Armed in Her Fashion

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

Claude drew his knife when he saw the horned man approaching. He didn’t want to hurt Monoceros but he wasn’t going to let him get in the way.

“Your mistress is dead,” Claude said. “You have no more business with me.”

“I’m not sure she is,” Monoceros answered. “But Hell seems to be going beneath the earth without me in it.”

“Then let us pass,” he said gruffly.

“I am not here to stop you. I am here to walk beside you, if you will allow it.”

Claude squinted at him.

“Come over here,” he said, and pulled Monoceros by the hand, away from Gertrude and Beatrix.

They stood close to each other in the cold night, with the bleak little trees still burning on the horizon. He felt as if he could not see Monoceros very well, that he needed to see him in better light, but there was no better light to be had.

“Why?” Claude asked. “Why did you let me go? You saw me. You knew who I was.”

“I am not sure I know who you are,” Monoceros said slowly. “But I know you are an honourable man.”

Claude stepped back, thinking hard. Monoceros knew the shape of his body. He had looked it over often enough, when he was crouched in the cell wearing nothing but a tunic.

“Yes,” Claude said simply. “A man who failed to become a chimera.”

He held up his right hand with Margriet’s gauntlet still chafing it.

Monoceros, in answer, put his hand to it, and pressed it down to Claude’s side, and in that moment he moved closer to him and kissed him on the mouth. It was a hard kiss, a soldier’s kiss. He smelled of brimstone.

“You are trying to trick me,” Claude said after a moment. He let his hands linger on the skin like armour.

“No,” Monoceros said. “Yes. I am a brigand. I can’t be trusted. And I am a unicorn. The noblest of creatures.”

“I don’t understand you.”

“Then let me walk beside you for a while, and we’ll see if we understand each other then.”

Claude glanced behind his shoulder, at Beatrix and Gertrude.

“I have to see her to the coast, to get a ship for England. It’s what Margriet wanted.”

“No,” said Beatrix, stepping forward. He had not known she could hear. “We’re going to Spain. As pilgrims. But we’ll walk with you as far as Paris, and farther, if you’re going south.”

The Chatelaine lay dying. She knew she was dying, she knew from the froth of blood in her own mouth, the bubbles of blood pushing at the packed dirt in her nostrils. From the sense that she was distant from her own body.

At the edges of her vision she saw eggs running on spindly legs. The beast’s spawn. The reason she was dying. The beast screamed, and opened its mouth wider than it ever had before. The egg-creatures scampered inside and down came those jaws, clamped tight. The Hellbeast slid into its burrow, back beneath the Earth.

Carrying her husband in its belly, her husband locked away with a key that only she held. She sobbed and turned her face into the cold mud.

They would find her body, and her mace-key on it.

A tree was afire, a little way into the distance. If she could get to that fire, she could thrust the mace into it, and hope to destroy it. No one should have the key to Hell.

And the other mace? The one she had given Monoceros to destroy? Her loyal Monoceros. He had said he would destroy it, and no doubt he had.

She crawled in her torn kirtle and surcote through the mud. Every movement was a dagger in her breast. She crawled under the burning tree and when a flaming limb fell she lifted her arm and slammed her arm, the one bearing the mace, into the fire. A small fire, but perhaps it would be enough.