“You betrayed me. The one person in all this world whom I have trusted completely.”
At those words, the baroness lost all trace of the silliness that so regularly painted her face more thickly than cosmetics. With deep sincerity she gazed up at her husband and tried to put out a hand to him, forgetting that she was restrained.
“My love,” she said, “I could never betray you. You betray yourself, but I will only ever bring you back.”
But the baron could not bear her words or her face. He turned away, and those standing nearest caught a glimpse of agony such as they had never seen in the eyes of any lord of Middlecrescent. When he spoke again, however, his voice was firm enough to say:
“Hang the traitors.”
Dovetree tried to scream, nearly choking on the rags in her mouth. The baroness turned and saw her lady-in-waiting being carried up the scaffold steps. “Oh!” she cried, struggling against her guards. “Let poor Dovetree go! She’s done nothing to merit this!”
“She betrayed you, my dear,” said the baron with deep bitterness. “Let traitors hang with traitors.”
Sir Palinurus shouted, and all the men of Parumvir raised an angry, threatening cry. The guards holding Prince Felix dared not move, for they saw the promise of war on those northern faces, a war they knew Southlands could not hope to win. But the dread of their master was great, and they stood frozen, unwilling to free the prince without the baron’s word, unwilling to drag him up that rickety stair and, with every step, drag their nation closer to destruction.
Felix watched Lionheart being pulled away, behind the collapsing Dovetree and before the confused baroness, who kept saying, “My dear girl, it will be all right! Lumé, child, don’t carry on so! You’ll be all out of breath!”
The baroness had strength in her. Just when one might most expect her to give way to hysterics, she seemed calm and motherly, smiling even at Lionheart as they were arranged beneath the nooses. Perhaps this was but the form of her hysterics.
Lionheart closed his eyes. As his hands were bound before him and he breathed the stench of the guardsman’s breath upon his face and heard the creaking of the scaffold floorboards, he pictured in his mind, as he had promised himself he would, a face. A sweet face with enormous silver eyes, otherworldly, strange, and lovely, crowned in roses.
“Beyond the Final Water falling,” he whispered as the noose was placed around his neck.
And Felix, standing below, watching all, wished desperately that he could look away. But he couldn’t. He stood staring, and he found himself saying, though he couldn’t hear his own voice in the din of the crowd, “Aethelbald, please . . .”
A wolfish snarl exploded over the heads of all those gathered.
An immediate hush fell upon the courtyard as everyone gasped and whirled in place, seeking the source of that horrible sound.
Another snarl, and now Felix saw the crowd parting, men and women falling back upon one another, dropping torches that sputtered out on the stones. This did not matter, for daylight grew keener by the moment. Indeed, it seemed as though the sun burst over the edge of the world quite suddenly, striking the eyes of all those present so that they believed they saw an enormous red wolf in their midst.
Then Daylily’s voice rang out against the stone.
“Unhand my mother at once, you dogs!”
No one moved to stop the wild, red-haired maid who sprang across the courtyard, past the guards, and up the scaffold stairs. She took a knife from the hand of the guard standing beside her mother, and in a single stroke (though the fibers were thick and tough with age), she cut through the rope. It fell like a dead snake upon the floor.
Then she turned and did the same to Lionheart’s and Dovetree’s nooses. And no one moved or spoke, for they all believed they must be dreaming. This wild creature in savage garments made of skins standing protectively before the three prisoners, her face so beautiful and so fierce, could not possibly be Lady Daylily! They must all be dreaming.
Even the baron, standing with his mouth agape, could not find the will to speak a command. His daughter turned on him with the ferocity of a she-wolf, and for the first time in his life, the baron was truly afraid.
Another voice, much gentler than hers, spoke then. Though it was mild, it drew every eye away from the wild apparition of Daylily on the scaffold.
“I have returned.”
Shadow Hand of Here and There. They all knew him at a glance. His untamed black beard, his strange, ancient clothes; the sight, the smell, the sound of old, old days that emanated from his face and every movement of his body as he made his way to the center of the courtyard, walking in a path of new sunlight. His frame was perhaps narrower than they might have expected, but his bearing was upright and his stride commanding, as befit any hero of old.