Three Hearts and Three Lions (16 page)

“No!” Gui shrilled. “I am!”

Raimberge stood for a moment, until a hard smile touched her lips. “They both lie nobly,” she said. “The skin-turner is myself, though, good folk. And you need not slay me, only guard me until time that I go to my wedding in Vienne. That far from the lands of Faerie, I’ll be beyond range of the powers which forced me to change.”

“Believe her not,” said Gui. Yve shook his head violently. A hoarse call might have been Blancheflor taking the blame on herself.

“This gets us no further,” said Raoul. “We can’t risk letting the
loup-garou
go free. Father Valdabrun, will you ready the last rites for this family?”

Holger drew sword and sprang before the high seat. “You’ll not kill the innocent while I’m alive,” said a voice and a will he recognized with amazement as his own.

The blacksmith Odo clenched his fists. “I’d be loath to overfall you, Sir ’Olger,” he said, “but if I must for my children, I must.”

“If you are the Defender,” said Raoul, “then name us our enemy.”

The stiffness fell again, stretched close to breaking. Holger felt the three pairs of eyes bum at his back: careworn Yve, ardent Gui, Raimberge who had been so hopeful. He heard the wheezing of the sick woman.
O Christ who cast out demons, aid me now.
Only afterward did he realize he had said his first conscious prayer since childhood.

What came to the forefront of his mind was something else, the workaday engineer’s approach. He was no longer sure of his old belief that all problems in life were practical problems. But this one was. A question of rational analysis. He was no detective, but neither was the warg a professional criminal. There must be—

It blazed in him. “By the Cross, yes!” he shouted.

“What? What? What?” Men started to their feet. Holger waved his sword aloft. The words spilled from him. He didn’t know himself what he would say next, he was thinking aloud in a roar, but they heard him with wonder:

“Look, the one we’re after is shape-strong by birth. He doesn’t need any magical skin, like the swan-may here. But then his clothes can’t change with him, can they? So he must go forth naked. Frodoart told me, a moment before the wolf showed up, he’d just left his master full-armed in the hall. And alone. Though even with help Sir Yve couldn’t have gotten out of that armor, and back into it afterward, in the few minutes he had. So he’s not the warg.

“Gui tried to plead guilty too, to save whoever else was. But he’d already scuttled himself. He mentioned having seen me helmetless. I was for one minute, when I stopped to inquire my way here. I put the helmet back on when the racket started. The wolf couldn’t have seen that. He—no, she—she was inside a house. She broke in through the rear door and escaped out a front window, which had been shuttered. The only way Gui could have seen me bareheaded in the torchlight was from the top of the tower above his room. I noticed it sticking over the roofs. He must have gone up to watch the flocks being driven in. So he was not anywhere near the place we saw the warg.

“Lady Blancheflor—” He stopped. How on earth, on all the Earths, could he explain the germ theory of disease? “Lady Blancheflor has been sick, with an illness that the dog tribe doesn’t get. If changing into a wolf did not make her well, then she’d be too weak to dash around as I saw the animal do. If the change did make her well, the, uh, the agent causing the disease couldn’t live in her animal body. She wouldn’t have a fever and a runny nose at this moment, would she? In either case, she’s eliminated.”

Raimberge cowered back against the wall. Her father made a broken noise and twisted about, trying to reach her with his bound hands. “No, no, no,” he keened. A noise like the wolf itself lifted from the commons. They began to edge close, one mass of hands and weapons.

The girl dropped on all fours. Her face writhed and altered, horrible to watch. “Raimberge!” Holger bawled. “Don’t! I won’t let them—” Raoul’s spear stabbed for her. Holger knocked it aside and cut the shaft across with his sword.

Raimberge howled. Alianora dropped to her knees and caught the half-altered body in her arms. “Nay,” she pleaded. “Nay, my sister, come back. He swears he’ll save ye.” The jaws snapped at her. She got her forearm crosswise into the mouth, forcing lips over fangs so the wolf couldn’t bite. She wrestled the creature to a standstill. “Lassie, lassie, we mean ye well.”

