Something Red (28 page)

Outside, the wind returned with force, and somewhere in the recesses of the keep a loose shutter was swinging open and closed, each swing producing a muffled boom at irregular intervals: a noise not loud, but one that gnawed at the nerves.

Lady Isabeau’s still beauty now looked less like an ivory figurine, and more like an image on a tomb. Only little Dame Aline made attempts at jest for a time, but gradually even her high spirits succumbed to the general air of dull anxiety, and eventually she gave up her attempts at conversation, and sank into a kind of appalled silence.

Sir Jehan’s fidgets increased; he made as though to eat more, but hesitated; at last, as though out of patience with something, he threw down his napkin upon the table, took his wife’s hand, and made to rise. The other men stood politely and bowed. Sir Jehan and Lady Isabeau said their good-nights and retired through the archway that led past the kitchen.

The meal resumed, but conversation was scant. Soon Lady Svajone’s face began to take on a sheen of perspiration, and she moved restlessly. Whether from the woodsmoke or the icy drafts from the window, she was evidently in some discomfort. Vytautas turned to her and took her wrist; the two esquires tensed. A look of deep concern ran among the three men, and they began making preparations
to retire. The doctor murmured apologies to the company on the dais. The esquires helped her up, and half-supported her as she tottered from the hall.

Hob just caught the glance that leaped between Nemain and her grandmother: a stony blank stare, whose very lack of expression, between those two who so often smiled on one another, marked it for Hob as some form of warning. A moment later Molly arose, and Nemain after her, close as a shadow. Sweeping her gaze over Jack and Hob, so that those two felt compelled to rise as well, Molly made her excuses to the company and left the hall.

T
HE MOMENT THEY HAD ENTERED
the outer of the two rooms set aside for their use, Molly turned to Nemain.

“It is here, is it not?” she asked her granddaughter.

“It is here,” said Nemain.

Molly turned away at once and stamped into the inner room, Nemain and Jack and Hob trailing slowly behind her, as the ocean trails up the strand, following the moon.

Once within the inner room, Molly stood a moment in immobile thought. Then she bade Nemain and Hob to remain, and taking Jack by the arm, drew him back out to the entrance room, and closed the door behind them.

Hob turned in puzzlement to Nemain. “What is here?”

Nemain said, “The bane of Osbert’s Inn.” Then she added, unhelpfully, “We’re just after feeling it, in the hall.”

“In the hall? You felt that they were here? The ones who, who killed Marg— The folk at the inn?”

“Aye,” she said, but distractedly: she was looking at the door to the outer room, where Molly’s and Jack’s voices could be heard, but indistinctly.

Hob was stunned. It was as though the castle had been turned inside out. The stout walls that rose about them, the locks, the armed men, changed from haven to snare, and the more tightly sealed the fortress was, the tighter they were caught.

The door opened, and the two adults entered. Molly looked grim, and Jack subdued. Jack closed the door firmly behind them. The clack as the latch engaged sounded like a poacher’s bent-branch snare snapping tight.

CHAPTER 18

M
OLLY WAS PACING THE FLOOR
before the fire. Nemain sat on a stool beside the fire, watching her grandmother. They were comparing their thoughts and perceptions, picking at the mystery, but again it was all in English.

Jack Brown and Hob were seated on a bench against the wall. Ever since Molly had spoken to the dark man, something was different about him. Hob tried to watch him without being seen to be watching. What was it? The normally stoic Jack now presented a serious, even a worried, countenance. This was not surprising, given their extraordinary circumstances, but beneath the concern was a furtive air foreign to Jack, openhanded Jack, kindhearted placid Jack. It was almost an air of guilt; and here and there beneath that, far down, glints of a hard glee.

Jack turned sideways and stretched his length on
the bench, and put a brawny arm across his eyes, as though settling for sleep. It was hard to tell if he was beginning to doze, or yet listening to the discussion. Hob looked away. His eyes roamed idly around the room, but he followed the women’s debate keenly.

Jack Brown had bolted the outer door to the rooms before coming into the inner room, and closed the inner door as well, another barrier against eavesdroppers. Jack had also reached up and twitched the door cloth across on its rod, so that the door was covered. The door cloth, a tapestry depicting a hunting scene, was there to forestall drafts, but had the additional virtue of muffling what was said within. Now Hob found himself seated opposite the door, contemplating the weaver’s art.

