The Very Best of Kate Elliott (42 page)

Aunt Marguerite wept, when they held a council that morning in the church, Uncle and Aunt and the eldest in the village, those that had their wits about them still. Uncle Heldric offered Daniella his cloak, but he did not beg her to stay. He held little Blanche on his lap. She was smiling now, playing with his beard, and he even laughed a bit. He was fond of Dhuoda’s child, what was left to him of his only daughter, favored child, the best-loved and the sweetest.

“You take my cloak,” he said gruffly to her.

“You have nothing to replace it with,” said Daniella. “Take my mother’s wedding shawl in exchange.”

“Nay, child,” he replied, looking shamed by her generosity, “we have nothing else to give you. It is all you have left of her.”

She gave Matthias four silver coins, which was all she could spare, knowing that she would need the rest for the care and feeding of the gelding, and Matthias sobbed as disconsolately as he had when their Da had been buried, and their Mother, dead bearing a child. He begged to come with her. Perhaps he even meant it, but with the coin he could buy himself a start on his own farm and get a wife, and like their Da he had the gift of understanding the land and the seasons, for all that he was scared of the wild lands surrounding the fields.

“You are meant to stay here,” she said to him: To Blanche she left Dhuoda’s bridal cloth, and to Robert, a single kiss of forgiveness.

“You must go to the Convent of Sant Valeria,” said Deacon Joceran. “You must walk seven days east and ten days north, and there at the town known as Autun ask for further direction. At the convent you will find, if not protection, at least advice, for the Abbesses there are known for their wisdom and for their understanding of the forbidden arts. You must not linger too long in one place as you travel, or these creatures, these galla, may bring mischief onto the people among whom you stay, and you will be named as a witch or a malefici and driven out, or worse. Take this letter and give to the Abbess at the convent. They will take you in.”

Daniella looked long and searchingly at the marks on the parchment, but they meant nothing to her, just as the book left behind in the saddlebags meant nothing.

“She will try to find me,” said Daniella suddenly “For the book, if nothing else.”

“If she has the power, if she yet lives, she will find you,” said Deacon, “but whether that would bode good or ill for you, I cannot say, child.”

Daniella did not reply, but she felt in her heart that she left Sant Laon, the only place she had ever known, not just to spare her family, to spare the others, but to seek after that meeting, as if it was ordained whether she willed it or no.

Aunt Marguerite brought her bread and cheese, which she put in one of the saddlebags, and Uncle Heldric brought her mother’s knife, which he had sharpened to a good edge. She tucked it in her belt, kissed Matthias one final time, and took the reins of Resuelto from Robert.

“Go with the Lord and Lady,” said Deacon Joceran, signing a benediction over her.

“Go safely,” said Aunt Marguerite. Little Blanche, caught up in her grandda’s arms, began to cry, reaching her arms out for Daniella.

But Daniella turned quickly away from them and started down the lane, leading Resuelto, since she did not know how to ride. She did not want them to see the tears in her eyes. She did not want them to fear for her or grieve for her. It was bad enough that they must grieve for Dhuoda, for Da, for her Mother. Let them believe that she went with a light heart, that it was a fate she went to meet willingly. It was the only kindness she could show them, as she left them behind, probably forever.

The gelding walked with dignity beside her, ears forward, eager to explore the road ahead. She kept her eyes on the dirt lane and the wood, and as she passed under cover of the trees, she looked back once to see her village, free of any trailing mist or tendrils of fog, lying in the bright warmth of the noonday sun. The sky was clear above, as blue as she had ever seen it.

At last, with a wrench, she turned to face the road ahead once more, and she walked resolutely on toward unknown lands.

T
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PIRITWALKER
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TORY

IT MIGHT HAVE BEEN the dog, or it might have been the woman. He wasn’t sure.

