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Wyrm I.VII
🕑 Added 2023-05-20 00:00:05 +0000 UTCChapter VII: Icarus
“Don’t die,” Lizzie hissed to Will, grinding her palm against his pretty mouth as he writhed under her, flat on his back in the narrow dirt passway behind the scullery. “You aren’t to die, maggot. Grub. You shapeless nothing. Do you understand me?” She spat in his face. He was crying now, eyes swollen, face scrunched up and red, and it made her clitoris stand stiff as a nail to see those tears fall to the packed dirt. She rubbed herself against his bony pelvis. His eyes pled with her for something they both feared and wanted, for the plain copper rings and the necklace of cheap tin she’d bought off a peddler in Ulfpen on a run a few months earlier, knowing then she wanted to cover Will in silk and jewels, though mummers’ paste and one of the late lady Jane’s old shifts would have to do.
She didn’t watch him ride away when the soldiers left to join the muster. Other women would go and throw dried flowers and sprigs of holly, calling after their husbands, sons, and sweethearts, little girls racing after their fathers. Instead Lizzie went up to the landing field where Sarah de Masard was brushing down her Guinevere, lathered and steaming in the cold after patrol. “All’s quiet,” said Sarah as Lizzie approached, footsteps crunching in the trampled snow. “Been crying over your little sweetmeat?”
Lizzie spat in the direction of the horse-faced, lanky pennon. Only when she’d snuck into the aviary and curled herself tight against Chauntecleer’s warm flank under cover of his wing did she let herself cry, stuffing her fist into her mouth and keening around it until no more would come, only dry, rattling groans and the clogged sucking of her blocked-up nostrils. She stared down at the tooth marks on the backs of her knuckles.
Don’t die.
Don’t leave me all alone.
The Skeleton was ill again. It happened every winter, her chest flooding with phlegmatic humors so that for a month or more she was confined to quarters in care of her lieutenant, Joan Peele. The two had been pennons in their girlhood, though Lizzie had never been able to imagine the big, soft woman with her broad hips and hanging belly soaring through the skies on kiteback. She looked almost preposterously fat beside the Skeleton, who was hawking greenish phlegm into a little bowl when Lizzie entered her tiny, sweltering bedchamber. The old pennon’s burning blue eyes followed her across the room. It wasn’t Lizzie she was angry with, though, but her own frail body, the only thing in Pennon House that didn’t leap to attention when she hobbled into a room.
“Preston,” the Skeleton wheezed, her voice raspier than usual. She suffered Joan to wipe her mouth with a damp cloth before falling back onto her sweat-damp pillow. “Come here.”
“You said broth first, Maggie,” Joan said stubbornly. “You have to eat.”
“You eat enough for both of us,” the Skeleton snapped, points of color flaring in her fleshless cheeks. “Get out. I have matters to discuss with a pennon who can do her duty.”
Joan rose, knees popping. Lizzie felt ashamed to see tears in the fat woman’s eyes. She looked away until the the door groaned shut, latch clinking into place. “The duke has set us a mission,” said the Skeleton, her narrow chest rising and falling with evident strain beneath the furs. “A missive for lord chancellor Pale, one of the utmost importance.” She retrieved a battered scroll case from the bedding. The wax of its seal had run and smeared the signet’s imprint, and the old pennon’s hand trembled as Lizzie took the case from her.
“Fly quickly,” said the Skeleton. “We have only a little while to stop what’s coming. Many lives hang on this message, Preston. Many lives hang on your shoulders.”
She paused to cough again, hacking and heaving until she managed to roll onto her side and spit a shapeless glob of sputum on the floor. She leaned there on one elbow, staring hard at Lizzie. “I told you that you were the future of this house,” she croaked after a time. “If you would only put that baeddel from your mind. You haven’t. Why?”
Lizzie felt suddenly faint. The room seemed to close in around her. It was so hot, so stifling. The air stank of some herb she didn’t know. The fire popped and snarled on the ash-choked hearth. “I love him,” she whispered at last.
