Through the open window, moon-beams had cast a soft glow around the hut. She paused a moment to breathe in the air and let her heart stop pounding. In the distance, outlined against the sky above her she could see the towers of the Monastery of St Cuthbert and St Chad, the high belfry a finger pointing toward the heavens, and beside the monastery the lower walls of the Convent of St Elizabeth, then the town, and nearer, to the left, the foregate where the sheriff’s armory was kept. Beyond the wall of the convent, the river made a ribbon in the moonlight, a silvery snake that bellied up to the bluff on one side, then stretched lazily across a woven tapestry of fields and farm houses, curled down beside another sleepy village, dropped rapidly into a steep ravine and finally in the far distance laid the tip of its tail in a lake that glistened silver in the bright moonlight.
Elspeth turned to go back to bed. The hut was still lighted by the dying embers of the fire in the fireplace where she had cooked the evening meal for herself and her father. On the table was the long-bread she had set out for their breakfast. She could hear her father’s breathing behind the curtain of the canopy bed, heavier than usual, but regular and deep. Elspeth had always taken comfort in her father’s night breathing. Its regularity had the effect of a clock—like the tower clock at the church. Her father’s night breathing measured off the night almost without variation. Everything was as it should be. She thought about the creature, the dragon. Would it come back?
A breeze came in through the window, ruffling her hair, then her bedclothes, then the curtain on her father’s canopy bed. Within the bed behind the canopy there was a soft glow, like the embers of the dying fire in the fireplace, but it ebbed and flowed in a rhythmic pattern, regular and deep like her father’s breathing. The only thing like it she had ever seen was the pile of coals in the forge at the blacksmith shop, flowing and ebbing with the movement of the bellows. She held her breath and slipped quietly in for a closer look. With one hand she steadied herself against the bedpost, and with the other she drew back the canopy—ever so gently—to see what made the glow in her father’s bed.
What she had seen was not her father at all, but a large animal, sleeping. She had watched in silence as the animal rolled over. It looked like a huge lizard, but larger than any lizard she had ever seen. Its upper back was covered with scales, like a trout maybe, which gave way to plates beneath on the creature’s underbelly. Its back was dark green, with an iridescent shimmer of yellow, but beneath, in the underbelly, the green lightened until it was almost white. The creature had four legs, the hind legs large and strong, the forelegs very small, with claws instead of feet. Each of the claws had three large talons, each talon the size of a man’s finger.
On its back were disproportionately large wings, too large for the body. From the size of the wings, Elspeth guessed that the dragon was still young, a pup or a kit, she did not know what to call it. A creature with wings of that size would need to be much larger in the body or the wings would be unworkable. Even so, the dragon was not small. She had the impression that if it were stretched out to its full length it might be larger than she was. On its head were two pointed, scaly ears, and large bulges where its eyes protruded slightly. The eyes were glazed over now in sleep, but were 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