Masks

by E.M. Prazeman

  Chapter Fourteen

  Mark couldn’t believe that was a trial. It was so disorderly as to be completely ridiculous. He didn’t dare say so aloud for fear that his new benefactor might take offense. But how they expected to find justice with people shouting things out and arguing and guessing ....

  It horrified him. Were mainland trials like this too?

  “My carriage is over here,” the elegant gentleman told Dr. Berto as they hurried Mark along a broad stone sidewalk.

  “Wait!” The jester with the whorled design on his face and the cat-lined eyes caught up with them. “My lord and master’s daughter would like to extend her household’s hospitality to the young man.” He had to take long strides to keep up.

  “As would I.” The large gentleman with the lady jester on his arm pursued them. Mark’s benefactors, or perhaps captors, didn’t pause and Mark had to crane his neck to catch a glimpse of the pair. “As mayor, I insist,” the large gentleman added.

  “The young gentleman was looking for me.”

  Mark’s whole body took a short leap of alarm at the elegant gentleman’s proclamation. The man firmed his grip on Mark’s arm, possibly hard enough to hurt. Mark couldn’t tell anymore. He couldn’t feel much past the slow drumming someone had started up again inside his head. His vision didn’t line up properly with his own body, which tended to slant toward the rising ground.

  So this was Rohn Evan, the man Obsidian had sent him to find, the man that Mark’s intended murderer had called a colonel. Mark knew he was addled beyond drunk, but he’d caught that hard enough to hang onto it.

  “My house isn’t far from Hevether Hall,” Dr. Berto told them. “It would be convenient so that I may better treat him.”

  “No offense, Dr. Berto, but Dr. Rowart will do just as well.” The mayor huffed a bit trying to catch up with them. “And my house is quite near here. You can’t intend to drag the poor lad halfway around the island.”

  “I think it would be safer.” Baron Evan slowed a bit to give his driver time to hop off of a fine, if stark black carriage and open the door. Unlike the other vehicles Mark had seen, this one was fully enclosed and glassed.

  “No one would dare—”

  “Please.” Mark sagged in relief as the colonel finally stopped pressing him to get into the carriage. “I thank all of you for your kind offers of hospitality—”

  “Don’t.” The colonel spoke the word quickly and quietly near Mark’s ear. It came out firmly, almost like an order, but it had the unmistakable tone of a plea.

  He doesn’t even know who I am and what I want, and he wants to protect me?

  Or maybe he knows what I bring.

  Or maybe he wants to make sure I’m no threat to him.

  Regardless, Mark intended to go with him. “But I am here to see the colonel.”

  “It’s settled, then.” Colonel Evan climbed into the carriage and held out his hand. Mark took it. Something about the way their grips matched made his belly flutter. Mark let the colonel pull him in with the doctor’s help. The driver shut the door, and they were off.

  To Hevether Hall.

  “Who sent you?” Baron, or rather Colonel—he seemed more like a colonel—Evan watched the passing buildings, and he spoke without inflection.

  “Obsidian.”

  “I assume that’s another jester.” If the colonel only pretended not to know Obsidian, he was a fine actor.

  Mark couldn’t allow the conversation to continue in that direction. “I’m not entirely sure ... that is, I have a letter, but until I read that letter I ....” He’d approached things from the wrong direction, but every time he looked for a better one he lost his way.

  The doctor took his wrist and measured his pulse. “Try to stay calm.”

  “I didn’t graduate from a university. I didn’t even attend one.” That seemed the best way to explain. “I have, or had, no intention of becoming a jester. I just had to be one, at least for a little while. But I’m not staying.”

  “Can you give him something to ease the fever?” Colonel Evan asked the doctor. “He’s losing his mind.”

  “I know it’s hard to follow what I’m saying. I’m sorry. The gist of what I’m trying to tell you is that I’m serving as a crude and hastily-appointed messenger. As soon as I’ve delivered my message, I hope to leave Perida and you in peace.”

  “You need medical attention before you go anywhere,” the doctor told him.

  “I can get it on the ship.”

  “No, you can’t. You need a proper doctor, and a clean living situation. None of those things are possible on a ship. Now please, try to keep still and quiet.”

