Standing in the dark, he thought of the Bower's Lady, trapped in the midst of it all. His finger touched the green knot at his belt. He thought of Cerlac, now dwelling at the Bower Castle. Cerlac's horse tossed its tail, pale against the darkness.
And here he was with Deorwen—now sound asleep and curled like a pup in the grass. His eyes followed the curve of her hip, and found her lips, dark as her tresses against her pale skin. He wondered about her and tried to imagine what had brought her to this place. Had she been following him since Red Winding? A part of him wanted to believe it. But Lady Bertana's train had blundered into Hesperand on its way west from Red Winding, that was all. The place had drawn a great many in. He wondered where Lady Bertana's holdings actually lay.
He was tired, the air was cold, and the night was as dark as any he had seen, but pacing kept him awake.
He woke to
find a hand on his arm, soft and insistent.
"Host of Heaven," said Deorwen. He could feel her breath against his jaw.
"Durand."
Her face hovered an inch from his and upside down. Her eyes were wide. He had a sense there was something around them in the fog.
Baffled, Durand rolled to see.
"Queen of Heaven," Deorwen breathed, a new horror in her voice.
They were surrounded. In every direction, men were waking. Shabby, disheveled creatures levered themselves from the ground only to tip at once into huddled crouches or pitch onto their hands and knees. Scabbards jutted from hips—most empty. He saw madness. The men were shaking their heads and moving their lips, utterly silent. Mute tongues flickered against yellow teeth.
Though he could not have said why, it was like a graveyard had been tipped out and its denizens left to crawl upon the ground. The madmen stared about themselves in horror. Brown blood stained surcoa
ts. Some of the men pawed disbe
lievingly at round wounds.
He counted dozens.
"King of Heaven," whispered Durand.
"You didn't wake me." Her face was close to his.
"I—" Durand hesitated. "I couldn't."
"They were just sleeping. All round. Till I woke you. Every eyelid snapped open as yours did." Despair shone from their faces like lamplight. The nearest was only a few feet away. His skin was wax against the blue of a rough surcoat, close enough to smell the old sweat caught in the weave—though there was nothing. Durand could see no way to move without stirring them all.
"The green is thick with them," Deorwen said.
'The green?" He remembered only a forest track.
"There's a whole village."
Like clods in a steaming cauldron, the sheds and hovels of a village rose from the fog at the limits of vision. Durand's graveyard was a village green. Deorwen and he lay in the rugged common ground near the road. Muckheaps, a tithe barn, and something that might have been a rough manor house loomed out there. More importantly, there was a ring of people: peasants by their small stature and hairy cloaks. Hands clutched a fence of woven hurdles, as the villagers squinted and whispered soundlessly to one another.
'The whole village has turned out. If I did not know I was awake—Queen of Heaven!" She pressed his arm.
The blue-coated man had reared to his feet, planting a boot by Durand's fingers, then staggering off through the others. Heads turned, though every face was confused. They were like men squinting at flies. The blue-coated man had his eyes squeezed shut and his fists locked in his hair. A bit of green cloth was knotted round his knuckles. Others followed, pitching onto their feet and stumbling through the crowd.
The faces twisted into silent rings—mute howls that set the peasants beyond the green running. The frenzy was building.
Durand thought of the green veil knotted through his own belt "This is madness," he rasped. The things blundered near enough that he had to snatch his legs away, but there was no sound. The lips stretched and eyes rolled, but the breath in Durand's mouth was louder than the loudest scream among them. He must get Deorwen free of the place. He had to find the horse.
Deorwen tugged him to his feet.
He spotted Cerlac's animal—two dozen crowded paces off—but, somehow, he would rather touch a drowned corpse than one of these men.
There was motion in the crowd of villagers.
A fierce-looking man stalked up to the hurdle fence. His face was lean and starkly bearded, and he was wrestling himself into the embroidered robe of a priest-arbiter. Beyond them all, the black doors of a squat shrine hung wide.
The priest swung his arms open, and opened his mouth without a sound. He ranted. Spittle flew. A madman touched Durand, shooting a razor-edged tingle up Durand's forearm.
The priest was tugging his sleeves up his own forearms. He held a staff, and there was gold enough stitched through his robes to buy half the village.
Suddenly, he gave his arms a shaking jolt, and Durand's clothing flinched around his limbs.
Every one of the madmen jolted, too, cloaks and surcoats twitching as if in a sudden wind.
"Durand?" said Deorwen, her face ashen.
After another rambling silence, the priest stabbed his staff heavenward, and now Durand felt the push.
He fell. He dropped as though into a well, his ears filling. Everything was wrong. His face and fingers might have been knobs of root in a garden.
But, suddenly, he could hear.
"Saewin, Saewin, Saewin,"
the madmen's voices sloshed in his ears. "I'm not Saewin," he gasped.
They echoed: "I am not Saewin! I am not he! A mistake. I'm not Saewin."
And Durand realized: They had been saying it all along. Every twitching mouth among the madmen was repeating the words until every beard was clotted with spittle. They had been with the Green Lady and Eorcan had ridden them down.
And, as he thought his mind would come adrift, he heard the dull thunder of hooves. All this, and now Eorcan was on their heels once more.
The men around him might have been ecstatic monks. 'Traitor," they said, and "adulterer" and "oathbreaker." Then, always, "I am not he!"
Deorwen was speaking. He turned to look at her, seeing panic. Her lips were moving, at first with no sound, then her voice came on, all in a rush. His skin was caught in her fists.
"Durand! "
Creation pitched, and Durand reeled from the half-world of the babbling men.