Holger waded into the mob. Turmoil broke loose. But after he had knocked several down, with a fist or the flat of his blade, they quieted. They snarled and grumbled, but the man in the hauberk overawed them.

He turned to Raimberge. She had resumed her human form and lay weeping in Alianora’s embrace. “I didn’t want to be. I didn’t want to. It came on me. And, and, and I was so afraid they’d burn me—Is my soul lost, Father Valdabrun? I th-think I must be in hell already. The way those babies screamed—”

Holger exchanged a look with the priest. “Sick,” said the Dane. “She’s not evil of her own will. She can’t help it.”

Yve stared like a blind man. “I had thought it might be her, “ he mumbled. “When the wolf ran’ in, past me, and I knew where Blancheflor and Gui were—I barred the door. I hoped, if this could only pass over until she departed—”

Holger squared his shoulders. “I don’t see why not,” he answered. “The idea is perfectly sound, as I understand the matter. Let her get far enough away, and the Middle World influence will be too weak to affect her. Till then, of course, you’ll have to keep her under restraint. She’s sorry now, but I don’t think that’ll last.”

“At dawn it will, when her human soul awakens,” said the priest. “Then she will indeed need comforting.”

“Well,” said Holger, “nothing too serious ever happened. Her father can pay compensation to the people who suffered loss and the parents whose kids were injured. Start her off for Vienne as soon as possible. I daresay a hundred miles would be quite far enough for safety. No one in the Empire has to know.”

Raoul, with a black eye, threw himself at Sir Yve’s feet while Odo, with a bloody nose, fumbled to release the knight and his son. “Master, forgive us,” the peasant begged.

Yve made a weary smile. “I fear ’tis I must ask your forgiveness. And yours above all, Sir ’Olger.”

Raimberge lifted her wet face. “Take me off,” she stammered. “I, I, I feel the darkness returning. Lock me away till dawn. “She held out her arms for the ropes taken off her father. “Tomorrow, Sir Knight, I can truly thank you... who saved my soul from hell.”

Frodoart embraced Holger’s knees. “The Defender is come,” he said.

“Oh, Lord!” protested the Dane. “Please, lay off that nonsense. I mean, I hate emotional scenes and I only came here to bum a meal. But could I have some wine first?”

15

BESIDES THE NEED for haste, to get expert advice before Morgan le Fay thought up a new devilment, Holger felt embarrassed in Lourville. Yve’s family were grateful and so forth, but they didn’t need further intrusions on their privacy at such a difficult time. The commoners were rather overwhelming; he couldn’t venture out of the house without being mobbed by his admirers. Lady Blancheflor asked that he lay hands on her, and within hours she was on her feet. She’d been due to recover anyway, her influenza past the crisis, but Holger could foresee every case of measles and rheumatism for ten miles around being brought to him.

So, what with one thing and another, he only stayed one day, and made an early start on the next. Sir Yve insisted on presenting Alianora with a horse, and this was welcome. Some money would have been even more welcome, but of course no belted knight could bring up so crass a subject.

The next several days were pleasant. They drifted through hills and valleys and forests, sheltering when it rained, pausing at lakes to fish and swim. Now and then they glimpsed the white shape of a woods-fay, or a griffin hot and golden against the sun; but the Middle Worlders let them alone.

To be sure, Alianora, though a fine and lovely girl, had some drawbacks as a traveling companion. The self-cleaning, self-renewing properties of her swan tunic disconcerted Holger: too much like an actual skin growing on her. Then she peeled it innocently off at the first swimming hole and disconcerted him a good deal more. Her forest friends showed up from time to time, and a squirrel with an offering of fruits was okay; but when a lion stalked into camp and laid a fresh-killed deer at her feet, Holger’s nerves didn’t untwist for half an hour afterward. Worse was the moral necessity of giving her a full and fair account of himself, his origin and intentions. Not that she wasn’t quick to understand—but—

The real trouble was her own attitude toward him. Damn it, he did not want to compromise himself with her. A romp in the hay with someone like Meriven or Morgan was one thing. Alianora was something else. An affair with her wouldn’t be good for either party, when he meant to leave this world the first chance he got. But she made it hard for him to remain a gentleman. She was so shyly and pathetically hoping for an affair.

