The Boy Who Plaited Manes Read Free Page A

She had thought it would be safe to take a mute as her lover… Perhaps he would not betray her.
    In fact, it was not he who betrayed her to her lord, but Wald.
    Her tiring-women suspected, perhaps because she had sent them on such a long errand. She had not thought they would suspect, for who would think that such a wisp of a beardless boy could be a bedfellow? But perhaps they also had seen the wild glow deep in his gray-green eyes. They whispered among themselves and with the kitchen maids, and the bold kitchen maid giggled with the grooms, and Wald heard.
    Even though the boy who plaited manes did all the work, Wald considered the constant plaiting and adorning of manes and tails a great bother. The whole fussy business offended him, and he had long since forgotten the few words of praise it had garnered from the lord at first. It seemed to him that he could be rid of the thin, silent, annoying boy and the wretched onus of braids and rosettes all in one stroke. The day the lord returned from his journey, Wald hurried to him, begged private audience, bowed low and made his humble report.
    Lord Robley heard him in icy silence, for he knew pettiness when he saw it; it had served him often in the past, and he would punish it if it misled him. He summoned his wife to question her. But the Lady Aelynn’s hair hung lank, and her guilt and shame could be seen plainly in her face.
    Lord Robley’s roar could be heard even to the stables.
    He strode over to her where she lay crumpled and weeping on his chamber floor, lifted her head by its honey-gold hair and slashed her across the face with his sword. Then he left her screaming and stinging her wound with fresh tears, and he strode to the stable with his bloody sword raised, Wald fleeing before him all the way; when the lord burst in all the grooms scattered but one. The boy Wald had accused stood plaiting the white palfrey’s mane.
    Lord Robley hacked the palfrey’s head from its braid-bedecked neck, and the boy who plaited manes stood by with something smoldering deep in his unblinking gray-green eyes, calmly waiting. If he had screamed and turned to flee, Lord Robley would with great satisfaction have given him a coward’s death from the back. But it unnerved the lord that the boy awaited his pleasure with such mute—what? Defiance? There was no servant’s bow in this one, no falling to the soiled straw, no groveling. If he had groveled, he could have been kicked, stabbed, killed out of hand…but this silent, watchful waiting, like the alertness of a wild thing—on the hunt or being hunted? It gave Lord Robley pause, like the pause of the wolf before the standing stag or the pause of the huntsman before the thicketed boar. He held the boy at the point of his sword—though no such holding was necessary, for the prisoner had not moved even to tremble—and roared for his men-at-arms to come take the boy to the dungeon.
    There the nameless stranger stayed without water or food, and aside from starving him Lord Robley could not decide what to do with him.
    At first the boy who plaited manes paced in his prison restlessly—he had that freedom, for he was so thin and small that the shackles were too large to hold him. Later he lay in a scant bed of short straw and stared narrow-eyed at the darkness. And yet later, seeing the thin cascades of moonlight flow down through the high, iron-barred window and puddle in moonglades on the stone floor, he got up and began to plait the moonbeams.
    They were far finer than any horsehair, moonbeams, finer even than the lady’s honey-colored locks, and his eyes widened with wonder and pleasure as he felt them. He made them into braids as fine as silk threads, flowing together into a lacework as close as woven cloth, and when he had reached as high as he could, plaiting, he stroked as if combing a long mane with his fingers and pulled more moonlight down out of the sky—for this stuff was not like any other stuff he had ever worked with.