The Serpent’s Tale

That disposed of the main players, then. She rested her face against his cheek in momentary contentment.

“Got your knife?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Cut this bloody rope.” He jiggled his bound hands.

She took another look at the soldier crouching the prow; his eyes were closed.

“Come on.” Rowley’s mouth barely moved. “I’ll be getting off in a minute.” They might have been journeying luxuriously together and he’d remembered a prior destination to hers.

“No.” She put her arms round him.

“Don’t,” he said. “I’ve got to find Henry. Warn him.”

“No.” In this blizzard, nobody would find anybody. He’d die. The fen people told tales about this sort of snowstorm, of unwary cottagers, having ventured out in it to lock up their poultry or bring in the cow, unable find their way back through a freezing, whirling thickness that took away sight and sense of direction so that they ended up stiff and dead only yards from their own front doors. “No,” she said again.

“Cut this bloody rope.”

The soldier in the prow stirred and muttered. “What you doing?”

They waited until he settled again.

“Do you want me to go with my hands tied?” Rowley breathed.

Christ God, how she loathed him. And loathed Henry Plantagenet. The king, always the king if it costs my life, yours, our child’s, all happiness.

She delved into her pocket, gripped the knife, and seriously considered sticking it into his leg. He couldn’t then go wandering about in a circle and end up as a mound of ice in some field.

“I hate you,” she told him. Tears were freezing on her eyelashes.

“I know. Cut the bloody rope.”

Holding the knife, she slid her right arm farther around him, all the time watching the man in the prow, wondering why she didn’t alert him so that Rowley would be restrained…

She couldn’t. She didn’t know what fate Eleanor intended for her prisoner or, even it was a benign one, what Eynsham or Schwyz might do.

Her fingers found his hands and walked their way to the rope round his wrists. She began cutting, carefully-the knife was so sharp that a wrong move could open one of his veins.

One strand severed, another. As she worked, she hissed bile. “Your leman, am I? No use to you, am I? I hope you freeze in hell-and Henry with you.”

The last strand went, and she felt him flex his hands to get their circulation back.

He turned his head so that he could kiss her. His chin scraped her cheek.

“No use at all,” he said, “except to make the sun come up.”

And he was gone.

Jacques took charge. Adelia heard him put a sob into his voice, telling the furious Cross that the collision with the bank had caused the bishop to fall overboard.

She heard the mercenary’s reply: “He’s dead meat, then.”

Jacques burst into a loud wail but smoothly took Ward off Adelia’s lap, shifted her so that she sat between him and Walt with the sleeping Dakers resting on her back, and returned the dog to its place under her cloak.

She was barely aware of the change. Except to make the sun come up.

I’ll make the sun come up if I see him again. I’ll kill him. Dear Lord, keep him safe.

The snow stopped, and the heavy clouds that carried it rolled away westward. The sun came out and Cross rolled back the sail, thinking there was warmth to be had.

Adelia took no notice of that, either, until Walt nudged her. “What’s up with he, mistress?”

She raised her head. The two mercenaries were sitting on the prow thwart opposite. The one called Cross was trying to rouse his companion. “Come on, Giorgio, upsy-daisy. Weren’t your fault we lost the bloody bishop. Come on, now.”

“He’s dead,” Adelia told him. The man’s boots were fixed in the solidified bilge water. Just another frozen corpse to add to the night’s list.

“Can’t be. Can’t be. I kept him in the warm, well, warm as I could.” Cross’s bad- tempered face was agonized.

Lord, this death is important to this man. It should be important to me.

For the look of the thing, Adelia stretched so that her hand rested against the dead man’s neck where a pulse should be. He was rigid. She shook her head. He’d been considerably older than his friend.

Jacques and Walt genuflected. She took the living soldier’s hand in one of hers. “I’m sorry, Master Cross.” She spoke the end words: “May God have mercy on his soul.”

“He was bloody sitting here, keeping warm, I thought.”

“I know. You did your best for him.”

“Why ain’t you lot dead, then?” Anger was returning. “You was sitting same as him.”

Useless to say that they had been bailing and therefore moving, just as Cross himself, who, even though exposed to the wind, had been active in preventing collision. And poor Giorgio had been alone, with no human warmth next to him.

“I’m sorry,” she said again. “He was old, the cold was too much for him.”

Cross said, “Taught me soldiering, he did. We been through three campaigns together. Sicilian, he was.”

“So am I.”

“Oh.”

“Don’t move him,” she said sharply.

Cross was trying to gather the body up so as to lay it along the thwart. Like Rosamund’s, its rigor would persist until it encountered heat-there was none in this sun-and the sight of it on its back with knees and hands curved like a dog’s was not one its friend would want to see.

Walt said, “By Gor, ain’t that Godstow by there?”

Allie.

She realized that she was surrounded by a glittering, diamond-hard landscape that she had to shade her eyes to look at. Trees had been upended, their roots like ghastly, desperate, twiggy fingers frozen in the act of appeal. For the rest, the countryside appeared flattened by the monstrous weight of snow fallen on it so that what had been dips in the ground were merely smooth shallows among the rises they interspersed. Straight threads of smoke rising against a cornflower-blue sky showed that the lumps scattered on the rise above the bank were half-buried houses.

There was a small, humped bridge in the distance, white as marble; she and Rowley had stood on it one night in another century. Beyond that-she had to squeeze her eyes nearly shut to see-many threads of smoke and, where the bridge ended, a wood and the suggestion of gates.

She was opposite the village of Wolvercote. Over there, though she couldn’t see it, stood the nunnery of Godstow. Where Allie was.

Adelia stood, slipped, and rocked the boat in her scramble to get up again. “Put us ashore,” she told Cross, but he didn’t seem to hear her. Walt and Jacques pulled her down.

The galloper said, “No good, mistress, even supposing…”

“Look at the bank, mistress,” Walt told her.

She looked at it-a small cliff where flat pasture should have been. Farther in, what appeared to be enormous frozen bushes were, in fact, the spread branches of mature oak trees standing in drifts that must be-Adelia estimated-fifteen feet or more deep.

“We’d never get through,” Jacques was saying.

She pleaded, begged, while knowing it was true; perhaps when the inhabitants disinterred themselves, they would dig tunnels through the snow to reach the river, but until then, or until it thawed, she was separated from the convent as if by a mountain barrier. She would have to sit in this boat and be swept away past Allie, only God knowing how or when, or if, she could get back to her.