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    Death and the Lady: The Hound and the Falcon, #4
    Death and the Lady: The Hound and the Falcon, #4
    Death and the Lady: The Hound and the Falcon, #4
    Ebook65 pages50 minutes

    Death and the Lady: The Hound and the Falcon, #4

    By Judith Tarr

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    About this ebook

    A story set in the world of The Hound and the Falcon:

    In the midst of the Black Death, in a nation constantly at war, the women of Sency have found ways to survive and even to thrive. They live well enough in their men’s absence, with their faces to the world and their backs to the ancient and perilous Wood. Then one day a traveler appears, a beautiful and mysterious lady who brings with her both danger and enchantment.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBook View Cafe
    Release dateNov 28, 2014
    ISBN9781611382853
    Death and the Lady: The Hound and the Falcon, #4
    Author

    Judith Tarr

    Judith Tarr is the author of more than twenty widely praised novels, including The Throne of Isis, White Mare's Daughter, and Queen of Swords, as well as five previous volumes in the Avaryan Chronicles: The Hall of the Mountain King, The Lady of Han-Gilen and A Fall of Princes (collected in one volume as Avaryan Rising), Arrows of the Sun, and Spear of Heaven. A graduate of Yale and Cambridge University, Judith Tarr holds degrees in ancient and medieval history, and breeds Lipizzan horses at Dancing Horse Farm, her home in Vail, Arizona.

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      Book preview

      Death and the Lady - Judith Tarr

      Death and the Lady

      A Story from the World of The Hound and the Falcon

      Judith Tarr

      Book View Cafe

      www.bookviewcafe.com

      Book View Café Edition

      July 30, 2013

      ISBN: 978-1-61138-285-3

      Copyright © 1992 Judith Tarr

      A story of love and loss and the price of immortality, written in honor of J.R.R. Tolkien’s 100th birthday.

      This is a sequel to The Hound and the Falcon.

      I.

      The year after the Great Death, the harvest was the best that anyone could remember. The best, and the worst, because there were so few of us to get it in; and the men who had lived through the plague all gone, even to the fledgling boys, in the high ones’ endless wars. The few that were left were the old and the lame and the witless, and the women. We made a joke of it that year, how the Angel of Death took his share of our men, and Sire and Comte the rest.

      We did what we could, we in Sency-la-Forêt. I had lost a baby that summer, and almost myself, and I was weak a little still; even so I would have been reaping barley with my sisters, if Mère Adele had not caught me coming out with the scythe in my hand. She had a tongue on her, did Mère Adele, and Saint Benedict’s black habit did nothing to curb it. She took the scythe and kilted up her habit and went to work down the long rows, and I went where she told me, to mind the children.

      There were more maybe than some had, if travelers’ tales told the truth. Every house had lost its share to the black sickness, and in the manor by the little river the dark angel had taken everyone but the few who had the wits to run. So we were a lordless demesne as well as a manless one, a city of women, one of the nuns from the priory called us; she read books, and not all of them were scripture.

      If I looked from where I sat under the May tree, I could see her in the field, binding sheaves where the reapers passed. There were children with her; my own Celine, just big enough to work, had her own sheaf to gather and bind. I had the littlest ones, the babies in their pen like odd sheep, and the weanlings for the moment in my lap and in a circle round me, while I told them a story. It was a very old story; I hardly needed to pay attention to it, but let my tongue run on and watched the reapers, and decided that I was going to claim my scythe back. Let Mère Adele look after the babies. I was bigger than she, and stronger, too.

      I was growing quite angry inside myself, while I smiled at the children and made them laugh. Even Francha, who never made a sound, nor had since her family died around her, had a glint of laughter in her eye, though she looked down quickly. I reached to draw her into my lap. She was stiff, all bones and tremblings like a wild thing, but she did not run away as she would have once. After a while she laid her head on my breast.

      That quieted my temper. I finished the story I was telling. As I opened my mouth to begin another, Francha went rigid in my arms. I tried to soothe her with hands and voice. She clawed her way about, not to escape, but to see what came behind me.

      Sency is Sency-la-Forêt not for that it was woodland once, though that is true enough; nor for that wood surrounds it, closing in on the road to Sency-les-Champs and away beyond it into Normandy; but because of the trees that are its westward wall. People pass through Sency from north to south and back again. Sometimes, from north or south, they go eastward into Maine or Anjou. West they never go. East and south and north is wood, in part the Sire de Sency’s if the Death had left any to claim that title, in part common ground for hunting and woodcutting and pig-grazing.

      West is Wood. Cursed, the priest said before he took fright at the Death and fled to Avranches. Bewitched, said the old women by the fire in the evenings. Enchanted, the young men used to say before they went away. Sometimes a young man would swear that he would go hunting in the Wood, or a young woman would say that she meant to scry out a lover in the well by the broken chapel. If any of them ever did it, he never talked of it, nor she; nor did people ask. The Wood was best not spoken of.

      I sat with Francha stiff as a stick in my arms, and stared where she was staring, into the green gloom that was the Wood. There

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