The Skeleton sighed. She settled back into her furs, looking very small and very old. Her lips were grayish, the circles under her deep-set eyes the color of old bruises. “Alright,” she said. “Alright, then. Go.”
“Ma’am—”
“I could swear you had a message to run, Preston.”
Lizzie stood a moment, angry and ashamed in equal measure. “Yes, ma’am.”
“Look in on Icarus for me before you go, will you?”
“Of course.”
She left. The hall outside felt bracing after the close, smothering heat of the Skeleton’s sickbed. Joan sat waiting on a narrow bench beside the stair, expression stony, hands folded in her lap in front of the formidable curve of her belly. In her plain white dress and wimple she looked more Carmelite than pennon, but she had taught Lizzie and the rest how to rig a saddle, how to recognize a swordbill from a bloody cardinal or a shavepate. She rose as Lizzie passed her, sweeping back toward the Skeleton’s bedchamber. A morbid curiosity seized Lizzie, watching her retreating form. Slowly, as quietly as she could manage, she slipped off her cracked and battered shoes and padded to the door to press her ear against it. The wood was warm to the touch, and the Skeleton’s voice thin and distant.
“I’m sorry, my heart.”
“I know, Maggie.”
“Don’t hate me.”
“Maggie…”
“Don’t hate me, please.”
A long silence. “I never could.”
“Tell me I’ve been good to you.”
Another silence. Joan’s voice, cold. “Why should I?”
“Because I need it.”
Lizzie left, guilt churning in her stomach. She didn’t understand what she’d just heard, but it made her sick to hear the Skeleton needing something, anything at all. It made her panicky and hot and queer. She clutched the message tight and shoved it into the breast of her quilted jacket, heading for the steps.
The aviary smelled of kite musk, a pleasant spicy reek that tickled Lizzie’s sinuses as she jogged down the aisle between the stalls. Framlingham’s dozen kites all quartered here beneath the aged beams where sparrows and butcher’s boys nested in their hundreds, molted feathers and dry white and black excretions covering whole swaths of floor. A few kites lifted their heads from under their wings as she passed to clack their bills, demanding fish or fruit or chicken. Other pennons nodded greetings. The house’s next crop of underfed waifs watched her with big, awestruck eyes. She stopped a while to feed Chauntecleer a dead rat she’d found behind the fullery and brush him down for sleep, and then, at the end of the great yawning barn, set back in the hill from which Framlingham grew, she came to Icarus’s stall.
The old kite seldom flew now. He was sire to half the kites at Framlingham, Chauntecleer included, but at near forty he was listless and feeble, his once-brilliant quills dulled to gray and white and molting thinner every year, his eyes cloudy with cataracts. Lizzie had brushed and groomed him more times than she could count, had flown with him on half a hundred patrols, had picked lice and wood ticks from his wing membranes and shoveled his hard, fruity-smelling dung since before she’d lost her maidenhead. She felt a great sadness looking at the wreck of him, a sense that something that could not be replaced was about to go out of the world.
Icarus raised his scabby head as she approached. He croaked a greeting, puffing out his chest, and quested blindly with the flat of his bill until he found her outstretched hand and submitted with a rumbling trill to being scratched on the velvety skin above his right eye. “You old brute,” she said softly. “Are you my boy? Are you my gentleman?”
Icarus chortled in agreement, pushing his head against her. From the point of his bill to the base of his skull was nearly as long as Lizzie was tall, but he felt like a little thing to her in that moment. Vulnerable and small. At Poitier he had killed a dozen swordbills and knocked a French pennon and her mount from the sky to crash shrieking into the French lines. She wondered as she stroked the loose skin of his throat if he remembered what it was like to be invincible and perfect.
“Your maman has taken ill, old man,” she told him. “The girls will see to you until she’s well again. Don’t fret.”
He shook himself, raising a cloud of loose quills and dead skin, and she patted his bill at the base and stepped back to let him preen. She would have to leave tonight to make London by Tuesday. She would take the heaviest flight jacket, the one with hot coals sewn between its layers, and muffle her face, and hope the weather held.
