Death and the Lady Read Free

stories, we in Sency, of what lived in the Wood.
Animals both familiar and strange, and shadows cast by no living thing, and
paths that wound deep and deep, and yet ended where they began; and far within,
behind a wall of mists and fear, a kingdom ruled by a deathless king.
    I shook myself hard. What was it to me that a wayward
stranger had come, brought in our harvest, and gone away again? To Francha it
was too much, and that I would not forgive.
    Whatever in the world had made our poor mute child fall so
perfectly in love with the lady, it had done Francha no good, and likely much
harm. She would not let me touch her now, scrambled to the far comer of the bed
when I lay down and tried to draw her in, and huddled there for all that I
dared do without waking the others.
    In the end I gave it up and closed my eyes. I was on the bed’s
edge. Francha was pressed against the wall. She would have to climb over me to
escape.
    oOo
    One moment, it seemed, I was fretting over Francha. The
next, the red cock was crowing, and I was staggering up, stumbling to the morning’s
duties. There was no sign of Lys. She had had no more than the clothes on her
back; those were gone. She might never have been there at all.
    I unlidded the fire and poked it up, and fed it carefully. I
filled the pot and hung it over the flames. I milked the cow, I found two eggs
in the nest that the black hen had thought so well hidden. I fed the pigs and
scratched the old sow’s back and promised her a day in the wood, if I could
persuade Bertrand to take her out with his own herd. I fed Mamère Mondine her
bowl of porridge with a little honey dripped in it, and a little more for each
of the children.
    Perrin and Celine gobbled theirs and wanted more. Francha
would not eat. When I tried to feed her as I had when I first took her in, she
slapped the spoon out of my hand.
    The other children were delighted. So were the cats, who set
to at once, licking porridge from the wall and the table and the floor.
    I sighed and retrieved the spoon. Francha’s face was locked
shut. There would be no reasoning with her today, or, I suspected, for days
hereafter. Inside myself I cursed this woman who had come, enchanted a poor
broken child, and gone away without a word. And if Francha sickened over it, if
she pined and died—as she well could, as she almost had before I took her—
    I dipped the porridge back into the pot. I wiped the
children’s faces and Francha’s hands. I did what needed doing. And all the
while my anger grew.
    oOo
    The rain had gone away with the night. The last of the
clouds blew away eastward, and the sun came up, warming the wet earth, raising pillars
and curtains of mist. The threshers would be at it soon, as should I.
    But I stood in my kitchen garden and looked over the hedge,
and saw the wall of grey and green that was the Wood. One of the cats wound
about my ankles.
    I gathered her up. She purred. “I know where the lady went,”
I said. “She went west. She said she would. God protect her; nothing else will,
where she was going.”
    The cat’s purring stopped. She raked my hand with her claws
and struggled free; hissed at me; and darted away around the midden.
    I sucked my smarting hand. Celine ran out of the house,
shrilling in the tone I was doing my best to slap out of her: “Francha’s crying
again, mama! Francha won’t stop crying!”
    What I was thinking of was quite mad. I should go inside, of
course I should, and do what I could to comfort Francha, and gather the children
together, and go to the threshing.
    I knelt in the dirt between the poles of beans, and took
Celine by the shoulders. She stopped her shrieking to stare at me. “Are you a
big girl?” I asked her.
    She drew herself up. “I’m grown up,” she said. “You know
that, mama.”
    “Can you look after Francha, then? And Perrin? And take them
both to Mère Adele?”
    She frowned. “Won’t you come, too?”
    Too clever by half, was my Celine. “I have to do