Chapter 2
From her wicker and moss platform in the beech tree that still had its leaves, Kari fed Valentine while she spied on his father. Settled comfortably with her back to the tree trunk and her legs crossed, surrounding her boy, she watched the scene below.
She had left her idiot hulk of a husband less than half a day earlier, and already he stumbled uselessly about the trail she had given him, heard his loud sigh as he removed the dried meat she had spitted for him on a clear-to-be seen, sharpened twig.
He has tried to find me for a month before yesterday, when I finally allowed him to see me. Kari half-approved, half-disliked her husband’s stubborn persistence. The courtly side of her that sighed at the romances, whispered that Constantine had followed her into her country and kept searching for her because he loved her. I wish I knew if that were true. Does he care, or is it merely to recover his wife and look manly before his fellow knights and lords?
Still, she had kept him wandering for weeks, and while the weather remained fair and kind she did no other. Knights are said to love quests. This one is his.
Now, she watched him prepare to bed down in her woodlands for the night, part of her wishing to drop a boulder on his thick head, part of her longing to climb down to him.
But not while he wonders if Valentine is a fairy child, or not his own. That last had hurt her most of all and still hurt, weeks later.
“Thank you, wife,” he said aloud at one point, crouched over his spitting fire—the idiot has not used dry enough kindling—and restlessly chewing.
“Gratitude is a beginning,” she whispered to Valentine, who giggled and yawned, his tiny jaw moving in the same way as his daddy’s did, when he yawned.
“Your father is still a fool,” she said, her voice lost in the swirl of rustling leaves that hid the platform from view—only because the idiot does not look up.
Kari closed her eyes, sending a prayer to the saints and spirits of her lands, the fey whose elvish life her misguided husband had been starting to fear their child shared—because he had listened to his brother.
“Should I have stayed and fought the Templar?” she asked Valentine, murmuring her question into the soft blond curls at the back of his neck. Part of her knew she had left too quickly, given in too easily, but she had witnessed the evil workings of rumor and the church before, with her aunt Melisande.
Kari softly stroked Valentine’s flaxen curls and twirled a necklace of dried beechnuts in front of his ever-clasping hands. Valentine snatched the faintly rustling necklace and dropped it over his head, then he almost fisted her in the eyes when he broke the toy, trying to place the “beads” on her hair.
“Thank you.” Kari looped the length around one of her ears and obligingly turned her head this way and that to amuse her chuckling son, all the while thinking of her aunt, the shepherd Melisande. Tall, bronzed, wiry and mob-haired, Melisande had been Kari’s courtesy kindred only, for the rangy shepherd had no living family—a lack of kin that had proved fatal in the end. Once the wicked whispers began, no one dared to speak up for her, including my parents. The memory still shamed Kari, especially in light of what had happened.
I was ten when she drowned herself. All because gossips and that odious, incomer priest called her a witch. Witch she may have been, but auntie was harmless. Melisande had delighted in foretelling women and girls their sweethearts by peeling an apple and tossing the peel over her right shoulder. When the peel made a letter, she would name a lad or man. It had been a gentle pastime, hurting no one. Quite often, couples who came together from that tiny prompt would leave little gifts at the shrines and wells Melisande suggested.
It had worked for everyone, until the new priest came, a Norman full of Latin and staring down his thin nose at all “Daughters of Eve.”
The same phrase Constantine’s brother uses, and to the same nasty effect.
Brother Osric—Ha! As if that man was anyone’s brother—had turned the menfolk against Melisande, arguing over time that the shepherd was too independent, too much “almost a man.” Threatened in their cock and balls, the fools of the high waterlands berated their womenfolk for believing Melisande and her apple peels.
She had no one to fight for her, and when she broke her arm in the low woods and her flock of ewes was taken soon after, she chose to end herself, rather than starve or have to rely on grudging charity, or live caged in my family’s winter keep. The Church may have called her death an unholy suicide, but I term it murder-by-cleric.
Now, with her hawk of a husband and his thin-nosed brother, the church was interfering anew in her homeland. Worse, it gouges into my life, my bed, and threatens my children.
Kari rose on the platform, finding Valentine his rag doll and doll’s clothes from her pack. Her searching fingers found the tiny string of bells she had wrapped in a cloth in the bottom of the pack. Why did I bring these? As toy, as a means to drive off or summon spirits? I must have lost my wits, the night I fled my husband’s lands. It was clear she had not been thinking clearly—but then, I had other fears and troubles on my mind. Leaving the bells where they were, she swiftly reined Valentine to the tree trunk by means of a long sash, so her little one could wander and play but would not tumble from their wicker nest.
If he fell, would my husband catch him?
She watched him through the deepening twilight—Sir Constantine, crusader knight, but no longer her emperor. Why do I still desire him? I try to hate him and fail.
“Da, Da!”
Her son called to Constantine, who did not hear. She was glad to hear Valentine call her husband so, although her babe was at the age when any older man was “Daddy”.
