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

And Vanessa was in the Free Towns, safe, because Roger had failed. Christopher fought the thought away, for it made his throat ache with her absence.

“. . . and suddenly I didn't worship him any more. All his gardening and all his quiet little ways just seemed to me then to be the marks of a man who was a failure. So I tried to ignore the fact that I was with him. Roger of Aurverelle: the man who had lost the Free Towns . . . and his nerve. As far as I was concerned, I was there on my own.”

Natil nodded but did not speak. Her harp was on her lap, and she had folded her hands on it and rested her chin on her interlaced fingers. Her eyes were gleaming, and for a moment, Christopher wondered whether he saw a hint of radiance about her.

“The festivities w3ere wonderful, of course,” he said. “There were plays and pageants and processions . . . even a fountain that spurted white and red wine. People dressed up like angels and all that. Ostentation, you know, but I was impressed by that sort of thing back then. But what really struck me was something that happened that evening. You see, they'd strung a rope from the tower of Notre Dame Cathedral all the way across to the top of the highest house on Pont Saint Michel, and an acrobat walked that rope in the darkness. He held a lit candle in each hand. He was singing. It was . . . beautiful.

Natil smiled.

“I wanted then . . .” Christopher's jaw trembled. “I wanted to be like that. Here was this man, walking a tightrope high above the earth, carrying lights in his hands . . . and singing.” Christopher sighed. “And I wanted to carry light into the darkness, too. I wanted to be valiant. I wanted to be brave. I wanted to accomplish something. Instead . . .” He shook his head, stretched his feet a little closer to the fire, snatched them back when a log crackled and sent a spark flying toward his toes. “Instead, I turned out much like my grandfather.”

Natil's face mirrored only compassion, and she was silent for a time. Then: “And do you not carry light?”

Christopher blinked.

“You saved Vanessa's life. She was a peasant girl, but you saved her. And now you offer aid to all the people of Adria. Something that the barons of Aurverelle . . .” And there was a sudden flicker of pain in Natil's eyes, deep pain. “. . . have never done before. You chose that course of action, and you chose it freely, just as Vanessa freely chose not to speak of what the patterns said to her . . . and it was you who first showed her how to keep silent. Do you not call that the bearing of light? Is that not valor?”

Though he wondered how the harper knew so much about Vanessa, he could not argue with her. But he still had questions. “But . . . but what happened to grandfather?”

“Does it matter?”

“Yes, it does.” Christopher got up and paced about the room, his bare feet padding across thick bearskins and oriental carpets. “There was a reason for it all. There had to be. I'm not him. All right. Fine. But until I know what happened to him, whether it was a harper playing for him, or an acrobat holding candles, or . . . or Elves or witches or God knows what else, I won't be satisfied. And I won't be free.”

Natil nodded slowly. “I . . . understand. . . .”

Christopher turned around abruptly. “You're a harper, Natil. You know all the legends.”

Natil was suddenly cautious. “I know . . .some of them, my lord.”

“What do you know about Elves? Roger talked about Elves. He was obsessed with them before his change, and he talked about them after. He'd say . . . odd things . . . when I knew him—nothing ever definite—and he even mentioned them on his deathbed.” He felt a little ashamed: confessing Roger's obsession with fantasies was much the same as revealing that a cousin was a sodomite, or a grandfather a habitual rapist.

Natil had been caught off guard. “I know a little.”

“Are they real?”

It was a rhetorical question only, something by which he hoped to satisfy himself once and for all that fantasies and delusions would remain fantasies and delusions. But Natil looked away quickly, and Christopher realized that his sudden, impulsive question had actually disconcerted her.

Her reply, though, disconcerted him just as much, if not more. “They are.”

He stared. He did not doubt her. If Natil said it, it must be true. But if it were true . . .

What had happened to his grandfather? Elves? But that was madness!

There was a sudden scrambling at the windows, a frantic clawing and scratching and hammering. Startled, Christopher at first blinked in astonishment, then, his hand on his dagger, cautiously approached and unfastened one of the shutters.

It was pulled open from the outside, and a grotesque head was thrust into the room. Beetle-browed and pop-eyed, it was rimed with frost and snow, and it gaped and gibbered at Christopher for a moment before the baron realized that it was the renegade, fruit-throwing monkey.

A muffled shout from the hallway. “This way! We've got him now!”

His eyes stinging from the blast of driving snow, Christopher stared at the frightened, half-starved, half-frozen creature that clung to the slippery shutter, its eyes pleading for warmth and protection. Poor thing, he thought, for he himself was just as desperately looking for an escape from another kind of cold.

Elves? Was that supposed to be an escape?

“Master! Master!” cried Pytor from outside the door. “The monkey! Is it there?”

“Yes . . .” said Christopher, not really sure whether he was referring to the monkey or to himself. “It's here.”