice as
cold as the dragon stone, she said, “If I find thee in a Lie to me again,
knight, thou wilt rue it to thy early death.”

Ruck raised his eyes, his humor expiring. She was white, staring at him
with her chin set and trembling.

“As thou livest,” she said through clenched teeth, “never lie to me, in
revel or no. Swear it now.”

“Lady—” He had meant only to make a mirth. She did not understand.

“Kneel!” she commanded.

He hesitated. He expected her to smile. He thought she would say that she
made merry of him, and laugh as she had when she threw the sand.

“On thy knees, knave!” She pointed at the floor. Her hand shook. “Abase
thyself!”

Shock welled in him, and resentment, warring with his honor that was
bound to her homage. Slowly he stood straight from the door.

“In the name of what you hold most dear,” she cried, “before God!”

In outrage he slammed one gloved fist inside the other. The harsh metal
sound of it rang in the little chapel, violence and submission joined as he
gripped his hands together and lowered himself before her. The whip of his
pride kept his head upright. He could see her fingers, balled tight in fear
or rage or some emotion beyond his comprehension.

“Ne’er will I speaken false to you, my lady,” he said briefly.

“Swear it!”
Her voice rose nearly to a shriek. “Swear upon what
you love as your life!”

He flung himself to his feet. “On my lady’s heart, then, I swear!” he
shouted. “Fore God, n’ill I ne lie to you, nought while I live! I ne have
nought lied, never! Was but a tale. A lay—for the delight of it, no more
than that!”

She glared at him. Then she turned away, pacing to the stone dragon, her
cloak sweeping the floor. She drew a breath. Slowly, as if she had to will
it, her hands stretched open at her sides.

She spoke more quietly. “I depend upon thee for truth.” She looked back
at him. Her lilac eyes were intense, outlined in black. “There is but one
person on the earth that I trust, and that is thee.”

If she had said some incantation, some unholy powerful mutter, if she had
spilled blood and boiled toads, stolen his hair and molded his figure in
wax, she could not have bound him so well and finally. He felt love like
pain, love for her when still he did not know who or what she was.

She said in a smaller voice, “Thou didst not tell me it was a poem.”

“My lady—” He made a miserable bitter laugh. “Were no true poem, but a
ragged thing, made out of my head. I will nought be false with you, my
lady—ne’er, nor devise no lay again.”

Her furred cloak rustled. He watched her as she ran her finger down the
dragon skull. “Was somewhat agreeable a tale,” she said. “Thou mayest devise
such—but tell me.” She looked up at him. “Certes tell me when thou speakest
not in troth.”

He bowed his head, just barely, in acknowledgment. He was angry at her,
at himself, and still more mortified. The weariness of two nights without
sleep marred his judgment; he did not know why he had hazarded to speak in
sport to her, or even half in sport. “Were a stupid jape, my lady.”

“Only say me.” She seemed almost penitent. “Only warn me.”

“Yea, my lady.”

With an unnatural bright smile she stroked the dragon skull. “This is a
monstrous creation. How came it here, knowest thou?”

“I found it. In a place to the south, cemented in a shelf above a
rockfall. Whiles, I carried it about as a penance. Weighs it sore, my lady.
But a priest was here then, and he gave me absolution to dedicate it to the
glory of Saint George’s chapel, which he said this was.”

“A penance!” She took on the smooth light manner of a court lady. “When
hast thou ever sinned, monkish man?”

His mouth tightened. He disliked her mockery the most when she ridiculed
the virtue that he fought so hard to preserve against her. Sin and dishonor
and temptation incarnate she was, with her elven’s boots and her black hair
drifting free of its golden net. “Daily, my lady,” he murmured.

“Daily!” she echoed, glancing at him and then down at the dragon.

He followed the slow caress of her fingertip across the stone, a carnal
thing, simple and compelling. “Every hour, my lady,” he said low, “and every
minute.”

She tapped the skull briskly. “Forsooth, I believe mote be a true dragon.
Drowned in the Deluge. Or haps it stole a very ugly damsel by mischance,
poor creature, and congealed to stone when it looked upon her. Some of us
needen no knight to fly to our rescue.”

“More like it were the Deluge, my lady.”

