‘Then go back to your bed if you have no courage within you, Mistress Maeb. Go back to your bed and wake in the morning and tell my lady mother that you will accept Saint-Valery’s offer. Your back will be straight and your pride intact, but how shall your soul fare, eh? Will you remember this night and, in your darkest moments, wish you had seen the sacredness of this place?’
It was his appeal to my lack of courage that undid my resolve. I had come this far, I would go further.
‘I am sorry,’ I said. ‘I was just so afraid. I cannot afford to lose my place in this —’
‘There are damn more important things in this world and the next than your cursed place in this household!’
He was so angry, and I so upset with myself for causing such anger, that the tears which had for long minutes threatened to fall now spilled over.
‘Please do not be angry with me,’ I said. ‘You do not know what it is like to have such uncertainty as to your place.’
‘Oh, sweet God,’ he muttered, and he stepped forward, seized my face in his hands, and kissed me.
I froze. I did not know what to do. No man had ever kissed me before. One part of me demanded I should berate him fiercely, perhaps even slap his face for his temerity, but another begged me to submit and to lean in against his body.
Stephen stepped back, giving a short, breathless laugh. ‘I do beg your forgiveness for that, Maeb. I should not have done it, for I think that you shall give your heart to another and I do not begrudge it. But I have blackened my name with that kiss. I will not do it again. Please, can we walk on now? This moment will not last forever.’
I nodded, unable to speak, and he took my arm and together we walked through the inner bailey toward the northern keep. Where we might go did not bother me. I no longer cared if any should see us. All I could think about was that moment when he had kissed me, what it had felt like, and the closeness of him now.
Stephen could have demanded anything of me at that point, and I think I would have submitted. But I also knew that he would not, and that for some reason I was safer with him now than I had been when first we walked down that stairwell.
Nonetheless, I wondered … he thought I would give my heart to another. Saint-Valery? Surely not.
We entered the garrison.
As with the great keep, there was no one about.
Stephen led me to a stairwell and, my hand in his, he led me up, further and further, around a dizzying number of bends, passing several doorways into different levels as we went.
Finally, when I thought I would never breathe easily again, he led me through a doorway and onto the roof.
It was shingled, and very slightly curved from the centre so that rain drained off into gutters and downpipes, but there was a walkway about its rim and he led me along it to the northern part of the parapets.
‘Look,’ he said, ‘the outer bailey. See there, the kitchens for the garrisons. And the buildings all about the foot of the walls are the workshops for the castle: the blacksmiths, the maille-smiths, the arrowsmiths, the bladesmiths … and there, stables, and yet more buildings too numerous to rattle off.’
I had thought myself over any amazement at this castle, but now it had taken my breath away yet again. The outer bailey was huge, perhaps twice the size of the inner bailey.
‘It is the least defensible portion of the castle,’ Stephen went on. ‘The ground beyond the walls is far less steep than that around the garrison, inner bailey and the great keep. If we were attacked, by a good force of arms, this would be surrendered first and all within taken into the garrison and inner bailey.’
‘I cannot imagine any force being strong enough to take this castle! My lord, it is impregnable, surely?’
‘So we hope.’ He tapped his foot on the garrison roof. ‘The garrison harbours hundreds of men, and more still in the great keep. There are few armies who would be willing to take us on.’
He glanced up at the moon, now dipping below the western ridges of Pen Cerrig-calch. ‘We have not much time,’ he said. ‘Maeb, do you remember what I said about this castle? That the legends tell that this was a sacred spot for the Old People who lived here in ancient times?’
I nodded.
‘Well,’ he said, and took a deep breath, ‘it is told that once a mighty prince of the Old People held his dancing circle atop this rock. On nights like this you can surely believe it.’
He put a hand on my shoulder. ‘Turn around now, and see.’
I turned … and cried out.
The great keep, all the castle, had entirely disappeared. Instead the flat top of the plateau where the castle stood was alive with torch-wielding people, their stature tall and willowy.
The Old People?
They danced in several interweaving circles, and in the middle of those circles stood a man atop the heartstone of the hill and on his head was a crown of light.
‘Look about,’ whispered Stephen, and I did so.
The hill and mountain tops were lined with tens of thousands of people, and all held torches so that the entire valley glimmered with life.
‘What is this?’ I said.
‘A dream,’ Stephen said, ‘of what once was here. I knew you would see it. I knew it.’
‘How …’
Stephen clapped his hands, and suddenly it all vanished, and all I could see was the solidity of the great keep, and the darkness falling over the mountains. ‘Some nights, they say, the Old People come back here to celebrate. On those nights, you can hear the wolves howling from the tops of the mountains.
‘And thus,’ Stephen finished softly, ‘the magic of Pengraic. Thus the reason I love it so. This is my home.’
I woke suddenly, jerking up so abruptly the bedclothes fell away from my body.
There was someone by the fire, and it took me a moment to realise it was the servant who habitually stoked the fires in the morning.
I grasped the bedclothes back to my breast. What had happened last night? Was it but a dream?
‘You’ll need to rise swiftly, mistress,’ the servant said as he straightened. ‘Your lady will be wondering where you are.’
By the time we broke our fast I had convinced myself that my night’s adventure had been but a dream.
When I rose from my bed I found that my linen chemise, kirtle, mantle and shoes all lay as I had left them when I went to bed.
By the time Lady Adelie had sat down in her favourite chair in the solar and taken up her stitching, Alice and Emmette by her side, I had all but brushed the memory away completely.
Then, as my back was turned, I heard Stephen enter the room and greet his mother.
My heart beating wildly, I turned about.
He did not so much as glance in my direction.
But then his mother spoke to him. ‘Stephen, you have such shadows under your eyes. Did you not sleep?’
‘Madam, it was a poor night for sleeping. Eventually I took myself to the top of the northern keep, where I could watch the moon rise and fall. Sometimes I imagine I can see such things in the soft, sweet moonlight as though the very mountaintops are afire.’
Then he raised his eyes and looked straight at me, and I knew that what had happened last night was no dream.
CHAPTER THREE