Wicked Women Page 11

  But Candide had spoken to them, and they had loved her. She had passed amongst them, meeting the barons and lords, and Ralpe had seen something in their eyes that was part adoration and part pure lust. And when she had asked them to accept Malmer as their duke, they could not refuse her.

  There had been resistance within Daine, too. Many there held old grudges against the Tyrenese. Ralpe had heard rumours of all manner of plots, and heard many openly expressed opinions that were little short of treason. The Tyrenese witch, they said, had ensorcelled their duke.

  And she had gone to these men, these old soldiers and scheming statesmen, and she had spoken softly to them, and met with them in private, and smoothed away their concerns. Now she had no stronger supporters than those who had once spoken against her.

  In fact it was this very success that set Ralpe to biting his nails and waiting for the inevitable explosion. There were a lot of rumours flying around the duchy concerning Candide, and many of them focused on just how well she was getting on with various members of the court. Calumny, of course; scurrilous lies, except Ralpe had seen the way men looked at her – and most especially he had seen the way they looked at her after she had met with them behind closed doors. There was a yearning there that was almost unhealthy. Not a longing for something denied them, but a longing for a second bite of a particular cherry.

  And Malmer never shared. That was Ralpe’s abiding memory of childhood. If Malmer had the faintest whiff that his bride to be had been generous in her affections, he would fly into a rage. He would order executions. He would…

  Except he didn’t. Ralpe held his breath and waited, but the moment of disaster never quite came. When Malmer was with Candide he was besotted, utterly infatuated. When she spoke, he listened, and it sometimes seemed he listened to nobody else. Certainly he had little time for his brother, or the actual logistics of the wedding.

  For Ralpe, this was a marked improvement. Before the betrothal, his elder brother had made it a fond pastime of his bored moments to force Ralpe to dance attendance on him, to mock Ralpe about his predilections for study (and his other predilections), and to generally continue the bullying habits of their younger years. Malmer obsessed with his bride to the exclusion of all else was no bad thing, in Ralpe’s estimation.

  And so the wedding went ahead, and without a hitch. The assassins sent by the other duchies were all apprehended, and even the ambassadors from those same duchies left the ceremony with a wistful look in their eyes, at the majesty of the proceedings, and at the ethereal beauty of the bride.

  She made a speech. It had not been part of Ralpe’s plan, but who could have stopped her? She spoke about the terrible destruction that the war between the duchies had wreaked: the hardship of the people, the burned forest, the salted earth. With tears of sincerity in her eyes she had expressed her heartfelt wish that her marriage to Malmer, the union of Tyrenan and Daine, would be the first step towards a lasting peace between all the duchies. Even those who stood to lose a great deal from the union seemed moved.

  Candide came to Ralpe’s study frequently: perhaps once a tenday he would glance up and see her at his door. She, who had the entire courts of two duchies trailing after her like lovelorn swains, seemed fascinated by him.

  Now she wandered his cluttered chambers, examining the spines of his books, and the various stones and bones and oddities he had collected. The smile she turned on him, at his question, was that same mischievous expression that had first won over Malmer.

  And he could feel it: the magnetism of the woman. She was so perfect a balance of grace and elegance and invitation. No wonder that the men of the court, old and young, wooed her chastely with all the tropes of courtly adoration. No wonder, too, the persistent rumours suggesting that less than chaste things went on behind Malmer’s back.

  And Malmer didn’t seem to know, or else he didn’t care. When he came to council meetings, he went mechanically through the business that had once absorbed him. Where before he had been a hothouse of plots against the other duchies - scheming and dealing for the sake of outwitting his opponents – now, he was a quieter, meeker man. His policies were for a longer and less confrontational game, an ideology that Ralpe had gladly embraced. Malmer’s passions now were all for his wife. Indeed, he seemed almost sick with her. The eyes he turned on her were like a fever victim’s; an addict’s. There was almost a fear, Ralpe sometimes thought: a fear of something he was in thrall to and could not escape from.