  Colonel Evan finally looked at Mark, and his gaze cut like twin swords. Mark’s heart skipped into his throat. The danger he sensed didn’t frighten him nearly as much as the rush of complicated feelings. Admiration, lust and trust warred with a cry of warning that jangled every nerve. “What is Obsidian’s message?” Colonel Evan asked.

  “I can’t give it to you here.”

  “The doctor—”

  “It’s not just the doctor, or the driver. There’s something I have to show you.” He didn’t dare say anything more than that.

  “It sounds like those bastards might have been right,” the doctor murmured. “I think this boy plans to kill you.”

  Colonel Evan looked away, watching the streets and buildings once more. “No. I don’t think so.”

  Mark admired the lines of the colonel’s handsome face. The traditional Cathretan name didn’t fit with the delicate, olive-toned skin, and the colonel’s dark hair didn’t have even a trace of curl to suggest Hasle somewhere in his lineage. He’d heard of noble families in the southeast mountains that touched on both the Vyennen and Hasle borders, but he hadn’t been introduced to any. Not that all Cathretan people were fair, far from it, but the noble families had that tendency, and were usually bland in complexion as Mark considered himself to be.

  The colonel might also be from a lineage originating somewhere far more exotic, like Bel. The family may have changed its name to something more easily pronounced by the Cathretan majority that had inhabited the Meriduan Islands since their discovery over three centuries ago.

  He’d reached the limits of his ability to think. The rest of the journey passed in heat and a confusion of sunlight and shadow. The few times Mark experienced full lucidity he saw a strange bird with golden tails so long it seemed impossible that it could fly, and blossoms in vivid crimson with throats like flame among vines with trunks as thick as trees, and a smooth curve of beach with black sand on which no living thing walked or grew. Black Shore Road. The sea roared across that sand, and from that point onward the sea thundered relentlessly. At times it sounded as if the waves raced and rushed and crashed all around them. He couldn’t tell if any of it was natural or a dream.

  The next thing he knew the doctor had him bent over a large silver bowl held by a young woman with hair already touched by gray. They poured frigid water over the back of Mark’s neck and it felt like it stabbed right through the spine. Afterward he felt a little better. He managed to walk mostly by himself to a white bed in a teal and cream room. The doors and windows stood wide open but they were hung with pale mesh more clever and fine than a spider’s web to help cut the strong sea breeze. The same gauze hung around the bed in place of drapes. It billowed with the touch of the wind’s cooling breaths. The ocean pounded close by, and gulls squawked right outside his window. Mark shivered in the damp, drafty room and remembered how Grant told him that people could in fact catch a chill in the tropics.

  Grant. “What’s going to happen to Grant Roadman?”

  “Nothing, I expect. He’s just a witness,” the doctor assured him. “No one so far has claimed that he killed anyone.”

  “He has, at his home, a bag. My bag. I need him to bring it to me.” Mark had no one else he could trust with it. He hated drawing Grant further into this mess but he had no choice. He didn’t dare ask for a servant to
fetch it.

  “Mr. Roadman doesn’t make friends easily.” Colonel Evan spoke from the doorway. Mark hadn’t noticed his presence before. Everything was so disjointed and strange—he wanted to return to Dainty and curl up on the tiny bunk he’d begun to think of as his own and sleep it all away. “He was a good soldier, and he’s a good man. I would be extremely offended if I discovered that you were involving him without his knowledge in some sort of mainland intrigue.”

  “I know nothing of it,” Mark told him. “You’re in a far better position than I am to know exactly what’s happening.”

  “Because you’re only delivering a message.”

  He didn’t sound like he believed it, and Mark didn’t blame him.

  “Your default is silence.” A hint of approval warmed Colonel Evan’s otherwise neutral, even voice. He turned to leave. “I’ll have my driver fetch your bag.”

  “I would rather—I asked Grant to keep it safe, and I would feel terrible if he found it missing or anything out of place and thought it was because of me.”

  Colonel Evan turned just enough to look at Mark past his own shoulder. The gesture would have been coy if the colonel didn’t have such a cold gaze. “Mr. Roadman has far better reason to trust me than he does to trust you, but I will instruct my man to see to it that he is there before anything is removed.”

  The doctor started removing Mark’s clothing. The colonel gave him a nod and left.

