Maze of Moonlight (17 page)

And then she left him. The horse that Baron Paul had given her for the trip was frisky and alert after two months of running free in a rich paddock, and Vanessa, in the fine traveling clothes that Christopher had bought for her, looked far away but rather genteel. The delAurvre signet glittered on her hand.

Ranulf would be her escort for the short trip down to Saint Blaise, but Christopher rode with her as far as the edge of the village. There, the road passed through a gate and turned down toward the lowlands. He could see Saint Blaise in the hazy distance, and Malvern Forest was close enough that, given the drop, a man with a strong arm might have pitched a stone into it.

At the head of the road, he reached out to her, took her hand. He had never offered or asked for a kiss, but she must have seen that he needed one, and so she leaned out and touched her lips lightly to his. “G'bye, Christopher,” she said.

“Farewell, my dear lady.”

That was all. She went down the road with Ranulf. By mid-afternoon, she would be in Saint Blaise, starting a new life. And perhaps she would now have a few tools with which to make it a happy one.

Christopher rode back toward the castle. He acknowledged the bows and curtsies of the townsfolk, but he hardly saw any of them. Vanessa still was not free, and so neither was he. Only that dratted monkey was free, and it did nothing with its liberty save pelt people with fruit.

Was he any different? Since he had risen from his bed on Christmas morning, he had acted the part of the ape, grinning and mocking, tossing fruit at all the customs and mores and sacraments of his society. Only since Vanessa had arrived had he really taken on, once again, the attributes of a civilized man.

A civilized man. At the gate of the castle, he dismounted and handed his horse over to a stable boy. He looked down at himself. Silks and velvets again. Even a sword. The baron of Aurverelle.

He laughed, suddenly. Howled. He could not stop. By the time Jerome and Pytor—summoned by the panicked gate guards—came running to see what was the matter, he was so weak with his sobbing mirth that he was leaning against the whitewashed wall, tears streaming down his face.

“Dear God, my lord,” said Jerome. “What's the matter?”

With an effort, Christopher managed to stop laughing, but his tears still flowed. “I'm the baron of Aurverelle,” he said. He took Vanessa's pendant in his hand, held it up before his eyes. The moon and star flashed. “That's what's the matter.”

No. He would never forget her.

Townsfolk were staring at him, frightened, and he realized that, as he had moderated his excesses for Vanessa's sake, he would have to do so for his people, her peers. He straightened. Composed himself as best he could. “I'll talk with you about those free companies now, Jerome,” he said, tucking the pendant into his tunic. “If we let them get away with this, they'll be eating off our plates by next spring, whether Yvonnet pays them or not.” He wiped at his eyes. Vanessa was gone. And he was the baron of Aurverelle. He would rather have been the monkey.

Pytor and Jerome exchanged glances. It was quite obvious to Christopher that they were wondering whether he was going to begin once more to caper like a bear.

“Master should rest,” said Pytor. “Master's harper has said that she would be willing to play for him at any time. Would he care for a song?”

Christopher blinked. “Harper?” What idiot had decided to see if the baron was really mad. And a woman at that?

“She arrived late last night,” Pytor explained. “I did not wish to disturb master. I gave her a room—it was not seemly to ask her to sleep with the men in the hall.”

“Yes, yes. But why do you call her
my
marper?”

Pytor squirmed. “She played for me, master. She's very good. I . . . I thought . . . I . . . ah . . . offered her a position.”

Pytor was trying to help, Christopher realized. The good-hearted seneschal had not wanted him to be lonely or unoccupied, and so he had allowed a wandering harper—they were all glib ones, those harpers—to talk him into a permanent post.

“Fine, Pytor. Thank you. But I don't want her to play. Not now.”

Pytor shuffled his feet. “Some other time, then, my master?”

Christopher turned toward the gate. Pytor was trying to help, and doubtless the harper was good. But there were free companies to deal with, and there was also a cask of wine in the castle. He was not sure how he felt about the free companies, but with Vanessa gone, he had nothing left to believe in save the monkey and the cask. And he could not drink the monkey. “Yes, yes,” he said absently. “Some other time. Maybe.”

