Maze of Moonlight, Gael Baudino [ebook reader screen TXT] 📗

been touched with the same aura of shame that now clung to him. For a long time after, he had not been able to look Paul—or anyone else—in the eye. There had been a sense of damage about him.

Yvonnet . . .

Paul considered. Martin had visited Yvonnet again in the course of his journey home with Vanessa. Odd. And now the shame again.

My son. My son: what happened to you?

He must have fallen asleep then, for when he opened his eyes, it was quite dark, and only the faint glint of a waning moon filtered down through the trees. He heard voices nearby, recognized Martin's tenor and Terrill's firm, factual intonation.

“My thanks, Fair One, for your help.”

“We do all that we can, Master Martin. While we have strength, we will continue to labor.”

The camp—if such a straggling line of refugees could be called a camp—slept. Snores. Mumbles. The voices of Terrill and Martin were hushed, but Paul sensed that Martin was struggling with something. The night was tense with it.

“Fair One . . .”

Terrill's form was lithe and taut in the moonlight, and Paul, his elven blood stirring into uneasy wakefulness, saw the soft, pervasive shimmer that surrounded him. “What would you, Master Martin?”

Martin still struggled. “You helped Prunella,” he said. “Can you . . .” Paul felt the lad's tension. “Can you help me?”

“You know what I mean. You know about me and . . .”

Paul's hands clenched on his knees. He was beginning to guess. Martin's shame . . . and Yvonnet. There were rumors about the baron of Hypprux. Yvonnet's position kept him safe from inquiry, but Martin could find safety only in absolute obscurity.

My son.

He wanted a son. He had been dispossessed of a sister and castle and lands, but he would settle for a wife and a son. But Martin and Yvonnet . . .

“Do not tell me unless you wish me to know,” Terrill was saying.

“I'm a sodomite.”

Terrill was silent.

Martin's voice was hoarse. “Elves can heal, Fair One. Will you heal me?”

Paul was weeping. Silently, soundlessly, the tears streaked his face, dampened his beard. He shut his eyes to the swirls of light that were all that was left of the stars.

Terrill's silence continued. In his mind's eye, Paul could see the Elf searching, examining, evaluating Martin. What did Terrill think? Was he disgusted with the depravity of the vices to which humans clung like drunkards hanging on their flasks? Was he sick with the knowledge that it was to such as these that the Elves had been forced by time and circumstance to yield their world?

And still he wept. My son.

“I cannot heal you,” Terrill said at last.

“I . . . understand.”

“You do not understand,” said the Elf. Neither reproof nor repugnance touched his voice. “I say that I cannot heal you, for that which is not sick cannot be cured.”

Terrill had said it. It had to be true. But still Paul wept. My son.

“Then I'm lost,” said Martin bitterly. “I'm surely lost.”

But, abruptly, Terrill had turned toward the east, back towards Shrinerock. “Something is wrong.”

And Paul suddenly noticed a tang in the air, a piquant scent of wood smoke and burning leaves. The east wind, which had slackened this last day, now returned, freshening, roaring through the treetops in whirling song. The odor increased.

“Ai, Elthiai.”

“What is it?”

Paul knew before Terrill answered. Malvern was burning. Angry, vengeful, desperate to kill the refugees and the baron who led them, the free companies had fired the forest.

***

Christopher wanted to be angry. He wanted to rage, to shout, to vent a frustration that mingled so inextricably with fright that he could not even begin to say where one left off and the other began.

The Elves had struck his grandfather, sending him into a mild little life of peach trees and gardens, sending Christopher himself on a fool's journey to Nicopolis and disaster. It was a terrible power they had, one that could alter the very substance and soul of a man. And yet their regret at what they had done—an immortal regret, continuing undiminished throughout the years—had caused them to work for Christopher's healing, to save his life, to undo, as much as was within their power, what they had done.

And now Christopher held Vanessa in his arms again, and had found that the patterns that had battered her life into a hell of borderline madness had been quelled. Again, by an elven hand.

“It wa' Mirya who helped me,” Vanessa told him. “She wa' the one who healed me in your castle. She can heal minds as well as bodies . . .”

Christopher thought of his grandfather, tried to fill himself with Vanessa's calm brown eyes. Healing? Was that healing?

“. . . but she could na do it wi'out my permission and help. An' so we went out among the patterns together, an' we danced wi' them, and she helped me to reweave them. They can be woven, you know, like a piece o' cloth. An' together we wove them, and now I only see patterns whan I want to.”

Changed, like his grandfather. Struck by magic . . . and happy in being so stricken. What, he wondered, had Roger felt? Relief? Had his grandfather's rage and arrogant disregard for anything resembling common humanity been a burden for him, one to be put off with the same rejoicing that Vanessa now exhibited for her own newfound clarity?

Peach trees. Christopher wanted to throw some fruit.

Natil—wisely—vanished for the rest of the day, and Christopher had a chance to hold Vanessa, meet and thank those who had taken her in and befriended her, learn something of her life in the village. But when, after dinner, the harper reappeared to ask permission to return to the forest to recuperate from her efforts at Shrinerock, he gave it to her curtly, trying to make up in appearance for anger that smacked of the illegitimate. “Go. Go on. Go find someone else to meddle with.”

His words disappeared into Natil's calm like a