  Dr. Berto rubbed a salve that stank of something sour and moldy into Mark’s wounds, and then measured something syrupy and golden into a bottle. “Have you taken anything for the pain?”

  “The priest gave me a smoke.” Mark shivered through and through. He grabbed up the sheets and quilts. “And I had wine this morning.”

  “Do you know what kind of smoke?”

  “No. He just called it leaf.”

  The doctor gritted his teeth into a pained smile. “They might as well have put your head in an oven. Some of their remedies work extremely well, but some are ... they practice medicine based on sacred poetry rather than science, and sacred poetry is far too subject to interpretation.” He finished measuring out the syrup and put the bottle away into a large case. “Have you heard of gracian?”

  Mark’s gut clenched in alarm. “Of course I have.”

  “If you take this as I direct, you will heal faster.”

  “I don’t want to become an addict. No thank you.” Mark trembled not just from fever now, but fear.

  “It’s very important that you take it. This infection you’re struggling with is dangerous not just in its own right. Open wounds invite even more dangerous things, things that don’t keep mainlanders awake at night worrying every time they catch their skin on something sharp.”

  Mark had heard of blood worms from the days when the islands were first colonized, and gorer maggots too. “But as long as the wounds are covered ....”

  “You may have already been exposed. We don’t know how the eggs get in there. We do know that gracian seems to prevent these things from hatching inside the body, and the quick healing can only do you good. I’ve measured just enough for a week. That’s not terribly long.”

  “I don’t want to be another addict floating in grace.”

  Dr. Berto smiled. “I think you have little to worry about in that regard. Yes, it happens, but most people don’t become dependant on it when they take it for the prescribed time in the prescribed manner.”

  He was all alone and though part of him trusted these people, he trusted them against his will, without a single rational reason save that they seemed to be trying to help him now. “I’ll take my chances with the worms.”

  “If I were a disinterested party I would let you make this choice and be on my way. Not everyone develops the secondary maladies we all dread. If they did, this would be an island of corpses. However, I told the colonel I would do my best, and my best includes this medicine. Your leg wound in particular is extremely deep, and I don’t know how long you were exposed to insects and the like before whoever it was that treated you did their work, or how well they did it. I certainly have my doubts on that score. So I’m afraid we are left with little choice. Besides, I intend to stitch you up properly before I leave. You won’t feel it once the gracian does its work, and that’s for the best.”

  Stitches. He would have scars. It shouldn’t have mattered, but it did. He’d no longer have perfect skin, or the illusion of youth, or even that little bit of innocence he didn’t realize he’d had until he killed those men.

  The doctor let out a sigh. “Shall I call for the colonel to help me insist?”

  “You say most men don’t become addicts?”

  “Not if they’re properly cared for, and you will be cared for.”

  “Can I take just one dose?”

  The doctor shook his head and let out a grim chuckle. “Two a day for four days. I insist that you rally the courage and have a little faith in yourself. Or if not in yourself, than in the colonel who you have come so far to see.”

  Mark forced himself to nod.

  The doctor measured out a spoonful of the syrup and offered it. Mark took it in his mouth and pulled his lips over the spoon before he could change his mind.

  Honey, a bitter tang of something like orange rind, and then all the flavor vanished into a soothing warmth that eased his chills. He didn’t feel fevered anymore. His gaze focused past the gauzy curtains for the first time. Gulls glided by. He made his way to the window, vaguely aware of the doctor’s protest, and sat on the broad sill. The sea was a deep blue-green here and covered in lace and foam. The waves rose in huge mounds and then exploded into white shards against sharp black rocks. The shards rained down among rainbows into pools linked by waterfalls. It was more magnificent than the most artful fountains he’d ever seen. The sky wasn’t just blue. Here it appeared to be brushed with a thin coat of violet over the brightest sapphire, and at the horizon it paled to a hue he’d never seen in nature, as if an emerald and a morning glory blossom had dissolved into ice.

  He sang softly to it about Mairi’s death, and the song healed his fear, and his pain, his anger and even the grief that haunted his memories. The lyrics came to him easily from the air and the sea’s rhythm and his own breath, but then he faltered on a rhyme and couldn’t remember where the music had been leading him.

