They came across a narrow, sandy track that led downward off the slope. He urged Hawk to a slow canter, ducking branches as the path took them again into the woods. Princess Melanthe held to him, quiet now.
He brought Hawk to a quick halt at the edge of the trees. In a burst of noise a flock of wild geese took wing from the deserted garden plots.
Beyond the fallow earth lay the priory, sharp sandstone walls rising clear of the wasteland, the imposition of God on the wilderness. The bell tower stood solid and lofty, crowned foursquare by spires, with the domestic ranges huddling in its shadow. Ruck had not seen the priory for half a dozen years, and then only for a night's lodging before the monks ferried him across the river. Ten and six habited brothers and a few laymen had occupied it then, a small house—but at least they had kept the garden plots neat and enriched, and their livestock fed.
Now only a single white goose, wings clipped, was left behind on the empty field. It waddled toward where Hawk stood, honking impatiently.
Ruck examined the open space and all the distance along the trees. "Wait here with the horse," he said softly. He dismounted, tossing Hawk's reins over a branch to make the destrier stand. Halfway across the field the goose paused, turning a bright eye toward Ruck.
Using the thickets of bog myrtle as cover, he circled the priory's cleared land, moving out toward the river. The ferry landing was deserted. Only one of the monks' sturdy rafts lay beached, tied by a thick, sandy snake of hemp to its high-tide mooring.
Ruck squinted up at the priory. It was possible that behind the walls and heavy doors, the monks worshiped as usual, that it was simply happenstance—or fear of outlaws—that kept all inside, including the lay brothers, on this winter day.
But there were no bells.
For a long while he lay in a copse and watched. The white goose poked and prodded in the open ground, feeding near Hawk. When he was sure Nones had passed, with no bell rung and no sign or sound of human voice, Ruck finally decided to chance crossing to the gate beneath the guesthouse. The goose came hurrying after him, demanding and impudent, nipping at his heels. He knocked the bird aside, but it followed, making loud claims on his charity.
Before the gate he paused with his hand lifted—and then pulled the bell rope thrice in slow time. The sound seemed huge and clear, though it was only the gate bell and not the tower.
There was no answer. He gave the gate a push, but it was barred from inside.
The goose renewed its excited honking. Ruck turned, walking along the wall and around the corner to the church porch with the goose following doggedly. He shoved at the outer door. It gave easily beneath his effort, squeaking wide on strap hinges. Beyond, the church doors stood open, revealing the tall, stark void rising in ranks of double arches that demanded the eye follow them to the great window where the white light shone down, jeweled with the small figures of saints.
Ruck swept a wary glance about the sanctuary. It stood silent after the echoes of his entry died away.
It seemed sacrilegious to go armed into a church, but he made a brief obeisance, crossing himself and asking pardon in respect of the holy place. He walked to the side aisle. The sound of his steps on the stone-tiled floor came back in more reverberations, each finished by the jangle of his spurs.
He unbarred the side door and opened it onto the cloister. The monks' carrels and book cupboards stood unused, but there was a volume lying open upon a lectern, with parchment beside it and an inkpot still uncapped, as if a black-robed figure had left it just a moment before. Loose chickens scratched in the dirt.
"Oyeh!" Ruck called. "Haylle, good monks!"
He had no answer, nor truly expected one. Moving quickly, he crossed the cloister-garth, ducking through a barrel-vaulted passage that brought him out on the stableyard behind the guesthouse and refectory.
The livestock was missing, but he saw no sign of struggle. There were still cattle tracks in the mud, a few days old at most. A green-glazed jug sat on a bench, full of soured milk.
Ruck swore softly on Saint Julian. He strode back through the vaulted slype and stopped, looking hard at each window over the cloister arches. He began an examination of the undercroft, though the doors were locked and the narrow cracks between boards showed only blackness inside. The parchment upon the abandoned lectern rustled lightly in the silent air.
