Dangerous Women
Dangerous Women
George Raymond Richard Martin
Gardner Dozois
George R.R. Martin and Gardner Dozois have put together a towering anthology of specially-commissioned stories from the most stellar names in the genre, set in a number of readers' favourite fantasy worlds.George R.R. Martin is the bestselling author of A Song of Ice and Fire, the inspiration for HBO’s hit series Game of Thrones.The collection will also feature a new and unpublished 100pp novella by George R.R. Martin set in the world of A Song of Ice and Fire – now the award-winning HBO show, Game of Thrones.The novella, entitled 'The Princess and the Queen', will reveal the origins of the Targaryen Civil War, otherwise known as 'The Dance of the Dragons', a war that split a then-fledgling Westeros in two, pitting Targaryen against Targaryen and dragon against dragon.The Dangerous Women anthology also contains contributions from the following worldwide bestselling authors:• “Some Desperado” by Joe Abercrombie – A Red Country story• “Nora’s Song” by Cecelia Holland• “Bombshells” by Jim Butcher – A Harry Dresden story• “Wrestling Jesus” by Joe R. Lansdale• “Neighbours” by Megan Lindholm (who also writes as Robin Hobb)• “Shadows For Silence in the Forests of Hell” by Brandon Sanderson• “A Queen in Exile” by Sharon Kay Penman• “The Girl in the Mirror” by Lev Grossman – A Magicians story• “Virgins” by Diana Gabaldon – An Outlander story
DANGEROUS WOMEN
EDITED BY
GEORGE R. R. MARTIN
AND
GARDNER DOZOIS
Copyright (#ulink_c442ccd6-30f2-54e9-9df8-559da4e15a3e)
HarperVoyager
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
First published in Great Britain by HarperVoyager 2013
Copyright © George R.R. Martin and Gardner Dozois 2013
Dangerous Women / Edited by George R.R. Martin and Gardner Dozois.
“Some Desperado” Copyright © 2013 by Joe Abercrombie
“My Heart Is Either Broken” Copyright © 2013 by Megan Abbott
“Nora’s Song” Copyright © 2013 by Cecelia Holland
“The Hands That Are Not There” Copyright © 2013 by Melinda Snodgrass
“Bombshells” Copyright © 2013 by Jim Butcher
“Raisa Stepanova” Copyright © 2013 by Carrie Vaughn
“Wrestling Jesus” Copyright © 2013 by Joe R. Lansdale
“Neighbors” Copyright © 2013 by Megan Lindholm
“I Know How to Pick ’Em” Copyright © 2013 by Lawrence Block
“Shadows for Silence in the Forests of Hell” Copyright © 2013 by Brandon Sanderson
“A Queen in Exile” Copyright © 2013 by Sharon Kay Penman
“The Girl in the Mirror” Copyright © 2013 by Lev Grossman
“Second Arabesque, Very Slowly” copyright © 2013 by Nancy Kress
“City Lazarus” Copyright © 2013 by Diana Rowland
“Virgins” Copyright © 2013 by Diana Gabaldon
“Hell Hath No Fury” Copyright © 2013 by Sherrilyn Kenyon
“Pronouncing Doom” Copyright © 2013 by S. M. Stirling
“Name the Beast” Copyright © 2013 by Sam Sykes
“Caretakers” Copyright © 2013 by Pat Cadigan
“Lies My Mother Told Me” Copyright © 2013 by Caroline Spector
“The Princess and the Queen” Copyright © 2013 by George R. R. Martin
The author of each individual story asserts their moral rights, including the right be identified as the author of their work
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780007549405
Ebook Edition © NOVEMBER 2013 ISBN: 9780007549412
Version: 2018-06-20
To Jo Playford, my dangerous minion.
[—George R. R. Martin]
Contents
Cover (#u61173c97-7aa5-5aa8-820d-0dc6dea2a710)
Title Page (#ueb02a1d3-c691-5977-a780-e052ff75210b)
Copyright (#u2289ea98-cb5d-5493-ba0c-e6270f2bf97e)
Dedication (#u470b646c-0e4a-5cdf-ba32-1dee817af478)
Introduction (#u5b509b54-17a3-56ce-b653-b8bba791a3b3)
Some Desperado by Joe Abercrombie (#u02bc890d-2d9d-5bde-995d-61a17a586594)
My Heart Is Either Broken by Megan Abbott (#ua61e72ad-4118-5160-876f-72a891b0a0bd)
Nora’s Song by Cecelia Holland (#ucd45114c-8ecf-57d8-ad45-fb0315b9e7b4)
The Hands That Are Not There by Melinda Snodgrass (#u68dcca73-5695-54df-8081-ecf148e6d05c)
Bombshells by Jim Butcher (#ud4338be8-6a4b-5d2a-b693-41191a708d1d)
Raisa Stepanova by Carrie Vaughn (#uc6cddaf7-5ca1-5fa1-85c9-12e53e9cf470)
Wrestling Jesus by Joe R. Lansdale (#u85664e44-55ec-5ac9-878c-82232f1c206c)
Neighbors by Megan Lindholm (#u80998992-9730-5133-9e53-434a9c2df5b4)
I Know How to Pick ’Em by Lawrence Block (#uc9f54ee8-b5c4-5793-b792-d406b50a7fc3)
Shadows For Silence in the Forests of Hell by Brandon Sanderson (#udc55d5bd-6508-53d9-b74a-e863e81f282e)
A Queen in Exile by Sharon Kay Penman (#u1ccc45a6-8d5d-5163-ab44-5db4749f90b5)
The Girl in the Mirror by Lev Grossman (#u9bc80138-1587-5ed3-a7fb-78e542120d95)
Second Arabesque, Very Slowly by Nancy Kress (#uc3829fb5-86fe-519e-bf3c-a126c3fe5ffd)
City Lazarus by Diana Rowland (#ubd18517f-ea7e-55ae-96a3-0881d542dd57)
Virgins by Diana Gabaldon (#uf52e9769-91bf-59c9-813e-c3523a1940a0)
Hell Hath No Fury by Sherrilyn Kenyon (#u0f599192-6f9d-5e82-8f46-d10e0205adcc)
Pronouncing Doom by S. M. Stirling (#u2a671230-97b9-5a63-9ef8-c0add54e62c0)
Name the Beast by Sam Sykes (#u3385bfbe-b97a-51af-89bc-e1e2c14b0104)
Caretakers by Pat Cadigan (#u33507933-090f-5d0a-a257-bd0b4b825ae0)
Lies My Mother Told Me by Caroline Spector (#ude71b7e0-6331-5409-bfa6-e93e84ff6768)
The Princess and the Queen by George R. R. Martin (#ubfc78906-ee57-56d1-968a-503ea18d3d14)
Footnote (#u5f8e436c-c435-583f-98fe-2a3b5d0940c5)
About the Publisher (#u27f4035c-d349-5d32-9b51-961125441c3b)
Introduction by Gardner Dozois (#ulink_9c4a3d5d-1a8f-5202-b1d0-cb5c7ce8787d)
Genre fiction has always been divided over the question of just how dangerous women are.
In the real world, of course, the question has long been settled. Even if the Amazons are mythological (and almost certainly wouldn’t have cut their right breasts off to make it easier to draw a bow if they weren’t), their legend was inspired by memory of the ferocious warrior women of the Scythians, who were very much not mythological. Gladiatrix, women gladiators, fought other women—and sometimes men—to the death in the arenas of Ancient Rome. There were female pirates like Anne Bonny and Mary Read, and even female samurai. Women served as frontline combat troops, feared for their ferocity, in the Russian army during World War II, and serve so in Israel today. Until 2013, women in the U.S. forces were technically restricted to “noncombat” roles, but many brave women gave their lives in Iraq and Afghanistan anyway, since bullets and land mines have never cared whether you’re a noncombatant or not. Women who served as Women Airforce Service Pilots for the United States during World War II were also limited to noncombat roles (where many of them were nevertheless killed in the performance of their duties), but Russian women took to the skies as fighter pilots, and sometimes became aces. A Russian female sniper during World War II was credited with more than fifty kills. Queen Boudicca of the Iceni tribe led one of the most fearsome revolts ever against Roman authority, one that was almost successful in driving the Roman invaders from Britain, and a young French peasant girl inspired and led the troops against the enemy so successfully that she became famous forever afterwards as Joan of Arc.
On the dark side, there have been female “highwaymen” like Mary Frith and Lady Katherine Ferrers and Pearl Hart (the last person to ever rob a stagecoach); notorious poisoners like Agrippina and Catherine de Medici, modern female outlaws like Ma Barker and Bonnie Parker, even female serial killers like Aileen Wuornos. Elizabeth Báthory was said to have bathed in the blood of virgins, and even though that has been called into question, there is no doubt that she tortured and killed dozens, perhaps hundreds, of children during her life. Queen Mary I of England had hundreds of Protestants burnt at the stake; Queen Elizabeth of England later responded by executing large numbers of Catholics. Mad Queen Ranavalona of Madagascar had so many people put to death that she wiped out one-third of the entire population of Madagascar during her reign; she would even have you executed if you appeared in her dreams.
Popular fiction, though, has always had a schizophrenic view of the dangerousness of women. In the science fiction of the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s, women, if they appeared at all, were largely regulated to the role of the scientist’s beautiful daughter, who might scream during the fight scenes but otherwise had little to do except hang adoringly on the arm of the hero afterwards. Legions of women swooned helplessly while waiting to be rescued by the intrepid jut-jawed hero from everything from dragons to the bug-eyed monsters who were always carrying them off for improbable purposes either dietary or romantic on the covers of pulp SF magazines. Hopelessly struggling women were tied to railroad tracks, with nothing to do but squeak in protest and hope that the Good Guy arrived in time to save them.
And yet, at the same time, warrior women like Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Dejah Thoris and Thuvia, Maid of Mars, were every bit as good with the blade and every bit as deadly in battle as John Carter and their other male comrades, female adventuresses like C. L. Moore’s Jirel of Joiry swashbuckled their way through the pages of Weird Tales magazine (and blazed a trail for later female swashbucklers like Joanna Russ’s Alyx); James H. Schmitz sent Agents of Vega like Granny Wannatel and fearless teenagers like Telzey Amberdon and Trigger Argee out to battle the sinister menaces and monsters of the spaceways; and Robert A. Heinlein’s dangerous women were capable of being the captain of a spaceship or killing enemies in hand-to-hand combat. Arthur Conan Doyle’s sly, shady Irene Adler was one of the only people ever to outwit his Sherlock Holmes, and probably one of the inspirations for the legions of tricky, dangerous, seductive, and treacherous “femmes fatale” who featured in the works of Dashiell Hammett and James M. Cain and later went on to appear in dozens of films noir, and who still turn up in the movies and on television to this day. Later television heroines such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Xena, Warrior Princess, firmly established women as being formidable and deadly enough to battle hordes of fearsome supernatural menaces, and helped to inspire the whole subgenre of paranormal romance, which is sometimes unofficially known as the “kick-ass heroine” genre.
Like our anthology Warriors,Dangerous Women was conceived of as a cross-genre anthology, one that would mingle every kind of fiction, so we asked writers from every genre—science fiction, fantasy, mystery, historical, horror, paranormal romance, men and women alike—to tackle the theme of “dangerous women,” and that call was answered by some of the best writers in the business, including both new writers and giants of their fields like Diana Gabaldon, Jim Butcher, Sharon Kay Penman, Joe Abercrombie, Carrie Vaughn, Joe R. Lansdale, Lawrence Block, Cecelia Holland, Brandon Sanderson, Sherilynn Kenyon, S. M. Stirling, Nancy Kress, and George R. R. Martin.
Here you’ll find no hapless victims who stand by whimpering in dread while the male hero fights the monster or clashes swords with the villain, and if you want to tie these women to the railroad tracks, you’ll find you have a real fight on your hands. Instead, you will find sword-wielding women warriors; intrepid women fighter pilots and far-ranging spacewomen; deadly female serial killers; formidable female superheroes; sly and seductive femmes fatale; female wizards; hard-living bad girls; female bandits and rebels; embattled survivors in postapocalyptic futures; female private investigators; stern female hanging judges; haughty queens who rule nations and whose jealousies and ambitions send thousands to grisly deaths; daring dragonriders; and many more.
Enjoy!
Joe Abercrombie
As the sizzlingly fast-paced and action-packed story that follows demonstrates, sometimes chasing a fugitive can be as dangerous for the pursuers as for the pursued—particularly when the quarry has no place left to run …
Joe Abercrombie is one of the fastest-rising stars in fantasy today, acclaimed by readers and critics alike for his tough, spare, no-nonsense approach to the genre. He’s probably best known for his First Law trilogy, the first novel of which, The Blade Itself, was published in 2006; it was followed in subsequent years by Before They Are Hanged and Last Argument of Kings. He’s also written the stand-alone fantasy novels Best Served Cold and The Heroes. His most recent novel is Red Country. In addition to writing, Abercrombie is also a freelance film editor and lives and works in London.
SOME DESPERADO (#ulink_762c95a5-679a-5cff-a77f-a6e90db7049f)
Shy gave the horse her heels, its forelegs buckled, and, before she had a notion what was happening, she and her saddle had bid each other a sad farewell.
She was given a flailing instant aloft to consider the situation. Not a good one at a brief assay, and the impending earth gave her no time for a longer. She did her best to roll with the fall—as she tried to do with most of her many misfortunes—but the ground soon uncurled her, gave her a fair roughing up, and tossed her, flopping, into a patch of sun-shrivelled scrub.
Dust settled.
She stole a moment just to get some breath in. Then one to groan while the world stopped rolling. Then another to shift gingerly an arm and a leg, waiting for that sick jolt of pain that meant something was broke and her miserable shadow of a life would soon be lost in the dusk. She would’ve welcomed it, if it meant she could stretch out and not have to run any more. But the pain didn’t come. Not outside of the usual compass, leastways. As far as her miserable shadow of a life went, she was still awaiting judgment.
Shy dragged herself up, scratched and scuffed, caked in dust and spitting out grit. She’d taken too many mouthfuls of sand the last few months but she’d a dismal premonition that there’d be more. Her horse lay a few strides distant, one foamed-up flank heaving, forelegs black with blood. Neary’s arrow had snagged it in the shoulder, not deep enough to kill or even slow it right off, but deep enough to make it bleed at a good pace. With her hard riding, that had killed it just as dead as a shaft in the heart.
There’d been a time Shy had got attached to horses. A time—despite reckoning herself hard with people and being mostly right—she’d been uncommon soft about animals. But that time was a long time gone. There wasn’t much soft on Shy these days, body or mind. So she left her mount to its final red-frothed breaths without the solace of her calming hand and ran for the town, tottering some at first, but quickly warming to the exercise. At running, she’d a heap of practice.
“Town” was perhaps an overstatement. It was six buildings, and calling them buildings was being generous to two or three. All rough lumber and an entire stranger to straight angles, sun-baked, rain-peeled, and dust-blasted, huddled about a dirt square and a crumbling well.
The biggest building had the look of a tavern or brothel or trading post or more likely all three amalgamated. A rickety sign still clung to the boards above the doorway but the name had been rubbed by the wind to just a few pale streaks in the grain. Nothing, nowhere, was all its proclamation now. Up the steps two by two, bare feet making the old boards wheeze, thoughts boiling away at how she’d play it when she got inside, what truths she’d season with what lies for the most likely recipe.
There’s men chasing me! Gulping breath in the doorway and doing her best to look beyond desperate—no mighty effort of acting at that moment, or any occupying the last twelve months, indeed.
Three of the bastards! Then—provided no one recognised her from all the bills for her arrest—They tried to rob me! A fact. No need to add that she’d robbed the money herself from the new bank in Hommenaw in the company of those three worthies plus another since caught and hung by the authorities.
They killed my brother! They’re drunk on blood! Her brother was safe at home where she wished she was, and if her pursuers were drunk, it would likely be on cheap spirits as usual, but she’d shriek it with that little warble in her throat. Shy could do quite a warble when she needed one, she’d practiced it ’til it was something to hear. She pictured the patrons springing to their feet in their eagerness to aid a woman in distress. They shot my horse! She had to admit it didn’t seem overpowering likely that anyone hard-bitten enough to live out here would be getting into a sweat of chivalry, but maybe fate would deal her a winning hand for once.
It had been known to happen.
She blundered through the tavern’s door, opening her mouth to serve up the tale, and stopped cold.
The place was empty.
Not just no one there, but nothing there, and for damn sure no winning hand. Not a twig of furniture in the bare common room. A narrow stairway and a balcony running across the left-hand wall, doorways yawning empty upstairs. Chinks of light scattered where the rising sun was seeking out the many gaps in the splitting carpentry. Maybe just a lizard skittering away into the shadows—of which there was no shortage—and a bumper harvest of dust, greying every surface, drifted into every corner. Shy stood there a moment just blinking, then dashed back out along the rickety stoop and to the next building. When she shoved the door, it dropped right off its rusted hinges.
This one hadn’t even a roof. Hadn’t even a floor. Just bare rafters with the careless, pinking sky above, and bare joists with a stretch of dirt below, every bit as desolate as the miles of dirt outside.
She saw it now as she stepped back into the street with vision unhindered by hope. No glass in the windows, or wax paper, even. No rope by the crumbling well. No animals to be seen—aside from her own dead horse, that was, which only served to prove the point.
It was a dried-out corpse of a town, long since dead.
Shy stood in that forsaken place, up on the balls of her bare feet as though she was about to sprint off somewhere but lacked the destination, hugging herself with one arm while the fingers of the other hand fluttered and twitched at nothing, biting on her lip and sucking air fast and rasping through the little gap between her front teeth.
Even by recent standards, it was a low moment. But if she’d learned anything the last few months, it was that things can always get lower. Looking back the way she’d come, Shy saw the dust rising. Three little grey trails in the shimmer off the grey land.
“Oh, hell,” she whispered, and bit her lip harder. She pulled her eating knife from her belt and wiped the little splinter of metal on her dirty shirt, as though cleaning it might somehow settle the odds. Shy had been told she had a fertile imagination, but even so, it was hard to picture a more feeble weapon. She’d have laughed if she hadn’t been on the verge of weeping. She’d spent way too much time on the verge of weeping the last few months, now that she thought about it.
How had it come to this?
A question for some jilted girl rather than an outlaw with four thousand marks offered, but still a question she was never done asking. Some desperado! She’d grown expert on the desperate part but the rest remained a mystery. The sorry truth was that she knew full well how it came to this—the same way as always. One disaster following so hard on another that she just bounced between ’em, pinging about like a moth in a lantern. The second usual question followed hard on the first.
What the fuck now?
She sucked in her stomach—not that there was much to suck in these days—and dragged the bag out by the drawstrings, coins inside clicking together with that special sound only money makes. Two thousand marks in silver, give or take. You’d think that a bank would hold a lot more—they told depositors they always had fifty thousand on hand—but it turns out you can’t trust banks any more than bandits.
She dug her hand in, dragged free a fistful of coins, and tossed the money across the street, leaving it gleaming in the dust. She did it like she did most things these days—hardly knowing why. Maybe she valued her life a lot higher’n two thousand marks, even if no one else did. Maybe she hoped they’d just take the silver and leave her be, though what she’d do once she was left be in this corpse town—no horse, no food, no weapon—she hadn’t thought out. Clearly she hadn’t fixed up a whole plan, or not one that would hold too much water, leastways. Leaky planning had always been a problem of hers.
She sprinkled silver as if she was tossing seed on her mother’s farm, miles and years and a dozen violent deaths away. Whoever would’ve thought she’d miss the place? Miss the bone-poor house and the broke-down barn and the fences that always needed mending. The stubborn cow that never gave milk and the stubborn well that never gave water and the stubborn soil that only weeds would thrive in. Her stubborn little sister and brother too. Even big, scarred, softheaded Lamb. What Shy would’ve given now to hear her mother’s shrill voice curse her out again. She sniffed hard, her nose hurting, her eyes stinging, and wiped ’em on the back of her frayed cuff. No time for tearful reminiscences. She could see three dark spots of riders now beneath those three inevitable dust trails. She flung the empty bag away, ran back to the tavern, and—
“Ah!” She hopped over the threshold, bare sole of her foot torn on a loose nail head. The world’s nothing but a mean bully, that’s a fact. Even when you’ve big misfortunes threatening to drop on your head, small ones still take every chance to prick your toes. How she wished she’d got the chance to grab her boots. Just to keep a shred of dignity. But she had what she had, and neither boots nor dignity were on the list, and a hundred big wishes weren’t worth one little fact—as Lamb used to boringly drone at her whenever she cursed him and her mother and her lot in life and swore she’d be gone in the morning.
Shy remembered how she’d been then, and wished she had the chance now to punch her earlier self in the face. But she could punch herself in the face when she got out of this.
She’d a procession of other willing fists to weather first.
She hurried up the stairs, limping a little and cursing a lot. When she reached the top she saw she’d left bloody toe prints on every other one. She was working up to feeling pretty damn low about that glistening trail leading right to the end of her leg, when something like an idea came trickling through the panic.
She paced down the balcony, making sure to press her bloody foot firm to the boards, and turned into an abandoned room at the end. Then she held her foot up, gripping it hard with one hand to stop the bleeding, and hopped back the way she’d come and through the first doorway, near the top of the steps, pressing herself into the shadows inside.
A pitiful effort, doubtless. As pitiful as her bare feet and her eating knife and her two-thousand-mark haul and her big dream of making it back home to the shit-hole she’d had the big dream of leaving. Small chance those three bastards would fall for that, even stupid as they were. But what else could she do?
When you’re down to small stakes, you have to play long odds.
Her own breath was her only company, echoing in the emptiness, hard on the out, ragged on the in, almost painful down her throat. The breath of someone scared near the point of an involuntary shitting and all out of ideas. She just couldn’t see her way to the other side of this. She ever made it back to that farm she’d jump out of bed every morning she woke alive and do a little dance, and give her mother a kiss for every cuss, and never snap at her sister or mock Lamb again for being a coward. She promised it, then wished she was the sort who kept promises.
She heard horses outside, crept to the one window with half a view of the street, and peered down as gingerly as if she was peering into a bucket of scorpions.
They were here.
Neary wore that dirty old blanket cinched in at the waist with twine, his greasy hair sticking up at all angles, reins in one hand and the bow he’d shot Shy’s horse with in the other, the blade of the heavy axe hanging at his belt as carefully cleaned as the rest of his repugnant person was beyond neglect. Dodd had his battered hat pulled low, sitting his saddle with that round-shouldered cringe he always had around his brother, like a puppy expecting a slap. Shy would have liked to give the faithless fool a slap right then. A slap for starters. Then there was Jeg, sitting up tall as a lord in that long red coat of his, dirt-fringed tails spread out over his big horse’s rump, hungry sneer on his face as he scanned the buildings, that tall hat which he thought made him look quite the personage poking off his head slightly crooked, like the chimney from a burned-out farmstead.
Dodd pointed to the coins scattered across the dirt around the well, a couple of ’em winking with the sun. “She left the money.”
“Seems so,” said Jeg, voice hard as his brother’s was soft.
She watched them get down and hitch their mounts. No hurry to it. Like they were dusting themselves off after a jaunt of a ride and looking forward to a nice little evening among cultured company. They’d no need to hurry. They knew she was here, and they knew she was going nowhere, and they knew she was getting no help, and so did she.
“Bastards,” Shy whispered, cursing the day she ever took up with them. But you have to take up with someone, don’t you? And you can only pick from what’s on offer.
Jeg stretched his back, took a long sniff and a comfortable spit, then drew his sword. That curved cavalry sword he was so proud of with the clever-arsed basketwork, which he said he’d won in a duel with a Union officer, but that Shy knew he’d stolen, along with the best part of everything else he’d ever owned. How she’d mocked him about that stupid sword. She wouldn’t have minded having it to hand now, though, and him with only her eating knife.
“Smoke!” bellowed Jeg, and Shy winced. She’d no idea who’d thought that name up for her. Some wag had lettered it on the bills for her arrest and now everyone used it. On account of her tendency to vanish like smoke, maybe. Though it could also have been on account of her tendencies to stink like it, stick in folks’ throats, and drift with the wind.
“Get out here, Smoke!” Jeg’s voice clapped off the dead fronts of the buildings, and Shy shrank a little further into the darkness. “Get out here and we won’t hurt you too bad when we find you!”
So much for taking the money and going. They wanted the price on her too. She pressed her tongue into the gap between her teeth and mouthed, “Cocksuckers.” There’s a certain kind of man, the more you give him, the more he’ll take.
“We’ll have to go and get her,” she heard Neary say in the stillness.
“Aye.”
“I told you we’d have to go and get her.”
“You must be pissing your pants with joy over the outcome, then, eh?”
“Said we’d have to get her.”
“So stop pointing it out and get it done.”
Dodd’s wheedling voice. “Look, the money’s here, we could just scrape this up and get off, there ain’t no need to—”
“Did you and I really spring from between the same set o’ legs?” sneered Jeg at his brother. “You are the stupidest bastard.”
“Stupidest,” said Neary.
“You think I’m leaving four thousand marks for the crows?” said Jeg. “You scrape that up, Dodd, we’ll break the mare.”
“Where do you reckon she is?” asked Neary.
“I thought you was the big tracker?”
“Out in the wild, but we ain’t in the wild.”
Jeg cocked an eyebrow at the empty shacks. “You’d call this the highest extent of civilisation, would you?”
They looked at each other a moment, dust blowing up around their legs, then settling again.
“She’s here somewhere,” said Neary.
“You think? Good thing I got the self-described sharpest eyes west of the mountains with me, so I don’t miss her dead horse ten fucking strides away. Yes, she’s here somewhere.”
“Where do you reckon?” asked Neary.
“Where would you be?”
Neary looked about the buildings and Shy jerked out of the way as his narrowed eyes darted over the tavern.
“In that one, I reckon, but I ain’t her.”
“Course you ain’t fucking her. You know how I can tell? You got bigger tits and less sense. If you was her, I wouldn’t have to fucking look for her now, would I?”
Another silence, another dusty gust. “Guess not,” said Neary.
Jeg took his tall hat off, scrubbed at his sweaty hair with his fingernails, and jammed it back on at an angle. “You look in there, I’ll try the one next to it, but don’t kill the bitch, eh? That’ll half the reward.”
Shy eased back into the shadows, feeling the sweat tickling under her shirt. To be caught in this worthless arsehole of a place. By these worthless bastards. In bare feet. She didn’t deserve this. All she’d wanted was to be somebody worth speaking of. To not be nothing, forgotten on the day of her death. Now she saw that there’s a sharp balance between too little excitement and a huge helping too much. But like most of her lame-legged epiphanies, it had dawned a year too late.
She sucked air through the little gap between her teeth as she heard Neary creaking across the boards in the common room, maybe just the metal rattle of that big axe. She was shivering all over. Felt so weak of a sudden she could hardly hold the knife up, let alone imagine swinging it. Maybe it was time to give up. Toss the knife out the door and say, “I’m coming out! I’ll be no trouble! You win!” Smile and nod and thank ’em for their betrayal and their kind consideration when they kicked the shit out of her or horsewhipped her or broke her legs and whatever else amused them on the way to her hanging.
She’d seen her share of those and never relished the spectacle. Standing there tied while they read your name and your crime, hoping for some last reprieve that wouldn’t come while the noose was drawn tight, sobbing for mercy or hurling your curses and neither making the slightest hair of difference. Kicking at nothing, tongue stuck out while you shat yourself for the amusement of scum no better’n you. She pictured Jeg and Neary, up front in the grinning crowd as they watched her do the thief’s dance at rope’s end. Probably arrayed in even more ridiculous clothes secured with the reward money.
“Fuck them,” she mouthed at the darkness, lips curling back in a snarl as she heard Neary’s foot on the bottom step.
She had a hell of a contrary streak, did Shy. From when she was a tot, when someone told her how things would be, she immediately started thinking on how she’d make ’em otherwise. Her mother had always called her mule stubborn, and blamed it on her Ghost blood. “That’s your damn Ghost blood,” as though being quarter savage had been Shy’s own choice rather than on account of her mother picking out a half-Ghost wanderer to lie with who turned out—no crashing surprise—to be a no-good drunk.
Shy would be fighting. No doubt she’d be losing, but she’d be fighting. She’d make those bastards kill her and at least rob ’em of half the reward. Might not expect such thoughts as those to steady your hand, but they did hers. The little knife still shook, but now from how hard she was gripping it.
For a man who proclaimed himself the great tracker, Neary had some trouble keeping quiet. She heard the breath in his nose as he paused at the top of the steps, close enough to touch if it hadn’t been for the plank wall between them.
A board groaned as he shifted his weight and Shy’s whole body tensed, every hair twitching up. Then she saw him—not darting through the doorway at her, axe in his fist and murder in his eyes, but creeping off down the balcony after the bait of bloody footsteps, drawn bow pointed exactly the wrong way.
When she was given a gift, Shy had always believed in grabbing it with both hands rather than thinking on how to say thank you. She dashed at Neary’s back, teeth bared and a low growl ripping at her throat. His head whipped around, the whites of his eyes showing and the bow following after, the head of the arrow glinting with such light as found that abandoned place.
She ducked low and caught him around the legs, shoulder driving hard into his thigh and making him grunt, her hand finding her wrist and clamping tight under Neary’s arse, her nose suddenly full of the horse-and-sour sweat stink of him. The bowstring went, but Shy was already straightening, snarling, screaming, bursting up, and—big man though he was—she hoisted Neary right over the rail as neat as she used to hoist a sack of grain on her mother’s farm.
He hung in the air a moment, mouth and eyes wide with shock, then he plummeted with a breathy whoop and crashed through the boards down below.
Shy blinked, hardly able to believe it. Her scalp was burning and she touched a finger to it, half expecting to feel the arrow stuck right in her brains, but she turned and saw it was in the wall behind her, a considerably happier outcome from her standpoint. Blood, though, sticky in her hair, tickling at her forehead. Maybe the lath of the bow scratched her. Get that bow, she’d have a chance. She made a step towards the stairs, then stopped dead. Jeg was in the doorway, his sword a long, black curve against the sun-glare of the street.
“Smoke!” he roared, and she was off down the balcony like a rabbit, following her own trail of bloody footprints to nowhere, hearing Jeg’s heavy boots clomping towards the stairs. She hit the door at the end full tilt with her shoulder and burst into the light, out onto another balcony behind the building. Up onto the low rail with one bare foot—better to just go with her contrary streak and hope it somehow carried her through than to pause for thought—and she jumped. Flung herself writhing at a ramshackle balcony on the building across the narrow lane, as if flapping her hands and feet like she was having a fit might carry her further.
She caught the rail, wood smashing her in the ribs, slipped down, groaning, clawing for a grip, fought desperately to drag herself up and over, felt something give—
And with a groan of tortured wood the whole weather-blasted thing tore from the side of the building.
Again Shy was given a flailing instant aloft to consider the situation. Again not good, at a brief assay. She was just starting to wail when her old enemy the ground caught up with her—as the ground always will—folded up her left leg, spun her over, then smashed her in the side and drove her wind right out.
Shy coughed, then moaned, then spat more grit. That she had been right about her earlier sandy mouth not being her last was scant comfort. She saw Jeg standing on the balcony where she’d jumped. He pushed his hat back and gave a chuckle, then ducked back inside.
She still had a piece of the rail in her fist, well rotted through. A little like her hopes. She tossed it away as she rolled over, waiting again for that sick pain that told her she was done. Again it didn’t come. She could move. She worked her feet around and guessed that she could stand. But she thought that she might leave that for now. Chances were she’d only get to do it one more time.
She floundered clear of the tangle of broken wood against the wall, her shadow stretching out towards the doorway, groaning with pain as she heard Jeg’s heavy footsteps inside. She started wriggling back on her arse and her elbows, dragging one leg after, the little knife blade hidden up behind her wrist, her other fist clutching at the dirt.
“Where are you off to?” Jeg ducked under the low lintel and into the lane. He was a big man, but he looked a giant right then. Half a head taller than Shy, even if she’d been standing, and probably not much short of twice her weight, even if she’d eaten that day. He strutted over, tongue wedged into his lower lip so it bulged out, heavy sword loose in his hand, relishing his big moment.
“Pulled a neat trick on Neary, eh?” He pushed the brim of his hat up a little to show the tan mark across his forehead. “You’re stronger’n you look. That boy’s so dumb he could’ve fallen without the help, though. You’ll be pulling no tricks on me.”
They’d see about that, but she’d let her knife say it for her. Even a little knife can be a damned eloquent piece of metal if you stick it in the right place. She scrambled back, kicking up dust, making it look like she was trying to push herself up, then sagging back with a whimper as her left leg took her weight. Looking badly hurt was taking no great effort of acting. She could feel blood creeping from her hair and tickling her forehead. Jeg stepped out of the shadow and the low sun shone in his face, making him squint. Just the way she wanted it.
“Still remember the day I first put eyes on you,” he went on, loving the sound of his own bleating. “Dodd come to me, all excited, and said he met Smoke, her whose killer’s face is on all them bills up near Rostod, four thousand marks offered for her capture. The tales they tell on you!” He gave a whoop and she scrambled back again, working that left leg underneath her, making sure it would work when she needed it. “You’d think you was a demon with two swords to a hand the way they breathe your name. Picture my fucking disappointment when I find you ain’t naught but a scared girl with gappy teeth and a powerful smell o’ piss about her.” As if Jeg smelled of summer meadows! He took another step forward, reaching out for her with one big hand. “Now, don’t scratch; you’re worth more to me alive. I don’t want to—”
She flung the dirt with her left hand as she shoved up hard with her right, coming to her feet. He twisted his head away, snarling as the dust showered across his face. He swung blind as she darted at him low and the sword whipped over her head, wind of it snatching at her hair, weight of it turning him sideways. She caught his flapping coat tail in her left hand and sank her eating knife into his sword shoulder with the other.
