Blue Flame

by K. M. Grant

  “The Flame?” he asked. He would concentrate on that.

  “It’s here.”

  He put down the bowl and lay back. They were silent for a while. Then he spoke again. “We can’t just do nothing anymore.”

  “It seems to me that you’ve already done quite a lot, and not all of it very wise.”

  “You know what I mean. We can’t do nothing. We’ve got the Flame and we’ve got to use it. Aimery is going to betray the Occitan. I know he is.”

  “Yes,” Parsifal said. “But it’s so hard to know how to use the Flame for the best.” He took it out of its box. “I mean, why did it show itself when it did? What good has it done? I’m supposed to know and I don’t.”

  Raimon wiped his mouth. The air of the cave was clammy, which made his head still feel full of water. The Flame today was in dull mode, its blue unmemorable. He was silent for a long time.

  “Perhaps,” he said in the end. “Perhaps it wanted to draw everything to one place. I mean that’s what’s happened, isn’t it? The White Wolf was already here, but after the Flame showed itself, the inquisitor arrived. And Sir Hugh.”

  “And was that a good thing?”

  “It doesn’t seem so,” said Raimon grimly.

  They both regarded the Flame, although it did not seem to notice them at all.

  “I feel I should be able to answer questions rather than ask them,” said Parsifal. “But I’m always very confused and the Flame doesn’t even try to help me.”

  “You knew how to rescue me,” said Raimon, “and Yolanda at the cemetery, and Brees.” He said Yolanda’s name with a twist of his mouth that Parsifal pretended not to notice.

  “Oh, I think I prayed, and God did that,” Parsifal said.

  Raimon shifted and his cheeks hollowed. “What, the same God who allows the White Wolf and the inquisitor to live while my mother dies?”

  “Men killed your mother.”

  “In God’s name. If God didn’t like it, why didn’t he strike them down?”

  “Men have free will, Raimon.” He stopped. It was the first time he had used the boy’s name, and he could not explain, and didn’t try to, how nice that felt. He used it again, rolling it around his mouth. “Do you know, I’ve been trying to remember, while you were sleeping, exactly what my father told me about the Flame. I’ve always thought that one of its roles was to keep the Occitan free from invaders. That’s what my father thought.”

  “And that’s right. The song says so.”

  “But what if it’s not right? What if it doesn’t mean just keeping the Occitan free from invaders like King Louis?”

  “What other invaders are there?”

  “Well, there’s Inquisitor Girald and the White Wolf.”

  “But they’re not really invaders,” said Raimon. “The only thing they have to commend them is that at least they both want to keep the Occitan free.”

  “Free?” Parsifal absentmindedly filled Raimon’s plate again. “Does the White Wolf make people free? Does Girald make people free?”

  “No, but that’s different. At least they still want the Occitan to be a place on its own.”

  “Yet still, according to them, to be a true Occitanian you must be a Cathar or a Catholic. It’s not really freedom, is it?”

  Raimon said nothing.

  “I’ve been thinking,” said Parsifal carefully. “What if we’re all wrong about the Flame? What if it’s got nothing to do with King Louis at all? I mean, what if the Flame stands not for freedom in the paths of righteousness, as my father told me, but freedom from the paths of self-righteousness. Could it be, and I’m only saying could it, but could it be that over the centuries people just substituted the original words for words that suited them better? Righteousness sounds good, and thinking you are righteous means you can claim to be right. Both the inquisitor and the White Wolf think they’re righteous. But they’re not really righteous, are they? They’re self-righteous, which is a false kind of righteousness, and their self-righteousness blinds them to the truth, which is that they’re just men who know nothing much at all.” It was a very long speech for Parsifal.

  “But when I stood up at that—that trial, and tried to say that, or something like it, nobody stood with me,” Raimon argued. “Nobody. They were all completely silent. Even if I’d shown them the Flame I don’t think people would have shouted Girald down.”

  “They were all frightened, Raimon. Terrified. You can’t blame them. When people are frightened, they just agree with the person who seems strongest, and that certainly wasn’t you.”

  “It will never be me.”