Will rode behind sir Ralph and a dozen other knights to the muster at Cotter’s Field just north of Whitsun where sir Edmund and Dick Preston had gathered some three hundred men of fighting age. The men streamed out to meet them onto the field from tents and leans and the edge of the wood where some had camped as Will and the other squires dismounted. Crofters, masons, potters, the second and third sons of a few-score peasant families; it was a motley assemblage under his lordship’s fleur-de-lis and lion, but sir Ralph addressed them from high in his saddle as though they were knights and sheriffs of the realm.
“We ride South to London,” he thundered, heeling Lady slowly along their front line, “to check the bad council of his majesty’s favorites, the charlatans Pole and de Vere, who have misled him grievously and beggared the realm in so doing! You will be armed, trained, and paid at the expense of his lordship the duke of Norfolk, Thomas Mowbray, headman of the Court of Chivalry, two pence for each day on the march! Skilled archers shall have three pence daily. If our backs are strong and our aim true, we can right the kingdom and please God in doing it. Bishop William of Wykeham has pledged a plenary indulgence to each man who takes up arms in service to his excellency’s cause!”
There was a ragged cheer at that. These men might not understand the vagaries of courtly life and their sovereign’s affections, but they understood Hell. They understood gold. Will wondered if he would end his days like the old farmers who came to bring their sons to the muster, departing now in tears, kissing rueful boys and saying please, please, come home to me, to your mother. Please. He thought of his own father. His mother had refused to speak of him and for a time he’d entertained the foolish daydream that it was sir Ralph himself, or even the duke, but then one day Gaston Meeks had told him it was just that she had been a whore in town and didn’t like to say.
That night sir Ralph made love to him for the first time since their bout in the training yard. He stuffed a rag into Will’s mouth to muffle his cries and for near an hour pounded hard against him, fist twisted up in Will’s blond hair. When he was done there was blood on the pallet and Will felt flushed and feverish. There was a terrible ache rooted deep behind his anus. The smell of shit filled the tent. “Clean yourself,” the knight grunted, levering himself up off of Will. Will fumbled in the dark, searching the pockets of his arming jacket for a rag.
The next day another hundred men came up from Ulfpen and the towns around it. More from Wiltham the day after, and then Shedd, and Houghton. Cotter’s Field became a maze of tents. Drills trampled what grain still stood into the earth, blocks of men marching and wheeling, bracing spears and heavy mallard-choppers with their big rectangular blades. Archers and longbowmen ranged their fire to lines of painted stones on cleared land to the West. Will stood with the other squires at the field’s edge, thinking of Christopher Tewskbury’s trampled body and the way the armadon had trumpeted in agony when the lancers rode down on it and pierced its flank. In the mornings he drilled with lance and sword until his arms felt as though they would burst into flame or drip like molten lead and his thighs were raw from gripping his ostri’s saddle.
In front of the soldiery sir Ralph acted as though Will did not exist. Will was just the thing that carried his sword, the thing that brushed Lady down at night, the thing serving his supper on bended knee and taking his manhood night after night into its sore and throbbing holes, the thing with the dark bruise shining — you see what she drives me to? — under its right eye around a swollen cut where a mailed glove had torn its skin. At least Lizzie kissed him where she made him hurt. At least she needed him, even if it made him nauseous to be under her.
Clean yourself.
The other squires were older than Will. Taller. Broader through the shoulders. He thought at first that they might torment him for sport, but sir Parsifal Cummings’ squire Peter, who the other boys called Red Peter for his carroty hair, seemed to have taken a liking to him. He was a brash boy, hellfire in the saddle and fair to middling with a sword, but when he found himself alone with Will his jests and boasts seemed to dry up and blow away. He blushed like a maid. His hands shook. He tripped over his words. They played at kissing sometimes in the thicket downwind of where the shrikes were quartered in a timber-walled paddock. It was rut for the beasts and the stench of the oils soaking the plumage on their haunches and around their cloacae kept most of the camp away. Will liked to watch them strut and circle, the cocks flushed yellow as finches along their muzzles and vivid red on their crests, bowing and fluting for the larger, more vicious hens. Sometimes a hen would bow in turn and the cock would mount her, the two wyrms thrashing in the mud, snapping and snarling at one another as his pale, ribbed member slid free of its sheath and coiled under her tail.
