The Witch Queen's Secret (2 page)

She was pretty, though. More than pretty,
really, with her white skin and big gray eyes and her black hair
braided and pinned like a crown around her head. She was also small
and slight, and Dera knew she couldn’t be more than twenty summers
old. But the look in her eyes still made Dera think of Mam. Who’d
been dead since Dera was sixteen. And still, thinking of her made
stupid tears rise to Dera’s eyes.

“
No, my
lady. It was Jory I came here for.” She nodded to her son. The dog
had lain back down by the hearth, and Jory was curled up beside
him, scratching him behind the ears. “He’s this cough, you see.
Started just after Samhain, and it’s lingered. Just won’t go away,
and—”

Lady
Isolde nodded. “I heard it. And I’ll give you some horehound syrup
for him. But if you’re in need of attention, as well—” she had
small hands, slim and graceful and very quick. One of them reached
out and lightly touched a place on Dera’s ribs,
the
n moved to a spot on
her cheek, just below her right eye. The bruises must not have
faded yet. And she could still feel the cut on her upper lip.
Though at least it wasn’t so swollen anymore.

“
I’m all
right. It’s nothing to speak of, my lady. Just—” Dera clenched her
teeth again to stop her voice from trembling, even as she felt her
mouth twist. “You know what men are.”

Dera
would wager the
Lady
Isolde did know what men were, all too well. She’d been forced into
marrying Lord Marche of Cornwall three months back. And Dera had
watched her, while she and Jory had waited for her to get done with
her rounds among the wounded men. Lady Isolde never stopped being
gentle and kind—and she’d a way of speaking to the men that could
get a smile or a laugh out of even the roughest-tempered. But when
one of the sickest of them clutched at her, grabbed her arm or her
hand in some fever-dream, Dera had seen her go very still, like she
was holding her breath and forcing herself not to flinch or pull
away.

Then Lord Marche had turned traitor, had gone
against Britain and joined his armies to the Saxon devils. The fine
lords and kings on the High King’s council might have been
surprised by that. Not Dera. She’d scars of her own she’d gotten at
Lord Marche’s hands, when she’d been fool enough to take payment
from him for a night’s tumble. Turned out that tumbling hadn’t been
all—or even half—of what he’d wanted. Which she should have known;
you got to recognize the mean ones by the look in their eyes. The
man who’d given her these bruises had had that look about him, as
well. But Jory’d been hungry enough that she hadn’t been able to
tell him no.

And besides, all the men were in vile tempers
these days, with the fighting going so badly, and battle after
battle lost to Lord Marche and his dirty Saxon allies. Half the
soldiers who asked for it used her like they were punishing her for
the loss of their brothers and friends. As if the bloody war had
been all her idea, or it was her fault Lord Marche had to be not
just a traitor but a master warrior, as well.

At least
this last man had
paid
her; sometimes his kind just laughed and told her she should be
thanking them for a good time. But this one had paid with a
battered bronze finger ring taken off a dead Saxon. And that had
bought her and Jory a ride on a cart here, to Dinas Emrys, the new
High King Madoc’s fortress high in the rocky Gwynedd mountains. A
place as safe from Saxon attacks as anywhere was, these
days.

Now
Lady Isolde
was looking from the bruise on Dera’s face to the way she was
holding herself hunched over to guard against the aching stabs that
kept shooting through her ribs—and Dera saw her big gray eyes
filling with tears. “I’m so sorry.” Her voice sounded soft, shaky,
sort of. “I did look for you, three months ago. You and Jory, both.
But you were gone. I should have looked harder, though. I should
have—”

Lady Isolde stopped at a commotion at the
infirmary door: two men carrying in a third, who was screaming and
bellowing like an angry bull. Not that Dera blamed him; the front
of his tunic was all cut open and stained with blood, and she could
see the sword cut in his belly and part of his guts poking out
through the wound.

“
I’m
sorry.” Lady Isolde was already moving towards the new man, but she
stopped long enough to touch Dera’s arm. “I must go. But please
stay—as long as you like. And I’ll get you the horehound syrup for
Jory just as soon as I—”

The rest of what she said was lost; she was
already gesturing for the screaming man to be put down on one of
the empty pallets of straw, kilting up her skirts and kneeling down
next to him, taking out a little bone-handled knife and using it to
cut the bloodied fragments of his shirt away.