Ruck walked to the podium. He put his hand on the parchment. He was no scholar to have studied Latin; he read French and English, but little more. Nevertheless he ran his gloved finger down what was clearly a letter, scowling over each word. He skimmed the salutation, which directed the missive to the bishop of Chester. From liturgies he recognized the words for "humble brethren beseech you," and "hear us," and a reference to "after Christmas." With difficulty he followed a passage describing a brother—the cellarer, he thought—a trip, the village of Lyerpool, and something about a swine and candles.
The next sentence said that all at Lyerpool were dead or ailing.
Ruck read it again, his finger on each word. Mortuum, he was certain of that. Omnis and invalidus he knew, also. He could not translate it any other way.
A slow dread began to grow in him as he passed his finger down the page. Miasma malignus. Pestis.
He pushed away so hard and suddenly that he overturned the lectern. It crashed upon the stone, the dry inkpot shattered. Chickens clucked and fluttered overtop one another in alarm. Ruck walked swiftly along the cloister. The cemetery lay beyond the eastern range. He found admission beside the chapter, house, another dark passage that opened to winter grass beyond.
In the open ground there were ten new graves. On the far side of the chapter house, over a wall, he counted two more in the burying ground for laymen. Twelve—and the others fled. He stood by the wall and put his forehead down on his locked fists.
He tried to conjure Isabelle's glowing features, tried to ask her to beg God to spare His children. Or if the pestilence must come again to castigate mankind, to let it take Ruck this time, so that he would not have to watch the whole world die around him once more. He was as wicked as any other; he deserved affliction as surely as the next man.
And yet he did not mean it. He could not see Isabelle in his mind, not anymore, and the willful flame of life burned stubbornly, deaf to fear and fueled by flesh—he realized amid his despair that he was hungry. The Princess Melanthe was in his charge, another link to human clay. She was worldly passion, hot desire—and like enough she would be glad to eat, as well.
* * *
He caught up Hawk's reins, untangling them from the brush. "Come, be no cause for us to biden here."
He said nothing of plague. She asked naught, only looked down at him from the pillion with strange innocence, as if she did not comprehend the truth of their situation even yet. She held the furs awkwardly about her shoulders, her fingers pale and stained with dried blood beneath their load of glittering rings. Her eyes seemed sooty dark instead of clear, tiny lines at the corners that he had not noticed before. The cold made her cheeks red, marring their smooth whiteness. With wonder he realized that she was not now so very beautiful as he had thought.
No longer a princess—only a woman, not even comely, but cold and apprehensive. And instead of repelling him, it made all his senses rise a hundredfold in response, hot greed to protect and possess her, things beyond honor or vows.
With a sudden move he turned his face away from her. He gathered Hawk's reins and led the horse out of the trees down to the ferry landing. Across the river Mercy, a mile distant, the castle of Lyerpool was a silent gray shadow; no ships lying in the water below it; no sign of life that he could discern on the other side.
"We moten cross while the tide runs in," he said, halting the destrier.
He raised his arms to her. She shifted her skirts, showing a flash of her white hose and green long-toed boots. She put her hands on his shoulders, but he barely felt that through his armor; his mind was fastened on the brief image of her boots and ankles, trimmed
in silver and fine as an elven's slippers.
He released her instantly, but she did not move away, only took hold of his sword belt and stood beside him. The furs dropped to the ground.
He reached up and yanked the ties free on the bags, searching out her cloak. The emerald wool came loose in a puff of breeze as he dragged it down.
She still held to his belt, as if loath to let go. The shock of her lover's death, the sudden transition in circumstances from rich comfort to cold peril—he would not have blamed any woman who succumbed to distress. But since the fit had left her, she seemed subdued, even sleepy, indifferent to time or destination.
When she made no move away from him, he stepped back, disengaging her hand from his belt as gently as he could, careful not to crush her fingers in the metal of his gloves.
"Be nought fearful, lady," he said. "Put on the cloak and go aboard."
She seemed not to hear him. He swept the cloak around her shoulders and caught her up in his arms.
The raft was near to floating in the rise of the tide. His stride cleared a half yard of shallows as he sprang onto the boards. He set her on her feet, holding her muffled female figure steady as the casks and boards rocked beneath them.