It felt good to let Peter kiss him down there while the great wyrms rutted in the muck not twenty yards away. It felt like riding lightning. Like racing the devil. Afterward they lay together on the dead brown winter moss, the chill nipping at their noses and bare buttocks, and daydreamed of sweet things. For a little while.
A hard rain fell on the second morning of their journey, grounding them at a rookery in York where the talk among the other pennons was all of how the king and Norfolk had made peace at Michaelmas, de la Pole would be chancellor again come Spring, and perhaps a war with France, to shake off any lingering ill sentiment between the parties. A freckled, gap-toothed girl from Kent asked Lizzie shyly if she’d like to pass the time.
“Some other day I would,” Lizzie assured her, thinking of Will marching through this downpour and feeling as though someone had stuffed her belly full of ashes. She wanted his plump ass, his long and shapely thighs, so like a girl’s. She wanted to switch him with rose stems until blood ran down the backs of them, so that she knew he was alive and hers and helpless. “My mind is elsewhere. I’m sorry.”
The girl gave Lizzie a funny look before abandoning her to her thoughts. She joined a group of younger pennons drinking blackberry wine and playing quoits near the wall while their kites bickered and groomed one another. Pebbles clicked and rattled over the reed-strewn flagstones. Gossip passed from lips to ears. Once, it had felt so easy to join in with them. Years ago it seemed now, from the lonely peak of seventeen. Chauntecleer, as though sensing her mood, lowered his head onto her shoulder with a mournful trill. She was bone-tired from their flight, her nose itching furiously where the wind had cut against it through her scarf. She thought of the Skeleton lying feverish and pitiful in her bed. She thought of her pleading tone, heard through the door.
Because I need it.
Lizzie slept, hard and dreamless. She woke after dark and found the weather broken, the rookery on its hillside deserted of all but its royal foresters. She saddled Chauntecleer and mounted him without a word, and they were off.
She saw the smoke before she saw London, and for a harrowing few moments in the pre-dawn gloom she thought somehow that Lord Thomas and his men had reached the city and sacked it, that her Will was dead in an alley or a knacker’s cart somewhere, head split, teeth shattered by mace or hammer, eyes stabbed out, rats and pullets yanking at his — she pressed her face hard into Chauntecleer’s hump, forcing herself to breathe. She squinted through the haze of light snowfall at where the great column of roiling black twisted and swayed in the wind. There, a glint of tarnished metal. It was clear by the time she could make out the vague outline of the crosses and Cripplegate below. The ark was burning.
The clark who conveyed her from the landing field to lord chancellor Pale’s apartments — she couldn’t tell if he was the same one who’d met her last, and to ask seemed against the spirit of things — told her the fire had started just before the king’s party returned from Framlingham, raging through the ark’s decrepit innards. A nun from the priory of Saint Mary had said she saw a bolt of lightning start it from a clear blue sky. A fishmonger taking his catch down Billingsgate claimed it was a dragon, and a squire he knew who was privy to Robert de Vere’s pillow talk said the duke had sent men in to fight the blaze and that none had emerged, nor — obviously — had they quelled the blaze.
By the time they reached the chancellor’s offices Lizzie had decided it was the same clark and that she no longer cared why the ark was burning. Either Christ had returned in a torrent of heavenly flame or some potboy had gotten drunk and knocked over a lantern. Who was to say?
Pale looked much the same as he had in summer, hunched at his ornately carved oak desk with his tiny spectacles perched on the ax blade of his nose, immersed in scrolls and cloth-bound books. His cream-colored raptor perched on his right shoulder, head tucked beneath a feathered arm.