One evening he drew Hugi aside. He’d just spent an hour kissing Alianora goodnight, and had needed all his willpower—or won’t power—to stop at that and pack her off to sleep. “Look,” he said, “you know what’s going on with me and her.”

“Aye, so I do,” grinned the dwarf. “And a guid thing ’tis. She’s dwelt too long wi’ no near friends save beasties and the wee folk.”

“But... but you warned me to behave myself with her.”

“’That were afore I kenned ye well. Noo methinks ye’re a richt guid man for her; and the lassie needs a man. She and ye could reign o’er us in the woods. We’d be glad o’ ye.”

“Good grief! You’re no help whatsoever.”

“I been as helpfu’ as could be,” said Hugi in an injured tone. “Ye dinna know hoo oft I turned ma face, or wandered into the woods, to leave ye twa alane.”

“That’s not what—Oh, never mind.”

Holger lit his pipe and stared gloomily into the fire. He wasn’t any Don Juan. He couldn’t understand why one woman after another, in this world, should throw herself at him. Meriven and Morgan had had good practical reasons, but he wasn’t too dense to realize they had enjoyed their work more than usual. Alianora had quite simply fallen in love with him. Why? He had no illusions about his own irresistibility.

But of course that alter ego of his could be another story. He imagined that his slow return to forgotten habits showed in numberless subtle ways which transformed the total impression he made. What had he been like, this knight of the hearts and lions?

Well, let’s see. Figure it out on the basis of what had happened hitherto. Obviously a mighty warrior, which was what counted most in this world. A gusty, good-natured bruiser, not especially nimble-witted, but likeable. Something of an idealist, presumably: Morgan had spoken of his defending Law even if he stood to gain more from Chaos. He must have had a way with the ladies, or so wise a jade as she would hardly have taken him off to Avalon. And... and... that seemed to be all he could deduce. Or remember?

No, wait, Avalon. Holger looked at his right hand. That same hand had rested on a balustrade of green malachite, whose top was set with silver figures that had jewels in their centers. He remembered how the sun had fallen on the back of his hand, turning the hair to gold wires against the brown skin, and how the silver under his palm was warmer than the stone, and how the rubies glowed crimson. Straight down below the balustrade tumbled a cliff, which was of glass. From above he could see how the grottos broke light into a million rainbow shards, spraying the light outward again, hot sparks of red and gold and violet. The sea beneath had been so dark it was almost purple, with foam of amazing snowy whiteness where the cliff plowed the water... for Avalon stayed never in one place, the island floated over the western ocean in a haze of its own magic...

No more would come to mind. Holger sighed and composed himself for sleep.

After a week or so—he lost count of days—they left the wilderness and entered lands where the forest was thinned to copses. Grainfields billowed yellow across the hills. Shaggy little horses and cows pastured behind rail fences. The peasant homes grew numerous, mostly of rammed earth in this district, clustered in hamlets amid the cultivated acres. Here and there could be seen a stockaded wooden castle. The up-to-date ones of stone lay westward, where the Holy Empire held full sway. The mountains Holger had crossed, and the Faerie wall of dusk, were quite lost to sight. Northward, however, he saw the dim blue line of a much higher range, three of whose snowpeaks seemed to float pale and disembodied in the sky. Hugi said the Middle World lay beyond those too. No wonder the men hereabouts always went armed, even when working in the fields; no wonder the elaborate hierarchical civilization of the Empire was discarded for a frontier informality. The knights who put the travelers up two evenings in succession were unlettered, rough-fisted Western marshal types, though friendly enough and avid for news.

Toward sunset of their third day in the farmlands they entered Tarnberg, which Alianora said was the nearest thing to a city in the whole eastern half of the duchy. But its castle stood vacant. The baron had fallen with his sons in battle against heathen raiders from the north, his lady had gone west to her Imperial kinfolk, and no successor had yet arrived. It was a part of the general bad luck in the last few years, the radiation of Chaos as the Middle Worlders readied their powers. Now the Tarnberg men posted their own guard on the wooden walls, and governed themselves by an improvised council of estates.