  The doctor led him back to the bed, and stitched him up, and washed him. The woman who’d been sitting by quietly in a chair helped Mark dress into a nightshirt, and then moved her chair beside the bed.

  “What’s your name?” Mark asked her.

  “Trudy, m’jeste. I’m the housekeeper.”

  “Isn’t this the sort of thing you’d delegate to a chamber maid, Miss Trudy?”

  “I hope you will allow me to serve as such. We have no one besides myself, Norbert and Philip, and the men are ill-suited for this sort of work.”

  It wasn’t fair to her—such a large house, and now she had Mark to tend to as well. “I expect I’ll need help with the chamberpot eventually, Miss Trudy, so I think it’s reasonable to call me by the name my father gave me. I’m Mark, and I’m very pleased to meet you.”

  “Master jester, I think you’ll change your mind when you are well again, but I’ll call you what you wish while you’re ill. Besides, I don’t think it’s fair to call you by your given name when you call me Miss.”

  Mark closed his eyes, and his breath sighed out. When he took his next breath, sleep came with it, and dreams so glorious he hoped he’d never wake.

  Mark huddled, drenched in sweat, hot and cold at the same time, shivering and desperately thirsty.

  Colonel Evan stalked into the dark room following Trudy, who held a lamp for him. Mark flinched from the light. It wasn’t bright so much as it emitted sharp, golden needles that seemed to pierce his eyes.

  “Trudy tells me you won’t take the gracian.”

  Mark wanted to, but he knew the beautiful dreams waited, and he remembered how everything w
as easy and calm and how that illusion broke open when he came to his senses. And those senses didn’t return all at once, either. They returned like pockets of terrifying clarity in a heavy fog of bliss. One moment he’d be relaxed and the next he’d remember that he was in a stranger’s house and there had been a trial and that men might hang from the neck until dead if judgment was brought against them. He’d sink back into calm, half-fighting it, half-willing himself to drown in that peace again, and then surface into the knowledge that his actions would get back to Captain Shuller who might not let him back on Dainty. He might be trapped here, trapped in a jester’s life with no patron, no lord master, no connections, and Gutter would come for him with a wrath Mark wasn’t sure he could face.

  Colonel Evan smoothed his fingers over Mark’s bicep and gradually firmed his grip. Something about his touch grounded Mark somewhat, though his breath still rushed around so ragged he thought he’d tear apart inside.

  “You need to take seven more doses of gracian or it will do you no good to have taken it at all.” Colonel Evan spoke softly, though Mark suspected it was more due to the late hour than any consideration for Mark’s nerves. “Given that you have to take those doses, there’s no sense whatsoever in delaying to the point of withdrawal sickness.”

  “So this is what happens at the end of it.”

  “Yes.”

  “Does it get worse?”

  “No. You’re well into the worst of it. Trudy, measure out a spoonful.”

  “Yes, sir.” She existed only as a kind face, the fall of her hair lit gold by candlelight, and graceful arms. Everything else was shadow pierced with those needles of light.

  Mark drank in the honeyed evil and it fooled him all over again, and again. He dreamed up such poems and lyrics and music, but could never finish any of it. He couldn’t even hold it in his mind enough to write it down, though the memory of its beauty haunted him. Sometimes dangerous thoughts came to him, wondering if he took a little more, or took it more often, if that power of lyric might not linger long enough for him to own it and repeat it for the world.

  Colonel Evan visited him only to dose him, and then left him to Trudy’s care. Mark had no idea how she managed to keep such a faithful watch over him without fading into exhaustion. She had to leave at times, probably while he slept, because she always had clean clothes and she didn’t eat in the room. Twice, or perhaps more, she helped him to a bath filled with warm water scented by exotic blossoms and musk. The cook brought food and Trudy fed him biscuits scented of coconut and oranges and sweet hams and strange smoky meats full of fiery flavor that he could only soothe with what they called cool creams—chilled, milky drinks with hints of various fruit flavors. They served him fruits for which he had no name, and edible flowers some of which tasted like radishes and others like a thick, juicy lettuce and others like thin slices of beets, on and on, and fish with meats of such varying textures that some seemed like a form of rich porridge while others needed slicing like steak. Some of the white flesh opened into fans of firm flakes and some came apart in tender shreds like stew meat.