“The pennon Elizabeth Preston,” said the clark, standing aside to let Lizzie enter the high-ceilinged room. Old tapestries and paintings and pages excised from manuscripts covered the walls. The crusaders routing Saladin at the battle of Hattin, the tutelage, Christ walking in Galilee with the apostles crawling after him. There were relics, too. The knucklebones of holy kites and mallards, a shrike’s serrated jawbone, a devil’s horns carved with the crucifixion and the resurrection, the heel of Saint Agatha, worn and brown and pitted. Each rested atop a little pillow on shelves built up flush to the walls. It seemed strange to her; she would not have taken the chancellor for a religious man.
“Thank you, Thomas,” the chancellor rumbled without looking up. “That will be all. Or, no, find me Jon Howard. I’ll want to see him next.”
“Thomas!” said Lizzie, snapping her fingers, and then shrank as they both looked at her. After a moment, Pale chuckled.
“Of course, excellency,” said Thomas, his face brick red. He turned on his heel and left.
“I oughtn’t to laugh,” said Pale, inking his quill. His raptor raised her head, one slitted pink eye glaring out at Lizzie. “He is a ready lad, and capable.”
“I’m sure, my lord.”
“Ready lad,” the raptor echoed in a garbled hiss. She tapped her dewclaws against Pale’s the shoulder of Pale’s doublet and then hopped down neatly onto his desk, crest standing on end. “A ready lad, ready lad.”
Pale brushed the raptor’s tailfeathers away from his papers. “Sothotha was my mother’s,” he said, smiling faintly as he scratched beneath the hen’s chin with one long, tapering finger. “Fifty years old and still a chick.”
What a queer name, thought Lizzie. It pricked her skin with goosebumps, somehow, the way it rhymed against itself.
“Here we are again, pennon.”
Lizzie fumbled the message out from under her leathers and quilting, fingers shaking with sudden nerves. Pale took it. He rapped the seal against the edge of his desk to break it as Sothotha rubbed herself against him, pushing the top of her head under his chin and emitting a series of rapid, high-pitched clicks like a chain running out its length through the eye of a piton. Pale ignored her. He read, beady black eyes flicking back and forth over the creased and yellowed parchment. “The gossip?” he asked.
She thought of lord Thomas’s knights riding out into the snow, blood-red banners fluttering from the heads of their lances. “Her ladyship is ill,” she said at last. “You must have heard that from the king, though.”
Pale continued to read. He made no comment.
Lizzie racked her brain. “One of her ladyship’s maids…” Plump, pretty Kate gazing over the merlons at the yawning dark, stepping up between the stones. The way her arse had looked through that thin gown, and the fear in her big doe eyes when she’d looked back. “...has been sleeping with a stablehand. I heard it from Mary Cutter in the kitchen.”
The lord chancellor produced a small key of black iron from the sleeve of his tunic. He busied himself behind his desk, unlocking some drawer or cabinet.
“The ark is burning at the mouth of the river.”
A smile quirked his narrow gash of a mouth. “I had heard.”
“Burning,” croaked Sothotha. “Burning. Ark is burning.”
Pale rose from his desk and came toward her. His feet were bare and huge and veined. He was so tall, the presence of him so overwhelming, that it was a moment before Lizzie realized he had a message cylinder of his own. She took it dumbly. The top of her head didn’t even reach his breastbone.
“You’ve saved a great many lives today,” he said, bending low and speaking in a rumbling whisper. “Do you know that, pennon?”
“I’m only the messenger.”
He smiled again at that. She wished he wouldn’t. His face frightened her, with its deep-set eyes and crowded teeth, its gaunt lines and unsettling planes.“Your dedication is admirable,” he said, and with surprising tenderness he raised a hand to touch her cheek, just a brush with one skeletal thumb, and then he swept away back to his writing. He looked of a piece with all the things around him. Archaic. Grave. A little sad.
Lizzie paused in the doorway, knowing it wasn’t her place to speak but possessed suddenly by a burning curiosity.
“Why is the ark burning, my lord?”
His quill scratched in the silence.