  “Perhaps not,” said Parsifal carefully. “Except that you’re brave and loyal and seem to know what freedom really means, and that’s a kind of strength, and if there is a reason that the Flame showed itself here, in this place and at this time, could it not be you?”

  “But I’m not a knight, I’m—”

  “Just a weaver? You don’t believe that, do you?”

  “It’s what Yolanda said.” He shrugged. “Never mind about me—what will happen to the Occitan if the Flame won’t help against King Louis?”

  Parsifal shook his head. “That I don’t know,” he said, and felt his old fears and insecurities returning. “Perhaps I’m wrong about you, wrong about everything. Maybe I’m just getting old. Old men clutch at things, you know, particularly old men like me who’ve spent most of their lives running away and hiding.”

  There was a splatter at their feet and they both looked down. Parsifal’s sudden garrulity seemed to have cheered the Flame up. It had been smoking, but now its blue was the blue of the midnight sky, changing suddenly to turquoise before sparking into the color of my summer evenings.

  “What’s it saying?” Raimon asked.

  “I’ve no idea,” said Parsifal rather gloomily. “Absolutely no idea at all.”

  Raimon looked disappointed.

  “Come,” said Parsifal. “Sleep again. If you don’t get your strength back, we can do nothing, even if the Flame itself were suddenly to write a book.”

  Raimon obediently lay down, and Parsifal did too. He was soon snoring. Not Raimon. He rested his chin in cupped hands. What a strange thing this Flame was, and what a strange man this Knight Magician. When he finally felt sleep creeping over him, he hoped he would dream about saving the Occitan, but instead he dreamed about Yolanda. And it was not a dream, it was a nightmare, for she was next to Hugh, with her hair brushed like a halo, in a way she never brushed it for him.

  13

  The Dark

  He woke with a start. He was being dragged. His arms flew up as his spiders’ web bandages trickled off like skeins of tickling threads. “What—”

  “Quiet! Quiet!” Parsifal stopped dragging him and urged him onto all fours. “There are people.” He was crouched down beside Raimon, the Flame’s box in his hand because he’d had no time to get it into the pouch. “I don’t know what they’re doing.”

  This soon became clear. Like the syncopated barks of a dozen sore-throated foxes came the ruff-ruff-ruff of two-handed saws. Timber was being felled, cut into small logs, rolled down the scree, and stacked at the front of the cave, behind the piles of collected stones but in front of the fringe of roots. Parsifal and Raimon squatted at the back, expecting any moment that the protective curtain would part and they would be discovered. The dark of the cave would work in their favor, but the forester had a lantern. When the curtain remained unmoved for more than ten minutes, they began to breathe again. They could hear the forester cursing.

  “The inquisitor said logs small enough to catch fire quickly, you imbecile. And hurry up, it’s cold in here.” He appeared to throw the unacceptable timber back out of the cave.

  “Oh Lord in heaven,” said Parsifal. The boy moved closer. “Logs for pyres.”

  Raimon swallowed hard; his legs, still weak, were suddenly weaker still.

  More shouts and an unknown voice calling out, “What’s that thing doing here?”


  Now the root curtain did part and through it—all tongue and paws and thrills of greeting—came Brees. He nearly knocked Parsifal down before hurling himself at Raimon. The boy took hold of him anywhere he could get a purchase, unsure whether to drag him back or push him out. Brees just licked and licked. Then Raimon heard the sound he both longed for and dreaded: Yolanda’s voice, high and anxious and tired. She called the dog’s name again and again, as if she couldn’t think of anything else to say. Raimon felt Brees open his mouth to bark and tell her what he’d found, so he gripped the shaggy throat and what should have been a roar turned into a squeak.

  “I can’t see him, mistress.” The forester’s voice was suddenly uncomfortably near. “But he shouldn’t be here, and nor should you.”

  “He came in.” Yolanda’s voice was nearer still. She was stepping toward the curtain. “I’m not leaving without him.” She found herself in front of the roots, murmured a small “oh” of surprise when she felt what they were, pushed them aside, and found herself staring at the whites of two eyes with deep dark holes in the middle.