In the tapestry a stylized array of knights and foresters rode in a wood, carrying boar-spears: hunting spears with a crossbar that prevented an impaled boar, mad with rage, from forcing its way along the shaft to kill its tormentor. To one side a boar was depicted backed against a tree, encircled by alaunts, the powerful dogs used to hunt boar and bear. At its feet a dog lay dead.

“It may be the moon that is calling to it, and the moon waxing these past nights,” said Molly, “or it may be that someone has entered the castle and we not knowing of it. I felt it, I felt it! There in the hall, this night, this hour! As I have not felt it these nights past. Yet I cannot tell where it is; no more can I tell who it might be.” She came to the door; she flicked irritably at the edge of the tapestry, then turned and stalked slowly back past the fire. “But be said by me, we should not trust this wolfish lord.”

Nemain watched her closely.

“Oh aye, ’twas there tonight,” the girl said slowly. “I felt it there,
seanmháthair,
and yet I cannot think it is Sir Jehan.”

Molly halted and looked down at her. “That foxy jackeen! ‘I have been to the Irish wars.’ And him looking at us from the sides of his eyes
the while.” And after a moment: “ ‘A hedge queen,’ Himself says! This back-of-the-beyond Norman lordling!” Hob realized that she was far more angry at Sir Jehan’s gibes than she had appeared the other night. “These Normans! These new men, with their new-wrought titles!”

She resumed her pacing, walking up and down the small room, her arms hugging herself beneath her heavy breasts, her lips pursed, frowning at the floor as though she might find the answer in the random designs the strewn rushes made there. Her passage raised a piquant scent: to the fragrance of the rushes themselves, bruised beneath her feet, was added that of the dried fennel, red mint, cowslips, that were sprinkled in amid the long rustling stems. Hob found it enjoyable even at this tense moment, one of the pleasures of castle life that had not been found in Father Athelstan’s austere household.

It was doubtful that Molly noticed the spiced air: she was deep in her own thoughts. “His own dogs would not come nigh him!” she said viciously. And then, almost muttering: “It must be Himself, it must be.”

“Never, never. I cannot feel it in him. ’Twas the high table that the dogs would not come nigh.”

“Yet ’tis here, you yourself have said it! And why else should not the dogs come nigh the high table?”

“Others sat or served at the high table as well as Himself,
seanmháthair,
and one of them may be . . . I feel it to be here as well . . . ” said Nemain, and stopped. And a moment later: “But ’tis not male.”

“Not male!”

“I am not to be moved from that belief,” said Nemain.

A draft from some chink or crevice set the tapestry rippling. That, and the firelight’s flicker over the hanging, drew Hob’s eyes again. The figures seemed to move against the forest background. Hob came to his feet, his eyes fixed on the boar at bay, the dogs living and dead.

“Mistress!”

“Hob, what is—”

“Mistress, did Lady Svajone not pass by the inn without stopping?”

Molly and Nemain were staring at him as he stood: his stance was rigid, his voice strained, his mouth drawn down.

“And did she not tell us . . . that, that they parted from the masons at the ford; they came here. They came straightway here. She
told
us this.”

“Yes, child, but—”

“Yet she knew!”

That he would interrupt Molly not once but twice was a mark of his distraction. He gazed fixedly at the tapestry, where the shivering fabric made knight and forester, horse and dog, seem to move. The merest mocking semblance of life.

“You told her that the dogs were slain, but naught of the manner of their slaying. Yet she knew! If even those terrible dogs could be slain, she said,
their bellies slashed open like fishes.
As though she’d seen! But Mistress, she said she was past the inn and away and gone long before. And all who were within the inn are dead.
Who is it would know how the dogs were killed?
”

For a moment they both just looked at him, a blue gaze, a green gaze, and then Molly put a hand over her eyes. After a moment she drew it down her face, with a motion as of one who, stepping indoors from a rainstorm, wipes the blinding water from her eyes.

She turned to Nemain. “Have I not chosen well?”

Nemain said gravely, “You have chosen well,
seanmháthair,
and I am pleased with your choice.”

Molly turned back. “Blind! Hob,
a rún,
you have seen it, and all our art blind as a mole. Cobwebs, cobwebs! Yet the instant you’re after saying it . . . ” She tilted her head and spat onto the hearth, a curiously ritualistic action. “The thinnest twig may serve to break a cobweb.” She turned and looked away to the corner of the room, her head raised as
though to see someone on the level above. “I feel her now, I feel her now! Nemain, it is she, is it not?”