“Burning,” piped Sothotha. “Burning, burning, burning.”
“I expect to know quite soon,” said Pale. “Thank you, pennon.”
She lingered, frightened and intrigued, certain she was at the edge of understanding something, and then she left.
Lord Thomas led the column out of Cotter’s Field. It felt strange to Will to be a part of something so vast, to look out over rank after rank of men from the vantage of his saddle, arming coats and mail and helms, fat and muscle, skin and bone, and know that each of them was a living soul, like him. The blades of their spears flashed and glittered in the crisp morning cold. The knights’ mallards bellowed. Their twelve tricornes, which had killed three men between them in as many days — two gored trying to saddle the old bitch sow Mathilde, one found crushed in their makshift run after a night of drinking with his fellow soldiers — led them, a cantankerous wall of steel and muscle, with the lancers behind, then outriders on ostri-back, then bowmen, and finally the foot. Behind them the baggage train snaked along the Roman road, rammed earth over buried flags, gutters choked with deadfall under the new-fallen snow.
They met Gloucester, big fleshy Tom Woodstock with his baby-blonde curls and brilliant grin, and his five hundred at the border of Nottingham. The sight of his banner, a white swan on red, emerging from the morning fog drew a cheer from the men. With him came the Percies, Hotspur leading them on his red shrike Belial, and the Nevilles behind them, his mother’s kin. The elder Henry, it was whispered, had suffered an intimate injury while wenching and could not bring himself to risk the saddle. Pockmarked, goatish Richard FitzAlan joined them at Wattley Town with forty lances and two hundred foot, his maiden sister Eleanor, known throughout the countryside as the Hag of Arundel, beside him on mallardback and armored like a man.
By the time they came to Derby they were more than two thousand strong, the earth reverberating with the ceaseless pounding of their footsteps and the tread of their wyrms, their baggage train a snaking line of duckies, drovers, and wagons stretching back beyond Will’s vision. Villagers came out to cheer them on from stone walls and fallow fields. Whores raised their skirts from rooftops in the bigger towns. Some joined in with the singing of the men at arms, who belted out ballads and marching songs and the simple rhyming couplets known by anyone who’d worked a field.
Janey Carey’s grinding oats
Hulling barley
Herding goats
Dancing barefoot on the heath
She’ll wear no man’s wedding wreath
Will felt foolish singing with them. These were men, and it was no matter if knights like sir Ralph and Dick Preston could slip easily between the worlds, Will knew that he would never be a part of this one. Real men were a mystery to him, rough and quick and changeable, laughing one moment and boiling over with dark, sullen rage the next. Their first night encamped on the road to London he watched through the flaps of his tent as sir Ralph wrestled a huge spearman in the midst of a laughing crowd, the firelight flickering over their bare, muscled backs so that they looked in the rippling shadows like a knot of serpents thrashing in the snow. Bearded faces howled and hooted all around them. Knotted fists thumped backs and chests. They looked to Will like the ape that a Venetian merchant had brought years ago to Framlingham as a gift for the lady Elizabeth, half the size of a man, wizened and hairy, with dark, mournful eyes that crinkled at the corners when it grinned.
The duke’s raptors had cornered it behind the fullery one night and torn it limb from limb.
Before she landed, Lizzie knew something was wrong. The rookery’s peaked roof was stove in, and something had smashed through the fullery like a hurricane. There was rubble and splintered wood in the courtyard, laborers bustling to cart it off, and a group of men at arms awaited her on the field when she came in for a landing. The aviary’s doors were closed and barred. She stroked Chauntecleer’s neck as he reared back from the approaching spearpoints and clacked his beak, thumping his callused knuckles into the turf. “Hush, baby,” she clucked, smoothing his bristling ruff even as her heart raced, beating hard against her breast. “Hush, hush. Mama’s here.”
“Gentle him down!” one of the soldiers shouted. He was older than her uncle, leathery from too much sun and wind, and wore a black cloth wrapped around his skull to hide his missing eye. Adam, or Albert. Something like that.