He gave a strangled grunt as she pulled the knife clear and stabbed at him again, blade ripping open the arm of his coat and the arm inside it too, almost cutting into her own leg. She was bringing up the knife again when his fist crunched into the side of her mouth and sent her reeling, bare feet wrestling with the dirt. She caught hold of the corner of the building and hung there for a moment, trying to shake the light from her skull. She saw Jeg a pace or two off, bared teeth frothy with spit as he tried to fumble the sword from his dangling right hand into his left, fingers tangled with the fancy brass basketwork.
When things were moving fast, Shy had a knack for just doing, without thoughts of mercy, or thoughts of outcomes, or thoughts of much at all. That was what had kept her alive through all this shit. And what had landed her in it in the first place, for that matter. Ain’t many blessings aren’t mixed blessings, once you got to live with them, and she’d a curse for thinking too much after the action, but that was another story. If Jeg got a good grip on that sword she was dead, simple as that, so before she’d quite stopped the street spinning she charged at him again. He tried to free an arm but she managed to catch it with her clawing left hand, pressing up against him, holding herself steady by his coat as she punched wildly with the knife—in his gut, in his ribs, in his ribs again—her snarling at him and him grunting at her with every thump of the blade, the grip slippery in her aching hand.
He got hold of her shirt, stitches tearing as the arm half-ripped off, tried to shove her away as she stabbed him again but there was no strength in it, only sent her back a step. Her head was clearing now and she kept her balance, but Jeg stumbled and dropped on one knee. She lifted the knife up high in both hands and drove it right down on that stupid hat, squashing it flat, leaving the blade buried to the handle in the top of Jeg’s head.
She staggered back, expecting him just to pitch onto his face. Instead he lurched up suddenly like a camel she’d once seen at a fair, the brim of his hat jammed down over his eyes to the bridge of his nose and the knife handle jutting straight up.
“Where you gone?” The words all mangled as if his mouth was full of gravel. “Smoke?” He lurched one way, then the other. “Smoke?” He shuffled at her, kicking up dust, sword dangling from his bloody right hand, the point scratching grooves in the dust around his feet. He reached up with his left, fingers all stretched out stiff but the wrist all floppy, and started prodding at his hat like he had something in his eye and wanted to wipe it clear.
“Shmoke?” One side of his face was twitching, shuddering, fluttering in a most unnatural way. Or maybe it was natural enough for a man with a knife lodged through his brains. “Thmoke?” There was blood dripping from the bent brim of his hat, leaving red streaks down his cheek, his shirt halfway soaked with it; but he kept coming on, bloody right arm jerking, hilt of his sword rattling against his leg. “Thmoe?” She backed away, staring, her own hands limp and all her skin prickling, until her back hit the wall behind her. “Thoe?”
“Shut your mouth!” And she dived at him with both palms, shoving him over backwards, sword bouncing from his hand, bloody hat still pinned to his head with her knife. He slowly rolled over, onto his face, right arm flopping. He slid his other hand underneath his shoulder as though he’d push himself up.
“Oh,” he muttered into the dust. Then he was still.
Shy slowly turned her head and spat blood. Too many mouthfuls of blood the last few months. Her eyes were wet and she wiped them on the back of her trembling hand. Couldn’t believe what had happened. Hardly seemed she’d had any part in it. A nightmare she was due to wake from. She pressed her eyes shut, and opened them, and there he still lay.
She snatched in a breath and blew it out hard, dashed spit from her lip, blood from her forehead, caught another breath and forced it free. Then she gathered up Jeg’s sword, gritting her teeth against the urge to spew, rising in waves along with the thumping pain in the side of her face. Shit, but she wanted to sit down! Just stop. But she made herself turn away. Forced herself up to the back door of the tavern. The one Jeg had come through, still alive, a few moments before. Takes a lifetime of hard work to make a man. Only takes a few moments to end one.
Neary had dragged himself out of the hole his fall had put through the floorboards, clutching at his bloody trouser leg and looking quite put out about it. “Did you catch that fucking bitch?” he asked, squinting towards the doorway.
“Oh, no doubt.”
His eyes went wide and he tried to drag himself towards his bow, not far out of reach, whimpering all the way. She hefted Jeg’s big sword as she got close, and Neary turned over, eyes wide with terror, holding up one desperate arm. She hit it full-blooded with the flat of the sword and he moaned, clutching it to his chest. Then she hit him across the side of the head and rolled him over, blubbering, into the boards. Then she padded past him, sliding the sword through her belt, picked up the bow, and dragged some arrows from his quiver. She made for the door, stringing one as she went, and peered out into the street.
Dodd was still scraping coins from the dust and into the bag, working his way towards the well. Insensible to the fates of his two companions. Not as surprising as you might suppose. If one word summed up Dodd, it was “insensible.”
She padded down the steps of the tavern, near to their edges where they were less likely to give a warning creak, drawing the bow halfway and taking a good aim on Dodd, bent over in the dust with his back to her, a dark sweat patch down the middle of his shirt. She gave some long, hard consideration to making that sweat patch the bull’s-eye and shooting him in the back right there. But killing a man isn’t easy, especially after hard consideration. She watched him pick up the last coin and drop it in the bag, then stand, pulling the drawstrings, then turn, smiling. “I got the—”
They stayed there awhile. He crouched in the dusty street, bag of silver in one hand, uncertain smile lit up in the sun, but his eyes looking decidedly scared in the shadow of his cheap hat. She on the bottom step of the tavern, bloody bare feet, bloody split mouth, bloody hair plastered across her bloody forehead, but the bow good and steady.
He licked his lips, swallowed, then licked them again. “Where’s Neary?”
“In a bad way.” She was surprised by the iron in her voice. Sounded like someone she didn’t even know. Smoke’s voice, maybe.
“Where’s my brother?”
“In a worse.”
Dodd swallowed, sweaty neck shifting, starting to ease gently backwards. “You kill him?”
“Forget about them two and stop still.”
“Look, Shy, you ain’t going to shoot me, are you? Not after all we been through. You ain’t going to shoot. Not me. Are you?” His voice was rising higher and higher, but still he edged back towards the well. “I didn’t want this. It weren’t my idea!”
“Course not. You need to think to have an idea, and you ain’t up to it. You just went along. Even if it happened to mean me getting hung.”
“Now, look, Shy—”
“Stop still, I said.” She drew the bow all the way, string cutting tight into her bloody fingers. “You fucking deaf, boy?”
“Look, Shy, let’s just talk this out, eh? Just talk.” He held his trembly palm up like that might stop an arrow. His pale blue eyes were fixed on her, and suddenly she had a memory rise up of the first time she met him, leaning back against the livery, smiling free and easy, none too clever but plenty of fun. She’d had a profound lack of fun in her life since she’d left home. You’d never have thought she left home to find it.
“I know I done wrong, but … I’m an idiot.” And he tried out a smile, no steadier than his palm. He’d been worth a smile or two, Dodd, at least to begin with, and though no artist of a lover, had kept the bed warm, which was something, and made her feel as if she weren’t on her own on one side with the whole rest of the world on the other, which was something more.
“Stop still,” she said, but more softly now.
“You ain’t going to shoot me.” Still he was edging back towards the well. “It’s me, right? Me. Dodd. Just don’t shoot me, now.” Still going. “What I’m going to do is—”
She shot him.
It’s a strange thing about a bow. Stringing it, and drawing it, and nocking the arrow, and taking your aim—all that takes effort, and skill, and a decision. Letting go the string is nothing. You just stop holding it. In fact, once you’ve got it drawn and aimed, it’s easier to let fly than not to.
Dodd was less than a dozen strides distant, and the shaft flitted across the space between them, missed his hand by a whisker and stuck silently into his chest. Surprised her, the lack of a sound. But then, flesh is soft. ’Specially in comparison to an arrowhead. Dodd took one more wobbly pace, like he hadn’t quite caught up with being arrow-stuck yet, his eyes going very wide. Then he blinked down at the shaft.
“You shot me,” he whispered, and he sank to his knees, blood already spreading out on his shirt in a dark oval.
“Didn’t I bloody warn you!” She flung the bow down, suddenly furious with him and with the bow too.
He stared at her. “But I didn’t think you’d do it.”
She stared back. “Neither did I.” A silent moment, and the wind blew up one more time and stirred the dust around them. “Sorry.”
“Sorry?” he croaked.
Might’ve been the stupidest thing she’d ever said, and that with some fierce competition, but what else could she say? No words were going to take that arrow out. She gave half a shrug. “I guess.”
Dodd winced, hefting the silver in one hand, turning towards the well. Shy’s mouth dropped open, and she took off running as he toppled sideways, hauling the bag into the air. It turned over and over, curving up and starting to fall, drawstrings flapping, Shy’s clutching hand straining for it as she sprinted, lunged, fell …
She grunted as her sore ribs slammed into the wall around the well, right arm darting down into the darkness. For a moment she thought she was going in after the bag—which would probably have been a fitting conclusion—then her knees came back down on the dirt outside.
She had it by one of the bottom corners, loose canvas clutched by broken nails, drawstrings dangling as dirt and bits of loose stone filtered down around it.
Shy smiled. For the first time that day. That month, maybe.
Then the bag came open.
Coins tumbled into the darkness in a twinkling shower, silver pinging and rattling from the earthy walls, disappearing into the inky nothingness, and silence.
She straightened up, numb.
She backed away slowly from the well, hugging herself with one hand while the empty bag hung from the other.
She looked over at Dodd, lying on his back with the arrow sticking straight up from his chest, his wet eyes fixed on her, his ribs going fast. She heard his shallow breaths slow, then stop.
Shy stood there a moment, then doubled over and blew puke onto the ground. Not much of it, since she’d eaten nothing that day, but her guts clenched up hard and made sure she retched up what there was. She shook so bad she thought she was going to fall, hands on her knees, sniffing bile from her nose and spluttering it out.
Damn, but her ribs hurt. Her arm. Her leg. Her face. So many scrapes, twists, and bruises, she could hardly tell one from another: her whole body was one overpowering fucking throb.
Her eyes crawled over to Dodd’s corpse, she felt another wave of sickness and forced them away, over to the horizon, fixing them on that shimmering line of nothing.
Not nothing.
There was dust rising there. She wiped her face on her ripped sleeve one more time, so filthy now that it was as like to make her dirtier as cleaner. She straightened, squinting into the distance, hardly able to believe it. Riders. No doubt. A good way off, but as many as a dozen.
“Oh, hell,” she whispered, and bit her lip. Things kept going this way she’d soon have chewed right through the bloody thing. “Oh, hell!” And Shy put her hands over her eyes and squeezed them shut and hid in self-inflicted darkness in the desperate hope she might have somehow been mistaken. Would hardly have been her first mistake, would it?
But when she took her hands away, the dust was still there. The world’s a mean bully, all right, and the lower down you are, the more it delights in kicking you. Shy put her hands on her hips, arched her back, and screamed up at the sky, the word drawn out as long as her sore lungs would allow.
“Fuck!”
The echoes clapped from the buildings and died a quick death. No answer came. Perhaps the faint droning of a fly already showing some interest in Dodd. Neary’s horse eyed her for a moment, then looked away, profoundly unimpressed. Now Shy had a sore throat to add to her woes. She was obliged to ask herself the usual questions.
What the fuck now?
She clenched her teeth as she hauled Dodd’s boots off and sat in the dust beside him to pull them on. Not the first time they’d stretched out together in the dirt, him and her. First time with him dead, though. His boots were way too loose on her, but a long stride better than no boots at all. She clomped back into the tavern in them.
Neary was making some pitiable groans as he struggled to get up. Shy kicked him in the face and down onto his back, plucked the rest of the arrows from his quiver, and took his heavy belt knife too. Back out into the sun and she picked up the bow, jammed Dodd’s hat onto her head, also somewhat on the roomy side but at least offering some shade as the sun got up. Then she dragged the three horses together and roped them into a string—quite a ticklish operation, since Jeg’s big stallion was a mean bastard and seemed determined to kick her brains out.
When she’d got it done, she frowned off towards those dust trails. They were headed for the town, all right, and fast. With a better look, she reckoned on about nine or ten, which was two or three better than twelve but still an almighty inconvenience.
Bank agents after the stolen money. Bounty hunters looking to collect her price. Other outlaws who’d got wind of a score. A score that was currently in the bottom of a well, as it happened. Could be anyone. Shy had an uncanny knack for making enemies. She found that she’d looked over at Dodd, facedown in the dust with his bare feet limp behind him. The only thing she had worse luck with was friends.
How had it come to this?
She shook her head, spat through the little gap between her front teeth, and hauled herself up into the saddle of Dodd’s horse. She faced it away from those impending dust clouds, towards which quarter of the compass she knew not.
Shy gave the horse her heels.
Megan Abbott
Megan Abbott was born in the Detroit area, graduated from the University of Michigan with a B.A. in English literature, received her Ph.D. in English and American literature from New York University, and has taught literature, writing, and film at New York University and the State University of New York at Oswego. She published her first novel, Die a Little, in 2005, and has since come to be regarded as one of the foremost practitioners of modern noir mystery writing, with the San Francisco Chronicle saying that she was poised to “claim the throne as the finest prose stylist in crime fiction since Raymond Chandler.” Her novels include Queenpin, which won the Edgar Award in 2008, The Song Is You,Bury Me Deep, and The End of Everything. Her most recent novel is Dare Me. Her other books include, as editor, the anthology A Hell of a Woman: An Anthology of Female Noir and a nonfiction study, The Street Was Mine: White Masculinity in Hardboiled Fiction and Film Noir. She lives in Forest Hills, New York, and maintains a website at meganabbott.com.
In the subtle yet harrowing story that follows, she shows us that there are some things that you just can’t get over, no matter how hard you try—and some insights into the hearts of even those we love the most that you can’t unsee once you see them.
MY HEART IS EITHER BROKEN (#ulink_b8fbcf17-3c22-5931-967f-3fd9856dc9d4)
He waited in the car. He had parked under one of the big banks of lights. No one else wanted to park there. He could guess why. Three vehicles over, he saw a woman’s back pressed against a window, her hair shaking. Once, she turned her head and he almost saw her face, the blue of her teeth as she smiled.
Fifteen minutes went by before Lorie came stumbling across the parking lot, heels clacking.
He had been working late and didn’t even know she wasn’t home until he got there. When she finally picked up her cell, she told him where she was, a bar he’d never heard of, a part of town he didn’t know.
“I just wanted some noise and people,” she had explained. “I didn’t mean anything.”
He asked if she wanted him to come get her.
“Okay,” she said.
On the ride home, she was doing the laughing-crying thing she’d been doing lately. He wanted to help her but didn’t know how. It reminded him of the kinds of girls he used to date in high school. The ones who wrote in ink all over their hands and cut themselves in the bathroom stalls at school.
“I hadn’t been dancing in so long, and if I shut my eyes no one could see,” she was saying, looking out the window, her head tilted against the window. “No one there knew me until someone did. A woman I didn’t know. She kept shouting at me. Then she followed me into the bathroom stall and said she was glad my little girl couldn’t see me now.”
He knew what people would say. That she was out dancing at a grimy pickup bar. They wouldn’t say she cried all the way home, that she didn’t know what to do with herself, that no one knows how they’ll act when something like this happens to them. Which it probably won’t.
But he also wanted to hide, wanted to find a bathroom stall himself, in another city, another state, and never see anyone he knew again, especially his mother or his sister, who spent all day on the Internet trying to spread the word about Shelby, collecting tips for the police.
Shelby’s hands—well, people always talk about baby’s hands, don’t they?—but they were like tight little flowers and he loved to put his palm over them. He never knew he’d feel like that. Never knew he’d be the kind of guy—that there even were kinds of guys—who would catch the milky scent of his daughter’s baby blanket and feel warm inside. Even, sometimes, press his face against it.
It took him a long time to tug off the dark red cowboy boots she was wearing, ones he did not recognize.
When he pulled off her jeans, he didn’t recognize her underwear either. The front was a black butterfly, its wings fluttering against her thighs with each tug.
He looked at her and a memory came to him of when they first dated, Lorie taking his hand and running it along her belly, her thighs. Telling him she once thought she’d be a dancer, that maybe she could be. And that if she ever had a baby she’d have a C-section, because everyone knew what happened to women’s stomachs after, not to mention what it does down there, she’d said, laughing, and put his hand there next.
He’d forgotten all this, and other things too, but now the things kept coming back and making him crazy.
He poured a tall glass of water for her and made her drink it. Then he refilled it and set it beside her.
She didn’t sleep like a drunk person but like a child, her lids twitching dreamily and a faint smile tugging at her mouth.
The moonlight coming in, it felt like he watched her all night, but at some point he must have fallen asleep.
When he woke, she had her head on his belly, was rubbing him drowsily.
“I was dreaming I was pregnant again,” she murmured. “It was like Shelby all over again. Maybe we could adopt. There are so many babies out there that need love.”
They had met six years ago. He was working for his mother, who owned a small apartment building on the north side of town.
Lorie lived on the first floor, where the window was high and you could see people walking on the sidewalk. His mother called it a “sunken garden apartment.”
She lived with another girl and sometimes they came in very late, laughing and pressing up against each other in the way young girls do, whispering things, their legs bare and shiny in short skirts. He wondered what they said.
He was still in school then and would work evenings and weekends, changing washers on leaky faucets, taking out the trash.
Once, he was in front of the building, hosing down the garbage cans with bleach, and she rushed past him, her tiny coat bunched around her face. She was talking on the phone and she moved so quickly he almost didn’t see her, almost splashed her with the hose. For a second he saw her eyes, smeary and wet.
“I wasn’t lying,” she was saying into the phone as she pushed her key into the front door, as she heaved her shoulders against it. “I’m not the liar here.”
One evening not long after, he came home and there was a note under the door. It read:
My heart is either broken or I haven’t paid the bill.
Thx, Lorie, #1-A
He’d read it four times before he figured it out.
She smiled when she opened the door, the security chain across her forehead.
He held up his pipe wrench.
“You’re just in time,” she said, pointing to the radiator.
No one ever thinks anything will ever happen to their baby girl. That’s what Lorie kept saying. She’d been saying that to reporters, the police, for every day of the three weeks since it happened.
He watched her with the detectives. It was just like on TV except nothing like on TV. He wondered why nothing was ever like you thought it would be and then he realized it was because you never thought this would be you.
She couldn’t sit still, her fingers twirling through the edges of her hair. Sometimes, at a traffic signal, she would pull nail scissors from her purse and trim the split ends. When the car began moving, she would wave her hand out the window, scattering the clippings into the wind.
It was the kind of careless, odd thing that made her so different from any girl he ever knew. Especially that she would do it front of him.
He was surprised how much he had liked it.
But now all of it seemed different and he could see the detectives watching her, looking at her like she was a girl in a short skirt, twirling on a bar stool and tossing her hair at men.
“We’re gonna need you to start from the beginning again,” the male one said, and that part was like on TV. “Everything you remember.”
“She’s gone over it so many times,” he said, putting his hand over hers and looking at the detective wearily.
“I meant you, Mr. Ferguson,” the detective said, looking at him. “Just you.”
They took Lorie to the outer office and he could see her through the window, pouring long gulps of creamer into her coffee, licking her lips.
He knew how that looked too. The newspapers had just run a picture of her at a smoothie place. The caption was “What about Shelby?” They must have taken it through the front window. She was ordering something at the counter, and she was smiling. They always got her when she was smiling. They didn’t understand that she smiled when she was sad. Sometimes she cried when she was happy, like at their wedding, when she cried all day, her face pink and gleaming, shuddering against his chest.
I never thought you would, she had said. I never thought I would. That any of this could happen.
He didn’t know what she meant, but he loved feeling her huddled against him, her hips grinding against him like they did when she couldn’t hold herself together and seemed to be holding on to him to keep from flying off the earth itself.
“So, Mr. Ferguson,” the detective said, “you came home from work and there was no one home?”
“Right,” he said. “Call me Tom.”
“Tom,” the detective started again, but the name seemed to fumble in his mouth like he’d rather not say it. Last week he’d called him Tom. “Was it unusual to find them gone at that time of day?”
“No,” he said. “She liked to keep busy.”
It was true, because Lorie never stayed put and sometimes would strap Shelby into the car seat and drive for hours, putting 100 or 200 miles on the car.
She would take her to Mineral Pointe and take photos of them in front of the water. He would get them on his phone at work and they always made him grin. He liked how she was never one of these women who stayed at home and watched court shows or the shopping channels.
She worked twenty-five hours a week at the Y while his mother stayed with Shelby. Every morning, she ran five miles, putting Shelby in the jogging stroller. She made dinner every night and sometimes even mowed the lawn when he was too busy. She never ever stopped moving.
This is what the newspapers and the TV people loved. They loved to take pictures of her jogging in her short shorts and talking on the phone in her car and looking at fashion magazines in line at the grocery store.
“What about Shelby?” the captions always read.
They never understood her at all. He was the only one.
“So,” the detective asked him, rousing from his thoughts, “what did you do when you found the house empty?”
“I called her cell.” He had. She hadn’t answered, but that wasn’t unusual either. He didn’t bother to tell them that. That he’d called four or five times and the phone went straight to voice mail and it wasn’t until the last time she picked up.
Her voice had been strange, small, like she might be in the doctor’s office, or the ladies’ room. Like she was trying to make herself quiet and small.
“Lorie? Are you okay? Where are you guys?”
There had been a long pause and the thought came that she had crashed the car. For a crazy second he thought she might be in the hospital, both of them broken and battered. Lorie was a careless driver, always sending him texts from the car. Bad pictures came into his head. He’d dated a girl once who had a baby shoe that hung on her rearview mirror. She said it was to remind her to drive carefully, all the time. No one ever told you that after you were sixteen.
“Lorie, just tell me.” He had tried to make his voice firm but kind.
“Something happened.”
“Lorie,” he tried again, like after a fight with her brother or her boss, “just take a breath and tell me.”
“Where did she go?” her voice came. “And how is she going to find me? She’s a little girl. She doesn’t know anything. They should put dog tags on them like they did when we were kids, remember that?”
He didn’t remember that at all, and there was a whirr in his head that was making it hard for him to hear.
“Lorie, you need to tell me what’s going on.”
So she did.
She said she’d been driving around all morning, looking at lawn mowers she’d found for sale on Craigslist. She was tired, decided to stop for coffee at the expensive place.
She saw the woman there all the time. They talked online about how expensive the coffee was but how they couldn’t help it. And what was an Americano, anyway? And, yeah, they talked about their kids. She was pretty sure the woman said she had kids. Two, she thought. And it was only going to be two minutes, five at the most.
“What was going to be five minutes?” he had asked her.
“I don’t know how it happened,” she said, “but I spilled my coffee, and it was everywhere. All over my new white coat. The one you got me for Christmas.”
He had remembered her opening the box, tissue paper flying. She had said he was the only person who’d ever bought her clothes that came in boxes, with tissue paper in gold seals.
She’d spun around in the coat and said, Oh, how it sparkles.
Crawling onto his lap, she’d smiled and said only a man would give the mother of a toddler a white coat.
“The coat was soaking,” she said now. “I asked the woman if she could watch Shelby while I was in the restroom. It took a little while because I had to get the key. One of those heavy keys they give you.”
When she came out of the restroom, the woman was gone, and so was Shelby.
He didn’t remember ever feeling the story didn’t make sense. It was what happened. It was what happened to them, and it was part of the whole impossible run of events that led to this. That led to Shelby being gone and no one knowing where.
But it seemed clear almost from the very start that the police didn’t feel they were getting all the information, or that the information made sense.
“They don’t like me,” Lorie said. And he told her that wasn’t true and had nothing to do with anything anyway, but maybe it did.
He wished they could have seen Lorie when she had pushed through the front door that day, her purse unzipped, her white coat still damp from the spilled coffee, her mouth open so wide, all he could see was the red inside her, raw and torn.
Hours later, their family around them, her body shuddering against him as her brother talked endlessly about Amber Alerts and Megan’s Law and his criminal justice class and his cop buddies from the gym, he felt her pressing into him and saw the feathery curl tucked in her sweater collar, a strand of Shelby’s angel-white hair.
By the end of the second week, the police hadn’t found anything, or if they did they weren’t telling. Something seemed to have shifted, or gotten worse.
“Anybody would do it,” Lorie said. “People do it all the time.”
He watched the detective watch her. This was the woman detective, the one with the severe ponytail who was always squinting at Lorie.
“Do what?” the woman detective asked.
“Ask someone to watch their kid, for just a minute,” Lorie said, her back stiffening. “Not a guy. I wouldn’t have left her with a man. I wouldn’t have left her with some homeless woman waving a hairbrush at me. This was a woman I saw in there every day.”
“Named?” They had asked her for the woman’s name many times. They knew she didn’t know it.
Lorie looked at the detective, and he could see those faint blue veins showing under her eyes. He wanted to put his arm around her, to make her feel him there, to calm her. But before he could do anything, she started talking again.
“Mrs. Caterpillar,” she said, throwing her hands in the air. “Mrs. Linguini. Madame Lafarge.”
The detective stared at her, not saying anything.
“Let’s try looking her up on the Internet,” Lorie said, her chin jutting and a kind of hard glint to her eyes. All the meds and the odd hours they were keeping, all the sleeping pills and sedatives and Lorie walking through the house all night, talking about nothing but afraid to lie still.
“Lorie,” he said. “Don’t—”
“Everything always happens to me,” she said, her voice suddenly soft and strangely liquid, her body sinking. “It’s so unfair.”
He could see it happening, her limbs going limp, and he made a grab for her.
She nearly slipped from him, her eyes rolling back in her head.
“She’s fainting,” he said, grabbing her, her arms cold like frozen pipes. “Get someone.”
The detective was watching.
“I can’t talk about it because I’m still coping with it,” Lorie told the reporters who were waiting outside the police station. “It’s too hard to talk about.”
He held her arm tightly and tried to move her through the crowd, bunched so tightly, like the knot in his throat.
“Is it true you’re hiring at attorney?” one of the reporters asked.
Lorie looked at them. He could see her mouth open and there was no time to stop her.
“I didn’t do anything wrong,” she said, a hapless grin on her face. As if she had knocked someone’s grocery cart with her own.
He looked at her. He knew what she meant—she meant leaving Shelby for that moment, that scattered moment. But he also knew how it sounded, and how she looked, that panicky smile she couldn’t stop.
That was the only time he let her speak to reporters.
Later, at home, she saw herself on the nightly news
Walking slowly to the TV, she kneeled in front of it, her jeans skidding on the carpet, and did the oddest thing.
She put her arms around it, like it was a teddy bear, a child.
“Where is she?” she whispered. “Where is she?”
And he wished the reporters could see this, the mystifying way grief was settling into her like a fever.
But he was also glad they couldn’t.
It was the middle of the night, close to dawn, and she wasn’t next to him.
He looked all over the house, his chest pounding. He thought he must be dreaming, calling out her name, both their names.
He found her in the backyard, a lithe shadow in the middle of the yard.
She was sitting on the grass, her phone lighting her face.
“I feel closer to her out here,” she said. “I found this.”
He could barely see, but moving closer saw the smallest of earrings, an enamel butterfly, caught between her fingers.
They had had a big fight when she came home with Shelby, her ears pierced, thick gold posts plugged in such tiny lobes. Her ears red, her face red, her eyes soft with tears.
“Where did she go, babe?” Lorie said to him now. “Where did she go?”
He was soaked with sweat and was pulling his T-shirt from his chest.
“Look, Mr. Ferguson,” the detective said, “you’ve cooperated with us fully. I get that. But understand our position. No one can confirm her story. The employee who saw your wife spill her coffee remembers seeing her leave with Shelby. She doesn’t remember another woman at all.”
“How many people were in there? Did you talk to all of them?”
“There’s something else too, Mr. Ferguson.”
“What?”
“One of the other employees said Lorie was really mad about the coffee spill. She told Shelby it was her fault. That everything was her fault. And that Lorie then grabbed your daughter by the arm and shook her.”
“That’s not true,” he said. He’d never seen Lorie touch Shelby roughly. Sometimes it seemed she barely knew she was there.
“Mr. Ferguson, I need to ask you: Has your wife had a history of emotional problems?”
“What kind of question is that?”
“It’s a standard question in cases like this,” the detective said. “And we’ve had some reports.”
“Are you talking about the local news?”
“No, Mr. Ferguson. We don’t collect evidence from TV.”
“Collecting evidence? What kind of evidence would you need to collect about Lorie? It’s Shelby who’s missing. Aren’t you—”
“Mr. Ferguson, did you know your wife spent three hours at Your Place Lounge on Charlevoix yesterday afternoon?”
“Are you following her?”
“Several patrons and one of the bartenders contacted us. They were concerned.”
“Concerned? Is that what they were?” His head was throbbing.
“Shouldn’t they be concerned, Mr. Ferguson? This is a woman whose baby is missing.”
“If they were so concerned, why didn’t they call me?”
“One of them asked Lorie if he could call you for her. Apparently, she told him not to.”
He looked at the detective. “She didn’t want to worry me.”
The detective looked back at him. “Okay.”
“You can’t tell how people are going to act when something like this happens to you,” he said, feeling his head dipping. Suddenly his shoulders felt very heavy and he had these pictures of Lorie in his head, at the far corner of the long black lacquered bar, eyes heavy with makeup and filled with dark feelings. Feelings he could never touch. Never once did he feel sure he knew what she was thinking. That was part of it. Part of the throb in his chest, the longing there that never left.
“No,” he said, suddenly.
“What?” the detective asked, leaning forward.
“She has no history of emotional problems. My wife.”
It was the fourth week, the fourth week of false leads and crying and sleeping pills and night terrors. And he had to go back to work or they wouldn’t make the mortgage payment. They’d talked about Lorie returning to her part-time job at the candle store, but somebody needed to be home, to be waiting.
(Though what, really, were they waiting for? Did toddlers suddenly toddle home after twenty-seven days? That’s what he could tell the cops were thinking.)
“I guess I’ll call the office tomorrow,” he said. “And make a plan.”
“And I’ll be here,” she said. “You’ll be there and I’ll be here.”
It was a terrible conversation, like a lot of those conversations couples have in dark bedrooms, late into the night, when you know the decisions you’ve been avoiding all day won’t wait anymore.
After they talked, she took four big pills and pushed her face into her pillow.
He couldn’t sleep and went into Shelby’s room, which he only ever did at night. He leaned over the crib, which was too small for her but Lorie wouldn’t use the bed yet, said it wasn’t time, not nearly.
He put his fingers on the soft baby bumpers, festooned with bright yellow fish. He remembered telling Shelby they were goldfish, but she kept saying Nana, nana, which was what she called bananas.
Her hands were always covered with the pearly slime of bananas, holding on to the front of Lorie’s shirt.
One night, sliding his hand under Lorie’s bra clasp, between her breasts, he felt a daub of banana even there.
“It’s everywhere,” Lorie had sighed. “It’s like she’s made of bananas.”
He loved that smell, and his daughter’s forever-glazed hands.
At some point, remembering this, he started crying, but then he stopped and sat in the rocking chair until he fell asleep.
In part, he was relieved to go back to work, all those days with neighbors and families and friends huddling in the house, trading Internet rumors, organizing vigils and searches. But now there were fewer family members, only a couple friends who had no other place to go, and no neighbors left at all.
The woman from the corner house came late one evening and asked for her casserole dish back.
“I didn’t know you’d keep it so long,” she said, eyes narrowing.
She seemed to be trying to look over his shoulder, into the living room. Lorie was watching a show, loudly, about a group of blond women with tight lacquered faces and angry mouths. She watched it all the time; it seemed to be the only show on TV anymore.
“I didn’t know,” the woman said, taking her dish, inspecting it, “how things were going to turn out.”
you sexy, sexy boy, Lorie’s text said. i want your hands on me. come home and handle me, rough as u like. rough me up.
He swiveled at his desk chair hard, almost like he needed to cover the phone, cover his act of reading the text.
He left the office right away, driving as fast as he could. Telling himself that something was wrong with her. That this had to be some side effect of the pills the doctor had given her, or the way sorrow and longing could twist in her complicated little body.
But that wasn’t really why he was driving so fast, or why he nearly tripped on the dangling seat belt as he hurried from the car.
Or why he felt, when he saw her lying on the bed, flat on her stomach and head turned, smiling, that he’d burst in two if he didn’t have her. If he didn’t have her then and there, the bed moaning beneath them and she not making a sound but, the blinds pulled down, her white teeth shining, shining from her open mouth.
It felt wrong but he wasn’t sure why. He knew her, but he didn’t. This was her, but a Lorie from long ago. Except different.
The reporters called all the time. And there were two that never seemed to leave their block. They had been there right at the start, but then seemed to go away, to move on to other stories.
They came back when the footage of Lorie coming out of Magnum Tattoo Parlor began appearing. Someone shot it with their cell phone.
Lorie was wearing those red cowboy boots again, and red lipstick, and she walked right up to the camera.
