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

come to Hypprux, but perhaps if he made an entirely glorious fight of it, people would tend to forget the idiocy.

“My lord,” came a soft voice from outside the window.

Christopher looked over his shoulder and saw a fair face framed by dark hair shot with silver. Blue eyes flashed.

Natil.

“What—?”

“Hurry, my lord.” And with a slender hand, she helped him out the window and onto a narrow ledge. Sixty feet away was the inner curtain wall. Forty feet down was the ground. Christopher tried hard not to look at the ground, but Natil, perched on the ledge, looked quite comfortable.

“What are you doing here, Natil?”

A smile. “Helping you, my lord.”

“How did you know where I was?”

The smile again: gracious, kind, but, inexplicably, a little sad. “I knew.”

And then he saw that she was clad in garments of green and gray—tunic and breeches and soft boots—that blended softly with the color of stone and night. She had tied back her hair and tucked it down the back of her collar, but her beloved harp was slung over her shoulder.

He shook his head, bewildered—only Natil would go climbing about on the outside of a castle with a harp—and was speculating about her probable life as a burglar when the two groups of Yvonnet's soldiers met in the corridor.

“Seen him?”

“No. Didn't he come this way?”

“Didn't see him.”

“Well, keep looking. And—“

The man Christopher had struck wheezed out his last breath with a rattling gurgle, and the soldiers gathered around him with oaths and ineffective help. “Run fetch the leech,” someone said at last.

“But he's dead.”

“Run fetch the leech anyway.”

“He'll just want to bleed him. And he's dead. It can't help.”

“Dammit, it can't hurt. Do what I say.”

Eventually, the physician showed up to recommend bleeding, and the body was hauled away. The soldiers turned once again to the task of hunting down the baron of Aurverelle. “Where's he gone?”

“If I knew that, I wouldn't be here now, would I?”

The corridor finally cleared, and Natil rose. “We have a few minutes before they search this hall again.”

“We have to get out of here,” said Christopher. “Yvonnet wants Aurverelle and he'd be very pleased if I suddenly disappeared. Or died. An accident, you know.”

“Of course.” Natil looked into the corridor, nodded. “We will have to escape.” With unnerving grace and silence, she swung into the corridor, then reached back and helped Christopher in. “And we have Ranulf and the men to think of, too.” She paused, considered, looked up and down the corridor. “Do you want to worry about the horses?”

Christopher gaped at her. The horses? “I'll be satisfied with our skins. Preferably intact.”

Natil nodded. “Then let us go.”

She moved with an uncanny surety, slipping along corridors, waiting for search parties to pass by stairwells and corridors as though she anticipated their movements, occasionally beckoning Christopher out onto a ledge to wait while servants and soldiers argued and exchanged reports a few feet away.

Somehow Natil was guiding him through the Château with complete impunity, as though she read the future movements of the soldiers even as those movements were being planned. Given her behavior at times, he wondered, too, whether she could also see in the dark.

Quite a thief. He shuddered. She probably could have carted away all of Aurverelle between compline and lauds without anyone noticing.

A short time later, she pulled him into a cul-de-sac. “My lord, you must choose. We can either escape, you and I, and leave Ranulf and the men—I doubt that Yvonnet would be harsh with them—or we can attempt to take them with us.”

Her eyes flashed even in the dark. Christopher heard, distantly, muffled voices, slamming doors. It was late, and the searchers were baffled and angry. He was not as sure as Natil that Ranulf and the men would be spared. But escape for fifteen was more of a distinct problem than escape for two, not to mention the fact that the Aurverelle men were more than likely sleeping in the barracks with Yvonnet's soldiers. “I don't know how on earth we'd get them out. Unless . . .”

It was an insane thought. But he was, after all, mad. And he was angry enough to consider further madness.

“ . . . we had Yvonnet with us.”

Natil nodded. “I believe that would be the only way.”

Christopher eyed her. Quite a thief. And, as far as he could tell, absolutely loyal to him. William of Normandy had conquered England with Taillefer at his side. What might he have done with Natil! “You can take me to him, can't you?”

“I can.”

Of course she could. For a moment, Christopher wished that his grandfather had had someone like Natil. Maybe things would have been better. Maybe Roger would not have been mad.

Inwardly, he shook his head. Madness was not only unpalatable, it was indigestible. He simply could not accept it. “Lead the way, harper,” he said. “I think it's about time I had a little chat with my dear cousin.”

Out a window then, and up the wall. Natil climbed like a monkey, her garb invisible in the moon shadow, the strings of her harp glinting a soft gold in the starlight. Christopher followed more slowly, his shoulders and arms aching as he felt for patches of old and crumbly mortar that would offer a finger-hold.

Across a roof, down a drain. A stone gargoyle stared into Christopher's face as he locked his legs around a pipe. “I imagine you're one of my relations, too,” he said.

“Shhh,” said Natil from below.

And a few minutes later, they were crouching to either side of a wide window. It was early September, but the weather was still warm, and the shutters and casements were open.

Natil nodded. Yvonnet's bedroom.

Christopher waved his thanks and stood up slowly, steadying himself with a hand on the shutters. He gestured at the room within, raised an eyebrow. Natil nodded again. Yvonnet was there. Christopher did not know how she knew, but he accepted that she did, just as he accepted that she had known about Yvonnet's