  Though he could see almost nothing, for she blocked out all the tiny light there was, Raimon knew she was frowning, knew just the way her forehead was folding, with the little vertical crease in the middle, and how the muscles around her mouth were creating a tiny dip in her upper lip. He didn’t know any longer if he was glad to know these things or not.

  Yolanda couldn’t think at all. She dropped the roots so they swung down, but left her arms. With very careful precision, as though touching paint that might turn out to be wet, she extended two fingers. Raimon knew it would be wiser to draw back, but he didn’t. Her fingers found his cheek and traced, with almost unbearable delicacy, the path into the dimple in the middle that she and his mother had always loved and he had always hated, and then farther down his chin, still clear of a man’s stubble. Her fingers stroked around the smooth oval and up. When they found the edge of his lip they hesitated, then resumed, gliding over the soft ridges of his ears, and then into his hair. Her fingers stopped here and her other hand crept up until she had his head between her hands. He let out a long breath. Her hands pressed together. He could feel the pressure, feel her fingers spreading, keeping his head carefully gathered between them, as though if she didn’t, bits might disperse and she would lose them.

  The forester, halfway between the curtain and the cave’s mouth, was watching. The girl seemed to be standing in a very peculiar way. “Is there more cave behind?” He began to move toward her.

  It was agony for Yolanda to let her fingers drop, but she did, trying to keep what she had felt on their tips.

  “No,” she said. “There’s nothing behind here except wall. I was just feeling in case there was a wolf hole or something that Brees could have gotten through. That’s what must have happened. He’s certainly not here now.” Her voice was nothing like her voice a moment before. Now it was the voice of a sleepwalker or someone reluctant to wake from a dream. The forester didn’t notice. He noticed very little that was not to do with trees.

  “Come along then, mistress, out you come.” He moved back, heard his men arguing, clicked with irritation, and returned to the cave opening.

  Yolanda turned to the root curtain once more. Once more she pulled it aside. The face had gone, but something else transfixed her. Beyond where she could reach, two pales hands shimmered. She recognized them at once. They were the hands from the cemetery. They came forward, low as her waist, part of them hidden, with a panting noise. She found herself clutching Brees’s collar. Then the hands vanished. That was it. There was nothing more. Yolanda left the cave, telling the forester that Brees had, all the while, been hiding behind the finished logpile eating the remains of a badger’s dinner. She did not let the man see her face, for in it he would have seen such a fierce joy that he might have guessed she had seen something that had nothing to do with Brees at all.

  The log chopping didn’t flag until sunset and then the forester called his weary men together and paid them with bronze, at which they grumbled and spat because they had expected silver.

  “We could do with that dog to guard this lot,” he remarked to no one in particular. The men quickly dispersed in case they found themselves volunteered to do guard duty. The forester, remembering his wife, shrugged and left the cave alone.

  Even after the men had gone, Parsifal and Raimon did not emerge for fresh air, for they had no idea if there was a guard and it was too dangerous to discover. Parsifal, who felt utterly unable to offer any advice on matters of love, felt able to offer advice about something else.

  “If she comes again, don’t tell her about the Flame,” he said.

  “She won’t come.”

  Parsifal grunted.

  It was nearly midnight when she appeared, or rather when they heard her. Brees, naturally, came first and this time he got the welcome he expected. Raimon buried his face in the dog’s fur. Then Yolanda was speaking softly, her arms outstretched. Now Raimon drew back a little, finding that, although he wanted to hold her as tightly as he had held her on the steps of the great hall on the day this nightmare had started, his pride had not yet forgiven her for calling him “just a weaver.” But she was there, fumbling forward, barely realizing that she was breathing his name with every breath she took, both in and out. He could feel her despair as she pushed aside the roots and this time found nothing. Now she was no longer breathing, but panting, like a small animal searching for safety. Parsifal, crouching in the farthest corner with the Flame behind him and praying that it would not choose this moment to set the world alight, could feel her agony.

  “Go to her,” he silently urged. “Go to her.”