“I believe it’s truth he’s spoken,
seanmháthair.
It seems so, so . . . Well, now I can see it, I can feel her, now that Hob—and I said ’twas not male! But how did we come to be so blind?” said Nemain.

“She’s after hiding from us, and someone else, someone with a mort of power, spreading the cloak under which she’s lying concealed. Spinning the cobweb. Someone I did not suspect at all, and who else might that be? Not those two golden guard dogs of hers! I wonder what other accomplishments our outlander doctor may boast. Can he cast such a glamour over that thing, that we could not perceive her, nor perceive the glamour itself?”

Hob had gone back to the tapestry, and to his thoughts, hunting along his own trail; now he spoke up. “If Lady Svajone was there, Mistress, and her wagon is now out in the courtyard, then, then—”

“Then what, lad?”

“Then even now she must have the thing that killed the dogs chained up in that wagon!”

Abruptly Jack got up and passed behind the tapestry and went into the other room, closing the door again behind him very softly.

Nemain looked down; she moved the toe of one slipper in a small meaningless pattern, easing the rushes aside to expose a patch of fine-grained planking. There was a brief silence, and then Molly said gently, “Hob, Lady Svajone—she
is
the thing that killed the dogs.”

“Oh, it, no, she couldn’t, she—she’s just
little,
and she’s old, and sickly, and . . . ” His voice trailed away.

“She is a shapeshifter,” said Molly, “and when she has put on her Beast form, she will be neither little nor will she be sickly.”

Nemain had been silent, standing with a blind eye and her mind cast back over what the old woman had done, had said. Now she spoke up: “They are horrid liars entirely: all that trembling and keening when
we came here, clinging to you,
seanmháthair,
and she with a great showing of fear, and saying just that bit too much, about the dogs. And didn’t the doctor speak to her at that moment, in her tongue, and doesn’t it seem that he is fretting about her well-being, and feeling of her wrist and saying how she must be calm, and she’s just after hearing him say this and we see her flying into your arms. But that was a warning he spoke in their tongue, in those soothing tones, as though he was comforting her, that was, and she hearing it knew to beware her speech, and turn our thoughts elsewhere, and so she’s flying into your arms, that we might not notice her indiscretion.”

Molly gave a great gusty sigh. “So it is, and fool us they did, and it’s we who must set it right.”

She drew Hob to her, and put a proprietary arm around his shoulder, and looked at Nemain. She spoke in a somewhat distracted fashion.

“He has an eye in his head, and a sharp ear as well, and the cunning to use them.” Here she pushed Hob a little distance away and looked at him and thumped him lightly on the back, as though he were a horse she contemplated buying. “He is already on his way to be tall, and will grow strong; and he was not behindhand, on the wagon roof, that day we fought the forest bandits.”

Nemain said again, “You have chosen well,
seanmháthair.
”

Molly turned Hob loose, and sighed again. “
Arragh,
let me think.”

Molly sat on the side of the bed, her elbows on her thighs and her hands hanging down between her knees. Her head was down as if she studied the rushes at her feet. After a while she spoke to Hob again, but in a low voice, distant, as though she were thinking hard of something else all the while.

“These Beasts . . . the Northmen were after using them in Erin; not always, but now and then, here and there; any road, ’tis long since. Every Norther king had some in his household; berserkers they called them, the bear-shirt men. Some people said it was bare-shirt, that they’d
fight all naked, like the British men and my forefathers, so long ago; and some said they wore shirts made from bearskins; but my great-grandfather saw them in battles, and they were not men in bear shirts. They were men, and then they were bears.”

She shook her head. “Hard to kill as they were, some of them died, and weren’t they men again once death had a grip on them, and they with not a stitch on their bodies. I have myself seen those who turn to wolves, and to . . . other Beasts. Poor Eadmund, the prentice at the inn, maundering of a fox while he was dying—it may be that this outlander witch takes a fox’s form when she is at her killing. ’Twould be of a great size, that fox, to deal with ten dogs, and they Osbert’s famous killers at that, like so many kittens. These shapeshifters, they grow in power, they grow in size, the more years that they are at it, killing and eating of the flesh of men: and she is old, old.”