He could not bear it. He unpinned the cloak and swung it off his own shoulders to drape over the stooped shoulders of the woman, so that it covered the child as well. At once the others grasped at it and tugged, trying to get it into their own hands, fighting over it.
“Stop!”
They shrank back, even the one he had gifted. The child in her arms lay still and silent. For all he knew it had already expired.
A sick despair settled on him, a weight far heavier than the cloak had been. He shuddered in the biting autumn wind, spun, and hurried back to his horse. A groom was there to lace hands under his foot and hoist him up.
“God save us from beggars!” cried Lord Amalfred as the hunt made ready to leave. Harness jingled, horses snorted, and his leashed hounds lunged toward the children, who scattered with screams and cries. Amalfred laughed and gathered his companions around him as they plunged into the trees. Foresters vanished into the wood before them, and far away they heard the solitary bell of a hound marking a scent.
“It isn’t right to mock them,” said Alain to the count, who had come up beside him.
Lavastine did not speak until they had left the clearing behind. “You can’t clothe them all.”
“Poor creatures. I would have given them my boots, but then I saw how they would fight over them and it would only be worse. Ai, Lord! What suffering.”
“It is a mystery, indeed.”
“What is a mystery?”
“Why God allows suffering in the world.”
“The deacons say it is a just punishment from God for those who have sinned.”
Lavastine grunted in a way that suggested he was not convinced. “I have listened to the Holy Verses, and it seems to me that they have not heeded the words of the blessed Daisan. Some things are within our nature. Just as lions eat meat, sheep eat grass, and scorpions sting, we eat and drink, sleep and wake, grow up and grow old, are born and then die. But wealth and sickness, poverty and heath: these things are brought about purely by the decree of Fate. Not everything happens according to our will. Yet we also have liberty to choose our own actions, as you did just now by giving that poor woman your cloak. She has liberty to make use of the gift or to cast it away, and the others with her may steal it, or leave it in her hands. That is the measure of our worth to God: how we act with what we are given, and whether we chose to obey God’s law whatever our circumstances.”
Hounds belled, and their belling blossomed into a sudden rash of barking. The young lords attending Lord Amalfred whooped and cheered and raced ahead into the forest, leaving Alain, Lavastine, and some few men who by reason of age or prudence chose to ride at a slower pace with their host.
Alain had lost his appetite for the hunt. “But surely sometimes desperation may drive you to sin,” he objected, watching branches whip and still as the forward party vanished into the trees.
“It is true that we aren’t made guilty by those things that lie outside our power, but certainly we aren’t justified by them either. Evil is the work of the Enemy. It is easier to do what is right.”
“You were laid under a compulsion. What you did while under that spell was no choice of your own.”
“And that, my son, is why the church must keep her hand closed tight around all matters pertaining to sorcery.”
All five black hounds broke into a chorus of barking. Steadfast and Fear bounded away into the brush. Lavastine pulled up and began to dismount, but suddenly Terror was beneath him, nudging him with his head as if to keep him in the saddle.
“I’ll go look,” said Alain quickly. Sorrow and Rage bristled, hackles up. They had coursed silently around to place themselves between Lavastine’s horse and the undergrowth where the other two hounds thrashed and barked within a thicket that rattled and swayed as if a wild wind had been bound into the spot.
“My lord count.” Several servingmen rode forward, but Alain pressed past them, dismounted, and with his sword out forged into the brush, batting aside branches, getting a mouthful of dry tern leaves as he shoved through. Sorrow followed him, still barking. Rage stayed behind with Terror. Steadfast and Fear had cornered something in the densest comer of the thicket strewn with brier and fern. He saw it, a flash of dead white darting here, and then back, seeking an exit. Dread hit like the blast of cold wind, making him shake.
“Alain!” called Lavastine.
“Don’t follow me!”
It darted past Fear’s snapping jaws. Alain cut. His sword hit loam, sprayed bits of leaves. Steadfast leaped past him. Sorrow bounced. A creature scurried away under the leaves. He saw it again where leaves parted and it darted into a screen of briers, that unnatural white gleam like bone washed clean and polished by the sea. He stabbed again at it but only got his hand scratched by thorns.