They ran photos of it in the newspaper with the headline: A Mother’s Grief?
He looked at the tattoo.
The words Mirame quemar written in script, wrapping itself around her hip.
It covered just the spot where a stretch mark had been, the one she always covered with her fingers when she stood before him naked.
He looked at the tattoo in the dark bedroom, a band of light coming from the hallway. She turned her hip, kept turning it, spinning her torso so he could feel it, all of it.
“I needed it,” she said. “I needed something. Something to put my fingers on. To remind me of me.
“Do you like it?” she asked, her breath in his ear. The ink looked like it was moving.
“I like it,” he said, putting his fingers there. Feeling a little sick. He did like it. He liked it very much.
Late, late into that night, her voice shook him from a deep sleep.
“I never knew she was coming and then she was here,” she was saying, her face pressed in her pillow. “And I never knew she was going and now she’s gone.”
He looked at her, her eyes shut, dappled with old makeup.
“But,” she said, her voice grittier, strained, “she was always doing whatever she wanted.”
That’s what he thought she said. But she was sleeping, and didn’t make any sense at all.
“You liked it until you thought about it,” she said. “Until you looked close at it and then you decided you didn’t want it anymore. Or didn’t want to be the guy who wants it.”
He was wearing the new shirt she had bought for him the day before. It was a deep, deep purple and beautiful and he felt good in it, like the unit manager who all the women in the office talked about. They talked about his shoes and he always wondered where people got shoes like that.
“No,” he said. “I love it. But it’s just … expensive.”
That wasn’t it, though. It didn’t seem right buying things, buying anything, right now. But it was also how colorful the shirt was, the sheen on it. The bright, hard beauty of it. A shirt for going out, for nightclubs, for dancing. For those things they did when they still did things: vodka and pounding music and frenzied sex in her car.
The kind of drunken sex so messy and crazy that you were almost shy around each other after, driving home, screwed sober, feeling like you’d showed something very private and very bad.
Once, years ago, she did something to him no one had ever done and he couldn’t look at her afterward at all. The next time he did something to her. For a while, it felt like it would never stop.
“I think someone should tell you about your wife,” the e-mail said. That was the subject line. He didn’t recognize the address, a series of letters and digits, and there was no text in the body of the e-mail. There was only a photo of a girl dancing in a bright green halter top, the ties loose and dangling.
It was Lorie, and he knew it must be an old picture. Weeks ago, the newspapers had gotten their hands on some snapshots of Lorie from her late teens, dancing on tabletops, kissing her girlfriends. Things girls did when they were drinking and someone had a camera.
In those shots, Lorie was always posing, vamping, trying to look like a model, a celebrity. It was a Lorie before he really knew her, a Lorie from what she called her “wild girl days.”
But in this picture she didn’t seem to be aware of the camera at all, seemed to be lost in the thrall of whatever music was playing, whatever sounds she was hearing in her crowded head. Her eyes were shut tight, her head thrown back, her neck long and brown and beautiful.
She looked happier than he had ever seen her.
A Lorie from long ago, or never.
But when he scrolled further down, he saw the halter top riding up her body, saw the pop of a hip bone. Saw the elegant script letters: Mirame quemar.
That night, he remembered a story she had told him long ago. It seemed impossible he’d forgotten it. Or maybe it just seemed different now, making it seem like something new. Something uncovered, an old sunken box you find in the basement smelling strong and you’re afraid to open it.
It was back when they were dating, when her roommate was always around and they had no place to be alone. They would have thrilling bouts in his car, and she loved to crawl into the backseat and lie back, hoisting a leg high over the headrest and begging him for it.
It was after the first or second time, back when it was all so crazy and confusing and his head was pounding and starbursting, that Lorie curled against him and talked and talked about her life, and the time she stole four Revlon eyeslicks from CVS and how she had slept with a soggy-eared stuffed animal named Ears until she was twelve. She said she felt she could tell him anything.
Somewhere in the blur of those nights—nights when he, too, told her private things, stories about babysitter crushes and shoplifting Matchbox cars—that she told him the story.
How, when she was seven, her baby brother was born and she became so jealous.
“My mom spent all her time with him, and left me alone all day,” she said. “So I hated him. Every night, I would pray that he would be taken away. That something awful would happen to him. At night, I’d sneak over to his crib and stare at him through the little bars. I think maybe I figured I could think it into happening. If I stared at him long enough and hard enough, it might happen.”
He had nodded, because this is how kids could be, he guessed. He was the youngest and wondered if his older sister thought things like this about him. Once, she smashed his finger under a cymbal and said it was an accident.
But she wasn’t done with her story and she snuggled closer to him and he could smell her powdery body and he thought of all its little corners and arcs, how he liked to find them with his hands, all the soft, hot places on her. Sometimes it felt like her body was never the same body, like it changed under his hands. I’m a witch, a witch.
“So one night,” she said, her voice low and sneaky, “I was watching him through the crib bars and he was making this funny noise.”
Her eyes glittered in the dark of the car.
“I leaned across, sticking my hands through the rails,” she said, snaking her hand towards him. “And that’s when I saw this piece of string dangling on his chin, from his pull toy. I starting pulling it, and pulling it.”
He watched her tugging the imaginary string, her eyes getting bigger and bigger.
“Then he let out this gasp,” she said, “and started breathing again.”
She paused, her tongue clicking.
“My mom came in at just that moment. She said I saved his life,” she said. “Everyone did. She bought me a new jumper and the hot-pink shoes I wanted. Everyone loved me.”
A pair of headlights flashed across them and he saw her eyes, bright and brilliant.
“So no one ever knew the real story,” she said. “I’ve never told anyone.”
She smiled, pushing herself against him.
“But now I’m telling you,” she said. “Now I have someone to tell.”
“Mr. Ferguson, you told us, and your cell phone records confirm, that you began calling your wife at 5:50 p.m. on the day of your daughter’s disappearance. Finally, you reached her at 6:45. Is that right?”
“I don’t know,” he said, this the eighth, ninth, tenth time they’d called him in. “You would know better than me.”
“Your wife said she was at the coffee place at around five. But we tracked down a record of your wife’s transaction. It was at 3:45.”
“I don’t know,” he said, rubbing at the back of his neck, the prickling there. He realized he had no idea what they might tell him. No idea what might be coming.
“So what do you think your wife was doing for three hours?”
“Looking for this woman. Trying to find her.”
“She did make some other calls during that time. Not to the police, of course. Or even you. She made a call to a man named Leonard Drake. Another one named Jason Patrini.”
One sounded like an old boyfriend—Lenny someone—the other he didn’t even know. He felt something hollow out inside him. He didn’t know who they were even talking about anymore, but it had nothing to do with him.
The female detective walked in, giving her partner a look.
“Since she was making all these calls, we could track her movements. She went to the Harbor View Mall.”
“Would you like to see her on the security camera footage there?” the female detective asked. “We have it now. Did you know she bought a tank top.”
He felt nothing.
“She also went to the quickie mart. The cashier just IDed her. She used the bathroom. He said she was in there a long time and when she came out, she had changed clothing.
“Would you like to see the footage there? She looks like a million bucks.”
She slid a grainy photo across the desk. A young woman in a tank top and hoodie tugged low over her brow. She was smiling.
“That’s not Lorie,” he said softly. She looked too young, looked like she looked when he met her, a little elfin beauty with a flat stomach and pigtails and a pierced navel. A hoop he used to tug. He’d forgotten about that. She must have let it seal over.
“I’m sure this is tough to hear, Mr. Ferguson,” the male detective said. “I’m sorry.”
He looked up. The detective did look very sorry.
“What did you say to them?” he asked.
Lorie was sitting in the car with him, a half block from the police station.
“I don’t know if you should say anything to them anymore,” he said. “I think maybe we should call a lawyer.”
Lorie was looking straight ahead, at the strobing lights from the intersection. Slowly, she lifted her hand to the edges of her hair, combing them thoughtfully.
“I explained,” she said, her face dark except for a swoop of blue from the car dealership sign, like a tadpole up her cheek. “I told them the truth.”
“What truth?” he asked. The car felt so cold. There was a smell coming from her, of someone who hasn’t eaten. A raw smell of coffee and nail polish remover.
“They don’t believe anything I say anymore,” she said. “I explained how I’d been to the coffee place twice that day. Once to get a juice for Shelby and then later for coffee for me. They said they’d look into it, but I could see how it was on their faces. I told them so. I know what they think of me.”
She turned and looked at him, the car moving fast, sending red lights streaking up her face. It reminded him of a picture he once saw in a National Geographic of an Amazon woman, her face painted crimson, a wooden peg through her lip.
“Now I know what everyone thinks of me,” she said, and turned away again.
It was late that night, his eyes wide open, that he asked her. She was sound asleep, but he said it.
“Who’s Leonard Drake? Who’s Jason whatever?”
She stirred, shifted to face him, her face flat on the sheet.
“Who’s Tom Ferguson? Who is he?
“Is that what you do?” he asked, his voice rising. “Go around calling men.”
It was easier to ask her this than to ask her other things. To ask her if she had shaken Shelby, if she had lied about everything. Other things.
“Yes,” she said. “I call men all day long, I go to their apartments. I leave my daughter in the car, especially if it’s very hot. I sneak up their apartment stairs.”
She had her hand on her chest, was moving it there, watching him.
“You should feel how much I want them by the time they open their doors.”
Stop, he said, without saying it.
“I have my hands on their belts before they close the door behind me. I crawl onto their laps on their dirty bachelor’s sofas and do everything.”
He started shaking his head, but she wouldn’t stop.
“You have a baby, your body changes. You need something else. So I let them do anything. I’ve done everything.”
Her hand was moving, touching herself. She wouldn’t stop.
“That’s what I do while you’re at work. I wasn’t calling people on Craigslist, trying to replace your lawn mower. I wasn’t doing something for you, always for you.”
He’d forgotten about the lawn mower, forgotten that’s what she’d said she’d been doing that day. Trying to get a secondhand one after he’d gotten blood blisters on both hands using it the last time. That’s what she’d said she was doing.
“No,” she was saying, “I was calling men, making dates for sex. That’s what I do since I’ve had a baby and been at home. I don’t know how to do anything else. It’s amazing I haven’t been caught before. If only I hadn’t been caught.”
He covered his face with his hand. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”
“How could you?” she said, a strangle in her throat. She was tugging all the sheet into her hands, rolling it, pulling off him, wringing it. “How could you?”
He dreamt of Shelby that night.
He dreamt he was wandering through the blue-dark of the house and when he got to Shelby’s room, there was no room at all and suddenly he was outside.
The yard was frost-tipped and lonely looking and he felt a sudden sadness. He felt suddenly like he had fallen into the loneliest place in the world, and the old toolshed in the middle seemed somehow the very center of that loneliness.
When they’d bought the house, they’d nearly torn it down—everyone said they should—but they decided they liked it; the “baby barn,” they’d called it, with its sloping roof and faded red paint.
But it was too small for anything but a few rakes and that push lawn mower with the sagging left wheel.
It was the only old thing about their house, the only thing left from before he was there.
By day, it was a thing he never thought about at all anymore, didn’t notice it other than the smell sometimes coming off it after rain.
But in the dream it seemed a living thing, neglected and pitiful.
It came to him suddenly that the lawn mower in the shed might still be fixed, and if it were, then everything would be okay and no one would need to look for lawn mowers and the thick tug of grass under his feet would not feel so heavy and all this loneliness would end.
He put his hand on the shed’s cool, crooked handle and tugged it open.
Instead of the lawn mower, he saw a small black sack on the floor of the shed.
He thought to himself in the way you do in dreams: I must have left the cuttings in here. They must be covered with mold and that must be the smell so strong it—
Grabbing for the sack, it slipped open, and the bag itself began to come apart in his hands.
There was the sound, the feeling of something heavy dropping to the floor of the shed.
It was too dark to see what was slipping over his feet, tickling his ankles.
Too dark to be sure, but it felt like the sweet floss of his daughter’s hair.
He woke already sitting up. A voice was hissing in his head: Will you look in the shed? Will you?
And that was when he remembered there was no shed in the backyard anymore. They’d torn it down when Lorie was pregnant because she said the smell of rot was giving her headaches, making her sick.
The next day the front page of the paper had a series of articles marking the two-month anniversary of Shelby’s disappearance.
They had the picture of Lorie under the headline: What Does She Know? There was a picture of him, head down, walking from the police station yesterday. The caption read: “More unanswered questions.”
He couldn’t read any of it, and when his mother called he didn’t pick up.
All day at work, he couldn’t concentrate. He felt everyone looking at him.
When his boss came to his desk, he could feel the careful way he was being talked to.
“Tom, if you want to leave early,” he said, “that’s fine.”
Several times he caught the administrative assistant staring at his screen saver, the snapshot of Lorie with ten-month-old Shelby in her Halloween costume, a black spider with soft spider legs.
Finally he did leave, at three o’clock.
Lorie wasn’t in the house and he was standing at the kitchen sink, drinking a glass of water, when he saw her through the window.
Though it was barely seventy degrees, she was lying on one of the summer loungers.
Headphones on, she was in a bright orange bikini with gold hoops in the straps and on either hip.
She had pushed the purple playhouse against the back fence, where it tilted under the elm tree.
He had never seen the bikini before, but he recognized the sunglasses, large ones with white frames she had bought on a trip Mexico she had taken with an old girlfriend right before she got pregnant.
Gleaming in the center of her slicked torso was a gold belly ring.
She was smiling, singing along to whatever music was playing in her head.
That night he couldn’t bring himself to go to bed. He watched TV for hours without watching any of it. He drank four beers in a row, which he had not done since he was twenty years old.
Finally, the beer pulled on him, and the Benadryl he took after, and he found himself sinking at last onto their mattress.
At some point in the middle of the night, there was a stirring next to him, her body shifting hard. It felt like something was happening.
“Kirsten,” she mumbled.
“What?” he asked. “What?”
Suddenly she half sat up, her elbows beneath her, looking straight ahead.
“Her daughter’s name was Kirsten,” she said, her voice soft and tentative. “I just remembered. Once, when we were talking, she said her daughter’s name was Kirsten. Because she liked how it sounded with Krusie.”
He felt something loosen inside him, then tighten again. What was this?
“Her last name was Krusie with a K,” she said, her face growing more animated, her voice more urgent. “I don’t know how it was spelled, but it was with a K. I can’t believe I just remembered. It was a long time ago. She said she liked the two Ks. Because she was two Ks. Katie Krusie. That’s her name.”
He looked at her and didn’t say anything.
“Katie Krusie,” she said. “The woman at the coffee place. That’s her name.”
He couldn’t seem to speak or even move.
“Are you going to call?” she said. “The police?”
He found he couldn’t move. He was afraid somehow. So afraid he couldn’t breathe.
She looked at him, paused, and then reached across him, grabbing for the phone herself.
As she talked to the police, told them, her voice now clear and firm, what she’d remembered, as she told them she would come to the station, would leave in five minutes, he watched her, his hand over his own heart, feeling it beating so hard it hurt.
“We believe we have located the Krusie woman,” the female detective said. “We have officers heading there now.”
He looked at both of them. He could feel Lorie beside him, breathing hard. It had been less than a day since Lorie first called.
“What are you saying?” he said, or tried to. No words came out.
Katie-Ann Krusie had no children, but told people she did, all the time. After a long history of emotional problems, she had spent a fourteen-month stint at the state hospital following a miscarriage.
For the past eight weeks she had been living in a rental in Torring, forty miles away with a little blond girl she called Kirsten.
After the police released a photo of Katie-Ann Krusie on Amber Alert, a woman who worked at a coffee chain in Torring recognized her as a regular customer, always ordering extra milk for her babies.
“She sure sounded like she loved her kids,” the woman said. “Just talking about them made her so happy.”
The first time he saw Shelby again, he couldn’t speak at all.
She was wearing a shirt he’d never seen and shoes that didn’t fit and she was holding a juice box the policeman had given her.
She watched him as he ran down the hall toward her.
There was something in her face that he had never seen before, knew hadn’t been there before, and he knew in an instant he had to do everything he could to make it gone.
That was all he would do, if it took him the rest of his life to do it.
The next morning, after calling everyone, one by one, he walked into the kitchen to see Lorie sitting next to Shelby, who was eating apple slices, her pinkie finger curled out in that way she had.
He sat and watched her and Shelby asked him why he was shaking and he said because he was glad to see her.
It was hard to leave the room, even to answer the door when his mother and sister came, when everyone started coming.
Three nights later, at the big family dinner, the Welcome Home dinner for Shelby, Lorie drank a lot of wine and who could blame her, everyone was saying.
He couldn’t either, and he watched her.
As the evening carried on, as his mother brought out an ice cream cake for Shelby, as everyone huddled around Shelby, who seemed confused and shy at first and slowly burst into something beautiful that made him want to cry again—as all these things were occurring—he had one eye on Lorie, her quiet, still face. On the smile there, which never grew or receded, even when she held Shelby in her lap, Shelby nuzzling her mother’s wine-flushed neck.
At one point he found her standing in the kitchen and staring into the sink; it seemed to him she was staring down into the drain.
It was very late, or even early, and Lorie wasn’t there.
He thought she had gotten sick from all the wine, but she wasn’t in the bathroom either.
Something was turning in him, uncomfortably, as he walked into Shelby’s room.
He saw her back, naked and white from the moonlight. The plum-colored underpants she’d slept in.
She was standing over Shelby’s crib, looking down.
He felt something in his chest move.
Then, slowly, she kneeled, peeking through the crib rails, looking at Shelby.
It looked like she was waiting for something.
For a long time he stood there, five feet from the doorway, watching her watching their sleeping baby.
He listened close for his daughter’s high breaths, the stop and start of them.
He couldn’t see his wife’s face, only that long white back of hers, the notches of her spine. Mirame quemar etched on her hip.
He watched her watching his daughter, and knew he could not ever leave this room. That he would have to be here forever now, on guard. There was no going back to bed.
Cecelia Holland
Cecelia Holland is one of the world’s most highly acclaimed and respected historical novelists, ranked by many alongside other giants in that field such as Mary Renault and Larry McMurtry. Over the span of her thirty-year career, she’s written more than thirty historical novels, including The Firedrake,Rakóssy,Two Ravens,Ghost on the Steppe,TheDeath of Attila, Hammer for Princes,The King’s Road,Pillar of the Sky,The Lords of Vaumartin,Pacific Street,The Sea Beggars,The Earl, The Kings in Winter,The Belt of Gold, and more than a dozen others. She also wrote the well-known science fiction novel Floating Worlds, which was nominated for a Locus Award in 1975, and of late has been working on a series of fantasy novels, including The Soul Thief, The Witches’ Kitchen,The Serpent Dreamer,Varanger, and The King’s Witch. Her most recent books are the novels The High City,Kings of the North, and The Secret Eleanor.
In the high drama that follows, she introduces us to the ultimate dysfunctional family, whose ruthless, clashing ambitions threw England into bloody civil war again and again over many long years: King Henry II, his queen, Eleanor of Aquitaine, and their eight squabbling children. All deadly as cobras. Even the littlest one.
NORA’S SONG (#ulink_8affa8e5-43c1-5161-a225-705431b5771e)
MONTMIRAIL,
JANUARY, 1169
Nora looked quickly around, saw no one was watching, and slipped away between the trees and down the bank to the little stream. She knew there would be no frogs to hunt; her brother had told her that when the trees had no leaves, the streams had no frogs. But the water glittered over bright stones and she saw tracks printed into the damp sand. She squatted down to pick a shiny bit from the stream. It wouldn’t be pretty when it dried out. Behind her, her little sister Johanna slid down the bank in a rush.
“Nora! What do you have?”
She held out the pebble to her sister and went on a little way along the trickle of water. Those tracks were bird feet, like crosses in the damp sand. She squatted down again, to poke at the rocks, and then saw, in the yellow gritty stream bank, like a little round doorway, a hole.
She brushed aside a veil of hairy roots, trying to see in; did something live there? She could reach her hand in to find out, and in a quick tumble of her thoughts she imagined something furry, something furry with teeth, the teeth snapping on her hand, and tucked her fist against her skirt.
From up past the trees, a voice called, “Nora?”
That was her new nurse. She paid no attention, looking for a stick to probe the hole with; Johanna, beside her, went softly, “Ooooh,” and on all fours leaned toward the burrow. Her skirt was soaked from the stream.
“Nora!” Another voice.
She leapt up. “Richard,” she said, and scrambled up the bank, nearly losing a shoe. On the grassy edge, she pulled the shoe back on, turned and helped Johanna up behind her, and ran out through the bare trees, onto the broad open ground.
Her brother was striding toward her, smiling, his arms out, and she ran to him. She had not seen him since Christmas, the last time they had all been together. He was twelve years old, a lot older than she was, almost grown up. He bundled her into his arms and hugged her. He smelled like horses. Johanna came whooping up and he hugged her too. The two nurses, red in the face, were panting along behind them, their skirts clutched up in their hands. Richard straightened, his blue eyes blazing, and pointed across the field.
“See? Where Mother comes.”
Nora shaded her eyes, looking out across the broad field. At first she saw only the crowded people, stirring and swaying all around the edges of the field, but then a murmur swept through them, and on all sides rose into a roar. Far down there, a horse loped up onto the field and stopped, and the rider raised one hand in salute.
“Mama!” Johanna cried, and clapped.
Now the whole crowd was yelling and cheering, and, on her dark grey horse, Nora’s Mama was cantering along the sideline, toward the wooden stand under the plane trees, where they would all sit. Nora swelled, full to bursting; she yelled, “Hooray! Hooray, Mama!”
Up there, by the stand, a dozen men on foot went forward to meet the woman on the horse. She wheeled in among them, cast her reins down, and dismounted. Swiftly she climbed onto the platform, where two chairs waited, and stood there, and lifted her arm, turning slowly from one side to the other to greet the cheering crowd. She stood straight as a tree, her skirts furling around her.
Above the stand, suddenly, her pennant flapped open like a great wing, the Eagle of Aquitaine, and the thunderous shouting doubled.
“Eleanor! Eleanor!”
She gave one last wave to the crowd, but she had seen her children running toward her, and all her interest turned to them. She stooped, holding her arms out toward them, and Richard scooped Johanna into his arms and ran toward the platform. Nora went up the steps at the side. Coming to the front, Richard set Johanna at their mother’s feet.
Their mother’s hands fell on them. Nora buried her face in the Queen’s skirts.
“Mama.”
“Ah.” Their mother sat down, holding Johanna slightly away from her; she slid her free arm around Nora’s waist. “Ah, my dear ones. How I’ve missed you.” She kissed them both rapidly, several times. “Johanna, you’re drenched. This won’t do.” She beckoned, and Johanna’s nurse came running. Johanna squealed but was taken.
Still holding Nora against her, Eleanor leaned forward and leveled her gaze on Richard, leaning with his arms folded on the edge of the platform in front of her.
“Well, my son, are you excited?”
He pushed away from the platform, standing taller, his face flaming, his fair hair a wild tangle from the wind. “Mother, I can’t wait! When will Papa get here?”
Nora leaned on her mother. She loved Richard too, but she wished her mother would pay more heed to her. Her mother was beautiful, even though she was really old. She wore no coif, only a heavy gold ring upon her sleek red hair. Nora’s hair was like old dead grass. She would never be beautiful. The Queen’s arm tightened around her, but she was still tilted forward toward Richard, fixed utterly on Richard.
“He’s coming. You should get ready for the ceremony.” She touched the front of his coat, lifted her hand to his cheek. “Comb your hair, anyway.”
He jiggled up and down, vivid. “I can’t wait. I can’t wait. I’m going to be Duke of Aquitaine!”
The Queen laughed. A horn blew, down the pitch. “See, now it begins. Go find your coat.” She turned, beckoned to a page. “Attend the Lord Richard. Nora, now …” She nudged Nora back a step so that she could run her gaze over her from head to toe. Her lips curved upward and her eyes glinted. “What have you been doing, rolling in the grass? You’re my big girl now; you have to be presentable.”
“Mama.” Nora didn’t want to be the big girl. The idea reminded her that Mattie was gone, the real big girl. But she loved having her mother’s attention, she cast wildly around for something to say to keep it. “Does that mean I can’t play anymore?”
Eleanor laughed and hugged her again. “You will always be able to play, my girl. Just different games.” Her lips brushed Nora’s forehead. Nora realized she had said the right thing. Then Eleanor was turning away.
“See, here your father comes.”
A ripple of excitement rose through the crowd like the wind in a dry field, turned to a rumble, and erupted into a thunderous cheer. Down the pitch came a column of riders. Nora straightened, clapping her hands together, and drew in a deep breath and held it. In the center of the horsemen, her father rode along, wearing neither crown nor royal robes, and yet it seemed that everything bowed and bent around him, as if nobody else mattered but him.
“Papa.”
“Yes,” Eleanor said, under her breath. “The kingly Papa.” She drew her arm from Nora and sat straighter on her chair.
Nora drew back; if she got behind them, out of sight, they might forget her, and she could stay. Richard had not gone away, either, she saw, but lingered at the front of the royal stand. Her father rode up and swung directly from his saddle to the platform. He was smiling, his eyes narrow, his clothes rumpled, his beard and hair shaggy. He seemed to her like the king of the greenwood, wild and fierce, wreathed in leaves and bark. All along this side of the field, on either side of the booth, his knights rode up in a single rank, stirrup to stirrup, facing the French across the field. The king stood, throwing a quick glance that way, and then lowered his gaze to Richard, standing stiff and tall before him.
“Well, sirrah,” their father said, “are you ready to shiver a lance here?”
“Oh, Papa!” Richard bounced up and down. “Can I?”
Their father barked a laugh at him, looking down on him from the height of the booth. “Not until you can pay your own ransoms when you lose.”
Richard flushed pink, like a girl. “I won’t lose!”
“No, of course not.” The King waved him off. “Nobody ever thinks he’ll lose, sirrah.” He laughed again, scornful, turning away. “When you’re older.”
Nora bit her lip. It was mean to talk to Richard that way, and her brother drooped, kicked the ground, and then followed the page down the field. Suddenly he was just a boy again. Nora crouched down behind her mother’s skirts, hoping her father did not notice her. He settled himself in the chair beside the Queen’s, stretched his legs out, and for the first time turned toward Eleanor.
“You look amazingly well, considering. I’m surprised your old bones made it all the way from Poitiers.”
“I would not miss this,” she said. “And it’s a pleasant enough ride.” They didn’t touch, they didn’t give each other kisses, and Nora felt a little stir of worry. Her nurse had come up to the edge of the platform and Nora shrank deeper into Eleanor’s shadow. Eleanor paid the king a long stare. Her attention drifted toward his front.
“Eggs for breakfast? Or was that last night’s supper?”
Startled, Nora craned up a little to peer at him: his clothes were messy but she saw no yellow egg. Her father was glaring back at her mother, his face flattened with temper. He did not look down at his coat. “What a prissy old woman you are.”
Nora ran her tongue over her lower lip. Her insides felt full of prickers and burrs. Her mother’s hand lay on her thigh, and Nora saw how her mother was smoothing her skirt, over and over, with hard, swift, clawing fingers.
Her nurse said, “Lady Nora, come along now.”
“You didn’t bring your truelove,” the Queen said.
The King leaned toward her a little, as if he would leap on her, pound her, maybe, with his fist. “She’s afraid of you. She won’t come anywhere near you.”
Eleanor laughed. She was not afraid of him. Nora wondered what that was about; wasn’t her mother the King’s truelove? She pretended not to see her nurse beckoning her.
“Nora, come now!” the nurse said, loudly.
That caught her mother’s attention, and she swung around, saw Nora there, and said, “Go on, my girl. Go get ready.” Her hand dropped lightly to Nora’s shoulder. “Do as you’re bid, please.” Nora slid off the edge of the platform and went away to be dressed and primped.
Her old nurse had gone with Mattie when Nora’s big sister went to marry the Duke of Germany. Now she had this new nurse, who couldn’t brush hair without hurting. They had already laced Johanna into a fresh gown, and braided her hair, and the others were waiting outside the little tent. Nora kept thinking of Mattie, who had told her stories, and sung to her when she had nightmares. Now they were all walking out onto the field for the ceremony, her brothers first, and then her and Johanna.
Johanna slipped her hand into Nora’s, and Nora squeezed her fingers tight. All these people made her feel small. Out in the middle of the field everybody stood in rows, as if they were in church, and the ordinary people were all gathered closely around, to hear what went on. On either side banners hung, and a herald stood in front of them all, watching the children approach, his long shiny horn tipped down.
On big chairs in the very middle sat her father and mother and, beside them, a pale, weary-looking man in a blue velvet gown. He had a little stool for his feet. She knew that was the King of France. She and her sister and brothers went up before them, side by side, and the herald said their names, and as one they bowed, first to their parents and then to the French king.
There were only five of them now, with Mattie gone, and their baby brother still in the monastery. Henry was oldest. They called him Boy Henry because Papa’s name also was Henry. Then there was Richard, and then Geoffrey. Mattie would have been between Boy Henry and Richard. After Geoffrey was Nora, and Johanna, and, back with the monks, baby John. The crowd whooped and yelled at them, and Richard suddenly raised his arm up over his head like an answer.
Then they were all shuffled around into the crowd behind their parents, where they stood in line again. The heralds were yelling in Latin. Johanna leaned on Nora’s side. “I’m hungry.”
Two steps in front of them on her chair, Eleanor glanced over her shoulder, and Nora whispered, “Ssssh.” All the people around them were men, but behind the King of France a girl stood, who looked a little older than Nora, and now Nora caught her looking back. Nora smiled, uncertain, but the other girl only lowered her eyes.
A blast of the horn lifted her half off the ground. Johanna clutched her hand. One of Papa’s men came up and began to read from a scroll, Latin again, simpler than the Latin the monks had taught her. What he read was all about Boy Henry, how noble, how good, and, at a signal, her oldest brother went up before the two kings and the Queen. He was tall and thin, with many freckles, his face sunburnt. Nora liked the dark green of the coat he wore. He knelt before his father and the French king, and the heralds spoke and the kings spoke.
They were making Boy Henry a King too. He would be King of England now, just as Papa was. In her mind suddenly she saw both Henrys trying to jam together into one chair, with one crown wrapped around their two heads, and she laughed. Her mother looked over her shoulder again, her eyes sharp and her dark brows drawn into a frown.
Johanna was shuffling from one foot to the other. Louder than before, she said, “I’m hungry.”
“Sssh!”
Boy Henry got up from his knees, bowed, and came back around among the children. The herald said Richard’s name and he sprang forward. They were proclaiming him Duke of Aquitaine. He would marry the daughter of the French king, Alais. Nora’s eyes turned again toward the strange girl among the French. That was Alais. She had long brown hair and a sharp little nose; she was staring intently at Richard. Nora wondered what it felt like, looking for the first time on the man you knew you would marry. She imagined Alais kissing Richard and made a face.
In front of her, sitting stiff on her chair, the Queen pulled her mouth down at the corners. Her mother didn’t like this, either.
Until she was old enough to marry Richard, Alais would live with them, his family. Nora felt a stir of unease: here was Alais come into a strange place, as Mattie was gone off into a strange place, and they would never see her again. She remembered how Mattie had cried when they told her. But Mama, he’s so old. Nora pressed her lips together, her eyes stinging.
Not to her. This wouldn’t happen to her. She wouldn’t be sent away. Given away. She wanted something else, but she didn’t know what. She had thought of being a nun, but there was so little to do.
Richard knelt and put his hands between the long, bony hands of the King of France, and rose, his head tipped forward as if he already wore a coronet. He was smiling wide as the sun. He moved back to the family and the herald spoke Geoffrey’s name, who was now to be Duke of Brittany, and marry some other stranger.
Nora hunched her shoulders. This glory would never come to her, she would get nothing, just stand and watch. She glanced again at the Princess Alais and saw her looking down at her hands, sad.
Johanna suddenly yawned, pulled her hand out of Nora’s, and sat down.
Now up before them all came somebody else, his hands wide, and a big, strong voice said, “My lord of England, as we have agreed, I ask you now to receive the Archbishop of Canterbury, and let you be restored to friendship, end the quarrel between you, for the good of both our kingdoms, and Holy Mother Church.”
The crowd around them gave up a sudden yell, and a man came up the field toward the kings. He wore a long black cloak over a white habit with a cross hanging on his chest. The stick in his hand had a swirly top. A great cry went up from the people around them, excited. Behind her, somebody murmured, “Becket again. The man won’t go away.”
She knew this name, but she could not remember who Becket was. He paced up toward them, a long, gaunt man, his clothes shabby. He looked like an ordinary man but he walked like a lord. Everybody watched him. As he came up before her father, the crowd’s rumbling and stirring died away into a breathless hush. In front of the King, the gaunt man knelt, set his stick down, and then lay on the ground, spreading himself like a mat upon the floor. Nora shifted a little so she could see him through the space between her mother and her father. The crowd drew in closer, leaning out to see.
“My gracious lord,” he said in a churchy voice, “I beg your forgiveness for all my errors. Never was a prince more faithful than you, and never a subject more faithless than I, and I am come asking pardon not from hopes of my virtue but of yours.”
Her father stood up. He looked suddenly very happy, his face flushed, his eyes bright. Face to the ground, the gaunt man spoke on, humble, beseeching, and the King went down toward him, reaching out his hands to lift him up.
Then Becket said, “I submit myself to you, my lord, henceforth and forever, in all things, save the honor of God.”
