The Forlorn(29)

Tentatively she reached out a hand to feel the eiderdown. The dream had painted it so realistically she could touch its softness. She swung her feet out of bed, and splashed them into the pool of sunshine rippling on the rag rug. The dream really had a pleasant solidity. It had to be a dream. Houses didn't hum.

The dream was becoming more complex. Someone for whom the word "round" was the perfect description huffed gently up the stairs. She was short, rounded and plump, with a round face, apple-red round cheeks and a few spare chins underpinning the round, warm chuckle that issued from a cheery mouth. "You're awake, lassie! To be sure, I thought you'd sleep forever. There's some clothes for you set out on that chair there."

Shael did not reply. You don't have to in dreams. She smiled, and stood up, walking across to the chair, supremely unconcerned by her nakedness. On the chair lay a peasant girl's bright frock, embroidered and lovingly adorned with fine stitchery. She looked at it. The round woman picked it up and held it against her. She raised her arms. The round woman looked at her in surprise, but stepped onto the chair—she was considerably shorter than Shael—and dropped the frock over her head. Stepping down from the chair, she busied herself with buttoning and lacing. Then she stepped back, looking at Shael with an odd expression.

It was strange, thought Shael, as the gentle humming sound caressed her. She'd never dreamed of other people crying before. Yet those were definitely tears on the round cheeks.

"Eh, lassie." The voice cracked slightly. "Except for the eyes, you're the image of my Merthly. You're safe now. That Tyrant bastard'll never find you here. They're all the same, these dukes, princes and kings: just a bunch of bloody murdering swine to us ordinary folk. 'Tis no wonder you've lost your tongue, wi' the horrible things you've probably seen. But no one will come past th' bees." She gestured toward the window. Shael looked out at a leafy glade set about with white-painted beehives. And the air was alive with their humming.





CHAPTER 6


The three marauders had thought that dawn would be a good time for their raid. The spider-web-thin trip lines had tipped the skep over, virtually on top of them. Shael and Mamma Mae were already up, getting the fire ready to melt the beeswax for the candle molds. It was a task they wanted done before the day grew too hot, and made it unpleasant in the kitchen. The sound of screaming came in through the open window. They ran to bolt and latch the doors and windows. Whoever the bees were after might otherwise run for the house, bringing the angry swarm with them. It was nearly an hour later that the bee master came back to the house, carrying the unconscious man. Baer's normally placid face was grim. He sighed as he put the man down on the settle. "One of t'others with him is dead in the pond. Drowned himself trying to keep down. The other one run off wi' half a hive behind him. I don't like th' look of this, lasses. Them were armed for trouble, but they don't have the ragamuffin look o' hill bandits or deserters. Look you. This one's wearin' a fine golden ring." For him, it was a mighty long speech. In the last nine months Shael had seldom heard him use more than three words in his rare sentences.

Shael was already busy loosening the man's collar. She looked at the ring on the hand the bee master was holding up. The fingers were already so swollen that the gold edges cut deep into the white flesh. They were not a working man's hands. Too soft and too white, with the nails clean and exquisitely manicured. It was enough to make her look twice at the ring with its small engraved claw clutching at a tiny solitaire diamond. She felt the blood drain from her face as she stood up, looking carefully at the features obscured by the black sting points and the beginning of swelling.

The cry that was torn from her was not just fear: it was also loaded with misery. "They've found me!" The beekeeper and his wife stared at her in astonishment. It wasn't what she said. It was just that after nearly nine months of silence they no longer expected her to speak.

In the beginning it seemed the easiest way to avoid talking of her origins until she left. After a week Shael had decided that if it meant keeping quiet for the rest of her life she would do it. She had by luck, and poison ivy, stumbled on a nest of security and happiness she never wanted to leave. The beekeeper and his wife were simple folk. People who, a month before, she would have dismissed as nonentities, whose way of life would have bored her to the screaming point in minutes. It had taken dispossession and terror to give her the parents she'd never had. She felt the tears start behind her eyelids, and instinctively turned to the reaching arms of Mamma Mae.

In the early days Shael had stood rigid, both shocked and aloof, when Mamma Mae hugged her. Why was this little dumpling woman holding and squeezing her? After a while she had become accustomed to it, understanding it to be an overflowing of love from someone who, while she had a million cheery words for everything else, had no words for this.