Dera looked over at Jory. But he was asleep,
head pillowed on the big dog’s middle and his thumb in his mouth.
Amazing that all the man’s noise hadn’t woken him. Though the gods
knew he’d practice enough at sleeping through anything by now.

Dera
didn’t know why she moved closer. She’d seen her
bellyful of ugly sights these last months
and days. But ugly sights were like that sometimes: you’d be sick
to your stomach and still somehow couldn’t drag your eyes away.
Like it was so awful you had to keep looking and looking, trying to
decide whether it could be true.

The next she knew she was standing right next
to where Lady Isolde was kneeling—and Lady Isolde was looking up at
her, with the same look in her eyes as a man might have when he
inspected a weapon to be sure it was sharp. She’d wadded up a pad
of clean linen and had it clamped over the sword cut in the man’s
belly, but Dera could already see the fabric turning wet and
red.

“
Can you
help me?”

Dera gaped at her. “Can I—”

Lady Isolde shook her head and seemed to come
back to herself a bit. She spoke quickly. “I shouldn’t ask this of
you—I know this wasn’t what you came here for. But this man is
going to need stitching up. I’ve been handling the usual run of
injuries on my own—help is short here just now. And this is going
to take another pair of hands. Can you do it?”

Dera looked from the Lady Isolde to the man’s
face. He was older than the usual run of fighting men. Maybe forty
or forty-five. Heavy-muscled and tall, with a long, black mustache
and curly hair threaded through with gray. His eyes were dark,
staring straight at her, but so bleared with pain she could likely
have turned into a raven like the women in the faerie tales and
he’d not have blinked an eye. He’d stopped screaming and was biting
down on his lip; Dera saw a trickle of blood run down his chin.

At least he wasn’t one she could remember
servicing. Not that she made it a habit to study their faces, most
times.

Dera’s throat felt like her last meal had
been sharp-edged rocks, and one had stuck, but she swallowed and
then nodded. “All right. Reckon I can. Just tell me what to
do.”

* * *

IT WAS INTERESTING, sort of. Once you got
over wanting to heave your breakfast up onto your boots. The two
men who’d brought the wounded one in held him down while Lady
Isolde worked. Dera’s job was to hold her needles and thread, hand
what Lady Isolde needed to her at the proper times, and keep wiping
the blood away so that she could see what she was doing.

First, Lady Isolde cut the hole in the man’s
belly a bit wider. Which seemed lackwitted to Dera, until she
realized it was so the coil of his guts that was hanging out could
be fit back in. Lady Isolde asked for water and oil, and smeared
them over the pallid tubes of innards before she did that. And she
had Dera hold the edges of the wound open so that she could get
them slid back into place. Then she had the two fighting men shake
the wounded man just gently, side to side.

Dera had been biting down on her own lips,
but she must have made some squeak of a sound, because Lady Isolde
looked up and said, “It’s all right. It helps the intestines settle
into their proper place, that’s all.”

And then she started to stitch up the wound.
Watching, Dera could almost believe there was some magic about her,
just as the stories said. Lady Isolde used two needles at once,
changing them from hand to hand—and all so sure and steady she
might have been darning socks, not a man’s belly and guts. At first
Dera was too much taken up with watching—and trying too hard not to
be sick—to pay mind to anything else. But then, after a bit, she
realized Lady Isolde was speaking to herself under her breath,
quick and low, all the time she worked.

“
Climb on my back
, the water horse said,
and I’ll carry you
across.
” Dera knew that
story, about a ceffyl-dwr, a water horse that could take the shape
of a man, who tried to get a fair maid to climb on his back so that
he could take her deep down to the bottom of his river and make her
his wife. She hadn’t realized she was staring, though, until Lady
Isolde put in the final stitches and then looked up again with a
little twist of a smile. “The story gives me something else to
think about besides how much pain I’m causing him.”

