Paradise Red (21 page)

Nevertheless, without hesitation, Raimon offers Aimery his hand. In this dire peril, it is unthinkable not to. Aimery grabs the hand with fingers like wire and with the superhuman strength of terror, hauls himself partway back onto the ridge. Now, however, he lets go of Raimon's hand and seizes his ankle, trying to repay the favor by pitching his savior off the other side. Raimon kicks out feebly, his strength almost gone, but it is enough for Aimery, not yet quite firmly reestablished, to be forced to let go and grab another root. Still on his knees, Raimon crawls away, dragging himself toward the relative safety of the plateau. He is barely aware of reaching it, and the last thing he sees is not the Flame, though this is what he seeks, but a hawk hovering, hopeful of an easy dinner.

Aimery's feet are still paddling and although his forearms
are stretched flat against the stone, more of his torso is off the ridge than on. The strain as he inches himself up tears his tendons. “Laila! Help me!” he bellows. Where is the girl, damn her?

A shadow falls. Laila is above him. He gives her a lopsided grin. “Help me up, and let's finish him off.”

Laila's hand is welcome. He finds a foothold and then the small slice of rock sheers off. “Hold tight!” he gasps, but her hand slips away.

“Can't you kneel so that I can get my arm around your neck?” He is as angrily desperate for solid ground as a drunken sailor for a steady deck.

She kneels, just too far away. “Come on!” he shouts at her. “You need to be quick.”

“Quick?” says Laila in a strange voice. “I wonder if Ugly died quickly.”

Aimery almost has one leg back on the ledge but the Cathar habit he never managed to discard is caught and he has to shake it free. His legs swing again. The drop is awesome. “Ugly? Oh, that hideous dog. What on earth made you suddenly think of her?” His legs are scrabbling and his arms cramping. “Come closer, for God's sake.” His grip loosens. He drops an inch.

“I think of her all the time,” Laila replies without moving.

“No, you don't.” His toes can find no purchase.

“Yes, I do.”

“Lean down, damn you. She was just a dog.”

“And you are just the knight who killed her.”

It takes Aimery a long second to understand the implication of Laila's words, but she sits prim as prim, quite content to
wait. After all, she has waited many months for this moment, some of it terrified that it would be snatched from her. Now that it is here, she intends to enjoy it.

Aimery tries to find the authoritative voice that will command this guttersnipe to obey him, but it has vanished. The wind ruffles his hair. He thinks of Laila's clever fingertips smoothing it in the night. She can follow his every thought and deliberately twirls her corkscrew curls as if they were on a picnic.

Aimery slips a little more, grunts, and with a gargantuan effort, finds more solid tree roots. His legs stop flapping. He concentrates. He can do this. As he heaves himself forward, Laila stands up, and he thinks she is going to walk away, but she does not. Instead, she smiles her cat smile, then flicks her skirt and displays ankles made more shapely by the purple shoes she is thankful not to have discarded. Now she comes very close to him. He does not dare move his hands again. His chin is lodged on a stone. Laila bends gracefully, touches her own knuckles to her lips, and then touches his. “Good-bye, Aimery,” she says.

“Christ in Heaven, Laila! I didn't kill your dog.” He aims the words individually, like arrows.

“You didn't care!” She tosses hers like boulders.

“And nor did you, at least not for long. My God, girl, but you're a demon.”

“Well then, I'll look forward to seeing you in hell.”

Aimery feels one tree root loosen, and his voice pulses to a shriek. “All right, all right. I apologize for Ugly. It was my fault. I'll build a church for her. I'll ask the Pope to make her a saint. What else can I do?”

Laila smiles almost sadly. “Nothing, Aimery. Nothing at all.” She begins to walk away.

The tree root loosens further. “Please, Laila. Don't go. After I've delivered the Flame, the king has promised to make me a great man at the French court. I'll marry you! You can be a great lady. The greatest. You can have castles and servants and jewels. You can have a whole pack of ugly dogs. Anything you like. Anything.”

Her hand goes to her breast, where Hugh's necklace is secreted. She keeps walking.

