Read an Excerpt
One
“Lady?”
She looks up and out the window of the carriage; night has fallen with a swift and total blackness. She waits to see how she will be addressed.
For the first days of their journey, through the damp, twisting, dark-green trees of Breizh, she was Lady Roscille, the name pinned to her so long as she was in her homeland, all the way to the choky gray sea. They crossed safely, her father, Wrybeard, having beaten back the Northmen who once menaced the channel. The waves that brushed the ship’s hull were small and tight, like rolled parchment.
Then, to the shores of Bretaigne—a barbarian little place, this craggy island which looks, on maps, like a rotted piece of meat with bites taken out of it. Their carriage gained a new driver, who speaks in bizarre Saxon. Her name, then, vaguely Saxon: Lady Rosele?
Bretaigne. First there had been trees, and then the trees had thinned to scruff and bramble, and the sky was sickishly vast, as gray as the sea, angry clouds scrawled across it like smoke from distant fires. Now the horses are having trouble with the incline of the road. She hears, but cannot see, rocks coming loose under their hooves. She hears the wind’s long, smooth shushing, and that is how she knows it is only grass, grass and stone, no trees for the wind to get caught in, no branches or leaves to break the sound apart.
This is how she knows they have reached Glammis.
“Lady Roscilla?” her handmaiden prods her again, softly.
There it is, the Skos. No, Scots. She will have to speak the language of her husband’s people. Her people, now. “Yes?”
Even under her veil, she recognizes Hawise’s quavering frown. “You haven’t said a word in hours.”
“I have nothing to say.”
But that isn’t entirely true; Roscille’s silence is purposeful. The night makes it impossible to see anything out the window, but she can still listen, though she mostly hears the absence of sounds. No birds singing or insects trilling, no animals scuffling in the underbrush or scampering among the roots, no woodcutters felling oaks, no streams trickling over rock-beds, none of last night’s rain dripping off leaves.
No sounds of life, and certainly no sounds of Breizh, which is all she has ever known. Hawise and her frown are the only familiar things here.
“The Duke will expect a letter from you when we arrive. When the proceedings are done,” Hawise says vaguely. Half a dozen names she has for the Lady, in as many tongues, but she has somehow not found the word for “wedding.”
Roscille finds it funny that Hawise cannot speak the word when, at the moment, she is pretending to be a bride. Roscille thought it was a silly plan, when she first heard it, and it feels even sillier now: to disguise herself as handmaiden and Hawise as bride. Roscille is dressed in dull colors and stiff, blocky wool, her hair tucked under a coif. On the other side of the carriage, pearls circle Hawise’s wrists and throat. Her sleeves are yawning mouths, drooping to the floor. The train is so white and thick it looks like a snowdrift has blown in. A veil, nearly opaque, covers Hawise’s hair, which is the wrong shade of pale.
She and Hawise are of age, but Hawise has a husky Norsewoman’s build, all shoulders. These disguises will fool no one; even the sight of their shadows would reveal the ruse. It is an arbitrary exercise of power by her future husband, to see if the Duke will play along with his whimsical demands. She has considered, though, that perhaps his motive is more sinister: that the Thane of Glammis fears treachery in his own lands.
Just as Roscille is a gift to the Thane for his alliance, Hawise was a gift to Roscille’s father the Duke, for not having sent ships when he could have sent ships. For letting the Northmen retreat from the channel in peace, Hastein, the Norse chieftain, offered the Duke one of his many useless daughters.
Roscille’s father is so much more beneficent than Hawise’s boorish pirate-people. In Wrybeard’s court, even bastard daughters like Roscille get to be ladies, if the Duke thinks they can be put to some use.
But as Roscille has newly learned, she is not useful to her father because she can speak her native Brezhoneg, and fluent Angevin, and very good Norse, thanks to Hawise, and now Skos, out of necessity, even though the words scrape the back of her throat. She is not useful because she can remember the face of every noble who passes through Wrybeard’s court, and the name of every midwife, every servant, every supplicant, every bastard child, every soldier, and a morsel about them as well, the hard, sharp bits of desire that flash out from them like quartz in a cave mouth, so when the Duke says, I have heard whispers of espionage in Naoned, how shall I discover its source? Roscille can reply, There is a stable boy whose Angevin is suspiciously unaccented. He sneaks away with one kitchen girl behind the barn every feast day. And then the Duke can send men to wait behind the barn, and catch the kitchen girl, and flog her naked thighs to red ribbons until the Angevin spy / stable boy confesses.
No. Roscille understands now. She is useful for the same reason that the Duke’s effort at disguising her is doomed: She is beautiful. It is not an ordinary beauty—whores and serving girls are sometimes beautiful but no one is rushing around to name them lady or robe them in bridal lace. It is an unearthly beauty that some in Wrybeard’s court call death-touched. Poison-eyed. Witch-kissed. Are you sure, Lord Varvek, my noble Duke, Wry of beard, that she is not Angevin? They say the House of Anjou are all born from the blood of the serpent-woman Melusina.
Greymantle, lord of Anjou, has a dozen children and twice as many bastards and they always seem to slip into Wrybeard’s court with their pale hair, sleek as wet-furred foxes. Her father would not have been shy in admitting to have had an Angevin mistress, though perhaps Greymantle would have chafed at the accusation that his line could have produced such an aberrant creature as Roscille. But the Duke said nothing, and so the whispers began.
The white of her hair is not natural; it is like draining moonlight. Her skin—have you seen it?—it will not hold a color. She is as bloodless as a trout. And her eyes—one look into them will drive mortal men to madness.
One visiting noble heard such rumors and refused to meet her gaze. Roscille’s presence at the feast table was so unnerving that it scuttled a trade alliance, and then that same noble (le Tricheur, he is called) carried the story back with him to Chasteaudun and made all of Blois and Chartres shrink from having future dealings with Wrybeard and his court of tricky fairy-maidens. So Roscille was fitted with a gossamer veil, mesh and lace, to protect the world’s men from her maddening eyes.
That was when her father realized it was in fact good to have a story of his own, one that could neaten all these unruly and far-flung fears. “Perhaps you were cursed by a witch.” He said it in the same tone he used to proclaim the division of war spoils.
This is the Duke’s telling of it, which is now the truth, since no one is any the wiser. His poor, innocent mistress bleeding out on her birthing bed, the oddly silent child in her arms, the witch sweeping through the window and out again, all shadows and smoke and the crackle of lightning. Her laughter echoed through every hall of the castle—for weeks afterward it all reeked of ash!
The Duke recounts this to a gathered audience of France’s nobles, all who may have heard the rumors and been spooked out of arrangements and exchanges. As he speaks, some of Naoned’s courtiers begin nodding grimly along, Yes, yes, I remember it now, too.
It is only when all the nobles and courtiers are gone and she is alone with her father that Roscille, not quite thirteen, risks a question.
Why did the witch curse me?
Wrybeard has his favorite draughts board before him, its latticework of black and white made dull with use. He arranges the tiles as he speaks. Dames, the pieces are called, women.
A witch needs no invitation, he says, only a way of slipping through the lock.