  He felt stronger, but less sane, and he wondered if half of what he remembered of any given hour had really happened.

  Colonel Evan came in one morning when it came time for Mark’s next dose, but this time he drew a heavily padded chair from a corner of the room and sat. “You may have the remainder of today and all tomorrow off, Trudy,” he said. “I will sit with the master jester from here on.”

  “Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.” She curtsied and left.

  Mark had already begun to feel uneasy as the gracian’s effect had begun to ebb. “That was my last dose last night, wasn’t it.”

  The colonel nodded.

  “Good.” Mark said it, and meant it, but he was afraid. Perhaps the colonel was here to help him through the withdrawal sickness, or maybe he’d come to offer Mark a chance to continue leading a life of ease ... with a price.

  The colonel grew impatient after just a few minutes and stood to pace the room. Mark went to the window sill and settled to watch the ocean surge onto the rocks. The tide had changed.

  Dainty.

  Mark didn’t want to call attention to Captain Shuller, but he feared that the ship would sail on without him, either out of necessity or with a purpose to avoid him, if he didn’t send some sort of message.

  She might have already left.

  “I would like to see the docks again,” Mark said. “If it’s not too much trouble. I hardly saw anything of them before I was attacked.”

  “I would think you’d prefer to avoid them.”

  “Do you think I ought to? I have no idea how many there might be of the Morbai’s Kiss or if they will try to avenge their men.” He really didn’t care what the answer might be. He felt a powerful urge to return to the sea.

  “Where did you hear of the Morbai’s Kiss?” Colonel Evan sounded alarmed enough to make Mark turn away from the sea for a glance. Colonel Evan averted his gaze and began pacing again. He picked up a book from a small collection on shelves primarily adorned with horse statues. A large painting of a wild white horse loomed beside him.

  “Mr. Roadman told me a little about them.”

  “You’re right to be nervous about them, but they aren’t stupid. The man who led them to victory is a jester. They’ll consult him before they do anything further. Whether he is inclined to dissuade them or not, now that your situation is public, his master will be forced to insist that no harm come to you from that quarter. I believe you’re safe, at least for the moment.”

  His stomach shrank. A jester could easily get around a direct order if he wanted to. All the more reason to get off this island as soon as he could. “If you’re sure I’m safe from them, I see no reason to avoid the docks.”

  “I don’t think you’ll be fit for travel, master jester.”

  He almost asked why he had to stop the gracian all at once, and if a small dose might not help things along. He didn’t feel as if he craved it with any passion. It was a rational question, or so it seemed. The trouble was that he didn’t trust himself to think rationally, anymore than he believed that gracian could help him create the finest music the world had ever heard. “Were there many gracian addicts created by the war?”

  “More corpses than addicts, but yes. They usually don’t live long. Once they start stealing and murdering to get themselves more gracian, we hang them.” Colonel Evan paged through a book, his eyes flicking quickly from top to bottom on certain pages. “Only the wealthy manage to cling to life while enthralled to that mistress, and the jesters lay bets as to whether their health or their wealth will fail first. Health or wealth is a particularly cruel taunt that they began, and it has carried into the populace.”

  That implied that gracian was more expensive than he’d guessed.

  He owed the money in that purse to the church in Cathret. Did he really intend to default without Gutter’s protection?

  The Church never forgave and never gave up.

  “You’d better lie down and have some water.”

  “I’m all right.” His thoughts had fallen into a dangerous well. Lord Argenwain could pay off the indenture with the wave of a pen, but it wasn’t Lord Argenwain’s to pay. It was Mark’s. And if Gutter truly had burned Mairi, his crime went a small but important step beyond the scars he’d have on his soul for the horrific deaths inflicted on the crew and the destruction of a beautiful ship with many promising years left ahead of her.

  If Gutter was found guilty of such a thing, not only would he owe the worth of the ship, but Lord Argenwain might feel duty-bound as a noble to have him executed. It would be a horrific thing in its own right, not just for Gutter, but for Lord Argenwain. They’d been bonded for more than four decades.

  Am I willing to face the consequences should I discover that’s the truth?

  If he killed them, if Gutter killed my mother ....