“
Laila!
We can have such a future together.”

She walks three more paces.

“Laila!”

She turns and then she is running back. “Aimery of Amouroix! There's no need to plead. Of course I wouldn't leave you like this. What do you think I am?” The sun turns her eyes turquoise. His face is luminous with relief. “There's only one trouble about the future, though,” she says. “Yours is behind you.” And then, sporting her most unreadable smile, she raises her hem again, only this time Aimery has no time to admire her ankle before, taking deliberate aim, she plunges a high heel first into the back of one of his hands, then the other.

The effect is instant and dreadful. Aimery's fingers cannot hold. The final slide is surprisingly slow, which gives Laila ample time to witness the appalling contortions of his face as he hopelessly bangs and scratches, to see the blood on his chin as his beard scrapes away and to watch his mouth opening, fishlike, as he gasps for help that he knows will never come. “It's as it should be,” she repeats to herself in her hardest voice as she braces herself for the final catastrophe. “A death for a death.”

Nevertheless, the unearthly shriek that is forced from Aimery's lungs as, at last, his fingers close on nothing but air, and his head tips into the chasm, has her cringing. She thought she would continue to look but she cannot. She tries to listen but she cannot do that either. She tries to rejoice. But in the event, all she can do is fold herself up and chant Ugly's name like a mantra until the wind has whipped Aimery's last rasping sob so carelessly from mountaintop to mountaintop that there is nothing left to toss into the valley after a body broken into pieces that will know no burial.

After that Laila does not dally. Pelting back to Raimon she yanks off her habit and her shoes, for both are repulsive to her now. “Hurry,” she urges as she rips Raimon's shirt into bandages to bind up his wounds. “Hurry!” But he is dead to the world and it takes her an age to raise him. Even then, he has to lean so heavily against her that their progress is too slow for her liking. She pinches and hits him, sometimes with her arms, sometimes with the Flame's lantern, until the ridge and the plateau disappear as if they never were. Only then does she slow. She has had her revenge, yet instead of basking in it, she finds herself angry, furious even, that it does not taste nearly as sweet as it should.

Days later, Raimon and Laila sit together in a clearing in another valley some way from the pog, hidden from both the fortress and Hugh's soldiers—hidden, indeed, from everybody who does not chance upon them. Laila has managed several small miracles of theft from a hamlet and a traveling peddler, but though Raimon is now in marginally better shape, his bone does not mend and his wound festers. If only Laila had her box of tricks he could be as good as new in no time, but without it, she can do very little. Not that she gives any indication of worrying. They sit silently, not through anxiety but because when they are not silent they argue. Laila has recounted with pride the details of Aimery's death, and Raimon has not bothered to mask his shock and revulsion. “It was inhuman, Laila. Inhuman.”

“What he did to Ugly was inhuman.”

“Ugly was a dog.”

“Don't insult dogs.”

He still seems almost unable to believe it and cannot leave it alone. “You flirted with him, followed him all the way here—I believe you'd even have married him—and all for that?” He shudders.

“Well, do you wish he were still alive?” This is always her final, tart defense, because she knows it is impossible for Raimon to say that he does. Aimery was a schemer when he should have been a knight, a stoat when he should have been a stag. Who could mourn such a creature? Yet he was Yolanda's brother and Raimon cannot help wondering how it will look to her that he, with all his pretensions of knighthood, was there when Aimery was killed by a girl yet was too enfeebled to prevent it. Occasionally he is aware of a fleeting shadow crossing Laila's face, and this alone affords some relief. Deep in Laila's multicolored soul there is a dirty smudge of shame. What he cannot know, of course, is that Laila's shame has nothing to do with Aimery at all and rests entirely in a necklace Raimon has never seen and she will never show him.

They cannot remain at odds, however, for Raimon depends on Laila for everything. As a respite from her, he gazes at the Flame, whose old regal intensity has gentled like the face of an old king tempered by time and the experience of loss. At night, in a rising fever that Laila cannot control, he thinks he hears snatches of the Flame's old song. He wants to join in, but the song turns into torn paper and flutters away. Instead, he hears a lullaby that his mother used to sing and which he once taught to Yolanda when they were sleeping under the stars. Hot and uncomfortable one morning, he blurts out, “Where's Yolanda's ring?”