***

“Thankee, Ranulf.”

Patterns pressed close about Vanessa, and she saw them all as she and Ranulf halted that afternoon before the gates of Saint Blaise. There was a part of the pattern for Saint Blaise—a sea of housetops bright with money, blue slate glowing in the yellow sun—and there was a part for each house, and there were individual lines and mazes for all the people within. The gate guards in their fine livery participated, as did those who came and went before them. All a part of the multitude of patterns that wove through her mind, that always wove through her mind.

And all the patterns indicated that she would enter Saint Blaise and deliver herself and her letters to Martin Osmore, the mayor. The end was death, of course. Vanessa had been living with that knowledge for years now, ever since she had, for the first time, gropingly deciphered the maze of images, faces, and voices in her head. Whether it came at the stake or by hanging in any one of a thousand violet ways, it was still death that faced her, and it was still inevitable, and everything about her—Saint Blaise, the farmlands, the guards, the people—contributed to the patterns that enfolded her and drew her on toward that inevitable fate.

Ranulf was nodding gravely. “Baron Christopher told me t' ask if you had your letters, Mistress Vanessa.”

She wanted to cry. Christopher had treated her kindly, but even he had eventually bowed to the patterns. For a moment, she cleared as much mental space as she ever could amid the whirl of patterns and allowed herself to remember him. He was handsome and he was sad, and he had fought for her. It was like something out of an old tale. Save that, in the tale, she would have stayed in Aurverelle . . . with Christopher.

Impossible. She reached to the pouch on her belt, opened it, showed Ranulf the letters of introduction that Baron Paul had written to the mayor. “I ha' them.”

“Shall we go in, then?” said the captain. “I know the mayor's house. I can take you to his door.”

He wondered at her. That was in the patterns, too. Vaguely, she blinked at the sky, but she saw little save images, scenes, fragments of faces, and snatches of conversation that lay in the future. Far off lay death. Closer were Ranulf's doubts. She was tempted to say something to him about them, but she was silent. That much she had learned. She did not have to speak.

And then something else struck her. Choice. She did not have to speak. And that meant . . .

With Ranulf waiting patiently for her reply—he had, like everyone else who had ever had any dealings with her, grown used to her sudden lapses of attention—she sat, stunned, on her horse, transfixed by the sudden motion among the patterns. A moment ago she had seen only her entrance into the city, her first interview with the mayor. But now, mixed with those images of exile, were others. A long ride. The face of an old woman, her lake blue eyes bright with knowledge and love. A little town.

Somewhere else.

She started to tremble, but she suppressed it. She did not want Ranulf to see her fright and so become determined to accompany her straight to the mayor's door. She wanted . . .

The patterns blurred. More images. Other deaths, to be sure, but less violent. Impossibly, Christopher was there, too, almost lost in the blinding, visual cacophony of interweaving and contradictory patterns.

. . . freedom.

“Nay, Ranulf,” she said. “Thankee for your company, but I think I'll go i' the town alone. If I get lost, I can ask for help.” Her hands were clenched. Christopher's signet was a reassuring presence on her finger.

Ranulf frowned. Vanessa saw his doubt, but she also saw—and the patterns were shifting more and more quickly—that the captain would accede to her wishes. “Well, all right, Mistress Vanessa,” he said after a moment. “I'll leave you here, then. God be with you.”

“An' wi' you.”

He hesitated, still frowning. Vanessa did her best to banish his doubts by digging into her purse and holding up a coin to demonstrate that, yes, she had the penny gate toll. She saw another future forming. She wanted it. She fought for it.

Still obviously worried, Ranulf nodded to her, wished her good day and good luck, and turned his horse back towards Aurverelle.

Choice. She had a choice, just like Christopher had said.

“Do you need help, mistress?”

A woman stood beside her horse. Her gown was plain, but even through the patterns of future action and being that were now toppling rapidly into probability, Vanessa saw her red gold hair and green eyes. Straight and tall, a basket on her arm, she might well have been an ordinary townswoman on an errand, but she was a part of the patterns, too. A large part.

“I can take you in, if you are frightened of the city,” she said.