"My lady—" He kept his hands on her shoulders. "Are ye ill?"
"Nay," she said remotely. "Where do we go?"
"Across the river, Your Highness."
"The monks—" Her eyes came to his, wide and dark. "Were they dead?"
He hesitated for a long moment. "Yea, madam. Dead or departed."
She seemed bewildered at that, like a child that had been asked an incomprehensible question. She turned away from him and sank down into a huddle on the boards.
Ruck watched her for a moment. "I will keep you, lady. I swear it."
He jumped ashore to unload their meager baggage and toss it onto the raft. Experienced in water passages, Hawk made no objection to being led into the shallows and onto the unsteady surface: the horse put his big hoof on the boards and pulled it off again, then came in one great splattering lunge that tipped the raft, grounding it at one corner. He stood splay-legged and wild-eyed, until Ruck dressed the horse in his chaufrain, with its blinding pieces that narrowed his vision.
Hawk calmed immediately, as if what he could not see did not exist. Ruck led him a few steps, refloating the grounded casks by shifting the horse's weight.
The princess sat with the baggage. Ruck cast off the hempen line, took up a pole, and shoved, pushing them away from the shallows. The raft spun gently. He walked to the other side and poled there.
They drifted into open water. He unlashed the great oar that propelled and steered the unwieldy vessel, letting it swing loose between the thole-pins. When he looked up to make certain of the princess, he saw that she had settled herself against the bags, her cloak wrapped about her. She was gazing into the water.
He grasped the thick paddle with both hands and put his back into rowing. The next time he looked toward her, she had fallen fast asleep.
The raft spun slowly across the river, carried sometimes upstream on the tide, and sometimes downstream on a wayward current. Ruck could not guide the vessel with the skill the monks had used: even with the great oar, the casks drifted at the mercy of the water, so that it took a long time to cross. The incoming stream and a wind off the sea overbore the current, propelling them up the estuary, away from Lyerpool and the priory. Ruck thought he saw a figure moving in the village, but he could not be sure, and soon enough even the castle was lost to sight.
He took a landing where it came. Along a shoreline of coppice and reeds, the raft hit bottom. He poled it in as close as he could, and still had to wade through a spear's length of shallows.
The princess seemed reluctant to wake, huddling herself closer when he knelt and spoke to her. He pulled off his glove and pressed his hand to her forehead, but she was cool, her skin chapped with wind, not fever. "Ne may I sleepen?" she mumbled plaintively when he touched her. "I want to sleepen a little while."
He did not disagree, just picked her up and carried her again. The motion seemed to revive her a little; she sat in the sandy clearing he'd chosen for their camp with her arms clasped about her knees. She watched him silently as he slogged back and forth, moving the bags ashore.
Then, as he knelt to fetter Hawk, she turned sharply, her eyes on the shoreline of the Wyrale. "Listen!"
Ruck hurled himself to his feet, grabbing his sword. As he stood, he heard bells, dreamlike and soft; and at the same moment saw the white speck flash against dark trees.
"Gryngolet," she whispered, with her eyes fixed on the distance.
Almost as if it heard the longing in her voice, the pale falcon soared upward, turning black against the sky, and dipped into a wheeling curve toward them. It skimmed across the river with powerful fast beats, striking upward again, spiraling above them until it was naught but an atom in the winter-blue heights.
"She waits on us!" The princess sprang to her feet. "The lure—before she rakes away!"
Ruck dropped his sword. Both of them pounced upon the bags, tearing through them for the falcon's furniture. Ruck found the hawking-pouch, proffering it with a muttered prayer of thanks that he'd brought it. She snatched the prize from his hands.
White leather it was, embroidered in silver and jeweled like all the rest of her possessions. Emeralds caught the sun and sparkled on her gauntlet as she thrust her hand into the heavy glove. Even the lure itself was decorated with tiny gems at the ring and fastened along the shafts of the heron's feathers, with one splendid diamond blazing on the body.