Thank all the saints and the Mother that none of Constantine’s court, nor his haughty steward, nor Constantine himself, heard Val call out “Daddy” to other men! Thank the Mother that my fool of a husband has not thought to consider how his son could possibly know him, since his father left to go crusading while Valentine was yet in my womb?
Anger rose in her again, burning through the prickling heat of desire in her loins. She glowered at the man she had once been proud to call husband.
How tall he is, her desire whispered, how long-legged and lean and sinewed.
“No taller than a Norseman,” Kari muttered, flicking a twig at her errant spouse.
He has grey in his dark hair now, like a shaggy winter wolf’s pelt. It is attractive, adds a more imperial distinction to his looks, do you not think?
“A dog that molts prettily is still a dog.” Kari chewed restlessly on her own dried meat, no longer tasting it.
He came. Now her inner voice whined, as she did when she had toothache, or when Valentine had kept her awake all night because he missed his daddy. He has searched for you for virtually a month, leaving his own lands. He has shown not a snit of resentment against you for leaving behind his warriors and people. Surely that shows concern?
“He should not have left us first!”
The king did not agree. Would you have him foreswear his fealty to his overlord?
“Why not? He broke his marriage vows to me easily enough.” Kari reached out and shook a branch in her fury, glad that Valentine was busy dressing his doll in a tiny grey woolen robe, a little suit she had knitted last winter and meant to be chain-mail—like his father’s. That last thought made her want to weep, and she gripped her anger as if it was a life-line. “He listened to that brother of his, ahead of his own wife!”
You and he were apart, and for many months. His brother had his back in Outremer. Constantine is a younger son, accustomed to obey the elder. And if it were easy, why is he here, alone? He has left his retainers, his knights, his people, even his horses and hunting hounds for you, and ventured solitary into your kingdom, truly like a man entering the land of faery and danger, as the romance stories tell.
“He wants the child in my belly, his true heir as he thinks, and nothing more. He came by himself because he knows he would have no chance of finding me in my lands with a troop, or churned up my woods with horses, or worse, if he insulted me by hunting Valentine with dogs.”
As Kari ground out her answer, Constantine raised his head and looked straight at the wicker platform. Her breath stopped for an instant at the sight of his ravaged face. Always, he had the looks of a king of old, a magi, with a high brow, hooked nose, full lips and searching brown eyes that held a foil to his black-brown, grey-streaked mane. As the setting sun lit him, he seemed twenty years older, worn and dulled.
I did that to him by leaving.
“Kari,” he called up to her. “Please?”
Checking that her son still played and was secure, Kari kicked out a wicker hurdle, feeling only a worm of guilt when her husband reared back, stumbling onto his arse.
“How did you know I was up here?” she demanded. “You had no notion earlier.”
“When a tree rocks and there is no wind? Could only be you, wife.”
“Do not call me that!”
“You are such, Kari.” Constantine scrambled back to his feet, seizing mushrooms as he came. He held out the plucked fungi—does he remember that I love mushrooms? “For you and our son.”
And is there a death-cap among them? The acid comment hovered on her tongue, fatal and ripe to be spoken. With a shudder, she swallowed the poisonous reply, and not an instant too soon.
“Da!” Valentine hurtled to the edge of the platform, prevented from falling off only by his reins.
Constantine dropped the fungi and raised his arms.
To catch Valentine. That is something. The thought trembled at the edge of forgiveness, and then vanished.
“No!” He would not have her son. He called Val our son, but that was doubtless a feint. Fearful, mistrusting, Kari snatched back her baby, kissing his ears and face so her child would not be scared.
“You look well together, you and Va-Valentine.”
Kari had to sit down on the edge of the platform before her legs gave way. The shock of hearing Constantine stammer Valentine’s name blasted through her, leaving her trembling. She fixed on her husband’s haunted face. “You mean it?”
“I do.” He took a step nearer, looking as he had at the top of the waterfall, eager and...yearning. “I cannot say I am sorry yet—”
Her light-headedness froze into steel.
“Because I have not proved enough for you to believe me.”
She nodded, once, an acknowledgement, and leaned back to slip her son’s rein off the tree and back onto herself. Constantine watched, avid and silent, while she tied their babe securely to her breast.
“I will climb down,” she stated. “You will not touch us.”
“Agreed,” he said instantly, and backed away so quickly she would have laughed, had their trouble not been so perilous.
“When I come, I will fix that pitiful fire,” she said, wondering why and how she could speak of such commonplace things. But then, they had been at stretch for so long, what else could be a restart?
Constantine tried a smile but it would not hold. He scrubbed at his weary face with his long, clever fingers, as if trying to rub off his previous sins. “I never could make a fire like you.”
It was a start, but what next? With all that had passed between them, and all that had been said and not said, done and not done, how could they rebuild?
Mother of all holy water, I do not know how! But I must do something, and soon.