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

her, and it was still inevitable, and everything about her—Saint Blaise, the farmlands, the guards, the people—contributed to the patterns that enfolded her and drew her on toward that inevitable fate.

Ranulf was nodding gravely. “Baron Christopher told me t' ask if you had your letters, Mistress Vanessa.”

She wanted to cry. Christopher had treated her kindly, but even he had eventually bowed to the patterns. For a moment, she cleared as much mental space as she ever could amid the whirl of patterns and allowed herself to remember him. He was handsome and he was sad, and he had fought for her. It was like something out of an old tale. Save that, in the tale, she would have stayed in Aurverelle . . . with Christopher.

Impossible. She reached to the pouch on her belt, opened it, showed Ranulf the letters of introduction that Baron Paul had written to the mayor. “I ha' them.”

“Shall we go in, then?” said the captain. “I know the mayor's house. I can take you to his door.”

He wondered at her. That was in the patterns, too. Vaguely, she blinked at the sky, but she saw little save images, scenes, fragments of faces, and snatches of conversation that lay in the future. Far off lay death. Closer were Ranulf's doubts. She was tempted to say something to him about them, but she was silent. That much she had learned. She did not have to speak.

And then something else struck her. Choice. She did not have to speak. And that meant . . .

With Ranulf waiting patiently for her reply—he had, like everyone else who had ever had any dealings with her, grown used to her sudden lapses of attention—she sat, stunned, on her horse, transfixed by the sudden motion among the patterns. A moment ago she had seen only her entrance into the city, her first interview with the mayor. But now, mixed with those images of exile, were others. A long ride. The face of an old woman, her lake blue eyes bright with knowledge and love. A little town.

Somewhere else.

She started to tremble, but she suppressed it. She did not want Ranulf to see her fright and so become determined to accompany her straight to the mayor's door. She wanted . . .

The patterns blurred. More images. Other deaths, to be sure, but less violent. Impossibly, Christopher was there, too, almost lost in the blinding, visual cacophony of interweaving and contradictory patterns.

. . . freedom.

“Nay, Ranulf,” she said. “Thankee for your company, but I think I'll go i' the town alone. If I get lost, I can ask for help.” Her hands were clenched. Christopher's signet was a reassuring presence on her finger.

Ranulf frowned. Vanessa saw his doubt, but she also saw—and the patterns were shifting more and more quickly—that the captain would accede to her wishes. “Well, all right, Mistress Vanessa,” he said after a moment. “I'll leave you here, then. God be with you.”

“An' wi' you.”

He hesitated, still frowning. Vanessa did her best to banish his doubts by digging into her purse and holding up a coin to demonstrate that, yes, she had the penny gate toll. She saw another future forming. She wanted it. She fought for it.

Still obviously worried, Ranulf nodded to her, wished her good day and good luck, and turned his horse back towards Aurverelle.

Choice. She had a choice, just like Christopher had said.

“Do you need help, mistress?”

A woman stood beside her horse. Her gown was plain, but even through the patterns of future action and being that were now toppling rapidly into probability, Vanessa saw her red gold hair and green eyes. Straight and tall, a basket on her arm, she might well have been an ordinary townswoman on an errand, but she was a part of the patterns, too. A large part.

“I can take you in, if you are frightened of the city,” she said.

Vanessa shook her head. She did not want to go in. She had chosen not to go in. She pointed south. “Is thi' the main road through the Free Towns?”

The green eyes were kind. “It is.”

“Does it lead to . . .” Shifting. The patterns were shifting, the alternate future expanding, growing larger, unfolding like the petals of some immense flower. “. . . to Saint Brigid?”

“It does.”

“Then, thankee, but I'll be fine.”

The patterns wavered, then suddenly blurred and reformed. The choice—her choice—had been made. She had created her own pattern. And if that was possible, then . . .

“I'm going to Saint Brigid,” said Vanessa. She was smiling. “I'm . . . I'm going to find my grandma.”

***

Brother Jerome approached the duties of chief bailiff with the same finicky sense of detail with which he had once supervised a monastery library, and when Christopher entered his office that afternoon, he found a large map of Adria and eastern France already spread out on the big table. Markers showed the positions of reported free company attacks. Jerome had also tallied up the exact amounts of the losses resulting from the missing wool shipment, and was prepared with an admittedly tentative projection of future movement on the part of the mercenaries.

“It's hard to estimate anything exactly,” he said in his old, dry voice. “But since most of the fertile valleys of France have been stripped, it's logical to assume that they'll be moving into the passes of the Aleser fairly soon, and then into Adria proper.”

Christopher, though, was having difficulty keeping his mind on the free companies. Much as he tried to look at the markers that lay scattered across Burgundy and Alsace and Auvergne, his eyes kept tracking back across the Aleser, searching out Aurverelle, and then the road south, and then Saint Blaise. Vanessa would be there by now. How was she being treated? If those fat burghers dared to give her so much as a moment's tears, he would—

Would what? Raze Saint Blaise? Even his grandfather had never contemplated such a thing. Trumping up charges of heresy against the fiercely