  While Mark had been lost in thought, the colonel had taken a pair of steps
closer. “You’re trembling. I’ve seen men fire pistols into their ears trying to escape the fearful things gracian told them would be worse than death. I don’t expect that after this short time you would be that desperate. Nonetheless, I insist that you retire.”

  For the first time Mark noticed it was a considerable fall from the window to the rocks below.

  “The fall wouldn’t kill you,” Colonel Evan told him.

  “I don’t want to die.” Fear didn’t course through him, but rage. He’d almost left it behind, soothed by Dainty’s sweetness. Anger returned to him now with all the force of his grief behind it. Mark moved from the window. “What do you know about Lord Jester Gutter?”

  Colonel Rohn Evan startled so hard that it opened his expression completely. Those eyes, far too youthful and unclouded to be a colonel’s eyes, betrayed complete innocence. “Nothing that isn’t common knowledge.”

  Damnit all. If Gutter had done all this, what was the benefit? Why destroy so much, and for what? “I need my bag. I have to show you something.” Maybe the signet ring and the book would help connect things somehow.

  “I intend to discuss the contents of your bag as well, but we’ll wait until you’re sober.” The colonel returned his gaze to the book, but he clearly wasn’t reading. He kept flipping pages, his gaze focused somewhere beyond the spine.

  It sounded as if the colonel had already searched through Mark’s bag. The only thing that tempered Mark’s indignation was the seriousness of accusing a man of the colonel’s importance of doing something so unseemly. “Did you find what you were looking for?” Mark asked tightly.

  The colonel’s cheeks flushed. “It is within my rights to treat you as a prisoner until I determine whether or not you’re a threat to justice and liberty.”

  “And you’re willing to stoop to something so low—”

  “I’m grateful that you naturally attribute noble qualities to me that I may not possess.”

  “I take it you don’t require a jester because you’re perfectly willing to do anything you deem necessary yourself.”

  “That is precisely the reason I despise anything having to do with jesters. It is a false removal of responsibility. But I will not be accused of wrongdoing in this matter. You may consider it a sin to rifle a potential spy’s effects, but I read no such thing—”

  “So you do hold to some standard, whichever one is most convenient to your purposes.” Their mingled tempers intoxicated all of Mark’s senses. He drank it in with more relish than gracian. The color in the colonel’s face held more vivid ecstasy than a masterwork painting, and his voice inspired shivers more profound than any music he’d heard.

  “You don’t flinch from my accusation, I see,” the colonel growled.

  “That I’m a spy? Spying on what? That fleet of warships in the bay can be counted by any sailor coming and going from the docks, and with a better-trained eye.”

  “I will not be lured into defining a target for you.”

  “I am only delivering a message. Please, colonel.” That came out slightly less polite than a curse. “Allow me to dispatch my errand so I can quit this room, quit this house and quit you.” Of course now he wanted to do anything but quit the colonel. He’d never felt so alive or filled with power as he did at this very moment. His body began to shiver violently, but inside he felt as straight and tall and proud as Prathador Castle.

  Baron Evan stood proudly too, gradually composing himself until his face cooled and his hands relaxed. He softly closed the book and set it aside. All that time while his temper had raged, he’d held the book gently open in his hand.

  Was his anger an act, or did he really possess that much control? Either way he’d be a deadly opponent.

  “Tomorrow,” the colonel told him. “If you’re strong enough.”

  Mark glanced toward the hated bed. He started to feel heavy and miserable and lightheaded but he’d been in bed so long he couldn’t stand it anymore. He managed to make his way over to it and pulled the quilt with him to a stuffed chair. “May I have a book to read?”

  “Do you have a preference as to subject?”

  Would the colonel allow it? “Sacred poetry.”

  “I have none here and I won’t leave you to fetch it.”

  Mark marveled a bit that the man appeared to have no servants at the moment. “What are my options?”

  “Vale, Sutter, Olmsby, Mullerman ...” All poetry. “Two books on botany, one of which my father wrote.” Probably instructive but dull. “The Night of Swords.” The colonel touched the spine of the book he’d been paging through. Mark had that account of a particularly nightmarish caucus all but memorized.

  The colonel dropped his hand and looked at Mark expectantly.

  “There’s one more on the shelf,” Mark said.

  “You wouldn’t be interested.” The colonel spoke a little too quickly.

