C H A P T E R
Sixteen
Phillipe woke out of an exhausted, nightmare-haunted sleep as the sky began to brighten in the east. He rolled over, away from the light, gasped out an oath as the pain in his chest and shoulder startled him awake. He lay back, staring up into the brightening sky as he tried to remember what had happened to him. The wolf. He pushed himself up cautiously, grimacing. Isabeau . . . He found her lying near the fire, just as he remembered, asleep beside the wolf beneath Navarre’s heavy cloak.
But as he watched, the first rays of the morning sun flashed above the horizon. The light of the new day flowed across the snow and lit their peaceful, sleeping forms. They woke together, suddenly, as the metamorphosis began inside them. And caught inside that timeless instant of change, Isabeau and Navarre came face to face in the flesh.
Isabeau reached out as the wolf’s face shimmered, becoming Navarre’s. Her fingers stretched toward him—spreading, changing, becoming a feathered wing. The wolf shuddered, his spine unbending, his clawed foot lengthening into a human hand and fingers. Navarre reached out to Isabeau, as her yearning eyes narrowed, hardening into the cold, penetrating stare of a predatory bird. Navarre moaned in anguish, as his hand closed over emptiness, and his lover vanished before his eyes.
Navarre slumped back beneath the cloak as the hawk spread its magnificent wings, taking off into the sky. Phillipe bowed his head, aching with their sorrow, and his own.
Navarre sat up slowly, pulling on the clothes that Isabeau no longer needed, his face drawn. Phillipe untangled himself from his blankets, already dressed in the dry clothing Imperius had forced his shivering body into last night. He heard the monk stir and wake behind him as he shuffled toward the dying campfire. Grimacing, he bent down stiffly for an armload of branches to build up the blaze. Imperius had poured half a jug of wine over his wounds and down his throat as well last night, and he supposed that he would live. But he didn’t expect to enjoy it much for a few days.
Navarre got to his feet, looking around the campsite with an unreadable expression. If he wondered how the wolf had come to be sleeping beside Isabeau, he did not ask. His eyes flicked past Imperius, dismissing him, and settled on Phillipe. Phillipe held his breath. “My sword,” Navarre said.
Phillipe straightened up from the fire, his stomach knotting with anticipation.
“Where is it?” Navarre asked harshly, when he did not answer.
“Gone,” Phillipe said, meeting his eyes. “It . . . fell through the ice last night . . . crossing the river.”
Navarre’s face filled with incredulous loss. “Damn you! Damn you to hell! That sword was mine from my father and three fathers before him! The last bit of honor I possessed!” His voice shook. He looked toward the river and back again murderously.
“I can’t undo it!” Phillipe shook his head, his own voice sharp with tension. “But don’t you see? There is no mission of honor now. No jewel to be stuck in a sword hilt as a symbol of your meaningless death!” Navarre’s expression did not change. Desperately, Phillipe said, “But there’s a chance for life! A new life! With her, if you will only listen to us!” He held out his hands.
Navarre glared blackly at him, at Imperius. “I don’t need a sword to kill the Bishop.” He turned away toward his stallion.
“Navarre . . . Navarre . . . don’t go!” Imperius cried. Navarre did not even look at him.
Phillipe crossed in front of the monk, blocking Navarre’s path. “Go ahead then,” he said fiercely. “Kill yourself! Kill her too! You never cared as much for her as you did for yourself anyway!”
Navarre lunged at him with a curse. Phillipe dodged, not quickly enough. Navarre’s fist closed on his shirt, ripping the worn cloth, as Phillipe lost his balance and fell backward.
Phillipe lay panting in the snow, giddy with pain. Fresh blood oozed from the wound on his shoulder and trickled warmly down his side. He pushed himself up onto his elbows, looking down at the rags of his shirt, at the livid welts and gashes on his bare chest. He looked away again hurriedly.
Navarre stood motionless above him, staring down at his wounds in disbelief, like a man reliving a dream.
Imperius rose from his blankets. “It . . . happened last night. While he was saving your life.”