  ‘How did you live, in the forest?’ Ralpe asked her, now. His curiosity had gone leashed long enough.

  ‘Do you know,’ Candide said, ‘nobody has asked me that question, except you?’

  ‘I have an enquiring mind.’ Ralpe raised an eyebrow. ‘They say the deep forest is a terrible place, inimical to human life.’

  ‘It is dangerous for those who do not understand it. The same is true for many places,’ she told him idly.

  ‘How did you learn language, then? There are no schools in the deepwood, I’d wager.’

  ‘The people of the forest edge, they speak. When they come to hunt, to burn, to cut, they bring their language with them.’

  He frowned at her wording. ‘But…’

  ‘You are distressed that a child brought up in the wilds can adapt so well to your courts and palaces?’ She made such a hurt-looking face that he laughed despite himself.

  ‘I suppose that is what I’m saying, yes.’

  Her wicked grin broadened. ‘But Lord Ralpe, for all the words in all the world, there is a single language that speaks to all of us, and that we cannot resist.’

  ‘That is a very elegant way to speak of love,’ he admitted. Her expression, in the echo of that, seemed almost caught-out, as if that was not what she had meant at all.

  ‘I like you, Lord Ralpe,’ she told him. ‘I like you because you are a man to whom peace comes naturally, and that is a rare thing in these lands.’

  ‘I have simple and restrained tastes. Which I suppose is also a rare thing.’

  ‘And you work for your brother’s cause, now he is committed to unifying the duchies.’

  ‘Considerably more so than when his plan was to sow strife between them,’ Ralpe admitted. It was not something he felt he could have said to anyone else.

  Her smile was fond. ‘Will you ride with me some day, to the forest? I will show you my school and my nursery.’

  This sounded like a dangerous invitation, but his curiosity was up and, despite everything, he found it very hard to refuse her.

  That conversation with her was a turning point. His eyes seemed to have been opened to that secret language of hers, written in the faces and the mannerisms of those around him. He found that he had started playing a game: spot those men who had been favoured with the duchess’s attentions. Oh, nothing could be proved, and he had no intention of making any accusations, but there was a certain look, now he was searching for it. There was a pallor, as of late nights; there was a redness of eye, a slight shake to the hands. At council meetings and at court, an increasing number of men – and some women – were touched by the same hand, their faces turned towards the same radiant sun. It was a sun they cringed from; a fierce and terrible centre to their cosmos, and yet they could never look away from it for very long.

  ‘Surely the forest is no place for horses,’ he suggested.

  Candide’s grin was back. ‘They’ll take us part of the way, as will our escort.’ She waved at the rabble of servants and soldiers and minor nobles who had ridden out with them. ‘And then it will be just you and me, Lord Ralpe.’ Beneath the coquetry, there was something new to her manner. Was there a tension, in her? He had never seen her worried by anything. Or was it eagerness, to show him something she had never shown anyone else.

  ‘And what of the beasts and the monsters?’ he asked her. ‘Everyone knows it is death to set foot in the deep forest.’ In truth the thought was very much on his mind but, at the same time, he could not resist the thought of somehow securing
safe passage to that place, never before seen by human eyes.

  Never before seen, save by Candide. She had come to them from the deep wood, chaperoned by woodsmen and charcoal burners and herb-gatherers. Like a creature of folk tales, she had come. She was the lost scion of royalty, so beautiful and innocent that even the monsters had overcome their savage natures and raised her as their own.

  ‘I speak the language of the deep forest,’ she told him.

  ‘It has a language?’

  ‘That same one true language we spoke of, Lord Ralpe. That same language that conquers all living things.’

  He raised his eyebrows. ‘Forgive me if I say I had not thought the beasts of the deep forest were motivated by love.’

  She laughed at him, for that, and then they were touching their heels to their horses’ flanks and moving into the shadow of the wood.

  It began as a pleasant ride through woodland made open and spacious by the attentions of woodcutters. Polite conversation murmured around them, hangers on at court trying for a smile off the duchess with some choice piece of wit. She favoured them with a look, a word, but all the while she was leading them deeper.