Laila does not bawl at him as he expects, but fiddles. “I haven't got it anymore,” she says finally.

“You've thrown it away!” Does this girl's heartlessness know no bounds?

“No, of course I didn't.” She pauses. “Yolanda has it.”

“What?” He at once suspects her of lying. “You sent it to her?”

“No. I saw her. She came to Castelneuf.”

He is motionless. “When?”

“Before I came here.”

“You mean she's at Castelneuf right now?”

Laila begins to braid her curls very fast. “I've no idea where she is now. All I'm saying is that I last saw her at Castelneuf.”

Raimon tries but fails to stand up. “She let you come here alone? Why? Not so that you could kill her brother.”

“I'm not going to talk about Aimery
again
, and don't be so stupid. I told her Ugly was dead, but of course I didn't tell her what I was going to do about it. I just—I just told her I was coming here, and she didn't try to stop me.” She is as hot as Raimon and knows she is blustering.

Raimon says nothing until she has finished. His eyes are narrow and accusing. “Why didn't she come with you?”

“She didn't want to. And why should she? You'd gone off with Metta Moonface. She was hardly likely to want to congratulate you.”

Raimon winces but something still is not right. “You came without your box, and you've stayed with me although you don't even like me.”

She tries to shrug his questions away. “What I do with my box is my own affair. And why not stay with you? I only hated you when I thought you'd thrown Yolanda over.” Now she is angry with everybody and everything for conspiring to make her feel guilty. She is not guilty of anything! “What does it matter anyway? It's all over now. You've got the Flame. We can go back to Yolanda. Everything's perfect.”

“Perfect? Are you mad? Perfect, with the French army battering the pog and all those people holed up in the fortress?”

“So? Let them fight each other. This isn't your war anymore.”

He longs to agree. He longs to pick up the Flame, carry it back to Yolanda at Castelneuf, and build a huge wall to keep the rest of the world out. But how can he? “My father's up there, and Metta and Sir Roger. Sir Hugh's still Yolanda's husband.” He speaks slowly and pulls the Flame toward him. “Of course it's still my war.”

“You can forget about your father, that girl, and Sir Roger. They've chosen their fates, poor ninnies.” Laila wriggles her bare toes before she adds, with studied guilelessness, “As for Hugh still being Yolanda's husband, I don't think she thinks of him as such anymore. I don't think she even likes him.”

“Is that what she said? Is that why she came home?” His face flushes.

“Why else?” Laila says grandly, and then she expands, making circles with her ankles. “She understands everything, you know. I explained when I gave her your ring.”

“She didn't get my message?”

“What message?”

“I sent a message.”

Laila shakes her head. “Well, it doesn't matter now, does it.”

There are two bright spots on Raimon's cheeks. “Why didn't she come with you?”

“A girl has some pride, you know. Why should she come tearing after you? And anyway, as the wife of Hugh des Arcis, they would hardly have welcomed her into the fortress.”

“But she chose to stay with Hugh before. Why has she suddenly changed her mind?”

Laila stops twiddling her ankles. Then something so obvious occurs to her she cannot imagine why she has not seen it before. She has absolutely no need to feel uncomfortable or guilty. The truth is that she has actually done Raimon a favor. Yolanda is too softhearted. That's why she stayed with Hugh in his hour of need. If she was ever to leave him properly, she needed to hate him, and after the night at Castelneuf, she will certainly do that. Raimon need have no fears. Never again will Yolanda think of her husband with anything other than loathing. And she, Laila, played her part! Far from feeling guilty, she should be blowing her own trumpet. Her fingers creep up her bodice. She has been far too fastidious. She can wear the necklace with pride. Yet she does not draw it out. Instead, she changes the subject. “Where's Cador?”

Raimon answers shortly. He is still thinking of Yolanda. “He's waiting for me.” Then he pays more attention. “Or perhaps he's gone back to Castelneuf. So much time has passed. He may have given up hope.”