still fully visible behind thick, clear membranes. There was something familiar about the eyes, and Elspeth later remembered thinking that it might be the way they reminded her of a lizard she had once brought home from Alcera’s garden.
The glow came from the dragon’s nostrils. It was very calm, very steady, flaring and ebbing rhythmically as the creature slept. In some ways the consistency of it was even reassuring, like her father’s night breathing, but had that hard smell about it, like tar. Elspeth backed up slowly, not taking her eyes off the sleeping creature. “Father,” she said once again, calling out quietly as she had done before.
Fletcher lay in his bed and tried to picture Alysse in his mind’s eye, but all he saw was what he could remember of the girl she had been when she died—forever nineteen years old, forever gone. He fingered his bedclothes, imagining they were the cloth of her skirt. He searched his memory for the smell of her hair and the look of joy he had seen in her eyes on their wedding day. He laid his head back on the hard pillow, imagining so vividly Alysse’s lap. He listened for her breathing and the soft rustling movement of the straw in the ticking of the mattress.
Such imaginings were more difficult now. So many years had passed, and with each year it became harder and harder to remember. He had heard that there were artists who could draw or paint an image of a person that preserved the memory perfectly, but he had never seen such an image. Such extravagances were only for the royals and the landed gentry, or those among the merchants who had money and had traveled outside the shire, but they were not for poor men like archers.
The only things even remotely like such images he had ever seen were the stained windows and paintings and statues of the Blessed Virgin in the monastery church where the villagers gathered for mass, and he sometimes stood transfixed before the statue of the Virgin, imposing what details he could remember of Alysse’s face and shape upon the holy artifact until the mother of God and the mother of his child would blend together into a single image in his mind. He sensed that somehow this was a sacrilege, but both women were holy to him and he had continued the practice nonetheless, telling no one. Sometimes he wondered how the one woman could have given birth to so blessed a child while the other had birthed only this agony of a daughter for whom he could find no place in his broken heart.
When he could bring himself to pray he asked that the Virgin would carry word of his grief to his wife, but those were rare times. He seldom found the words for prayer.
In recent years there had been another source of agony. As the girl grew she had taken on her mother’s features—the line of her jaw when seen from behind, the way she held her head as she looked at the sunset, the sound of the mother’s laughter a distant echo in the laughter of her child. At night it was the same. Sometimes Fletcher gazed at the girl’s form, sleeping in the other bed, but he saw the form of Alysse there, too, and he wished she were sleeping beside him in his own bed, so that each night before he fell asleep he had to force himself to remember that it was only Elspeth’s face he saw, this imperfect imprint of her mother, this face of the girl who had forever taken his Alysse from him. She owed him something for that.
❧
The following day, returning home from his rounds, Fletcher entered the town through the north gate, dismounted, then led his horse past the town-side gate of the monastery and the south transept of St Cuthbert’s Church. If he were not distracted by his concern for Elspeth, he might have entered for a moment’s reflection and prayer, or at least to pause before the church, if only to draw comfort or guidance from the nobility of its architecture and the sacred art with which it was adorned. He wondered how many of the villagers had noticed that he often paused to mutter prayers before the statue of the Blessed Virgin. Tonight he passed in silence.
St Cuthbert’s Church was the jewel of the monastery grounds, a soaring structure of solid granite, with a wonderful red and white rose window overlooking the high altar in the chancel, scenes from the lives of Jesus and the Holy Apostle Paul displayed in six pairs of stained glass windows with pointed arches running down the ambulatories on either side of the nave, and a fine set of Old Testament scenes set into the north clerestory windows high above, so that even in the dimmed and slanting evening sun the stone walls often seemed pierced with colored light. Outside on the spires were finely carved grotesques and gargoyles, intended, the priest said, to ward off demons and dragons should they appear.
If the church was the jewel of the monastery, the altar was the jewel of the church. It was high, gleaming, its paneled triptych gilt in gold. Set into the panels were shallow carvings of biblical scenes, the crowns sometimes set with jewels. The altar was the pride of both the monastery and the congregation of townspeople and villagers. Whether it was due to the general superstition of the peasants, or the fact that Warwick was far enough from the beaten path that the bolder sort of bandits picked more accessible targets, or were simply afraid of getting caught, it had been a wonder to him and a tribute to Sheriff Ranulf that the sanctuary was unlocked day and night, quite open and unguarded, and yet the jewels of the high altar of St Cuthbert’s Church remained untouched. Perhaps they were protected by the unseen hand of God.
Through an open doorway in the transept Fletcher caught a fleeting glimpse of an old monk, silently lighting candles in preparation for Vespers, and then, deeper within the chancel, the niche that held the statue of the Blessed Virgin. In the moment it took to take in this scene his mind flashed back with its usual dogged persistence to the single most momentous occasion of his religious experience—the funeral of his beloved Alysse. The flickering candles brought it all back. The coffin, the funeral march, the monks in the choir, Father Athanasius’ funeral homily preached all in Latin but translated for him by one of the brothers, the deep and unsatisfying sense of hollowness within him when it was over.
All of this transpired in only that moment it took to walk past the open doorway of the church. He continued through the foregate, released the horse to one of the sheriff’s grooms, and headed home. The path took him past The Pint and Ploughman, where he stopped for a drink to clear his head.
“Ale.” That was all he said to Sarabeth. She brought a flagon in silence. He failed to notice the way she fussed with a stray lock of her hair in the thin light of the doorway, or the bustling physicality of her body as she reached across his right shoulder to set the flagon before him on the table. There were so many troubles that required his attention, not least among them the emerging difficulty with his daughter, who was approaching womanhood with a petulance unbecoming a peasant girl in the year of the Lord 1253.
If nothing else, the goings on in the king’s forest told him the girl was hiding something from him. He could abide a strong-willed child, but not a liar. Then there was her obstinate refusal even to talk about the marriage he had arranged for her with that boy in Aberystwyth. There was the dragon the had appeared in the hut. Beneath it all, tugging strongly at the corners of his mind, was that troubling business with the wolf pup, with its flickering rapid-fire images revealing a deeply disturbing connection with Alysse, just as everything he did or said was connected in one way or another with Alysse.
When he looked up finally from the flagon of ale, Sarabeth was seated opposite him at the table, watching him intently. She was a large, rawboned woman whose ruddy complexion and long braid of thick red-gold hair reflected her Scottish ancestry. For all the energy she usually exuded, Sarabeth was also capable of that deep inner quiet of a woman accustomed to waiting. The world had not rewarded her wait, so that even though she was now past her prime, Sarabeth had known neither the pleasures of marriage nor the joys of motherhood. What maternal instincts she possessed she lavished on the patrons who frequented her brother Willem’s pub for ale, man and woman alike, but among these she paid special attention to those who were without the care of a wife at home, such as John the Fletcher who in his loneliness had occasionally sought out her help or advice about what to do with his daughter, Elspeth.
“So, John,” she said, eyeing him with more than her usual circumspection. “What’s