Vanessa shook her head. She did not want to go in. She had chosen not to go in. She pointed south. “Is thi' the main road through the Free Towns?”

The green eyes were kind. “It is.”

“Does it lead to . . .” Shifting. The patterns were shifting, the alternate future expanding, growing larger, unfolding like the petals of some immense flower. “. . . to Saint Brigid?”

“It does.”

“Then, thankee, but I'll be fine.”

The patterns wavered, then suddenly blurred and reformed. The choice—her choice—had been made. She had created her own pattern. And if that was possible, then . . .

“I'm going to Saint Brigid,” said Vanessa. She was smiling. “I'm . . . I'm going to find my grandma.”

***

Brother Jerome approached the duties of chief bailiff with the same finicky sense of detail with which he had once supervised a monastery library, and when Christopher entered his office that afternoon, he found a large map of Adria and eastern France already spread out on the big table. Markers showed the positions of reported free company attacks. Jerome had also tallied up the exact amounts of the losses resulting from the missing wool shipment, and was prepared with an admittedly tentative projection of future movement on the part of the mercenaries.

“It's hard to estimate anything exactly,” he said in his old, dry voice. “But since most of the fertile valleys of France have been stripped, it's logical to assume that they'll be moving into the passes of the Aleser fairly soon, and then into Adria proper.”

Christopher, though, was having difficulty keeping his mind on the free companies. Much as he tried to look at the markers that lay scattered across Burgundy and Alsace and Auvergne, his eyes kept tracking back across the Aleser, searching out Aurverelle, and then the road south, and then Saint Blaise. Vanessa would be there by now. How was she being treated? If those fat burghers dared to give her so much as a moment's tears, he would—

Would what? Raze Saint Blaise? Even his grandfather had never contemplated such a thing. Trumping up charges of heresy against the fiercely independent Free Towns and thereby providing an excuse for political conquest was one thing, out-and-out siege and destruction was entirely another.

“My lord?”

Christopher blinked. His grandfather again. And Vanessa. “I'm sorry, Jerome. What were you saying?”

Jerome frowned in a manner that made him look every inch a monastery librarian confronted with a pack of unruly novices. He had obviously guessed what was on Christopher's mind.

But Vanessa was gone from Aurverelle, and Jerome more than likely assumed that she would soon depart from Christopher's thoughts, also. And so he went back to his facts and his projections . . . without comment.

There were many free companies, all independent, all deriving their income from their own form of pillage and extortion. In size and composition they ranged all the way from bands of ten or twenty destitute soldiers who sacked isolated steadings and an occasional unprotected village to virtual armies of knights, men-at-arms, and archers who wore fine armor, sold their booty through long-established agents, lent their service to emperor and king, and could make even the pope tremble and offer them large sums of money if they would only go away.

And they all moved and milled and scattered like flies on a dung heap. A troop might winter in a given area, might even spend an entire year in a captured castle, but spring would find it on the move again. Christopher could see a certain wisdom in hunting down the company that had attacked the wool shipment, but even had he still possessed a taste for battle, the brigands in question were probably pillaging somewhere else by now, the Aurverelle pack train just one conquest out of many. A regrettable one, too, for wool wains were a notoriously clumsy prize to dispose of. It would, doubtless, not happen again.

He said as much. Jerome was nodding. Pytor agreed, too, but he spread his hands. “But if master does not show them that he can protect his property . . .”

“I know,” said Christopher. “They'll think they can help themselves.” And they would indeed help themselves. The century had been born in war, had sustained itself by war, was ending in war. War was profitable, war was easy. Christopher could hardly blame out-of-work soldiers for falling back on the skills that they knew best. “But that's where we'll have them. Once they enter Adria, then they'll be on our lands. We can track them, pick our place to fight, and win.”

“But if they enter Adria, my lord,” said Jerome, “it will not be in twos and threes, but in hordes. Aurverelle alone cannot protect the entire land.”

In hordes. Yes, the good brother was right. And though Baron Roger had been unwilling to use overt force against the Free Towns, companies of robbers who had no homes, marital relations, or political appearances to keep up, would have no qualms about leveling a town or two.