“
I know.”
Dera looked down. The wounded man had fainted halfway through; he
was lying now with his eyes shut and his mouth slack. “I remember
from—” She stopped and squeezed her eyes tight shut. Because if it
was stupid to cry at a bit of kindness from a fine lady like Lady
Isolde, it was stupider yet to cry over the dead baby girl Lady
Isolde had delivered. The baby who’d been fathered by
who-knew-which of the men she’d serviced, and who she’d never have
managed to keep warm and fed living on the road with winter coming
on.

“
I’m
sorry,” Lady Isolde said again. “Truly sorry, Dera.”

Dera opened her eyes and realized that Lady
Isolde had put a hand over hers. Both their hands were smeared,
sticky with blood. “Don’t be, my lady. Nothing you could have
done.” She felt her chin jerking up and down and the tears puddling
behind her eyes, so she bit her lip harder and said, “What do we do
now?”

* * *

W
HAT THEY DID
was send the two fighting men off to the kitchens and then bandage
the wounded man up. He woke about halfway through, and Lady Isolde
had Dera prop his head while she got him to swallow some poppy
syrup that had him unconscious again before the final bandage was
tied. Lady Isolde sat back on her heels. Dera looked over at Jory,
but he was still asleep, curled up with Lady Isolde’s
dog.

“
Will he
live?” Dera nodded at the man at their feet.

Lady Isolde pushed a stray curl of black hair
off her forehead with the back of her hand. She looked tired, like
she hadn’t been sleeping well. Her eyes were sad, too—sadder,
somehow, than they’d been three months before. “I don’t know.” She
looked down at the man’s face, hard, as if she was trying to
memorize what he looked like. “Hardly any man survives injuries
like his. Maybe one in twenty. If that many.”

Then she shook her head, like she was trying
to get the thought out of it, and said, “I haven’t thanked you
properly for your help. If he does have a chance, it’s because of
you.”

Dera felt her cheeks go red. “I didn’t do
much, my lady.”

“
Still.”
And then Lady Isolde stopped, searching Dera’s face with her eyes.
“Do you think you could—would you want to do something like that
again?”

Just for something to do, Dera had started
folding up the man’s belongings that had tumbled out of his pack in
a heap when his fellows had set him down. A spare set of breeches,
shirt, traveling cloak. He must not have a wife back home. Or if he
did, she wasn’t any too fond of him. The wedded men usually had a
bundle of rowan twigs or a love knot sewn into their clothes
somewhere.

Other
women were quick enough to call Lady Isolde the Witch Queen—but
they weren’t above trying out a bit of magic, themselves, and
buying a wise-woman’s herbs or a
peddler’s charm, hoping to keep their men safe in
battle. Dera had gotten good at noticing things like that, because
she always tried—unless she and Jory were too hungry to help it—not
to say yes to the men with wives waiting back home.

Not that she’d have been anything but
grateful if her own dead husband had ever gone and spent his nights
in someone else’s bed. But she wasn’t going to be the one to let a
man break his vows to some poor woman waiting patient for him to
come back to her.

Anyway, there were no charms or anything like
them among this man’s things, and his clothes were mended with
stitches so clumsy it looked like a blind man with two left thumbs
had put them in. Dera folded the cloak, then shrugged. “Usually
when I get this close to a man, I have to pretend I’m enjoying
myself. So this was at least one up on that.”

Lady Isolde’s mouth dimpled at the corners,
and then she laughed. She’d a pretty laugh, pretty as her speaking
voice—though it sounded surprised, like it had been a long time
since she’d thought about smiling or finding the fun in
something.

Dera looked up at her, “Why do you ask me
that, though, my lady?”

Lady
Isolde looked down, smoothing the blanket over the wounded man’s
chest. And then she said, “I was wondering whether you’d like to
stay here—you and Jory, too, of course. Space is tight,
these days, with so many
fighting men quartered here at Dinas Emrys for the winter. But we
could set up a space for the two of you to sleep in my workroom.
And—if you were willing—you could help me for part of the day. When
Jory doesn’t need you. Help grind herbs and prepare ointments.
Sometimes lend aid as you did today, when I need an extra set of
hands.”