Death and the Lady Read Free Page B

was half fallen. The remnant of a porch, the
arch of a gate, with the carving on it still, much blurred with age and
weather. The upper arm of the cross had broken. The Lady who sat beneath it had
lost her upraised hand, but the Child slept as ever in her lap, and her smile,
even so worn, was sweet.
    I crossed myself in front of her. No devils flapped shrieking
through the broken roof. Nothing moved at all, except the cat, which picked its
way delicately across the porch and vanished into the chapel.
    My hands were cold. I shifted my grip on my bundle. I was
hungry, suddenly, which made me want to laugh, or maybe to cry. My stomach
lived in a time of its own; neither fear nor anger mattered in the least to it.
    I would feed it soon enough. I gathered my courage and
stepped under the arch, ducking my head though it was more than high enough:
this was a holy place, though not, maybe, to the God I knew.
    The pavement had been handsome once. It was dull and broken
now. The altar was fallen. The font was whole, but blurred as was the carving
on the gate. A spring bubbled into it and bubbled out again through channels in
the wall. It was itself an odd thing, the stump of a great tree—oak, the
stories said—lined with lead long stripped of its gilding, and carved with
crosses. Here the roof was almost intact, giving shelter from the rain; or the
ancient wood would long ago have crumbled into dust.
    She was kneeling on the edge of the font, her dark head bent
over it, her white hands clenched on its rim. I could not see the water. I did
not want to see it. I could hear her, but she spoke no language I knew. Her
tone was troubling enough: pure throttled desperation, pleading so strong that
I lurched forward, hand outstretched.
    I stopped myself before I could touch her. If she was
scrying her lover, then she was calling him up from the dead.
    I shuddered. I made no sound, but she started and wheeled.
Her face was white as death. Her eyes—
    She lidded them. Her body eased by degrees. She did not seem
surprised or angered, or anything but tired. “Jeannette,” she said.
    “You left,” I said. “Francha cried all night.”
    Her face tightened. “I had to go.”
    “Here?”
    She looked about. She might have laughed, maybe, if she had
had the strength. “It was to be here first,” she said. “Now it seems that it will
be here last and always. And never.”
    I looked at her.
    She shook her head. “You don’t understand. How can you?”
    “I can try,” I said. “I’m no lady, I grant you that, but I’ve
wits enough for a peasant’s brat.”
    “Of course you have.” She seemed surprised. As if I had been
doing the doubting, and not she. “Very well. I’ll tell you. He won’t let me back.”
    “He?”
    “He,” said Lys, pointing at the font. There was nothing in
it but water. No face. No image of a lover that would be. “My lord of the Wood.
The cold king.”
    I shivered. “We don’t name him here.”
    “Wise,” said Lys.
    “He won’t let you pass?” I asked. “Then go around. Go south,
as Mère Adele told you. It’s a long way, but it’s safe, and it takes you west
eventually.”
    “I don’t want to go around,” said Lys. “I want to go in.”
    “You’re mad,” I said.
    “Yes,” she said. “He won’t let me in. I walked, you see. I
passed this place. I went where the trees are old, old, and where the sun seldom
comes, even at high noon. Little by little they closed in front of me. Then at
last I could go no farther. Go back, the trees said to me. Go back and let us
be .”
    “You were wise to do it,” I said.
    “Mad,” she said, “and wise.” Her smile was crooked. “Oh,
yes. So I came back to this place, which is the gate and the guard. And he
spoke to me in the water. Go back , he
said, as the trees had. I laughed at him. Had he no better word to offer me? Only this , he said. The way is shut. If you would open it, if you can—then you may. It is
not mine to do .”
    I looked at