  And Raimon, shoving the thornbush of his pride aside, did. He found her hands, and this time she was not delicate. She hurled herself into his unseen embrace and he could feel her tears; not gentle tears, but the hard, bitter tears of self-reproach.

  “I’m so sorry … I never meant … I didn’t think …” She finished no sentence, for whatever words she chose seemed inadequate for the task of repairing the hurt she had caused. Yet she still gathered them up in jumbles and hurled them at him, willing him to catch them and turn them into the healing apology she could not frame herself. As Raimon caught what she threw, hardly even hearing what she said, he found himself full of gratitude for the dark, for it allowed him to murmur to her, to stroke her hair and find it gloriously matted, and finally to stop the words with a kiss. He knew she wouldn’t laugh now, not even if his kiss went slightly awry because he could only sense and not see her mouth. Brees, finding himself not wanted, went to Parsifal and they sat in patient communion, each thinking thoughts that had absolutely nothing in common with the other.

  At last, from Yolanda, there were small whispered questions. She cared deeply for the answers one moment and cared nothing at all the next. What did it matter how Raimon got here? He was here. It was enough.

  But he answered, though with caution. “You remember the Knight Magician of the Breeze?” Of course she did. Raimon told her as much as she could know, and when he spoke of Parsifal’s pale hands, she asked only one question. “Where is he now? I should thank him.” She clutched Raimon harder, remembering the cemetery.

  “Not here,” Raimon lied, although it pained him to do so. “He’s gone.”

  They sat down, never letting go of each other. Her tangled mane was against his cheek and he could feel smooth patches in her dress where the velvet was rubbed away. The lumps of mud at the sleeves and hem gave him a pleasure as fierce as Yolanda’s earlier joy. It was not dirt to him, it was the bond of earth.

  In answer to his questions, she began to tell him how it was at the chateau. She told him how her uncle had filled the cellars, and that he had caught Adela and imprisoned Beatrice. She told him his father had vanished.

  “Alone?” Raimon asked, before he could stop himself. “Do you think he was alone?”

  “I don’t know,” she answered, finding this a curious
question. “I suppose so.” She told him too that Girald was leaving soon, heading for a town called Avignonet, where he was to meet the inquisitor who had the power to sign the death warrants.

  “The evidence has already gone in a cart,” she said. “There were two chests stuffed to the brim. That’s why the woodcutters … the woodcutters …”

  “Yes,” Raimon told her, holding her even closer. “Yes, I know.”

  She told him that the first pyre would be lit in two weeks. Raimon’s throat constricted. It had come to this. An Occitanian burning Occitanians. He could not help himself.

  “Girald has no business here, no business anywhere. I’m sorry he’s your uncle, Yolanda, but he’s got no business being alive. I should like to kill him myself.” The acrid stench of the road from Limoux was once again in his nostrils.

  “Shh! Shh!” Yolanda put her hand over his mouth. “Shh!”

  He collected himself. “Is that foreign knight still at Castelneuf?” He could not bring himself to call Hugh by his name. Yolanda hesitated, thus giving him the answer.

  They moved fractionally apart. “He’ll think us barbarians,” Raimon said shortly. He moved farther away and she could already feel cold seeping in where before there had been none. She wanted to push the cold out, but when she leaned over, there was only emptiness. Raimon was standing up, and now he was purely practical. The cellars must be emptied before Girald returned. There must be no burnings at Castelneuf. He asked her who held the cellar keys, how many exits and entrances—he couldn’t remember exactly. He wondered if they could do this, or perhaps that. What did she think?

  She stood too, and made a few tentative suggestions, then stopped him with one phrase.

  “The night of my party,” she said. “We could do it the night of my party.”

  “Your party?” She did not have to see his jaw to feel it drop. “With all this, you’re still going to have your party?”

  She felt hot. “Aimery insists. He won’t hear of calling it off. He’s made my father dispatch the invitations and carry on as if nothing has changed. I didn’t want it, Raimon. You can’t think I did, and the worst thing is that people will come not because they want to but because they are frightened to refuse. But that night,” she said rather desperately, “there’ll be so many people coming and going and so much noise that everything will be in a muddle. That would be the best night to get everyone out.”