A tremor ran through Navarre. The rage drained from his face; sorrow and shame replaced it. He turned away abruptly from the sight of what he had done.
The hawk swooped down in front of him, landing on Goliath’s saddle. She cocked her head at him questioningly. Navarre gazed at her for a long moment before he turned back again to Phillipe.
Phillipe got to his feet, pulling the rags of his shirt together.
“Forgive me,” Navarre said softly.
“I can’t.” Phillipe shook his head, looking up.
Navarre blinked in surprise. A frown of dismay creased his forehead as he searched Phillipe’s dark eyes for something he was suddenly afraid he had lost, or destroyed.
Phillipe let the corners of his mouth curve up in a tiny smile. “It’s not my place, sir,” he said with a shrug. “I’m as common as dirt, just like my mother said.”
But Navarre did not smile. Instead his own eyes filled with sudden emotion. “Your mother did not know you as I do,” he said, his voice husky.
Phillipe glanced down, unable to face what he saw in Navarre’s gaze. A feeling he could not even put a name to filled him until he could barely speak. But he forced the words out. “My mother did not know me at all, Captain. She died two days after I was born—hanged for stealing a loaf of bread.” He listened with a kind of disbelief to his own voice telling the truth. Raising his head again, he said, “I . . . wasn’t trying to be a hero last night, it’s just that . . . I . . . never had a friend before.”
Navarre’s arms reached out and pulled Phillipe to him in a gentle bear hug. Phillipe grinned, holding on, all pain forgotten.
Navarre stood looking down into the hole that Phillipe and Imperius had dug to trap the wolf. They had told him haltingly about last night, of their absurd and nearly fatal attempt to capture him. He looked back at them again, raising his eyebrows. They stood before him with heads hanging like guilty children.
“We hoped to . . . reason with you,” Phillipe said in a small voice, daring to look up at him again.
Imperius nodded. “At the very least—to make sure you didn’t arrive in Aquila until tomorrow, when the time will be right.”
Navarre studied their determined faces, feeling as if he actually saw clearly for the first time in years. What Imperius claimed was sheer insanity—and yet . . . “You both believe . . . enough to do this?” He gestured at the pit. The hawk circled down to him, settling on his wrist.
“To tell the truth, sir, we didn’t know what to do,” Phillipe said. He glanced at the hawk. “Digging the pit was her idea.”
Navarre looked at the hawk, surprised, and yet somehow not surprised at all. “Three against one, is it?” he said, resigned. The bird looked at him uncomprehendingly. She spread her wings, launching off into the sky again. He watched her fly, awed as he always was by her grace and strength, the beauty and freedom of her flight. And yet always she returned to him, because the bond they shared was stronger than instinct, or life itself.
He looked down again. He must truly have been mad, to have been so blind—to surrender to the Bishop’s evil, to willingly throw away their lives. He could not sacrifice her life, or even his own, on a useless, suicidal vendetta, as long as any hope of breaking the curse remained, no matter how small—or how insane.
He glanced into the hole again, for a brief moment picturing himself there, a snarling animal trapped in a pit. It was what he had become by day as well as by night, these past two years. But no longer. His mind was free—and suddenly it showed him the flawless disguise that would take him past the walls and the guards, and into Aquila alive. A disguise as much a part of him as his own skin . . .
He looked back at Phillipe and Imperius. “Then l
et me show you hopeless idiots how to trap a wolf.”
The monk and the boy gaped at him, then looked back at each other in astounded relief, as they realized that they had won.
They worked through the morning under his direction, cutting branches to construct a cage, lashing them together with pieces of torn blanket. At last he was satisfied that they had a trap no wolf could escape from . . . not even himself.
They loaded the cage onto Imperius’s cart, and traveled on down the mountainside until they reached the foothills overlooking the city. There they made camp for the last time, waiting for sunset. As the evening drew near, Navarre hid his saddle and weapons beneath Imperius’s belongings in the cart and hitched Goliath to its traces.
Then he left the others, to stand alone on the sheer stone precipice, gazing down at Aquila, as he had stood and studied it through countless days during the past two years. This time, at last, the city walls did not look impenetrable or the towers of Aquila Castle as unreachable as heaven. The hawk launched from his wrist into the air, stretching her wings in one last flight before nightfall. He watched her fly with an ache in his chest, and started back to the camp.