“Back up,” Lizzie shouted back. “He’ll calm if you give him room. Back up!”
Adam or Albert glowered up at her, but did as she said. Chauntecleer hissed deep in his chest, then folded his wings and hunkered down on all fours. Another few moments of whispered encouragement and he was calm enough for one of the pennon house’s trainees to bring up the ladder. The same girl who’d come when they had flown back after spotting the Welsh raiding party at the end of summer. “What’s your name?” Lizzie asked, planting a boot in the stirrup of the child’s cupped hands.
“Sally Leffords, pennon.”
“Thank you, Sally.”
“They took the Skeleton.”
Before Lizzie could ask what she meant, the castle’s men were on her. Chauntecleer screamed as two of them seized her by the arms and dragged her toward the silent, glowering bulk of Pennon House. The kite dragged little Sally Leffords, clinging to his saddle girth, twenty yards before the guards’ raised spears brought him up short. He reared again. Sally’s feet left the turf.
“No!” screamed Lizzie. Her pulse thundered in her ears. “No, baby! Hie, hie! Away! Away, Chauntecleer!”
He shrieked again, rearing up and lashing out with the claws on the leading edges of his mighty wings. A man at arms fell on his arse in the dirt, winded. A spear drew a brilliant red drop of blood from Chauntecleer’s breast.
“AWAY!” Lizzie screamed.
Chauntecleer dropped to all fours. He shook his head violently, the tip of his bill gouging a line in the earth and throwing sod and loose soil left and right, and then let out a long, mournful whistle. Sally scurried back to take his reins. The spearmen retreated slowly, dragging Lizzie with them. She sobbed with relief. It felt as though she’d seen her own corpse lying broken on the field, maggots writhing in the open mouth and flies seething over the sunken pits of her eyes.
As soon as they crossed the threshold of Pennon House, Adam or Albert had her up against the wall, his arm across her throat, his purpling face inches from hers. “The message,” he snarled. “What’d you tell that ghost bastard, Pale?”
“They’re the duke’s dispatches,” she rasped, fighting to breathe, hating that she had to cling to his forearm to keep herself from choking. “I don’t read them.”
He seized hold of her face with a gloved hand, blocking out her vision. “They’re your cunt Skeleton’s,” he growled. “Don’t play the innocent with me. I’ll have you in a cage next to your bitch commander before you can spit.”
Lizzie’s stomach dropped. I will not cry here, I will not cry in front of this man. She dug her fingers hard into his arm, wishing she could wring his neck, that she were a man, could swing a sword and beat others to death with nothing but her fists. “What did you do to her?”
“The bony old cunt did it to herself.” Adam-or-Albert’s smile was full of brown and rotten teeth. “Marched from her sickbed into her ladyship’s solar, bold as brass, and said she’d spied for the king these twenty years past, that she’d sent you winging to London to inform to Pale on the appellants’ march.”
You’ve saved a great many lives today. Pale’s finger on her cheek. His sad, dead eyes like little pits. Do you know that, pennon?
“No,” Lizzie said, but it was half a whimper.
“Enough!” came a man’s hoarse voice. Harold Greene, lord Thomas’s castellan and sir Edmund’s and the Skeleton’s elder brother, was limping toward them down the hall with several pennons and pages in tow, including a white-faced Joan. The wrapped butt of his crutch thumped with each hopping step he took. “Have your brains leaked out that bloody hole in your head? Let her down, man!”
Adam-or-Albert took his arm from Lizzie’s throat. She slid coughing to the floorboards as he stepped away. “Sorry, master Greene, it’s only that—”
“It’s only that you’re running wild like a half-hard potboy crowned king in Westminster!” Harold thundered. Even with his shriveled leg he had the whole house silent, men-at-arms backing away sheepishly and looking down at their armored feet. “Go put a son in that harridan wife of yours and spare us all her moaning when our business compels us to cross the blasted laundry yard!”
Adam-or-Albert purpled, lips pursed as tightly as a cat’s anus. “Sir,” he hissed. “You ought—”
Greene waved him off. “Oh, get out of my sight before I have you flogged.” He bent with some effort to offer Lizzie his hand, which she took. “Are you alright, then?” he asked her gruffly.