The Queen’s head snapped up. Behind Nora somebody gasped, and somebody else muttered, “Damn fool.” In front of them all, halfway to Becket, his hands out, Papa stopped. A kind of pulse went through the crowd.
The King said sharply, “What is this?”
Becket was rising. Dirt smeared his robe where his knees had pressed the ground. He stood straight, his head back. “I cannot give up the rights of God, my lord, but in everything else—”
Her Papa lunged at him. “This is not what I agreed to.”
Becket held his ground, tall as a steeple, as if he had God on his shoulder, and proclaimed again, “I must champion the honor of the Lord of Heaven and earth.”
“I am your Lord!” The King wasn’t happy anymore. His voice boomed across the field. Nobody else moved or spoke. He took a step toward Becket, and his fist clenched. “The kingdom is mine. No other authority shall rule there! God or no, kneel, Thomas, give yourself wholly to me, or go away a ruined man!”
Louis was scurrying down from the dais toward them, his frantic murmuring unheeded. Becket stood immobile. “I am consecrated to God. I cannot wash away that duty.”
Nora’s father roared, “I am King, and no other, you toad, you jackass, no other than me! You owe everything to me! Me!”
“Papa! My lord—” Boy Henry started forward and their mother reached out and grabbed his arm and held him still. From the crowd, other voices rose. Nora stooped and tried to make Johanna stand up.
“I won’t be disparaged! Honor me, and me alone!” Her father’s voice was like a blaring horn, and the crowd fell quiet again. The King of France put one hand on her Papa’s arm and mouthed something, and Papa wheeled around and cast off his touch.
“Henceforth, whatever comes that he chooses not to abide, he will call it the Honor of God. You must see this! He has given up nothing; he will pay me no respect—not even the respect of a swine for the swineherd!”
The crowd gave a yell. A voice called, “God bless the King!” Nora looked around, uneasy. The people behind her were shuffling around, drawing back, like running away slowly. Eleanor was still holding fast to Boy Henry, but now he whimpered under his breath. Richard was stiff, his whole body tipped forward, his jaw jutting like a fish’s. The French king had Becket by the sleeve, was drawing him off, talking urgently into his ear. Becket’s gaze never left Nora’s father. His voice rang out like the archangel’s trumpet.
“I am bound to the Honor of God!”
In the middle of them all, Nora’s father flung up his arms as if he would take flight; he stamped his foot as if he would split the earth, and shouted, “Get him out of here before I kill him! God’s Honor! God’s round white backside! Get him away, get him gone!”
His rage blew back the crowd. In a sudden rush of feet, the French king and his guards and attendants bundled Thomas away. Nora’s father was roaring again, oaths and threats, his arms pumping, his face red as raw meat. Boy Henry burst out of Eleanor’s grasp and charged him.
“My lord—”
The King spun around toward him, his arm outstretched, and knocked him down with the back of his hand. “Stay out of this!”
Nora jumped. Even before Richard and Geoffrey started forward, Eleanor was moving; she reached Boy Henry in a few strides, and as he leapt to his feet, she hurried him off. A crowd of her retainers bustled after her.
Nora stood fast. She realized that she was holding her breath. Johanna had finally gotten up and wrapped her arms around Nora’s waist, and Nora put her arms around her sister. Geoffrey was running after the Queen; Richard paused, his hands at his sides, watching the King’s temper blaze. He pivoted and ran off after his mother. Nora gasped. She and Johanna were alone, in the middle of the field, the crowd far off.
The King saw them. He quieted. He looked around, saw no one else, and stalked toward them.
“Go on—run! Everybody else is abandoning me. Run! Are you stupid?”
Johanna shrank around behind Nora, who stood straight and tucked her hands behind her, the way she stood when priests talked to her. “No, Papa.”
His face was red as meat. Fine sweat stood on his forehead. His breath almost made her gag. He looked her over and said, “Here to scold me, then, like your rotten mother?”
“No, Papa,” she said, surprised. “You are the King.”
He twitched. The high color left his face like a tide. His voice smoothed out, slower. He said, “Well, one of you is true, at least.” He turned and walked off, and as he went, he lifted one arm. From all sides his men came running. One led Papa’s big black horse and he mounted. Above all the men on foot surrounding him, he left the field. After he was gone, Richard trotted up across the grass to gather in Nora and Johanna.
“Why can’t I—”
“Because I know you,” Richard said. “If I let you run around, you’ll get in trouble.” He lifted her up into the cart, where already Johanna and the French girl sat. Nora plunked down, angry; they were only going up the hill. He could have let her ride his horse. With a crack of the whip, the cart began to roll, and she leaned back against the side and stared away.
Beside Nora, Alais said, suddenly, in French, “I know who you are.”
Nora faced her, startled. “I know who you are too,” she said.
“Your name is Eleonora and you’re the second sister. I can speak French and Latin and I can read. Can you read?”
Nora said, “Yes. They make me read all the time.”
Alais gave a glance over her shoulder; their attendants were walking along behind the cart, but nobody close enough to hear. Johanna was standing up in the back corner, throwing bits of straw over the side and leaning out to see where they fell. Alais said quietly, “We should be friends, because we’re going to be sisters and we’re almost the same age.” Her gaze ran thoughtfully over Nora from head to toe, which made Nora uncomfortable; she squirmed. She thought briefly, angrily, of this girl taking Mattie’s place. Alais said, “I’ll be nice to you if you’re nice to me.”
Nora said, “All right. I—”
“But I go first, I think, because I am older.”
Nora stiffened and then jumped as a cheer erupted around her. The cart was rolling up the street toward the castle on the hill, and all along the way, crowds of people stood screaming and calling. Not for her, not for Alais; it was Richard’s name they shouted, over and over. Richard rode along before them, bareheaded, paying no heed to the cheers.
Alais turned to her again. “Where do you live?”
Nora said, “Well, sometimes in Poitiers, but—”
“My father says your father has everything, money and jewels and silks and sunlight, but all we have in France is piety and kindness.”
Nora started. “We are kind.” But she was pleased that Alais saw how great her father was. “And pious too.”
The sharp little face of the French princess turned away, drawn, and for the first time her voice was uncertain. “I hope so.”
Nora’s heart thumped, unsteady with sympathy. Johanna was scrabbling around on the floor of the cart for more things to cast out, and Nora found a little cluster of pebbles in the corner and held them out to her. On Nora’s other side, Alais was staring down at her hands now, her shoulders round, and Nora wondered if she were about to cry. She might cry, if this happened to her.
She edged closer, until she brushed against the other girl. Alais jerked her head up, her eyes wide, startled. Nora smiled at her, and between them their hands crept together and entwined.
They did not go all the way up to the castle. The cheering crowd saw them along the street and onto a pavement, with a church on one side, where the cart turned in the opposite direction from the church and went down another street and through a wooden gate. Over them now a house loomed, with wooden walls, two rows of windows, a heavy overhang of roof. Here the cart stopped and they all got out. Richard herded them along through the wide front door.
“Mama is upstairs,” he said.
They had come into a dark hall, full of servants and baggage. A servant led Alais away. Nora climbed the steep, uneven stairs, tugging Johanna along by the hand. Johanna was still hungry and said so every step. At the top of the stairs was one room on one side and another on the other side, and Nora heard her mother’s voice.
“Not yet,” the Queen was saying; Nora went into the big room and saw her mother and Boy Henry at the far side; the Queen had her hand on his arm. “The time is not yet. Don’t be precipitous. We must seem to be loyal.” She saw the girls, and a smile twitched over her face like a mask. “Come, girls!” But her hand on Boy Henry’s arm gave him a push away. “Go,” she said to him. “He will send for you; better you not be here. Take Geoffrey with you.” Boy Henry turned on his heel and went out.
Nora wondered what “precipitous” meant; briefly she imagined a cliff, and people falling off. She went up to her mother and Eleanor hugged her.
“I’m sorry,” her mama said. “I’m sorry about your father.”
“Mama.”
“Don’t be afraid of him.” The Queen took Johanna’s hands and spoke from one to the other. “I’ll protect you.”
“I’m not—”
Her mother’s gaze lifted, aimed over Nora’s head. “What is it?”
“The King wants to see me,” Richard said, behind Nora. She felt his hand drop onto her shoulder.
“Just you?”
“No, Boy and Geoffrey too. Where are they?”
Nora’s mother shrugged, her whole body moving, shoulders, head, hands. “I have no notion,” she said. “You should go, though.”
“Yes, Mama.” Richard squeezed Nora’s shoulder and he went away.
“Very well.” Eleanor sat back, still holding Johanna by one hand. “Now, my girls.” Nora frowned, puzzled; her mother did know where her other brothers were, she had just sent them out. Her mother turned to her again. “Don’t be afraid.”
“Mama, I’m not afraid.” But then she thought, somehow, that her mother wanted her to be.
Johanna was already asleep, curled heavy against Nora’s back. Nora cradled her head on her arm, not sleepy at all. She was thinking about the day, about her splendid father and her beautiful mother, and how her family ruled everything, and she was one of them. She imagined herself on a big horse, galloping, and everybody cheering her name. Carrying a lance with a pennon on the tip, and fighting for the glory of something. Or to save somebody. Something proud, but virtuous. She caught herself rocking back and forth on her imaginary horse.
A candle at the far end cast a sort of twilight through the long narrow room; she could see the planks of the wall opposite and hear the rumbling snore of the woman asleep by the door. The other servants had gone down to the hall. She wondered what happened there that they all wanted to go. Then, to her surprise, someone hurried through the dark and knelt by her bed.
“Nora?”
It was Alais. Nora pushed herself up, startled, but even as she moved, Alais was crawling into the bed.
“Let me in, please. Please, Nora. They made me sleep alone.”
She could not move to make room because of Johanna, but she said anyway, “All right.” She didn’t like sleeping alone, either: it got cold, sometimes, and lonely. She pulled the cover back, and Alais crept into the space beside her.
“This is an ugly place. I thought you all lived in beautiful places.”
Nora said, “We don’t live here.” She snuggled back against Johanna, and without waking, her little sister murmured and shifted away, giving her more room, but Alais was still jammed up against her. She could smell the French girl’s breath, meaty and sour. Rigid, she lay there wide awake. She would never fall asleep now.
Alais snuggled into the mattress; the ropes underneath creaked. In a whisper she said, “Do you have boobies yet?”
Nora twitched. “What?” She didn’t know what Alais meant.
“Bumps, silly.” Alais shifted, pulling on the covers, banging into her. “Breastses. Like this.” Her hand closed on Nora’s wrist and she pulled, brushing Nora’s hand against Alais’ chest. For an instant, Nora felt a soft roundness under her fingers.
“No.” She tried to draw her hand out of Alais’ grip, but Alais had her fast.
“You’re just a baby.”
Nora got her hand free, and squirmed fiercely against Johanna, trying to get more room. “I’m a big girl!” Johanna was the baby. She struggled to get back the feeling of galloping on the big horse, of glory, pride, and greatness. She blurted out, “Someday I’m going to be king.”
Alais hooted. “Girls aren’t kings, silly! Girls are only women.”
“I mean, like my mother. My mother is as high as a king.”
“Your mother is wicked.”
Nora pushed away, angry. “My mother is not—”
“Sssh. You’ll wake everybody up. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. It’s just everybody says so. I didn’t mean it. You aren’t a baby.” Alais touched her, pleading. “Are you still my friend?”
Nora thought the whole matter of being friends to be harder than she had expected. Surreptitiously, she pressed her palm against her own bony chest.
Alais snuggled in beside her. “If we’re to be friends, we have to stay close together. Where are we going next?”
Nora pulled the cover around her, the thickness of cloth between her and Alais. “I hope to Poitiers, with Mama. I hope I will go there, the happiest court in the whole world.” In a flash of temper she blurted out, “Any place would be better than Fontrevault. My knees are so sore.”
Alais laughed. “A convent? They put me in convents. They even made me wear nun clothes.”
Nora said, “Oh, I hate that! They’re so scratchy.”
“And they smell.”
“Nuns smell,” Nora said. She remembered something her mother said. “Like old eggs.”
Alais giggled. “You’re funny, Nora. I like you a lot.”
“Well, you have to like my mother too, if you want to go to Poitiers.”
Again, Alais’ hand came up and touched Nora, stroking her. “I will. I promise.”
Nora cradled her head on her arm, pleased, and drowsy. Maybe Alais was not so bad after all. She was a helpless maiden, and Nora could defend her, like a real knight. Her eyelids drooped; for an instant, before she fell asleep, she felt the horse under her again, galloping.
Nora had saved bread crumbs from her breakfast; she was scattering them on the windowsill when the nurse called. She kept on scattering. The little birds were hungry in the winter. The nurse grabbed her by the arm and towed her away.
“Come here when I call you!” The nurse briskly stuffed her headfirst into a gown. Nora struggled up through the mass of cloth until she got her head out. “Now sit down so I can brush your hair.”
Nora sat; she looked toward the window again, and the nurse pinched her arm. “Sit still!”
She bit her lips together, angry and sad. She wished the nurse off to Germany. Hunched on the stool, she tried to see the window through the corner of her eye.
The brush dragged through her hair. “How do you get your hair so snarled?”
“Ooow!” Nora twisted away from the pull of the brush, and the nurse wrestled her back onto the stool.
“Sit! This child is a devil.” The brush smacked her hard on the shoulder. “Wait until we get you back to the convent, little devil.”
Nora stiffened all over. On the next stool, Alais turned suddenly toward her, wide-eyed. Nora slid off the stool.
“I’m going to find my Mama!” She started toward the door. The nurse snatched at her and she sidestepped out of reach and moved faster.
“Come back here!”
“I’m going to find my Mama,” Nora said, and gave the nurse a hard look, and pulled the door open.
“Wait for me,” said Alais.
The servingwomen came after them; Nora went on down the stairs, hurrying, just out of reach. She hoped her Mama was down in the hall. On the stairs, she slipped by some servants coming up from below and they got in the nurses’ way and held them back. Alais was right behind her, wild-eyed.
“Is this all right? Nora?”
“Come on.” Gratefully she saw that the hall was full of people; that meant her mother was there, and she went in past men in long stately robes, standing around waiting, and pushed in past them all the way up to the front.
There her mother sat, and Richard also, standing beside her; the Queen was reading a letter. A strange man stood humbly before her, his hands clasped, while she read. Nora went by him.
“Mama.”
Eleanor lifted her head, her brows arched. “What are you doing here?” She looked past Nora and Alais, into the crowd, brought her gaze back to Nora, and said, “Come sit down and wait; I’m busy.” She went back to the letter in her hand. Richard gave Nora a quick, cheerful grin. She went on past him, behind her Mama’s chair, and turned toward the room. The nurses were squeezing in past the crowd of courtiers, but they could not reach her now. Alais leaned against her, pale, her eyes blinking.
In front of them, her back to them, Eleanor in her heavy chair laid the letter aside. “I’ll give it thought.”
“Your Grace.” The humble man bowed and backed away. Another, in a red coat, stepped forward, a letter in his hand. Reaching for it, the Queen glanced at Richard beside her.
“Why did your father want to see you last night?”
Alais whispered, “What are you going to do?” Nora bumped her with her elbow; she wanted to listen to her brother.
Richard was saying, “He asked me where Boy was.” He shifted his weight from foot to foot. “He was drunk.”
The Queen was reading the new letter. She turned toward the table on her other hand, picked up a quill, and dipped it into the pot of ink. “You should sign this also, since you are Duke now.”
At that, Richard puffed up, making himself bigger, and his shoulders straightened. The Queen turned toward Nora.
“What is this now?”
“Mama.” Nora went up closer to the Queen. “Where are we going? After here.”
Her mother’s green eyes regarded her; a little smile curved her lips. “Well, to Poitiers, I thought.”
“I want to go to Poitiers.”
“Well, of course,” her Mama said.
“And Alais too?”
The Queen’s eyes shifted toward Alais, back by the wall. The smile flattened out. “Yes, of course. Good day, Princess Alais.”
“Good day, your Grace.” Alais dipped into a little bow. “Thank you, your Grace.” She turned a bright happy look at Nora, who cast her a broad look of triumph. She looked up at her mother, glad of her, who could do anything.
“You said you’d protect us, remember?”
The Queen’s smile widened, and her head tipped slightly to one side. “Yes, of course. I’m your mother.”
“And Alais too?”
Now the Queen actually laughed. “Nora, you will be dangerous when you’re older. Yes, Alais too, of course.”
On the other side of the chair, Richard straightened from writing, and Eleanor took the letter from him and the quill also. Nora lingered where she was, in the middle of everything, wanting her mother to notice her again. Richard said, “If I’m really Duke, do I give orders?”
The Queen’s smile returned; she looked at him the way she looked at no one else. “Of course. Since you are Duke now.” She seemed to be about to laugh again; Nora wondered what her Mama thought was funny. Eleanor laid the letter on the table and the quill jigged busily across it.
“I want to be knighted,” her brother said. “And I want a new sword.”
“As you will, your Grace,” her mother said, still with that little laugh in her voice, and gave him a slow nod of her head, like bowing. She handed the letter back to the man in the red coat. “You may begin this at once.”
“God’s blessing on your Grace. Thank you.” The man bobbed up and down like a duck. Someone else was coming forward, another paper in his hand. Nora bounced on her toes, not wanting to go; the nurses were still waiting, standing grimly to the side, their eyes fixed on the girls as if a stare could pull them within reach. She wished her mother would look at her, talk to her again. Then, at the back of the hall, a hard, loud voice rose.
“Way for the King of England!”
Eleanor sat straight up, and Richard swung back to his place by her side. The whole room was suddenly moving, shifting, men shuffling out of the way, flexing and bending, and up through the suddenly empty space came Nora’s Papa. Nora went quickly back behind the Queen’s chair to Alais, standing there by the wall.
Only the Queen stayed in her chair, the smile gone now. Everybody else was bent down over his shoes. The King strode up before Eleanor, and behind him the hall quickly emptied. Even the nurses went out. Two of her father’s men stood on either side of the door, like guards.
“My lord,” the Queen said, “you should send ahead; we would be more ready for you.”
Nora’s Papa stood looking down at her. He wore the same clothes he had the day before. His big hands rested on his belt. His voice grated, like walking on gravel. “I thought I might see more if I came unannounced. Where are the boys?” His gaze flicked toward Richard. “The other boys.”
The Queen shrugged. “Will you sit, my lord?” A servant hurried up with a chair for him. “Bring my lord the King a cup of wine.”
The King flung himself into the chair. “Don’t think I don’t know what you’re doing.” His head turned; he had seen Nora, just behind the Queen, and his eyes prodded at her. Nora twitched, uncomfortable.
“My lord,” Eleanor said, “I am uncertain what you mean.”
“You’re such a bad liar, Eleanor.” The King twisted in the chair, caught Nora by the hand, and dragged her up between their two chairs, in front of them both. “This little girl, now, she spoke very well yesterday, when the rest of you ran off. I think she tells the truth.”
Standing in front of them, Nora slid her hands behind her back. Her mouth was dry and she swallowed once. Her mother smiled at her. “Nora has a mind. Greet your father, dear.”
Nora said, “God be with you, Papa.”
He stared at her. Around the black centers, his eyes were blue like plates of sky. One hand rose and picked delicately at the front of her dress. Inside the case of cloth, her body shrank away from his touch. He smoothed the front of her dress. Her mother was twisted in her chair to watch. Behind her, Richard stood, his face gripped in a frown.
“So. Just out of the convent, are you? Like it there?”
She wondered what she was supposed to say. Instead, she said the truth. “No, Papa.”
He laughed. The black holes got bigger and then smaller. “What, you don’t want to be a nun?”
“No, Papa, I want—” To her surprise, the story had changed. She found a sudden, eager courage. “I want to be a hero.”
Eleanor gave a little chuckle, and the King snorted. “Well, God gave you the wrong stature.” His gaze went beyond her. “Where are you going?”
“Nowhere, my lord,” Richard said in a cool voice.
The King laughed again, so that his teeth showed. He smelled sour, like old beer and dirty clothes. His eyes watched Nora, but he spoke to her mother.
“I want to see my sons.”
“They are alarmed,” the Queen said, “because of what happened with Becket.”
“I’ll deal with Becket. Keep out of that.” The servant came with the cup of wine and he took it. Nora shifted her feet, wanting to get away from them, the edges of their words like knives in the air.
“Yes, well, how you deal with Becket is getting us all into some strange places,” her mother said.
“God’s death!” He lifted the cup and drained it. “I never knew he had such a hunger for martyrdom. You saw him. He looks like an old man already. This is a caution against virtue, if it turns you into such a stork.”
Her mother looked off across the room. “No, you are right. It does no service to your justice when half the men in the kingdom can go around you.”
He twisted toward her, his face clenched. “Nobody goes around me.”
“Well,” she said, and faced him, her mouth smiling, but not in a good way. “It seems they do.”
“Mama,” Nora said, remembering how to do this. “With your leave—”
“Stay,” her father said, and, reaching out, took her arm and dragged her forward, into his lap.
“Nora,” her mother said. Beyond her, Richard took a step forward, his eyes wide. Nora squirmed, trying to get upright on her father’s knees; his arms surrounded her like a cage. The look on her mother’s face scared her. She tried to wiggle free, and his arms closed around her.
“Mama—”
The Queen said, her voice suddenly harsh, “Let go of her, sir.”
“What?” the King said, with a little laugh. “Aren’t you my sweetheart, Nora?” He planted a kiss on Nora’s cheek. His arms draped around Nora; one hand stroked her arm. “I want my sons. Get my sons back here, woman.” Abruptly, he was thrusting Nora away, off his lap, back onto her feet, and he stood up. He crooked his finger at Richard. “Attend me.” His feet scraped loud on the floor. Everybody was staring at him, mute. Heavily, he went out the door, Richard on his heels.
Nora rubbed her cheek, still damp where her father’s mouth had pressed; her gaze went to her mother. The Queen reached out her arms and Nora went to her and the Queen held her tight. She said, “Don’t be afraid. I’ll protect you.” Her voice was ragged. She let Nora go and clapped her hands. “Now we’ll have some music.”
Feathers of steam rose from the tray of almond buns on the long wooden table. Nora crept down the kitchen steps, staying close by the wall, and swiftly ducked down under the table’s edge. Deeper in the kitchen, someone was singing, and someone else laughed; nobody had noticed her. She reached up over the side of the table and gathered handfuls of buns, dumping them into the fold of her skirt and, when her skirt was full, swiftly turned and scurried back up the steps and out the door.
Just beyond the threshold, Alais hopped up and down with delight, her eyes sparkling, her hands clasped together. Nora handed her a bun. “Quick!” She started toward the garden gate.
“Hey! You girls!”
Alais shrieked and ran. Nora wheeled, knowing that voice, and looked up into Richard’s merry eyes.
“Share those?”
They went into the garden and sat on a bench by the wall, and ate the buns. Richard licked the sweet dust from his fingers.
“Nora, I’m going away.”
“Away,” she said, startled. “Where?”
“Mama wants me to go find Boy and Geoffrey. I think she’s just getting me away from Papa. Then I’m going to look for some knights to follow me. I’m duke now, I need an army.” He hugged her, laid his cheek against her hair. “I’ll be back.”
“You’re so lucky,” she burst out. “To be duke. I’m nobody! Why am I a girl?”
He laughed, his arm warm around her, his cheek against her hair. “You won’t always be a little girl. You’ll marry someday, and then you’ll be a queen, like Mama, or at least a princess. I heard them say they want you to marry somebody in Castile.”
“Castile. Where’s that?” A twinge of alarm went through her. She looked up into his face. She thought that nobody was as handsome as Richard.
“Somewhere in the Spanish Marches.” He reached for the last of the buns, and she caught his hand and held on. His fingers were all sticky.
“I don’t want to go away,” she said. “I’ll miss you. I won’t know anybody.”
“You won’t go for a while. Castile—that means castles. They fight the Moors down there. You’ll be a Crusader.”
She frowned, puzzled. “In Jerusalem?” In the convent, they had always been praying for the Crusade. Jerusalem was on the other side of the world, and she had never heard it called Castile.
“No, there’s a Crusade in Spain too. El Cid, you know, and Roland. Like them.”
“Roland,” she said, with a leap of excitement. There was a song about Roland, full of thrilling passages. She tilted her face toward him again. “Will I have a sword?”
“Maybe.” He kissed her hair again. “Women don’t usually need swords. I have to go. I just wanted to say good-bye. You’re the oldest one left at home now, so take care of Johanna.”
“And Alais,” she said.
“Oh, Alais,” he said. He took her hand. “Nora, listen, something is going on between Mama and Papa, I don’t know what, but something. Be brave, Nora. Brave and good.” His arm tightened a moment and then he stood and walked away.
“When will we be in Poitiers?” Alais said happily. She sat on a chest in the back of the wagon and spread her skirts out.
Nora shrugged. The carts went very slowly and would make the journey much longer. She wished they would let her ride a horse. Her nurse climbed in over the wagon’s front, turned, and lifted Johanna after her. The drover led the team up, the reins bunched in his hands, turned the horses’ rumps to the cart, and backed them into the shafts. Maybe he would let her hold the reins. She hung over the edge of the wagon, looking around at the courtyard, full of other wagons, people packing up her mother’s goods, a line of saddled horses waiting.
The nurse said, “Lady Nora, sit down.”
Nora kept her back to her, to show she didn’t hear. Her mother had come out of the hall door, and at the sight of her everybody else in the whole courtyard turned toward her as if she were the sun; everybody warmed in that light. Nora called, “Mama!” and waved, and her mother waved back.
“Lady Nora! Sit!”
She leaned on the side of the wagon. Beside her, Alais giggled and poked her with her elbow. A groom was bringing the Queen’s horse; she waved away someone waiting to help her and mounted by herself. Nora watched how she did that, how she kept her skirts over her legs but got her legs across the saddle anyway. Her Mama rode like a man. She would ride like that. Then, from the gate, a yell went up.
“The King!”
Alais on the chest twisted around to look. Nora straightened. Her father on his big black horse was riding in the gate, a line of knights behind him, mailed and armed. She looked for Richard, but he wasn’t with them. Most of the knights had to stay outside the wall because there was no room in the yard.
Eleanor reined her horse around, coming up beside the wagon, close enough that Nora could have reached out and touched her. The horse sidestepped, tossing its head up. His face dark, the King forced his way through the crowd toward her.
She said, “My lord, what is this?”
He threw one wide look all around the courtyard. His face was blurry with beard and his eyes were rimmed in red. Nora sat quickly down on the chest. Her father spurred his horse up head to tail with her mother’s.
“Where are my sons?”
“My lord, I have no notion, really.”
He stared at her, furious. “Then I’ll take hostages.” He twisted in his saddle, looking back toward his men. “Get these girls!”
Nora shot to her feet again. “No,” the Queen said, forcing her way between him and the wagon, almost nose to nose with him, her fist clenched. “Keep your hands off my daughters.” Alais reached out and gripped Nora’s skirt in her fist.
He thrust his face at her. “Try to stop me, Eleanor!”
“Papa, wait.” Nora leaned over the side of the wagon. “We want to go to Poitiers.”
The King said evilly, “What you want.” Two men had dismounted, were coming briskly toward the wagon. He never took his gaze off her mother.
The Queen’s horse bounded up between the men and the cart. Leaning closer to the King, she spoke in a quick low voice. “Don’t be foolish, my lord, on such a small matter. If you push this too hastily, you will never get them back. Alais has that handsome dowry; take her.”
“Mama, no!” Nora stretched her arm out. Alais flung her arms around her waist.
“Please—please—”
The Queen never even looked at them. “Be still, Nora. I will deal with this.”
“Mama!” Nora tried to catch hold of her, to make her turn and look. “You promised. Mama, you promised she would come with us!” Her fingers grazed the smooth fabric of her mother’s sleeve.
Eleanor struck at her, hard, knocking her down inside the wagon. Alais gave a sob. The King’s men were coming on again, climbing up toward them. Nora lunged at them, her fists raised.
“Get away! Don’t you dare touch her!”
From behind, someone got hold of her and dragged her out of the way. The two men scrambled up over the side of the wagon and fastened on the little French princess. They were dragging her up over the side. She cried out once and then was limp, helpless in their arms. Nora wrenched at the arm around her waist, and only then she saw it was her mother holding her.
“Mama!” She twisted toward Eleanor. “You promised. She doesn’t want to go.”
Eleanor thrust her face down toward Nora’s. “Be still, girl. You don’t know what you’re doing.”
Behind her, the King was swinging his horse away. “You can keep that one. Maybe she’ll poison you.” He rode off after his men, who had Alais clutched in their grip. Other men were lifting out Alais’ baggage. They were hauling her off like baggage. Nora gave a wordless cry. With a sharp command, her father led his men on out the gate again, taking Alais like a trophy.
Her arm still around Nora’s waist, Eleanor was scowling after the King. Nora wrenched herself free and her mother turned to face her.
“Well, now, Nora. That was unseemly, wasn’t it.”
“Why did you do that, Mama?” Nora’s voice rang out, high-pitched and furious, careless who heard.
“Come, girl,” her mother said, and gave her a shake. “Settle yourself. You don’t understand.”
With a violent jerk of her whole body, Nora wrenched away from her mother. “You said Alais could come.” Something deep and hard was gathering in her, as if she had swallowed a stone. She began to cry. “Mama, why did you lie to me?”
Her mother blinked at her, her forehead crumpled. “I can’t do everything.” She held out her hand, as if asking for something. “Come, be reasonable. Do you want to be like your father?”
Tears were squirting from Nora’s eyes. “No, and not like you, either, Mama. You promised me, and you lied.” She knocked aside the outstretched hand.
Eleanor recoiled; her arm rose and she slapped Nora across the face. “Cruel, ungrateful child!”
Nora sat down hard. She poked her fists into her lap, her shoulders hunched. Alais was gone; she couldn’t save her after all. It didn’t matter that she hadn’t really liked Alais much. She wanted to be a hero, but she was just a little girl, and nobody cared. She turned to the chest and folded her arms on it, put her head down, and wept.
Later, she leaned up against the side of the wagon, looking down the road ahead.
She felt stupid. Alais was right: she couldn’t be a king, and now she couldn’t even be a hero.
The nurses were dozing in the back of the wagon. Her mother had taken Johanna away to ride on her saddle in front of her, to show Nora how bad she had been. The drover on his bench had his back to her. She felt as if nobody could see her, as if she weren’t even there.
She didn’t want to be a king anyway if it meant being mean and yelling and carrying people off by force. She wanted to be like her mother, but her old mother, the good mother, not this new one, who lied and broke promises, who hit and called names. Alais had said, “Your mother is wicked,” and she almost cried again, because it was true.
She would tell Richard when he came back. But then in her stomach something tightened like a knot: if he came back. Somehow the whole world had changed. Maybe even Richard would be false now.
“You’ll be a Crusader,” he had said to her.
She didn’t know if she wanted that. Being a Crusader meant going a long, long way and then dying. “Be good,” Richard had said. “Be brave.” But she was just a little girl. Under the whole broad blue sky, she was just a speck.
The wagon jolted along the road, part of the long train of freight heading down toward Poitiers. She looked all around her, at the servants walking along among the carts, the bobbing heads of horses and mules, the heaps of baggage lashed on with rope. Her mother was paying no heed to her, had gone off ahead, in the mob of riders leading the way. The nurses were sleeping. Nobody was watching her.
Nobody cared about her anymore. She waited to disappear. But she didn’t.
She stood, holding on to the side to keep from falling. Carefully, she climbed up over the front of the wagon onto the bench, keeping her skirts over her legs, and sat down next to the drover, who gawked down at her, a broad, brown face in a shag of beard.
“Now, my little lady—”
She straightened her skirts, planted her feet firmly on the kickboard, and looked up at him. “Can I hold the reins?” she said.
Melinda Snodgrass
A writer whose work crosses several mediums and genres, Melinda M. Snodgrass has written scripts for television shows such as Profiler and Star Trek: The Next Generation (for which she was also a story editor for several years), a number of popular SF novels, and was one of the cocreators of the long-running Wild Card series, for which she has also written and edited. Her novels include Circuit,Circuit Breaker,Final Circuit,The Edge of Reason,Runespear (with Victor Milán), High Stakes,Santa Fe, and Queen’s Gambit Declined. Her most recent novel is The Edge of Ruin, the sequel to The Edge of Reason. Her media novels include the Wild Cards novel Double Solitaire and the Star Trek novel The Tears of the Singers. She’s also the editor of the anthology A Very Large Array. She lives in New Mexico.
Here she takes us to a distant planet to show us that even in a society where spaceships thunder through the night and aliens mingle with humans on crowded city streets, some of the games you might run into go way back.
