Forbidden Forest by Michael Cadnum

long vigil.
    She did sleep, although badly, waking moment by moment. But each time the dark was perfect outside. She could hear the watchman calling that long, high-voiced syllable that sounded to her like swell, swell , as if he were treading the streets imploring the moon to swell and grow round.
    â€œAll is well, all is well,” he was saying, the words grown smooth over the hundreds of nights of duty. Where did her beloved Matthew’s bones lie? she wondered. For all the love she still held for him, his face was blurred now in her memory. She prayed that he might be at peace.
    She put her hands to her face, to her hair, wondering how, when she was a wife, this new state would change her nature. She had seen the wives of worthy men, their cool gaze dismissing beggars, no word spoken. Would she be like that, or would she still spare a farthing for the minstrel and a loaf for the blind man at the city gate?
    Bridgit swept through the earliest gray dawn, calling sweetly that it was time for the maidens of the kingdom to stir themselves. Margaret knelt, and after her usual morning prayers added a special prayer to Saint Nicholas of Myra, the patron saint of brides. She had rehearsed this prayer for many months.
    In this strange body, arms and legs that belonged to her father but were soon to belong to a knight of wide renown, she moved the way a poppet might, a doll given unexpected but uncertain life.
    Bridgit gave her watered white wine and wheat bread for breakfast. Margaret dipped the bread in the wine. She could not eat more than a few bites.
    â€œEat well, my lady,” said Bridgit. “This is no day for a weak woman, nor the night to come, either.”
    Bridgit had arranged for the gown maker and his seamster to be on hand, and the mantler too, as Margaret stood in her father’s workshop—the only room in the house large enough to admit such activity. Margaret now believed she knew how a knight must feel as his squire and shield bearer, draping him in chain mail, girdled and strapped him, cinching tight the raiment of battle.
    Bridgit gave her anise seeds to chew, “So your wedding breath is sweet.” But Margaret knew the woman was simply providing her with something to occupy her tongue and her mind as the apprentices and their masters did their work, deftly, cunningly, full of courtesy and well-wishing.
    â€œToo slow, by my faith, every one of you,” said Bridgit.
    â€œI cannot walk or breathe,” said Margaret. It was not a complaint—to be so straitened by her layers of clothing was proof of the new station in life she was about to achieve. No new eminence, Margaret had been taught, could be attained without the price of measured suffering.
    â€œA lady can walk encased in stone,” said Bridgit.
    Margaret directed the mantler to leave them, and she stood arrayed like one of the Holy Virgins of Heaven, she imagined, and felt exactly that far removed from her usual life. Her father’s workshop smelled even now of crushed cinnamon bark, powdered mace, and other spices used to flavor wine.
    â€œI knew you would be so,” said Bridgit, weeping. “I knew you would be as a queen is, and I am thankful to Heaven I lived to see this day.”
    The wedding mantle was purest white wool, combed soft, the finest any draper could provide. Margaret wore it through the streets on her way to Saint Alban’s, the train carried by women Bridgit had chosen herself, women of “chastity and deep worship.”
    The street was not paved, and the damp earth, though so crisscrossed with ruts and hooves and footprints that it was flat in most places, was strewn with rushes and white flowers, pale irises, and white rose petals. It was proper that Margaret should keep her eyes downcast, and she did, although sometimes she lifted her chin and took in the brown rooflines and the dark shutters flung wide so that each window could be crowded with faces.
    Only before the church