“Yes, sir.” She hated how pitifully grateful she felt to him in that moment.
“My sister—” his voice broke a little before he recovered himself. “Pennon Greene informed us that you would bear a return message.”
“He gave it to me,” she forced out past the lump in her throat, producing the cylinder from inside her jacket. It hit her all at once how overdressed she was, how sweaty and itchy her skin had become in the heat of Pennon House. She tried not to think of the Skeleton inspecting their beds at morning review, or of the summer the woman had nursed her through a fever, squeezing milk and honey from a wet cloth into her mouth as the small hours of the night ticked past, all the while complaining that she’d rather have been mucking stalls. “The lord chancellor. He said it was for lord Thomas.”
“Come.”
He led her down the hall past staring girls and men at arms, away from Joan, whose eyes were red from crying again over Margaret Greene, to the Skeleton’s solar. Harold eased himself into the chair behind his sister’s desk, handing his cane to his page, and cracked the cylinder’s seal with a thumbnail. Carefully, he drew the rolled sheet of vellum out and smoothed it flat on the desk. When he was through, he let her read it.
I, Martin Pale, lord chancellor by the grace of his majesty Richard II, writing in the year of our lord 1385, hereby attest that the bearer of this message shares no part in the agreement between myself, the crown, and Margaret Greene. Nor does lieutenant Joan Peele or any other pennon have any part in our compact, which has been kept in the strictest secrecy. To this end find affixed my seal and the seal of his majesty, your sovereign, to whose natural authority obedience is lawful and favored by God, may He grant you health and long life.
There followed Pale’s scratchy signature, and then the king’s huge, looping one. Lizzie let the vellum fall from her nerveless hands. A moment later she let out a great sob, her whole body shaking, and covered her face to hide her tears from Greene. He rose and left the room, pausing only to grip her shoulder for a moment. He can’t even grieve her, she thought, and sobbed harder, curling in on herself as the castellan and his page departed.
You’ve saved a great many lives today, pennon.
She had betrayed the Skeleton. She’d betrayed lord Thomas. She’d betrayed Will, and told the king’s men where and when to find him. One life already lost. Chauntecleer hurt, nearly killed. Her baby. It couldn’t be true. The Skeleton looking up at her from her sickbed.
Alright, then, child. Alright.
When she finally looked up, wiping her eyes, it was to find Joan standing in the doorway. “Come and see her,” she said. “They’ll send you out again before too long.”
They left pennon house and made their way to the head of the stair, where they could plainly see the rookery and its swarming hosts of bloody cardinals and swordbills. The Skeleton sat slumped in one of the old hanging cages, flyaway gray hair plastered by rain to her pale scalp, crows and butchers’ boys squabbling over her body’s meagre spoils. She looked to have been dead a day or more. In the courtyard below, workmen were piling cordwood on a pyre where Icarus’s body burned, wings curled up in sheets of flaking black ash, flames licking his great skull.
“He went mad when she died,” said Joan, her voice hollow. “Broke out of the aviary, killed one of the grooms. He was trying to get to her, but of course his eyes… he could tell she was close, but he couldn’t see her. It made him wild. The duke’s men…” She passed a hand over her mouth, tears welling. “I tried to get to him. Calm him down. He wouldn’t. I wasn’t fast enough. They shot him full of arrows. His breast, his wings, his… his head.” Tears ran freely down her face. “I can still see her riding him for the first time. The smile she had that day, like the sun coming out, and Icarus all full of vinegar and trying to throw her over the lake, diving and wheeling. She hung on so tight. So tight. ”
Lizzie was crying again, but there was no fury to it this time. The tears came freely. “Why did she do it?”
“I don’t know, child,” said Joan, and the loss in her voice was so terrible that Lizzie wished for a moment to never fall in love again, to fall out of love with Will so he could never do to her what Margaret Greene had done to Joan. “She never told me.”