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George Raymond Richard Martin
Gardner Dozois
George R.R. Martin and Gardner Dozois have put together a towering anthology of specially-commissioned stories from the most stellar names in the genre, set in a number of readers' favourite fantasy worlds.George R.R. Martin is the bestselling author of A Song of Ice and Fire, the inspiration for HBO’s hit series Game of Thrones.The collection will also feature a new and unpublished 100pp novella by George R.R. Martin set in the world of A Song of Ice and Fire – now the award-winning HBO show, Game of Thrones.The novella, entitled 'The Princess and the Queen', will reveal the origins of the Targaryen Civil War, otherwise known as 'The Dance of the Dragons', a war that split a then-fledgling Westeros in two, pitting Targaryen against Targaryen and dragon against dragon.The Dangerous Women anthology also contains contributions from the following worldwide bestselling authors:• “Some Desperado” by Joe Abercrombie – A Red Country story• “Nora’s Song” by Cecelia Holland• “Bombshells” by Jim Butcher – A Harry Dresden story• “Wrestling Jesus” by Joe R. Lansdale• “Neighbours” by Megan Lindholm (who also writes as Robin Hobb)• “Shadows For Silence in the Forests of Hell” by Brandon Sanderson• “A Queen in Exile” by Sharon Kay Penman• “The Girl in the Mirror” by Lev Grossman – A Magicians story• “Virgins” by Diana Gabaldon – An Outlander story
DANGEROUS WOMEN
EDITED BY
GEORGE R. R. MARTIN
AND
GARDNER DOZOIS
Copyright (#ulink_c442ccd6-30f2-54e9-9df8-559da4e15a3e)
HarperVoyager
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
First published in Great Britain by HarperVoyager 2013
Copyright © George R.R. Martin and Gardner Dozois 2013
Dangerous Women / Edited by George R.R. Martin and Gardner Dozois.
“Some Desperado” Copyright © 2013 by Joe Abercrombie
“My Heart Is Either Broken” Copyright © 2013 by Megan Abbott
“Nora’s Song” Copyright © 2013 by Cecelia Holland
“The Hands That Are Not There” Copyright © 2013 by Melinda Snodgrass
“Bombshells” Copyright © 2013 by Jim Butcher
“Raisa Stepanova” Copyright © 2013 by Carrie Vaughn
“Wrestling Jesus” Copyright © 2013 by Joe R. Lansdale
“Neighbors” Copyright © 2013 by Megan Lindholm
“I Know How to Pick ’Em” Copyright © 2013 by Lawrence Block
“Shadows for Silence in the Forests of Hell” Copyright © 2013 by Brandon Sanderson
“A Queen in Exile” Copyright © 2013 by Sharon Kay Penman
“The Girl in the Mirror” Copyright © 2013 by Lev Grossman
“Second Arabesque, Very Slowly” copyright © 2013 by Nancy Kress
“City Lazarus” Copyright © 2013 by Diana Rowland
“Virgins” Copyright © 2013 by Diana Gabaldon
“Hell Hath No Fury” Copyright © 2013 by Sherrilyn Kenyon
“Pronouncing Doom” Copyright © 2013 by S. M. Stirling
“Name the Beast” Copyright © 2013 by Sam Sykes
“Caretakers” Copyright © 2013 by Pat Cadigan
“Lies My Mother Told Me” Copyright © 2013 by Caroline Spector
“The Princess and the Queen” Copyright © 2013 by George R. R. Martin
The author of each individual story asserts their moral rights, including the right be identified as the author of their work
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780007549405
Ebook Edition © NOVEMBER 2013 ISBN: 9780007549412
Version: 2018-06-20
To Jo Playford, my dangerous minion.
[—George R. R. Martin]
Contents
Cover (#u61173c97-7aa5-5aa8-820d-0dc6dea2a710)
Title Page (#ueb02a1d3-c691-5977-a780-e052ff75210b)
Copyright (#u2289ea98-cb5d-5493-ba0c-e6270f2bf97e)
Dedication (#u470b646c-0e4a-5cdf-ba32-1dee817af478)
Introduction (#u5b509b54-17a3-56ce-b653-b8bba791a3b3)
Some Desperado by Joe Abercrombie (#u02bc890d-2d9d-5bde-995d-61a17a586594)
My Heart Is Either Broken by Megan Abbott (#ua61e72ad-4118-5160-876f-72a891b0a0bd)
Nora’s Song by Cecelia Holland (#ucd45114c-8ecf-57d8-ad45-fb0315b9e7b4)
The Hands That Are Not There by Melinda Snodgrass (#u68dcca73-5695-54df-8081-ecf148e6d05c)
Bombshells by Jim Butcher (#ud4338be8-6a4b-5d2a-b693-41191a708d1d)
Raisa Stepanova by Carrie Vaughn (#uc6cddaf7-5ca1-5fa1-85c9-12e53e9cf470)
Wrestling Jesus by Joe R. Lansdale (#u85664e44-55ec-5ac9-878c-82232f1c206c)
Neighbors by Megan Lindholm (#u80998992-9730-5133-9e53-434a9c2df5b4)
I Know How to Pick ’Em by Lawrence Block (#uc9f54ee8-b5c4-5793-b792-d406b50a7fc3)
Shadows For Silence in the Forests of Hell by Brandon Sanderson (#udc55d5bd-6508-53d9-b74a-e863e81f282e)
A Queen in Exile by Sharon Kay Penman (#u1ccc45a6-8d5d-5163-ab44-5db4749f90b5)
The Girl in the Mirror by Lev Grossman (#u9bc80138-1587-5ed3-a7fb-78e542120d95)
Second Arabesque, Very Slowly by Nancy Kress (#uc3829fb5-86fe-519e-bf3c-a126c3fe5ffd)
City Lazarus by Diana Rowland (#ubd18517f-ea7e-55ae-96a3-0881d542dd57)
Virgins by Diana Gabaldon (#uf52e9769-91bf-59c9-813e-c3523a1940a0)
Hell Hath No Fury by Sherrilyn Kenyon (#u0f599192-6f9d-5e82-8f46-d10e0205adcc)
Pronouncing Doom by S. M. Stirling (#u2a671230-97b9-5a63-9ef8-c0add54e62c0)
Name the Beast by Sam Sykes (#u3385bfbe-b97a-51af-89bc-e1e2c14b0104)
Caretakers by Pat Cadigan (#u33507933-090f-5d0a-a257-bd0b4b825ae0)
Lies My Mother Told Me by Caroline Spector (#ude71b7e0-6331-5409-bfa6-e93e84ff6768)
The Princess and the Queen by George R. R. Martin (#ubfc78906-ee57-56d1-968a-503ea18d3d14)
Footnote (#u5f8e436c-c435-583f-98fe-2a3b5d0940c5)
About the Publisher (#u27f4035c-d349-5d32-9b51-961125441c3b)
Introduction by Gardner Dozois (#ulink_9c4a3d5d-1a8f-5202-b1d0-cb5c7ce8787d)
Genre fiction has always been divided over the question of just how dangerous women are.
In the real world, of course, the question has long been settled. Even if the Amazons are mythological (and almost certainly wouldn’t have cut their right breasts off to make it easier to draw a bow if they weren’t), their legend was inspired by memory of the ferocious warrior women of the Scythians, who were very much not mythological. Gladiatrix, women gladiators, fought other women—and sometimes men—to the death in the arenas of Ancient Rome. There were female pirates like Anne Bonny and Mary Read, and even female samurai. Women served as frontline combat troops, feared for their ferocity, in the Russian army during World War II, and serve so in Israel today. Until 2013, women in the U.S. forces were technically restricted to “noncombat” roles, but many brave women gave their lives in Iraq and Afghanistan anyway, since bullets and land mines have never cared whether you’re a noncombatant or not. Women who served as Women Airforce Service Pilots for the United States during World War II were also limited to noncombat roles (where many of them were nevertheless killed in the performance of their duties), but Russian women took to the skies as fighter pilots, and sometimes became aces. A Russian female sniper during World War II was credited with more than fifty kills. Queen Boudicca of the Iceni tribe led one of the most fearsome revolts ever against Roman authority, one that was almost successful in driving the Roman invaders from Britain, and a young French peasant girl inspired and led the troops against the enemy so successfully that she became famous forever afterwards as Joan of Arc.
On the dark side, there have been female “highwaymen” like Mary Frith and Lady Katherine Ferrers and Pearl Hart (the last person to ever rob a stagecoach); notorious poisoners like Agrippina and Catherine de Medici, modern female outlaws like Ma Barker and Bonnie Parker, even female serial killers like Aileen Wuornos. Elizabeth Báthory was said to have bathed in the blood of virgins, and even though that has been called into question, there is no doubt that she tortured and killed dozens, perhaps hundreds, of children during her life. Queen Mary I of England had hundreds of Protestants burnt at the stake; Queen Elizabeth of England later responded by executing large numbers of Catholics. Mad Queen Ranavalona of Madagascar had so many people put to death that she wiped out one-third of the entire population of Madagascar during her reign; she would even have you executed if you appeared in her dreams.
Popular fiction, though, has always had a schizophrenic view of the dangerousness of women. In the science fiction of the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s, women, if they appeared at all, were largely regulated to the role of the scientist’s beautiful daughter, who might scream during the fight scenes but otherwise had little to do except hang adoringly on the arm of the hero afterwards. Legions of women swooned helplessly while waiting to be rescued by the intrepid jut-jawed hero from everything from dragons to the bug-eyed monsters who were always carrying them off for improbable purposes either dietary or romantic on the covers of pulp SF magazines. Hopelessly struggling women were tied to railroad tracks, with nothing to do but squeak in protest and hope that the Good Guy arrived in time to save them.
And yet, at the same time, warrior women like Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Dejah Thoris and Thuvia, Maid of Mars, were every bit as good with the blade and every bit as deadly in battle as John Carter and their other male comrades, female adventuresses like C. L. Moore’s Jirel of Joiry swashbuckled their way through the pages of Weird Tales magazine (and blazed a trail for later female swashbucklers like Joanna Russ’s Alyx); James H. Schmitz sent Agents of Vega like Granny Wannatel and fearless teenagers like Telzey Amberdon and Trigger Argee out to battle the sinister menaces and monsters of the spaceways; and Robert A. Heinlein’s dangerous women were capable of being the captain of a spaceship or killing enemies in hand-to-hand combat. Arthur Conan Doyle’s sly, shady Irene Adler was one of the only people ever to outwit his Sherlock Holmes, and probably one of the inspirations for the legions of tricky, dangerous, seductive, and treacherous “femmes fatale” who featured in the works of Dashiell Hammett and James M. Cain and later went on to appear in dozens of films noir, and who still turn up in the movies and on television to this day. Later television heroines such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Xena, Warrior Princess, firmly established women as being formidable and deadly enough to battle hordes of fearsome supernatural menaces, and helped to inspire the whole subgenre of paranormal romance, which is sometimes unofficially known as the “kick-ass heroine” genre.
Like our anthology Warriors,Dangerous Women was conceived of as a cross-genre anthology, one that would mingle every kind of fiction, so we asked writers from every genre—science fiction, fantasy, mystery, historical, horror, paranormal romance, men and women alike—to tackle the theme of “dangerous women,” and that call was answered by some of the best writers in the business, including both new writers and giants of their fields like Diana Gabaldon, Jim Butcher, Sharon Kay Penman, Joe Abercrombie, Carrie Vaughn, Joe R. Lansdale, Lawrence Block, Cecelia Holland, Brandon Sanderson, Sherilynn Kenyon, S. M. Stirling, Nancy Kress, and George R. R. Martin.
Here you’ll find no hapless victims who stand by whimpering in dread while the male hero fights the monster or clashes swords with the villain, and if you want to tie these women to the railroad tracks, you’ll find you have a real fight on your hands. Instead, you will find sword-wielding women warriors; intrepid women fighter pilots and far-ranging spacewomen; deadly female serial killers; formidable female superheroes; sly and seductive femmes fatale; female wizards; hard-living bad girls; female bandits and rebels; embattled survivors in postapocalyptic futures; female private investigators; stern female hanging judges; haughty queens who rule nations and whose jealousies and ambitions send thousands to grisly deaths; daring dragonriders; and many more.
Enjoy!
Joe Abercrombie
As the sizzlingly fast-paced and action-packed story that follows demonstrates, sometimes chasing a fugitive can be as dangerous for the pursuers as for the pursued—particularly when the quarry has no place left to run …
Joe Abercrombie is one of the fastest-rising stars in fantasy today, acclaimed by readers and critics alike for his tough, spare, no-nonsense approach to the genre. He’s probably best known for his First Law trilogy, the first novel of which, The Blade Itself, was published in 2006; it was followed in subsequent years by Before They Are Hanged and Last Argument of Kings. He’s also written the stand-alone fantasy novels Best Served Cold and The Heroes. His most recent novel is Red Country. In addition to writing, Abercrombie is also a freelance film editor and lives and works in London.
SOME DESPERADO (#ulink_762c95a5-679a-5cff-a77f-a6e90db7049f)
Shy gave the horse her heels, its forelegs buckled, and, before she had a notion what was happening, she and her saddle had bid each other a sad farewell.
She was given a flailing instant aloft to consider the situation. Not a good one at a brief assay, and the impending earth gave her no time for a longer. She did her best to roll with the fall—as she tried to do with most of her many misfortunes—but the ground soon uncurled her, gave her a fair roughing up, and tossed her, flopping, into a patch of sun-shrivelled scrub.
Dust settled.
She stole a moment just to get some breath in. Then one to groan while the world stopped rolling. Then another to shift gingerly an arm and a leg, waiting for that sick jolt of pain that meant something was broke and her miserable shadow of a life would soon be lost in the dusk. She would’ve welcomed it, if it meant she could stretch out and not have to run any more. But the pain didn’t come. Not outside of the usual compass, leastways. As far as her miserable shadow of a life went, she was still awaiting judgment.
Shy dragged herself up, scratched and scuffed, caked in dust and spitting out grit. She’d taken too many mouthfuls of sand the last few months but she’d a dismal premonition that there’d be more. Her horse lay a few strides distant, one foamed-up flank heaving, forelegs black with blood. Neary’s arrow had snagged it in the shoulder, not deep enough to kill or even slow it right off, but deep enough to make it bleed at a good pace. With her hard riding, that had killed it just as dead as a shaft in the heart.
There’d been a time Shy had got attached to horses. A time—despite reckoning herself hard with people and being mostly right—she’d been uncommon soft about animals. But that time was a long time gone. There wasn’t much soft on Shy these days, body or mind. So she left her mount to its final red-frothed breaths without the solace of her calming hand and ran for the town, tottering some at first, but quickly warming to the exercise. At running, she’d a heap of practice.
“Town” was perhaps an overstatement. It was six buildings, and calling them buildings was being generous to two or three. All rough lumber and an entire stranger to straight angles, sun-baked, rain-peeled, and dust-blasted, huddled about a dirt square and a crumbling well.
The biggest building had the look of a tavern or brothel or trading post or more likely all three amalgamated. A rickety sign still clung to the boards above the doorway but the name had been rubbed by the wind to just a few pale streaks in the grain. Nothing, nowhere, was all its proclamation now. Up the steps two by two, bare feet making the old boards wheeze, thoughts boiling away at how she’d play it when she got inside, what truths she’d season with what lies for the most likely recipe.
There’s men chasing me! Gulping breath in the doorway and doing her best to look beyond desperate—no mighty effort of acting at that moment, or any occupying the last twelve months, indeed.
Three of the bastards! Then—provided no one recognised her from all the bills for her arrest—They tried to rob me! A fact. No need to add that she’d robbed the money herself from the new bank in Hommenaw in the company of those three worthies plus another since caught and hung by the authorities.
They killed my brother! They’re drunk on blood! Her brother was safe at home where she wished she was, and if her pursuers were drunk, it would likely be on cheap spirits as usual, but she’d shriek it with that little warble in her throat. Shy could do quite a warble when she needed one, she’d practiced it ’til it was something to hear. She pictured the patrons springing to their feet in their eagerness to aid a woman in distress. They shot my horse! She had to admit it didn’t seem overpowering likely that anyone hard-bitten enough to live out here would be getting into a sweat of chivalry, but maybe fate would deal her a winning hand for once.
It had been known to happen.
She blundered through the tavern’s door, opening her mouth to serve up the tale, and stopped cold.
The place was empty.
Not just no one there, but nothing there, and for damn sure no winning hand. Not a twig of furniture in the bare common room. A narrow stairway and a balcony running across the left-hand wall, doorways yawning empty upstairs. Chinks of light scattered where the rising sun was seeking out the many gaps in the splitting carpentry. Maybe just a lizard skittering away into the shadows—of which there was no shortage—and a bumper harvest of dust, greying every surface, drifted into every corner. Shy stood there a moment just blinking, then dashed back out along the rickety stoop and to the next building. When she shoved the door, it dropped right off its rusted hinges.
This one hadn’t even a roof. Hadn’t even a floor. Just bare rafters with the careless, pinking sky above, and bare joists with a stretch of dirt below, every bit as desolate as the miles of dirt outside.
She saw it now as she stepped back into the street with vision unhindered by hope. No glass in the windows, or wax paper, even. No rope by the crumbling well. No animals to be seen—aside from her own dead horse, that was, which only served to prove the point.
It was a dried-out corpse of a town, long since dead.
Shy stood in that forsaken place, up on the balls of her bare feet as though she was about to sprint off somewhere but lacked the destination, hugging herself with one arm while the fingers of the other hand fluttered and twitched at nothing, biting on her lip and sucking air fast and rasping through the little gap between her front teeth.
Even by recent standards, it was a low moment. But if she’d learned anything the last few months, it was that things can always get lower. Looking back the way she’d come, Shy saw the dust rising. Three little grey trails in the shimmer off the grey land.
“Oh, hell,” she whispered, and bit her lip harder. She pulled her eating knife from her belt and wiped the little splinter of metal on her dirty shirt, as though cleaning it might somehow settle the odds. Shy had been told she had a fertile imagination, but even so, it was hard to picture a more feeble weapon. She’d have laughed if she hadn’t been on the verge of weeping. She’d spent way too much time on the verge of weeping the last few months, now that she thought about it.
How had it come to this?
A question for some jilted girl rather than an outlaw with four thousand marks offered, but still a question she was never done asking. Some desperado! She’d grown expert on the desperate part but the rest remained a mystery. The sorry truth was that she knew full well how it came to this—the same way as always. One disaster following so hard on another that she just bounced between ’em, pinging about like a moth in a lantern. The second usual question followed hard on the first.
What the fuck now?
She sucked in her stomach—not that there was much to suck in these days—and dragged the bag out by the drawstrings, coins inside clicking together with that special sound only money makes. Two thousand marks in silver, give or take. You’d think that a bank would hold a lot more—they told depositors they always had fifty thousand on hand—but it turns out you can’t trust banks any more than bandits.
She dug her hand in, dragged free a fistful of coins, and tossed the money across the street, leaving it gleaming in the dust. She did it like she did most things these days—hardly knowing why. Maybe she valued her life a lot higher’n two thousand marks, even if no one else did. Maybe she hoped they’d just take the silver and leave her be, though what she’d do once she was left be in this corpse town—no horse, no food, no weapon—she hadn’t thought out. Clearly she hadn’t fixed up a whole plan, or not one that would hold too much water, leastways. Leaky planning had always been a problem of hers.
She sprinkled silver as if she was tossing seed on her mother’s farm, miles and years and a dozen violent deaths away. Whoever would’ve thought she’d miss the place? Miss the bone-poor house and the broke-down barn and the fences that always needed mending. The stubborn cow that never gave milk and the stubborn well that never gave water and the stubborn soil that only weeds would thrive in. Her stubborn little sister and brother too. Even big, scarred, softheaded Lamb. What Shy would’ve given now to hear her mother’s shrill voice curse her out again. She sniffed hard, her nose hurting, her eyes stinging, and wiped ’em on the back of her frayed cuff. No time for tearful reminiscences. She could see three dark spots of riders now beneath those three inevitable dust trails. She flung the empty bag away, ran back to the tavern, and—
“Ah!” She hopped over the threshold, bare sole of her foot torn on a loose nail head. The world’s nothing but a mean bully, that’s a fact. Even when you’ve big misfortunes threatening to drop on your head, small ones still take every chance to prick your toes. How she wished she’d got the chance to grab her boots. Just to keep a shred of dignity. But she had what she had, and neither boots nor dignity were on the list, and a hundred big wishes weren’t worth one little fact—as Lamb used to boringly drone at her whenever she cursed him and her mother and her lot in life and swore she’d be gone in the morning.
Shy remembered how she’d been then, and wished she had the chance now to punch her earlier self in the face. But she could punch herself in the face when she got out of this.
She’d a procession of other willing fists to weather first.
She hurried up the stairs, limping a little and cursing a lot. When she reached the top she saw she’d left bloody toe prints on every other one. She was working up to feeling pretty damn low about that glistening trail leading right to the end of her leg, when something like an idea came trickling through the panic.
She paced down the balcony, making sure to press her bloody foot firm to the boards, and turned into an abandoned room at the end. Then she held her foot up, gripping it hard with one hand to stop the bleeding, and hopped back the way she’d come and through the first doorway, near the top of the steps, pressing herself into the shadows inside.
A pitiful effort, doubtless. As pitiful as her bare feet and her eating knife and her two-thousand-mark haul and her big dream of making it back home to the shit-hole she’d had the big dream of leaving. Small chance those three bastards would fall for that, even stupid as they were. But what else could she do?
When you’re down to small stakes, you have to play long odds.
Her own breath was her only company, echoing in the emptiness, hard on the out, ragged on the in, almost painful down her throat. The breath of someone scared near the point of an involuntary shitting and all out of ideas. She just couldn’t see her way to the other side of this. She ever made it back to that farm she’d jump out of bed every morning she woke alive and do a little dance, and give her mother a kiss for every cuss, and never snap at her sister or mock Lamb again for being a coward. She promised it, then wished she was the sort who kept promises.
She heard horses outside, crept to the one window with half a view of the street, and peered down as gingerly as if she was peering into a bucket of scorpions.
They were here.
Neary wore that dirty old blanket cinched in at the waist with twine, his greasy hair sticking up at all angles, reins in one hand and the bow he’d shot Shy’s horse with in the other, the blade of the heavy axe hanging at his belt as carefully cleaned as the rest of his repugnant person was beyond neglect. Dodd had his battered hat pulled low, sitting his saddle with that round-shouldered cringe he always had around his brother, like a puppy expecting a slap. Shy would have liked to give the faithless fool a slap right then. A slap for starters. Then there was Jeg, sitting up tall as a lord in that long red coat of his, dirt-fringed tails spread out over his big horse’s rump, hungry sneer on his face as he scanned the buildings, that tall hat which he thought made him look quite the personage poking off his head slightly crooked, like the chimney from a burned-out farmstead.
Dodd pointed to the coins scattered across the dirt around the well, a couple of ’em winking with the sun. “She left the money.”
“Seems so,” said Jeg, voice hard as his brother’s was soft.
She watched them get down and hitch their mounts. No hurry to it. Like they were dusting themselves off after a jaunt of a ride and looking forward to a nice little evening among cultured company. They’d no need to hurry. They knew she was here, and they knew she was going nowhere, and they knew she was getting no help, and so did she.
“Bastards,” Shy whispered, cursing the day she ever took up with them. But you have to take up with someone, don’t you? And you can only pick from what’s on offer.
Jeg stretched his back, took a long sniff and a comfortable spit, then drew his sword. That curved cavalry sword he was so proud of with the clever-arsed basketwork, which he said he’d won in a duel with a Union officer, but that Shy knew he’d stolen, along with the best part of everything else he’d ever owned. How she’d mocked him about that stupid sword. She wouldn’t have minded having it to hand now, though, and him with only her eating knife.
“Smoke!” bellowed Jeg, and Shy winced. She’d no idea who’d thought that name up for her. Some wag had lettered it on the bills for her arrest and now everyone used it. On account of her tendency to vanish like smoke, maybe. Though it could also have been on account of her tendencies to stink like it, stick in folks’ throats, and drift with the wind.
“Get out here, Smoke!” Jeg’s voice clapped off the dead fronts of the buildings, and Shy shrank a little further into the darkness. “Get out here and we won’t hurt you too bad when we find you!”
So much for taking the money and going. They wanted the price on her too. She pressed her tongue into the gap between her teeth and mouthed, “Cocksuckers.” There’s a certain kind of man, the more you give him, the more he’ll take.
“We’ll have to go and get her,” she heard Neary say in the stillness.
“Aye.”
“I told you we’d have to go and get her.”
“You must be pissing your pants with joy over the outcome, then, eh?”
“Said we’d have to get her.”
“So stop pointing it out and get it done.”
Dodd’s wheedling voice. “Look, the money’s here, we could just scrape this up and get off, there ain’t no need to—”
“Did you and I really spring from between the same set o’ legs?” sneered Jeg at his brother. “You are the stupidest bastard.”
“Stupidest,” said Neary.
“You think I’m leaving four thousand marks for the crows?” said Jeg. “You scrape that up, Dodd, we’ll break the mare.”
“Where do you reckon she is?” asked Neary.
“I thought you was the big tracker?”
“Out in the wild, but we ain’t in the wild.”
Jeg cocked an eyebrow at the empty shacks. “You’d call this the highest extent of civilisation, would you?”
They looked at each other a moment, dust blowing up around their legs, then settling again.
“She’s here somewhere,” said Neary.
“You think? Good thing I got the self-described sharpest eyes west of the mountains with me, so I don’t miss her dead horse ten fucking strides away. Yes, she’s here somewhere.”
“Where do you reckon?” asked Neary.
“Where would you be?”
Neary looked about the buildings and Shy jerked out of the way as his narrowed eyes darted over the tavern.
“In that one, I reckon, but I ain’t her.”
“Course you ain’t fucking her. You know how I can tell? You got bigger tits and less sense. If you was her, I wouldn’t have to fucking look for her now, would I?”
Another silence, another dusty gust. “Guess not,” said Neary.
Jeg took his tall hat off, scrubbed at his sweaty hair with his fingernails, and jammed it back on at an angle. “You look in there, I’ll try the one next to it, but don’t kill the bitch, eh? That’ll half the reward.”
Shy eased back into the shadows, feeling the sweat tickling under her shirt. To be caught in this worthless arsehole of a place. By these worthless bastards. In bare feet. She didn’t deserve this. All she’d wanted was to be somebody worth speaking of. To not be nothing, forgotten on the day of her death. Now she saw that there’s a sharp balance between too little excitement and a huge helping too much. But like most of her lame-legged epiphanies, it had dawned a year too late.
She sucked air through the little gap between her teeth as she heard Neary creaking across the boards in the common room, maybe just the metal rattle of that big axe. She was shivering all over. Felt so weak of a sudden she could hardly hold the knife up, let alone imagine swinging it. Maybe it was time to give up. Toss the knife out the door and say, “I’m coming out! I’ll be no trouble! You win!” Smile and nod and thank ’em for their betrayal and their kind consideration when they kicked the shit out of her or horsewhipped her or broke her legs and whatever else amused them on the way to her hanging.
She’d seen her share of those and never relished the spectacle. Standing there tied while they read your name and your crime, hoping for some last reprieve that wouldn’t come while the noose was drawn tight, sobbing for mercy or hurling your curses and neither making the slightest hair of difference. Kicking at nothing, tongue stuck out while you shat yourself for the amusement of scum no better’n you. She pictured Jeg and Neary, up front in the grinning crowd as they watched her do the thief’s dance at rope’s end. Probably arrayed in even more ridiculous clothes secured with the reward money.
“Fuck them,” she mouthed at the darkness, lips curling back in a snarl as she heard Neary’s foot on the bottom step.
She had a hell of a contrary streak, did Shy. From when she was a tot, when someone told her how things would be, she immediately started thinking on how she’d make ’em otherwise. Her mother had always called her mule stubborn, and blamed it on her Ghost blood. “That’s your damn Ghost blood,” as though being quarter savage had been Shy’s own choice rather than on account of her mother picking out a half-Ghost wanderer to lie with who turned out—no crashing surprise—to be a no-good drunk.
Shy would be fighting. No doubt she’d be losing, but she’d be fighting. She’d make those bastards kill her and at least rob ’em of half the reward. Might not expect such thoughts as those to steady your hand, but they did hers. The little knife still shook, but now from how hard she was gripping it.
For a man who proclaimed himself the great tracker, Neary had some trouble keeping quiet. She heard the breath in his nose as he paused at the top of the steps, close enough to touch if it hadn’t been for the plank wall between them.
A board groaned as he shifted his weight and Shy’s whole body tensed, every hair twitching up. Then she saw him—not darting through the doorway at her, axe in his fist and murder in his eyes, but creeping off down the balcony after the bait of bloody footsteps, drawn bow pointed exactly the wrong way.
When she was given a gift, Shy had always believed in grabbing it with both hands rather than thinking on how to say thank you. She dashed at Neary’s back, teeth bared and a low growl ripping at her throat. His head whipped around, the whites of his eyes showing and the bow following after, the head of the arrow glinting with such light as found that abandoned place.
She ducked low and caught him around the legs, shoulder driving hard into his thigh and making him grunt, her hand finding her wrist and clamping tight under Neary’s arse, her nose suddenly full of the horse-and-sour sweat stink of him. The bowstring went, but Shy was already straightening, snarling, screaming, bursting up, and—big man though he was—she hoisted Neary right over the rail as neat as she used to hoist a sack of grain on her mother’s farm.
He hung in the air a moment, mouth and eyes wide with shock, then he plummeted with a breathy whoop and crashed through the boards down below.
Shy blinked, hardly able to believe it. Her scalp was burning and she touched a finger to it, half expecting to feel the arrow stuck right in her brains, but she turned and saw it was in the wall behind her, a considerably happier outcome from her standpoint. Blood, though, sticky in her hair, tickling at her forehead. Maybe the lath of the bow scratched her. Get that bow, she’d have a chance. She made a step towards the stairs, then stopped dead. Jeg was in the doorway, his sword a long, black curve against the sun-glare of the street.
“Smoke!” he roared, and she was off down the balcony like a rabbit, following her own trail of bloody footprints to nowhere, hearing Jeg’s heavy boots clomping towards the stairs. She hit the door at the end full tilt with her shoulder and burst into the light, out onto another balcony behind the building. Up onto the low rail with one bare foot—better to just go with her contrary streak and hope it somehow carried her through than to pause for thought—and she jumped. Flung herself writhing at a ramshackle balcony on the building across the narrow lane, as if flapping her hands and feet like she was having a fit might carry her further.
She caught the rail, wood smashing her in the ribs, slipped down, groaning, clawing for a grip, fought desperately to drag herself up and over, felt something give—
And with a groan of tortured wood the whole weather-blasted thing tore from the side of the building.
Again Shy was given a flailing instant aloft to consider the situation. Again not good, at a brief assay. She was just starting to wail when her old enemy the ground caught up with her—as the ground always will—folded up her left leg, spun her over, then smashed her in the side and drove her wind right out.
Shy coughed, then moaned, then spat more grit. That she had been right about her earlier sandy mouth not being her last was scant comfort. She saw Jeg standing on the balcony where she’d jumped. He pushed his hat back and gave a chuckle, then ducked back inside.
She still had a piece of the rail in her fist, well rotted through. A little like her hopes. She tossed it away as she rolled over, waiting again for that sick pain that told her she was done. Again it didn’t come. She could move. She worked her feet around and guessed that she could stand. But she thought that she might leave that for now. Chances were she’d only get to do it one more time.
She floundered clear of the tangle of broken wood against the wall, her shadow stretching out towards the doorway, groaning with pain as she heard Jeg’s heavy footsteps inside. She started wriggling back on her arse and her elbows, dragging one leg after, the little knife blade hidden up behind her wrist, her other fist clutching at the dirt.
“Where are you off to?” Jeg ducked under the low lintel and into the lane. He was a big man, but he looked a giant right then. Half a head taller than Shy, even if she’d been standing, and probably not much short of twice her weight, even if she’d eaten that day. He strutted over, tongue wedged into his lower lip so it bulged out, heavy sword loose in his hand, relishing his big moment.
“Pulled a neat trick on Neary, eh?” He pushed the brim of his hat up a little to show the tan mark across his forehead. “You’re stronger’n you look. That boy’s so dumb he could’ve fallen without the help, though. You’ll be pulling no tricks on me.”
They’d see about that, but she’d let her knife say it for her. Even a little knife can be a damned eloquent piece of metal if you stick it in the right place. She scrambled back, kicking up dust, making it look like she was trying to push herself up, then sagging back with a whimper as her left leg took her weight. Looking badly hurt was taking no great effort of acting. She could feel blood creeping from her hair and tickling her forehead. Jeg stepped out of the shadow and the low sun shone in his face, making him squint. Just the way she wanted it.
“Still remember the day I first put eyes on you,” he went on, loving the sound of his own bleating. “Dodd come to me, all excited, and said he met Smoke, her whose killer’s face is on all them bills up near Rostod, four thousand marks offered for her capture. The tales they tell on you!” He gave a whoop and she scrambled back again, working that left leg underneath her, making sure it would work when she needed it. “You’d think you was a demon with two swords to a hand the way they breathe your name. Picture my fucking disappointment when I find you ain’t naught but a scared girl with gappy teeth and a powerful smell o’ piss about her.” As if Jeg smelled of summer meadows! He took another step forward, reaching out for her with one big hand. “Now, don’t scratch; you’re worth more to me alive. I don’t want to—”
She flung the dirt with her left hand as she shoved up hard with her right, coming to her feet. He twisted his head away, snarling as the dust showered across his face. He swung blind as she darted at him low and the sword whipped over her head, wind of it snatching at her hair, weight of it turning him sideways. She caught his flapping coat tail in her left hand and sank her eating knife into his sword shoulder with the other.
He gave a strangled grunt as she pulled the knife clear and stabbed at him again, blade ripping open the arm of his coat and the arm inside it too, almost cutting into her own leg. She was bringing up the knife again when his fist crunched into the side of her mouth and sent her reeling, bare feet wrestling with the dirt. She caught hold of the corner of the building and hung there for a moment, trying to shake the light from her skull. She saw Jeg a pace or two off, bared teeth frothy with spit as he tried to fumble the sword from his dangling right hand into his left, fingers tangled with the fancy brass basketwork.