  “You desperately need a jester.” He might be a fine military man, but he had no social ability. He should have known that such a statement would only make Mark more curious.

  “I suppose you plan to volunteer.”

  “No. I just want a book to read and all you did was make me more curious about the one that’s left. As if anything on that shelf could be more dull than botany.”

  The colonel’s neck stiffened. “I’m rather fond of botany.”

  “What you’re more likely fond of is a connection to your father’s interests and what his notes reveal about the inner workings of his mind. May I please see the book?”

  “It’s personal.”

  Mark laughed. “It is not! It’s probably something embarrassing like a tawdry romance.”

  The colonel blushed.

  “It is! It’s a romance.” The hilarity of it helped distract him from the increasingly insistent tremors radiating out from his belly. “Let me see it. Please.”

  The colonel snatched it off the shelf and stalked over. Mark pulled it from the colonel’s reluctant grip, opened the fanciful but wordless cover and read the title aloud.

  “The HandMaiden’s Cup: A novel of forbidden love. I’ve heard of books like this but I haven’t read one before.” He decided not to admit that he’d read the other sort to Lord Argenwain—men romping and conquering everything with two legs, and sometimes more. Lord Argenwain’s favorite, and Mark’s, was Barry’s Barnyard Scandals. It was truly awful but wonderful at the same time, more of a comedy than erotica.

  The colonel moved to take it away. Mark clutched it to his chest. “You’ve had your fun. That’s enough,” the colonel said.

  “You think I’m teasing you, but I really want it. Some of these books are ridiculous. But this looks interesting.” He glanced over the first page. “The prose is clean and direct, but not too spare. Do you mind?”

  “Of course I mind.”

  “I’ve noticed you haven’t tried to foist blame onto Miss Trudy or a woman friend.”

  The colonel scowled. “The book is mine.”

  “A gift, I’m guessing?”

  “Stop it.” The colonel didn’t sound angry. Was that grief?

  He’d taken his curiosity to softer places than he’d intended, and touched something very private. “I’m sorry. Please. May I read it?”

  The colonel walked away, took up one of the other books, and settled down to read. Mark did his best to focus on the words on the first page.

  Marielle first saw him from an upper window while she waited to hear if she would be forced to visit Duke Amsbury that night ....

  “They forced themselves upon each other with savage desire,” Colonel Evan read while Mark could barely draw in one breath after another. “But then Thomas gathered her close and kissed her. Her body deepened against him and they became one being, no longer alone or afraid. They moved like waves, not against each other but like love traveling through liquid joy.”

  Mark gripped the colonel’s wrist. “Read that again.”

  The colonel smiled gently. “I’ll read the entire passage,
and then we’ll go back and read it again if you’re still inclined.”

  Something sharp cut through Mark from throat to belly and his body cramped around it. The pain didn’t let him breathe, only writhe. He held on to the colonel’s wrist, terrified to let go.

  The pain ebbed away and Mark lay limp in the sweaty bed. The spasms were getting worse.

  The colonel moved the ribbon marker into place and closed the book. “I think it’s time. Dr. Berto told me if you appeared to be in danger, I should give you a quarter dose.”

  “No.”

  “I insist.”

  “I would rather die.” It frightened him, but he refused to go back even one step. “I want to be done, one way or another. So please. Read to me.”

  “This is damned foolish. There’s no need to endanger your life in this way.”

  “Yes there is. You don’t understand.”

  “Then explain it to me.”

  “How can I explain years of yielding because it was easy, or wise, or necessary? I can’t describe to you how it is to trust someone you know is using you, and making yourself blind to the shame and disgrace of it. I have to say no again and again until ....” He couldn’t describe a state of being that his heart wanted more than anything, but for which he had no name.

  “Until you’re free.” Those dark words seemed full of understanding and knowledge beyond Mark’s own. “Not because someone released you, but because you fought, and you won.” The colonel sat very still and very near, his dark suit and dark hair a blur against his olive-toned skin and the shadows of his dark brows and dark eyes.

  Yes.

  The colonel sat back and Mark’s hand slipped from his wrist. “But then Thomas gathered her close and kissed her. Her body deepened upon him and they became one being, no longer alone or afraid. They moved like waves, not against each other but like love traveling through liquid joy ....”