She regarded her own hand as if it interested her greatly. “Sober and
chaste, monkish man. That is what they sayen of thee.” A subtle smile marked
her lips. “What lady’s heart didst thou swear upon, Green Sire?”

“My lady wife’s,” he said. It was not a falsehood. He was sure it was the
truth. It must be the truth.

“Alas.” She lifted one brow. “I may but mourn it was not mine.”

“If I say you troth, my lady, ne can I nought flatteren, also,” he said
stubbornly.

Pink flushed her cheek. “In faith, I am honestly answered for my ungrace
in asking.”

Ruck had not spoken false. He must have sworn upon Isabelle, for she was
his wife. But he looked at Princess Melanthe’s face, and he could not
remember Isabelle. Had not been able to remember, not for years.

“What wants ye of me, my liege lady?” he asked harshly. “Dalliaunce and
kisses?”

“Yea,” she said, without looking up. “Yea, I think I want those things of
thee, otherwise would I not bear myself so bold. Such is not like me. But I
am not sure.”

He had never known a woman to be so open about it, or so maddening. His
heart thudded slow, but his blood felt too hot for his veins.

She made a peculiar laugh. “Too strange it is—I have said in my heart
that now I am free, now I have no need to deceive. Now I can speak always in
troth—and I find I cannot distinguish what is true and what is not.” She
faced him openly. “I have forgotten how.”

The painted cross stood behind her, simple and stark. To cool himself,
Ruck said, “The priests would tell my lady to pray and find God’s troth.”

“So they would. And then take themselves off to their dinners and
concubines.” She lifted her chin and threw back her shoulders with a little
shrug. “But lo—thou art a man with a nun for a wife,” she said. “Avoi, I
know not what the world comes to, with these upside-down arrangements!”

“My lady,” he said, “up swa downer is it, that so worthy as you would
incline to so poor as your knight.”

“Ah.” She rested against the table and looked about the little shadowed
space, opening her hand. “But among these hundred of suitors, thou art my
favorite, Sir Ruck.”

He did not know how he was to go on with her so near to him. She stood in
this chapel, all but offering herself to be his lover. Never would he have
looked so high above him, even had he succumbed to love-amour, but it was
she who chose.

He closed his fist around the hasp of the door. “These are foolish
matters,” he said abruptly. “The night comes on too swift.”

“And what if I made thee a greater man? I have lands escheated to me,
with yet no lord. I will maken thee a present of them.”

She stung his pride with that. “I am lord in my own lands, my lady, and
my father before me. I need no whore-toll.”

Her swift look made him instantly regret that he had said so much. She
said mildly, “What lands are these?”

He held the door wide. “If my lady does please to pass?”

“Whence hails thee?” she demanded, without moving.

Ruck stood silently, angry at himself. He felt her study penetrate him.

“Thou speakest the north in every syllable.”

“Yea, a rude and runisch northeron I am, lady. Avoi, will you come then,
ere I cast you o’er my saddle and ravish you off to the wilderness, for to
take my will like a wild man?”

She laughed aloud. “Nay, not while all is upside down.” She came to him,
a sweep of cloak and warmth out of the shadow, taking hold of both his arms.
“I will take
thee
captive, and have my will here and now, for I
cannot cast thee upon a horse to ravish thee away, and we are in wilderness
already.”

She leaned up and kissed him, all softness and glee, so that he was
powerless, captive in truth. He was instantly beyond thinking of spells and
enchantment: what she willed, he willed. He held his arm under her back and
lifted her against him, hungry for her body against his, despairing that his
armor screened all sensation of it.

“My lady,” he mumbled on her cheek, when her indrawn gasp for breath
broke the kiss. “It is a church.”

“Then release me, monkish man, and I will lead thee astray outside.”

He relaxed his arm. She slipped down, laughing still, and he followed her
like a mongrel dog would follow a kind-hearted village girl in hopes of a
scrap of bread, dragging the door in closed behind him.

She turned and met him, another stand on tiptoe—he could not feel her,
but he could not even think of her body, her breasts, without his member
going full and stiff. He pressed his gloved palms wide under her arms,
taking her up against him again. He leaned back hard on the door of the
chapel, drawing her whole weight on himself so that he had some crude sense
of her through his plated armor.