She looked up. Ruck watched her face as she followed the falcon's tower. He had thought her not so beautiful in the unsparing light of day, but he found himself mistaken again. Witchlike, she had transformed herself to loveliness once more, as the falcon changed its nature from earthbound to sky-free in one leap.
He turned to find the bird and could not see it, the black speck gone so high it was beyond sight. Her hand swept upward. The sun took the lure as it arced over their heads, scattering brilliant light. Hawk pricked his ears at the faint rush of the cord and feathers spinning through the air. The princess kept her face to the sky, her arm outstretched against the blue, her gauntlets sparkling, green fire and silver flying from her fist.
She called her falcon, spinning the lure; a carol of love, half laughter—and the bird came, dropping hard from the sky.
Ruck heard the stoop before he saw it. The bells screamed one long, high note as the falcon hurtled downward, a prick on the blue that became a dot, a lancet, an arrow bolt, a scythe, its wings bowed close in two thousand feet of fall. The lure rose to it, aflame with emeralds.
At the instant of strike, a fan of white burst open, wings spread wide against the glitter as the hit sent a crack of sound echoing across the water; the lure shot downward and the falcon threw up into the air, jesses dangling. The lure impacted the ground, spraying sand, and sailed off again under Princess Melanthe's hand on the cord.
They began a dance, the woman and the bird, a swinging and sweeping dance that defied the compass of the earth, marked by the flash of emeralds, the bells, and the white glory of the falcon's twisting flight as it drove and stooped and chased the toll. Around and around the lure spun, beckoning and evading, mercurial, up and down and doubled back, the falcon keen and nimble in pursuit—an eternity— and yet before Ruck could take his eyes from them, before he could imprint the picture on his mind, before he could overcome the irresistible rise of his heart at the sight of the falcon's dance, it was over.
She ended the flight in a fashion he had never seen. Instead of letting the toll drop onto the ground for the falcon to take, she swung the lure up and caught it into her other hand, lifting it like a pagan priestess calling to the sun. The bird shot past, chopping once at the feathered toll with her talons. Then she swung wide and slanted back, checking hard.
With wings outspread the falcon came to the glove, silvered talons open to grip fast.
In a regal sweep she settled, folding her wings and reaching greedily for the lure.
"Poor Gryngolet!" The princess was breathless, laughing and weeping at once. "Poor Gryngolet, my beauty, my love! 'Tis a foul trick, I vow. We have no garnish for your reward."
The falcon spread her wings again, screaming angrily and striking the meatless lure at this injustice, but her mistress had a secure hold on the jesses that Ruck had severed to cut the bird free. The falcon's complaints ceased as the princess deftly slipped a hood over its head.
Now that the moment was over, Ruck found his heart thudding in reaction. He could not believe what he had seen, that tremendous stoop from such a height and the dance that followed. The gyrfalcon sat quietly, unresisting as the princess caught the braces, drawing the gaily plumed hood closed. One-handed, she tied the shortened jesses to the glittering varvels and leash, using her teeth to finish off the tightening of the knots.
Ruck picked up the fallen toll. Its feathers were battered, one broken. The big diamond had fallen off, and emeralds hung loose by metallic threads. He looked about him on the ground, searching for the lost gem. When he saw a white glint in the sand, he pulled off his glove and reached down.
"Keep it. It is thine," she said as he rose with the diamond between his thumb and fingers. "A token." She was smiling. Glowing, her eyes shining with tears of elation. "So thou wilt not forget her flight."
The gem lay in his palm, a gulf between them, a distance beyond comprehension—so careless was she of such stones, to hazard them as decoration for a falcon's lure, to give them in casual remembrance—as generous as the greatest lord Ruck could imagine. He did not know if the king himself did such things.
"My lady, I need me no token to mind such a sight. As help me God on high, I shall ne'er forgetten it."
"Ne the less," she said, "keep it." She turned her attention to the falcon, leaving him with his hand extended.
He felt vaguely insulted, though there was nothing slighting in her manner, or in the gift itself. It was the first time she had given any sign that he was due anything at all for his service.