Maze of Moonlight by Gael Baudino (read with me TXT) 📕

“They don't hate you, Vanessa. They're just afraid.”

“People hate what they're afraid o'.” The brown eyes were filling with tears now. “Tha's wi' my ma and da sent me awa'. That's wi'the folk i' my village din't talk to me. That's wi' your folk run awa' now.”

There was a bench at the end of the avenue, and Christopher pulled her down onto it and held her while she wept. For a few minutes, she was no longer a feral little fox that had trotted into the main hall of Castle Aurverelle; she was, rather, simply a girl of fifteen summers, a girl who had seen too much pain and loss.

“It doesn't work,” said Christopher, rocking her gently. “If it doesn't work, then don't do it any more. Don't even try. I learned that at Nicopolis.”

“The . . .” She was seeing again. “. . . the battle.”

“Yes.” He smiled thinly. “You saw that right off, didn't you, my dear girl? Practically the first words out of your mouth.”

She bit her lip, and the tears welled again. Christopher shook his head.

“No,” he said. “No, don't cry. I didn't say that to wound. You saw it because it's become me, just like your patterns have become you. I don't play at knighthood anymore because it hurts me, and it hurts everyone around me. I gave it up. It doesn't work.” He took her hands, grimaced at the intervening bandages, and, without thinking, freed her fingers from their linen swaddling.

Flesh against flesh. That was good. To his grandfather before his reform, it would have been an encouragement to strip off Vanessa's gown and put her on her back in the middle of the lawn, but Christopher, though he had possessed his share of country maidens—and, God help him, his wife, Anna—was content with the holiness of this simple touch: one abandoned soul taking the hands of another and finding in that gentle clasp a faint assurance of companionship.

And maybe, someday, healing.

“Don't try, Vanessa,” he said softly. “Don't even try. Something my grandfather taught me: if you don't say anything at all, people will hear what they want to hear.” And was that bit of counsel the product of the years before or after Roger's remarkable reform? He did not know. He found that at present he did not care.

“But the patterns . . .” She was shaking her head violently. “The patterns say I must. The patterns show wha' must be, an' so tha's the way it is . . . unless . . .” She drooped. “. . . unless . . .” There was a sudden flash of fear in her eyes, the same that he had seen that first morning: the look of an animal caught in a trap.

“Unless?”

Her fear was stark, uncompromising. “I saw them change,” she said softly. “The patterns. I didn't think they could change, but when the legate cam up to me, I saw them change. He changed them. Everything turned about, an' then there wa' a different future. . . .”

Christopher finally understood. It was not Etienne's attack itself that had so shattered Vanessa. It was, instead, that the churchman's unexpected violence had fragmented her world of absolute predestination into an infinitude of maybes. Now, sundered from her firm, fixed, tragic universe, she was adrift in a sea of uncertainty.

“An' I dan understand it now,” Vanessa was sobbing. “I dan understand anything. Wha' does it mean?”

Christopher looked back along the avenue to the castle. Straight. Unswerving. He and Vanessa had walked the length of it to the bench they now occupied. But where they went from here—whether to the arbor across the open expanse of lawn, to the fountain that spurted cool water on even the hottest of days, or to the stand of beech trees that Roger had left deliberately haphazard and unkempt so as to better resemble a little piece of deep forest—was open to choice. Anything was possible. Even God did not know everything that would happen. Or if He did, He at least had the courtesy—

No. Courtesy had nothing to do with it. It was free will. “It means,” he said, “that you're just like the rest of us, Vanessa.”

She blinked at him, bewildered. “I dan understand.”

“You see patterns, you say . . .” Not having Vanessa's eyes, Christopher had no real idea what he was talking about, but he was mad, and therefore perhaps his babblings—like the ravings of madmen everywhere—might, by chance, contain a particle of truth. “Maybe what you see doesn't cause the world. Maybe it only reflects it. Etienne changed the patterns because he made a choice. You can change them by making a choice, too. You can keep silent.”

“So . . .” Vanessa looked at her fingers. The nails, after two weeks in bandages, were long and smooth. “So I shouldn't say anything about wha' I see?”

Christopher shook his head. “Not because you shouldn't. Because you don't have to. It's your decision.”

Vanessa had obviously become accustomed to heeding the maze of images in her mind as though they were immutable decrees, had fallen into the habit of passively accepting what came as inevitable. Now Christopher was telling her something different. But he was telling himself the same thing, for he had himself accepted passively, as a redeeming standard to set up against his grandfather's vices and virtues, the tortured logic of a theory of conduct and society devised by men who had never confronted the arid plateaux of Nicopolis . . . and his world had fragmented when it had been proven false.

She was looking at him with bright eyes. “Your grandfather . . .”

He caught his breath. Unerringly, positively unerringly, she had laid her finger upon his heart.

But Vanessa started to cry again. “See? I've done it again. Now you'll send me awa'.”

Christopher shook his head, still amazed. “Where . . . where on earth would I send you?”

“I'm going to Saint Blaise. I've got to go t'