Death and the Lady by Judith Tarr Read Free Book Online

lightning, no clouds of brimstone. Only the slender big-bellied figure
in my blue mantle, and the soft low voice.
    She read his future for him. How he would ride out from Sency,
and she behind. How they would go back to Rouen. How the war was raging there,
and how it would rage for years out of count. How the Death would come back,
and come back again. How he would fight in the war, and outlive the Death, and
have great glory, with her at his side: ever young, ever beautiful, ever
watchful for his advantage. “Always,” she said. “Always I shall be with you,
awake and asleep, in war and at peace, in your heart as in your mind, soul of
your soul, indissolubly a part of you. Every breath you draw, every thought you
think, every sight your eye lights upon—all these shall be mine. You will be
chaste, Giscard, except for me; sinless, but that you love me. For nothing that
you do shall go unknown to me. So we were, Aymeric and I, perfect in love as in
amity. So shall we two be.”
    For a long while after she stopped speaking, none of us
moved. Messire Giscard’s lips were parted. Gaping, I would have said, in a man
less good to look at.
    Lys smiled with awful tenderness. “Will you have me,
Giscard? Will you have the glory that I can give you?”
    He wrenched free. The sweep of his arm sent her sprawling.
    I leaped for him, veered, dropped beside her. She was
doubled up, knotted round her center.
    Laughing. Laughing like a mad thing. Laughing till she wept.
    By the time she stopped, he was gone. She lay exhausted in
my arms. My dress was soaked with her tears.
    “Could you really have done it?” I asked her.
    She nodded. She struggled to sit up. I helped her; gave her
my kerchief to wipe her face. “I can do it to you, too,” she said. Her voice
was raw. “I can hear everything, see it, feel it—every thought in every head.
Every hope, dream, love, hate, fear, folly—everything.” She clutched her head. “Everything!”
    I held her and rocked her. I did not know why I was not
afraid. Too far past it, I supposed. And she had lived with us since
Michaelmas; if there was anything left to hide from her, then it was hidden
deeper than I could hope to find.
    She was crying again, deep racking sobs. “I was the best, my
father said. Of all that are in the Wood, the strongest to shield, the clearest
to see both how the walls were raised and how to bring them down. None of us
was better fit to walk among human folk. So I defied them all, brought down the
ban, walked out of the Wood. And I could do it. I could live as the humans lived. But I could—not—die as they died. I
could not.” Her voice rose to a wail. “I wanted to die with Aymeric. And I
could not even take sick!”
    “Oh, hush.” Mère Adele stood over us, hands on hips. She had
gone out when Giscard took flight; now she was back, not an eyelash out of
place, and no awe at all for the woman of the Wood. “If you had really wanted
to cast yourself in your lover’s grave, you would have found a way to do it.
There’s no more can’t in killing
yourself than in killing someone else. It’s all won’t , and a good fat measure of Pity-me .”
    Lys could have killed her then. Oh, easily. But I was glad
for whatever it was that stopped her, can’t or won’t or plain astonishment.
    She got to her feet with the first failing of grace that I
had ever seen in her. Even her beauty was pinched and pale, too thin and too
sharp and too odd.
    Mère Adele regarded her with utter lack of sympathy . “You
got rid of his lordship,” she said, “and handily, too. He’ll see the back of
hell before he comes by Sency again. You do know, I suppose, that he could have
sworn to bring the Inquisition down on us, and burn us all for what you did to
him.”
    “No,” said Lys. “He would not. I made sure of that.”
    “You—made—sure?”
    Even Lys could wither in the face of Mère Adele’s wrath. She
raised her hands to her face, let them fall. “I made him do nothing