The Cup of the World by John Dickinson Page B

Black-and-white pennants hung and flapped gently from spear-poles planted at the door. A dozen men were visible, sitting, walking listlessly. There were horse-lines by the stockade. His escort was still here, then. So he must still be in Aclete, too.
    She turned from the window, with her heart knocking against her ribs, and drew a long breath.
    The pile of new clothes was lying where they had left it, before a big glass. She tiptoed over to it. The dress she chose was simple and white, which she knew would go well with the colour of her skin. It had a high neck and buttoned down the front. She chose a golden girdle, but passed over the ornaments.
    Her fingers were trembling.
    She could not have said why she was dressing like this, unaided, when she had but to stir the sleeping maid to be dressed as she had been every day of her life. There hadbeen no reason why he should have disappeared from her waking world as suddenly as he had stepped into it. Yet her fear that he would do so had been real. She was shaken; and knowing that he had not gone was important too. She wanted to think about it. She wanted to think about …
Ulfin
.
    She had known him for years, and yet to name him made a stranger of him. It made him into that lord of Tarceny of whose house no man could say a good thing. He had sent heralds for her hand as if he had been any other noble in the Kingdom, and his men had been shown the gates within the hour. He had never mentioned it to her.
    And after all these years, thought Phaedra, trying to steady herself, what did she know? His face was handsome, his hands long, his thoughts quick. He was the march-count. She knew his father had been a brigand and a pillager, who had chased the monks from his land and harried his own people outside his walls; but he had died by his own fire, she had heard, some years ago. She knew of no other family. What sort of a lord was Ulfin, then, to Tarceny, this place of terrible name where people smiled and curtsied and pressed their hospitality?
    All the everyday things about him were strange or unknown. Only the memory of his voice recalled the familiar, shadowed dreams where they had walked together since she was a child. Her heart had leaped on seeing him, and had leaped again when her hand had touched him on the boat and assured her that he was there. And now he had not left her. He was waiting across the bay. She was here, close to him, and surely would see him again verysoon. He knew her better than any man in the world.
    It seemed impossible – a thing against all the laws of nature that she had learned or come to expect. In her mind it was like the moment when an eddy draws a leaf on the surface of some river pool upstream against the current. The eddy must break, the leaf must sink, and all be washed away; and yet, for a moment at least, some magical force sustains them where they cannot be. Like a leaf herself, she drifted without knowing it around the room. Her hands were locked together and her throat tickled with the memory of dark water. She was trying to imagine what he thought of her, but could not. The eddy drew her to the table before the glass. There was a hairbrush.
    She picked it up and began brushing her long, black hair, turning her head to watch herself in the mirror. She rehearsed conversations with herself, mouthing her words softly. All the time she kept the brush moving as steadily as she could, seeking calm in the steady stroke, stroke, stroke, as she thought of the face and hands of Ulfin.
    A sound behind her made her turn. The maid had stirred in her chair. She was barely awake, but she was staring at Phaedra with her mouth open.
    ‘Why can't I look like you?’ she said.
    Suddenly Phaedra felt a power rising in herself, and she laughed. ‘Umbriel writes what has been given, and why, and what else was given with it,’ she said. ‘But how do we read a book in which all things are written?’ It was from one of Brother David's sermons. Just then, she