Brother Cadfael 19: The Holy Thief

fervour. "You would turn any convent indoors-outdoors within a month. No, you'll never hear me give you that advice. It is not for you."
    "It was for you," she pointed out, with mischief in her voice and her eyes. "And for that lad Tutilo from Ramsey. Or would you have ruled him out, too? His case is much like mine. It irks me to be in bondage, it irked him to be a menial in the same house as a loathsome old satyr who liked him far too well. A third son to a poor man, he had to look out for himself."
    "I trust," said Cadfael, giving the linctus bottle an experimental shake to ensure the contents should be well mixed, "I trust that was not his only reason for entering Ramsey."
    "Oh, but I think it was, though he doesn't know it. He thinks he was called to a vocation, out of all the evils of the world." She herself, Cadfael guessed, had known many of those evils on familiar terms, and yet emerged thus far rather contemptuous of them than either soiled or afraid. "That is why he works so hard at being holy," she said seriously. "Whatever he takes it into his head to do he'll do with all his might. But if he was convinced, he'd be easier about it."
    Cadfael stood staring at her in mild astonishment. "You seem to know more than I do about this young brother of mine," he said. "And yet I've never seen you so much as notice his existence. You move about the enclave, when you're seen at all, like a modest shadow, eyes on the ground. How did you ever come to exchange good-day with him, let alone read the poor lad's mind?"
    "R� borrowed him to make a third voice in triple organa. But we had no chance to talk then. Of course no one ever sees us look at each other or speak to each other. It would be ill for both of us. He is to be a monk, and should never be private with a woman, and I am a bondwoman, and if I talk with a young man it will be thought I have notions only fit for a free woman, and may try to slip out of my chains. I am accustomed to dissembling, and he is learning. You need not fear any harm. He has his eyes all on sainthood, on service to his monastery. Me, I am a voice. We talk of music, that is the only thing we share."
    True, yet not quite the whole truth, or she could not have learned so much of the boy in one or two brief meetings. She was quite sure of her own judgement.
    "Is it ready?" she asked, returning abruptly to her errand. "He'll be fretting."
    Cadfael surrendered the bottle, and counted out pastilles into a small wooden box. "A spoonful, smaller than your kitchen kind, night and morning, sipped down slowly, and during the day if he feels the need, but always at least three hours between. And these pastilles he can suck when he will, they'll ease his throat." And he asked, as she took them from him: "Does any other know that you have been meeting with Tutilo? For you have observed no caution with me."
    Her shoulders lifted in an untroubled shrug; she was smiling. "I take as I find. But Tutilo has talked of you. We do no wrong, and you will charge us with none. Where it's needful we take good care." And she thanked him cheerfully, and was turning to the door when he asked: "May I know your name?"
    She turned back to him in the doorway. "My name is Daalny. That is how my mother said it, I never saw it written. I cannot read or write. My mother told me that the first hero of her people came into Ireland out of the western seas, from the land of the happy dead, which they call the land of the living. His name was Partholan," she said, and her voice had taken on for a moment the rhythmic, singing tone of the storyteller. "And Daalny was his queen. There was a race of monsters then in the land, but Partholan drove them northward into the seas and beyond. But in the end there was a great pestilence, and all the race of Partholan gathered together on the great plain, and died, and the land was left empty for the next people to come out of the western sea. Always from the west. They come from there, and when they die they go back there."
    She was away into the gathering twilight, lissome and straight, leaving the door open behind her. Cadfael watched her until she rounded the box hedge and vanished from his sight. Queen Daalny in slavery, almost a myth like her namesake, and every bit as perilous.
    At the end of the hour she had allowed herself, Donata turned the hourglass on the bench beside her bed, and opened her eyes. They had been closed while Tutilo played, to absent herself in some degree from him,