  Ralpe felt as though they were travelling back in time, in some strange way. Here, where the trees were that much closer together, was what the wider wood would have looked like before fire and axe had thinned it. Here the trees were old and getting older as they progressed. The signs of human presence were less – no more than the trail they followed and woodsman’s marks cut into the trunks. Conversation dwindled and the looks of their attendants grew anxious as the shadow beneath the canopy deepened.

  And now they were riding single file, winding in and out between trees that muscled in upon one another, branches interlocked like the limbs of wrestlers, the noonday sun dimmed almost to dusk. Strange things moved in the gloom, to lumber off when the light of lanterns was turned on them. Creatures buzzed in the air and slithered underfoot and cackled amid the branches.

  And Candide turned to their followers and said, ‘Lord Ralpe and I will continue onwards alone.’

  Ralpe saw not a little relief on many faces, but there were still some dutiful enough to protest.

  ‘My lady,’ said the captain of their guard, ‘from here on in must be the deep forest. That is no safe place for anyone. We should turn back.’

  ‘Captain, of all here, I have nothing to fear,’ she assured him. ‘I am going home, after all. And Lord Ralpe shall fear nothing while he is with me.’

  Except you, Ralpe thought, but he said nothing. He felt that he was on the brink of a great secret, and he had always been one for secrets: not the petty secrets of court intrigue, but the grand understanding of what made the world move, which wise men sought always and so seldom found.

  They left their mounts with the captain, and she led him deeper, by paths he did not see before they took them, by paths he would not be able to find again, to where the light was smothered green by the leaves above, the air choked grey. She led him between trees so close he had to suck in his belly to squeeze through; she led him over secret dark streams where pallid fish-like things clutched at the waterweed with fingered fins, and through shadowed clearings where the fairy rings of mushrooms stood man-high, and gleamed with their own furtive radiance.

  At the last they came to a grove where the trees soared tall enough that their upper branches were lost in a gloom of their own making. In a cathedral-like space lit by the luminous shelves and florets and clutching hands of fungi, sparkling with the glimmering motes that they exhaled into the air, she halted. She turned about; head tilted back, arms outstretched, as though dancing with the forest itself.

  ‘You have come here because you are curious, Lord Ralpe,’ she said.

  ‘I have.’ There was a leaden stone in his gut from the feeling that he would die there; that the price of his answers would be his life.

  ‘Then tell me this: what are the true lords of the forest?’

  He glanced about them: the answer seemed too obvious, but he said it: ‘The trees, surely.’

  She laughed. ‘And yet there are a hundred kinds of gnawing beast that daily crop their leaves and chew their bark and burrow into their wood.’

  ‘Those beasts, then.’ He felt he was in a folk tale, the young hero being tested.

  ‘And what of those with fang and claw that make a meal of them – that would make a meal of you, if I allowed it.’ Her words peopled the dark between the trees with hungry eyes.

  ‘And if I said those beasts?’

  She fixed him with a quizzical stare. ‘So what will you say?’

  ‘I say that, by your logic, the flea that bites the wolf is the wolf’s master.’

  Candide laughed delightedly. ‘Now you are thinking. Everything in the forest is a feast for the insects, Lord Ralpe: trees, beasts, living, dead, there is some bug that makes each thing its dining table. And yet they are not the dukes of this duchy. Within the bugs, Lord Ralpe, are worms that live out their lives through the innards of many different creatures in turn. And in the worms, my lord, are a thousand spores, and the spores riddle the worms that consume the bugs that feed on the beasts that browse the trees.’

  He swallowed and nodded. ‘I see. Your forest is a terrible place of things feasting on other things and being feasted on in turn, from without and from within.’

  Her expression arrested him: it was the first time he had seen her look upset.