He looked down at the cage sitting on the ground by the fire . . . waiting for him. He sighed. “So much has to go exactly as planned—and nothing in my life ever has.” He faced the others: Imperius, who had betrayed Isabeau and himself out of weakness, but who stood ready now to give up his own life if necessary to save them. And Phillipe, ready to risk his life for them for a reason that was even more extraordinary and rare. This might be the last time he ever saw either one of them . . .
He let his eyes record every detail of their faces. “If you should be the ones to survive,” he said softly, “think well of me. And if God has chosen to sacrifice us all—He has blessed me with the two most loyal friends a man ever had.”
A shriek filled the air above him as the hawk swooped down to his arm. He caressed her gently, his eyes blurring until she seemed to glow inside a halo of light. “We have known true love, Isabeau,” he whispered. “No one could ask for more.”
C H A P T E R
Seventeen
Blazing campfires lit up the moonless night before the walls of Aquila. Marquet had ordered his men back to stand guard in force before the city gates, as clergy gathered from miles around to give their confessions to the Bishop. Navarre was still at large, and the Bishop’s mood on this eve of the holy day was distinctly unforgiving. Marquet knew, as His Grace did, that the influx of strangers offered Navarre a perfect opportunity to slip into the city. And Marquet knew, as the Bishop did, that his life depended on seeing that it didn’t happen.
The guardsmen huddled close to the campfires among their tents, trying to keep the night’s chill away, as countless abbots and abbesses, priests and friars and nuns, made their way through the encampments toward the arching bridge and the well-watched gates of the city.
Imperius sighed heavily, releasing his held breath at last as he guided his cart along the Aquila road through the encampments. Isabeau sat beside him, wearing a monk’s robe, her face hooded by the cowl. As he had hoped, no one gave them more than a cursory glance as they approached, two among so many religious pilgrims. Most of the glances went to Navarre’s stallion, docilely drawing the cart. In the back of the cart, the wolf lay silently in its cage, hidden beneath a blanket. And beneath the cart Phillipe lay hidden too, waiting for the moment when he would slip away to play his own role in their plan.
“God’s mercy . . . God’s mercy . . .” Imperius greeted the guards warmly, lifting his hand to bless them, as the cart passed through another camp, the final one before the city gates. Isabeau glanced nervously at him; he nodded in placid reassurance, wishing silently that he had not given up the last bit of his wine.
As they approached the bridge he slowed his cart, allowing other pilgrims to pass ahead of him; allowing Phillipe a moment in the shadows and confusion to drop from beneath the cart and disappear under the bridge’s arch. Then he drove on, with his heart in his throat, watching the gates loom above them.
A huge, surly guardsman stepped out in front of the cart, raising his hand. Imperius stopped the stallion obediently. The guard circled them slowly, peered with suspicion at the covered cage. Imperius took a deep breath. “A surprise gift for His Grace, my son. From the devoted people of my parish.”
The guard ignored him, and reached into the cart abruptly to jerk away the blanket covering the cage. The wolf snarled and sprang to its feet, snapping at the guard’s hand through the cage bars. The guard leaped back with a startled grunt.
“A fine pelt for his wall . . .” Imperius murmured as the guard came forward again, his suspicious eyes now peering at the cart’s human occupants. He stopped beside Isabeau, who sat slumped over, her face hidden beneath her hood.
“. . . A luxurious rug for his floor . . .” Imperius droned on, with an earnest smile. The guard reached up and peeled back Isabeau’s hood. She jerked around, her face filled with fear. Imperius felt her shudder as the guard leered at her.
“A . . . most pious daughter of the Church,” Imperius said hastily. “Poor thing’s deaf and dumb. Excuse her nervousness. It’s her first time in Aquila.”
The guard’s malicious grin widened. “Deaf and dumb, eh? That’s how I like them too, Father . . .” He reached up. touching her cheek with a filthy hand. She flinched away in disgust.
