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

smiled through the tears. “You were right. I dan have to see the patterns. I dan have to look, an' if I look, I dan have to let them tell me wha' to do. I can just be me.”

Christopher clung to her, filling his arms with her common, warm humanity. “The Elves?”

“The Elves, Christopher.” She was crying. “The Elves showed me.” She tried to laugh, but managed only a fresh burst of joyful tears. “They helped me, Christopher. They're good people, an' they helped me.”

Helping and healing, Natil had said. They tried. Sometimes it all went awry, but at least they tried.

Christopher held her tightly. “They helped me, too,” he murmured into her hair. Despite his grandfather, despite Nicopolis, despite his confused and shamefaced vacillation between anger and gratitude, he wanted to believe it. “Dear Lady, Vanessa, they helped me, too.”

Chapter Twenty-five

Terrill led the way through Malvern Forest with silent, elven footsteps, but the secret path existed for twos and threes, not for hundreds, and the men and women and children of the Shrinerock estate plodded forward towards Aurverelle.

By the end of the second day, they had covered only about a third of the distance through the woods. Exhausted women gathered hungry children together as the shadows fell. The men collected bracken and dry leaves for beds and shelters. Paul's guards took the watch. Abbot Wenceslas and his monks chanted vespers and compline from memory, then helped with the sharing of a meager ration of food. On Terrill's advice, they lit no fires, for the drought had turned the forest tinder dry, and in any case the smoke would give away their position.

Paul sat down, his legs aching. “Are you actually expecting them to be looking for us?”

Terrill's eyes glittered in the falling darkness. “I do not know,” he said. “Once, I might have seen. But everything is obscure now.” He sighed, passed a hand over his face. “I see only your people, and great sadness.”

The figures of the refugees were a shadowed mélange of lights and darks: clumps and hummocks of human beings settling down amid the roots of oaks and beeches and rowans, trying to snatch what little sleep they could in the middle of a forest of trees and fears both. Paul knew their questions. He was asking many of them himself. Would they live? Would they return? What would they return to?

It was easy to see sadness. Shrinerock taken, the free companies in Adria, and the Elves fading. And . . .

He thought again of Jehan and the surprise attack, bent his head. It was inescapable. It had to have been Jehan. Terrill saw great sadness. Paul, too, saw great sadness.

“My lord.” It was Martin. Dark and lithe, the lad slid through the forest, stepping over sleeping figures and sliding through bushes and leaves as quietly as Terrill. And yet the unobtrusiveness of his comings and goings did not seem to Paul to derive so much from skill and inner harmony as from a desire for invisibility.

A stranger would not have noticed it, but Paul noticed. He could not help but notice. Martin was fearful, even ashamed, of something.

“Everyone's resting,” said the lad. “Prunella is having difficulty, though.”

Paul sighed heavily. “It's hard on the women that last month.”

Martin looked to Terrill. “I have heard, Fair One, that Elves can heal.”

Terrill's gray eyes were dispassionate. “That is true.”

“Can you help Prunella?”

The Elf was silent. “I am no healer,” he said at last, “but I will do what I can, young master.”

For an instant, almost wavering, and still with that sense of shame, Martin looked at Terrill as though he were going to ask something else, something that had nothing to do with Prunella. But then his gaze flicked to Paul, and he faltered. “I'll take you to her.”

And the two slipped away into the falling dusk.

Paul received bread and nuts and a fragment of cheese from the hand of one of the monks—“Benedicamus Domino.” “Deo gratias. And thank you also, Brother.”—and settled down to take what comfort he could from his dinner . . . alone. True, he was surrounded by the men and women of his estate, and Isabelle came from helping with the children to cuddle and hold hands with him for a short time before sleep, but Paul was nonetheless alone. He was the baron, and these were his people. They looked to him for help and for protection.

He felt his impotence. He did not have a castle, he did not have a sword, he did not even have a son. Jehan was gone. In fact, Jehan . . . Jehan might be a traitor.

Isabelle slumped against his leg, asleep. Paul signaled to a guard, and they stretched her out on a bed of bracken and covered her with her cloak, but Paul did not sleep. He was still thinking of Jehan, and of Martin.

Jehan, prideful and demanding, had turned his back on his father and his family because he had not been given immediately what he wanted. Martin, though, had never asked for anything. Ever conscious, it seemed, of his social position, he had not thought to be so forward. Paul had hinted about knighthood, but Martin had shied away almost with a kind of fear, as though he wanted nothing more out of life than to fade into faceless and unremarkable obscurity.

And now, Jehan had betrayed Shrinerock, and Martin was apologizing for his existence with every word he offered, every gesture he made, every expression of his dark face.

Ashamed? Of what? Paul did not know. He had never seen Martin like this save . . .

His back to a tree, he lifted his head and regarded the darkening sky through a screen of heat-gilt leaves. Never . . . save once.

It had been a few years ago, at Yvonnet a'Verne's coming of age party. Martin had disappeared in the course of the evening. With Yvonnet. And when he had turned up after an absence that had lasted several days, he had