  ‘Lord Ralpe, this is a world bound together in balance and harmony. This is life that grows as fast as it decays, and so can live eternal. This is what I was brought up to cherish, until they took me from here and sent me to your world. Your world is fire and violence, exploitation, starvation, division, the catastrophes unleashed on humans by humans for no reason than that you disagree over who owns a field or a ditch.’

  ‘Or a duchy,’ he pointed out.

  ‘It is but a greater field. Would you truly wish to shed so much blood and cut so many trees for no more than that?’

  He took a deep breath. ‘Malmer would: my brother; your husband.’

  She read the rest in his face. ‘But not you. I thought I had your measure. My lord, shall we return? Our escort will be worried.’

  He thought of what he said when he lay in bed with his chosen lover, an athletic young groom named Helvers.

  ‘The petitioners all complain of her, of course,’ Helvers told him. ‘Where before it was a matter of greasing the right palm, now their bribes achieve nothing. No merchant, no land-owner can buy preferment any more, not since she came. Now, all the lords think about is her.’

  ‘And you?’

  ‘I think only of you.’ Helvers shrugged closer into his embrace. ‘And for that, they would all bribe me to press their cases to you, seeing you as their last hope.’

  ‘It’s very different to how they once saw me,’ Ralpe observed. ‘But you must tell them, there’s no joy for them that way. I won’t be moved. And you mustn’t be bribed.’

  Helvers sighed. ‘A man could grow rich.’

  Ralpe thought only of the dark, dark forest, that consumed itself forever, and of Candide’s displeasure.

  ‘Don’t be tempted,’ he warned. ‘It’s not worth it.’ I don’t want anything to happen to you.

  He was still thinking of what Candide had said when he sat at his brother’s next council. He looked from one waxy face to another; their collective attention giving her a seat at their deliberations even thought she was absent. His brother’s rictus smile; the general’s shaking hands; the chief steward’s nervous tic: men possessed by the very thought of the woman in the next room.

  There had come, with Candide, a shift in policy in the duchies of Daine and Tyrenan. Where before ambassadors had been met with veiled threats and resurrected grudges, now they encountered overtures of truce and offers to bury old grievances. The more aggressive of them met with the duchess, too, and went away as infatuated as everyone else. Something was spreading outwards from the union of Malmer and
his true love – leaching into the soil and the water of the duchy, sprouting in each town, growing in the dark, unregarded places until it was ready to burst forth. It was peace, Ralpe thought; it was justice, spreading from wherever Candide laid her hand, from each footprint she left behind her.

  He was not bound to her by his longings, as were those who had – why try to hide it? – shared her bed. Still, he found he was a little in love with her, nonetheless. He was enamoured of the effect, while the rest all lusted for the cause.

  It was a week later that he was woken past midnight by someone rapping at his chamber door. He jack-knifed up, reaching for the dagger he kept by his bed. Assassins! he thought, as though they would have knocked. Ralpe had always feared assassins – sent from other duchies, sent by his brother, or just hired by magnates from the court who felt his proclivities brought shame upon his family.

  Someone stirred in the bed beside him, a comforting weight. Helvers. And wasn’t it strange how those proclivities of his didn’t seem to matter much, now, so that he could be in the company of one man most days, without fearing the old censure? It was as though the great and the good had other things on their minds…

  For a moment he just listened: no wide-scale panic, no sound of fire or battle, just that knock and a man’s voice hissing his name.

  He rolled himself out of bed, slipping a robe on and tucking the dagger inside it just in case.

  Ralpe did not recognise the man there, some slightly shabby-looking servant. The message the man had come bearing was enough to get Ralpe dressed and hurrying into the ducal palace as swiftly as he could manage, though. The court physician needed to see him urgently.

  The court physician was a decade older than Ralpe, thin-faced and with a distinct air of authority. He was to be found down in the cool cellars where he kept his specimens and his operating theatre. The air there was heavy with perfume underlain with the scent of corruption, a sure sign that he had been hard at work. When no live patients braved his clutches, the man was known to hone his skills by investigating the internal configurations of the dead. Sure enough, on the table before him, a suspiciously human shape was shrouded by a cloth.