When he had prowled into the garden from the enclosed parkland beyond, the little pug dog had been yapping in a skull-rattling fashion. His first instinct was to shut it up. He’d also wanted to cleanse his palate of those tickling feathers from the peahen he’d had so much fun chasing down in the parkland. So he’d bounded after the dog, snapped it up, and shaken it. The dog was small and fatty and sour-smelling, but at least it didn’t have feathers.

Then a woman’s voice tensely said, “Blessed Venus, step back out of sight, Felicia. A slow step. Don’t startle it. Just back away and it will eat that hells-cursed pug and not you.”

“But do you see what it is, Ami?”

“Yes, I see what it is. It is a very large and very hungry saber-toothed cat.”

He raised his head just as the dog weakly wriggled, its blood dribbling down his dagger-like incisors.

“It’s so beautiful.”

A woman stood on marble steps lined by troughs of prickly winter shrubs that were dusted by snow. She was anything but prickly. She was delectably plump. She was wearing indoor clothes with a bodice laced tightly over a full bosom and white petticoats pulled up to keep their hems out of the snow. Her ankles were so shapely he wasn’t sure whether he wanted to gnaw on them or lick them.

The pug gave a last little farting gasp.

Her ankles, or the pungent scent. Hard to say which triggered the sudden flowing river of change that cut through his lean cat’s body like the tide of a dream changing him from one creature into another. He shivered out of the skin of the cat in which he’d been born and lived in his natural home in the spirit world, and slipped into the skin of the man’s body he wore here in the Deathlands.

Which meant he found himself sitting on his bare ass in cold, slimy snow.

He spat out a foul-tasting hairy mouthful of bloody skin. The pug plopped limply across his lap like an incongruous set of lumpy drawers. Scraps of the clothing he had been wearing when he’d changed earlier from man into cat shed onto the ground around him with a smattering of pats and thuds. A torn hank of boot leather was caught between toes. His long black hair, and the dead dog, were his only covering.

How on earth did creatures survive in this blistering cold?

“Oh! My!”

He looked up to see the woman the other one had called Ami venture onto the steps. She was tall, strong like a whip, much darker in skin than the first, and with a magnificent cloud of black hair surrounding her head. She also had a metal stick in her hand which she held as if she knew how to whack with it. She halted beside the paler, plumper one called Felicia. Together they stared at him.

“Yes, that was my thought, too,” said Felicia. “He’s gorgeous.”

He wiped his blood-smeared mouth with the back of a hand before smiling at them, for he was sure his half sister Cat would have told him to use proper manners. “I have no clothes. They came off. My apologies.”

The two women looked at each other. The wordless interchange reminded him of Catherine and her spoiled and irritating cousin Beatrice (no actual relation to him, he was glad to know!). Cat and Bee spoke a great deal without saying anything. Sometimes they did it when they rattled on with words to addle their listeners into thinking they hadn’t even a pair of half thoughts to rub together into one. Other times they displayed the uncanny ability to look at each other and come to an unspoken agreement.

“And I’m cold,” he added, aggrieved the two women hadn’t already noticed that he would be cold because he had no garments. Cat would have noticed. “I’m very very cold. And I’d like to wash out my mouth. I didn’t mean to bite the pug,” he added, for it abruptly occurred to him that the rules were different here and he could not just take what he wanted. “Perhaps it was a favorite of someone. However unlikely that may seem.”

“That nasty little beast!” said Felicia, taking another step down as she looked him over. “It pisses on the couches and bites us as it wishes, and we are the ones who get slapped for it by the mistress.”

Rory considered the dead dog. “My apologies, then, if there will be trouble for you because of what I did.” He grasped it by the scruff and hoisted it with a sigh. “It is an unsightly creature. But I suppose it’s dead now and can’t be living again.”

Ami gasped. “Blessed Mother, Felicia! Don’t go any closer! You don’t know what manner of creature he is. He could be anything, prowling about on Solstice Night!”