When things were moving fast, Shy had a knack for just doing, without thoughts of mercy, or thoughts of outcomes, or thoughts of much at all. That was what had kept her alive through all this shit. And what had landed her in it in the first place, for that matter. Ain’t many blessings aren’t mixed blessings, once you got to live with them, and she’d a curse for thinking too much after the action, but that was another story. If Jeg got a good grip on that sword she was dead, simple as that, so before she’d quite stopped the street spinning she charged at him again. He tried to free an arm but she managed to catch it with her clawing left hand, pressing up against him, holding herself steady by his coat as she punched wildly with the knife—in his gut, in his ribs, in his ribs again—her snarling at him and him grunting at her with every thump of the blade, the grip slippery in her aching hand.
He got hold of her shirt, stitches tearing as the arm half-ripped off, tried to shove her away as she stabbed him again but there was no strength in it, only sent her back a step. Her head was clearing now and she kept her balance, but Jeg stumbled and dropped on one knee. She lifted the knife up high in both hands and drove it right down on that stupid hat, squashing it flat, leaving the blade buried to the handle in the top of Jeg’s head.
She staggered back, expecting him just to pitch onto his face. Instead he lurched up suddenly like a camel she’d once seen at a fair, the brim of his hat jammed down over his eyes to the bridge of his nose and the knife handle jutting straight up.
“Where you gone?” The words all mangled as if his mouth was full of gravel. “Smoke?” He lurched one way, then the other. “Smoke?” He shuffled at her, kicking up dust, sword dangling from his bloody right hand, the point scratching grooves in the dust around his feet. He reached up with his left, fingers all stretched out stiff but the wrist all floppy, and started prodding at his hat like he had something in his eye and wanted to wipe it clear.
“Shmoke?” One side of his face was twitching, shuddering, fluttering in a most unnatural way. Or maybe it was natural enough for a man with a knife lodged through his brains. “Thmoke?” There was blood dripping from the bent brim of his hat, leaving red streaks down his cheek, his shirt halfway soaked with it; but he kept coming on, bloody right arm jerking, hilt of his sword rattling against his leg. “Thmoe?” She backed away, staring, her own hands limp and all her skin prickling, until her back hit the wall behind her. “Thoe?”
“Shut your mouth!” And she dived at him with both palms, shoving him over backwards, sword bouncing from his hand, bloody hat still pinned to his head with her knife. He slowly rolled over, onto his face, right arm flopping. He slid his other hand underneath his shoulder as though he’d push himself up.
“Oh,” he muttered into the dust. Then he was still.
Shy slowly turned her head and spat blood. Too many mouthfuls of blood the last few months. Her eyes were wet and she wiped them on the back of her trembling hand. Couldn’t believe what had happened. Hardly seemed she’d had any part in it. A nightmare she was due to wake from. She pressed her eyes shut, and opened them, and there he still lay.
She snatched in a breath and blew it out hard, dashed spit from her lip, blood from her forehead, caught another breath and forced it free. Then she gathered up Jeg’s sword, gritting her teeth against the urge to spew, rising in waves along with the thumping pain in the side of her face. Shit, but she wanted to sit down! Just stop. But she made herself turn away. Forced herself up to the back door of the tavern. The one Jeg had come through, still alive, a few moments before. Takes a lifetime of hard work to make a man. Only takes a few moments to end one.
Neary had dragged himself out of the hole his fall had put through the floorboards, clutching at his bloody trouser leg and looking quite put out about it. “Did you catch that fucking bitch?” he asked, squinting towards the doorway.
“Oh, no doubt.”
His eyes went wide and he tried to drag himself towards his bow, not far out of reach, whimpering all the way. She hefted Jeg’s big sword as she got close, and Neary turned over, eyes wide with terror, holding up one desperate arm. She hit it full-blooded with the flat of the sword and he moaned, clutching it to his chest. Then she hit him across the side of the head and rolled him over, blubbering, into the boards. Then she padded past him, sliding the sword through her belt, picked up the bow, and dragged some arrows from his quiver. She made for the door, stringing one as she went, and peered out into the street.
Dodd was still scraping coins from the dust and into the bag, working his way towards the well. Insensible to the fates of his two companions. Not as surprising as you might suppose. If one word summed up Dodd, it was “insensible.”
She padded down the steps of the tavern, near to their edges where they were less likely to give a warning creak, drawing the bow halfway and taking a good aim on Dodd, bent over in the dust with his back to her, a dark sweat patch down the middle of his shirt. She gave some long, hard consideration to making that sweat patch the bull’s-eye and shooting him in the back right there. But killing a man isn’t easy, especially after hard consideration. She watched him pick up the last coin and drop it in the bag, then stand, pulling the drawstrings, then turn, smiling. “I got the—”
They stayed there awhile. He crouched in the dusty street, bag of silver in one hand, uncertain smile lit up in the sun, but his eyes looking decidedly scared in the shadow of his cheap hat. She on the bottom step of the tavern, bloody bare feet, bloody split mouth, bloody hair plastered across her bloody forehead, but the bow good and steady.
He licked his lips, swallowed, then licked them again. “Where’s Neary?”
“In a bad way.” She was surprised by the iron in her voice. Sounded like someone she didn’t even know. Smoke’s voice, maybe.
“Where’s my brother?”
“In a worse.”
Dodd swallowed, sweaty neck shifting, starting to ease gently backwards. “You kill him?”
“Forget about them two and stop still.”
“Look, Shy, you ain’t going to shoot me, are you? Not after all we been through. You ain’t going to shoot. Not me. Are you?” His voice was rising higher and higher, but still he edged back towards the well. “I didn’t want this. It weren’t my idea!”
“Course not. You need to think to have an idea, and you ain’t up to it. You just went along. Even if it happened to mean me getting hung.”
“Now, look, Shy—”
“Stop still, I said.” She drew the bow all the way, string cutting tight into her bloody fingers. “You fucking deaf, boy?”
“Look, Shy, let’s just talk this out, eh? Just talk.” He held his trembly palm up like that might stop an arrow. His pale blue eyes were fixed on her, and suddenly she had a memory rise up of the first time she met him, leaning back against the livery, smiling free and easy, none too clever but plenty of fun. She’d had a profound lack of fun in her life since she’d left home. You’d never have thought she left home to find it.
“I know I done wrong, but … I’m an idiot.” And he tried out a smile, no steadier than his palm. He’d been worth a smile or two, Dodd, at least to begin with, and though no artist of a lover, had kept the bed warm, which was something, and made her feel as if she weren’t on her own on one side with the whole rest of the world on the other, which was something more.
“Stop still,” she said, but more softly now.
“You ain’t going to shoot me.” Still he was edging back towards the well. “It’s me, right? Me. Dodd. Just don’t shoot me, now.” Still going. “What I’m going to do is—”
She shot him.
It’s a strange thing about a bow. Stringing it, and drawing it, and nocking the arrow, and taking your aim—all that takes effort, and skill, and a decision. Letting go the string is nothing. You just stop holding it. In fact, once you’ve got it drawn and aimed, it’s easier to let fly than not to.
Dodd was less than a dozen strides distant, and the shaft flitted across the space between them, missed his hand by a whisker and stuck silently into his chest. Surprised her, the lack of a sound. But then, flesh is soft. ’Specially in comparison to an arrowhead. Dodd took one more wobbly pace, like he hadn’t quite caught up with being arrow-stuck yet, his eyes going very wide. Then he blinked down at the shaft.
“You shot me,” he whispered, and he sank to his knees, blood already spreading out on his shirt in a dark oval.
“Didn’t I bloody warn you!” She flung the bow down, suddenly furious with him and with the bow too.
He stared at her. “But I didn’t think you’d do it.”
She stared back. “Neither did I.” A silent moment, and the wind blew up one more time and stirred the dust around them. “Sorry.”
“Sorry?” he croaked.
Might’ve been the stupidest thing she’d ever said, and that with some fierce competition, but what else could she say? No words were going to take that arrow out. She gave half a shrug. “I guess.”
Dodd winced, hefting the silver in one hand, turning towards the well. Shy’s mouth dropped open, and she took off running as he toppled sideways, hauling the bag into the air. It turned over and over, curving up and starting to fall, drawstrings flapping, Shy’s clutching hand straining for it as she sprinted, lunged, fell …
She grunted as her sore ribs slammed into the wall around the well, right arm darting down into the darkness. For a moment she thought she was going in after the bag—which would probably have been a fitting conclusion—then her knees came back down on the dirt outside.
She had it by one of the bottom corners, loose canvas clutched by broken nails, drawstrings dangling as dirt and bits of loose stone filtered down around it.
Shy smiled. For the first time that day. That month, maybe.
Then the bag came open.
Coins tumbled into the darkness in a twinkling shower, silver pinging and rattling from the earthy walls, disappearing into the inky nothingness, and silence.
She straightened up, numb.
She backed away slowly from the well, hugging herself with one hand while the empty bag hung from the other.
She looked over at Dodd, lying on his back with the arrow sticking straight up from his chest, his wet eyes fixed on her, his ribs going fast. She heard his shallow breaths slow, then stop.
Shy stood there a moment, then doubled over and blew puke onto the ground. Not much of it, since she’d eaten nothing that day, but her guts clenched up hard and made sure she retched up what there was. She shook so bad she thought she was going to fall, hands on her knees, sniffing bile from her nose and spluttering it out.
Damn, but her ribs hurt. Her arm. Her leg. Her face. So many scrapes, twists, and bruises, she could hardly tell one from another: her whole body was one overpowering fucking throb.
Her eyes crawled over to Dodd’s corpse, she felt another wave of sickness and forced them away, over to the horizon, fixing them on that shimmering line of nothing.
Not nothing.
There was dust rising there. She wiped her face on her ripped sleeve one more time, so filthy now that it was as like to make her dirtier as cleaner. She straightened, squinting into the distance, hardly able to believe it. Riders. No doubt. A good way off, but as many as a dozen.
“Oh, hell,” she whispered, and bit her lip. Things kept going this way she’d soon have chewed right through the bloody thing. “Oh, hell!” And Shy put her hands over her eyes and squeezed them shut and hid in self-inflicted darkness in the desperate hope she might have somehow been mistaken. Would hardly have been her first mistake, would it?
But when she took her hands away, the dust was still there. The world’s a mean bully, all right, and the lower down you are, the more it delights in kicking you. Shy put her hands on her hips, arched her back, and screamed up at the sky, the word drawn out as long as her sore lungs would allow.
“Fuck!”
The echoes clapped from the buildings and died a quick death. No answer came. Perhaps the faint droning of a fly already showing some interest in Dodd. Neary’s horse eyed her for a moment, then looked away, profoundly unimpressed. Now Shy had a sore throat to add to her woes. She was obliged to ask herself the usual questions.
What the fuck now?
She clenched her teeth as she hauled Dodd’s boots off and sat in the dust beside him to pull them on. Not the first time they’d stretched out together in the dirt, him and her. First time with him dead, though. His boots were way too loose on her, but a long stride better than no boots at all. She clomped back into the tavern in them.
Neary was making some pitiable groans as he struggled to get up. Shy kicked him in the face and down onto his back, plucked the rest of the arrows from his quiver, and took his heavy belt knife too. Back out into the sun and she picked up the bow, jammed Dodd’s hat onto her head, also somewhat on the roomy side but at least offering some shade as the sun got up. Then she dragged the three horses together and roped them into a string—quite a ticklish operation, since Jeg’s big stallion was a mean bastard and seemed determined to kick her brains out.
When she’d got it done, she frowned off towards those dust trails. They were headed for the town, all right, and fast. With a better look, she reckoned on about nine or ten, which was two or three better than twelve but still an almighty inconvenience.
Bank agents after the stolen money. Bounty hunters looking to collect her price. Other outlaws who’d got wind of a score. A score that was currently in the bottom of a well, as it happened. Could be anyone. Shy had an uncanny knack for making enemies. She found that she’d looked over at Dodd, facedown in the dust with his bare feet limp behind him. The only thing she had worse luck with was friends.
How had it come to this?
She shook her head, spat through the little gap between her front teeth, and hauled herself up into the saddle of Dodd’s horse. She faced it away from those impending dust clouds, towards which quarter of the compass she knew not.
Shy gave the horse her heels.
Megan Abbott
Megan Abbott was born in the Detroit area, graduated from the University of Michigan with a B.A. in English literature, received her Ph.D. in English and American literature from New York University, and has taught literature, writing, and film at New York University and the State University of New York at Oswego. She published her first novel, Die a Little, in 2005, and has since come to be regarded as one of the foremost practitioners of modern noir mystery writing, with the San Francisco Chronicle saying that she was poised to “claim the throne as the finest prose stylist in crime fiction since Raymond Chandler.” Her novels include Queenpin, which won the Edgar Award in 2008, The Song Is You,Bury Me Deep, and The End of Everything. Her most recent novel is Dare Me. Her other books include, as editor, the anthology A Hell of a Woman: An Anthology of Female Noir and a nonfiction study, The Street Was Mine: White Masculinity in Hardboiled Fiction and Film Noir. She lives in Forest Hills, New York, and maintains a website at meganabbott.com.
In the subtle yet harrowing story that follows, she shows us that there are some things that you just can’t get over, no matter how hard you try—and some insights into the hearts of even those we love the most that you can’t unsee once you see them.
MY HEART IS EITHER BROKEN (#ulink_b8fbcf17-3c22-5931-967f-3fd9856dc9d4)
He waited in the car. He had parked under one of the big banks of lights. No one else wanted to park there. He could guess why. Three vehicles over, he saw a woman’s back pressed against a window, her hair shaking. Once, she turned her head and he almost saw her face, the blue of her teeth as she smiled.
Fifteen minutes went by before Lorie came stumbling across the parking lot, heels clacking.
He had been working late and didn’t even know she wasn’t home until he got there. When she finally picked up her cell, she told him where she was, a bar he’d never heard of, a part of town he didn’t know.
“I just wanted some noise and people,” she had explained. “I didn’t mean anything.”
He asked if she wanted him to come get her.
“Okay,” she said.
On the ride home, she was doing the laughing-crying thing she’d been doing lately. He wanted to help her but didn’t know how. It reminded him of the kinds of girls he used to date in high school. The ones who wrote in ink all over their hands and cut themselves in the bathroom stalls at school.
“I hadn’t been dancing in so long, and if I shut my eyes no one could see,” she was saying, looking out the window, her head tilted against the window. “No one there knew me until someone did. A woman I didn’t know. She kept shouting at me. Then she followed me into the bathroom stall and said she was glad my little girl couldn’t see me now.”
He knew what people would say. That she was out dancing at a grimy pickup bar. They wouldn’t say she cried all the way home, that she didn’t know what to do with herself, that no one knows how they’ll act when something like this happens to them. Which it probably won’t.
But he also wanted to hide, wanted to find a bathroom stall himself, in another city, another state, and never see anyone he knew again, especially his mother or his sister, who spent all day on the Internet trying to spread the word about Shelby, collecting tips for the police.
Shelby’s hands—well, people always talk about baby’s hands, don’t they?—but they were like tight little flowers and he loved to put his palm over them. He never knew he’d feel like that. Never knew he’d be the kind of guy—that there even were kinds of guys—who would catch the milky scent of his daughter’s baby blanket and feel warm inside. Even, sometimes, press his face against it.
It took him a long time to tug off the dark red cowboy boots she was wearing, ones he did not recognize.
When he pulled off her jeans, he didn’t recognize her underwear either. The front was a black butterfly, its wings fluttering against her thighs with each tug.
He looked at her and a memory came to him of when they first dated, Lorie taking his hand and running it along her belly, her thighs. Telling him she once thought she’d be a dancer, that maybe she could be. And that if she ever had a baby she’d have a C-section, because everyone knew what happened to women’s stomachs after, not to mention what it does down there, she’d said, laughing, and put his hand there next.
He’d forgotten all this, and other things too, but now the things kept coming back and making him crazy.
He poured a tall glass of water for her and made her drink it. Then he refilled it and set it beside her.
She didn’t sleep like a drunk person but like a child, her lids twitching dreamily and a faint smile tugging at her mouth.
The moonlight coming in, it felt like he watched her all night, but at some point he must have fallen asleep.
When he woke, she had her head on his belly, was rubbing him drowsily.
“I was dreaming I was pregnant again,” she murmured. “It was like Shelby all over again. Maybe we could adopt. There are so many babies out there that need love.”
They had met six years ago. He was working for his mother, who owned a small apartment building on the north side of town.
Lorie lived on the first floor, where the window was high and you could see people walking on the sidewalk. His mother called it a “sunken garden apartment.”
She lived with another girl and sometimes they came in very late, laughing and pressing up against each other in the way young girls do, whispering things, their legs bare and shiny in short skirts. He wondered what they said.
He was still in school then and would work evenings and weekends, changing washers on leaky faucets, taking out the trash.
Once, he was in front of the building, hosing down the garbage cans with bleach, and she rushed past him, her tiny coat bunched around her face. She was talking on the phone and she moved so quickly he almost didn’t see her, almost splashed her with the hose. For a second he saw her eyes, smeary and wet.
“I wasn’t lying,” she was saying into the phone as she pushed her key into the front door, as she heaved her shoulders against it. “I’m not the liar here.”
One evening not long after, he came home and there was a note under the door. It read:
My heart is either broken or I haven’t paid the bill.
Thx, Lorie, #1-A
He’d read it four times before he figured it out.
She smiled when she opened the door, the security chain across her forehead.
He held up his pipe wrench.
“You’re just in time,” she said, pointing to the radiator.
No one ever thinks anything will ever happen to their baby girl. That’s what Lorie kept saying. She’d been saying that to reporters, the police, for every day of the three weeks since it happened.
He watched her with the detectives. It was just like on TV except nothing like on TV. He wondered why nothing was ever like you thought it would be and then he realized it was because you never thought this would be you.
She couldn’t sit still, her fingers twirling through the edges of her hair. Sometimes, at a traffic signal, she would pull nail scissors from her purse and trim the split ends. When the car began moving, she would wave her hand out the window, scattering the clippings into the wind.
It was the kind of careless, odd thing that made her so different from any girl he ever knew. Especially that she would do it front of him.
He was surprised how much he had liked it.
But now all of it seemed different and he could see the detectives watching her, looking at her like she was a girl in a short skirt, twirling on a bar stool and tossing her hair at men.
“We’re gonna need you to start from the beginning again,” the male one said, and that part was like on TV. “Everything you remember.”
“She’s gone over it so many times,” he said, putting his hand over hers and looking at the detective wearily.
“I meant you, Mr. Ferguson,” the detective said, looking at him. “Just you.”
They took Lorie to the outer office and he could see her through the window, pouring long gulps of creamer into her coffee, licking her lips.
He knew how that looked too. The newspapers had just run a picture of her at a smoothie place. The caption was “What about Shelby?” They must have taken it through the front window. She was ordering something at the counter, and she was smiling. They always got her when she was smiling. They didn’t understand that she smiled when she was sad. Sometimes she cried when she was happy, like at their wedding, when she cried all day, her face pink and gleaming, shuddering against his chest.
I never thought you would, she had said. I never thought I would. That any of this could happen.
He didn’t know what she meant, but he loved feeling her huddled against him, her hips grinding against him like they did when she couldn’t hold herself together and seemed to be holding on to him to keep from flying off the earth itself.
“So, Mr. Ferguson,” the detective said, “you came home from work and there was no one home?”
“Right,” he said. “Call me Tom.”
“Tom,” the detective started again, but the name seemed to fumble in his mouth like he’d rather not say it. Last week he’d called him Tom. “Was it unusual to find them gone at that time of day?”
“No,” he said. “She liked to keep busy.”
It was true, because Lorie never stayed put and sometimes would strap Shelby into the car seat and drive for hours, putting 100 or 200 miles on the car.
She would take her to Mineral Pointe and take photos of them in front of the water. He would get them on his phone at work and they always made him grin. He liked how she was never one of these women who stayed at home and watched court shows or the shopping channels.
She worked twenty-five hours a week at the Y while his mother stayed with Shelby. Every morning, she ran five miles, putting Shelby in the jogging stroller. She made dinner every night and sometimes even mowed the lawn when he was too busy. She never ever stopped moving.
This is what the newspapers and the TV people loved. They loved to take pictures of her jogging in her short shorts and talking on the phone in her car and looking at fashion magazines in line at the grocery store.
“What about Shelby?” the captions always read.
They never understood her at all. He was the only one.
“So,” the detective asked him, rousing from his thoughts, “what did you do when you found the house empty?”
“I called her cell.” He had. She hadn’t answered, but that wasn’t unusual either. He didn’t bother to tell them that. That he’d called four or five times and the phone went straight to voice mail and it wasn’t until the last time she picked up.
Her voice had been strange, small, like she might be in the doctor’s office, or the ladies’ room. Like she was trying to make herself quiet and small.
“Lorie? Are you okay? Where are you guys?”
There had been a long pause and the thought came that she had crashed the car. For a crazy second he thought she might be in the hospital, both of them broken and battered. Lorie was a careless driver, always sending him texts from the car. Bad pictures came into his head. He’d dated a girl once who had a baby shoe that hung on her rearview mirror. She said it was to remind her to drive carefully, all the time. No one ever told you that after you were sixteen.
“Lorie, just tell me.” He had tried to make his voice firm but kind.
“Something happened.”
“Lorie,” he tried again, like after a fight with her brother or her boss, “just take a breath and tell me.”
“Where did she go?” her voice came. “And how is she going to find me? She’s a little girl. She doesn’t know anything. They should put dog tags on them like they did when we were kids, remember that?”
He didn’t remember that at all, and there was a whirr in his head that was making it hard for him to hear.
“Lorie, you need to tell me what’s going on.”
So she did.
She said she’d been driving around all morning, looking at lawn mowers she’d found for sale on Craigslist. She was tired, decided to stop for coffee at the expensive place.
She saw the woman there all the time. They talked online about how expensive the coffee was but how they couldn’t help it. And what was an Americano, anyway? And, yeah, they talked about their kids. She was pretty sure the woman said she had kids. Two, she thought. And it was only going to be two minutes, five at the most.
“What was going to be five minutes?” he had asked her.
“I don’t know how it happened,” she said, “but I spilled my coffee, and it was everywhere. All over my new white coat. The one you got me for Christmas.”
He had remembered her opening the box, tissue paper flying. She had said he was the only person who’d ever bought her clothes that came in boxes, with tissue paper in gold seals.
She’d spun around in the coat and said, Oh, how it sparkles.
Crawling onto his lap, she’d smiled and said only a man would give the mother of a toddler a white coat.
“The coat was soaking,” she said now. “I asked the woman if she could watch Shelby while I was in the restroom. It took a little while because I had to get the key. One of those heavy keys they give you.”
When she came out of the restroom, the woman was gone, and so was Shelby.
He didn’t remember ever feeling the story didn’t make sense. It was what happened. It was what happened to them, and it was part of the whole impossible run of events that led to this. That led to Shelby being gone and no one knowing where.
But it seemed clear almost from the very start that the police didn’t feel they were getting all the information, or that the information made sense.
“They don’t like me,” Lorie said. And he told her that wasn’t true and had nothing to do with anything anyway, but maybe it did.
He wished they could have seen Lorie when she had pushed through the front door that day, her purse unzipped, her white coat still damp from the spilled coffee, her mouth open so wide, all he could see was the red inside her, raw and torn.
Hours later, their family around them, her body shuddering against him as her brother talked endlessly about Amber Alerts and Megan’s Law and his criminal justice class and his cop buddies from the gym, he felt her pressing into him and saw the feathery curl tucked in her sweater collar, a strand of Shelby’s angel-white hair.
By the end of the second week, the police hadn’t found anything, or if they did they weren’t telling. Something seemed to have shifted, or gotten worse.
“Anybody would do it,” Lorie said. “People do it all the time.”
He watched the detective watch her. This was the woman detective, the one with the severe ponytail who was always squinting at Lorie.
“Do what?” the woman detective asked.
“Ask someone to watch their kid, for just a minute,” Lorie said, her back stiffening. “Not a guy. I wouldn’t have left her with a man. I wouldn’t have left her with some homeless woman waving a hairbrush at me. This was a woman I saw in there every day.”
“Named?” They had asked her for the woman’s name many times. They knew she didn’t know it.
Lorie looked at the detective, and he could see those faint blue veins showing under her eyes. He wanted to put his arm around her, to make her feel him there, to calm her. But before he could do anything, she started talking again.
“Mrs. Caterpillar,” she said, throwing her hands in the air. “Mrs. Linguini. Madame Lafarge.”
The detective stared at her, not saying anything.
“Let’s try looking her up on the Internet,” Lorie said, her chin jutting and a kind of hard glint to her eyes. All the meds and the odd hours they were keeping, all the sleeping pills and sedatives and Lorie walking through the house all night, talking about nothing but afraid to lie still.
“Lorie,” he said. “Don’t—”
“Everything always happens to me,” she said, her voice suddenly soft and strangely liquid, her body sinking. “It’s so unfair.”
He could see it happening, her limbs going limp, and he made a grab for her.
She nearly slipped from him, her eyes rolling back in her head.
“She’s fainting,” he said, grabbing her, her arms cold like frozen pipes. “Get someone.”
The detective was watching.
“I can’t talk about it because I’m still coping with it,” Lorie told the reporters who were waiting outside the police station. “It’s too hard to talk about.”
He held her arm tightly and tried to move her through the crowd, bunched so tightly, like the knot in his throat.
“Is it true you’re hiring at attorney?” one of the reporters asked.
Lorie looked at them. He could see her mouth open and there was no time to stop her.
“I didn’t do anything wrong,” she said, a hapless grin on her face. As if she had knocked someone’s grocery cart with her own.
He looked at her. He knew what she meant—she meant leaving Shelby for that moment, that scattered moment. But he also knew how it sounded, and how she looked, that panicky smile she couldn’t stop.
That was the only time he let her speak to reporters.
Later, at home, she saw herself on the nightly news
Walking slowly to the TV, she kneeled in front of it, her jeans skidding on the carpet, and did the oddest thing.
She put her arms around it, like it was a teddy bear, a child.
“Where is she?” she whispered. “Where is she?”
And he wished the reporters could see this, the mystifying way grief was settling into her like a fever.
But he was also glad they couldn’t.
It was the middle of the night, close to dawn, and she wasn’t next to him.
He looked all over the house, his chest pounding. He thought he must be dreaming, calling out her name, both their names.
He found her in the backyard, a lithe shadow in the middle of the yard.
She was sitting on the grass, her phone lighting her face.
“I feel closer to her out here,” she said. “I found this.”
He could barely see, but moving closer saw the smallest of earrings, an enamel butterfly, caught between her fingers.
They had had a big fight when she came home with Shelby, her ears pierced, thick gold posts plugged in such tiny lobes. Her ears red, her face red, her eyes soft with tears.
“Where did she go, babe?” Lorie said to him now. “Where did she go?”
He was soaked with sweat and was pulling his T-shirt from his chest.
“Look, Mr. Ferguson,” the detective said, “you’ve cooperated with us fully. I get that. But understand our position. No one can confirm her story. The employee who saw your wife spill her coffee remembers seeing her leave with Shelby. She doesn’t remember another woman at all.”
“How many people were in there? Did you talk to all of them?”
“There’s something else too, Mr. Ferguson.”
“What?”
“One of the other employees said Lorie was really mad about the coffee spill. She told Shelby it was her fault. That everything was her fault. And that Lorie then grabbed your daughter by the arm and shook her.”
“That’s not true,” he said. He’d never seen Lorie touch Shelby roughly. Sometimes it seemed she barely knew she was there.
“Mr. Ferguson, I need to ask you: Has your wife had a history of emotional problems?”
“What kind of question is that?”
“It’s a standard question in cases like this,” the detective said. “And we’ve had some reports.”
“Are you talking about the local news?”
“No, Mr. Ferguson. We don’t collect evidence from TV.”
“Collecting evidence? What kind of evidence would you need to collect about Lorie? It’s Shelby who’s missing. Aren’t you—”
“Mr. Ferguson, did you know your wife spent three hours at Your Place Lounge on Charlevoix yesterday afternoon?”
“Are you following her?”
“Several patrons and one of the bartenders contacted us. They were concerned.”
“Concerned? Is that what they were?” His head was throbbing.
“Shouldn’t they be concerned, Mr. Ferguson? This is a woman whose baby is missing.”
“If they were so concerned, why didn’t they call me?”
“One of them asked Lorie if he could call you for her. Apparently, she told him not to.”
He looked at the detective. “She didn’t want to worry me.”
The detective looked back at him. “Okay.”
“You can’t tell how people are going to act when something like this happens to you,” he said, feeling his head dipping. Suddenly his shoulders felt very heavy and he had these pictures of Lorie in his head, at the far corner of the long black lacquered bar, eyes heavy with makeup and filled with dark feelings. Feelings he could never touch. Never once did he feel sure he knew what she was thinking. That was part of it. Part of the throb in his chest, the longing there that never left.
“No,” he said, suddenly.
“What?” the detective asked, leaning forward.
“She has no history of emotional problems. My wife.”
It was the fourth week, the fourth week of false leads and crying and sleeping pills and night terrors. And he had to go back to work or they wouldn’t make the mortgage payment. They’d talked about Lorie returning to her part-time job at the candle store, but somebody needed to be home, to be waiting.
(Though what, really, were they waiting for? Did toddlers suddenly toddle home after twenty-seven days? That’s what he could tell the cops were thinking.)
“I guess I’ll call the office tomorrow,” he said. “And make a plan.”
“And I’ll be here,” she said. “You’ll be there and I’ll be here.”
It was a terrible conversation, like a lot of those conversations couples have in dark bedrooms, late into the night, when you know the decisions you’ve been avoiding all day won’t wait anymore.
After they talked, she took four big pills and pushed her face into her pillow.
He couldn’t sleep and went into Shelby’s room, which he only ever did at night. He leaned over the crib, which was too small for her but Lorie wouldn’t use the bed yet, said it wasn’t time, not nearly.
He put his fingers on the soft baby bumpers, festooned with bright yellow fish. He remembered telling Shelby they were goldfish, but she kept saying Nana, nana, which was what she called bananas.
Her hands were always covered with the pearly slime of bananas, holding on to the front of Lorie’s shirt.
One night, sliding his hand under Lorie’s bra clasp, between her breasts, he felt a daub of banana even there.
“It’s everywhere,” Lorie had sighed. “It’s like she’s made of bananas.”
He loved that smell, and his daughter’s forever-glazed hands.
At some point, remembering this, he started crying, but then he stopped and sat in the rocking chair until he fell asleep.
In part, he was relieved to go back to work, all those days with neighbors and families and friends huddling in the house, trading Internet rumors, organizing vigils and searches. But now there were fewer family members, only a couple friends who had no other place to go, and no neighbors left at all.
The woman from the corner house came late one evening and asked for her casserole dish back.
“I didn’t know you’d keep it so long,” she said, eyes narrowing.
She seemed to be trying to look over his shoulder, into the living room. Lorie was watching a show, loudly, about a group of blond women with tight lacquered faces and angry mouths. She watched it all the time; it seemed to be the only show on TV anymore.
“I didn’t know,” the woman said, taking her dish, inspecting it, “how things were going to turn out.”
you sexy, sexy boy, Lorie’s text said. i want your hands on me. come home and handle me, rough as u like. rough me up.
He swiveled at his desk chair hard, almost like he needed to cover the phone, cover his act of reading the text.
He left the office right away, driving as fast as he could. Telling himself that something was wrong with her. That this had to be some side effect of the pills the doctor had given her, or the way sorrow and longing could twist in her complicated little body.
But that wasn’t really why he was driving so fast, or why he nearly tripped on the dangling seat belt as he hurried from the car.
Or why he felt, when he saw her lying on the bed, flat on her stomach and head turned, smiling, that he’d burst in two if he didn’t have her. If he didn’t have her then and there, the bed moaning beneath them and she not making a sound but, the blinds pulled down, her white teeth shining, shining from her open mouth.
It felt wrong but he wasn’t sure why. He knew her, but he didn’t. This was her, but a Lorie from long ago. Except different.
The reporters called all the time. And there were two that never seemed to leave their block. They had been there right at the start, but then seemed to go away, to move on to other stories.
They came back when the footage of Lorie coming out of Magnum Tattoo Parlor began appearing. Someone shot it with their cell phone.
Lorie was wearing those red cowboy boots again, and red lipstick, and she walked right up to the camera.
They ran photos of it in the newspaper with the headline: A Mother’s Grief?
He looked at the tattoo.
The words Mirame quemar written in script, wrapping itself around her hip.
It covered just the spot where a stretch mark had been, the one she always covered with her fingers when she stood before him naked.
He looked at the tattoo in the dark bedroom, a band of light coming from the hallway. She turned her hip, kept turning it, spinning her torso so he could feel it, all of it.
“I needed it,” she said. “I needed something. Something to put my fingers on. To remind me of me.
“Do you like it?” she asked, her breath in his ear. The ink looked like it was moving.
“I like it,” he said, putting his fingers there. Feeling a little sick. He did like it. He liked it very much.
Late, late into that night, her voice shook him from a deep sleep.