The priest was still speaking, his eyes on the clouds, but now Durand knew that Eorcan was coming. He tried to reach for Deorwen, but found that his hands would hardly answer him. His face felt like so much cold flesh on a butcher's table.
The priest's ranting was some sort of ritual: casting out fiends. Durand's cloak rippled with the man's words. Between the priest and Eorcan they must leave.
"Come on!" Durand managed, fumbling at the woman's hand and hauling her into the crowd. They must get to the horse. Some of the madmen reeled out of their way. Some vanished like brown smoke.
The priest was turning. Up the road, the track crooked into the trees. They would get little warning before the duke was on top of them.
Without time for a saddle, he threw himself onto the horse's bare back and heaved the woman up behind. The priest's eyes glinted, tongue and teeth rattling another frantic abjuration, and Durand could see that his fit was building toward another great climax. God knew what would happen.
With the woman's arms clamped tight, he kicked the gray into a gallop so wild he could scarcely hold on to the terrified animal's back. He could feel the priest's words shaking Creation behind him, each syllable chopping a bite from the world, catching at his soul with frenzied claws.
The jolt, as it hit, was enough to throw his cloak forward into the wind.
They leapt the hurdle fence and swung into the road. The duke's armored squadron rumbled like a storm, their horns yowling out above the drumbeat of hooves. The woman screamed behind him. They hung on, and gained ground. They swerved between roadside banks. While a good rider could do clever tricks bareback, it took everything to stick to that animal as it careered through the fog, wild beyond controlling, and without bit or bridle. Trees swung down like a battalion of giants. They should have died.
After the better part of a league, the horse began to stagger, and, as it fell out of its cantering rhythm, the drumbeat of the duke's horsemen asserted itself on the road behind them. The duke would overtake them—nothing could prevent it—but a man would not face the Bright Gates of Heaven with a lance in his back.
Dropping into the trail, he hauled his sword free and turned to face his onetime comrades. He would die on his feet.
The woman was shouting at him, but somehow he could not make out what she said. She should run. He tried to make that clear. This had nothing to do with her. It was him they were after, not some woman they had never seen, but it was as though a thunderous wind were snatching the words from his lips.
Two hundred paces down the track, the Host of Hesperand rumbled into sight. He knew them all. He could see lances by the score flickering under the canopy of branches, and hard men on big horses with Eorcan of Hesperand and his tall Peregrine Crown at the forefront. His onetime liege lord would not stop for parley. He had betrayed them all and deserved no reprieve. On Eorcan's dark lance, where there might have been a duke's banner, trailed knots of green rag, some clotted black.
Duke Eorcan raised his lance high and swept its green rags down in the ancient command to bring the charge home.
The woman was tugging at his sleeve, and again her wind-snatched voice was in his ears, vague and desperate. She would be killed, but he had no time. If she must stay, she must stand behind him. At most, he would get one swing. At best, he would sell their lives dearly. Eorcan's deadly lance was coming on.
The woman took hold of his arm. There was something strange about her touch, almost as though she were a creature of cold water. What could she have to tell him?
In a glance, he took in leaves tumbling down and a whole track full of leaves behind her: a world of brown leaves. Red. There was something wrong with that.
Before him, green leaves stormed down the track.
The woman was looking desperately into his eyes.
In an instant, lances would pitch him into the air like a sheaf of wheat. She was saying something, her lips moving.
Durand.
He blinked.
"Durand!" she said again, and, this time, he heard.
The scent of autumn filled his head.
The wall of lancers struck then—a crumbling cloud billowing round—as Durand looked into the depths of Deorwen's eyes, and she said once more, "Durand."
Eorcan and his riders were the dust of crumbled leaves and Durand clung to Deorwen, hanging on as the spent force tumbled past them in clouds. He stared down into those dark, dark eyes, now trembling with tears. They had pulled him from that black dream.
For a long time, and with the force of a convulsion, he kissed her—standing there among the autumn leaves once more, on a straggling trail where autumn Mornaway met Lost Hesperand. The Blood Moon hung pale against a blue Heaven.
The Green Lady's favor had left Hesperand.
18. Mornaway Welcome
D
eorwen saw it without turning, just as they finally parted, half-wondering, half-sheepish. 'The bridge!" she said.
Durand wavered as the weight of their strange flight left him. He had been someone else. "No wonder the forest seemed so familiar," she murmured. Durand blinked. "I don't understand." "There," she said and pointed.
Durand turned and saw a glint through the trees: a bit of white masonry half a league across the tawny countryside. It was all so bright So free.
"It's the Forest Bridge," Deorwen said. One hand rested idly on Durand's hip. "It's right by—"
She hesitated, her face oddly empty. She had turned half away. "It goes nowhere anymore. Parties will ride out through the forest just to see it. High Ashes isn't far, I think."
They must already be on the Duke of Mornaway's land. There was a scent of river mud in the autumn damp. "Is it the Glass?" Durand asked.
"Aye. The Glass. They might have come this way. They'd have to cross at the bridge."
"All right," Durand said, nodding. It was possible. He touched her arm, a reassurance.
With the bright Eye of Heaven steaming the Otherworld damp from their cloaks, they led Cerlac's horse down the track. This was open country. Light blazed upon shocks of yellow grass between the trees. The country fell gently toward the river, and the two wanderers quickly lost sight of the bridge as they left the high ground. Long cords of bracken played snare. They startled a flight of pheasants. A red squirrel, inverted, watched them from the bark of a rowan tree. The earth under their feet was stiff and cool.