Felicia reached the base of the steps and halted on a strip of pavement swept free of snow. “What’s your name?” she asked boldly. “How could you be a saber-toothed cat one moment and a . . . man the next?”

The tall one gave a snorting sort of sound like a choked-off laugh. She strode down the steps in an arrestingly commanding fashion, a woman who knew how to take charge. Halting beside Felicia, she brandished the metal stick, which he finally recognized as an implement with which you could poke fires.

“What is your name? Are you a cold mage? I don’t think so, for I never heard that cold mages could change shape. It’s only creatures from the spirit world who can change.”

Still holding the pug, he stood. Their gazes took in the line of his body, and then they looked at each other again, and Felicia’s brow raised in a deliciously charming way.

“Roderic Barr, at your service,” he said, offering a smile to sweeten the introduction, “but you may call me Rory. That’s my pet name. What shall I do with the dog? How can I help you? I wouldn’t want you to be punished for me biting it. That doesn’t seem fair.”

“Little enough about life is fair,” said the tall one, but Rory noted how she nudged Felicia with her hip, as if reminding her to not say anything. “How did you get in the garden?”

“There was a tree and a wall and another tree, easy to leap and climb if you know trees. Where I come from, I’m used to trees and walls. I’m very agile.”

“I don’t doubt that,” murmured Felicia with a sensuous upward curve of her rich red lips.

“Hush,” said the tall one. “Don’t even think it, Fee. He’s some kind of spirit man. My grandmother would tell you such creatures cross over from the spirit world to seduce women.”

“And then?” asked Felicia. “What happens then?”

“Then everyone is pleased,” said Rory. “Is there something wrong with that?”

A bell rang, shaken impatiently. Ami and Felicia winced.

“Where is my Coco?” cried a booming female voice from within. “Where is my little chub’ums? He’ll take his death if you force him outdoors to do his widdle business! Really! Why you cannot let him do his business under your cots as he likes to do for it’s safest and warmest there in these cold winter nights . . . Girls? Girls? Where have those lazy sluts gone?”

“Hide!” said Felicia. “Behind the troughs.”

“What about—?” He shook the limp body with a hand rather as he had earlier shaken its living self in his jaws.

“Hurry!” Ami leaped down to grab him by an elbow and drag him to the prickly shrubs.

He’d grown up in a pride of saber-toothed cats ruled by his mother’s implacable will, so he simply never argued with females. With the oozing pug still in hand, he dashed behind the shrubs and crouched. The stone was like ice against his bare feet. The needles scratched him most painfully. But when a woman dressed in a robe of flowing gold swept out onto the patio at the top of the steps, bellowing about her chub’ums and her ungrateful servants, she did not see him. Another small dog was tucked in the angle of one of her arms. This one was even fatter and uglier than the corpse he held.

“Where is he?” she demanded.

For a moment he thought she had seen him, but then he realized her only thought was for the missing dog.

“We just saw him run inside through the parlor curtains, Your Highness,” said Ami with a smile so false it would have curdled milk.

“My poor frightened Coco! You chased him! You heartless beasts!” The highness happened to be standing closest to plump Felicia. She slapped her. The pug on her arm snapped at Felicia, teeth catching on her sleeve. Felicia took a step back, and the highness grasped her sleeve and wrenched her back toward the growling dog. “Don’t try to run away from your crime!”

A snarl escaped Rory, and he shifted forward to his toes and would have leaped up to pounce on her but Ami pounded the metal poker into the stone once in what he took as a warning to stay put. The pug began to huff out a wheezy cascade of barks. Its beady black eyes were fixed on the shrubbery, for it had clearly smelled Rory or the blood of its missing companion.

“We have not seen him, Your Highness,” repeated Ami with a false smile.

Yes, yes, obviously they were lying to protect themselves; he could understand that. But that awful woman wasn’t being fair to them at all. Yet by the flash of Ami’s gaze toward the shrubbery, as if fearful he might spring out, he knew he had to stay hidden.