“I never knew she was coming and then she was here,” she was saying, her face pressed in her pillow. “And I never knew she was going and now she’s gone.”
He looked at her, her eyes shut, dappled with old makeup.
“But,” she said, her voice grittier, strained, “she was always doing whatever she wanted.”
That’s what he thought she said. But she was sleeping, and didn’t make any sense at all.
“You liked it until you thought about it,” she said. “Until you looked close at it and then you decided you didn’t want it anymore. Or didn’t want to be the guy who wants it.”
He was wearing the new shirt she had bought for him the day before. It was a deep, deep purple and beautiful and he felt good in it, like the unit manager who all the women in the office talked about. They talked about his shoes and he always wondered where people got shoes like that.
“No,” he said. “I love it. But it’s just … expensive.”
That wasn’t it, though. It didn’t seem right buying things, buying anything, right now. But it was also how colorful the shirt was, the sheen on it. The bright, hard beauty of it. A shirt for going out, for nightclubs, for dancing. For those things they did when they still did things: vodka and pounding music and frenzied sex in her car.
The kind of drunken sex so messy and crazy that you were almost shy around each other after, driving home, screwed sober, feeling like you’d showed something very private and very bad.
Once, years ago, she did something to him no one had ever done and he couldn’t look at her afterward at all. The next time he did something to her. For a while, it felt like it would never stop.
“I think someone should tell you about your wife,” the e-mail said. That was the subject line. He didn’t recognize the address, a series of letters and digits, and there was no text in the body of the e-mail. There was only a photo of a girl dancing in a bright green halter top, the ties loose and dangling.
It was Lorie, and he knew it must be an old picture. Weeks ago, the newspapers had gotten their hands on some snapshots of Lorie from her late teens, dancing on tabletops, kissing her girlfriends. Things girls did when they were drinking and someone had a camera.
In those shots, Lorie was always posing, vamping, trying to look like a model, a celebrity. It was a Lorie before he really knew her, a Lorie from what she called her “wild girl days.”
But in this picture she didn’t seem to be aware of the camera at all, seemed to be lost in the thrall of whatever music was playing, whatever sounds she was hearing in her crowded head. Her eyes were shut tight, her head thrown back, her neck long and brown and beautiful.
She looked happier than he had ever seen her.
A Lorie from long ago, or never.
But when he scrolled further down, he saw the halter top riding up her body, saw the pop of a hip bone. Saw the elegant script letters: Mirame quemar.
That night, he remembered a story she had told him long ago. It seemed impossible he’d forgotten it. Or maybe it just seemed different now, making it seem like something new. Something uncovered, an old sunken box you find in the basement smelling strong and you’re afraid to open it.
It was back when they were dating, when her roommate was always around and they had no place to be alone. They would have thrilling bouts in his car, and she loved to crawl into the backseat and lie back, hoisting a leg high over the headrest and begging him for it.
It was after the first or second time, back when it was all so crazy and confusing and his head was pounding and starbursting, that Lorie curled against him and talked and talked about her life, and the time she stole four Revlon eyeslicks from CVS and how she had slept with a soggy-eared stuffed animal named Ears until she was twelve. She said she felt she could tell him anything.
Somewhere in the blur of those nights—nights when he, too, told her private things, stories about babysitter crushes and shoplifting Matchbox cars—that she told him the story.
How, when she was seven, her baby brother was born and she became so jealous.
“My mom spent all her time with him, and left me alone all day,” she said. “So I hated him. Every night, I would pray that he would be taken away. That something awful would happen to him. At night, I’d sneak over to his crib and stare at him through the little bars. I think maybe I figured I could think it into happening. If I stared at him long enough and hard enough, it might happen.”
He had nodded, because this is how kids could be, he guessed. He was the youngest and wondered if his older sister thought things like this about him. Once, she smashed his finger under a cymbal and said it was an accident.
But she wasn’t done with her story and she snuggled closer to him and he could smell her powdery body and he thought of all its little corners and arcs, how he liked to find them with his hands, all the soft, hot places on her. Sometimes it felt like her body was never the same body, like it changed under his hands. I’m a witch, a witch.
“So one night,” she said, her voice low and sneaky, “I was watching him through the crib bars and he was making this funny noise.”
Her eyes glittered in the dark of the car.
“I leaned across, sticking my hands through the rails,” she said, snaking her hand towards him. “And that’s when I saw this piece of string dangling on his chin, from his pull toy. I starting pulling it, and pulling it.”
He watched her tugging the imaginary string, her eyes getting bigger and bigger.
“Then he let out this gasp,” she said, “and started breathing again.”
She paused, her tongue clicking.
“My mom came in at just that moment. She said I saved his life,” she said. “Everyone did. She bought me a new jumper and the hot-pink shoes I wanted. Everyone loved me.”
A pair of headlights flashed across them and he saw her eyes, bright and brilliant.
“So no one ever knew the real story,” she said. “I’ve never told anyone.”
She smiled, pushing herself against him.
“But now I’m telling you,” she said. “Now I have someone to tell.”
“Mr. Ferguson, you told us, and your cell phone records confirm, that you began calling your wife at 5:50 p.m. on the day of your daughter’s disappearance. Finally, you reached her at 6:45. Is that right?”
“I don’t know,” he said, this the eighth, ninth, tenth time they’d called him in. “You would know better than me.”
“Your wife said she was at the coffee place at around five. But we tracked down a record of your wife’s transaction. It was at 3:45.”
“I don’t know,” he said, rubbing at the back of his neck, the prickling there. He realized he had no idea what they might tell him. No idea what might be coming.
“So what do you think your wife was doing for three hours?”
“Looking for this woman. Trying to find her.”
“She did make some other calls during that time. Not to the police, of course. Or even you. She made a call to a man named Leonard Drake. Another one named Jason Patrini.”
One sounded like an old boyfriend—Lenny someone—the other he didn’t even know. He felt something hollow out inside him. He didn’t know who they were even talking about anymore, but it had nothing to do with him.
The female detective walked in, giving her partner a look.
“Since she was making all these calls, we could track her movements. She went to the Harbor View Mall.”
“Would you like to see her on the security camera footage there?” the female detective asked. “We have it now. Did you know she bought a tank top.”
He felt nothing.
“She also went to the quickie mart. The cashier just IDed her. She used the bathroom. He said she was in there a long time and when she came out, she had changed clothing.
“Would you like to see the footage there? She looks like a million bucks.”
She slid a grainy photo across the desk. A young woman in a tank top and hoodie tugged low over her brow. She was smiling.
“That’s not Lorie,” he said softly. She looked too young, looked like she looked when he met her, a little elfin beauty with a flat stomach and pigtails and a pierced navel. A hoop he used to tug. He’d forgotten about that. She must have let it seal over.
“I’m sure this is tough to hear, Mr. Ferguson,” the male detective said. “I’m sorry.”
He looked up. The detective did look very sorry.
“What did you say to them?” he asked.
Lorie was sitting in the car with him, a half block from the police station.
“I don’t know if you should say anything to them anymore,” he said. “I think maybe we should call a lawyer.”
Lorie was looking straight ahead, at the strobing lights from the intersection. Slowly, she lifted her hand to the edges of her hair, combing them thoughtfully.
“I explained,” she said, her face dark except for a swoop of blue from the car dealership sign, like a tadpole up her cheek. “I told them the truth.”
“What truth?” he asked. The car felt so cold. There was a smell coming from her, of someone who hasn’t eaten. A raw smell of coffee and nail polish remover.
“They don’t believe anything I say anymore,” she said. “I explained how I’d been to the coffee place twice that day. Once to get a juice for Shelby and then later for coffee for me. They said they’d look into it, but I could see how it was on their faces. I told them so. I know what they think of me.”
She turned and looked at him, the car moving fast, sending red lights streaking up her face. It reminded him of a picture he once saw in a National Geographic of an Amazon woman, her face painted crimson, a wooden peg through her lip.
“Now I know what everyone thinks of me,” she said, and turned away again.
It was late that night, his eyes wide open, that he asked her. She was sound asleep, but he said it.
“Who’s Leonard Drake? Who’s Jason whatever?”
She stirred, shifted to face him, her face flat on the sheet.
“Who’s Tom Ferguson? Who is he?
“Is that what you do?” he asked, his voice rising. “Go around calling men.”
It was easier to ask her this than to ask her other things. To ask her if she had shaken Shelby, if she had lied about everything. Other things.
“Yes,” she said. “I call men all day long, I go to their apartments. I leave my daughter in the car, especially if it’s very hot. I sneak up their apartment stairs.”
She had her hand on her chest, was moving it there, watching him.
“You should feel how much I want them by the time they open their doors.”
Stop, he said, without saying it.
“I have my hands on their belts before they close the door behind me. I crawl onto their laps on their dirty bachelor’s sofas and do everything.”
He started shaking his head, but she wouldn’t stop.
“You have a baby, your body changes. You need something else. So I let them do anything. I’ve done everything.”
Her hand was moving, touching herself. She wouldn’t stop.
“That’s what I do while you’re at work. I wasn’t calling people on Craigslist, trying to replace your lawn mower. I wasn’t doing something for you, always for you.”
He’d forgotten about the lawn mower, forgotten that’s what she’d said she’d been doing that day. Trying to get a secondhand one after he’d gotten blood blisters on both hands using it the last time. That’s what she’d said she was doing.
“No,” she was saying, “I was calling men, making dates for sex. That’s what I do since I’ve had a baby and been at home. I don’t know how to do anything else. It’s amazing I haven’t been caught before. If only I hadn’t been caught.”
He covered his face with his hand. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”
“How could you?” she said, a strangle in her throat. She was tugging all the sheet into her hands, rolling it, pulling off him, wringing it. “How could you?”
He dreamt of Shelby that night.
He dreamt he was wandering through the blue-dark of the house and when he got to Shelby’s room, there was no room at all and suddenly he was outside.
The yard was frost-tipped and lonely looking and he felt a sudden sadness. He felt suddenly like he had fallen into the loneliest place in the world, and the old toolshed in the middle seemed somehow the very center of that loneliness.
When they’d bought the house, they’d nearly torn it down—everyone said they should—but they decided they liked it; the “baby barn,” they’d called it, with its sloping roof and faded red paint.
But it was too small for anything but a few rakes and that push lawn mower with the sagging left wheel.
It was the only old thing about their house, the only thing left from before he was there.
By day, it was a thing he never thought about at all anymore, didn’t notice it other than the smell sometimes coming off it after rain.
But in the dream it seemed a living thing, neglected and pitiful.
It came to him suddenly that the lawn mower in the shed might still be fixed, and if it were, then everything would be okay and no one would need to look for lawn mowers and the thick tug of grass under his feet would not feel so heavy and all this loneliness would end.
He put his hand on the shed’s cool, crooked handle and tugged it open.
Instead of the lawn mower, he saw a small black sack on the floor of the shed.
He thought to himself in the way you do in dreams: I must have left the cuttings in here. They must be covered with mold and that must be the smell so strong it—
Grabbing for the sack, it slipped open, and the bag itself began to come apart in his hands.
There was the sound, the feeling of something heavy dropping to the floor of the shed.
It was too dark to see what was slipping over his feet, tickling his ankles.
Too dark to be sure, but it felt like the sweet floss of his daughter’s hair.
He woke already sitting up. A voice was hissing in his head: Will you look in the shed? Will you?
And that was when he remembered there was no shed in the backyard anymore. They’d torn it down when Lorie was pregnant because she said the smell of rot was giving her headaches, making her sick.
The next day the front page of the paper had a series of articles marking the two-month anniversary of Shelby’s disappearance.
They had the picture of Lorie under the headline: What Does She Know? There was a picture of him, head down, walking from the police station yesterday. The caption read: “More unanswered questions.”
He couldn’t read any of it, and when his mother called he didn’t pick up.
All day at work, he couldn’t concentrate. He felt everyone looking at him.
When his boss came to his desk, he could feel the careful way he was being talked to.
“Tom, if you want to leave early,” he said, “that’s fine.”
Several times he caught the administrative assistant staring at his screen saver, the snapshot of Lorie with ten-month-old Shelby in her Halloween costume, a black spider with soft spider legs.
Finally he did leave, at three o’clock.
Lorie wasn’t in the house and he was standing at the kitchen sink, drinking a glass of water, when he saw her through the window.
Though it was barely seventy degrees, she was lying on one of the summer loungers.
Headphones on, she was in a bright orange bikini with gold hoops in the straps and on either hip.
She had pushed the purple playhouse against the back fence, where it tilted under the elm tree.
He had never seen the bikini before, but he recognized the sunglasses, large ones with white frames she had bought on a trip Mexico she had taken with an old girlfriend right before she got pregnant.
Gleaming in the center of her slicked torso was a gold belly ring.
She was smiling, singing along to whatever music was playing in her head.
That night he couldn’t bring himself to go to bed. He watched TV for hours without watching any of it. He drank four beers in a row, which he had not done since he was twenty years old.
Finally, the beer pulled on him, and the Benadryl he took after, and he found himself sinking at last onto their mattress.
At some point in the middle of the night, there was a stirring next to him, her body shifting hard. It felt like something was happening.
“Kirsten,” she mumbled.
“What?” he asked. “What?”
Suddenly she half sat up, her elbows beneath her, looking straight ahead.
“Her daughter’s name was Kirsten,” she said, her voice soft and tentative. “I just remembered. Once, when we were talking, she said her daughter’s name was Kirsten. Because she liked how it sounded with Krusie.”
He felt something loosen inside him, then tighten again. What was this?
“Her last name was Krusie with a K,” she said, her face growing more animated, her voice more urgent. “I don’t know how it was spelled, but it was with a K. I can’t believe I just remembered. It was a long time ago. She said she liked the two Ks. Because she was two Ks. Katie Krusie. That’s her name.”
He looked at her and didn’t say anything.
“Katie Krusie,” she said. “The woman at the coffee place. That’s her name.”
He couldn’t seem to speak or even move.
“Are you going to call?” she said. “The police?”
He found he couldn’t move. He was afraid somehow. So afraid he couldn’t breathe.
She looked at him, paused, and then reached across him, grabbing for the phone herself.
As she talked to the police, told them, her voice now clear and firm, what she’d remembered, as she told them she would come to the station, would leave in five minutes, he watched her, his hand over his own heart, feeling it beating so hard it hurt.
“We believe we have located the Krusie woman,” the female detective said. “We have officers heading there now.”
He looked at both of them. He could feel Lorie beside him, breathing hard. It had been less than a day since Lorie first called.
“What are you saying?” he said, or tried to. No words came out.
Katie-Ann Krusie had no children, but told people she did, all the time. After a long history of emotional problems, she had spent a fourteen-month stint at the state hospital following a miscarriage.
For the past eight weeks she had been living in a rental in Torring, forty miles away with a little blond girl she called Kirsten.
After the police released a photo of Katie-Ann Krusie on Amber Alert, a woman who worked at a coffee chain in Torring recognized her as a regular customer, always ordering extra milk for her babies.
“She sure sounded like she loved her kids,” the woman said. “Just talking about them made her so happy.”
The first time he saw Shelby again, he couldn’t speak at all.
She was wearing a shirt he’d never seen and shoes that didn’t fit and she was holding a juice box the policeman had given her.
She watched him as he ran down the hall toward her.
There was something in her face that he had never seen before, knew hadn’t been there before, and he knew in an instant he had to do everything he could to make it gone.
That was all he would do, if it took him the rest of his life to do it.
The next morning, after calling everyone, one by one, he walked into the kitchen to see Lorie sitting next to Shelby, who was eating apple slices, her pinkie finger curled out in that way she had.
He sat and watched her and Shelby asked him why he was shaking and he said because he was glad to see her.
It was hard to leave the room, even to answer the door when his mother and sister came, when everyone started coming.
Three nights later, at the big family dinner, the Welcome Home dinner for Shelby, Lorie drank a lot of wine and who could blame her, everyone was saying.
He couldn’t either, and he watched her.
As the evening carried on, as his mother brought out an ice cream cake for Shelby, as everyone huddled around Shelby, who seemed confused and shy at first and slowly burst into something beautiful that made him want to cry again—as all these things were occurring—he had one eye on Lorie, her quiet, still face. On the smile there, which never grew or receded, even when she held Shelby in her lap, Shelby nuzzling her mother’s wine-flushed neck.
At one point he found her standing in the kitchen and staring into the sink; it seemed to him she was staring down into the drain.
It was very late, or even early, and Lorie wasn’t there.
He thought she had gotten sick from all the wine, but she wasn’t in the bathroom either.
Something was turning in him, uncomfortably, as he walked into Shelby’s room.
He saw her back, naked and white from the moonlight. The plum-colored underpants she’d slept in.
She was standing over Shelby’s crib, looking down.
He felt something in his chest move.
Then, slowly, she kneeled, peeking through the crib rails, looking at Shelby.
It looked like she was waiting for something.
For a long time he stood there, five feet from the doorway, watching her watching their sleeping baby.
He listened close for his daughter’s high breaths, the stop and start of them.
He couldn’t see his wife’s face, only that long white back of hers, the notches of her spine. Mirame quemar etched on her hip.
He watched her watching his daughter, and knew he could not ever leave this room. That he would have to be here forever now, on guard. There was no going back to bed.
Cecelia Holland
Cecelia Holland is one of the world’s most highly acclaimed and respected historical novelists, ranked by many alongside other giants in that field such as Mary Renault and Larry McMurtry. Over the span of her thirty-year career, she’s written more than thirty historical novels, including The Firedrake,Rakóssy,Two Ravens,Ghost on the Steppe,TheDeath of Attila, Hammer for Princes,The King’s Road,Pillar of the Sky,The Lords of Vaumartin,Pacific Street,The Sea Beggars,The Earl, The Kings in Winter,The Belt of Gold, and more than a dozen others. She also wrote the well-known science fiction novel Floating Worlds, which was nominated for a Locus Award in 1975, and of late has been working on a series of fantasy novels, including The Soul Thief, The Witches’ Kitchen,The Serpent Dreamer,Varanger, and The King’s Witch. Her most recent books are the novels The High City,Kings of the North, and The Secret Eleanor.
In the high drama that follows, she introduces us to the ultimate dysfunctional family, whose ruthless, clashing ambitions threw England into bloody civil war again and again over many long years: King Henry II, his queen, Eleanor of Aquitaine, and their eight squabbling children. All deadly as cobras. Even the littlest one.
NORA’S SONG (#ulink_8affa8e5-43c1-5161-a225-705431b5771e)
MONTMIRAIL,
JANUARY, 1169
Nora looked quickly around, saw no one was watching, and slipped away between the trees and down the bank to the little stream. She knew there would be no frogs to hunt; her brother had told her that when the trees had no leaves, the streams had no frogs. But the water glittered over bright stones and she saw tracks printed into the damp sand. She squatted down to pick a shiny bit from the stream. It wouldn’t be pretty when it dried out. Behind her, her little sister Johanna slid down the bank in a rush.
“Nora! What do you have?”
She held out the pebble to her sister and went on a little way along the trickle of water. Those tracks were bird feet, like crosses in the damp sand. She squatted down again, to poke at the rocks, and then saw, in the yellow gritty stream bank, like a little round doorway, a hole.
She brushed aside a veil of hairy roots, trying to see in; did something live there? She could reach her hand in to find out, and in a quick tumble of her thoughts she imagined something furry, something furry with teeth, the teeth snapping on her hand, and tucked her fist against her skirt.
From up past the trees, a voice called, “Nora?”
That was her new nurse. She paid no attention, looking for a stick to probe the hole with; Johanna, beside her, went softly, “Ooooh,” and on all fours leaned toward the burrow. Her skirt was soaked from the stream.
“Nora!” Another voice.
She leapt up. “Richard,” she said, and scrambled up the bank, nearly losing a shoe. On the grassy edge, she pulled the shoe back on, turned and helped Johanna up behind her, and ran out through the bare trees, onto the broad open ground.
Her brother was striding toward her, smiling, his arms out, and she ran to him. She had not seen him since Christmas, the last time they had all been together. He was twelve years old, a lot older than she was, almost grown up. He bundled her into his arms and hugged her. He smelled like horses. Johanna came whooping up and he hugged her too. The two nurses, red in the face, were panting along behind them, their skirts clutched up in their hands. Richard straightened, his blue eyes blazing, and pointed across the field.
“See? Where Mother comes.”
Nora shaded her eyes, looking out across the broad field. At first she saw only the crowded people, stirring and swaying all around the edges of the field, but then a murmur swept through them, and on all sides rose into a roar. Far down there, a horse loped up onto the field and stopped, and the rider raised one hand in salute.
“Mama!” Johanna cried, and clapped.
Now the whole crowd was yelling and cheering, and, on her dark grey horse, Nora’s Mama was cantering along the sideline, toward the wooden stand under the plane trees, where they would all sit. Nora swelled, full to bursting; she yelled, “Hooray! Hooray, Mama!”
Up there, by the stand, a dozen men on foot went forward to meet the woman on the horse. She wheeled in among them, cast her reins down, and dismounted. Swiftly she climbed onto the platform, where two chairs waited, and stood there, and lifted her arm, turning slowly from one side to the other to greet the cheering crowd. She stood straight as a tree, her skirts furling around her.
Above the stand, suddenly, her pennant flapped open like a great wing, the Eagle of Aquitaine, and the thunderous shouting doubled.
“Eleanor! Eleanor!”
She gave one last wave to the crowd, but she had seen her children running toward her, and all her interest turned to them. She stooped, holding her arms out toward them, and Richard scooped Johanna into his arms and ran toward the platform. Nora went up the steps at the side. Coming to the front, Richard set Johanna at their mother’s feet.
Their mother’s hands fell on them. Nora buried her face in the Queen’s skirts.
“Mama.”
“Ah.” Their mother sat down, holding Johanna slightly away from her; she slid her free arm around Nora’s waist. “Ah, my dear ones. How I’ve missed you.” She kissed them both rapidly, several times. “Johanna, you’re drenched. This won’t do.” She beckoned, and Johanna’s nurse came running. Johanna squealed but was taken.
Still holding Nora against her, Eleanor leaned forward and leveled her gaze on Richard, leaning with his arms folded on the edge of the platform in front of her.
“Well, my son, are you excited?”
He pushed away from the platform, standing taller, his face flaming, his fair hair a wild tangle from the wind. “Mother, I can’t wait! When will Papa get here?”
Nora leaned on her mother. She loved Richard too, but she wished her mother would pay more heed to her. Her mother was beautiful, even though she was really old. She wore no coif, only a heavy gold ring upon her sleek red hair. Nora’s hair was like old dead grass. She would never be beautiful. The Queen’s arm tightened around her, but she was still tilted forward toward Richard, fixed utterly on Richard.
“He’s coming. You should get ready for the ceremony.” She touched the front of his coat, lifted her hand to his cheek. “Comb your hair, anyway.”
He jiggled up and down, vivid. “I can’t wait. I can’t wait. I’m going to be Duke of Aquitaine!”
The Queen laughed. A horn blew, down the pitch. “See, now it begins. Go find your coat.” She turned, beckoned to a page. “Attend the Lord Richard. Nora, now …” She nudged Nora back a step so that she could run her gaze over her from head to toe. Her lips curved upward and her eyes glinted. “What have you been doing, rolling in the grass? You’re my big girl now; you have to be presentable.”
“Mama.” Nora didn’t want to be the big girl. The idea reminded her that Mattie was gone, the real big girl. But she loved having her mother’s attention, she cast wildly around for something to say to keep it. “Does that mean I can’t play anymore?”
Eleanor laughed and hugged her again. “You will always be able to play, my girl. Just different games.” Her lips brushed Nora’s forehead. Nora realized she had said the right thing. Then Eleanor was turning away.
“See, here your father comes.”
A ripple of excitement rose through the crowd like the wind in a dry field, turned to a rumble, and erupted into a thunderous cheer. Down the pitch came a column of riders. Nora straightened, clapping her hands together, and drew in a deep breath and held it. In the center of the horsemen, her father rode along, wearing neither crown nor royal robes, and yet it seemed that everything bowed and bent around him, as if nobody else mattered but him.
“Papa.”
“Yes,” Eleanor said, under her breath. “The kingly Papa.” She drew her arm from Nora and sat straighter on her chair.
Nora drew back; if she got behind them, out of sight, they might forget her, and she could stay. Richard had not gone away, either, she saw, but lingered at the front of the royal stand. Her father rode up and swung directly from his saddle to the platform. He was smiling, his eyes narrow, his clothes rumpled, his beard and hair shaggy. He seemed to her like the king of the greenwood, wild and fierce, wreathed in leaves and bark. All along this side of the field, on either side of the booth, his knights rode up in a single rank, stirrup to stirrup, facing the French across the field. The king stood, throwing a quick glance that way, and then lowered his gaze to Richard, standing stiff and tall before him.
“Well, sirrah,” their father said, “are you ready to shiver a lance here?”
“Oh, Papa!” Richard bounced up and down. “Can I?”
Their father barked a laugh at him, looking down on him from the height of the booth. “Not until you can pay your own ransoms when you lose.”
Richard flushed pink, like a girl. “I won’t lose!”
“No, of course not.” The King waved him off. “Nobody ever thinks he’ll lose, sirrah.” He laughed again, scornful, turning away. “When you’re older.”
Nora bit her lip. It was mean to talk to Richard that way, and her brother drooped, kicked the ground, and then followed the page down the field. Suddenly he was just a boy again. Nora crouched down behind her mother’s skirts, hoping her father did not notice her. He settled himself in the chair beside the Queen’s, stretched his legs out, and for the first time turned toward Eleanor.
“You look amazingly well, considering. I’m surprised your old bones made it all the way from Poitiers.”
“I would not miss this,” she said. “And it’s a pleasant enough ride.” They didn’t touch, they didn’t give each other kisses, and Nora felt a little stir of worry. Her nurse had come up to the edge of the platform and Nora shrank deeper into Eleanor’s shadow. Eleanor paid the king a long stare. Her attention drifted toward his front.
“Eggs for breakfast? Or was that last night’s supper?”
Startled, Nora craned up a little to peer at him: his clothes were messy but she saw no yellow egg. Her father was glaring back at her mother, his face flattened with temper. He did not look down at his coat. “What a prissy old woman you are.”
Nora ran her tongue over her lower lip. Her insides felt full of prickers and burrs. Her mother’s hand lay on her thigh, and Nora saw how her mother was smoothing her skirt, over and over, with hard, swift, clawing fingers.
Her nurse said, “Lady Nora, come along now.”
“You didn’t bring your truelove,” the Queen said.
The King leaned toward her a little, as if he would leap on her, pound her, maybe, with his fist. “She’s afraid of you. She won’t come anywhere near you.”
Eleanor laughed. She was not afraid of him. Nora wondered what that was about; wasn’t her mother the King’s truelove? She pretended not to see her nurse beckoning her.
“Nora, come now!” the nurse said, loudly.
That caught her mother’s attention, and she swung around, saw Nora there, and said, “Go on, my girl. Go get ready.” Her hand dropped lightly to Nora’s shoulder. “Do as you’re bid, please.” Nora slid off the edge of the platform and went away to be dressed and primped.
Her old nurse had gone with Mattie when Nora’s big sister went to marry the Duke of Germany. Now she had this new nurse, who couldn’t brush hair without hurting. They had already laced Johanna into a fresh gown, and braided her hair, and the others were waiting outside the little tent. Nora kept thinking of Mattie, who had told her stories, and sung to her when she had nightmares. Now they were all walking out onto the field for the ceremony, her brothers first, and then her and Johanna.
Johanna slipped her hand into Nora’s, and Nora squeezed her fingers tight. All these people made her feel small. Out in the middle of the field everybody stood in rows, as if they were in church, and the ordinary people were all gathered closely around, to hear what went on. On either side banners hung, and a herald stood in front of them all, watching the children approach, his long shiny horn tipped down.
On big chairs in the very middle sat her father and mother and, beside them, a pale, weary-looking man in a blue velvet gown. He had a little stool for his feet. She knew that was the King of France. She and her sister and brothers went up before them, side by side, and the herald said their names, and as one they bowed, first to their parents and then to the French king.
There were only five of them now, with Mattie gone, and their baby brother still in the monastery. Henry was oldest. They called him Boy Henry because Papa’s name also was Henry. Then there was Richard, and then Geoffrey. Mattie would have been between Boy Henry and Richard. After Geoffrey was Nora, and Johanna, and, back with the monks, baby John. The crowd whooped and yelled at them, and Richard suddenly raised his arm up over his head like an answer.
Then they were all shuffled around into the crowd behind their parents, where they stood in line again. The heralds were yelling in Latin. Johanna leaned on Nora’s side. “I’m hungry.”
Two steps in front of them on her chair, Eleanor glanced over her shoulder, and Nora whispered, “Ssssh.” All the people around them were men, but behind the King of France a girl stood, who looked a little older than Nora, and now Nora caught her looking back. Nora smiled, uncertain, but the other girl only lowered her eyes.
A blast of the horn lifted her half off the ground. Johanna clutched her hand. One of Papa’s men came up and began to read from a scroll, Latin again, simpler than the Latin the monks had taught her. What he read was all about Boy Henry, how noble, how good, and, at a signal, her oldest brother went up before the two kings and the Queen. He was tall and thin, with many freckles, his face sunburnt. Nora liked the dark green of the coat he wore. He knelt before his father and the French king, and the heralds spoke and the kings spoke.
They were making Boy Henry a King too. He would be King of England now, just as Papa was. In her mind suddenly she saw both Henrys trying to jam together into one chair, with one crown wrapped around their two heads, and she laughed. Her mother looked over her shoulder again, her eyes sharp and her dark brows drawn into a frown.
Johanna was shuffling from one foot to the other. Louder than before, she said, “I’m hungry.”
“Sssh!”
Boy Henry got up from his knees, bowed, and came back around among the children. The herald said Richard’s name and he sprang forward. They were proclaiming him Duke of Aquitaine. He would marry the daughter of the French king, Alais. Nora’s eyes turned again toward the strange girl among the French. That was Alais. She had long brown hair and a sharp little nose; she was staring intently at Richard. Nora wondered what it felt like, looking for the first time on the man you knew you would marry. She imagined Alais kissing Richard and made a face.
In front of her, sitting stiff on her chair, the Queen pulled her mouth down at the corners. Her mother didn’t like this, either.
Until she was old enough to marry Richard, Alais would live with them, his family. Nora felt a stir of unease: here was Alais come into a strange place, as Mattie was gone off into a strange place, and they would never see her again. She remembered how Mattie had cried when they told her. But Mama, he’s so old. Nora pressed her lips together, her eyes stinging.
Not to her. This wouldn’t happen to her. She wouldn’t be sent away. Given away. She wanted something else, but she didn’t know what. She had thought of being a nun, but there was so little to do.
Richard knelt and put his hands between the long, bony hands of the King of France, and rose, his head tipped forward as if he already wore a coronet. He was smiling wide as the sun. He moved back to the family and the herald spoke Geoffrey’s name, who was now to be Duke of Brittany, and marry some other stranger.
Nora hunched her shoulders. This glory would never come to her, she would get nothing, just stand and watch. She glanced again at the Princess Alais and saw her looking down at her hands, sad.
Johanna suddenly yawned, pulled her hand out of Nora’s, and sat down.
Now up before them all came somebody else, his hands wide, and a big, strong voice said, “My lord of England, as we have agreed, I ask you now to receive the Archbishop of Canterbury, and let you be restored to friendship, end the quarrel between you, for the good of both our kingdoms, and Holy Mother Church.”
The crowd around them gave up a sudden yell, and a man came up the field toward the kings. He wore a long black cloak over a white habit with a cross hanging on his chest. The stick in his hand had a swirly top. A great cry went up from the people around them, excited. Behind her, somebody murmured, “Becket again. The man won’t go away.”
She knew this name, but she could not remember who Becket was. He paced up toward them, a long, gaunt man, his clothes shabby. He looked like an ordinary man but he walked like a lord. Everybody watched him. As he came up before her father, the crowd’s rumbling and stirring died away into a breathless hush. In front of the King, the gaunt man knelt, set his stick down, and then lay on the ground, spreading himself like a mat upon the floor. Nora shifted a little so she could see him through the space between her mother and her father. The crowd drew in closer, leaning out to see.
“My gracious lord,” he said in a churchy voice, “I beg your forgiveness for all my errors. Never was a prince more faithful than you, and never a subject more faithless than I, and I am come asking pardon not from hopes of my virtue but of yours.”
Her father stood up. He looked suddenly very happy, his face flushed, his eyes bright. Face to the ground, the gaunt man spoke on, humble, beseeching, and the King went down toward him, reaching out his hands to lift him up.
Then Becket said, “I submit myself to you, my lord, henceforth and forever, in all things, save the honor of God.”
The Queen’s head snapped up. Behind Nora somebody gasped, and somebody else muttered, “Damn fool.” In front of them all, halfway to Becket, his hands out, Papa stopped. A kind of pulse went through the crowd.
The King said sharply, “What is this?”
Becket was rising. Dirt smeared his robe where his knees had pressed the ground. He stood straight, his head back. “I cannot give up the rights of God, my lord, but in everything else—”
Her Papa lunged at him. “This is not what I agreed to.”
Becket held his ground, tall as a steeple, as if he had God on his shoulder, and proclaimed again, “I must champion the honor of the Lord of Heaven and earth.”