The wolf lunged against the cage bars with a furious snarl. Its paw shot out; claws raked the guard’s exposed arm.
The guard leaped back, his face filling with fury. He drew his sword, his mouth pressed tight. “I’ve never had the pleasure of killing a wolf before,” he muttered.
Isabeau gasped. Imperius caught her arm in painful warning as she would have thrown herself off the cart at the guard. “Odd,” he said loudly, “that’s precisely what His Grace said.”
The guard froze and looked back at the monk with an uncertain frown.
“When he heard about the gift,” Imperius bent his head at the cage. “ ‘I’ve never had the pleasure.’ ” He shrugged. “But I’m sure he’ll understand you had your reasons. He’s a notoriously forgiving man.”
The guard hesitated, looking back at the wolf. He lowered his sword truculently, his frown deepening. “Pass on through, Father.”
Imperius clucked to the stallion and started on. “May God grant you your just reward, my son.”
Watching from the shadows below the bridge, Phillipe sighed as he saw the cart pass safely through the gates at last. “We’ve come full circle, Lord,” he murmured. “I’d like to think there’s some higher meaning to all this.” He looked up at the sky. “It certainly would reflect well on you.” He removed the coil of rope from beneath his tunic, checked it carefully before he slung it over his head and shoulder. Then, taking a deep breath, he slipped into the chill black waters of the moat.
He swam toward the grating he had escaped through only days ago . . . days that seemed somehow to have become a lifetime. Fighting the current of the outflow, he caught hold of the grating. He took a deep breath, and then another, with a fervent prayer that this was not about to become a lifetime literally—a painfully short one. Holding his third breath, he ducked under the surface.
He pulled himself downward along the grate, battered by the cold, surging water. His hands felt their way to the gap between the bars at the bottom of the grating, and he dragged himself under it. The current pried at his fingers, nearly sweeping him loose and carrying him away over and over again, as he squirmed like an eel past the clog of debris trapped behind the grate.
He shot to the surface again, gasping for air in the reeking darkness. He was inside the walls. He climbed up the slippery grating, more grateful than he had ever expected to be that he had already done this once the hard way. Flopping onto the ancient access ledge carved into the tunnel wall, he huddled there, feeling for the flask of wine that Imperius had given him to warm his shivering, aching body. He would have t
o wait for dawn, for enough light to filter down into the caverns to let him find his way back to the cathedral. He took a long swig of wine and sighed, promising himself that at least the hard part was over . . .
Imperius and Isabeau exchanged smiles of heartfelt relief as they drove through the dark, deserted back streets of Aquila, searching for the unobtrusive alleyway Imperius had chosen as their hiding place while they waited for the new day. At last they reached the quiet cul-de-sac, surrounded by windowless walls and piles of hay from a nearby stable. Imperius halted Goliath with a nod of satisfaction. He looked up at the narrow slice of sky between the buildings, where, in the morning, they would see . . .
His smile faded. Overhead the stars were disappearing one by one behind a spreading edge of clouds.
C H A P T E R
Eighteen
The new morning brightened over Aquila, revealing a sky entirely gray. The cathedral bells began to toll, rousing believers and nonbelievers alike, reminding them that this was the day of atonement. Marquet paced the broad, curving ramp that led to the cathedral entrance, staring out across the deserted square as if by sheer will he could make Navarre appear. He was ready; he had been ready for far too long, by now. He ached for this. They had found no trace of Navarre last night; nothing even remotely suspicious had been reported. And yet Marquet was certain that Navarre was here . . . just as certain as he was that he would be the man to kill him.
The Bishop moved restlessly about his bedchamber, twisting the emerald ring on his thumb. Navarre was trying to come for him, mad with revenge; he was certain of it. Everything and everyone he had sent against Navarre had failed. It was almost as if Navarre were under some sort of divine protection . . . And yet, what did he have to fear? There was no way his former captain could possibly get past the ring of guards with which he had surrounded his city and himself. And there was no way that Navarre could break the curse. His own soul was safe from hell, as long as Navarre was damned . . . Navarre, and Isabeau . . .
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