“Four Legs and a Tale (Part IX)”

By the time they slow their pace, Sian is favouring his far hind leg. He perseveres, lurching gamely up the trail until he reaches the familiar haven of the cave. Joel immediately jumps down to inspect the injured limb. Roanne stays mounted. “We have to go back for Kev.”

“We can’t. Sian’s lamed himself. I hate to say this, but Da will have to look at him.”

She wants to burst into frustrated tears. “Da can’t look at him! We’ve gone out of our way to keep Da from finding him!”

“And a fine fat load of good we’ve done, too,” Joel grumbles. He’s as wrought with the manhorse as much as with his sister. Going anywhere near the manor is foolish in the daytime, yet both Sian and Roanne decided to double the peril and visit after dark.

“She said his name,” Roanne murmurs. She glances down at Joel, keeping her voice low. “Did you hear her? She called him ‘Blais’.”

“You told me that’s his real name,” Joel reminds her, peevishly.

“Yes, but … ” She hadn’t believed it; not really. Not until Lady Alarice had softened and called out to him. “Joel, do you think it’s true? Do you think Lord Derrick’s brother really loved Lady Alarice?”

“Maybe you should ask if Lady Alarice really loved Lord Derrick’s brother,” Joel retorts.

“Of course she did. Does. Why else would she have called his name just now?”

“Why else would he have run from her?”

Roanne strokes her hand over the muscle of the manhorse’s shoulder. He stands immobilized, shaken but breathing more calmly since the end of their flight. She wants more than anything to ask him Joel’s question herself.

“You didn’t hear, did you?” Joel asks her.

“Hear what?”

“When we first came on Sian in the orchard tonight. He called you ‘Norra’.” 

* * * 

The sound of her name stops the breath in Sian’s throat. Is it possible? Can the boy know anything about his past? He has believed that the slip went unnoticed, but hearing her name again, spoken with the Lirosi lilt, sends a quivering warmth through his entrails. He would look at the children’s faces, but he is suddenly, unaccountably afraid of what he might see in them. Particularly in Roanne’s.

You have already seen her in Roanne’s face. And in her mother’s. If he looks closely, he will see her in Joel as well, in the arch of the boy’s brows and the wry quirk at the corner of his mouth. The brown-eyed girl with the straw-coloured hair. That is the difference, the hue of the hair; a slight, single difference, yet enough to cast doubt on the obvious.

An unbidden rush of imagery flows past his mind’s eye. The summer fair. Dancing to the music of fiddles and flutes, linking arms with a graceful girl, letting her go at the end of the round. Seeking her out when the dancing is done, knowing none of her words though their meaning strikes deep in his heart. But she speaks the manor tongue with a melodic accent when she comes to him in the dark, when she whispers his name and tells him her own …

Then the other voice, the woman’s voice, the woman’s rage, so powerful that it makes itself heard though she says nothing aloud.

Mine!

He closes his eyes and breathes. He was a man, then. He had two legs and no tail, but his hair was as long and blond and curly as it is now. He was Derrick’s younger brother, younger by more than a decade, and of an age with Alarice.

Alarice.

He covers his eyes with his hand, staggering under the onslaught of memory loosed without warning: Derrick, dark and furious, accusing him of theft and corruption, of perfidious betrayal, of incest and adultery though he, Blais, vehemently denies the claim. I have not touched her! but his brother disbelieves and storms from the room in a glacial fury, leaving him bereft in the deafening silence.

And Alarice smiles from her listening place in the corridor …

He shakes his head to stop the deluge. The cave reforms around him. Roanne yet sits, a subtle weight at best, on his back. Joel has ceased his inspection of the far hind leg. Both children are quiet, either disinterested in talking or mutually alert to the turmoil within their manhorse.

For he is theirs. He belongs to them as he once belonged to their sister, to beautiful Norra with the dancing brown eyes and the silken, straw-coloured hair. He belongs with them more than at the manor, for when he met Norra, he met his destiny. That was what Derrick refused to accept; not that his little brother lusted after his wife—which was easier to believe, whether or not it was true—but that his little brother had fallen in love with a Lirosi girl, that he wanted to adopt their ways and restore them to their rightful place as stewards of the land taken from them by force.

How they had argued, he remembers now. Again and again, almost daily, they had feinted and parried, debated and discussed, usually at full volume with no care for listening ears. Derrick is a man of action, quicker with a sword than his wit; he considers the natives to be idle and inferior, content to tend their herds and cheat their betters. Their one honest quality is their skill with horses, else he wouldn’t bother with them at all. Blais feels differently—Blais feels, after all; he doesn’t think as his brother insists he should—and Alarice is clever enough, spiteful enough, to await her moment. When she does, when she did, Derrick took her side against his brother and cast him out in a boiling tempest of self-righteous indignation.

And Alarice smiled from her listening place in the corridor.

He remembers nothing after that. Nothing. Nothing until he woke at the base of the sheer cliff and found himself reformed with four legs and a tail.

Alarice has seen him. Alarice knows what has become of him.

Of course she knows. She did this to me. 

* * * 

“We’d better get back,” Joel says, without much enthusiasm. He knows, as does Roanne, that Mam and Da have already discovered their absence and will be on their way to the cave. Whether their parents find Sian or not, the children are about to discover how deeply in trouble they are. By any account, the prospect is grim.

But Sian will not let them go. He puts himself squarely in the cave’s entrance and blocks every attempt they make to get by him. He paws the ground and shakes his head, his blue eyes more fierce than Roanne has seen them. “I think he knows something, Joel.”

“Like how much of our hides Da will take when he finds us?”

She studies the manhorse for a moment. He stands quietly while the children are still; only when one of them tries to dart past him does he rear or kick to discourage them. It’s like he’s trying to warn them … but they already know Da is going to kill them. There’s no fate worse than that.

“He won’t let Da hurt us,” she decides.

“What’s to stop Da from hurting him, too?”

“Besides four hooves waving about his ears? Not much.” Roanne has one hope, though—a hope that her brother, in his youthful stubbornness, has not considered. Mam and Da speak the manor tongue. It could be that the manhorse has a story to tell, and he wants to tell their parents. About Lady Alarice, perhaps? Or about himself, now that he knows his name. Though what he thinks her parents can do—will do—escapes her. She was certain that Da would take him straight to the lord. Now she is not so sure. It depends on what he has to say.

Whatever it is, he had better be convincing. Their fate is never more reliant on him than when rustling footsteps herald the approach of newcomers outside the cave. Sian moves to keep the children behind him. Joel sets his shoulders and prepares to defy the manhorse’s strategy, but on identifying the form that takes shape in the cave’s mouth, he sees the wisdom in relenting.

It’s neither Mam nor Da. It’s Lady Alarice. 

To be continued …

 

copyright 2013 Ruth R. Greig