“I am your Lord!” The King wasn’t happy anymore. His voice boomed across the field. Nobody else moved or spoke. He took a step toward Becket, and his fist clenched. “The kingdom is mine. No other authority shall rule there! God or no, kneel, Thomas, give yourself wholly to me, or go away a ruined man!”
Louis was scurrying down from the dais toward them, his frantic murmuring unheeded. Becket stood immobile. “I am consecrated to God. I cannot wash away that duty.”
Nora’s father roared, “I am King, and no other, you toad, you jackass, no other than me! You owe everything to me! Me!”
“Papa! My lord—” Boy Henry started forward and their mother reached out and grabbed his arm and held him still. From the crowd, other voices rose. Nora stooped and tried to make Johanna stand up.
“I won’t be disparaged! Honor me, and me alone!” Her father’s voice was like a blaring horn, and the crowd fell quiet again. The King of France put one hand on her Papa’s arm and mouthed something, and Papa wheeled around and cast off his touch.
“Henceforth, whatever comes that he chooses not to abide, he will call it the Honor of God. You must see this! He has given up nothing; he will pay me no respect—not even the respect of a swine for the swineherd!”
The crowd gave a yell. A voice called, “God bless the King!” Nora looked around, uneasy. The people behind her were shuffling around, drawing back, like running away slowly. Eleanor was still holding fast to Boy Henry, but now he whimpered under his breath. Richard was stiff, his whole body tipped forward, his jaw jutting like a fish’s. The French king had Becket by the sleeve, was drawing him off, talking urgently into his ear. Becket’s gaze never left Nora’s father. His voice rang out like the archangel’s trumpet.
“I am bound to the Honor of God!”
In the middle of them all, Nora’s father flung up his arms as if he would take flight; he stamped his foot as if he would split the earth, and shouted, “Get him out of here before I kill him! God’s Honor! God’s round white backside! Get him away, get him gone!”
His rage blew back the crowd. In a sudden rush of feet, the French king and his guards and attendants bundled Thomas away. Nora’s father was roaring again, oaths and threats, his arms pumping, his face red as raw meat. Boy Henry burst out of Eleanor’s grasp and charged him.
“My lord—”
The King spun around toward him, his arm outstretched, and knocked him down with the back of his hand. “Stay out of this!”
Nora jumped. Even before Richard and Geoffrey started forward, Eleanor was moving; she reached Boy Henry in a few strides, and as he leapt to his feet, she hurried him off. A crowd of her retainers bustled after her.
Nora stood fast. She realized that she was holding her breath. Johanna had finally gotten up and wrapped her arms around Nora’s waist, and Nora put her arms around her sister. Geoffrey was running after the Queen; Richard paused, his hands at his sides, watching the King’s temper blaze. He pivoted and ran off after his mother. Nora gasped. She and Johanna were alone, in the middle of the field, the crowd far off.
The King saw them. He quieted. He looked around, saw no one else, and stalked toward them.
“Go on—run! Everybody else is abandoning me. Run! Are you stupid?”
Johanna shrank around behind Nora, who stood straight and tucked her hands behind her, the way she stood when priests talked to her. “No, Papa.”
His face was red as meat. Fine sweat stood on his forehead. His breath almost made her gag. He looked her over and said, “Here to scold me, then, like your rotten mother?”
“No, Papa,” she said, surprised. “You are the King.”
He twitched. The high color left his face like a tide. His voice smoothed out, slower. He said, “Well, one of you is true, at least.” He turned and walked off, and as he went, he lifted one arm. From all sides his men came running. One led Papa’s big black horse and he mounted. Above all the men on foot surrounding him, he left the field. After he was gone, Richard trotted up across the grass to gather in Nora and Johanna.
“Why can’t I—”
“Because I know you,” Richard said. “If I let you run around, you’ll get in trouble.” He lifted her up into the cart, where already Johanna and the French girl sat. Nora plunked down, angry; they were only going up the hill. He could have let her ride his horse. With a crack of the whip, the cart began to roll, and she leaned back against the side and stared away.
Beside Nora, Alais said, suddenly, in French, “I know who you are.”
Nora faced her, startled. “I know who you are too,” she said.
“Your name is Eleonora and you’re the second sister. I can speak French and Latin and I can read. Can you read?”
Nora said, “Yes. They make me read all the time.”
Alais gave a glance over her shoulder; their attendants were walking along behind the cart, but nobody close enough to hear. Johanna was standing up in the back corner, throwing bits of straw over the side and leaning out to see where they fell. Alais said quietly, “We should be friends, because we’re going to be sisters and we’re almost the same age.” Her gaze ran thoughtfully over Nora from head to toe, which made Nora uncomfortable; she squirmed. She thought briefly, angrily, of this girl taking Mattie’s place. Alais said, “I’ll be nice to you if you’re nice to me.”
Nora said, “All right. I—”
“But I go first, I think, because I am older.”
Nora stiffened and then jumped as a cheer erupted around her. The cart was rolling up the street toward the castle on the hill, and all along the way, crowds of people stood screaming and calling. Not for her, not for Alais; it was Richard’s name they shouted, over and over. Richard rode along before them, bareheaded, paying no heed to the cheers.
Alais turned to her again. “Where do you live?”
Nora said, “Well, sometimes in Poitiers, but—”
“My father says your father has everything, money and jewels and silks and sunlight, but all we have in France is piety and kindness.”
Nora started. “We are kind.” But she was pleased that Alais saw how great her father was. “And pious too.”
The sharp little face of the French princess turned away, drawn, and for the first time her voice was uncertain. “I hope so.”
Nora’s heart thumped, unsteady with sympathy. Johanna was scrabbling around on the floor of the cart for more things to cast out, and Nora found a little cluster of pebbles in the corner and held them out to her. On Nora’s other side, Alais was staring down at her hands now, her shoulders round, and Nora wondered if she were about to cry. She might cry, if this happened to her.
She edged closer, until she brushed against the other girl. Alais jerked her head up, her eyes wide, startled. Nora smiled at her, and between them their hands crept together and entwined.
They did not go all the way up to the castle. The cheering crowd saw them along the street and onto a pavement, with a church on one side, where the cart turned in the opposite direction from the church and went down another street and through a wooden gate. Over them now a house loomed, with wooden walls, two rows of windows, a heavy overhang of roof. Here the cart stopped and they all got out. Richard herded them along through the wide front door.
“Mama is upstairs,” he said.
They had come into a dark hall, full of servants and baggage. A servant led Alais away. Nora climbed the steep, uneven stairs, tugging Johanna along by the hand. Johanna was still hungry and said so every step. At the top of the stairs was one room on one side and another on the other side, and Nora heard her mother’s voice.
“Not yet,” the Queen was saying; Nora went into the big room and saw her mother and Boy Henry at the far side; the Queen had her hand on his arm. “The time is not yet. Don’t be precipitous. We must seem to be loyal.” She saw the girls, and a smile twitched over her face like a mask. “Come, girls!” But her hand on Boy Henry’s arm gave him a push away. “Go,” she said to him. “He will send for you; better you not be here. Take Geoffrey with you.” Boy Henry turned on his heel and went out.
Nora wondered what “precipitous” meant; briefly she imagined a cliff, and people falling off. She went up to her mother and Eleanor hugged her.
“I’m sorry,” her mama said. “I’m sorry about your father.”
“Mama.”
“Don’t be afraid of him.” The Queen took Johanna’s hands and spoke from one to the other. “I’ll protect you.”
“I’m not—”
Her mother’s gaze lifted, aimed over Nora’s head. “What is it?”
“The King wants to see me,” Richard said, behind Nora. She felt his hand drop onto her shoulder.
“Just you?”
“No, Boy and Geoffrey too. Where are they?”
Nora’s mother shrugged, her whole body moving, shoulders, head, hands. “I have no notion,” she said. “You should go, though.”
“Yes, Mama.” Richard squeezed Nora’s shoulder and he went away.
“Very well.” Eleanor sat back, still holding Johanna by one hand. “Now, my girls.” Nora frowned, puzzled; her mother did know where her other brothers were, she had just sent them out. Her mother turned to her again. “Don’t be afraid.”
“Mama, I’m not afraid.” But then she thought, somehow, that her mother wanted her to be.
Johanna was already asleep, curled heavy against Nora’s back. Nora cradled her head on her arm, not sleepy at all. She was thinking about the day, about her splendid father and her beautiful mother, and how her family ruled everything, and she was one of them. She imagined herself on a big horse, galloping, and everybody cheering her name. Carrying a lance with a pennon on the tip, and fighting for the glory of something. Or to save somebody. Something proud, but virtuous. She caught herself rocking back and forth on her imaginary horse.
A candle at the far end cast a sort of twilight through the long narrow room; she could see the planks of the wall opposite and hear the rumbling snore of the woman asleep by the door. The other servants had gone down to the hall. She wondered what happened there that they all wanted to go. Then, to her surprise, someone hurried through the dark and knelt by her bed.
“Nora?”
It was Alais. Nora pushed herself up, startled, but even as she moved, Alais was crawling into the bed.
“Let me in, please. Please, Nora. They made me sleep alone.”
She could not move to make room because of Johanna, but she said anyway, “All right.” She didn’t like sleeping alone, either: it got cold, sometimes, and lonely. She pulled the cover back, and Alais crept into the space beside her.
“This is an ugly place. I thought you all lived in beautiful places.”
Nora said, “We don’t live here.” She snuggled back against Johanna, and without waking, her little sister murmured and shifted away, giving her more room, but Alais was still jammed up against her. She could smell the French girl’s breath, meaty and sour. Rigid, she lay there wide awake. She would never fall asleep now.
Alais snuggled into the mattress; the ropes underneath creaked. In a whisper she said, “Do you have boobies yet?”
Nora twitched. “What?” She didn’t know what Alais meant.
“Bumps, silly.” Alais shifted, pulling on the covers, banging into her. “Breastses. Like this.” Her hand closed on Nora’s wrist and she pulled, brushing Nora’s hand against Alais’ chest. For an instant, Nora felt a soft roundness under her fingers.
“No.” She tried to draw her hand out of Alais’ grip, but Alais had her fast.
“You’re just a baby.”
Nora got her hand free, and squirmed fiercely against Johanna, trying to get more room. “I’m a big girl!” Johanna was the baby. She struggled to get back the feeling of galloping on the big horse, of glory, pride, and greatness. She blurted out, “Someday I’m going to be king.”
Alais hooted. “Girls aren’t kings, silly! Girls are only women.”
“I mean, like my mother. My mother is as high as a king.”
“Your mother is wicked.”
Nora pushed away, angry. “My mother is not—”
“Sssh. You’ll wake everybody up. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. It’s just everybody says so. I didn’t mean it. You aren’t a baby.” Alais touched her, pleading. “Are you still my friend?”
Nora thought the whole matter of being friends to be harder than she had expected. Surreptitiously, she pressed her palm against her own bony chest.
Alais snuggled in beside her. “If we’re to be friends, we have to stay close together. Where are we going next?”
Nora pulled the cover around her, the thickness of cloth between her and Alais. “I hope to Poitiers, with Mama. I hope I will go there, the happiest court in the whole world.” In a flash of temper she blurted out, “Any place would be better than Fontrevault. My knees are so sore.”
Alais laughed. “A convent? They put me in convents. They even made me wear nun clothes.”
Nora said, “Oh, I hate that! They’re so scratchy.”
“And they smell.”
“Nuns smell,” Nora said. She remembered something her mother said. “Like old eggs.”
Alais giggled. “You’re funny, Nora. I like you a lot.”
“Well, you have to like my mother too, if you want to go to Poitiers.”
Again, Alais’ hand came up and touched Nora, stroking her. “I will. I promise.”
Nora cradled her head on her arm, pleased, and drowsy. Maybe Alais was not so bad after all. She was a helpless maiden, and Nora could defend her, like a real knight. Her eyelids drooped; for an instant, before she fell asleep, she felt the horse under her again, galloping.
Nora had saved bread crumbs from her breakfast; she was scattering them on the windowsill when the nurse called. She kept on scattering. The little birds were hungry in the winter. The nurse grabbed her by the arm and towed her away.
“Come here when I call you!” The nurse briskly stuffed her headfirst into a gown. Nora struggled up through the mass of cloth until she got her head out. “Now sit down so I can brush your hair.”
Nora sat; she looked toward the window again, and the nurse pinched her arm. “Sit still!”
She bit her lips together, angry and sad. She wished the nurse off to Germany. Hunched on the stool, she tried to see the window through the corner of her eye.
The brush dragged through her hair. “How do you get your hair so snarled?”
“Ooow!” Nora twisted away from the pull of the brush, and the nurse wrestled her back onto the stool.
“Sit! This child is a devil.” The brush smacked her hard on the shoulder. “Wait until we get you back to the convent, little devil.”
Nora stiffened all over. On the next stool, Alais turned suddenly toward her, wide-eyed. Nora slid off the stool.
“I’m going to find my Mama!” She started toward the door. The nurse snatched at her and she sidestepped out of reach and moved faster.
“Come back here!”
“I’m going to find my Mama,” Nora said, and gave the nurse a hard look, and pulled the door open.
“Wait for me,” said Alais.
The servingwomen came after them; Nora went on down the stairs, hurrying, just out of reach. She hoped her Mama was down in the hall. On the stairs, she slipped by some servants coming up from below and they got in the nurses’ way and held them back. Alais was right behind her, wild-eyed.
“Is this all right? Nora?”
“Come on.” Gratefully she saw that the hall was full of people; that meant her mother was there, and she went in past men in long stately robes, standing around waiting, and pushed in past them all the way up to the front.
There her mother sat, and Richard also, standing beside her; the Queen was reading a letter. A strange man stood humbly before her, his hands clasped, while she read. Nora went by him.
“Mama.”
Eleanor lifted her head, her brows arched. “What are you doing here?” She looked past Nora and Alais, into the crowd, brought her gaze back to Nora, and said, “Come sit down and wait; I’m busy.” She went back to the letter in her hand. Richard gave Nora a quick, cheerful grin. She went on past him, behind her Mama’s chair, and turned toward the room. The nurses were squeezing in past the crowd of courtiers, but they could not reach her now. Alais leaned against her, pale, her eyes blinking.
In front of them, her back to them, Eleanor in her heavy chair laid the letter aside. “I’ll give it thought.”
“Your Grace.” The humble man bowed and backed away. Another, in a red coat, stepped forward, a letter in his hand. Reaching for it, the Queen glanced at Richard beside her.
“Why did your father want to see you last night?”
Alais whispered, “What are you going to do?” Nora bumped her with her elbow; she wanted to listen to her brother.
Richard was saying, “He asked me where Boy was.” He shifted his weight from foot to foot. “He was drunk.”
The Queen was reading the new letter. She turned toward the table on her other hand, picked up a quill, and dipped it into the pot of ink. “You should sign this also, since you are Duke now.”
At that, Richard puffed up, making himself bigger, and his shoulders straightened. The Queen turned toward Nora.
“What is this now?”
“Mama.” Nora went up closer to the Queen. “Where are we going? After here.”
Her mother’s green eyes regarded her; a little smile curved her lips. “Well, to Poitiers, I thought.”
“I want to go to Poitiers.”
“Well, of course,” her Mama said.
“And Alais too?”
The Queen’s eyes shifted toward Alais, back by the wall. The smile flattened out. “Yes, of course. Good day, Princess Alais.”
“Good day, your Grace.” Alais dipped into a little bow. “Thank you, your Grace.” She turned a bright happy look at Nora, who cast her a broad look of triumph. She looked up at her mother, glad of her, who could do anything.
“You said you’d protect us, remember?”
The Queen’s smile widened, and her head tipped slightly to one side. “Yes, of course. I’m your mother.”
“And Alais too?”
Now the Queen actually laughed. “Nora, you will be dangerous when you’re older. Yes, Alais too, of course.”
On the other side of the chair, Richard straightened from writing, and Eleanor took the letter from him and the quill also. Nora lingered where she was, in the middle of everything, wanting her mother to notice her again. Richard said, “If I’m really Duke, do I give orders?”
The Queen’s smile returned; she looked at him the way she looked at no one else. “Of course. Since you are Duke now.” She seemed to be about to laugh again; Nora wondered what her Mama thought was funny. Eleanor laid the letter on the table and the quill jigged busily across it.
“I want to be knighted,” her brother said. “And I want a new sword.”
“As you will, your Grace,” her mother said, still with that little laugh in her voice, and gave him a slow nod of her head, like bowing. She handed the letter back to the man in the red coat. “You may begin this at once.”
“God’s blessing on your Grace. Thank you.” The man bobbed up and down like a duck. Someone else was coming forward, another paper in his hand. Nora bounced on her toes, not wanting to go; the nurses were still waiting, standing grimly to the side, their eyes fixed on the girls as if a stare could pull them within reach. She wished her mother would look at her, talk to her again. Then, at the back of the hall, a hard, loud voice rose.
“Way for the King of England!”
Eleanor sat straight up, and Richard swung back to his place by her side. The whole room was suddenly moving, shifting, men shuffling out of the way, flexing and bending, and up through the suddenly empty space came Nora’s Papa. Nora went quickly back behind the Queen’s chair to Alais, standing there by the wall.
Only the Queen stayed in her chair, the smile gone now. Everybody else was bent down over his shoes. The King strode up before Eleanor, and behind him the hall quickly emptied. Even the nurses went out. Two of her father’s men stood on either side of the door, like guards.
“My lord,” the Queen said, “you should send ahead; we would be more ready for you.”
Nora’s Papa stood looking down at her. He wore the same clothes he had the day before. His big hands rested on his belt. His voice grated, like walking on gravel. “I thought I might see more if I came unannounced. Where are the boys?” His gaze flicked toward Richard. “The other boys.”
The Queen shrugged. “Will you sit, my lord?” A servant hurried up with a chair for him. “Bring my lord the King a cup of wine.”
The King flung himself into the chair. “Don’t think I don’t know what you’re doing.” His head turned; he had seen Nora, just behind the Queen, and his eyes prodded at her. Nora twitched, uncomfortable.
“My lord,” Eleanor said, “I am uncertain what you mean.”
“You’re such a bad liar, Eleanor.” The King twisted in the chair, caught Nora by the hand, and dragged her up between their two chairs, in front of them both. “This little girl, now, she spoke very well yesterday, when the rest of you ran off. I think she tells the truth.”
Standing in front of them, Nora slid her hands behind her back. Her mouth was dry and she swallowed once. Her mother smiled at her. “Nora has a mind. Greet your father, dear.”
Nora said, “God be with you, Papa.”
He stared at her. Around the black centers, his eyes were blue like plates of sky. One hand rose and picked delicately at the front of her dress. Inside the case of cloth, her body shrank away from his touch. He smoothed the front of her dress. Her mother was twisted in her chair to watch. Behind her, Richard stood, his face gripped in a frown.
“So. Just out of the convent, are you? Like it there?”
She wondered what she was supposed to say. Instead, she said the truth. “No, Papa.”
He laughed. The black holes got bigger and then smaller. “What, you don’t want to be a nun?”
“No, Papa, I want—” To her surprise, the story had changed. She found a sudden, eager courage. “I want to be a hero.”
Eleanor gave a little chuckle, and the King snorted. “Well, God gave you the wrong stature.” His gaze went beyond her. “Where are you going?”
“Nowhere, my lord,” Richard said in a cool voice.
The King laughed again, so that his teeth showed. He smelled sour, like old beer and dirty clothes. His eyes watched Nora, but he spoke to her mother.
“I want to see my sons.”
“They are alarmed,” the Queen said, “because of what happened with Becket.”
“I’ll deal with Becket. Keep out of that.” The servant came with the cup of wine and he took it. Nora shifted her feet, wanting to get away from them, the edges of their words like knives in the air.
“Yes, well, how you deal with Becket is getting us all into some strange places,” her mother said.
“God’s death!” He lifted the cup and drained it. “I never knew he had such a hunger for martyrdom. You saw him. He looks like an old man already. This is a caution against virtue, if it turns you into such a stork.”
Her mother looked off across the room. “No, you are right. It does no service to your justice when half the men in the kingdom can go around you.”
He twisted toward her, his face clenched. “Nobody goes around me.”
“Well,” she said, and faced him, her mouth smiling, but not in a good way. “It seems they do.”
“Mama,” Nora said, remembering how to do this. “With your leave—”
“Stay,” her father said, and, reaching out, took her arm and dragged her forward, into his lap.
“Nora,” her mother said. Beyond her, Richard took a step forward, his eyes wide. Nora squirmed, trying to get upright on her father’s knees; his arms surrounded her like a cage. The look on her mother’s face scared her. She tried to wiggle free, and his arms closed around her.
“Mama—”
The Queen said, her voice suddenly harsh, “Let go of her, sir.”
“What?” the King said, with a little laugh. “Aren’t you my sweetheart, Nora?” He planted a kiss on Nora’s cheek. His arms draped around Nora; one hand stroked her arm. “I want my sons. Get my sons back here, woman.” Abruptly, he was thrusting Nora away, off his lap, back onto her feet, and he stood up. He crooked his finger at Richard. “Attend me.” His feet scraped loud on the floor. Everybody was staring at him, mute. Heavily, he went out the door, Richard on his heels.
Nora rubbed her cheek, still damp where her father’s mouth had pressed; her gaze went to her mother. The Queen reached out her arms and Nora went to her and the Queen held her tight. She said, “Don’t be afraid. I’ll protect you.” Her voice was ragged. She let Nora go and clapped her hands. “Now we’ll have some music.”
Feathers of steam rose from the tray of almond buns on the long wooden table. Nora crept down the kitchen steps, staying close by the wall, and swiftly ducked down under the table’s edge. Deeper in the kitchen, someone was singing, and someone else laughed; nobody had noticed her. She reached up over the side of the table and gathered handfuls of buns, dumping them into the fold of her skirt and, when her skirt was full, swiftly turned and scurried back up the steps and out the door.
Just beyond the threshold, Alais hopped up and down with delight, her eyes sparkling, her hands clasped together. Nora handed her a bun. “Quick!” She started toward the garden gate.
“Hey! You girls!”
Alais shrieked and ran. Nora wheeled, knowing that voice, and looked up into Richard’s merry eyes.
“Share those?”
They went into the garden and sat on a bench by the wall, and ate the buns. Richard licked the sweet dust from his fingers.
“Nora, I’m going away.”
“Away,” she said, startled. “Where?”
“Mama wants me to go find Boy and Geoffrey. I think she’s just getting me away from Papa. Then I’m going to look for some knights to follow me. I’m duke now, I need an army.” He hugged her, laid his cheek against her hair. “I’ll be back.”
“You’re so lucky,” she burst out. “To be duke. I’m nobody! Why am I a girl?”
He laughed, his arm warm around her, his cheek against her hair. “You won’t always be a little girl. You’ll marry someday, and then you’ll be a queen, like Mama, or at least a princess. I heard them say they want you to marry somebody in Castile.”
“Castile. Where’s that?” A twinge of alarm went through her. She looked up into his face. She thought that nobody was as handsome as Richard.
“Somewhere in the Spanish Marches.” He reached for the last of the buns, and she caught his hand and held on. His fingers were all sticky.
“I don’t want to go away,” she said. “I’ll miss you. I won’t know anybody.”
“You won’t go for a while. Castile—that means castles. They fight the Moors down there. You’ll be a Crusader.”
She frowned, puzzled. “In Jerusalem?” In the convent, they had always been praying for the Crusade. Jerusalem was on the other side of the world, and she had never heard it called Castile.
“No, there’s a Crusade in Spain too. El Cid, you know, and Roland. Like them.”
“Roland,” she said, with a leap of excitement. There was a song about Roland, full of thrilling passages. She tilted her face toward him again. “Will I have a sword?”
“Maybe.” He kissed her hair again. “Women don’t usually need swords. I have to go. I just wanted to say good-bye. You’re the oldest one left at home now, so take care of Johanna.”
“And Alais,” she said.
“Oh, Alais,” he said. He took her hand. “Nora, listen, something is going on between Mama and Papa, I don’t know what, but something. Be brave, Nora. Brave and good.” His arm tightened a moment and then he stood and walked away.
“When will we be in Poitiers?” Alais said happily. She sat on a chest in the back of the wagon and spread her skirts out.
Nora shrugged. The carts went very slowly and would make the journey much longer. She wished they would let her ride a horse. Her nurse climbed in over the wagon’s front, turned, and lifted Johanna after her. The drover led the team up, the reins bunched in his hands, turned the horses’ rumps to the cart, and backed them into the shafts. Maybe he would let her hold the reins. She hung over the edge of the wagon, looking around at the courtyard, full of other wagons, people packing up her mother’s goods, a line of saddled horses waiting.
The nurse said, “Lady Nora, sit down.”
Nora kept her back to her, to show she didn’t hear. Her mother had come out of the hall door, and at the sight of her everybody else in the whole courtyard turned toward her as if she were the sun; everybody warmed in that light. Nora called, “Mama!” and waved, and her mother waved back.
“Lady Nora! Sit!”
She leaned on the side of the wagon. Beside her, Alais giggled and poked her with her elbow. A groom was bringing the Queen’s horse; she waved away someone waiting to help her and mounted by herself. Nora watched how she did that, how she kept her skirts over her legs but got her legs across the saddle anyway. Her Mama rode like a man. She would ride like that. Then, from the gate, a yell went up.
“The King!”
Alais on the chest twisted around to look. Nora straightened. Her father on his big black horse was riding in the gate, a line of knights behind him, mailed and armed. She looked for Richard, but he wasn’t with them. Most of the knights had to stay outside the wall because there was no room in the yard.
Eleanor reined her horse around, coming up beside the wagon, close enough that Nora could have reached out and touched her. The horse sidestepped, tossing its head up. His face dark, the King forced his way through the crowd toward her.
She said, “My lord, what is this?”
He threw one wide look all around the courtyard. His face was blurry with beard and his eyes were rimmed in red. Nora sat quickly down on the chest. Her father spurred his horse up head to tail with her mother’s.
“Where are my sons?”
“My lord, I have no notion, really.”
He stared at her, furious. “Then I’ll take hostages.” He twisted in his saddle, looking back toward his men. “Get these girls!”
Nora shot to her feet again. “No,” the Queen said, forcing her way between him and the wagon, almost nose to nose with him, her fist clenched. “Keep your hands off my daughters.” Alais reached out and gripped Nora’s skirt in her fist.
He thrust his face at her. “Try to stop me, Eleanor!”
“Papa, wait.” Nora leaned over the side of the wagon. “We want to go to Poitiers.”
The King said evilly, “What you want.” Two men had dismounted, were coming briskly toward the wagon. He never took his gaze off her mother.
The Queen’s horse bounded up between the men and the cart. Leaning closer to the King, she spoke in a quick low voice. “Don’t be foolish, my lord, on such a small matter. If you push this too hastily, you will never get them back. Alais has that handsome dowry; take her.”
“Mama, no!” Nora stretched her arm out. Alais flung her arms around her waist.
“Please—please—”
The Queen never even looked at them. “Be still, Nora. I will deal with this.”
“Mama!” Nora tried to catch hold of her, to make her turn and look. “You promised. Mama, you promised she would come with us!” Her fingers grazed the smooth fabric of her mother’s sleeve.
Eleanor struck at her, hard, knocking her down inside the wagon. Alais gave a sob. The King’s men were coming on again, climbing up toward them. Nora lunged at them, her fists raised.
“Get away! Don’t you dare touch her!”
From behind, someone got hold of her and dragged her out of the way. The two men scrambled up over the side of the wagon and fastened on the little French princess. They were dragging her up over the side. She cried out once and then was limp, helpless in their arms. Nora wrenched at the arm around her waist, and only then she saw it was her mother holding her.
“Mama!” She twisted toward Eleanor. “You promised. She doesn’t want to go.”
Eleanor thrust her face down toward Nora’s. “Be still, girl. You don’t know what you’re doing.”
Behind her, the King was swinging his horse away. “You can keep that one. Maybe she’ll poison you.” He rode off after his men, who had Alais clutched in their grip. Other men were lifting out Alais’ baggage. They were hauling her off like baggage. Nora gave a wordless cry. With a sharp command, her father led his men on out the gate again, taking Alais like a trophy.
Her arm still around Nora’s waist, Eleanor was scowling after the King. Nora wrenched herself free and her mother turned to face her.
“Well, now, Nora. That was unseemly, wasn’t it.”
“Why did you do that, Mama?” Nora’s voice rang out, high-pitched and furious, careless who heard.
“Come, girl,” her mother said, and gave her a shake. “Settle yourself. You don’t understand.”
With a violent jerk of her whole body, Nora wrenched away from her mother. “You said Alais could come.” Something deep and hard was gathering in her, as if she had swallowed a stone. She began to cry. “Mama, why did you lie to me?”
Her mother blinked at her, her forehead crumpled. “I can’t do everything.” She held out her hand, as if asking for something. “Come, be reasonable. Do you want to be like your father?”
Tears were squirting from Nora’s eyes. “No, and not like you, either, Mama. You promised me, and you lied.” She knocked aside the outstretched hand.
Eleanor recoiled; her arm rose and she slapped Nora across the face. “Cruel, ungrateful child!”
Nora sat down hard. She poked her fists into her lap, her shoulders hunched. Alais was gone; she couldn’t save her after all. It didn’t matter that she hadn’t really liked Alais much. She wanted to be a hero, but she was just a little girl, and nobody cared. She turned to the chest and folded her arms on it, put her head down, and wept.
Later, she leaned up against the side of the wagon, looking down the road ahead.
She felt stupid. Alais was right: she couldn’t be a king, and now she couldn’t even be a hero.
The nurses were dozing in the back of the wagon. Her mother had taken Johanna away to ride on her saddle in front of her, to show Nora how bad she had been. The drover on his bench had his back to her. She felt as if nobody could see her, as if she weren’t even there.
She didn’t want to be a king anyway if it meant being mean and yelling and carrying people off by force. She wanted to be like her mother, but her old mother, the good mother, not this new one, who lied and broke promises, who hit and called names. Alais had said, “Your mother is wicked,” and she almost cried again, because it was true.
She would tell Richard when he came back. But then in her stomach something tightened like a knot: if he came back. Somehow the whole world had changed. Maybe even Richard would be false now.
“You’ll be a Crusader,” he had said to her.
She didn’t know if she wanted that. Being a Crusader meant going a long, long way and then dying. “Be good,” Richard had said. “Be brave.” But she was just a little girl. Under the whole broad blue sky, she was just a speck.
The wagon jolted along the road, part of the long train of freight heading down toward Poitiers. She looked all around her, at the servants walking along among the carts, the bobbing heads of horses and mules, the heaps of baggage lashed on with rope. Her mother was paying no heed to her, had gone off ahead, in the mob of riders leading the way. The nurses were sleeping. Nobody was watching her.
Nobody cared about her anymore. She waited to disappear. But she didn’t.
She stood, holding on to the side to keep from falling. Carefully, she climbed up over the front of the wagon onto the bench, keeping her skirts over her legs, and sat down next to the drover, who gawked down at her, a broad, brown face in a shag of beard.
“Now, my little lady—”
She straightened her skirts, planted her feet firmly on the kickboard, and looked up at him. “Can I hold the reins?” she said.
Melinda Snodgrass
A writer whose work crosses several mediums and genres, Melinda M. Snodgrass has written scripts for television shows such as Profiler and Star Trek: The Next Generation (for which she was also a story editor for several years), a number of popular SF novels, and was one of the cocreators of the long-running Wild Card series, for which she has also written and edited. Her novels include Circuit,Circuit Breaker,Final Circuit,The Edge of Reason,Runespear (with Victor Milán), High Stakes,Santa Fe, and Queen’s Gambit Declined. Her most recent novel is The Edge of Ruin, the sequel to The Edge of Reason. Her media novels include the Wild Cards novel Double Solitaire and the Star Trek novel The Tears of the Singers. She’s also the editor of the anthology A Very Large Array. She lives in New Mexico.
Here she takes us to a distant planet to show us that even in a society where spaceships thunder through the night and aliens mingle with humans on crowded city streets, some of the games you might run into go way back.
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Джордж Мартин и Гарднер Дозуа
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Фэнтези про драконов
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
Отзывы: Пока нет Добавить отзыв
О книге: George R.R. Martin and Gardner Dozois have put together a towering anthology of specially-commissioned stories from the most stellar names in the genre, set in a number of readers′ favourite fantasy worlds.George R.R. Martin is the bestselling author of A Song of Ice and Fire, the inspiration for HBO’s hit series Game of Thrones.The collection will also feature a new and unpublished 100pp novella by George R.R. Martin set in the world of A Song of Ice and Fire – now the award-winning HBO show, Game of Thrones.The novella, entitled ′The Princess and the Queen′, will reveal the origins of the Targaryen Civil War, otherwise known as ′The Dance of the Dragons′, a war that split a then-fledgling Westeros in two, pitting Targaryen against Targaryen and dragon against dragon.The Dangerous Women anthology also contains contributions from the following worldwide bestselling authors:• “Some Desperado” by Joe Abercrombie – A Red Country story• “Nora’s Song” by Cecelia Holland• “Bombshells” by Jim Butcher – A Harry Dresden story• “Wrestling Jesus” by Joe R. Lansdale• “Neighbours” by Megan Lindholm (who also writes as Robin Hobb)• “Shadows For Silence in the Forests of Hell” by Brandon Sanderson• “A Queen in Exile” by Sharon Kay Penman• “The Girl in the Mirror” by Lev Grossman – A Magicians story• “Virgins” by Diana Gabaldon – An Outlander story